The Deepest Secret (5 page)

“More likely his wife didn’t show up to take their kid for the day.” She tilts her head. “Why don’t I bring you back something? Which do you want, turkey or roast beef?”

These are his usual orders. She’ll even know to tell them to hold the mayo, add an extra dill pickle. “Surprise me.”

“Sure.”

He returns his attention to the spreadsheet opened before him. He checks Preston’s algorithms for the third time, and they seem tight. So it’s something else, something that he’s not seeing.

It’s the deposits that don’t match. He flips back a few screens, studies the numbers there, then carries them forward. There it is.
The decimal’s in the wrong place. A small error, and he can understand Preston having made it.

He moves the decimal, but now the numbers go off-kilter in a different way. He has a sense of foreboding. Page by page, he begins to study the second and fifth columns.

“Here you go,” Renée says. She’s standing there, hip cocked, holding a Styrofoam container. “I got you chips, too.” The smile on her face dims. “What?” She comes around the desk to study the laptop screen. He points to the column of numbers. “Seven thousand dollars. Gone.”

“But how?”

“Preston stole it.”

“No.” Her breath stirs the hairs at the back of his neck. “No way.”

“I know, but there it is.” He’s always liked Preston. The man shows a rare sense of humor in those interminable monthly budget meetings. They’ve gone out for the occasional beer and talked about the Skins’ chances. “It goes back eight months.”

“What!” She straightens. “Fifty-six
thousand
dollars?”

“Somehow he thought he could get away with it.”

“This is awful.” She leans back against the desk and looks at him, her arms crossed. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t have a choice.”

“Maybe you should talk to him, give him a chance to come clean.”

“That won’t change anything. The client’s coming in Tuesday. He’s going to expect a report.”

“Right.” She frowns. “What if they’re not the only ones he’s targeted?”

“That’s what I’m worried about.”

She gives him a rueful look. “Good luck.”

Stan’s office is down the hall, the door standing wide open. He
looks up when David knocks on the doorframe. “Don’t tell me you’re done already.”

“There’s something I need to show you.” David holds open his laptop, scrolls through the screens. He highlights a column of numbers. “And this is only one client. We could be talking hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Stan takes the laptop. “I’m not sure what I’m looking at.”

“See here? These columns should be the same.”

“Okay.”

“So if you do this …” He taps a key.

Stan frowns. “This is really serious.”

“I know.”

“Maybe it’s a mistake.”

“No. He’s done the same thing to a different account each month so that he spreads the monies out. He was trying to avoid triggering an audit.”

“Damn.” Stan shakes his head. “Well, it’s a good thing you caught this.”

Back in his office, setting his laptop on his desk, David feels a twinge of guilt. Which is ridiculous. Preston’s the one who should feel guilty. He opens his bottom desk drawer and pulls out the 35 mm single-lens reflex camera he’d picked up for Tyler’s birthday. Eve had done the research and given David very specific directions. He hadn’t even known they still made film cameras, but she’d insisted. If Tyler was serious about photography, and Eve believed he was, then he’d want to learn how to develop and print film. There were differences, apparently, between digital and film, important differences, and Eve wanted to give Tyler the opportunity to understand them. She makes all her decisions regarding Tyler with great care, even the small ones, as though by choosing the right path, she can forestall the inevitable.

I’m sorry
, the specialist had said. They’d waited months to see
him. Their regular doctor couldn’t explain the blisters that bloomed across their infant son’s face and belly, or why he suffered strange fevers that could only be relieved by cool baths and Eve rocking him in a darkened room. The man had sat down facing them, his hands loosely clasped in front of him, as if he were saying,
We’re all in this together
. But David had immediately sensed that whatever the man was about to tell him would draw a dark thick line, and only he and Eve would be standing on one side of it, and this man would be on the other, the safe side, peering over.

David had leaned forward, desperate to understand what the doctor was saying. The words made no sense. Tyler was perfect. Anyone could see it. He was sweet-natured and sturdy. He held tight to your hand when you walked to the park. He chortled when you played peek-a-boo, and blew spit bubbles, and curled up in your lap to read a story. He was perfect, and no one could say otherwise. But this doctor was shaking his head with a terrible finality, and David finally understood. Horror swept through him and left him shaking. Eve was weeping and, blindly, he turned to her and pulled her into his arms. She pressed her head against his shoulder and he held onto her tightly. They were together. They had each other. They would get through this.

David looks around at his office, the bleak walls. He thinks of his apartment, echoing and cheaply furnished. If he could, he’d take every single day of his own future and hand them to his son, three dozen years, four dozen. If only it were possible. But the specialist had been clear. There was nothing anyone could do to save Tyler, not even conjuring magic tricks out of thin air.

EVE

L
ate that afternoon the heavy gray sky bursts open to release slanting washes of rain that bash the pavement and shake the trees. Thunder booms and lightning flares, crisp and startling against the dark clouds. The weather forecasters are delirious with delight. It’s been a dry summer and the farmers have been suffering.
Watch out for local flooding
, the fellow on Channel Six warns at noon. He’s practically bouncing, he’s so happy at having something to report.

Eve works in the dining room, encircled by lamplight. Three clients have emailed with website event updates. They need them posted immediately. The werewolf author’s eager to see a preliminary design, and Izzie’s asked about revamping her site to reflect her recent foray into adult fiction.
Can two sites be linked to one?
Izzie wants to know. She’s been a good friend. She’s believed in Eve from the very beginning. Eve checks into the forum, sees with relief that
Nori’s online. She messages her.
How’s Yoshi doing?
Nori writes back:
It’s taking a lot out of her, but the doctors think it might work
.

Maybe. There’s only a ten percent chance a second round of chemo will work. The cancer cells usually adapt during the first round. But Nori and Eve tell themselves that ten percent is so much better than zero. They have learned to live within those narrow gaps of possibility.

Eve turns off Skype and her screensaver image blooms across the screen: Tyler and Melissa, arms wrapped tight around each other, cheeks pressed close. Melissa had been eleven and Tyler nine, both of them in that pre-adolescent stage where Eve could still kiss them good night and hold their hands when they walked to the park. She has hundreds of pictures of her children—no, thousands—but this is her favorite: Melissa with those bangs that refused to lie flat and a blueberry stain on her blouse, and Tyler with a gap-toothed grin and crooked collar. Melissa hates this picture. She complains that she looks fat and stupid, which is, of course, untrue. She looks joyful, and so does Tyler, their bond so pure and strong. Every time Eve looks at this ordinary photograph taken on an ordinary day, she feels peaceful. She feels whole.

Eve shuts her laptop and rises to unhook the UV meter from where it hangs beside the door. The dining room is walled in glass. This house has more windows than any of the other houses on their cul-de-sac. In a fit of whimsy one day, David had walked around and counted. She’s attached special films to the glass that are guaranteed to keep out ninety-nine percent of UV radiation, but there’s always that remaining one percent. All it would take is one particle of UV to kill her son.

She holds up the meter. The arrow wobbles but holds steady at zero. Maybe she can let Tyler out a little early tonight. It’s a tricky call, and one she needs to consider. Heavy cloud coverage is the good thing about bad weather. The bad thing is that it could change in an instant. Here in central Ohio, clouds sweep across the sky with
gusto. In five minutes, it could be a clear sunny day and the only sign that it had just been storming would be the puddles shimmering on the ground. That burn on his arm—is it any paler?

David answers the phone on the third ring.

“I called you earlier,” she says. A pause that tells her David is collecting his thoughts, distancing himself. She tries to picture him, standing in his office—or is he sitting? He’s Skyped, held up the laptop so she can see his surroundings for herself, but it’s a hollow substitute. It’s impossible to render three dimensions satisfyingly into two. She doesn’t know the space her husband occupies, how it feels, smells, encloses him or expands around him. Sometimes she missed him so much she felt dizzy with desire. “Tyler got burned.”

“What? How? Is he okay?”

David sounds confused. So he hadn’t known. He hadn’t been keeping it a secret from her, which means he hadn’t even thought to check their son. “When you went to the park last Saturday,” she says, “you let him take off his sweatshirt, didn’t you? I was only gone thirty minutes, David.”

“How bad is it?”

No apology, no promise to do better in the future. Nothing. “Dr. Brien said to keep an eye on it.”

“It happened in a second, Eve. We were talking, laughing. We turned onto our street. I didn’t even hear the car approach.”

“That’s supposed to make me feel better?” Dimly, she hears the back door open and her daughter stomp into the kitchen. Eve moves into the living room and lets herself outside to stand on the porch. The air is wet. Everything around her is black and gray, and lashing. Water rushes down the curb and pours into the storm drain. “You should have been here last night.”

“I know. I wanted to be there, but I couldn’t. Tyler understood.”

That’s just like Tyler not to reveal hurt feelings or disappointment. Tyler’s always been stoic. He’s never been one to feel sorry for
himself. “What he understood was that your job is more important to you than he is.”

“Don’t be dramatic. He knows I have responsibilities.”

“To your family.”

“Yes! To provide for them.”

Eve leans against the railing, listening to the rain, welcoming the cold dampness. Her cheeks are burning with fury. “One day, David. What difference does taking off one day make?”

“Stan’s already asked me if I want to take on a less challenging workload. I told him no. But I can’t keep taking off weekends like this.”

“You don’t take off weekends. You work from home.” He sits on the couch, laptop opened before him, for hours each day and long into the evening.

“It’s not the same. I’m never going to make partner at this rate.”

They need that extra income. They need that job security. “Of course you will,” she says uncertainly.

“It’s been two years,” he says, and now she understands he’s moving the conversation in another direction, a place she literally doesn’t want to go. “We can’t move to DC.” This is what he wants, what he’s been hinting at for months. But she’s made a safe haven for Tyler here, in this house, in this neighborhood. She won’t uproot him. “It’s too dangerous.” David knows this. He knows this just as well as she does, but he no longer seems to care.

“We can make it work. We can drive in tandem, at night. I’ll find a house ahead of time and make sure it’s safe.”

“Like you did last Saturday?” she snaps before she can stop herself. A strained pause that writhes with recrimination, with blame. She doesn’t want this. She loves him. She needs him. They all do. “It’s just that … Tyler’s doctors are here.”

“We can find new doctors, Eve. There’s no shortage of them here.”

New doctors won’t be as familiar with Tyler; they might miss a
crucial early warning sign—the slightest pigmentation change, the smallest freckle. David doesn’t understand how hard she’s worked to forge these relationships. He’s not the one who takes Tyler to his appointments, talks to the doctors and the nurses in an effort to unite them in the unrelenting effort to save her son. He’s uncomfortable around doctors and in medical settings. “We can’t pull him out of school. Not just as high school’s starting.”

“He sits in his room and watches a computer screen. He can do that anywhere.”

“No,” she says between her teeth. “He can’t.” It had taken her months to set everything up, meet with the teachers, pave the way for them to adapt to her son’s unique needs.
He won’t want to be singled out
, she’s told them.
Kids can always meet here for projects, as long as it’s after dark
. Tyler doesn’t build rapport with his teachers. He doesn’t have impromptu opportunities to ask questions in the hall, to work with his classmates on projects. They’d tried, the kids in his group taking the computer and sitting with it, but it had been a failure from the start. Something always went wrong. The kids didn’t listen when Tyler volunteered something. Someone knocked the computer askew and he couldn’t see everyone. Someone in another part of the room said something that he didn’t catch. Group projects had had to be conducted with kids who were willing to go out of their way to come to their house. Often it was Eve herself who
was
the group.

“You’re underestimating him.”

But she’s not. “What about his friends? It’s so hard for him.” It’s not enough for Tyler to have friends he only knows online. Zach’s important. He helps normalize Tyler’s life. She loves hearing them debate at the dinner table and roughhouse on the trampoline. She loves hearing Tyler laugh.

“He’ll be all right. What’s important is that we’re a family.”