Secrets She Left Behind (15 page)

I rested my hand on his. “You know you have a place to go,” I said. “You and Maggie.”

He nodded. Pressed his lips together. “If it’s still okay with you and Steve, maybe we could try it for a while,” he said.

“Of
course,
” I said.

“It’ll just be temporary.” Jamie sounded as if he was trying to warn me of something, but if he was, I didn’t hear it. I was already making plans. I’d cook for them. Take care of them. And I’d erase the frown lines that were deepening by the day across Jamie’s forehead.

Having Jamie and Maggie in the house worked out better than I could have imagined. Steve was gone so much, and I loved Jamie’s company. When Steve
was
around, I got a kick out of watching a different side of Jamie emerge—the masculine side that could talk sports and cars. It was a facet of his personality I’d had no idea existed. He used to ride a motorcycle, he told Steve, and the two men even went to a motorcycle show together in Raleigh. Jamie and I kept careful distance from each other, even more so when Steve was out of town than when he was there. A witness would never guess we’d ever been lovers. But even though we didn’t touch, the longer Jamie was there, the deeper in love I fell.

In September, I missed my period. I’d never been very regular, but when I missed it again in October and felt queasy two mornings in a row, I went to my gynecologist, who told me what I already knew: I was eight weeks pregnant. Eight weeks earlier, Steve had been in the middle of his training in California.

I was both excited and terrified. I was pregnant! No baby could ever replace Sam, but how I’d longed to try again! Yet it wasn’t Steve’s baby, and I had no idea what Jamie would say.

I called him at the real-estate office as soon as I got home from the doctor. I hated to tell him over the phone, but Steve would be home that night, and I’d have no privacy then to speak to him.

“I’m eight weeks pregnant,” I said less than a second after he said hello.

He didn’t respond right away and I twisted the phone cord in my hand, waiting.

“Hold on a minute,” he said.

He spoke to someone, then I heard the sound of a door being closed. Finally, he was back on the line.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Do you mean physically or emotionally?”

“Is it mine?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Oh, God,” he said. “I’m sorry. I should have been more careful.”

“I’m
happy,
” I said. “I want this baby so much, Jamie.”

“Are you…will you let Steve think it’s his?”

I paused, wishing, hoping, he would say the things I needed him to say. “Only if I have to,” I said. “Only if you won’t…” I squeezed the phone cord again. “I can divorce him,” I said.

“Sara,” Jamie said, “I can’t leave Laurel.”

For the first time in the nearly two years since I’d known him, I was angry with him.

“That’s crazy, Jamie!” I said. “You’ve
already
left her. You left her emotionally a long time ago, and now you’ve left her physically. You
live
with us, remember? You live with
me.
” Although the truth was, he went to the Sea Tender often to check on Laurel. So did I, for that matter, building a friendship with her to ease my guilt over my feelings for Jamie. I pretended to myself as well as to the world that I cared for them both. God, what a sloppy, crazy, twisted life I was living!

Jamie responded with his usual calm. “I’ll help you any way I can, but I don’t think either Laurel or I expect our separation to be permanent, Sara,” Jamie said. “I’ve told you that. She’s still sick. Sicker than before, really. She needs me.”

“I need you, too,” I said.

“I know, but you have Steve. Laurel only has me.”

My anger rose again. “I’m supposed to let this baby…this child…grow up thinking that Steve is his or her father?” I asked. “This baby can’t possibly be Steve’s.”

“But he doesn’t know that, does he?”

“But
I
do, and so do you!” I said. “What do you want me to do, Jamie? Just make this baby go away?” I wouldn’t have an abortion no matter what he said.

“No, I don’t want you to do that,” he said. “Look, Sara. I’ll support you whatever you choose to do.”

“What does that
mean?
”

“I’ll support you financially. Emotionally.” He hesitated. “You know I love you.”

Tears burned my eyes. Yes, I knew he loved me. That’s what made this all the more painful.

“I’ll love the baby, too,” he said. “And I’m sorry this is so hard for you. But I have a commitment to Laurel and Maggie that I can’t break.”

“What about me?” I asked. “Where do I fit in?”

He hesitated. “Sara,” he said finally, “what I have with Laurel is public and shallow. What I have with you is private and deep. Which part of me would you rather have?”

Keith

I
PULLED INTO ONE OF THE TWO PARKING SPACES IN FRONT
of Marcus’s tower. His pickup was in the other space and I sat looking at it for a couple of minutes, trying to decide if I should go through with talking to him or just go home instead. I took another Percocet and washed it down with a swig from my water bottle. I was a little spacy from the extra Percs, but I needed them. I could swear the pain was worse every day. I wouldn’t talk to Marcus until it eased off a bit. I was uptight enough to begin with.

I’d finally made it back to physical therapy a couple of days earlier. As soon as Gunnar, my therapist, stretched my left arm over my head, I broke out in a sweat.

“You’ve lost some of your mobility here,” he said.

“No shit.” I gritted my teeth together.

Gunnar looked like a Viking, tall and blond and ripped. He grew up in Alabama, though, and when he opened his mouth, it was weird to hear that drawl come out. “Have you been keeping up with your exercises?” he asked.

His question pissed me off more than the pain. “It’s hard to do them alone,” I said.

“Sorry,” Gunnar said. “Still no word on your mother, huh?”

I shook my head. I didn’t want to talk about it.

“You have to keep your appointments.” Gunnar moved my arm out to the side and I squeezed my eyes shut. It felt like he was tearing the scar tissue apart. “It’s bad enough about your mother. You don’t want to backslide physically, too, now, do you?”

Yeah, that was exactly what I was after. Getting worse.

“We’ll fix some way you can do the exercises alone,” Gunnar said. He didn’t get it. It was more than just having her hold the other end of the exercise band. It was the way she’d cheer me on. The
“you can do it, honey!”
and the
“just two more and I’ll make you a banana split.”
I hated how she treated me like I was ten years old. But if I got back to the trailer and found her waiting there for me, she could treat me any way she liked.

Today made it a full week. Those critical first forty-eight hours were long gone.

Between the Percocet and the fact that I’d hardly slept since she disappeared, I was wiped out. My mind kept torturing me with those horror stories about what might’ve happened to her. I just hoped that if some bastard killed her, he made it fast. That was the worst part—picturing her scared, ’cause she would be. I mean, who wouldn’t? But being a woman, kind of defenseless like she was, she’d be scared shitless. I had to get up at night and turn on the TV to get those thoughts out of my head.

I thought I saw some movement in one of the second-story windows of Marcus’s tower. I scrunched down in my seat, wishing the Percocet would kick in. If I didn’t feel better in five minutes, I’d leave. I could hold out another couple of days before I had to talk to him. At least I hoped I could.

It wasn’t just the PT appointments I’d been skipping; I wasn’t going to school, either. Mrs. Wichewski, one of the guidance counselors, actually came to the trailer the day before. She didn’t call
first with a warning or anything. Just showed up at the door. That’s how you knew you were either totally screwed or a charity case or both. Did I need transportation? she asked. Did I need a tutor? She shook me up. If she got into my school records, she’d figure out I was seventeen and I’d be up shit’s creek. Wouldn’t she have to call a social worker or something? Right now, I was slipping through the cracks and that’s how I wanted it. The cops weren’t all that worried about me. My mother was missing, but not dead—or at least not confirmed dead. I was pushing eighteen, so nearly legal anyway. There were plenty of younger kids who needed help more than I did, so maybe someone knew I was seventeen and was just letting me slide. Mrs. Wichewski, though. She could get it in her mind she needed to save me or something and I’d end up in a foster home after all.

“What about moving in with a friend’s family for now?” she suggested. “You could come to school with your friend, then.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said, trying to get her off my case. Like I still had friends in school. Some graduated, but a lot dropped out. They were probably spending their days getting high. Not that popping Percocets was all that different.

The front door to Marcus’s tower suddenly opened.

“Keith?” he called.

Busted. No turning back now. I got out of my car.

“Hey,” I said.

“I saw your car out here. You all right?”

“Never better.” Why did people keep asking me stupid questions like that? How was I supposed to answer? My mother was gone. I had a screwed-up face. My arms looked like they were covered in pink Saran Wrap. I could end up in some group home who knew where. And now—and this was my reason for coming to see
Marcus—I was almost out of money. My mother’s savings account still had a little over a thousand in it—the same amount as when the cops first checked it—but I couldn’t get at it. The day of the search, Marcus gave me two hundred bucks to keep me going. Just pulled out his wallet and peeled off ten twenties, like it was no big deal. That two hundred looked like a lot to me, but pizzas and Chinese ate it up, and every time I went to PT, I had to pay a copay. Marcus’d give me more money if I asked for it, but I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want his money. I wanted
mine.

“Come in.” He held the door open for me.

I hadn’t been inside Marcus’s tower for a few years. Probably the last time had been for Andy’s tenth or eleventh birthday party. Marcus’s house was the coolest on the Island, or close to it, anyway. He’d taken one of the old Operation Bumblebee towers they used back in the forties and added to it, painted it light green and pimped it out with an awesome sound system on every floor. The rooms were small but every one of them had a major view of the ocean, so who cared? The only thing I didn’t like about his house was his roof. It was flat, with no railing, and the one time I went up there, I had some kind of panic attack. I wasn’t great with heights. And of course, I wasn’t great with fire now, either. This week, I could add living alone to my list of phobias. I wasn’t afraid someone was going to break in and kill me or anything like that, but I got this weird empty feeling in my chest at night, like maybe I was going to have a heart attack or something. The darker it got outside, the more I felt it. I’d take that feeling over living with a bunch of loser foster kids, though.

I followed Marcus into the living room/dining room/kitchen, and could see some surfers out on the waves. I hadn’t surfed since the day my mother went missing.

Marcus stuck his hands in his pockets. “What can I get you to drink?” he asked.

“Beer?”

“Yeah, right. Second choice?”

“Nothing.” I sat down on his leather couch. “I just need to ask you a question.”

He pulled a bar stool out from beneath the kitchen counter and perched on it. “Shoot,” he said.

“You know that college fund you gave my mother?” I’d never talked to him about that money. Never thanked him or anything.

He nodded.

“Well, like, with my mother gone, I need the money. She always told me I couldn’t use it for anything except college, though. Is that true?”

He leaned back against the counter. “Here’s how it worked, Keith,” he said. “I set it up as a trust fund, with your mom as the trustee and with the—I guess they call them directives—that the money only be used for college. In that case, your mother would arrange to have the money paid directly to the school. Unless you were twenty-five. Then the money could go to you.”

“But what if I need it now?”

He shook his head. “You can’t get at it now.” He sat forward, his elbows on his knees. “But listen,” he said. “You don’t need to worry about money, all right? You tell me what you need and I’ll—”

“
You
set the fund up, though, right?” I was getting pissed.

“That’s right.”

“So why can’t you change it now that the, like, the whole situation’s different?”

“It’s out of my hands. I had nothing to do with it once it was set up. I’m sorry.”

I looked out at the surfers. Man, I envied them. Nothing to worry about except catching the next wave. I’d have to get a job. I could just picture going someplace, looking like I did, and asking for work.

“Keith,” Marcus said, “you have to let people help you.”

I stood up. “No, thanks.” I walked toward his door. “I’ll figure somethin’ out.”

“The restitution money!” Marcus said suddenly, getting to his feet. “You get that monthly from Maggie, don’t you?”

“The fucking restitution money goes into my mother’s account!” I shouted. “I never see it, and the bank won’t let me touch it.” I reached for his door and started to pull it open, but he grabbed my arm.

“Shit!”
I squeezed my eyes shut. The pain was like a hot iron running up my arm and into my shoulder.

He let go quickly, his hands in the air. “Oh, buddy!” he said. “I’m sorry!”

“Go to hell.” I pulled open the door and went outside, and this time he didn’t try to stop me.

The needle on my damn gas gauge was on E as I drove home, and I drove right past a gas station without stopping. I couldn’t. Here’s how I’d been getting gas since the fire: either Mom would fill the tank for me, or I’d drive to the station in Sneads Ferry, where this burned dude—the one who bought me beer—would take care of it. It wasn’t the money that was the problem. It was the smell of gas. I couldn’t make myself take the cap off the gas tank, push the start button on the pump and then smell that explosive stuff running into my car. I kept picturing it catching on fire, wrapping me up in flames again. I had actual nightmares
about it. I thought the vet from Iraq was the bravest guy I knew to work around something as flammable as gasoline. “It’s how I deal with it, man,” he told me once. “I decided I’d work in a place where I had to face my fear every damn day.” Yeah, well, good for him. I wasn’t doing it.

The needle was dropping below the E, actually, and I acted like I didn’t notice as I pulled into the trailer park. I’d do something about it later. Just couldn’t press that start button today.

Inside the trailer, I turned on the TV, then went into the kitchen to nuke a frozen thing of lasagna. From the living room, I heard those two words that made me want to barf:
Maggie Lockwood.
I went back to the living room to change the station, but I saw ol’ Maggie outside what looked like the elementary school, getting pelted by rotten tomatoes or something. A woman news anchor was talking in the background while a line of pissed-off adults showed up on the screen.

“The parents wouldn’t let Lockwood into the school,” she said as ol’ Maggie ducked behind her purse.

“Kill the bitch!” I shouted at the TV. This was the best thing I’d seen in a long time.

Then they interviewed this big blond dude who I figured was one of the parents.

“She can do her community service on the moon,” he said. His face was totally red. “She can do it in
I-raq,
for all I care! But she ain’t doing it anywhere near our kids.”

“You tell ’em!” I said.

The news changed to something about beach erosion, and I went back into the kitchen to take the lasagna out of the microwave. For the first time in a week—hell, maybe the first time in a
year—
I was smiling.