Secrets She Left Behind

I was afraid he meant me, but he covered the mouthpiece and looked at Laurel. “It’s Keith. He sounds shaken up.”

We were all quiet as Mom took the phone. I tried to picture how Keith looked now. The last time I saw him was in the hospital, when his arms looked like giant white tree stumps, thin steel rods sticking out of the bandages covering the fingers of his left hand. More bandages had covered half his face. I knew he was scarred. No one had told me exactly how bad it was. I could guess, though.

Mom held the phone away from her ear and looked at Andy.

“When Sara…Miss Sara said she was going to the store, did she say when she planned on getting home?” she asked.

Andy licked his spoon. “I don’t think so.”

“Did she say what store? What kind of shopping?”

“I don’t remember.”

She spoke into the phone again. “He doesn’t know anything, Keith,” she said. She stood up, turned her back toward us and walked toward the kitchen. She lowered her voice, but I could still hear her. “Why don’t you try Dawn?” she asked. “Maybe she’ll know something.”

Dawn Reynolds was the woman Ben had cheated on me with. Or, as I admitted to myself this past year, I was the woman—the girl, really—Ben cheated on Dawn with. He’d lived with her, after all. Thank God he’d gone back to his wife in Charlotte and I wouldn’t have to worry about bumping into him. Oh my God. That would be the worst.

“What’s up?” Uncle Marcus asked as Mom hung up the phone and sat down again.

“Keith got home around five, and Sara wasn’t there and she’s still not home.” She picked up her empty ice-cream bowl like she was going to get up and carry it to the kitchen, but she didn’t budge from her seat. “He saw the note I left, thanking her for watching Andy.”

“She probably told him she’d be out and he forgot,” Uncle Marcus said.

“Kind of strange, though.” Mom frowned. “What time did she leave, Andy?”

“Leave where?” Andy asked.

“The trailer. Their mobile home.”

Andy shrugged. “I was killing Mega Warriors,” he said.

Uncle Marcus laughed. “What was your score?”

“My best was 52, 341,” Andy said proudly.

Uncle Marcus smiled at my mother. “The boy has his priorities when it comes to what he remembers and what he doesn’t,” he said. “I’m sure Sara’s fine.”

I listened to the conversation, feeling apart from them all of a sudden. I felt as though I wasn’t really there. Like I was only dreaming that I was home. It was a dream I’d been longing to have all year.

Around ten-thirty, Uncle Marcus went upstairs and I realized he was staying over. I was glad. I didn’t feel safe in our house, and I liked having him there. I thought the news vans were finally gone, but I still felt as though people were sneaking around outside, maybe looking in the windows, maybe carrying something to throw. Oh, God! What if someone torched the house with all of us inside? They might think that perfectly fit my crime.

I went upstairs myself, and for the first time in a year, put on the soft old drawstring shorts and T-shirt I liked to sleep in. The shorts just about fell off me. Wow, I’d lost weight this year. Big-time.

Before I went to prison, I used to always watch some TV from my bed at night, but I’d had it with TV for today. I lay in the darkness for a half hour, imagining I was hearing sounds outside. If someone set fire to our house and it blocked the stairs, what would we do? Andy and I both had these roll-up ladders in our closets that we could hook onto our windowsills, but there was nothing like that in Mom’s room. I started to cry just thinking about how awful it would be.

Finally, I went downstairs, teddy bear in my arms, to make sure everything was locked up tight. I walked barefoot into the dark kitchen. Through the glass door, I could see the moonlight on the sound and our pier. I wanted to go out on the pier and breathe in the smell of the water and feel the salty air on my skin and in my hair. No way did I dare go outside, though.

I walked into the family room and saw that the door to the porch was open, and I froze. I tiptoed toward the porch and peeked around the door frame to see my mother sitting on the glider in the darkness.

“Hi,” I said.

“Can’t sleep?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Come sit with me.”

I glanced toward the street.

“No one’s there,” she said. “Even if they were, they couldn’t see us here, it’s so dark. Sit.” She patted the cushion next to her on the glider.

I sat down. It felt strange to sit next to her like that. I bet I hadn’t sat so close to her since I was a kid. Maybe not even then.

“I’m just biding my time until midnight,” Mom said.

“What’s happening at midnight?”

“I decided if I haven’t heard from Keith by then, I’m calling him to be sure Sara got home all right.”

“She probably did.”

“Probably.”

“Do you know if he talked to Dawn?” I wanted to say her name out loud to let Mom know I could take it. She didn’t need to get weird about it.

“I don’t know. I hope so.” She rocked the glider a little. “You know, Maggie, I’ve gotten to know Dawn better this year.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just…she and I had to clear the air after everything that happened. She was hurt, too, by the situation with…by the triangle between you and her and Ben.”

“I know.” I still felt some leftover hatred for Dawn. It wasn’t her fault, but I couldn’t help it.

“She’s a decent person,” Mom said. “She has a new man in her life now. Frankie. He works at this boat-rental place, and he moved in with her last month. I don’t know him well, but he seems nice.”

I hugged the teddy bear tighter.

“She’s worked very hard to help the victims and their families, getting financial support for them and making sure they had counseling or whatever else they needed.”

“I know,” I whispered. “I saw some of them on the news. Mr. Eggles’s niece was…” I shook my head, not wanting to remember the ugly look on the woman’s face.

“Mr. Eggles’s family is very angry,” Mom said. “A lot of people are still angry. Marcus got a call from the police a little while ago and they said they caught the boy who threw the concrete through our window. It turns out he was a friend of Henderson Wright’s.”

I remembered the poster of Henderson Wright at the memorial service for the fire victims, how he looked like a scared little rabbit. I remembered Reverend Bill saying his family lived in a car.

“Henderson’s family, though, has been more understanding,” Mom said. “They’ve been quite forgiving.”

“Really?”

“Dawn was able to get them into an apartment, and they’re the kind of people who just…” She rocked the glider a little more. “They’re religious. They have a way of accepting what happened that I can’t even imagine.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t imagine it either.

Mom sighed. “I need to tell you about Jordy Matthews’s mother,” she said. “I don’t want you to hear about it through the grapevine.”

Oh, no. Jordy Matthews was the third death in the fire. A really cute blue-eyed blonde with the future ahead of her. I had those posters memorized. I still saw them when I closed my eyes at night. “What about her mother?” I asked.

Mom looked toward the moonlit sound. “She couldn’t get over her grief,” she said. “Not that I blame her for an instant. She tried to kill herself after Jordy died and they put her in a psych hospital for a few months. I guess she seemed better when she got out, but a few weeks ago, she was killed when she flipped her car off the high-rise bridge.”

I sucked in my breath. “She was—” I pictured the bridge, how incredibly hard it would be to drive a car off it. That couldn’t happen by accident. “Suicide?” I asked.

Mom nodded. “It was all too much for her. She was a single mom. She had another daughter in college, but I don’t think she had a good relationship with her, so I guess she felt like she didn’t have anyone or anything else to live for.”

I rested my chin on the teddy bear. “It just goes on and on, doesn’t it?” I said. “What I did.”

Mom put her arm around me. “I know you feel terrible,” she said. “And I didn’t tell you about Ellen—Jordy’s mother—to make you feel worse. But I wanted you to hear it from me.”

I leaned close to her until my head rested on her shoulder. “I’m glad you told me,” I said.

She touched the teddy bear. “Isn’t that the softest thing?”

“You must think I’m nuts, carrying it around.”

“Not nuts at all. I thought it was sweet Marcus got it for you.” “It was.

“Is it uncomfortable for you?” she asked. “Having him stay over?”

I sat up straight again.”It’s awesome,” I said. “It’s like this family’s the way it should be, finally.” I ran my fingers through the angora on the back of the teddy bear. “Are you going to get married?”

“Probably. Would you like that?”

“Yes,” I said. “Definitely.”

She squeezed my shoulder. “Oh, sweetheart, do you have any idea how happy I am to have you home again?” I heard tears in her voice.

“Not as happy as I am to be home.”

“I worry about how this year’s changed you. Hardened you.”

The last thing I felt was hard. “I think it softened me,” I said. “I’m nervous about what happens now, though.” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d confided in my mother. It felt both strange and good.

“We’ll take it one step at a time,” she said. “And I’ll be by your side every minute.” She ran her hand over my cheek. “I forgot to tell you that I made an appointment for you for Thursday with the court-ordered therapist.”

“Already?” I didn’t feel like talking to anyone. Not yet.

“They said you needed your first appointment within a week of your release. And I have an idea for your community service. Do you want to hear it now or maybe tomorrow or later this—”

“Now.” I hadn’t thought about where I would do my community service. Topsail Island wasn’t exactly crawling with opportunities. Plus, the idea of maybe running into all those hurt and pissed-off people was enough to make me nauseous.

“My school,” Mom said. “Douglas Elementary. I spoke to Ms. Terrell—you know, the principal?—and she said you could help out in one of the classrooms. She’s already talked to the first-grade teacher, Mrs. Hadley, who you’ll love, and she said she’d like to have you.”

“Really? I’m an ex-con, Mom.”

“Don’t use that term. You don’t really think of yourself that way, do you?”

Yeah, actually, I did, even though the word made me think of disgusting old men. “That’s what I am,” I said.

“Well, Ms. Terrell didn’t seem to think it would be a problem. She and I have talked a lot this past year and I think she understands who you really are and what led you to do what you did. Would you like that? Working at the school?”

“Yes,” I said. “As long as the teacher, you know, thinks it’s okay.”

I loved that my mother had figured it out for me. Made all the arrangements. She’d left me to take care of myself for most of my life, and this felt good. Plus, she’d made a good choice for me. I wanted to make up to everyone for the fire, but how could I do that when I was afraid to walk out my front door? Little first graders had to be the safest possible choice. They wouldn’t know who I was or what I’d done.

The next best thing to a stuffed teddy bear.

Chapter Six

Keith

MY MOTHER COULD ANNOY THE CRAP OUT OF ME SOMETIMES. She hovered over me, like I was going to die if she didn’t keep her eye on me every second. I almost did kick the bucket after the fire, so I guess that gave her the right to freak out, but it could really get to me. So when I came home from the beach and she wasn’t there, I was glad. And after a couple hours, when I could heat up my own mac and cheese for dinner and eat it in front of a Simpsons rerun without her giving me grief about it, I was still liking it.

The Simpsons was still on when I heard someone on our deck and then a knock on the door. I opened it and saw a couple of guys out there. One was on the other side of our screen door, the other back a ways, holding a camera. The sun was starting to go down behind his head.

“Keith?” the guy closest to me said. “Today Maggie Lockwood was released from prison. As one of the fire victims, can you tell us how you feel about that?”

It took me a couple of seconds to realize what was going on. Reporters!

“No fuckin’ way!” I slammed the door shut in his face, then walked around the trailer yanking down the shades. Like I needed this! Where was my mother? She would’ve answered the door and told those bastards to take a hike off the end of a pier.

When The Simpsons was over, the news came on. I never watched the news, but I wanted to make sure they didn’t say anything about me. They didn’t. Not by name, anyway. But the first thing they showed was this mob outside the prison and Maggie coming out the door, looking pale and scared. The crowd was vicious, shouting and holding these protest signs and everything. I loved it.

“You deserve it, bitch!” I shouted at the TV.

I watched the news awhile longer, then looked at the clock on the stove, which I could see from the couch. Almost seven-thirty. Where was my mother? She probably told me she was going out with Dawn or something and I forgot. I didn’t listen all that much when she talked. But by eight o’clock, which was when she always helped me with my physical-therapy exercises, and she still wasn’t home, I got…worried is the wrong word. Mad. I was mad she hadn’t left a note or anything. She knew I forgot things she told me, and if she was going to miss eight o’clock, then she should have left a note or a message on my cell or something.

I sat in the living room and dialed her cell number. It rang and rang and finally cut to her voice mail.

“It’s eight o’clock,” I said. “Where are you?”

So I called Laurel to see if my mother had said anything to Andy. A sign of total desperation—me calling Laurel. After I talked to her, I called Dawn. Frankie answered the phone and tried to make chitchat with me.

“Just put Dawn on,” I said. I didn’t know what Dawn saw in that dude.

She sounded worried when I said Mom wasn’t home. Dawn’d had no plans with her, and my mother didn’t have much in the way of friends, really. She’d been best friends with Laurel all those years and then this last year she’d been glued to my hip, so she didn’t get out much. Dawn said she hadn’t talked to my mother since the day before at Jabeen’s Java, where they worked together.

I tried to do my exercises by myself. I got out the exercise bands. My mother would pull against them while I pulled back, working all the muscles in my arms and trying to keep the scar tissue from tightening up. It was brutal shit. Without my mother there, I wrapped the bands around the leg of the heaviest chair in the living room, but every time I pulled on the band, the chair moved. My mother would always kind of cheer me on. You can do it. I know it hurts. Keep going. I hated her rah-rah stuff, but without it I wasn’t doing all that good.

I sat like I was supposed to, with my legs stretched out wide on the floor, and got the red band into position on my left arm. I pulled, leaning way back, and the damn chair flipped over on my ankle.

“Goddamn it!” I managed to push the chair off my foot. I threw the band to the floor and stood up, grabbing my cell phone again, punching the number for my mother’s phone.

“Where the hell are you?” I shouted, then rammed the phone into my pocket. Screw the exercises. Screw them. Now my ankle was killing me on top of the whole arm agony. I took a Percocet even though it was a couple of hours before I was supposed to.

I went outside and ran down the deck stairs to my car, moving fast in case the reporters were still hanging around. She went to the store, Andy’d said. Not that I trusted Andy to remember things right, but what else did I have to go on? I couldn’t believe Andy and I were now in the same year when he was dumb as a toad. What did I care, really? School was a waste of time. My mother kept pressuring me, like, what do you want to do when you graduate? I didn’t know the answer to that question before the fire. Now it was as if my choices had been reduced by thousands. Everyone at school was talking about college and how they were going to visit different ones this year, and since so many kids were poor—like us—how they’d get loans or try to get scholarships and all that crap. My counselor said if I could get my grades up, I might be able to get a scholarship myself, but the whole time he was talking to me, he was looking at my right eye so he could avoid the left side of my face. Didn’t want to be caught staring at the freak. Pretending it was a normal dude he was talking to. I was thinking, oh sure, buddy. Once I was out of Douglas High, the last thing I wanted was more school with more kids staring at me. I didn’t bother telling him that if I wanted to go to college, I didn’t need a scholarship. I had a college fund. Guilt money given to me by Marcus Lockwood after Jamie Lockwood—my real father—died. I could only use the money for college, but if I didn’t do college, I could have it when I was twenty-five. Twenty-five! What was I supposed to do till then?

So I headed toward the Food Lion in Hampstead where my mother usually shopped, checking the ditches along the side of the road for her car. It was dark and I had to use a flashlight and I thought, this is so lame. So fucking dramatic. Like what did I think, I was in some movie or something? But then I kept coming back to the fact that it didn’t make sense she was gone. I called her, like, fifteen times. Maybe her cell battery was shot, but still, couldn’t she find a phone somewhere?

Her car wasn’t in the Food Lion parking lot. Then I drove back to the island and checked out the parking lots at Jabeen’s and the restaurants and anyplace else I could think of, mostly because I didn’t know what else to do. I wondered if I should call the police, but that seemed like even more drama. I went home after a while and sat in front of my computer and got online. We didn’t have high-speed Internet, but I could piggyback on someone else’s connection nearly every time I tried. I did what I usually did online. I Googled stuff like suicide and burns and ostracism and grief and all that shit. Sometimes I went to porn sites, but that was so pathetic. I didn’t like thinking about how those sites would probably be the only place I’d get any for the rest of my life. Instead, I liked reading about how burn victims like me felt. Most of them were older. Some of their wives and husbands left them. Couldn’t take the stress, they said, but I bet it was more like the embarrassment of having a partner who looked like a monster.

Most of the burn victims I read about took antidepressants. So did I. If I didn’t, I probably would have offed myself months ago. I still thought about suicide, but not like I used to. Back then, I thought about how I could do it. Get a gun. Hang myself. OD on meds. Every time I thought about my mother finding me dead, though, I’d start crying. Pathetic. I’d turned into a sissy this year. Then I got on the Zoloft and stopped feeling like I wanted to die, but I still wasn’t sure why I should want to live. My mother was worried because they said some kids on antidepressants were more likely to kill themselves. I thought that was interesting and paid attention to how I felt. The truth was, I wanted the Zoloft to push me over the edge. To give me the guts to do it. I started thinking that I could hang myself from this tree over by the police station. I could do it at night so no one would see me until it was too late, and then the cops would be first to find me and they’d cut me down before my mother could see me like that. But on the Zoloft, I started losing the urge. I got more pissed than sad. I felt more like hanging other people than hanging myself. It was Maggie Lockwood I wanted to see dead. Not myself.

I was still surfing the Net around midnight when the phone rang. The caller ID said it was the Lockwoods’ house and I stared at the number for a few seconds, worried it might be Maggie calling to say she was sorry or something. But around the fourth ring, I thought maybe it was Laurel and she knew where my mother was, so I picked it up.

“Did your mom get home okay?” Laurel asked.

“No,” I said. “I don’t know where she is. Dawn doesn’t know either.”

Laurel was quiet. “Did you try her other friends?”

I wasn’t going to let her know there were no other friends. “Nobody knows where she is,” I said.

“Keith, you should call the police. Or if you want, I’ll call them for you.”

“No.” I didn’t want Laurel Lockwood to do anything for me.

“Will you call them, then? Please? I’m worried.”

“Yeah, I’ll call,” I said. It was like she was giving me permission to dive into the drama. Like it wasn’t just me overreacting.

“Let me know what happens, Keith,” she said. “Do you want me to come over there and stay with you?”

Right, I thought. That’s just what I want.

“No. I’m good. I’m getting off so I can call the police.”

A cop showed up half an hour after I called. Must’ve been a slow night in Surf City.

“Hey, Keith,” he said when I opened the door. “I’m Officer Pryor.” His name didn’t register. He was an old guy, and he seemed to know me. But then, everyone knew who I was: the most damaged living victim of the fire. My claim to fame. “Okay if I come in?” he asked.

We sat in the kitchen. He took off his hat, leaving ridges in his gray hair. He knew my mother from Jabeen’s, he told me. Nice lady. Where did I think she was?

“If I knew, I wouldn’t’ve called you,” I said.

He asked me the expected stuff about her description, even though he knew her. A couple of inches shorter than me, I told him. Blue eyes. Short blond hair. Tan. She had that kind of skin that went dark just from walking between the trailer and her car. She’d looked exactly the same my whole life. Never changed that hair or the way she dressed or her routine or anything. She never changed anything. That thought freaked me out. Made me realize how serious this was.

“She’s always home at night to do my exercises with me,” I said. “My physical therapy. And she always makes dinner, unless she’s working and she didn’t work today. Makes no sense.”

He wrote things down on a notepad as I talked. He had fat hands and a gold band on his ring finger.

“Does she have any medical conditions?” he asked.

“No. I mean, except for some arthritis in her knees.” She groaned like an old lady when she got down on the floor with me to do the exercises.

“No seizures or anything like that? Diabetes? Heart problems?”

“No.”

“Did she take any medication?”

I couldn’t ever remember seeing my mother take anything, except maybe cough syrup or vitamins.

“Nothing.”

“How about mental-health problems? Been a hard year for her and you both, with the fire and all. Do you know if she was depressed?”

“Nah,” I said, but I wondered. How would I know? I didn’t think much about what this year had been like for her. “She’s not the depressed type.”

“What does that mean?”

“You know. She’s tough. If she went on one of those Survivor shows, she’d win.”

“Some of those tough survivor types are cream puffs inside.”

“Not my mother.”

“Did you call any of her friends?”

“Dawn Reynolds and Laurel Lockwood.”

He raised his eyebrows when I mentioned the name Lockwood. Probably because of Maggie getting out of prison.

I explained about Andy being sick and staying in our trailer while Laurel went to get Maggie. How Mom told him she was going to the store and just didn’t come back.

“What store would she go to?”