Secret Sins: (A Standalone)

by CD Reiss

  “You can’t tell,” he said.

  “You know I won’t.”

  “You need to really swear.”

  Jesus. To be in grade school again. To make the big little and the little big. To think you had control when you didn’t and adulthood was just childhood layered over with manners and privilege. When lies seemed like easy answers to uncomfortable truths.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s do this. Let’s take a pledge. We hold our hands up and swear anything we say is secret. When we put our hands down, we lock it closed and go back to normal.”

  He thought about it for a second, then with a short nod he said, “Okay.”

  “But there’s another thing. We cannot lie. Not when the pledge is open.”

  “Fine.”

  I held my hand up, and he mirrored me.

  “Pledge open,” I said. “What happened?”

  He took a deep breath and looked at the corner of the room. “Kerry and I were outside when it started raining, and we got stuck in the pool house.”

  Kerry was the daughter of one of Dad’s associates. She was a year older than Jonathan and pretty smart.

  “Go on.”

  “We started doing stuff.”

  Jesus Christ, use a condom.

  He’s not ready.

  He glanced at me, tearing his attention from the corner for half a second, then planting it back. I didn’t answer the glance or egg him on. I knew what was coming, more or less. Mom and Dad weren’t very forthcoming about sex with the kids, thinking my early knowledge led to my early downfall.

  He spit out the next line. “I think she broke it.”

  “Broke what?” I knew the answer, but my mouth ran before my brain caught up.

  He wouldn’t say but pointed at his crotch with both hands.

  Do. Not. Laugh. Do. Not. Laugh.

  “What makes you think it’s broken?”

  “She touched it. It got… it got weird then…” He looked at the ceiling.

  I had to finish for him. Putting him on the spot wasn’t working. He was in fifth grade, and though he’d started getting big, he was still a child.

  “It got hard then felt tickly then white stuff came out?”

  His eyes went wide. “Yes.”

  “It’s not broken.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Aren’t you and your friends talking about this amongst yourselves? Girls? Sex?”

  “I didn’t have sex with her!”

  I waved it away. “I know. Okay. I’m just going to assure you, it’s not broken. You’re fine. But tomorrow, let me take you to lunch and I can tell you why. All right?”

  He took a deep breath of reprieve. “Yes.”

  “Until then, keep away from Kerry O’Neill.”

  “All right.”

  “Tuck your shirt in.”

  He did it, jamming the shirttails into his waistband as if Daddy was in the other room. He took a step toward the doorway.

  “Jon. Stop.”

  “What?”

  I put my hand up then down. “Close pledge.”

  “Close pledge.”

  We went back into the tasting room. Drew leaned on one of the benches, hair flopped over his face like a rock star, shirt dry like a lawyer, with a manila envelope in one hand and a white rectangle in the other. He looked at it then Jonathan.

  “What?” I said.

  Drew just shook his head as Jonathan bolted up the stairs with barely a wave.

  “Strat mailed stuff to Audio City. I don’t know why.” He put down the manila envelope. Old stamps. Crap handwriting. He laid out the contents. “A note for me, and pictures of when we were kids. He was… he was so hurt. He couldn’t show it because you were mine. But…” His voice drifted to silence.

  “Drew?”

  “When you left, he acted like it was nothing.” He pushed the runny letter toward me.

  I couldn’t see much but my name, my real one, and phrases… she was yours but… never wanted this… like a brother to me…

  “I knew about you and Strat. He told me in pledge,” Drew said.

  “In Nashville.”

  “Yes, but I—”

  “That’s why you were such a dick when you got back.”

  “I regret that.”

  “I deserved it.”

  He looked at the picture, shook it, pressed his lips together, and gave it to me as if it was the hardest thing he’d had to do in his life. I took it but kept my eyes on his. I had no idea what he could look so distressed about.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Just tell me what you see.”

  I looked at the picture.

  Two boys about twelve years old, arms over shoulders, a suburban sidewalk stretching behind them. I recognized young Drew McCaffrey by the flop of his hair and the shape of his eyes.

  And the other boy? I recognized him. I knew who he was. He was Stratford Gilliam, a kid with only a few more years to live, but that wasn’t the kid I recognized. He looked like the three-dimensional kid had been transported from my house onto a two-dimensional surface.

  I swallowed. None of this computed.

  “It’s a coincidence,” I whispered.

  Not unless Stratford Gilliam fucked your mother.

  I couldn’t do the math in my head.

  Twelve-year-old Strat was a clone of my brother, Jonathan.

  No. The other way around. Jonathan looked exactly like Strat.

  I looked up from the picture. Drew stood above me, confident and together as if he knew something I didn’t.

  “Your family name came up in the Dublin office. Your baby’s adoptive family is suing your father for breach of contract.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Don’t you?

  “They never had your real name. I presume it was to protect you. It took that long to find him.”

  “There would be two babies.”

  “We checked the public records. Your mother’s eighth child was stillborn.”

  I took a step back, covering my mouth so I wouldn’t scream. The calculus suddenly made sense. A sick fucking sense.

  “I didn’t know what I’d find here,” Drew said. “But I didn’t think this. I thought it was simpler. Not until I saw—”

  I didn’t hear anything else. Just my little brother’s—

  son’s

  —voice in my head as he spoke French with a perfect ear for tone. As I saw the lines of his body superimposed on Strat’s—

  his father’s

  —and the face which was unmistakably from the same gene pool.

  I did the math with my senses. Heard the voice and saw the face. Smelled the new baby smell that seemed of my own body and knew, just knew, he was mine.

  “I can’t.” My breathing got choppy. I was shaking.

  Drew grabbed my wrists. “Margie.”

  “I can’t tell him.”

  “You don’t—”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Shh. It’s going to be all right.”

  He tried to gather me in his arms, but I pushed him away and I ran. I flung myself up the narrow stairs into the chaos of the kitchen. How many people were in the ballroom? Fifty? A hundred?

  “Margie?” Orry asked, a piece of raw fish in his thick hands.

  Everyone in the kitchen was looking at me, sauté pans frozen mid-agitation, break knives up, colanders dripping starch-thickened water into drains.

  I heard Drew clop a couple of elephantine steps up from the cellar.

  Cornered.

  Your brother is your son.

  I didn’t even know what I was running from. I was a spider in a tub. I couldn’t get up the sides. Couldn’t get away, even on eight legs, from the glass bowl coming down.

  “Margie?” Drew called.

  A second had passed, and in that second, every feeling I was supposed to have in the past few decades dropped on me. I felt my shell break under the pressure as my insides got bigger than my outside, slowly giving wa
y to hairline fractures. I couldn’t do this here. I couldn’t break with the kitchen staff staring and Drew climbing the stairs.

  I ran out of the kitchen, following the map of my childhood.

  Through the morning room, the library, the kids’ playroom, and the breakfast room to the back deck. I threw myself down the wooden stairs to the beach where I almost collapsed on the cold sand. I got my feet under me and ran toward the wall of sound and water. The horizon. The darkness on the outskirts of the lights of civilization, where the water flattened the land.

  I fell with my knees in the water and the rush of the tide in my ears. I stayed there and wept. I wept for what I’d done to sweet Drew. For acting as though Strat had no feelings. For my son who I was never, ever going to hurt by telling. For my misguided parents who had lost a baby and taken mine into their hearts.

  The lip of the next wave reached me, soaking my calves and the top of my head. I wasn’t mature enough for any of this. No one was. But I didn’t cry for myself. I cried for everyone I’d hurt.

  The water got louder than I thought possible, blowing at my ears so much that my lungs felt the pain, and the earth went out from under me. I spun in space, clawed the wet sand, tasted rough salt and foam. The sea wrapped around me like a vise, yanking me against it, pulling me to the air, where Drew had me in his arms.

  He put me on the sand, and his voice became the sense inside the ocean’s chaos. “Margie?”

  He was cloudy and grey. My eyes couldn’t focus. My chest couldn’t hold my lungs, and I coughed. Sucked in a breath. Was I drowning or crying so hard I couldn’t breathe?

  His hands on my cheeks.

  “Talk to me,” he said.

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I know.”

  “I want to claw my heart out of my chest.”

  I realized I was gripping the front of my shirt as if I meant to literally claw through skin and bone.

  He took my hands, leaning over. “It’s all right. Margie. Can you hear me?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. I was young. I put you in a terrible position.”

  “No. Don’t you dare. Don’t you ever blame yourself. Ever. I was the one to blame. I should have known better.”

  “I never admitted I loved you.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “I was scared.”

  “I don’t want you to be scared. Not ever again.”

  I reached for him, and he held me on the beach. I was cold, but I wasn’t. I was hurt, but I was healed. I was alone, but no, I wasn’t. Not at all. I pressed my face to his neck and let him encircle me so tightly I thought he’d break me.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  I couldn’t see his face in the embrace, but mine was scrunched with the push of sobs.

  “I didn’t tell you what I knew the minute I came to LA. I didn’t know what I was walking into. I was afraid you’d shut down. I was afraid I’d still have feelings for you. And I do, Margie. I do.”

  I nodded.

  “I know you just got blindsided tonight.”

  I choked out a laugh. We loosened our hold on each other until we were face to face. I brushed the sand from his cheek.

  “Blindsided,” I said. “Good word.”

  “I had no idea. I want you to know. I had pieces but didn’t know the puzzle.”

  I nodded. “No one would believe the truth.”

  “What should we do?”

  I knew he’d asked a broad question. He was talking about us, the world, the firm, my family, our past, our future. But I couldn’t think past the tide of feelings. They may have gone back out to sea for the moment, but they’d be back. If I knew anything about emotions (and I didn’t know a damn thing but this), they’d be back.

  “Let’s slip around the side and go to my place,” I said.

  “You’ve got a crappy track record of sneaking out of here.”

  “This time I have you with me.”

  He smiled and shifted a strand of hair from my face. “You do. You have me.”

  He kissed me with the passion of a promise. We stood and walked off the beach together.

  Chapter 30.

  1994

  Kentucky. More than halfway to New York.

  I didn’t dig graveyard scenes or talking to guys who weren’t really there. I didn’t understand putting flowers down for a dead guy who hadn’t seemed to like them when he was alive. The young groupie hated downer shit, and the jaded law clerk—no, lawyer—didn’t have the time.

  And there was still the whole issue of feelings.

  I told Drew when he opened the car door for me, “Doing something for the express purpose of making yourself feel sad is fake. The thing is fake, and the feeling is fake.”

  “The lawyer doth protest too much.”

  He held his hand out for me, and I took it, letting him pull me out of the car. I didn’t need help, but he liked helping. Didn’t take me long to figure that out, and who was I to refuse him his pleasure?

  He’d given me too much in the past six months. He’d stood by my decision to let Jonathan stay my brother, to let my parents think I knew nothing about their loss. Though my father had masterminded the entire fairytale, his scheme to keep his grandson in the family was meant to protect my mother.

  I couldn’t refuse my father that, but mostly, I remained silent to protect my son, Jonathan. I’d die with that secret. I’d sew my own mouth shut before letting it pass my lips.

  The only other person who knew was the man holding the flowers in the parking lot of a Kentucky cemetery.

  The little notes all over my house were long gone.

  “I’ll end you,” I whispered to Drew one night, wrapped in sheets and darkness, my voice shredded from crying his name too many times.

  He kissed me. I could taste my pussy on his face.

  “You always threaten me before you fall asleep.”

  That was when the worry swept in. The worry that my family would be upended. That my brother would lose his mind. That my mother would go off the deep end. And my father, ever unpredictable, would hurt the messenger if the messenger wasn’t me.

  “You’re the only one who knows.” I touched his face in the dark. “I trust you. But I will end you.”

  He pinned my hands over my head. “I’ll end you too.”

  We’d had this discussion a hundred times. In bed, over dinner, in earnestness and in jest. “I’ll end you” wasn’t a threat. Not really. It was a way of telling him how deeply I trusted him.

  “Not if I end you first,” I said, pushing my hips against him.

  “How are you going to do that, Cinny-sin-sin?”

  “Test me.”

  He let my hands go and wrapped himself around me. “Never.”

  “Smart guy.”

  He didn’t move and barely paused. “Come back to New York with me. I can’t live without you. The city feels like a tomb.”

  I sighed. We’d been long distance for too many months. “Speaking of testing… I’m sitting for the bar in February.”

  He got up on his elbows, eyes wide and blue, shocked and delighted. I’d waited to tell him so I could drink in that expression.

  “The New York State Bar?” he asked.

  “No, asshole, the old man’s bar on Seventh and B. Of course the New York State Bar.”

  He was off me like a shot, sitting straight, suddenly awake. “You have to study. Have you been studying? We have to get on it.”

  “Relax. It’s easy.”

  He scooped up my entire body and covered it in happy kisses.

  I hadn’t forgotten what had brought us together, but it was all drowned out by a feeling of safety and joy. I had to admit, as feelings went, those were pretty good.

  The parking lot of the Kentucky cemetery was empty but for a few beat-up trucks. Our shiny black Audi was the brightest object for miles. Drew had parked it in the middle of the lot, away from the wooden poles poking out from the earth at odd angles. The rusted chains between
them were shaped like kudzu-wrapped smiles, one after the other on the edge of the rectangle—smile, smile, smile. The sky was the color of the asphalt, and the freight train clacking at the river’s edge lumbered slowly, as if showing off its eternal length like a peacock showing off his blues.

  I’d passed the New York bar six months after passing the California bar. I threatened to rack up forty-eight more states for fun, and Drew threatened to tie me to the bed.

  That had worked out well.

  Everything had worked out well. I was leaving. Maybe for a few years, maybe for good, but I was going. I never imagined I’d leave Los Angeles, but the thought of such freedom made me feel silly and lighthearted.

  Me. Margaret Drazen.

  I got goofy in the weeks before we finally left. Daddy hadn’t been happy when we told him, and he eyed Drew as if maybe he remembered him from twelve years before, when a young man had shown up at the door asking for his oldest daughter.

  But, you know, tough shit.

  When Drew insisted we take 70 (apparently, I wasn’t supposed to say the 70. Just 70 without the article), I didn’t think anything of it. But he swung off the interstate and went south into Kentucky.

  “Six-oh-six E-Y-E-B-R-O-W,” I said from the passenger seat.

  He glanced over. “I need to.”

  “I know.”

  We stopped at a light and he put his hand over mine. “I went to the funeral, but I didn’t visit the… you know. The thing.” He looked away.

  “There’s a florist up ahead. You don’t want to show up empty-handed.”

  He’d bought a bunch of yellow flowers because they looked fresher than any of the others. Stillness shrouded us on the way to the cemetery. I pressed my hand on his, rubbing the rough patch on his fingertip where guitar strings had calloused the skin.

  I took his hand again in the parking lot, and we walked down the gravel path, counting lanes and ways against our printed map.

  We found the grave exactly where it was supposed to be. Just another stitch in the houndstooth pattern of grey stones on the grassy hill. It said what it was supposed to say. His name. The relevant dates. Where the others had their defining roles—Father, Wife, Mother, Son, Baby—Stratford Gilliam had a clef like the one on his neck, short five-line staff and a quarter note tucked between the two lowest lines.