On moonlit nights, the stars shine like coins on the surface of the water. During the winter, the water turns white as it freezes. Snow piles up along the banks, and the course of the river is revealed, a crisp, irregular path that cuts between the rocky hillsides. People in Minnesota wait for their lakes to freeze so they can drag little cabins out into the middle where they huddle inside and fish through holes they chop in the ice. Sometimes they miscalculate the depth of the ice and plunge through.
Farther east, the gradient grows shallower, and there’s a path that leads between people’s houses and down to the water. The river’s wider there, and calmer. His mom’s figured out a way of taking sidewalks and trails that lead from their house through other neighborhoods—the house covered in ivy they nicknamed the Bush House, the house with stumpy slabs of limestone ranged across the yard like gravestones—and then through the woods to the water. They were both pretty excited the first time they did that and found the old boathouse standing there.
Pine needles slither beneath the soles of his shoes. Crickets chirp all around him; mosquitoes rise up and buzz in his ear. He walks down to the water that sometimes looks gray, sometimes sparkles, but tonight looks flat and dead.
The boathouse squats on the corner, weathered walls and a crumbling roof. But it had been a good hiding place when he was a kid. His mom made him and Melissa wear glow sticks snapped into circles around their necks so she could keep track of them, which defeated the purpose of hide-and-seek. He’d been nine when he’d figured out Melissa was humoring him when she claimed she couldn’t find him.
The boathouse has no doors, just doorways and squares cut out as windows. The last time he was here was on the Fourth of July, when he persuaded his mom to let them watch the fireworks across the river from here. They stared up at the dark sky exploding into streamers of light and smoke. Firecrackers are safe. He can watch a million of them, just like everybody else.
His shoes squeak across the damp wooden floor. Cobwebs glimmer in the glow of his flashlight. He takes a photograph of them strung across the rafters, adjusts the shutter and f-stop and takes another. Some of these pictures will be better than others. He leans out through the windows to take shots of the river below. That might be cool, to do a sequence of the water, varied only by the fish swimming past.
The wind shifts and he inhales a rich, acrid odor that scrapes against the roof of his mouth and hollows out his throat. Skunk. He gags.
Where? He looks all around the small space, but it’s not in the building with him. It must be somewhere outside. The click of his shutter must have startled it.
He tiptoes to the doorway and searches the shore for the bright white tail, listens for the scratching of its claws on the ground. Leaves rustle in the breeze. It’s gone, disappearing into the brush as silently as it had appeared. He takes a few pictures of the shore before heading back home.
A car’s turning out of his cul-de-sac and onto the road, the light from its headlights racing across the trees in front of him. He jumps back just in time. Some headlights are safe and others aren’t. There’s no way to tell which are which. Yoshi’s told him that being blind is no big deal. You get used to it, she’s said, but what good is a photographer who can’t see? He waits for the growl of the engine to fade into the distance before stepping out of hiding.
The reporters’ vans are still there, so he takes the back way, walking behind Amy’s house, stepping over the crumbling logs that line her yard from where the old neighbors kept their firewood.
“Well, hello,” someone says, and he freezes, his face red. It’s Holly and she’s sitting right there on her deck in a folding lawn chair.
“Hi,” he says. “Sorry,” he adds.
Light shines down from an upstairs window, shining on her head and shoulders, the tops of her legs. He averts his gaze.
“Don’t your parents mind you wandering around late at night?” she says.
Is she threatening to tell them? But no, her voice holds no challenge, just mild curiosity. “I can take care of myself,” he says.
“I suppose it’s different when you’re a guy.”
Guy, she said. Not boy. Is this how she sees him? The thought warms him. What’s she doing, sitting out here in the dark by herself? He goes closer, walking across the grass. He thinks she’s smiling, but he’s not sure.
“So what do you do?” she says. “When you walk around?”
He can’t tell her he looks in people’s windows. He knows how creepy that sounds. “Take pictures,” he says, which is something even Zach doesn’t know. Cool, Zach would say, but then he’d talk about football practice or the car show or the trip to New Orleans his parents dragged him on.
“Of what?” she says, and she sounds interested.
“Animals, mostly.”
“And little boys who don’t brush their teeth?”
She’s making a joke, wrapping it around the two of them. “Yeah.”
“You can pull over a chair, you know. I don’t bite.”
There are more chairs leaning against the wall. The old neighbors used to have a big glass table with rocking chairs all around it, but it went with them when they moved. He unfolds a chair and sets it up beside Holly, but not too close.
“Want some lemonade?” she says.
“I’m okay.” That’s the thing about Holly, maybe the thing he likes best. She’s never asked him what it felt like to have to hide from the sun, whether he thought about dying, or if he was afraid. She never goes to that place that matters so much to everyone else.
There’s a tiny spurt of fire, and he sees she’s lit a cigarette. He doesn’t mind. He kind of likes the smell of it. “So what do you think?” she says in a voice that tells him she’s letting him in on something. “Do you think it’s better to have dreams and lose them, or not to have dreams at all?”
He’s not sure what kind of dreams she’s talking about. He’s never heard of anyone losing a dream. Forgetting one, maybe. “I don’t know,” he says, hearing how lame that sounds, feeling very much like a boy and not like a guy.
“What about you?” She blows out some smoke that curls around in the air and disappears. “What do you want to do with your life?”
Oh. Those kinds of dreams. His mom’s told him that he can grow up to be whatever he wants, but they both know that’s impossible. He can never be a lifeguard, never work in an office building. There are so many things he can never be. “A photographer. Or an astronaut.” Why not?
“That’s a good dream. Maybe I could be an astronaut, too.”
Sure. They could both grow up and fly in spaceships.
“I don’t know anything about the stars, though,” she says. “I don’t even know where the Big Dipper is.”
“Really?” As soon as he says that, he wishes he could take the word back. It makes it sound like he thinks she’s stupid. But she doesn’t seem to notice. “I have a telescope. I can show you sometime.”
He knows all about stars. He’s spent hours studying them through his telescope. At one point he even thought he’d be an astronomer. Space is constantly expanding, stretching galaxies farther and farther apart. And maybe somewhere there’s a space for someone like him. “Why would somebody have a cage in their house?”
“Like what kind of cage?”
“A big one.”
“A dog, maybe?”
Not a dog.
She sighs. “How did I end up married with two kids?”
His mom gave up her career when he was diagnosed. When Zach’s mom went back to work, because she was going nuts staying at home and her brain was rotting, Tyler asked his mom if she wanted to go back, too, and she gave him a funny look and said, No way, Jose. “You must have been a great actress.”
She looks at him. Has he said the wrong thing? But her mouth curves into a smile. She taps the ash from the end of her cigarette. “What a sweetie you are.”
But Tyler hears her real words. I see you.
EVE
; Someone’s shaking her awake. She opens her eyes and sees a blurry figure bending over her. It’s Tyler. She sits up, suddenly alert, heart pounding. “What is it? Are you okay?”
“Owen’s here. He wants to talk to you.”
“Tell him I’ll be right there.” The world is fuzzy, black around the edges. She’s only slept a few hours, a flimsy sleep, plagued with broken images. She kept jerking awake to the realization that she was forgetting something important, something that required her to sit up and take stock of her surroundings, and it made her tick down the usual list: Tyler, Melissa, David. Each time her mind had stalled with terrible certainty on Amy. Amy, who’s alone out there somewhere. Amy, who would have returned home if she could.
Owen’s in the living room, looking out the window. The drapes are pulled open, and moonshine gleams on the wood, the glass. “Owen?”
He turns. He’s haggard, his face sunk in deep folds. He’s short and powerfully built, but he’s collapsed in on himself. He seems smaller somehow, and the magnetism that radiates from him is gone. He’s just a man, not the guy with the booming voice and quick temper. “Sorry to wake you.”
“What is it? Have they found her?”
He shakes his head, and she feels the corrosive rush of relief. Every hour that passes pulls the events of that night farther away. With every minute that goes by, people’s memories are blurring and evidence is wearing away. But she’s not free yet.
“I need to talk to you,” he says.
Tyler’s hovering in the dining room. He’s been gaming, his controller lying on the coffee table, the TV screen frozen on the scene of a soldier running across a burned-out courtyard. “Go to bed, Ty,” she tells him gently. “Classes start in a few hours.” It used to be when he couldn’t sleep, he’d wake her and she’d keep him company. To Owen, she says, “Let’s go into the kitchen. I’ll put on some coffee.”
Coffee would be good. It would clear the fog in her head.
They sit across from each other at the kitchen table. The blinds are open in here, the way they keep them at night. Through the window, she can see the trees in the backyard, the corner of the new neighbors’ house. A light burns in an upstairs window. She guesses someone’s up with the baby.
“Tell me,” he says. “You’re Charlotte’s best friend. Tell me she isn’t mixed up in this.”
“No! Of course she’s not.”
“I want to believe her, but she’s lied to me before.”
“I know.”
“It was going on right under my nose, and I never had a clue.”
Charlotte had kept it from Eve, too. But Eve had noticed how Charlotte and Robbie had angled themselves away from each other at that Christmas party, and she’d known instantly. Until then, Robbie had been just another one of Charlotte’s clients, a name Charlotte had mentioned from time to time. Eve had urged Charlotte to talk to Owen. God help her, she’d told Charlotte to confess. Eve had believed there was room in their marriage for honesty, and she’d been wrong. David had been annoyed. He’d warned her to stay out of it. And now … he’s retreated.
It’s like we’re not even married, he’d said, and her heart had plummeted down a thousand flights. Maybe no one’s safe. Maybe there’s no such thing as a true love that lasts a lifetime.
Eve finds her voice, reaches for his hand. “She would never hurt Amy. You know that.”
“They’d been fighting so much lately. Every day I got inundated with texts and phone calls from Amy, wanting to come live with me.”
But Owen wouldn’t take her in. “Nikki and Charlotte argued, too. Remember?”
“Little stuff, not like this. This was on a whole new level. Charlotte even locked her out of the house one night. Amy called, crying. She was only outside for a few minutes, but still. You don’t do that to a kid.”
Eve hadn’t known about that.
“It’s Robbie,” Owen says. “How could she fall for a jerk like that? What does she see in him?”
“Maybe she sees the person she wants to be.”
“I don’t know her. I have no idea who she is anymore.”
She’s still holding his hand. They’ve never touched before other than the brief hugs at the occasional dinner. “She’s still the same Charlotte.” It’s Eve who’s changed. Or maybe this is who she is, who she’s been all along.
“You make sure she tells the truth today,” Owen says. “You hold her to it.”
———
Tyler sits, spooning cereal into his mouth. Melissa sits across from him, holding a glass of juice and texting, her thumbs moving rapidly over the face of her phone. They don’t look at each other. They’re not talking at all. It’s as if they’re strangers. This shared grief, never brought out into the open but always lying just beneath the surface.
“You look nice,” Eve tells Melissa. She didn’t even know her daughter owned a pair of jeans that weren’t ripped or a shirt with actual sleeves instead of straps or that hung off the shoulder. Maybe this is a sign her daughter’s growing up.
Tyler pushes back his chair and carries his bowl to the sink. He’d been full of the usual questions. What if the teacher asks a question I don’t know the answer to? What if I look like a dork on camera? This is why she needed to be home. You couldn’t possibly look like a dork, she’d told him. And no one knows the answers on the first day of school.
“I’ll be up in a sec,” she tells him.
The school bus is due any minute. Eve peels back an inch of drapery fabric, pushes aside the blinds. They’re under siege, imprisoned within their own house. But for this brief slice of time, the street is blessedly empty of strange cars. It’s a gift, this peace. Jason Freed had stopped them in the driveway, a cameraman right behind him, aiming his camera into their car. Eve huddled against the door and averted her face, but the man had stood only a few feet away. He could have captured her image. Somewhere it could be playing, and someone could be watching. Maybe someone who’d been on the road that stormy night.
“Mom?” Melissa says, impatient.
“All right, you can take the bus. But if the reporters are back this afternoon, I’ll come get you.”
They go into the garage and close the kitchen door behind them, even though Tyler’s in his room.
The garage is cool and dark. Melissa punches the button on the wall. The garage door slowly rolls up, creaking along its tracks. For years, Melissa’s left this house—to catch the school bus, climb into a friend’s car. Eve feels the weight of all those departures, all those minutes and hours her daughter has been gone from her. Don’t go, she longs to beg. Stay with me.
Pale yellow sun washes across the pavement. Melissa ducks beneath the garage door and straightens her shoulders. She is preparing herself, and Eve loves this small, simple act of courage.
“Have a good day,” Eve calls. Be safe.
Melissa trudges up the street to the ravine road. She won’t tell Eve who sits next to her at lunch. She won’t explain why she won’t wear braids anymore or whether she’s finished her summer reading book. This is normal, right? Melissa’s just trying to sort herself out, establish herself apart from her parents. But Tyler had said, She lies right to your face. David had said, Something’s wrong with our daughter. It’s Eve who hasn’t seen it.
It would be easy to go into Melissa’s room and search for clues. Eve’s mother would have done it. She believed that a teenager should have no expectation of privacy. Her mother had been disappointed when Eve didn’t tell her about David until they were engaged. Eve had been determined to be a different kind of mother. She had told David this when they were expecting Melissa. He had smiled and shaken his head. We’ll still make mistakes, he’d told her. They’ll just be different ones.
How is a parent supposed to balance the needs of a healthy child against a fragile one? It can’t ever be equal—not the time, nor the resources, nor the hours lying awake in the dark consumed by tangled thoughts—but the love can be exactly the same. The love has always been split
precisely down the middle, an effortless divide. Melissa knows this. She must know this.
There are other kids waiting at the corner. They turn as Melissa approaches, and she steps among them.
———
The police station echoes with brightness, doors leading off everywhere, people coming and going. Phones ring. Conversations are cut off in midstream as doors open and close. This could be any office building, anywhere, except for the uniformed officers with their heavy gun belts. They wear their guns so easily. At any moment, they could pull them out and point them at her. We know what you did.
She’s pinned to her chair. Why had she agreed to this? Charlotte doesn’t need her. She’s got Gloria and Felicia, Nikki and Scott. But Charlotte had asked, and David had made Eve feel ashamed for hesitating. But she feels her heart banging against her ribs. Charlotte could say something that might unravel everything. She might say something that would make the police stop and take another, harder look at Eve.
“What’s taking so long?” Scott says.
“It’s only been an hour,” Gloria says. “These things take time.”
No one asks her how she knows this. It’s a platitude, and they all recognize it.
“This is so stupid,” Nikki says. She’s small and sturdy. She’s done gymnastics for years; she wears her makeup like armor. Even the black lines around her eyes are firm and straight. “Why are they wasting their time? Why aren’t they looking for Amy?”
“They are,” Gloria says. “Everyone’s looking for her.”
Charlotte’s behind a door fifteen feet away. She’d had to go alone. She couldn’t take anyone in with her, not even a lawyer. All she had was herself and her version of events.
“What do you think they’re talking about?” Nikki asks.
“What do you think?” Scott says.
“This is all my fault,” Nikki says. “If I’d been home, I could have caught Amy sneaking out. I would have stopped her.”
“News flash,” Scott says. “The world doesn’t revolve around you.”
The Deepest Secret Page 15