The Secret History of Us

by Jessi Kirby

  I read every article, watch every news clip I can find, and each one offers almost the same details—that he was bringing a boat into the harbor, saw the accident, and jumped in to help. They all use the same pictures, mostly blurry screen captures from the video clip. One article has a different shot, though. It’s of a gurney being loaded onto an ambulance, presumably with me on it, but it’s hard to tell. There’s a small crowd of people in the background, and I zoom in, searching for a glimpse of Walker. I find Matt, sitting on the ground with one of those shiny silver blankets around his shoulders as a paramedic examines something on his arm. I scan the rest of the photo for Walker but don’t see him anywhere at first. I’m about to give up when I spot him at the very edge of the shot. He stands alone, off to the side, arms crossed over his chest, wet clothes clinging to him. Watching the gurney as it’s being loaded into the ambulance.

  And that’s it.

  There are a few follow-up stories that mention an investigation into what caused the accident, but that’s all. There’s nothing else about Walker anywhere. No interviews, not one quote from him. No social media pages, or tagged photos. Nothing.

  Like until the night of the accident, he didn’t exist.

  NINE

  THE NEXT MORNING, I find my mom bent over the dining room table, in the same clothes she was wearing yesterday.

  “Did you stay up all night?”

  She jumps, then turns around, hand on her chest, and I can tell by the bags under her eyes that the answer is probably yes.

  “You scared me,” she says. “I didn’t even hear you come down the stairs.”

  “I’m stealthy,” I say, walking stiffly over to the table. “What are you doing?”

  She turns back to the table and puts her hands on her hips. “I pulled everything out last night and started putting it in chronological order, but then I ended up looking through it all. Kind of taking my own trip down memory lane, I guess.” She smiles, but she looks exhausted. “Maybe it’s time for a break. And some coffee.”

  “Do I drink coffee now?”

  “No,” she says. “Not anything I count as coffee, anyway.” She puts a hand on my shoulder. “Come on. Let’s get you something to eat before you take your antibiotics.”

  We walk into the kitchen and she goes to the refrigerator. “Did you sleep okay? Better than in the hospital?” She pours a glass of juice and slides it across the kitchen island to me, and I sit down on one of the stools.

  I take a sip, and the images that played over and over in my mind all night—of the black water, and Matt, and Walker, and my body on the deck of his boat—flash through my mind. “I slept great,” I say, as brightly as I can. I don’t bring up the video, and neither does she.

  She reaches over and tucks a strand of my hair behind my ear. “Anything come back? Now that you’re home?”

  I look down at the counter. “Nothing that I don’t already remember from before,” I answer, feeling the failure in my response.

  “That’s okay,” she says gently. “It’s probably just going to take some time.”

  Neither of us raises the other possibility, that maybe it won’t come back at all, but I’m certain we can both feel it, hovering in the air above us.

  My mom doesn’t let it hover long. “So Sam and Dad are at work already. I’ve done everything humanly possible to get someone to cover my workshop today, but no one is available, so I have to go in—just for a few hours.” She looks at me, apology written all over her face. “Will you be okay here alone? Maybe I should just cancel it.”

  “Don’t do that,” I say. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Are you really sure? I hate to leave you at all on your first day home. Maybe you should invite Paige to come over. So you’re not alone.”

  “It’s my second day home. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine. I don’t need a babysitter.” She looks at me carefully, and I can tell she’s still on the fence. “Didn’t Dr. Tate say something about getting back to our lives? I think that was supposed to include you too.”

  I say this to make her feel better about leaving—because a big part of me wants her to go so I can be alone here, in our house. So that I can examine it like I did my room, without anyone watching.

  She takes a deep breath and lets it out. “You’re right.” She looks at her watch. “Shoot. I don’t even have time to shower. You sure you’ll be okay? Really. I can just cancel. People would understand.”

  “Mom. I’ll be fine. Go. I’m still pretty tired, so I’ll probably just rest most of that time anyway.”

  She nods and glances at the dining room table, where the yearbooks and photos are all laid out neatly. She’s even labeled them with a different-colored Post-it for each year.

  “And if I get bored, I have those to look through,” I add.

  She seems reassured, even encouraged, by this, so I don’t tell her that going through years of memories I don’t have is something I’d really rather do on my own. For the first time, anyway. Like watching the video.

  “Okay,” she says, nodding like she’s trying to give herself the final push to believe her answer. “But if you need anything, or if something happens, you call me—oh! That reminds me. Your dad went out last night and got you a new phone.” She smiles. “You have the nicest one of all of us now,” she says, crossing the kitchen to the counter next to the fridge. She unplugs a sleek silver iPhone and grabs the shopping bag next to it, then brings them to me.

  “Here you go. He set it up already. It’s got our numbers and Sam’s, Paige’s, and . . . and Matt’s—just in case.” She pauses. “It’s a new number, so nobody but Dad and Sam and I have it yet. That way you won’t . . . get any unwanted calls.”

  The way she says it makes me think that she’s not just talking about Matt. I think of the way Dad’s phone rang off the hook during dinner last night, and then of the card from Dana Whitmore, with her number on it, stashed in my dresser drawer.

  “Thank you,” I say, taking the phone from her.

  She eyes me carefully. “Do you . . . remember how to use it?”

  I look down at it in my hand. As far as I remember, this is the first one I’ve ever had. Not that I don’t know how to work it. I flash on a memory of playing with the one Paige got as a gift for eighth-grade promotion. I remember the quiet envy I’d felt because my parents still were still digging in their heels about getting me one. I click the home button, and the screen appears. “Yes,” I say quietly. “Thank you,” I add, scrolling through my five contacts.

  “You’re welcome, honey.” She takes one last sip of coffee. “Okay, I really should get going.” She turns my stool so we’re face-to-face. “One last thing—and this is important. Don’t answer the house phone, and if anyone comes to the door—anyone you don’t know—don’t answer that either. And give your dad a call and let him know right away.”

  I look at her for a long moment and think of so many questions I want to ask, but I know if I ask them they’ll make her nervous and she’ll probably decide to stay home, and I really do want to be alone right now. I need space to think.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “And call me. For anything. I’ll be home right away.”

  “Okay.” I stand up and put my hands on her shoulders, steering her toward the stool at the end of the counter where her purse is hanging.

  “And make sure you eat a little something with your medicine so you don’t get queasy. I stocked the fridge and pantry with all your favorites—I mean the things you normally ate and liked—before. But it’s okay if that’s changed. If you want something different, just call or text and I’ll pick it up on the way home, okay?”

  “Okay.” I smile. “I’ll be fine, Mom. I will. Go.”

  Her eyes well up, and she shakes her head like that’ll somehow keep the tears from coming. “All right. I’m going.” She pulls me into a hug. “You are so strong, Liv, and I am just so . . .”

  I hug her back. “I love you. Now go to work.”

  Sh
e nods into my shoulder. “Okay.”

  We part, and she grabs her purse and keys, and I walk her to the door. After she steps out, she waits for me to close and lock it like she used to when I was little and she started leaving Sam and me for short times to go the grocery store, or run some other errand. I make sure the lock clicks into place, just like I used to do. Satisfied with that sound of safety, she heads down the walkway to her car.

  I wait for her to get inside and pull away before I turn from the window and look around the quiet living room in the empty house that is familiar but not, at the same time.

  And then I decide to try to find some answers.

  I walk over to the dining room table where my mom has tried to help me. Spread over the entire length of the table are my high school years. My lost years. There are four rows—each neatly labeled with Post-its detailing the year and my grade in school, along with its yearbook and corresponding family photo book.

  I recognize the photo books and am happy that this hasn’t changed. Since Sam was born, my mom has made one every year. The older ones, from when we were babies, are actual scrapbooks with the fun paper and little cardboard shapes and stickers and themes, but I think that got to be too much to keep up. Somewhere along the way, she switched to annual photo books, the kind you upload your pictures into and create the layouts, and then it arrives all put together, shiny and finished, and bound with the year embossed on the spine.

  These books are a big deal in our house because they’re a big deal to my mom. There are very few pictures of her childhood and her family, neither of which was very happy, so she’s always made a point to document that ours have been. She’s almost never without a camera when we’re all together, and she’s always snapping away—candid shots when we’re not looking, trying to capture something that might otherwise go unnoticed. She’s the one who taught me about photography, about the magic of capturing a moment just right. And even though she’d since bought a digital camera, she always said that there was something she liked more about actual film. Something special, which couldn’t be replicated digitally.

  I think that was why, when I’d asked for my analog camera for my thirteenth birthday, she’d gone outside her normally frugal self and gotten me a nice one. I’d read the instruction booklet cover to cover. Learned how to thread the film and use the different aperture settings. How to take the time to really see what the camera lens would see. But my favorite part was always the moment of surprise when I finally got to see what I had captured when the film was developed.

  I think she felt the same way about her photo books when she was finished. I think she liked to see the span of what had developed over the course of each year.

  I sit down with the first photo book on the table, which begins with the second half of my eighth-grade year. I flip through pictures I remember—New Year’s with just me and Sam and Mom. Dad almost always works the New Year’s Eve shift, so it was just the three of us. The opening shot is of Sam and me on the couch in shiny party hats, raising our glasses of Martinelli’s sparkling cider and blowing on noisemakers in the glow of the TV. I remember him being so mad that he had to stay home that year when his friends were starting to go to parties. But there was no convincing my dad, and secretly, I was happy Sam was there. As much as he bugs me sometimes, he always makes things more fun.

  Next is my birthday, in February. I remember this too. There’s a shot of Paige and Jules and me, scarves looped loose and bright around our necks, holding on to each other for balance at the skating rink. We’re laughing so hard there were probably tears running down our cheeks, pink with the cold. I don’t remember what we were laughing about, but I do remember the feeling of that day, of turning fourteen and celebrating with my two best friends, and thinking we’d always be together like that. Again, a pang of sadness at the loss of Jules hits me. I need to find out what happened—to find her—because it doesn’t feel right that we’re not friends anymore.

  I flip through the next few pages of events, and land on our spring break family camping trip up the coast in the motor home. All of us but Sam got deathly sick and spent most of the trip inside that motor home, but you wouldn’t know it from the pictures. There we are, standing among the towering redwoods, and there we are sitting around the campfire. There we are, our silhouettes watching the sun set over the ocean. It must’ve been hard to make that trip look good in the book, but Mom did. She chose the very best moments and made them the only ones for anyone who hadn’t actually been on the trip. Like a highlight reel.

  I don’t really think about it too much until I flip past Fourth of July, and a whole summer spent on the lake, because that was the year we got a new boat. These are pictures and experiences I remember—Sam and me screaming on the inner tube, jumping off rocks into blue-green water, wakeboarding until the wind came up and the sun set behind the golden hills. Looking at them, I can smell the sunscreen, and feel the heat, and the freedom of summer—the joy of it. These moments are there in my mind, and being able to call them up from memory is a comfort. I sit there awhile, soaking in this feeling, before I turn the page, ready for another memory to unfold.

  But that’s not what happens. In the series of photos on the next page, Sam and I are standing on the front porch with these silly little chalkboard signs Mom made us use for this same photo every year, since the time he started kindergarten and I started preschool. Our First Day of School photo. There we are holding our chalkboard signs, Sam’s with “Eleventh Grade,” and mine with “Ninth Grade,” written on them.

  I look at myself. Examine my summer-lightened hair and sun-freckled nose, my big smile, and what must’ve been a completely new and carefully chosen outfit, from my red backpack all the way down to the little brown boots on my feet.

  Though this is the me I remember being, the one I expected to see when I looked in the mirror, I have no memory of this moment, or the night before it, or anything after that, until I woke up in the hospital. I don’t know what I felt like, standing there on the front step on the first day of high school. I don’t remember if I was more nervous or excited. I don’t know how many outfits I tried on before I settled on that one, or if I talked to Paige and Jules the night before. All of that is behind-the-scenes, cutting-room-floor stuff. The stuff you know only because you remember.

  This is as close to the beginning of the time I’ve lost as I’m going to get.

  I flip the pages, through fall, and pumpkin picking, and my first Homecoming dance. Jules is still in these pictures, and I’m relieved. And then it’s Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I’m smiling for the camera in all these photos, in all these moments, and I don’t remember a single one. I can’t feel them the way I could with the earlier photos. I go through the next year, and the next. I move on to my yearbooks and go through each of them, one by one.

  I’m surprised to find I’m on a lot of the pages. Student Council and volleyball, art and photography clubs—at least freshman year. I seemed to give up art club and photography after that. I show up in some random candids. Paige and Jules are by my side in a few, and then it’s just Paige. I look for Jules and find her among my class, follow her school photos along with mine and Paige’s, and I can almost see when we went our separate ways.

  It’s funny how even in a school as small as ours, the things you’re a part of seem to define and separate you. Paige and I dropped art and photography, and she stayed. We stuck with volleyball and Student Council, and she joined the yearbook staff and started a student magazine. We all went to the same school, but by the end, it looks like that’s all we did together.

  And then Matt comes into the picture—literally. In my sophomore yearbook, his school photo is there, and I know from Paige that it’s the year we started dating, but I don’t know how we met or what he said to me or how we began. He’s all over the yearbook too—water polo and swimming, track and Student Council. Maybe that’s how we met. I try to picture it—the me I remember, sharing a class with the cute boy in th
e picture. Maybe we sat next to each other and he said something sweet that made me laugh, or maybe we spotted each other across the room, and there was a spark right away. Maybe there were butterflies. I don’t know. Did he take me on a first date? Ask me to one of the dances we put on? Where and when was our first kiss? Who said “I love you” first? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. But I do know that he seemed to genuinely care about me at the hospital, and that he seemed just as genuinely hurt that I didn’t know him. That makes me want to know him, and who we were together. It makes me want to know more about what happened on Walker’s boat.

  And then there’s Walker. The only picture I can find of him is in my freshman yearbook. In it, he doesn’t smile, just stares past wavy, disheveled hair at the camera like he’s looking right through it. And then he’s gone, just like last night. He isn’t anywhere. I wonder if he moved away and came back, or maybe he dropped out. Maybe he got in trouble. I search his picture like it’ll give me an answer, but there’s nothing. All I know of him is that we went to school together until ninth grade, but I wasn’t friends with him then. And that he pulled me out of a sunken car, breathed air into my lungs, and saved my life—which makes me want to know him now.

  That, at least, I can do something about.

  But as I sit here looking over years of my life that I don’t remember, it starts to hit me what I’ve really lost. A photo takes a fraction of a second to snap. Even if I added up all the time, in all the photos, from all these years, it probably wouldn’t amount to more than a few minutes of my life. What about all the unrecorded moments? All the thoughts and feelings. Times I laughed until I couldn’t breathe, or cried myself to sleep. Things I dreamed of, and secrets I kept. These are the things that make up who we are, and these are the things I’m worried I won’t get back.