The Secret Between Us

by Barbara Delinsky

  Deborah wasn’t about to dignify the charges with a reply. “Your sister-in-law is upset. She’s angry. But right now, my family’s suffering on several fronts.”

  Footsteps sounded in the hall. Seconds later, Grace came through the kitchen door. One look at the man there, and she screamed.

  Hurrying over, Deborah slipped an arm around her waist. She could feel the girl trembling, much as she had right after the accident. “It’s okay, sweetie.”

  Grace was ashen. “Mr. McKenna?”

  “Not your teacher. His brother.”

  She continued to stare at him. “What’s he doing here?”

  “He’s trying to understand what happened, just like we are.”

  Looking at her mother, Grace whispered, “He’s come to haunt me.”

  Deborah managed a small smile. “Absolutely not. He’s come to make sure we’re okay.” In a roundabout way, she supposed it was true. At least, that was the outcome of his visit. If he had a lawsuit in mind, he had learned there were two sides to this story. The Coumadin made Cal McKenna’s death much more complicated.

  “I’ll be leaving,” Tom said quietly, looking at Deborah. “No need to show me out.”

  Breaking away from her mother, Grace ran into the hall to make sure the stranger had left. She stood at the sidelight, peering out as his car pulled away.

  “That was interesting,” said her mother.

  “It was horrible!” Grace didn’t realize she was biting her nail until her mother pulled her hand from her mouth. “He looks just like Mr. McKenna.”

  “They’re definitely related. This one seems more solid.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Physically more solid. Your teacher was very thin. At the open house last fall, he kept doing this nervous thing with his finger, like he was scratching a bug bite on his scalp.” She imitated it.

  “Not scratching a bite,” Grace corrected. “Picking his brain. He did that when he was thinking.”

  “His brother didn’t do it the whole time he was here.”

  Grace cringed. “The whole time? How long did he stay?”

  “Ten, fifteen minutes.”

  “Making sure we were okay?” Grace didn’t believe it for a minute. “He knows.”

  “Knows what?”

  “About the accident. He was staring at me.”

  “You were staring at him. And you screamed.”

  But Grace persisted. “He knows there’s more to the accident than we’re telling anyone. Did he ask about me?”

  “No.”

  “I guess that would have been too obvious.”

  Her mother gave her a squeeze. “He does not know. In fact, he wanted to know if the reason I didn’t see his brother was because I was putting on lipstick.”

  Grace stared at her, then actually laughed. “He asked that? I mean, he obviously doesn’t know you. What a chauvinist.”

  “Uh-huh. So. Want to take the car and drive me to Karen’s?”

  Grace sobered. “No.”

  “Danielle wants to talk.”

  “I can’t.”

  “What about Megan? You could drive there.”

  “This isn’t like getting back on a bike, Mom. People don’t die when you hit them with a bike. Thanks, but I don’t want to drive. It’s bad enough when we pass that place on the road and you’re driving.”

  “You have to do it sometime,” her mother coaxed.

  “Sometime I will.”

  “Nothing gets solved when you shut yourself off from the world. Your dad really wants to help.”

  Grace snorted. “He wants to think he’s helping, because that’s part of his new image.”

  “At least he’s trying. You could give him a chance.”

  “Like he gave you? Did he give you even the tiniest clue that he was planning to leave? Did he tell you he had loved Rebecca before he met you, or that they’d kept in touch? Did he tell you Rebecca even existed?” She felt horrid when her mother’s face fell. “I’m sorry, Mom. I know it hurts, but it hurts me, too.”

  Her mother collected herself, spine straightening. “Maybe we need to accept what’s happened and move on. Same with the accident.”

  “I can’t forget I killed Mr. McKenna.”

  “You didn’t kill him. He bled to death because no one knew he was on Coumadin.”

  “His life still ended. It’s over. I can’t forget that.”

  Deborah hugged her. “I’m not suggesting you forget anything, not the accident and not the divorce. I’m just saying that staying angry at Dad is as counterproductive as continuing to blame yourself for the accident. Locking yourself in your room accomplishes nothing.”

  “I feel safe there,” Grace said quietly.

  “Safe from whom?”

  “The world. People staring, maybe knowing things they shouldn’t.”

  “I’m not the world. What happened to your hanging out down here?”

  “This is your space. My room is mine.” The words came easily. Grace had always thought she was different from her friends, because she really liked her mother, but there was this thing between them now.

  “Since when is there a dividing line?” Deborah asked.

  “Since you decided to take responsibility for something I did and won’t listen to how I feel about it. It’s awful wondering when someone’s going to find out the truth.”

  “But the truth is a technicality, Grace,” her mother insisted, doing exactly what Grace had just said, which went to prove that she wasn’t listening. “I was still the driver of record. There’s no point in your hiding away.”

  “Like you’re not?” Grace threw back, angry again. “You haven’t been at the gym since it happened.”

  “When have I had time to go to the gym?” Deborah asked.

  But Grace wasn’t falling for that. “When do you ever have the time, but you’re still there five days a week. You say it’s good that people see you, so they’ll know you’re not just blowing hot air when you tell them they should exercise. But you haven’t been there since the accident.”

  “I wanted to spend more time with you. You’ve had me worried. I wish you’d gone to the party last night.”

  Grace squeezed her eyes shut. “No, you don’t.”

  “When something bad happens,” Deborah said, “you need to put space and experience between past and present. Doing things with your friends will help. They were all at the party last night.”

  “So was a keg,” Grace said, because it was the only sure way she could shut her mother up.

  Deborah stared at her. Then her shoulders sagged. “You knew?”

  “All the kids knew.”

  “What about Kim’s parents?”

  “They were taking car keys. We’ve talked about this, Mom. You know it happens.”

  “But these are your friends.”

  “And we’re supposed to be different?” Grace cried in exasperation. Her mother expected her to have tons of friends, get good grades, and run faster than anyone else—which was totally delusional. Grace couldn’t be perfect. Neither could her friends. “Everyone slept over at Kim’s, girls upstairs, boys down.”

  “That doesn’t make it right.”

  “Lots of things aren’t right, but they still happen. You’re saying it’s okay I was driving, as long as no one knows. So if no one who wasn’t at Kim’s party knows about the keg, isn’t that okay? If people sleep off what they drink before driving again, what’s the harm? The harm,” she went on, feeling a rising tightness in her chest, “is when you drive after you’ve had a couple of drinks and you don’t tell anyone and something happens, like a man being killed. That’s when it’s really bad.” Her throat closed. Head bent, hair falling forward, she covered her face with her hands and started to cry.

  There it was. Out!

  She wept softly, bracing for her mother’s anger and disappointment. She wanted to be punished, because drinking and driving was a really bad thing to do, and keeping it a secret from her moth
er was like having a piece of broken glass in her gut.

  “Oh, Grace,” Deborah said softly.

  “It’s awful,” Grace sobbed. “I mean, none of us meant any harm, and it wasn’t anything more than beer, and it’s like all the kids do this.”

  Her mother stroked her hair. “I know what peer pressure’s like, but I still think you need to be with friends again. Maybe last night wasn’t the right time. For what it’s worth, sweetie, I’m glad you didn’t go.”

  It was a minute before the words registered, and a minute more before Grace understood. Her mother hadn’t heard. Her confession had gone nowhere. Deborah didn’t get it. She refused to see.

  And Grace couldn’t say it again.

  Still crying, she said, “Why did Mr. McKenna’s brother have to come here? This is our house, and now it’s like…like…we’ve been violated.”

  “That’s being overly dramatic, sweetie. He came to our house because this is where we are, and he asked questions about that night, because, in his grief, that’s one of the few things he can do. He’s trying to figure out why his brother was out in the rain Monday night.”

  Grace barely heard the last. Feeling more alone than she ever had in her life, she turned and headed for the winding staircase that had been built with her own fairy-tale wedding in mind—or so her father had always said, right along with how much he loved his wife, his children, and his house, as he was running out the door to go to work. But now her parents were divorced and Dylan couldn’t see and her mother still thought Grace was perfect, but there was still the beer—two cans—and Mr. McKenna was still dead.

  She just didn’t know what to do.

  Chapter 9

  Breakfast Monday morning was a silent affair.

  “Doin’ okay?” Deborah asked Dylan when he hadn’t said a word, but he only nodded.

  She bent down so he was forced to look at her. “Eyes okay?” He had been blinking earlier—had actually been blinking a lot lately—and no matter how many times she told herself that she had a roster of children with problems more serious than his, which would be solved in two or three years at most, it didn’t help. As a mother, she couldn’t bear the thought that his eyes were getting worse.

  He nodded again and, though she didn’t quite believe him, she couldn’t let her own fear create a problem where perhaps none existed. So she simply straightened and asked, “Cereal okay?”

  He nodded a third time and went back to it.

  Grace was no better. She kept her head bent over her French book.

  Deborah rested a hand on her shoulder. “Test today?”

  “Mm.”

  “Tough one?”

  “Mm.”

  Discouraged by the terseness, Deborah gave her shoulder a playful squeeze. “Anything else?” When Grace looked up blankly, she said, “In school? Today?”

  Her daughter shook her head and returned to her notebook.

  The drive into town was only marginally better. At first glance, Grace appeared to be still studying. Then, Deborah realized that though her head was bent over the book, her eyes weren’t on the page. Deep in thought, she jumped when Deborah touched her hand.

  “This week will be better,” Deborah said softly.

  “How?”

  “Less raw.”

  “Do you feel less raw?” the girl asked accusingly.

  Deborah considered her answer. “Yes. I do. That doesn’t mean I’m not upset or that my stomach doesn’t still churn when I realize Mr. McKenna is dead. It doesn’t mean I’m not grieving.” Desperate to open a door to discussion, she added, “You’re right to be feeling what you do, Grace. You wouldn’t be the sensitive person you are if you didn’t.”

  Her daughter turned away.

  “I mean that,” Deborah said, but Grace didn’t look up, and in the ensuing silence, Deborah wondered if she had said the right thing. She had moments when she wondered if she’d done the right thing the previous Monday night. Grace had always been such a happy child, always positive, always a talker. Now she was silent.

  Deborah missed their former closeness.

  She had wanted to validate what Grace was feeling, but the girl didn’t speak again until Dylan left the car. Then she looked at Deborah and said in a cool voice, “I shouldn’t have told you about the keg. Are you going to tell anyone?”

  Deborah’s heart ached. “I want you to tell me things like that. You can confide in me. Anything you say stops here.”

  “If you tell anyone, my friends will hate me.”

  “Have I ever violated your trust?”

  “I wasn’t even there,” Grace cautioned, “so I don’t know for sure that there really was a keg. If there wasn’t, you’d get me in trouble for nothing. Everything is hard enough without that.”

  “The accident was an accident, sweetie. You aren’t in trouble for that.”

  “Will you hear about the police report today?”

  “I don’t know. But there is nothing to worry about. We were not driving recklessly.”

  “We were not driving at all. Will the report tell who was?”

  Deborah pulled up at the high school curb. “I…don’t see how.”

  “My fingerprints were on the wheel,” Grace said.

  “The police aren’t looking for fingerprints,” Deborah reasoned. “They assume I was driving. They haven’t asked about you. Besides, I touched the wheel after you did. I held it when I reached back in to take the registration from the glove box.”

  “Deliberately?” Grace asked, sounding dismayed.

  Deborah felt instantly guilty. “No. I only realized it afterward.” She took a shaky breath. “Don’t look at me like that, sweetheart. I didn’t plan this. Had the police ever asked who was driving, I’d have told them. I’ve always valued honesty. You know that.” Grace made a sputtering sound. “The lack of it here eats at me just as much as it eats at you. I made the decision I thought was right. It may not have been, but it is what it is.”

  Grace said nothing at first. She looked at her book, then at the school. When her eyes finally turned back to Deborah, they held a dare. “So, are you going to the gym later?”

  “Yes,” Deborah promised. “Definitely.”

  Deborah wasn’t hiding. Keeping a low profile, perhaps. But given Cal McKenna’s death, this was appropriate.

  Following Grace’s remarks, though, she saw things differently. She made her usual morning stop at the bakery and deliberately greeted everyone by name. When a woman asked how she was doing, she said tentatively, “Gettin’ there.” She settled into her usual armchair, drank her coffee and ate her pecan roll while she skimmed the New England Journal of Medicine. She was in full public view. No one could accuse her of hiding.

  “Anything good there?” Jill asked. Wearing bright yellow today, she put her own drink on the table and sat. “Anything new on what a pregnant woman shouldn’t be doing? No wine. No fish. No red meat. No artificial sweetener. No caffeine. No sleeping on the right side, or is it the left? No painkiller stronger than Tylenol. Talk about a novel method of birth control—give women so many rules, and they figure having more kids isn’t worth it.”

  Deborah smiled and glanced at the trio behind the counter filling orders. “Does anyone here know?”

  “No. I just rolled out a batch of Stickies, like I do every morning, and no one can tell I’m drinking decaf instead of high-test. I’m expanding our Smoothie options, but that could as well be for summer as for me. Mango. Blueberry. Raspberry. This is definitely the season to be pregnant.”

  “I really wish you’d tell Dad. He could use a boost. It was a rough weekend.”

  “Rough how?”

  “He missed his first couple of patients Saturday morning, and didn’t make it to brunch yesterday.”

  “That’s surprising,” Jill remarked dryly. “Last time I was there, he was going through mimosas like he couldn’t live without them.”

  “Maybe he can’t,” Deborah said. “He worries me sometimes. He spends his e
venings alone.”

  “Drinking.”

  Deborah nodded. “He misses Mom.”

  “So do I, but I’m not getting soused to fill the void.”

  “You weren’t married to her for forty years.”

  “No, but she was still my mom. And my business partner. We talked about having a bakery way back when I was still at school. Bet you didn’t know that.”

  “I didn’t,” Deborah said in surprise.

  “I thought it was the perfect thing for me, because I’d always loved helping Mom in the kitchen, and being a baker didn’t require an advanced degree. Little did I know how much I’d have to learn about business. But Mom had faith. Poor thing, she was always walking a fine line with Dad when it came to me.”

  Deborah realized that Ruth Barr had walked a fine line about lots of things. Michael wasn’t a tyrant. He was simply a man with definite opinions. Ninety-eight percent of the time he was right. The other two inevitably had to do with family expectations.

  Deborah finished eating and wiped her hand on a napkin. “Did Mom ever outwardly lie?”

  “I doubt it,” Jill said. “She just didn’t say what he didn’t need to know.”

  “Right. So should we confront him with the drinking?”

  “That depends. How bad is it?”

  “He drinks himself to sleep at night.”

  “Every night?”

  “Most, I’d guess.” Deborah sat back. “He lacks a focus. Tell him about the baby, Jill. I think it would help.”

  “My baby should be a focus for his anger at life?”

  “It could give him a new reason to live.”

  “Hey, if he doesn’t have enough of that on his own, my baby won’t help. It could stoke the anger.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “Does the drinking affect his work?”

  Deborah sipped her coffee, then lowered the cup. “He oversleeps. He’s a little rough around the edges when he first gets up.”

  “Does it impair him as a doctor?”

  “Not yet. And I do watch that. Can you imagine what would happen if he botched a diagnosis because he was taking nips from his desk drawer?” It was a viable fear, good reason right there for malpractice insurance. “Since last week, he’s been fixated on my reputation. What about his? What about mine, if he does something wrong. Maybe I should talk to him. I use the word enabler with my patients all the time. Am I enabling Dad?”