When Secrets Die

by Lynn S. Hightower

  “The thing is, Blaine, I called your mom right after we hung up.”

  “You did? Why?” Blaine felt the oddest sense of panic, rising in her stomach and to her chest.

  “What happened between the two of you anyway?”

  Blaine didn’t answer.

  “I guess you had a pretty big fight.”

  Blaine nodded. “What did she say?”

  “Blaine, nothing she said made a whole lot of sense.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, honey, that when I talked to her she was home, and she’d evidently been drinking. A lot. And she was kind of incoherent, I’m sorry to say.”

  Blaine felt the tears spilling down her cheeks, and she rubbed them away. She did not want to cry in front of this woman.

  “I don’t think it’s such a good idea for you to go home right now. My brother and I have a little getaway house, down in Tennessee. I go there a lot on weekends and for vacations. I’m starting a little business down there, and that’s where I was heading today when you called. I was thinking it might be good for you to come on down and stay with me, just a night, and give you and your mother a time-out.”

  “But what about school? What did my mother say?”

  Amaryllis gave her a pitying look. “She said a lot of things, honey. Things I know she wouldn’t have said if she hadn’t been drinking. Things I know she didn’t really mean. Let me put it this way. Your mom thinks it would be a good idea for the two of you to have a little break.”

  Blaine turned her face to the window. It was hard to cry and be quiet about it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Blaine had been cold all night. Racked with chills. Someone had come into the room during the night and covered her up with a blanket. Normally, she was a pretty light sleeper, but last night she had slept really hard. It was creepy to think of Amaryllis coming into her room and looking at her when she was asleep. Blaine listened for noises in the house. She had the feeling she was alone, but she needed to be sure. There was no lock on the door. Amaryllis had come in and covered her up with the blanket.

  She wasn’t sick anymore, just exhausted. But last night she had started vomiting, suddenly, right around midnight, her stomach heaving so hard she’d just about stood up with it. The pain in her stomach had been so sharp, she could not talk or call for help. The chills had been terrible. Freezing, freezing, freezing. And she had been all alone, and so far away from her mother.

  Sick just the way Ned had been sick. Sick like her mother, except her mom brought it on herself now with the drinking. How she could stand it, Blaine did not know. How she could make herself that ill and still drink. People were right, it had to be a sickness.

  But the thing was, Blaine never found empty bottles of alcohol in the garbage. Never saw her mother buy anything but wine, and not enough of that to make her as sick as she got. Blaine had been through the liquor supply after she’d talked to Amaryllis the first time. She knew where everything was kept; she’d tasted everything she wanted to try ages ago, with her mother’s blessing. Mom took the mystery out of these things. She remembered one of the Mormon guys telling her that a friend of his could get them some beer. If I want beer, I’ll ask my mom, she’d told him. He’d looked at her like her mother was the Antichrist. Her mother hated the boy. One time he’d asked her mom if he could marry Blaine, and Mom had said no, without hesitation or explanation, her words like the blow of an ax. The look she’d given the kid had embarrassed Blaine, and secretly pleased her. It was reassuring to know her mother would not let her do anything stupid, like get married too early to a Mormon boy who really knew how to surround a girl with his attention until she was so tangled she didn’t know which way was up.

  There was a bathroom off the bedroom, which was nice. Private. Blaine looked at her face in the mirror. White, her freckles standing out a mile. Ned had had freckles too. He’d looked like Blaine. He’d looked like a brother. Funny, she hadn’t realized how alike they looked. Now that she felt like crap, with no makeup on and the night from hell behind her, she could see the resemblance. Face stripped of everything except the aftermath of misery, honed down to the outline of their features, they looked amazingly alike.

  Maybe she had what he had. Maybe she was going to die. Last night when she’d been throwing up so hard, when she had continued to throw up long after everything was out of her stomach, long after her system was out of yellow bile and she spewed nothing but soapy white froth, she knew something was bad wrong. She knew her system was reacting, lashing out in survival fury, her body rocked by something really, really bad.

  She needed her mom. She needed her now, before she got sick again. Only it looked like she really had gone too far this time, and her mother didn’t want her back home. Amaryllis had told her to wait, when Blaine had brought it up again, kind of panicking when they were halfway to Tennessee, deciding she wanted to go home no matter what. And Amaryllis told her that her mother was still furious, didn’t want her to come home, and was making arrangements either to put her in juvenile detention or in Charter Ridge. Amaryllis said her mother wasn’t sure she could afford Charter Ridge, and it took Blaine’s breath away thinking her mother had already been looking into it. Was that where she was when Blaine had called? Amaryllis said just wait, give her time to cool down. She’d been drinking, clearly, and wasn’t thinking straight. But wasn’t her mother worried about all the schoolwork she was missing? She’d been out of school for two days now. She was falling behind. She was losing more ground in Algebra I, and now she’d never pass. The unit test was coming up at the end of the week. Better to miss that, actually, and make it up later. After she’d had a chance to study.

  She could call Twyla, and get all her assignments. Provided Twyla was actually going to school. But she didn’t have her books.

  There was a phone in the living room, and Blaine turned the knob of her door. It made a loud noise, and she held her breath, she was not quite sure why. The house had that empty feeling to it. She did not think that Amaryllis was there.

  She heard a voice and stopped, then realized it was coming from outside. A man, right across the tiny lane. The house was one of eight on a small horseshoe drive, so close you could hear the neighbors open and close their front doors. The driveways here were weird, kind of like half drives, like little aprons in front of each house. Most of them were rentals. Somewhere, just out of her sight, someone was practicing jumps on a skateboard—she could hear it slamming against wood, then hitting the concrete on one of the driveways.

  Amaryllis was not in the kitchen, or the bedroom. Blaine went to the phone in the living room and dialed home. Nothing but a busy signal, so no long distance. She could call collect, but what if her mother would not accept the call? Blaine dialed ten-ten-two-twenty, appreciative, for one swift second, for the commercials that she had always found annoying. At least she remembered the number.

  She realized her arm was sore, and she saw that the inside of her left elbow was deeply bruised. She didn’t remember doing that.

  The phone rang. Six times, and then the answering machine picked up. Blaine felt her throat go tight and her nose start to run as the tears ran down her cheeks. Just this once, couldn’t her mother be home?

  She listened to the sound of her own voice, sounding tinny and weird, “Hey, you’ve got the Marsdens. Leave a message …,” and then, like a miracle, her mother’s voice. “Blaine, if that’s you, I love you. Come home. Wherever you are, it’s okay, I’ll come and get you.”

  “Mom?”

  Then a beep, and Blaine realized that her mother had added this message onto the one already there. Her mother wasn’t there, on the other end of the line, but she wanted Blaine to come home. She sounded so much like the same old mom, with that little catch in her voice at the end because she was obviously going to cry, and nothing at all like this new mom who drank herself sick, wanted to put her daughter in jail, and didn’t seem to care how much school Blaine had missed.

 
“Mom, it’s me, I’m …” Blaine realized the machine had shut off. And that she did not know exactly where she was.

  Blaine hung up the phone. She could go outside and get the name of the road off a street sign, and maybe the address would be on the mailbox or painted on the curb. She didn’t know the name of Amaryllis Burton’s subdivision. She could still hear whoever it was out there practicing jumps on the skateboard. She could ask the skater.

  The front door was locked and dead-bolted. Blaine went out on the front porch, looking for people. She didn’t see anyone, but she could still hear the skateboard, coming from the left side of the house. She went down the front steps and onto the road.

  The skater was right next door, male, sixteen or seventeen. Skinny and tall, wearing jeans with holes and boxer shorts over the top. His hair was tucked behind his ears; reddish brown hair, thin and silky, sticking-out ears. His Adam’s apple was knobby and huge, and the toes had been cut out of his Skechers. He rode the board up the jump, then off, then nudged it with a toe, sending it spinning, catching it in his hand as he landed, lithe as a tiger.

  He looked bored. Skaters always looked bored.

  She just stood there, but he didn’t say anything, just looked back, not unfriendly.

  “I’m not local,” she said. It was her usual introduction. She and her mother always moved so much, it applied to way too many situations.

  “Me either.”

  “No?”

  “From Tucson. Visiting my mom.” He inclined his head toward the house behind him, the house exactly like the one she’d come out of, exactly like the one on either side. Across the street the houses were different. Same brick, same trim, but one story instead of two.

  “You’re not in school?” she asked. Another stupid dropout?

  “Suspended.”

  She nodded.

  “I live with my dad,” he said. “Don’t much like the new husband. But my father had to go to Toronto on business, and didn’t want me running loose while he was out of town.”

  Blaine nodded. “What’d you do to get suspended?”

  “Explosives in my locker.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “It was just a few firecrackers. But, you know. Suddenly I’m a terrorist. An enemy of the state. A threat to homeland security.”

  Blaine rolled her eyes. “Bad break.”

  He shrugged. “It’s a chance to get out of town. See my little brother. He lives with Mom. I don’t get along with the new guy, that’s why I’m with my dad. My mom’s new husband is a prick. You know him?”

  “No. I’m …” She looked over her shoulder. How exactly did she explain this one? “Look, I know it sounds retarded, but see, I had this big fight with my mom.”

  He nodded.

  “And so now I’m kind of staying with a family friend, just a little while.”

  “What about school?” he asked.

  “I’m flunking algebra. The thing is, it’s kind of awkward at this lady’s house. It’s like … her own kid died years ago, and she doesn’t want me to leave. But I want to go home, you know? If things are cool with my mom.”

  “Why don’t you call her?”

  “I tried. I left her a message. Then I realized, I don’t exactly know how to tell her where to find me. What city is this, anyway? I feel like I’m in suburbia from nowhere.”

  He laughed. “Good instincts. This is Sevierville, as in Pigeon Forge, and Gatlinburg, Tennessee.”

  She shrugged. “Okay, Smoky Mountains and all that. Look, could you, like, call a friend of mine? Her name is Twyla. Ask her to get the down-low on this and see what’s up at home and all? And tell her where I am?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s in Kentucky. Where I’m from. So it’s long-distance from here.”

  He nodded. “Sure, I’ll do it. Just give me the number. By the time they get the phone bill, I’ll be long gone. I’ve already talked to all my friends in Tucson.”

  Blaine heard a car on the pavement behind her, heard the slam of a car door. “I don’t have a pen,” she said, voice going breathless and panicky.

  But he did, and he wrote her number down on his forearm. “I’ll take care of it,” he said, quickly and softly.

  “Blaine?” Amaryllis, in her softest baby voice, only she sounded mad. Well, Blaine was mad too.

  “Got to go,” Blaine said, and turned away.

  Amaryllis had opened the trunk. She did not put the car in the garage. “Blaine, can you come and help me carry these boxes? Goodness, never mind, your feet must be cold, what are you doing out here barefooted?”

  Blaine put her hands in her pockets and walked carefully, avoiding rocks. Amaryllis was wearing that same stupid brown sweater, the one that had been worn so much the shape had stretched right out of it, but instead of the skirt she had on a tentlike denim jumper. That and dirty white tennies. And her long, long fake blond hair, clean and shiny, all pride and joy in a ponytail. Her bangs needed cutting. They came to her eyebrows now. The woman should wear makeup. Her eyes were so bland, so nothing in the pale round face.

  “Who’s your little friend? Not much of a gentleman, I guess. He could have offered to carry something in.”

  Blaine didn’t try to explain that boys just didn’t do things like that anymore.

  Blaine expected grocery bags in the trunk, but no, just taped-up brown boxes. Small. She picked up two, and followed Amaryllis up the front porch steps and into the kitchen. She didn’t like the kitchen here. The light wasn’t right. It was dark and depressing, and there were thick cotton curtains over the windows, frilled curtains, curtains that her mother would have dismissed with a roll of the eyes and a mutter of “frou-frou” before she installed plantation shutters, like she had in their kitchen. Okay, crooked, but Blaine wasn’t going to point that out.

  Blaine poked at the boxes on the kitchen table. A round glass table with fabric-covered chairs. Ick. One of the boxes read “Scottie’s Medical Supplies.”

  “I think if a boy really likes a girl, he acts like a gentleman. I guess that boy didn’t really like you all that much. Although your mother always tells me how popular you are. With the boys. Guess this is one you missed.”

  Blaine smiled politely, but she was hurt. She was not a slut, and she did not care if that boy liked her. This Amaryllis said things in a nice voice, but she was always digging. Why was it her mother never saw that? It was as if having lost a child like they had lost Ned meant this woman was okay no matter what she did.

  “Look, I need to go home. I know it’s a lot to ask, but could you drive me back? I really need to go back to school and work things out with my mom.”

  Amaryllis gave her a look over her shoulder and headed to the sink, opened a drawer, and took out a pair of scissors. “You know I have about a million things to do myself, Miss Blaine. I have a little business I’m trying to get established down here so I don’t have to stay at my job, which is pretty unhappy for me these days because I’ve been helping your mother, taking her side against Dr. Tundridge. I’m using my vacation time to get this done. It will take me four and a half hours just to drive you back to Lexington, and then another four and a half to drive back here.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have brought me down here.”

  “Maybe I should have left you by the side of the road.”

  Blaine blinked. It was one thing for her mother to say things like that. This woman was weird and mean.

  “Fine,” Blaine said. “I’ll find my own way.”

  She was to the door and out on the front porch when Amaryllis caught up with her, puffing away like she’d run a hundred miles.

  Outside, a good wind was kicking up, and the sky had gone dirty blue. The air was snappish, and it was oddly warm.

  “Blaine, don’t be silly. I talked to your mother last night. She’s driving down to get you this afternoon.”

  Blaine felt her knees give just a little. Mom. Finally. Thank God.

  “Come on back in, it’s goin
g to storm.”

  Amaryllis watched her, eyes very round and unblinking. And Blaine stood in the doorway, hand on the screen, thinking how good it would feel to walk away and get out of this house because Amaryllis was really starting to creep her out. But Mom was coming. If her mom had already left, she’d be there before dinnertime. No more gaggy peanut butter sandwiches.

  If she walked away her mother would never find her. All she wanted was to go home. Blaine looked back up at the dark kitchen, the living room, overfurnished and cluttered. And followed Amaryllis back into the house.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  It was surreal, sitting on the worn fabric of Amaryllis’s couch, in god-awful Sevierville, Pigeon Forge, Gatlinburg, Tennessee, listening to the woman’s brother snore, trying to avoid looking at his large feet and his big toe thrusting through a hole in dingy athletic socks. Amaryllis had been talking about her brother all afternoon, saying he had called and was coming to stay, because they shared the house and he used it when he was in the area.

  She talked about him like he was this very savvy-cool entrepreneur. Actually, he was tired looking, with slicked-back hair that was either oily or wet with rain, a potbelly that stuck up over the waistband of his cheap navy blue cotton trousers, and hair growing out of his ears. So totally unattractive and masculinity-gross that Blaine said an actual thank-you to God that hers was a single-mother household. Thank God her mother had never brought anything like this back to the house.

  He had seemed startled to see Blaine sitting on the couch watching reruns of Roseanne in the middle of the day; seeing him had taken her equally aback. She had heard him first, the grinding metal noise of a semi truck, only it was just the cab, being parked on the street beside the house, because no way was there room in the actual driveway or out front. The cab was purple. Like bubble gum.

  He had taken his shoes off when he entered the front door, and Blaine connected that with the pile of shoes on a mat by the entranceway and concluded that this was one of those “shoes off” households she and her mother always made fun of. No doubt she had already offended Amaryllis by wearing her shoes around inside, and while she normally went barefooted at home, or sock-footed in the winter, she now kept her shoes on at all times. It made her feel better. Like she was ready to go.