The Secrets We Carried

by Mary McNear

  Part of her was relieved. In all likelihood, he no longer lived here. He’d gone on to do the things he’d always wanted to. Even at sixteen, when he and Quinn had first become friends, Butternut could barely contain his ambition, talent, and energy. She could remember him so clearly now: his longish, light brown hair, his pale skin, and his intense blue-gray eyes that seemed almost to be lit from within. At the time, she had perhaps underestimated his charm. The way he’d brushed his hair out of his eyes, the way he’d smiled that uneven, slightly crooked smile, the way he’d lounge on anything as though it was the most comfortable piece of furniture on the planet. Most of all, though, she remembered the way he listened to her in a way that was thoughtful, intense, and without judgment. It would be years before Quinn realized what a rare quality that was in someone. But it wasn’t just his physical presence she remembered. He’d been a dreamer whose dreams had never seemed beyond his grasp. He’d wanted to take a road trip with Quinn through the American West, taking photographs of the landscape and of people. And he’d wanted to go to college, to study photography, and then to travel the world, working for National Geographic. Quinn figured, now, they’d be lucky to have him. He was probably photographing the Namibian sand dunes even as she stood here.

  But she frowned, slightly. Thinking about him always brought with it a familiar uneasiness. Because as close as they’d once been, they’d lost touch with each other since then. Not gradually, either, the way you do with some old friends, but suddenly, almost overnight, during Quinn’s freshman year of college. And it wasn’t just losing touch that made Quinn uneasy. It was her memory of what she and Gabriel had done on the night of the accident, after they’d left the bonfire, that troubled her too. She rubbed her gloved hands together for warmth. She missed him, though. If he hadn’t returned for the dedication, it meant she wouldn’t see him during this, her one and, she hoped, only visit to Butternut.

  “If you could please give us a minute,” Mr. Mulvaney, the principal, said, his voice sailing over the heads of the crowd and interrupting Quinn’s thoughts. “We’re waiting for one of the speakers to find a parking spot.” Quinn puffed out a breath and squinted at the sky. The weather report was right. The sun was beginning to burn through the clouds, though its light carried little warmth. She shuffled her feet, wishing she’d chosen her boots for warmth instead of for appearance.

  “Quinn!” someone standing to her right said in a low, throaty voice. Quinn turned to see a woman in a pink paisley scarf. “You don’t remember me, do you?” she asked her, with a deep chuckle. “It’s okay. I haven’t seen you since you graduated from high school.”

  “Mrs. Fast?” Quinn said, because the woman standing beside her was both heavier and blonder than her seventh-grade social studies teacher had been.

  She nodded, pleased. “Yes, but you can call me Kathy.”

  “Kathy,” Quinn corrected herself.

  “Do you remember the extra-credit project you did on the Lewis and Clark expedition?” Mrs. Fast whispered, since there was now an expectant stir of movement that suggested the dedication was about to begin. “You wrote a wonderful monologue about Sacagawea.”

  “I do,” Quinn said, with a smile. In Mrs. Fast’s presence, she was remembering other things, too, from that social studies class: the Louisiana Purchase, Manifest Destiny, and the Industrial Revolution.

  “Are you still writing?” Mrs. Fast asked her.

  Quinn nodded. “I’m a journalist.”

  “Good for you,” Mrs. Fast said, or rumbled rather, her deep voice resonant. She placed a pink gloved hand on Quinn’s arm. “You’re one of those students of mine who got away. You left here and never looked back.” She gave Quinn’s arm a final squeeze and released it, then worked her way back to where she’d been standing in the crowd. Got away? Quinn thought. That was an odd choice of words. She was pretty sure, though, that Mrs. Fast meant this as praise. So why did Quinn feel this might also be a kind of indictment? And was that what Gabriel had done too? Gotten away?

  “We’re almost ready to begin,” Mr. Mulvaney said, and Quinn saw that he had been joined by a petite woman in her fifties or sixties whose wispy red hair refused to stay in the bun she had fashioned it into. That must be Butternut’s mayor, Jane Steadman, Quinn guessed. She’d read in the newspaper that the mayor was going to speak here today, and for some reason, Quinn felt sorry for her. She looked ill at ease, handing the piece of paper she’d brought with her to Mr. Mulvaney and trying to do something complicated, and unworkable, with her hair. Quinn glanced at the teenage girl to her left. She was still on her iPhone. Quinn wanted to ask her to put it away, but the girl, as if sensing Quinn’s disapproval, looked up and shrugged. “He made us come,” she said to Quinn, cutting her eyes to Mr. Mulvaney. “The whole junior class.”

  “He did?”

  “Well, I mean, he ‘strongly encouraged’ us to come,” she said, putting those two words in air quotes. She stuffed her iPhone into her down jacket pocket. Quinn wondered why Mr. Mulvaney had wanted them to come. Perhaps it was simply as representatives of the high school, or perhaps it was more than that. Had he seen this as a life lesson for students? A teachable moment? In any case, though, that lesson might have difficulty taking hold. Alone among the crowd, the students appeared unimpressed by the seriousness of the occasion. Quinn watched as one boy knocked the baseball cap off another one in a mocking gesture, and the other one picked it up with a dramatic flourish and put it back on his head. It would take a lot more to impress them than the deaths of three young men. Quinn remembered that age, with its almost unshakable belief in your own immortality. Death was something that happened to other people, older people, not to your peers, and least of all to you. She’d thought that then, too, thought it until the spring of her senior year.

  “Welcome, everyone, and thank you for coming,” Mr. Mulvaney began. “We’re going to begin with an invocation from Pastor Hanson.” Quinn and everyone else—even the girl with the blue eye shadow—bent their heads for the opening prayer. When it was over, Mr. Mulvaney spoke again. “No parent, principal, or politician ever wants to give a dedication like the one I am giving today,” he began. “It was here, on Shell Lake, ten years ago, that three remarkable young men—Jake Lightman, Dominic Dobbs, and Griffin Hoyer—died.” He halted. And hearing their names, Quinn felt emotion well up in her. She fought the impulse to cry. This isn’t a good place to fall apart, she told herself, standing up a little straighter and tightening her scarf. Mr. Mulvaney continued, “Many of you know what happened that night. But for those of you who don’t, these three young men drove a truck out onto this lake, which they believed was still frozen through. But it wasn’t. And all three young men drowned . . .” Quinn stopped listening to Mr. Mulvaney. She was remembering the newspaper clipping about the dedication she’d brought with her and looked at last night before she went to bed. The clipping she’d read only twice but remembered verbatim:

  The driver, Jake Lightman, 18, along with his two passengers, Dominic Dobbs and Griffin Hoyer, both 18, drove a 1980s Ford truck out onto Shell Lake, a little after midnight on March 24, 2007. And although many people drive their trucks and snowmobiles out onto area lakes in the winter, this was late in the season when the ice is notoriously unstable due to fluctuations in temperature. Mr. Lightman and his friends had been attending a high school bonfire at the Shell Lake picnic area. According to witnesses who’d been at the bonfire that night, it appeared that Mr. Lightman stopped the truck in the middle of the lake for several minutes, before the truck broke through and was submerged in the water. The police report said that stopping on the ice may have increased the load beyond the ice’s breaking point, causing it to give way beneath them . . .

  “. . . all three of these young men were seniors at our high school,” Quinn heard Mr. Mulvaney say now. “They had their whole lives in front of them: college, jobs, and family. We have all been deeply saddened by this tragedy, and each of their families has suffered an unfathomable los
s. But today, as we unveil this dedication stone in their names, we choose to remember them and to honor them.” Mr. Mulvaney looked at the crowd through his half-lowered glasses. Quinn felt suddenly unsteady. She was afraid she was going to faint. She loosened her scarf, unbuttoned the top button of her coat, and hoped that the cold air would prove bracing. It did. She took a deep breath, and her vision cleared. But she couldn’t follow the rest of what Mr. Mulvaney said. Couldn’t or wouldn’t. She had known this service would be difficult. Standing here, though, she understood that knowing this wasn’t the same thing as being prepared for it.

  To steady herself she focused on the people near the memorial stone. She noticed Dominic Dobbs’s parents, Jeffrey and Theresa, standing off to the side. She hadn’t seen them earlier, but she knew from the newspaper article that Jeffrey was going to speak today. Dominic had been Jake’s best friend since elementary school. He had been different from Jake, quieter and more serious. But theirs was a bond forged in early childhood. Quinn had liked him. She hadn’t known him before her senior year, but once she’d started dating Jake, Dominic went out of his way to make her feel comfortable. Griffin, on the other hand, had only been friends with Jake since high school. He’d moved to Winton from Wisconsin in ninth grade, but when he’d joined the cross-country team, he’d fallen in with Dominic and Jake. And she’d liked him, too, but he was much harder to get to know. Quinn’s father had told her that Griffin Hoyer’s parents and siblings weren’t coming to the dedication. The family had moved back to their hometown in Wisconsin, where they’d lived before the accident, and they weren’t making the trip back for this event.

  Mr. Mulvaney finished speaking and introduced Mrs. Steadman, the mayor. Whatever credentials she’d brought to office with her, public speaking wasn’t one of them. Her voice was much quieter than Mr. Mulvaney’s and Quinn could make out little of what she said. As she talked on, Quinn saw something out of the corner of her eye. A black bird had alighted from a nearby tree branch, and she followed it as it flew into the sky above. The clouds were breaking up, and in between them were patches of blue. Medium blue. The same color as Jake’s Ford truck. Jake had loved that truck. She had loved that truck too. They’d spent a lot of time in it together. But whatever good memories she’d had of it had long since been wiped clean. And, suddenly, she imagined the truck the night of the accident: Jake and Dominic and Griffin crowded together in the front seat as Jake drove out onto the middle of frozen Shell Lake. The truck’s windows rolled up, the cab filling with the smoke from Dominic’s cigarette, the radio pulsing on the hard rock station Griffin had liked. And then, before they had time to register it, the ice groaning and then cracking beneath them, and the truck plunging into the water. Coldness. And then blackness. Quinn felt a wave of nausea roll over her, and then a hot, prickly faintness. She wanted to sit down at one of the picnic tables, but instead she squeezed her eyes tightly shut and then opened them. Focus, Quinn. Focus on the present.

  The mayor finished, and Jeffrey Dobbs came to stand next to Pastor Hanson, while his wife, Theresa, who looked much older to Quinn than she had ten years ago, held back on the edge of the crowd, an unreadable expression on her face. Like the mayor, Mr. Dobbs lacked Mr. Mulvaney’s ease in front of a crowd, but unlike the mayor, he was loud enough, and he spoke, too, with an unfiltered emotion it was impossible to ignore. “We miss our son every minute of every day,” he said, pushing gloved hands into the pockets of his parka. “Theresa and I would do anything to turn back time and change the outcome of that night. But we can’t. Our Dominic and Jake and Griffin are with God now. And I hope that by dedicating this memorial stone here, today, it will remind other young men and young women not to take the same kind of risk,” he added, his voice cracking. He stopped speaking, and, moving with an awkward heaviness, he pushed away the rocks that had secured the drop cloth and pulled it back to reveal a large granite stone with a brass plaque embedded in it. The rock glinted in the sun and Mr. Dobbs, looking around at the crowd, said in a steadier voice, “Thank you for coming today, and please come back to the Butternut Recreation Center for the reception.” There was silence, a silence that felt almost loud to Quinn, and then, as if in unison, the gathered crowd began to loosen and the guests, talking quietly, began to drift toward the parking lot.

  Quinn didn’t move. She was replaying Mr. Dobbs’s words. “I would do anything to turn back time and change the outcome of that night.” Mr. Dobbs, she thought, couldn’t have altered the course of that night. Quinn, on the other hand, could have, but didn’t. How many times had she wanted to go back and change what she had done? Change what she had said. Many, many times. Too many times to count.

  Chapter 4

  Quinn?” She felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to see Tanner standing beside her.

  “Tanner,” she said, and though the last time she had seen him had been at his brother’s memorial service, ten years ago, he pulled her into a surprisingly natural hug now.

  “I was hoping you’d be here,” he said. “I asked someone about you, a couple of weeks ago, and they said, ‘Quinn LaPointe? She left. She’s gone. As in, completely dropped off the map.’ And I said, ‘That sounds about right. She was always very . . . enigmatic.’”

  “I don’t know about enigmatic,” she said. “Busy is probably a better word.” But as soon as she said this, she regretted it. It was a callous excuse for not coming back even once, especially when you considered the tragedy she’d left behind. The truth was, she hadn’t wanted to come back. She’d been afraid, afraid that if she did, her memories of her senior year would overwhelm her. And yet, avoiding Butternut hadn’t protected her from the past. Far from it. So she’d changed tack. Perhaps she didn’t need to be protected from it. She needed to confront it.

  Tanner, who had been stopped by an older couple, turned back to Quinn now. “That’s good,” Tanner said. “Good that you’re busy. Not good that we haven’t seen more of you. Where are you living these days?”

  “I’m living in Chicago. Evanston, actually. I’m writing there. Freelance,” she added, disarmed by how much he resembled his brother. Same dark hair, prone to cowlicks. Same gold eyes. Same square jaw. Why hadn’t she noticed before how alike they were? Or had she known this but forgotten? It was hard to say. She and Jake hadn’t spent a lot of time with Tanner. By their senior year, he was already a junior at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and when he came home over vacations, he was more interested in spending time with his friends than with his family. Still, their lives had intersected, a handful of times, like when Tanner was back for Christmas and paid too much attention to Quinn at a family dinner. She’d thought Tanner was trying to make her feel comfortable. Jake had believed he was flirting with her.

  “Jake told me once you wanted to be a writer,” Tanner said, bringing her back to the moment. “Good for you. You’re doing what you wanted to do. And, by the way, you look beautiful. You haven’t aged a day.”

  “Neither have you,” Quinn said. Tanner paused then to say good-bye to a middle-aged woman who was leaving the dedication. Quinn took a steadying breath and realized that he and his brother were not, after all, carbon copies of each other. There was plenty to separate the two of them, starting with the fact that Tanner didn’t have a scar on his right cheek. (The small scar Jake had had there, two parallel lines that looked like an equals sign, was the result of running into a tree branch when he was six years old.) Even to the untrained eye, though, there were other, bigger differences. Tanner was several inches taller than Jake had been, and he had the build of a conventional athlete—he’d been a double letterman in high school—broad through the shoulders and chest, whereas his brother had had the leaner build of a distance runner. And Tanner’s features were a little heavier than Jake’s, his voice a few notes deeper, though that might have had to do with the fact that Tanner, at thirty-one or thirty-two, was a man now, whereas Jake . . . Jake would be forever caught somewhere between boyhood and manhood, balanced on a thresho
ld he’d never cross.

  “How long are you here for?” Tanner asked, turning back to Quinn.

  “Until tomorrow, definitely. But I’ll probably stay longer,” she said. An older man now stopped by to greet Tanner. This was true, she thought, she might stay longer. That didn’t mean she wanted to stay longer. And she couldn’t help but think of her small but perfect apartment in Evanston, which was where she had gone to college at Northwestern University. She rented it from a professor of hers and his wife. It was a one-bedroom unit over their garage and, in the winter, when there were no leaves on the trees, Quinn could see Lake Michigan if she stood on her kitchen counter. (She actually had done this once or twice.)

  “I’m sorry,” Tanner said, turning to Quinn as the older man walked away from them. “Looks like everyone I know is here. I hope we can grab a cup of coffee before you leave town, though.”

  “Sure, a coffee would be great,” Quinn said. She realized that despite all the people milling around them, Tanner was looking at her intently as if the two of them were alone there. His brother could do that, too, she remembered. It was the Lightman charm. That ability to make you feel like you were the most important, no, the only person in the world. She smiled at him. “But I’ll see you at the reception, won’t I?” she asked him. “And your parents, too?”

  “No, we’re not going to be there,” Tanner said. “I’m taking them home. They aren’t really up to anything else today. But I know they’d love to see you. Why don’t you stop by the house tomorrow?”

  “I’d like that.” Her eyes searched the crowd and found the Lightmans. They were heading toward the parking lot and something about the way the two of them were walking, with their heads bowed and their shoulders touching, said We need to be left alone. Quinn still wrote them a card, every year, at Christmastime. Once or twice, Jake’s mom had written her back, but something about her note—the shortness of it, or the close, spidery cursive that trailed unevenly across the stationery—suggested how difficult it had been for her to do so, and, when she’d stopped answering her, Quinn had felt almost relieved.