The Secrets We Carried

by Mary McNear

  What she really needed now was some caffeine, she decided. There was a coffeepot in the motel office. She’d get a cup of it and unpack again. Then, maybe, she’d try writing something.

  But when she reached the office door, it was locked. Back in five, the note taped to it said. She looked through the glass. Sitting on a low table was the platter of shrink-wrapped breakfast pastries left over from the continental breakfast. Had that only been this morning? Less than six hours ago? How was that possible? She felt as if she’d been here forever. She lingered for a moment, peering into the office, and flashed on an image of Gabriel sitting on his couch in that impersonal cabin.

  “Damn it, Gabriel,” she muttered, as she turned around and headed back to her room. “What happened to you? Where is the old Gabriel?” she asked aloud as she passed the plastic tables and chairs lining the walkway. And why are you still here, and why didn’t you go to RISD? And why, why, why, did you give up the things you wanted to do? She needed to know. Tomorrow, she vowed, she would go back to his cabin. She’d see him again even if he didn’t want to see her. She remembered now the elation she’d felt when he’d opened his door and she’d seen him standing there. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed him until he was right in front of her. But that wasn’t the only reason to see him again, she reminded herself. Theo was right. Actually, she was right. All Theo had done was quote her back to herself. She’d told Theo she needed to face, head-on, the spring of her senior year, and Gabriel was a part of that. A big part of that. After all, they’d been together the night of the accident. No, she wasn’t backing down that easily.

  When she got back to the room, she sat down on the chair in front of the window and pulled her laptop out of her computer bag. Write, she told herself. Write about what happened the year leading up to the accident. Write about what Gabriel was like then. Write—as her creative writing professor had said her freshman year in college—write like your life depends on it.

  Chapter 7

  June, Junior Year in High School,

  With Gabriel in the Communications Room

  Gabriel, what are you doing?” Quinn asked, looking up from her yellow legal pad. She was sitting on the blue couch in the communications classroom—to the right of the hole that had stuffing leaking out of it, stuffing that Gabriel cheerfully referred to as the couch’s “intestines”—and Gabriel was standing at the window, opening and closing the blinds against the late-afternoon sun.

  “I’m trying to get the light right in here,” he said, looking at Quinn and making a minute adjustment to the tilt cord.

  “And this is important because . . . ?” They were supposed to be having their Monday after-school brainstorming session for that week’s edition of the school newspaper, which was published every Friday.

  Gabriel ignored her. He came back from the window, grabbed his camera off the coffee table, and looked at her through the viewfinder.

  “Gabriel,” Quinn protested. “No. No photo shoot. Not now. We need to talk about the paper. If I don’t start studying for my Spanish final soon . . .” She trailed off. He wasn’t listening to her anyway. When he got like this, he didn’t listen to anyone, and that included Quinn. She watched as he set up the shot, testing it from several different angles, changing the settings on his camera, leaving to adjust the blinds again, returning to reposition the coffee table that he was sitting on to get the shot, and then repositioning Quinn, too, rearranging her on the couch just as he might have rearranged one of the cushions.

  And Quinn sat still, knowing that the sooner he got the shot, the sooner the meeting could start. She looked at the poster that Gabriel had hung on the wall at the end of their sophomore year: a Shawshank Redemption poster in which Andy and Red are in the prison yard, with the quote “Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying” beneath them. After Gabriel had tacked it up there one afternoon, he’d said, “There, now the room is complete.”

  Quinn looked at Gabriel now. He was still adjusting his camera lens. She smiled. It wasn’t that she was enjoying herself. It was more like she was enjoying Gabriel enjoying himself. He was caught up in what he was doing, so oblivious to what was happening around him that the fire alarm could have gone off and he wouldn’t have noticed.

  A warm breeze blew through the classroom’s open windows now, lifting the blinds and bringing with it the sweet smell of freshly mowed grass from the school’s athletic fields. Quinn sighed. On the one hand, she loved this time of year. Winters lasted so long in northern Minnesota that spring could make you feel almost dizzy with appreciation and anticipation. On the other hand, it was so hard to concentrate on classes, and exams, and the paper with all that sunshine and warmth beckoning from outside. One more week, she told herself. Then school would be over, the last issue of the paper would be printed, and she’d be starting an internship at the Butternut Express. And Gabriel? He’d gotten into a summer photography program at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he’d be for several weeks before he spent the rest of the summer with relatives in suburban Chicago. She was a little nervous about his leaving. They weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend or anything, but they’d spent almost all their free time together this school year, and now she couldn’t quite imagine him being gone for ten whole weeks. What would she do with herself?

  “Okay, now, look down,” he told Quinn, as he sat on the edge of the coffee table, looking through the viewfinder. “Look down at the legal pad. Pretend to write something on it.” She did better than pretend. She wrote Gabriel is driving me crazy and I want to get this meeting over with in her neat, slanting script.

  “Now, look back up,” he said. She did. She didn’t smile, though. She had a feeling that Gabriel was going less for yearbook candid, and more for photographic auteur. The camera clicked again.

  “Got it,” he said, with satisfaction, sliding over from the coffee table onto the couch beside her. “It’s going to be cool,” he said. “Do you see these stripes?” He indicated the striped shadows from the blinds that were projected onto Quinn.

  “I see them,” she said, amused.

  “I think they should make these photographs interesting. I think I can get these developed tonight,” he added, indicating the camera.

  “How’s the home darkroom coming?”

  “It’s all right,” he said, his enthusiasm ebbing somewhat. Quinn was referring to Gabriel’s recent attempt to commandeer his family’s basement laundry room into a space where he could develop his photographs. “My mom doesn’t like the fact that I blacked out the windows,” he said, brushing hair out of his eyes. “But, I mean, it’s not like the space wasn’t already dark to begin with. Oh, and another thing. She’s worried about the chemicals being cancer causing. And I’m like, no, Mom, that would be your two-pack-a-day Marlboro Lights habit. I’m not giving up on the darkroom, though.” Gabriel loved the whole film development process, even at a time when many people were enamored with the immediacy and cheapness of digital cameras.

  “She’s not going to make you take it down, though, is she?”

  “No, I can leave it there.” He sighed. “She’s not completely evil.”

  Quinn smiled. Gabriel’s mother wasn’t evil at all, as far as she could tell. Neither was his dad or his three brothers. But that didn’t mean Gabriel’s relationship with them wasn’t problematic. His family was boisterous and loud, whereas Gabriel was quieter and more circumspect. He liked to talk—he and Quinn had had conversations that lasted all night—but when it came to other people, he only talked when he had something to say. His parents and brothers also loved sports—playing them, watching them, anything having to do with them—especially ones that involved speed and danger. Dirt-biking. ATVing. Snowmobiling. And when they weren’t riding on motorized vehicles, they were working on them.

  Gabriel, on the other hand, was indifferent to motion and speed, unless it involved photography. He was athletic. Quinn, who’d gone to elementary school with him, remembered his renowned dodgeball prowess. But he had
no passion for sports or games, except, for some reason, pool. And while he was what Quinn’s grandparents’ generation liked to call “handy”—he could fix almost anything—he reserved this trait not for working on mud-splashed ATVs, but for tinkering with his cameras. Still, if he’d confided in Quinn once that as a child he’d harbored a secret belief that he’d somehow ended up in the wrong family, he’d now reached a fragile truce with them. His parents had agreed to give him the space he needed, and he, in exchange, had agreed to stay out of trouble. Not that this was that difficult for Gabriel. But his parents appreciated it. What with his brothers’ occasional suspensions from school (cutting classes) and minor scrapes with the law (underage drinking), his mom and dad already felt that they had about as much as they could handle.

  Although Quinn adored her dad, sometimes she envied Gabriel his large and very extended family. Both her parents had been only children born to older parents and Quinn had hardly known them.

  Most of the time, though, Gabriel seemed to think his family was less of a blessing and more of a curse. And Quinn understood. But she could also see things from their perspective, and still imagine how unknowable Gabriel must seem to them. After all, she’d gone to school with him for ten years, and before last spring he’d practically been a stranger to her. She still marveled at the fact that while the two of them were sitting in the same classrooms, eating in the same cafeterias, riding on the same buses, she’d been oblivious to him. If anyone had asked what she’d thought of him then, she would have said he was quiet. And he was. But it wasn’t that simple; he was quiet and self-assured.

  It wasn’t until he showed up in the communications room that spring and asked if he could take photographs for the student newspaper that she started noticing other things about him. Like he was smart. Smart, as in, “he didn’t study that hard but he still got straight As smart.” And he was observant. He noticed things other people didn’t notice. Knew things other people didn’t know. And he was funny. He could make Quinn laugh like no one else could. And he was talented.

  And yet Quinn might never have been aware of any of this if Gabriel’s uncle hadn’t given him his vintage Nikon FM2 camera the summer before ninth grade. Because once Gabriel had that camera, all he wanted to do was take pictures. He was obsessed. And his obsession led him to Quinn, who was already preparing, at that point, to take over the editing of the school paper and had already changed its name from the Bobcat Bulletin to the Superior News.

  Since that spring, they’d spent almost all their free time together. They’d spent it on this couch in the communications room; in Gabriel’s room, where Quinn curled up on his bed, studying, and Gabriel sat at his desk, looking at photos on the desktop computer he shared with his brother; and at the kitchen table at Quinn’s house, where they ate microwavable pizza pockets and Gabriel tutored Quinn in precalculus, the one subject that had given her trouble. She liked being with him. But she didn’t give their relationship a lot of thought. She didn’t need to. It was easy. It was fun. It was right. And if her other friends didn’t always understand it, Quinn shrugged it off. It was still possible for members of the opposite sex to be friends with each other, she reminded them. She and Gabriel were those friends. Friends without benefits.

  “All right, let’s get started,” Quinn said. “Once again, Matty is missing in action.” Matty was the paper’s associate editor, whose video-game addiction interfered with this role. “But can I run some story ideas by you?” she asked Gabriel.

  “Yep,” he said, putting a lens cover on his camera.

  “All right. Number one: a profile of Northern Superior High School’s bus driver, Bart Walgamott. He’s retiring after forty years. I thought you could get a picture of him sitting behind the wheel.” Quinn made it a point to include a profile of one of Northern Superior’s administrators or employees in every issue. She wanted the paper to represent the whole school, not just the students.

  “I can take a picture of Bart,” Gabriel said.

  “Good,” she said, glancing down at her legal pad. “Idea number two: a theater review of the spring play.” It was The Crucible that year. “I can get Emma Raible to do that. She did a good job on the Music Man review, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah. It was good. Do you want a cast photo? Or something from a performance?”

  “Something from a performance. I already got tickets for us for Friday night.”

  “Cool.”

  “And, let’s see, number three.” Quinn studied her remaining suggestions. But she wasn’t satisfied with any of them. “God, someday I want to live in a place where more happens,” she said, biting her lower lip.

  “So make something up.”

  She raised an eyebrow at him. “That’s right. That’s the first rule of journalism. ‘Make something up.’”

  “It works in this country.”

  “Hmmm. Well, I’m trying to hold this paper to a higher standard,” Quinn said. She studied her scribblings on the page in front of her. Maybe she’d go with the article about the current drought? This part of the state was still recovering from it. She could get Gabriel to get a picture of a local farmer bending down in a field, sifting through a handful of dirt. She had no idea if farmers still did this, but it struck her as uniquely American. Hadn’t those photographers who’d chronicled the Dust Bowl taken pictures like that? She started to ask Gabriel but he interrupted her.

  “What about an article, no, not an article, more of an intellectual exercise, on why the cafeteria smells the way it does,” he suggested.

  “What does it smell like?”

  “Like some combination of spilled milk and bleach,” he said. “Haven’t you ever noticed it? Where does that come from? I mean, nobody drinks milk in there, except, maybe, for a couple of football players. And bleach? Nobody cleans that place. Maybe, like, once a week they run a damp mop around it, just for show. But Clorox? I don’t think so.”

  Quinn considered this. “Would you write it?” She’d always wanted Gabriel to write an article. She had a feeling it would be funny.

  “I’m not a writer. But I’d take pictures of the cafeteria. In line today, I was looking at the green Jell-O. I like that color. It’s kind of . . . violent.”

  Quinn nodded. “Why green?” she said. “Always green. All the time.” She was getting the idea for an article. “And why make it? Still? After all these years? Does anyone ever eat it? I can get Woods Fairbanks to do something on that. He’s good with humor. He did something about tater tots last year, remember?”

  “It was national tater tot day.”

  “Right,” Quinn said, scribbling green Jell-O on her legal pad. Okay, so this subject wasn’t exactly Woodward and Bernstein material, but she had to work with what she had here.

  “Um, Quinn?” she heard someone ask. She looked up from the couch.

  It was Emma Raible, a sophomore who wrote for the paper. She was petite, as in tiny, with wide brown eyes and a general air of adorability about her. “I finished that article,” she said, though she wasn’t looking at Quinn. She was looking at Gabriel. “The one on high school dress codes? I emailed it to you.”

  “Good, I’ll read it tonight,” Quinn said. “I might have something else for you this week too.”

  “How do you feel about green Jell-O?” Gabriel asked her. He’d been lying down on the couch but now he sat up.

  “Green Jell-O in what way?” Emma asked him, looking more serious than the subject required.

  “In every way.”

  Quinn made some notes on possible articles while the two of them chatted. She wanted to do an article on what colleges seniors were attending in the fall, and a companion article about juniors and their summer plans. But when Emma left, Quinn gave Gabriel a dirty look.

  “What?”

  “Why do you torture her? You know she likes you.” And in that moment, looking over at Gabriel lounging beside her, Quinn understood exactly why Emma had a crush on him.

  “No, she doesn
’t,” he said.

  “Gabriel, you can’t be that clueless . . . Ask her out.”

  “No. She’s, like, fourteen.”

  “She’s sixteen. And she’s so cute. She looks like a little doll.”

  “Not all men find that attractive.”

  “No?” She raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t notice. He was unscrewing the lens cap on his camera. She reached for her overloaded backpack, on the floor beside the couch, and unzipped it, stuffing the yellow legal pad inside. “Do you want a ride?” she asked.

  “Yeah, thanks. Aiden won’t be done with track for another hour,” he said, of his middle brother.

  She started to get up, then stopped. Gabriel was preparing to take another picture of her, and whereas before he’d been animated, now he was quiet and meditative. “Did I tell you about this tradition at Northwestern?” she asked him. She’d been online again last night, researching Northwestern University’s journalism program. “It happens on the Sunday night before final exams start. At nine P.M., all the students stick their heads out their dorm windows and scream as loud as they can. It’s supposed to release tension,” she added, imagining what her father might think if she tried this at home.

  “Do you think they do it at RISD?” she asked him.

  “Maybe,” he said. He was looking at her through his viewfinder, adjusting his lens.

  “I don’t know,” Quinn mused. “At RISD students are probably too busy hanging out in cool coffeehouses or something to stop and scream.”

  “Maybe,” Gabriel said. She heard the shutter click. “Hey, Quinn,” he said, “turn your head. A little to the left.”

  Chapter 8

  After Quinn finished writing this memory, she felt both exhilarated and exhausted. How she could feel both, she didn’t know. She’d never written anything like this before. It was a memory—or as true to that memory as she could get with the distance of ten years—and it was deeply personal to her, but it wasn’t even close to a personal essay. No, she’d written it in the third person. She’d heard this described as fictional memoir, but she hadn’t consciously planned to do this. It was simply that doing it this way—writing her memories like a story—made it possible to do it at all.