The Secrets We Carried

by Mary McNear

  Outside, the sky had darkened from a pewter to a gunmetal gray. The clouds were low and heavy. Perfect. Rain clouds. Soon the weather would match her mood. This wouldn’t be one of those pleasant spring rains, either, the kind that brought with it a freshness and a sweetness that put one in mind of summer. This would be one of those dull spring rains that, in this part of the country, were a part of the season’s long, slow slog out of winter.

  She saw the lights on in the little bar and grill. Should she have dinner now? It was only six thirty, but it wasn’t like there was anything else to do at Loon Bay out of season. Then, almost as if it were a reproof to this thought, Quinn heard the familiar, rhythmic sound of a basketball bouncing and followed it with her eyes over to the small court to the right of the bar. It was Jesse, Annika’s son, shooting baskets by himself. She hadn’t seen him since she’d bumped into him and his mom in town. He’d had a ball with him then, too, one of those Pinky rubber balls. She watched him do a layup now. Whoa. He was good. On the sidewalk outside Pearl’s he’d looked like a kid. Now he looked like an athlete. A raindrop hit the window. Then another. Out on the basketball court, Jesse paused, squinted up at the sky, and then started dribbling again. That’s right, Quinn thought, smiling. Don’t let a little rain chase you inside. She watched as a man in a sweatshirt and blue jeans jogged up to the court, and Jesse turned and threw him the ball. The man caught it, bounced it a couple of times, and passed it back to him. It was Tanner. He’d mentioned that he came up here once a month, so of course he’d have to know Jesse. They were well matched, Quinn thought.

  She left the window and sat down on one of the reading chairs. She wanted to see Gabriel, she realized, wanted to see him so much that she was almost willing to drive over to that cabin of his again. He might be home by now. Or, if he wasn’t, she could park on one of those logging roads nearby and stake out the place. A smile trembled at the corner of her lips. Or, if that didn’t work, she could break into the cabin and be waiting on his couch, drinking a cup of black coffee, when he got home. The thought of this amused her, and she was still smiling when her cell phone rang a moment later and she picked it up from the bedside table. It was Theo.

  “Hey,” she said, grateful for the distraction. “What’s up?”

  “Not much. I was wondering how you’re doing. Are you back in Evanston yet?”

  “No,” she said, tucking her legs under her. “I’m still in Butternut.”

  “That’s good, though, right?” he said. “Maybe you’ll get some . . . for lack of a better word, closure?”

  “Ugh. I hate that word,” Quinn said. “And you’re sounding like a therapist again. Although, honestly, Theo, I could probably use one right about now.”

  “What’s happening?”

  She wasn’t going to tell him about her encounter with Theresa. It was too disturbing. And she couldn’t tell him about the dreams she’d been having either. Those were too personal. So she told him instead about going to open the cabin with Gabriel and learning about his marriage and divorce. It hadn’t quite been like high school, she told Theo. But just being with him again had made her happy. Then, today, he’d blown her off.

  “So things aren’t perfect. But do you feel like you’re getting somewhere?”

  “I think so. It’s hard being here. But I’m not ready to leave yet.”

  “Then you’ll stay for as long as you need to. Are you writing, though? About that year?”

  “I am. And it’s helping me to remember.”

  “That’s cool. Do you think it could turn into something publishable?”

  “Not the way you mean. I’m not writing it like a personal essay. I’m writing it more like . . . a novel, I guess. I’m trying to re-create everything as faithfully as I can. It’s exhausting, sometimes,” she confessed, with a little laugh. “You know, having one foot in the past.”

  There was a pause. “Well, we miss you at Great Lakes Living. How much longer do you think you’ll be there?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, thinking of Gabriel. “A couple of days? Maybe more.”

  “Well, I’d love to take you out to dinner when you get back.”

  Quinn hesitated. They’d never done anything “datelike” before.

  “Or not,” he said, jokingly. “We could just stick to coffee.”

  “Coffee might be better,” Quinn said. “Things are a little complicated for me right now.”

  “No problem,” he said. “Give me a call when you get back and we’ll go over some story ideas.”

  After she hung up, she felt relieved. It was possible that she’d been nurturing a romantic interest in Theo. But something about being back in Butternut had diminished that interest. Her feelings had shifted. And that was a good thing. Theo was her editor. She wouldn’t want to change that. She liked working for him. Besides, she was unreliable in the relationship department these days.

  Chapter 22

  As soon as she’d said good-bye to Theo, Quinn headed over to the bar for dinner. There was no sign of Jesse or Tanner on the basketball court now. It was raining harder, a cold, pelting rain, and, pulling her hood up and keeping her head down, she decided to make a run for it. Her destination, housed in a nondescript, clapboard building, wasn’t much to look at by day, but by night, by rainy night, the Leinenkugel’s Beer signs that twinkled in the windows made the bar look cozy.

  She tugged open the door and came inside, lowering her hood. She was right, it was cozy. The single room consisted of a knotty pine bar with windows behind it that faced onto a deck with views of Butternut Lake, and a scattering of high tables with high stools filled out the rest of the room. Old fishing maps papered the walls (leaving space for the obligatory dartboard), a jukebox with 45 records still in it stood in one corner, and the same tabletop shuffleboard game Quinn and her dad had played here when she was a kid stood in another. The few updates to the place, as far as she could tell, consisted of a wall-mounted flat-screen TV and an arcade game called Big Buck Hunter.

  As she shrugged off her dripping jacket, she tried to imagine this bar in Chicago. She couldn’t. It wasn’t hip enough to be a hipster bar; it wasn’t divey enough to be a dive bar. It just was. Unironically. Unselfconsciously. And, God, let’s face it, it was refreshing. She was so tired, sometimes, in the media-saturated world she lived in, of everything having to mean something, stand for something, be something, something more complicated than it already was. She wanted to tell this to somebody now. To Gabriel, she realized.

  She raised her hand in greeting to the bartender, Gunner, whom she’d met the night before. He was making a half-hearted attempt to wipe down the bar as he watched a hockey game on TV. Watching it with him, his back to Quinn, was the bar’s only other customer, and following Gunner’s wave, he turned to her now and broke into a smile. “Quinn, Annika told me you’d checked in.”

  “Tanner,” she said, happy to see him. She hadn’t realized how much she was dreading spending another evening alone.

  He got off his stool and pulled out the one beside him for her. “Come join us,” he said. “We’re watching the Blackhawks game.”

  “That’s my team,” she said, though her interest in hockey was minimal at best. Still, it was good to see Tanner again.

  “Have you met my friend Gunner?” Tanner asked, as she slid onto the stool next to his.

  “I have. Last night,” she said, with a nod at Gunner, who didn’t look old enough to drink alcohol, let alone serve it. He hadn’t been much of a talker when she’d come in here, though in Gunner’s case, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Unlike Marty, from the Corner Bar, who’d been around the block a few times, Gunner seemed unaware of where that block might even be. His main accomplishment behind the bar, as far as Quinn could tell, was to combine boredom and disinterest in equal parts, and she couldn’t help thinking he was counting down the hours to when he could go home to a place where his mother still made his eggs the way he liked them and his dad still scolded him for not takin
g out the garbage.

  “Hey,” Gunner said to Quinn, exerting himself. “What can I get you?”

  “I’m going to have a glass of pinot grigio and the small veggie pizza.”

  He nodded, and as if already exhausted by the effort this order would require, he wandered off down the bar.

  “The pizza’s great here,” she said to Tanner, who was already drinking a bottle of Leinenkugel’s.

  “Oh, I know. It’s the special oven. Or so they say,” he added, flashing her another smile.

  “That’s the official line,” Quinn agreed, remembering what Carla, at the Butternut Motel, had said about the oven. Gunner brought her a glass and a mini–airplane bottle of pinot grigio and left them on the bar in front of her.

  “Jeez,” Tanner said, once Gunner was out of earshot. “He could at least pour it for you.” Instead, Tanner did it for her himself, twisting the lid off the little bottle and emptying it into her glass.

  “Thanks,” Quinn said. “Hey, I saw you playing basketball with Annika’s son.”

  “Jesse. Yeah, he’s a great kid,” Tanner said, peeling the label on his beer bottle.

  “Looks like he’s almost as good a player as you are,” Quinn commented.

  “I know. A couple years from now he’ll need to find someone better to play with.” He took a drink of his beer. “I’m glad you’re sticking around, Quinn, and that you ended up at Loon Bay.”

  “Well, I ran into Annika and Jesse in town yesterday. Plus I’ve always loved this place.”

  Tanner nodded. “Did you ever find your friend Gabriel?”

  “I did. You were right, by the way. He’s renting Mr. Phipps’s cabin.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “I’m not really sure,” she admitted. “He’s changed, but maybe I’ve changed too. But I’m hoping we’ll get to hang out more while I’m here.” Quinn took a sip of her wine. She refrained from wincing; it was pretty cheap stuff.

  “I hope you’re not too picky,” Tanner said. “Most people come for the Leinies,” he added, using the nickname for Leinenkugel’s.

  “It will do for now,” Quinn said, with a smile. Despite the bad wine, she felt good, and she realized that one of the reasons she did was because she was here with Tanner. Somehow, sitting on that stool beside hers, he managed to radiate an air of well-being that included her within its aura, and that kept at bay, at least for now, the tumult of the last few days. She noticed the spicy tang of his aftershave—good aftershave. It was just strong enough to register with her. He was dressed in a T-shirt, a zip-up hoodie, jeans, and the work boots that were de rigueur up here during mud season—but these clothes looked as right on him as the more formal attire he’d worn to the dedication. And then there were those eyes. Jake’s eyes. No, she reminded herself, they were Tanner’s, too. That same gold as the wrapped butterscotch candies Quinn’s grandmother Shaw had kept in a glass dish on the coffee table in her living room in Chicago.

  Gunner brought her pizza, still bubbling from the oven. “Oh, and I’ll have another pinot,” Quinn said, wondering if Gunner knew that an empty glass on the bar was the universal signal that a patron might want another drink.

  “Right,” he said, with a sigh. He brought her another airplane bottle and set it on the bar next to the empty one.

  Tanner rolled his eyes.

  “Maybe he wants me to keep track of how much I’m drinking?” Quinn suggested.

  Tanner laughed. “That’s one way to do it, I guess.”

  “Do you want to split this?” she asked him, of the pizza.

  “No, thanks. I already ate,” he said as Quinn lifted a slice.

  “Do you like ’80s music?” Tanner asked, reaching into his pocket and placing some change on the bar.

  “Sure,” she said, as he picked out the quarters.

  “Good. Because this jukebox is like an ’80s time capsule,” he said, sliding off his bar stool. “I think it’s the last time they put new music in it.” He went and fed it some quarters, and by the time he came back U2’s “With or Without You” was playing.

  “I stopped by to see your parents yesterday,” she said to him.

  “Did you?” he asked. “How’d you find them?”

  She hesitated. “They look well. Your mother, especially. But . . .”

  Tanner raised his eyebrows, waiting for her to finish.

  “But I was only there for half an hour, and, after that, she was tired. She said she needed to take a nap.” Quinn couldn’t help but remember how pleased they’d been to see her. They’d chased away the feelings that her encounter with Theresa in the Corner Bar had stirred up.

  “She naps a lot,” he said, taking another drink of his beer.

  Quinn nodded. She thought, now, about what Mrs. Lightman had said about Tanner. “We don’t see him that often.” Which was odd, considering he came up here once a month. “When you’re here, do you spend much time with your parents?” she asked, fiddling with the stem on her wineglass.

  He considered this, though it was a straightforward enough question. “I usually stop by to see them then.” Usually? If you’re not coming up here to see them, then why are you coming up here? Quinn wanted to ask. But it was none of her business, she knew. Families could be complicated. Still, the journalist in her won out.

  “So what else do you do when you come up here?” she asked, coming at the question from a different direction.

  “I’m here, mostly, at Loon Bay.”

  “Just hanging out?” she said, though she was confused as to why he would spend so much time doing it here. “I mean, don’t get me wrong,” she added. “Loon Bay’s a nice place. My cabin’s been very comfortable.” But she couldn’t help but feel that Minneapolis or St. Paul had much more to offer, especially for someone their age.

  “It is a nice place,” he said. “But that’s not why I come up here. There are a couple reasons. I can’t really go into them now,” he added, apologetically, and looked away. “But one reason—you might understand this,” he said, looking back at Quinn, “is because I miss Jake. And coming up here”—he paused to take another sip of his beer—“makes me feel closer to him. I guess that sounds strange.” He brushed his hair out of his eyes. Quinn wanted to comfort him, but there didn’t seem to be a graceful way to do this.

  Instead, she said, “It doesn’t sound strange, Tanner.” Though, truth be told, it sounded a little strange. After all, Jake and Tanner had grown up not on Butternut Lake, like Quinn, but in the neighboring town of Winton. Why would this place, of all places, make Tanner feel closer to Jake? Then again, there was no logic to grief. And because Tanner was watching her and wanting her, she felt sure, to say more, she told him something she’d never told anyone before.

  “I do something, too, that makes me feel close to Jake,” she said, taking a sip of her wine. “I run. I started in the spring of my junior year in college. I didn’t do it, at first, because of Jake. Believe it or not, at the time, I didn’t even make the connection between the two. I did it because I thought it would be a good stress reliever. It wasn’t until about six months after I started, when I was coming back from a five-mile run, that I had this moment where I felt, just for a second, like he was . . . there. Do you know what I mean? I couldn’t see him, or hear him, or anything like that, but I felt his nearness, I guess. His presence. I still feel it, sometimes.” What she didn’t say was that she felt his presence less and less often. “Now I sound strange,” she added, feeling self-conscious.

  He shook his head. “Not at all,” he said. “I know what you mean.”

  “You know, Jake talked about you a lot, Tanner. He really looked up to you.”

  Tanner looked pained. “I wish he hadn’t,” he said. “Looked up to me, I mean.”

  “Why?” Quinn asked.

  “He might still be alive if he hadn’t,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Quinn asked, confused.

  “It’s a long story,” he said, glancing away. “It’s true,
though; Jake did look up to me.” He took a sip of his beer and put it down on the counter. “When we were kids he followed me around like a puppy dog. I loved it. He was my own built-in fan club. We were close enough in age to hang out and play together, but I was always one step ahead of him—rode a bike first, dated girls first, drank first, learned to drive first. And I think it would have really driven him crazy, my being one step ahead of him all the time, except my mom doted on him to no end, and that seemed to balance things out.” He paused to drain his bottle of beer. “Sometimes, though, I think he got tired of always being a step behind me.”

  “Isn’t that natural, though?” But all Quinn knew about siblings was what she’d observed in her friends’ families.

  “Maybe. But I was his older brother. I was supposed to watch out for him. Instead, I encouraged him to try to keep up with me. To follow my lead. Even if what I was doing was stupid. And reckless.” He held his beer bottle up, as though inspecting it.

  “I don’t know about that, Tanner. But I do know you inspired him. You were the reason he pushed himself so hard. He wanted to follow you to the University of Wisconsin.”

  “Really? I think you were the one who inspired him. He had his whole life with you mapped out.”

  Quinn couldn’t help but think about what Mrs. Lightman had said yesterday, about Jake wanting to marry her. Had he told that to Tanner, too?

  “I miss him,” Tanner said, suddenly.

  “So do I,” Quinn said.

  He signaled Gunner for another beer. “To Jake,” he said, when the beer came. He tipped the bottle toward her. “To missing Jake. And to the ways we keep him close.”

  “To Jake,” she agreed, touching her glass to his bottle.

  They were quiet, then, Quinn nibbling on a pizza crust, and Tanner watching the end of the hockey game.

  “I just realized something,” she said, when he looked back at her.

  “What?”

  “Other than the fact that you live in Minneapolis and you come up here, I know almost nothing about your life now.”