The Secrets We Carried

by Mary McNear

  For some reason, Quinn saw an image of Jake’s mother, Maggie, sitting on her living room couch three days ago, her hair in an elegant twist, her clothes neat and chic as she sipped her Lipton’s English Breakfast Tea and made polite conversation. Who would Quinn be, who would any woman be, she wondered, when faced with the kind of loss these two women had suffered? Would they start their day applying lipstick in the mirror, or downing a fifth of vodka? Or would they muddle along somewhere in between the two? Probably the latter. Though, on the worst days, she thought, it might be tempting to take the vodka-for-breakfast route.

  “Quinn, you’re still here,” Theresa said now, taking her arm. She didn’t seem angry anymore. She seemed, instead, possessed of a fierce sense of urgency. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you again.”

  “I have some errands to run,” Quinn said, taking a step back. She tried to shake her arm free of Theresa’s hand, but Theresa didn’t appear to notice. It was almost as if, having placed her hand there, she was no longer responsible for it.

  “What happened that night, Quinn?” she asked, leaning closer. “The night of the accident? I never got a chance to ask you before. You left. And then you didn’t come back. Until now. And I want to know what happened.”

  “You know what happened,” Quinn said.

  “I wasn’t there,” Theresa said.

  “Neither was I. When it happened. I left before . . .” Before Jake drove out on the ice.

  Theresa shook her head with vigor. There was a strange gleam in her eye, almost as if she’d caught Quinn in a lie and she relished the opportunity to confront her with it.

  “No, before that, Quinn. What happened before you left that night? I know some of it. Dominic called me on his cell phone. From the lake. Did you know that?” she asked, as if she was goading her. “Did you know I talked to him that night?”

  Quinn shook her head. She hadn’t known that. And she realized she didn’t want to know that now.

  “Oh, he did,” Theresa said, breathing in Quinn’s face. A woman with a little boy passed them and the little boy looked back at Theresa. “He called me,” Theresa continued. “He always called me if he was going to be late. That’s the kind of kid he was. He’d call and he’d say, ‘Mom. Mom’ . . .” Theresa appeared to lose her train of thought here, and Quinn wondered if she was done. A woman walked by the two of them, pushing a grocery cart, and Quinn longed to follow her, wherever she was going. Anywhere was better than here.

  Now Theresa shook her head, as if clearing it, and continued. “Dom called and he said, he said, ‘Mom, Jake and Quinn got in a fight. And Jake’s drunk.’ And I was like, ‘What? Jake doesn’t drink.’ And he said . . . something about he’s drunk because he was fighting with Quinn, and he’s acting crazy, and then he said something about a ring being lost. He said, ‘Jake won’t leave the lake until we find that ring. I’m gonna help him find it.’ Then he had to go. And I said . . . I can’t remember what I said. I probably said something like, ‘Dom. Come home. It’s late. And you sound like maybe you’ve had a little too much to drink too.’ He hung up, though. That was it.” She looked at Quinn as if she still couldn’t believe it. “That was the kind of kid he was. Always helping people. You know what I mean? Those kids?” Her animosity was gone now. She was waiting, it seemed, for Quinn to agree with her about the kind of kid Dom had been.

  Quinn couldn’t speak, though. The mention of the lost ring had made her feel ill. It was that hot, cold, prickly sensation that had come over her at the dedication. This was worse; this feeling had come with a new knowledge she hadn’t had before. She hadn’t known that Jake was planning to look for the ring that night after she left.

  “Was it your ring he was looking for? Is that what you and Jake were fighting about?” Theresa asked her now. But she seemed to discount this last question as soon as she asked it because she then said, “It doesn’t matter. You fought with him and he got drunk. If he hadn’t been drunk, my Dom would be alive right now.” And she seemed to be looking not at Quinn, but just past her.

  “Theresa, I have to go,” Quinn said, brushing her hand off her arm. “I need to leave. I shouldn’t have stayed.”

  Incredibly, this seemed to cheer Theresa up. “Oh, you can’t leave, Quinn,” she said, a strange smile on her face. “You can’t just go away. You’re stuck here. With the rest of us.”

  That’s crazy, Quinn thought. She turned and walked as quickly as she could down the aisle, past the checkout counter, and into the parking lot, where the blacktop felt soft and putty-like beneath her shoes. She didn’t check to see if Theresa was following her. She got in her car and pulled out of her parking space, her hands clumsy on the steering wheel. One quick look in her rearview mirror showed Theresa standing now in the front of the IGA. Quinn stepped on the gas and tore out of the parking lot before she realized what she was doing and slowed down.

  Theresa had accosted her twice now, Quinn thought. Once in a restaurant. And once in the IGA. And both times she’d overstepped boundaries; both times she’d said things that were inappropriate. “It’s been a long ten years. Thanks to you,” she’d said at the Corner Bar. And what had she said a few minutes ago? “You’re stuck here. With the rest of us.” What had she meant by that? Who knows. Maybe she didn’t even know herself what she was saying.

  Except . . . except that she’d mentioned the ring. The lost ring. And that Dominic was going to help Jake look for it. Was that true? She’d never heard this before. That didn’t mean that Quinn hadn’t been haunted, over the years, by the possibility that Jake had driven out on the ice that night to find the ring.

  “Oh my God,” she murmured. She drove without thinking and pulled over on a residential street. She couldn’t keep going. She couldn’t make her hands do what she wanted them to do. She looked at them. They were shaking. She felt ill. And she felt dizzy, too. Only her dizziness was more like vertigo. It was like the feeling she had in dreams, the ones where she was standing on the edge of something. A building ledge. A cliff. A yawning abyss. One wrong move, and she would fall.

  And in that moment, Quinn thought she understood Theresa’s smile. It was a smile of triumph. Theresa had finally found someone to blame for the accident. It was you, Quinn, that smile had said. It was your fault. All of it. You set it in motion. Was Theresa right? Had Quinn caused this tragedy? She’d long ago pushed this possibility out of her mind, but she wasn’t sure she could any longer.

  She sat in her car and fought an overwhelming urge to go back to her cabin, curl up on the bed, pull the covers over her head, and sleep. Sleep for days. She ruled that out. She needed to think this through. Right here. Right now. In the days and weeks after the accident, she’d had so many questions. Why had Jake driven out on the lake so late in the season when the ice might be unstable? Why had he taken his two best friends with him? Why had he been drinking that night when he never drank during training season? And why had he stopped his truck in the middle of the lake for several minutes, a decision that might have caused the ice to give way? Had what she’d said to him earlier that night had anything to do with it? And finally, why had he lied to her earlier in the day about why his truck was parked in front of that house on Scuttle Hole Road? It was this lie, after all, that had triggered their fight.

  Yes, she’d had questions. But it was the tumultuous feelings she’d had that she thought about now. She’d felt shock, initially, that Jake had done something so . . . so unlike himself. So reckless. But the shock quickly gave way to grief, a feeling she’d never felt before that spring. And there was heartache, too, and sorrow, for the loss of him. Which brought her to guilt. At first, this promised to be the most damaging, the most paralyzing of all her emotions, especially since it came with an endless round of what-ifs. What if Quinn hadn’t argued with Jake that night? What if she hadn’t told him about losing her ring? What if she hadn’t left him at the bonfire? And, most crippling of all, what if she hadn’t left the bonfire with Gabriel? For guilt, and regret, were as
much the result of having failed to act as they were the result of having acted.

  The sheer hopelessness of the what-ifs, though, led her to another feeling. That had been harder to come by, and slower to take hold. But eventually, after the accident, when the days had turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months, she felt a flicker of resolve. She would keep going. She would go to college. She would rebuild her life, one way or another. If she was going to survive, though, and maybe, who knows, even thrive, she would have to stop thinking all these thoughts. Feeling all these feelings. She would have to put the past behind her. Either that, or it would drag her down.

  There had been setbacks. Most memorably, during her junior year in college. And yet, for the most part, her life had continued to move forward. The guilt remained, but she’d pushed it under the surface. She’d kept it at bay, not realizing that in doing this she was compounding the problem by not confronting it.

  But the guilt had always been about not stopping the accident. It had never been, at least not consciously, about causing the accident. Theresa had changed that. What had she said, exactly? Something about how Dominic had told her that Jake was looking for a ring, and that he wasn’t leaving Shell Lake without it. Dominic was going to help him find it. Unbeknownst to Theresa, of course, was the fact that it was Quinn’s ring that Dominic was talking about, the ring that Jake had given her. The ring that she’d lost earlier that day. Had Jake really gone out on the ice that night looking for it? Think, Quinn. Think. Remember that day, that night. Remember it in all its details.

  Chapter 27

  March 23–24, Senior Year,

  Day and Night of the Accident

  I think that might be it for the season,” Gene said, as he and Quinn trudged up from Shell Lake that evening, hauling their gear with them.

  “What? No ice fishing in May this year?” Quinn said, her boots crunching on the snow. Her dad smiled, probably because this wasn’t impossible to imagine. Quinn was more circumspect. She’d never known any winters but northern Minnesota winters, but they could still feel endless to her. On the first of this month, for instance, when spring was almost within reach, there’d been a blizzard; twenty inches of thick, wet snow had blanketed the region, burying cars, closing schools, and even forcing snowplows off the roads. Still, perhaps her dad was right about the ice-fishing season being over. Most of the snow from the storm had melted by now. And, when she and her dad had arrived here, a couple of hours ago, the sky had been a brilliant blue, and the sun had glinted off the fine-as-sand dusting of snow on the lake. Her dad, always cautious when it came to ice fishing, had cut a test hole in the ice near the shore. He was satisfied it was safe to fish; there were over four inches of clear, solid ice. They’d found a spot to ice fish about fifteen feet from the shore. Her dad had frowned, though, when he’d seen a couple of snowmobilers crisscrossing the lake later. “Just because it’s safe here . . .” he’d muttered, lowering his line into the water.

  “I know,” Quinn had said. As in I know, I know, you’ve drilled this into me by now, Dad. Hunting, shooting, fishing, whatever sport he taught her, Gene was a “safety first” kind of a guy. And who could fault him for this? Certainly not Quinn.

  Now she shifted the Styrofoam cooler in her arms—the ice and the six walleyes in it were surprisingly heavy—and glanced over at her dad as they crested the hill before the parking area. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Sorry about what?”

  “I wasn’t very good company today,” she said. It was true. She’d been too preoccupied to say much of anything.

  “Don’t be silly. Of course you were,” he said. But Quinn felt unsure. This was the first, and now, probably, the last, time they’d go ice fishing together this season. They’d meant to go sooner, but between Gene working late at the timber company, and Quinn’s commitments at school, and, of course, her commitment to Jake, they hadn’t been able to find the time before now. And what had Quinn done with that time, other than fish? She’d brooded.

  “Hey,” her dad said. “You don’t have to entertain me. I have the walleyes for that.”

  Quinn smiled. As her departure for college approached, she found herself appreciating her father more than ever. Like now, for instance. He knew something was wrong. He’d known it since she’d come home from school that afternoon. He’d asked her, casually, on the drive out to the lake, “Is everything all right?” But when she’d responded with a noncommittal shrug, he hadn’t pressed her. And he wouldn’t. It wasn’t his style.

  Now, as they got back to their pickup truck, the sun was dipping below the pines and the light was emptying out of the sky. They loaded their gear—the cooler, an ice auger, two plastic buckets, and the fishing rods—into the back of the truck and climbed into the front. Gene turned on the engine, then blasted the heat and fiddled with the radio dial until he found a country music song he liked, Kenny Chesney’s “Beer in Mexico.”

  “Do you think you can listen to this one more time?” he asked Quinn, as they snapped on their seat belts.

  “It’s fine, Dad,” she said, with a half-hearted smile, of a song they’d been listening to since January. Ordinarily, she would have tried to sell him on the classic rock station, but as they pulled out of the parking lot and onto Birch Road, she was barely aware of the music. She was trying to decide if she wanted to talk to her dad about what was on her mind. He wasn’t her first choice. Her first choice was Gabriel. But this was about Jake. And as much as she loved Gabriel, this was the one thing, the only thing, really, she couldn’t talk to him about. On the rare occasions she’d been with Jake and Gabriel at the same time, she could tell the two of them had reached a truce, uneasy though it might be. Quinn knew, though, that even after nine months of dating Jake, Gabriel remained, at best, deeply skeptical of him. So that left her dad to talk to about it.

  “Can I ask you something?” Quinn said, turning to him.

  He turned down the radio. “Of course.”

  “Do you think Jake is a good person? An honest person?”

  He looked surprised. “Jake? I think he’s a good kid.”

  “But?” Quinn prompted. Because she’d heard a but in there.

  “No. No buts,” he said. “It’s more . . . how do I say this . . . it’s more of me recognizing something in Jake. One man to another. Do you know what I mean?”

  Quinn didn’t.

  He hesitated, then started again. “He’s good looking. He has a lot of charisma. And there’s nothing wrong with either of those things, obviously. Except maybe, sometimes, he relies a little bit too much on those qualities. He gets away with things he might not otherwise get away with. He’s what my parents’ generation called a ‘charmer.’ You guys probably have a different word for it now.”

  “A player,” Quinn said. “We call someone like that a ‘player.’” She felt a little sick.

  “Oh, I don’t know if I’d use that word,” her dad said quickly. “What’s going on, though? Why do you want to know what I think of him?”

  Quinn looked out the window, at the woods sliding by in the dusky twilight. “Jake lied to me today. And I don’t think it’s the first time he’s lied to me either.”

  “Really?”

  She hesitated. “I don’t know,” she said. “Early on, when we first started dating, I think there were times where he’d tell me he was going to be one place, and then he’d be in another place. Or he’d tell me he needed to do something after school or on a weekend, but when I asked him about it later . . .” She shook her head. “You know how, when you know someone, you can almost read them? You get a feeling when they say something that isn’t true? But you want to believe it’s true. Your heart wants to believe, even if your head doesn’t. And Jake always had a way of explaining. He had a way of smoothing things over.”

  She frowned. There’d been other things, too, early in their relationship, things she hadn’t questioned him about. Unexplained absences. Unanswered texts and phone calls. Quinn had chalked t
hese up to how busy they both were, what with cross-country for him, the newspaper for her. And she’d been determined to not be that kind of girlfriend, the kind who always needed to know where her boyfriend was, who he was with, or what he was doing. She’d always been independent; why shouldn’t Jake be too?

  Her dad was quiet. Waiting, she knew, for her to say more. “Once, in December, I think I caught him in a lie,” she said. She was remembering the night he’d given her the ring. “After that, though, I don’t think there was any more lying.” That night had changed something, she realized. He was different. More serious, more solicitous of her. And that warning voice inside of her, the one she’d tried to ignore before, had quieted. Until today.

  “And then, this afternoon,” she continued, watching her dad in profile, “I saw him before seventh period, and he said he’d pick me up tonight and we’d go to the teachers’ basketball game, and then we’d drive out to the bonfire.” (The teachers’ basketball game was an annual high school fund-raiser.)

  “Is the bonfire at Shell Lake?” he asked. She nodded. Juniors and seniors from her high school sometimes had bonfires there on Friday and Saturday nights. Her dad didn’t mind her going to these things. He knew that Jake didn’t drink. In fact, among Jake’s friends, he was more or less the permanent designated driver.

  “Anyway, Jake told me that first, after school, he had to drive to Ely and meet with a sports physiologist. I said that was fine, I was going ice fishing with you, and we could meet up later at our house. Anyway, after my last class, I went to Pearl’s to pick up a hot chocolate, and then I realized I’d left my AP government textbook in my locker, so I drove back to school again, but this time I took the shortcut.” Gene knew the shortcut she meant; it involved taking Scuttle Hole Road. “And then, right where Scuttle Hole comes into Winton, I saw Jake’s truck, parked outside a house I didn’t recognize.”