The Secrets We Carried

by Mary McNear

  “Now listen to me, please,” Quinn said. She put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his eyes. She needed him to focus on her. On what she was going to say. He leaned forward as if to kiss her. She put her hands on his jacket front to stop him.

  “How was Ely?” she asked.

  “That’s what you want to talk about?” he asked. He concentrated on tucking a strand of her hair back into her hat. And something about the seriousness with which he did this made her want to cry.

  “Yes, that’s what I want to talk about.”

  “It was boring,” he said.

  “But, I mean, what happened? You drove there to meet with a sports physiologist and then what? Was that it?”

  “Questions, questions,” he teased. “You really are a journalist, aren’t you?” This irritated Quinn. He was trying to distract her.

  “Just answer me, okay?” she said. In the silence that followed, she could hear laughter down by the bonfire and a car starting somewhere in the parking lot.

  “All right,” he said, swaying a little. “I went to Ely and met with the physiologist. He was boring and boring and boring. And now I’m here with you.” But he said this last part almost sadly, as he tried to pull her to him again. Quinn stiffened.

  “Jake,” she said. “You’re lying. And you’ve lied to me before.” She felt sick. She looked away from him. She didn’t want to see him lie again. Something told her, though, that doing this was cowardly. She looked at him in time to see him try to smile. It didn’t come out as a smile; it came out as a grimace. It was weak and watery.

  “I didn’t lie,” he said, turning serious.

  “You did. I saw your truck parked outside a house on Scuttle Hole Road. You didn’t go to Ely.” His face fell, for a moment. Then she could see him thinking, thinking of a way to get out of the corner she’d backed him into.

  “I lent my truck to . . . this guy,” he said, finally. “We switched. He wanted to see what my truck was like. I took his to Ely.”

  Quinn shook her head, vigorously. “What guy? And why would you trade trucks with him? I don’t believe you. While you were parked at that house, you texted me you were in Ely. You lied to me.” She heard her voice catch. “And I want to know why.”

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “Then what is it?” she asked, relieved that she wasn’t, after all, going to cry. He didn’t answer her. “Just tell me, why were you there? Were you there with another girl?”

  Jake moved closer to her. “Quinn, listen to me. Just . . . listen. There’s no other girl. I promise. I don’t love anyone else. I love you,” he said, his gold eyes coming into focus. He dropped his voice. “I’ve never loved a girl like I love you.”

  Quinn was unmoved. She hated that even when she’d confronted him with his lie, he couldn’t admit it.

  “This isn’t the first time you’ve lied to me, Jake. I can’t be with you,” she said. “I can’t. I’m sorry. This won’t work.” Suddenly, she was on the verge of crying again.

  “Quinn, wait. We’ll work it out. I promise.” He slid his arms around her, and she let him pull her close. She expected him to plead his case now, but instead, he said, with some of the same urgency he’d kissed her with when she’d first seen him, “Let’s get out of here. Me and you. Let’s get in my truck and drive. We’ll go to California. I’ve never been there. We could live there. Get a place.”

  “You mean . . . stay there?”

  “Yes,” he said, tightening his arms around her.

  “No. What about college, Jake? And your scholarship?”

  He shrugged these away, as if they’d never been important to him. She stared at him, dumbfounded. She couldn’t believe what he was saying. It was so out of character for him. He might be romantic, but he was not a romantic. He was grounded in the here and now. And why shouldn’t he be? He already had everything he wanted.

  He looked hurt. “Why don’t you want to go?” he asked.

  “Because you sound crazy, Jake,” she said. “We can’t leave here. We have to graduate from high school.” She tried to push him gently away.

  “Quinn. Don’t go.” He tried to hold her, but she didn’t want to be held.

  “I can’t be with you, Jake,” she said. “I don’t trust you. And I’m not . . . I’m not your girlfriend anymore.”

  She spun around then and started walking, jogging almost, through the snow, soft and mushy beneath her boots, and under the low-hanging branches of the trees, one of which caught at her hat. She didn’t stop. She retraced her steps and passed the table with Jake’s friends at it. They called out something to her, but she ignored them. She thought Jake was calling out to her, too, but she tried not to listen. She sped up.

  By the time she reached the parking area, she might have been running. She passed people arriving, walking toward the beach, carrying cases of beer and firewood. Some of them called out to her, but she kept moving. She had no idea why she was going this way, toward Gabriel’s truck, when he would be down at the bonfire. Except that . . . he wasn’t. She saw Gabriel sitting in his truck, engine running and lights on. She didn’t know if Jake was following her or not. If he was, he didn’t catch her. Miraculously, this one time she was faster than he was.

  She reached the truck, yanked the passenger-side door open, and practically threw herself into the front seat. Gabriel, who was listening to music, was startled.

  “Quinn,” he said.

  “Let’s go. Now. Fast. Please.” And Gabriel put the car in drive and took off, out of the parking lot. Quinn didn’t look back. “It’s over. I broke up with him,” she said. She watched the truck’s headlights slide over the ghostly white trunks of a stand of birch trees, and she shivered, inexplicably. She wasn’t cold. But Gabriel turned up the heat. She nestled against the door and closed her eyes. She didn’t want to think about Jake right now. Or the nine months she’d spent with him. She wanted to banish him, and it, from her mind.

  Chapter 28

  Quinn had no idea how long she’d been writing about the night of the accident, but when she finally looked up, the shadows of the bare tree branches had lengthened on the street in front of her. She put her laptop back in her computer bag. Where am I? she wondered, looking out the car window now at the tidy little houses. After fleeing Theresa in the IGA parking lot, she’d driven without paying attention to where she was going. She looked more closely at the house she was parked in front of now and then shook her head in disbelief. She was parked on Webber Street. Without even realizing it, she’d driven to the safest place in all of Butternut. This was home. Or had been once.

  She’d parked three houses down from the yellow 1960s split-level house that she’d grown up in. It was the same house her parents had brought her home to after they’d left the hospital with her on an unseasonably warm May morning twenty-eight years ago, the same house she’d lived in with her mom and dad, and then just her dad, almost every day of her life for eighteen years.

  She rubbed her eyes and studied the house through the windshield. It was the same. Well, not exactly the same. The blue mailbox with brown owls painted on its side had been replaced with an ordinary white one. She’d loved the owl mailbox as a child. Her dad had told her that it was her mom’s first purchase for their house, bought at the hardware store on the day they moved in, and that she’d insisted that he pound the post in that night, before they went to bed. Gone, too, was a decorative birdbath, also her mother’s idea, on the front lawn. There were a few new additions, too; a red plastic baby swing hung from one of the branches of the beech tree, a satellite dish was bolted to the roof above what had once been Quinn’s bedroom window, and the house’s trim had changed from white to dark green. Still, to have it look so much the same was comforting to Quinn.

  She looked up and down the street. So many familiar houses and landmarks. So much unchanged. She wasn’t surprised. Not really. Even in her childhood, this street had been caught in something of a time warp. It had been a place wher
e people left their doors unlocked and had block parties and multifamily yard sales, and where children, in the summertime, gathered at backyard aboveground pools and played flashlight tag after dark. That’s what it had been like in the 1990s, Quinn thought. How lucky I was to have grown up here in this neighborhood, on this street, with my dad. She missed him. He was the only person she could talk to about what Theresa had said.

  She rummaged in her handbag for her cell phone. She found it, pressed Dad under her favorites, and listened to it ring.

  “Quinny, my love,” he answered, cheerfully. “You’re back. How was Butternut?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Quinn?” he asked, concerned.

  “Dad,” she said, finally, her voice cracking. And the tears that she’d kept at bay while she was writing came now.

  “Quinn, what is it?” he asked. “What’s going on? Don’t . . . don’t cry, okay?” he said, quickly. “Please. Just . . . stop. And we’ll talk.” Quinn couldn’t stop. She heard her father take a deep breath on the other end of the line, and when he spoke again, he sounded calm. Gentle. “Don’t pay any attention to me. Of course you can cry,” he said. “I’ll wait. And when you’re able to catch your breath, you can tell me what happened. Whatever it is, Quinn, we can fix it, okay?”

  She nodded, even though she knew he couldn’t see this. And she cried while he waited and, when the tempo of her crying slowed, he asked, “You’ve got some tissues there with you, don’t you? Why don’t you find them now. Just a big old handful of them. That ought to do the job.” Quinn smiled. When she was a child and she cried, her father had always been out of his comfort zone. But the rituals of comforting, these he learned how to do, and do faithfully: bringing her the box of Kleenex; patting her on the back; repeating the sometimes meaningless, but always reassuring words and phrases he trotted out for the occasion. She searched in her handbag again, this time for Kleenex, and came out with a crumpled packet. She extracted a few pieces of tissue and dutifully mopped her face with them. Forced to focus on something other than how she was feeling, she calmed down.

  “Quinn, what happened?”

  “I saw Theresa, Dominic’s mom, at the IGA.”

  “When was this?”

  “I don’t know. An hour ago?” she said.

  “Wait a minute. You’re still in Butternut? I thought you were staying for the weekend. Today is Wednesday.”

  “I know. But remember, I said I’d probably stay longer. And then I saw Gabriel and . . . I couldn’t leave.”

  “Really? What’s going on with him? Is he okay?”

  “No, he’s not,” she said, crumpling up the tissue. “I mean, I don’t know. He says he is. But he never left, Dad. He stayed here. He’s been here all these years.”

  “And? What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing. He was supposed to study photography, though. Remember how talented he was?”

  “I remember. But people change, Quinn. Things change. What’s he doing?”

  “He’s working as a caretaker.”

  “Ah, well. Those jobs are hard to get. Good for him.”

  “No, Dad. It’s not that. It’s that he seems so different. So changed. I feel like there’s something wrong. He seems stuck. Unhappy. And things aren’t good between us. At first, he was angry at me for falling out of touch with him. Then he said he wasn’t angry, he forgave me, but he didn’t want to see me anymore,” she said, slumping back against the seat. “I miss him,” she added. “And I miss him . . . caring about me,” she admitted.

  “I can’t imagine him not caring about you, sweetheart.” His voice was gentle. Gruff, even. “The Gabriel I knew would have done anything for you. That’s why he was my favorite.” He was silent for a moment. “Quinn?” he asked then. “What about Theresa, hon? What happened with her?”

  “Oh, her,” Quinn groaned. She’d forgotten about her for a whole sixty seconds. “Dad, she said something to me. She told me—”

  “You know she’s got a drinking problem, right?” he interposed. “And I’ve heard, since the accident, that she’s a little unstable, too.”

  “That’s true,” she murmured, thinking about the almost maniacal quality of Theresa’s accusations. “She told me something, though, that I didn’t know. She told me that the night of the accident, after I left the bonfire, Dominic called her from his cell phone and said that Jake was drunk and upset that he’d fought with me. And Theresa thinks it was my fault that Jake got drunk and then drove his truck out on the ice . . . and that’s not all, Dad. Theresa said that Dominic told her that Jake had lost a ring, and he wasn’t leaving Shell Lake until they found it.” Quinn stopped to take a breath. “Dad, don’t you see? That was my ring Dominic was talking about. And my ring that they drove out on the ice to find.”

  “Whoa, Quinn. Wait. What you’re saying, it makes no sense.”

  “It does,” she insisted. “I never told you this, Dad. I never told anyone. But the night of the accident Jake noticed I wasn’t wearing my ring. I told him I’d lost it ice fishing on Shell Lake. And he said he’d go look for it, right then. But to stop him, I told him we’d been out in the middle of the lake. If I’d have told him the truth, that we’d been fishing in the shallows, he’d have gone and tried to find it. So I lied to him. I never thought he’d go way out there to find it at night. But”—and here a sob escaped her—“he did go. Later that night. I think that’s why he took his truck on the ice.”

  “My love, why didn’t you tell me this ten years ago?”

  “Because I tried not to think about it. It was too awful a possibility.”

  She heard her father take a deep breath. “Quinn,” he said. “If you’d told me this before I would have said then what I’m going to say now. I’m sorry. But it’s just not possible that a young man as smart as Jake would take his truck, his truck, out on the ice in search of a little bitty ring. At midnight. Even a drunk person wouldn’t think they could find a ring with a truck. Sorry, love, it makes no sense. That’s not why he drove on the ice.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Are you there, love?”

  “Yes,” she said, softly, following his logic.

  “We’ll never know why Jake did what he did,” he said gently.

  “But, Dad, even if he wasn’t looking for the ring, he wasn’t thinking straight. And if I hadn’t fought with him that night, if I hadn’t broken up with him that night, he might not have gotten so drunk. And then I left him there—”

  “Quinn, you aren’t to blame,” he said. “It was an accident,” he continued, calmly, but forcefully. “There was nothing intentional about anything that happened. You may feel regret or guilt about things you did that night. But you are still not to blame. You did not make it happen. Jake made a bad decision. We’ve been through this all before. Right?”

  Quinn was silent. She had stopped crying. They’d had iterations of this conversation before—minus her recent revelation, of course—both right after the accident, and then later, when she’d withdrawn from college for part of her junior year. Right after the accident, she’d holed herself up in her bedroom and refused to see any of her friends, including Gabriel. After a couple of weeks of this, she’d gone back to school, but she’d still avoided her friends whenever possible. She’d gone to class, come home, and gone back into her room. What she remembered about this time, mostly, was her dad sitting on the end of her bed and explaining that what had happened that night was not her fault. Finally, whether because he’d worn her down, or because to believe she was at fault was simply too painful, she’d agreed with him.

  “Yes, Dad, we’ve been through this all before,” Quinn said now, a little wearily.

  “Good. Now, when are you checking out of the Butternut Motel?”

  “Oh. I’m not there anymore. I’m at Loon Bay. I couldn’t stay at the motel. It was too depressing. I’m not sure yet when I’m leaving. But I’m okay, Dad. You set me straight.” She smiled, tentatively. That was her dad
’s specialty.

  “All right,” he said. She knew he was probably against her staying. But she also knew he’d taken the measure of her stubbornness too often to object to it now. “I love you, Quinn. More than anything.”

  “I love you, too. I’ll call you later.”

  As she slipped her phone back into her bag, Quinn wondered what she would do without her dad. He was a voice of reason, and, of course, of love. She looked over at their old house. The beech tree on the front lawn was as enticing as ever. As a child, she’d spent countless hours in it. It was the perfect climbing tree, with its reachable, horizontal branches. Now, she had to suppress the urge to get out of the car and go climb it again. She chuckled. If the house’s current owners saw her up there, they’d think she was a nutcase. No, she’d go back to Loon Bay. There was someone else she needed to talk to.

  Chapter 29

  Later that afternoon, Quinn took the sandy path down to Loon Bay’s waterfront. She felt curiously weightless, as if seeing Theresa, talking to her dad, and writing down her memories of that day and night had somehow hollowed her out. She was pressing her luck coming down here, she knew, when she should have been crawling into bed back at her cabin. But she’d gone to get a hot tea at the bar and grill, and her new friend, Gunner, had mentioned, a little too casually, that he’d just seen Tanner go down to the boathouse. No point in putting this off, she’d thought, taking her tea to go.

  The sun was lowering and now only a few wispy clouds were blowing against a vivid blue sky. The resort’s golden beach looked pretty, if a little lonely, when Quinn reached it. In another three months, of course, this stretch of sand would be lively. Every morning, the resort’s guests and day visitors would establish a beachhead there and dig in with all their summer provisions. By then, the empty bay—whose dark blue water still looked cold and unforgiving—would be home to a flotilla of Sunfish sailboats, canoes, and kayaks, and the near silence that prevailed now would be replaced by the buzz of powerboats and the shouts of children being pulled behind them on water-skis or inner tubes that skimmed, at dizzying speeds, over the surface of the lake.