She was pretty. Not beautiful. There is a difference. She was thin in a reedy way. Her hair was incredible in that wash of sunlight. It hung well past her shoulders, and had the slightest wave to it—just enough to keep it from being straight. It was very dark and nearly Asian in its shininess, the polar opposite of my short blond cap of hair. She was fair-skinned with plain brown eyes—nothing like her husband’s—and her face was the shape of a heart. When she looked at the man, though, her eyes lit up. I was jealous. Not of the woman, specifically, but of any woman who could feel what she clearly felt. Total love. An adoration a man like that would return ten times over.
I tried to picture Steve standing up like the man had done, asking about God. Caring so passionately about something. Creating that tiny masterpiece of a building. I assumed, correctly, that the man was the one everyone talked about—the crazy, motorcycle-riding guy who’d built his own chapel. I couldn’t imagine Steve doing anything like that. I couldn’t picture him smiling at me the way the man smiled at his wife as she sat down again. Frankly, I had no idea what went on inside Steve’s mind. I’d married a near stranger because I felt like I had no choice. When you’re young, you have more choices than you’ll ever again have in your life, yet sometimes you can’t see them. I’d truly been blind.
Steve had been so handsome in his uniform on the day of our wedding. I’d convinced myself he was a fine man for offering to marry me when I told him about the baby. I’d accepted his offer, although neither of us talked about love, only about responsibility. I told myself that love would come later.
But that morning, the man with the sun in his eyes made me doubt that loving Steve would ever be possible. Maybe if I’d never set foot in the chapel, everything would have turned out okay. I would have learned to be satisfied with what I had. As I got to my feet after the service, though, I knew it was already too late. The seed was planted for everything that would follow. The damage was already done.
Chapter Five
Maggie
WHEN WE TURNED ONTO OUR SHORT STREET THAT DEAD-ENDED at the sound, I saw the news vans parked all over the place and people running around, and I suddenly knew what my life was going to be like for the next few days. Or maybe forever.
“Oh, no,” Mom said.
Uncle Marcus let out a noisy, angry breath. “Don’t worry, Mags,” he said. “We’ll pull right into the garage. You won’t have to talk to anyone.”
I scrunched low in my seat, thinking of the prisoners I’d seen on TV hiding their faces with jackets as they walked past the reporters. I always thought they were trying to protect their privacy. Now I understood. It was humiliation that made them want to hide.
Inside the house, I walked from room to room, smoothing my hand over the sofa, the china cabinet, the dining-room table. I loved how familiar everything was. Andy followed me around, talking constantly, like he was trying to make up for all our lost conversations.
In the kitchen, I recognized Uncle Marcus’s Crock-Pot on the counter. I could tell by the smell that Mom was cooking chili. I was glad they weren’t making a big deal out of me coming home. No party or anything like that, where I’d have to see a lot of people. I was totally overjoyed to be home, but it didn’t seem like something we should celebrate.
My room was exactly as I’d left it, with the blue-and-green-striped bedspread on the double bed and framed photographs of Daddy and Andy and some—former—friends on my dresser. There was a white teddy bear I’d never seen before on my pillow, and I picked it up. It was the softest thing! It held a little card that read, Welcome Home! Love, Uncle Marcus. The label on its leg said it was made of angora. A teddy bear might have seemed like a silly present for a nineteen-year-old, but it was totally perfect. How did Uncle Marcus know I needed something exactly like the bear? Something I could hold on to that made me feel kind of innocent, like a little kid who hadn’t meant to do something so wrong.
I carried the bear around with me as I walked through the rest of the house.
Mom’s room was a little different, mostly because of Uncle Marcus. His slippers were on the floor next to the bed. In her bathroom, his shaving stuff and toothbrush and deodorant and everything had taken over the counter around one of the sinks. While I was in her room, the doorbell rang a couple of times. I heard Uncle Marcus talking to whoever it was. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but I figured he was telling them to get lost. Leave us alone.
Andy’s room was exactly the same in every way except one: it smelled different. The air seemed thicker or something. I’d been in the bedrooms of my male friends before I hooked up with Ben, and Andy’s room smelled like theirs did. No longer a little-boy smell. Slightly dirty socks. A little sweat. A little aftershave. It felt weird to be in there.
“Do you want to see pictures?” Andy asked, sitting down at his computer.
“Sure.” I pulled his desk chair next to him and hugged my arms across the teddy bear. “Do you have one of Kimmie?”
“Yeah,” he said, clicking his mouse. He pulled up a bunch of pictures. “This is my Special Olympics team,” he said.
There were ten of them, six boys and four girls, lined up in their bathing suits against a wall. At least seven of them looked like they had Down syndrome. Two of the boys looked totally normal. Then there was Andy. Cute, but much tinier than the rest.
“That’s Matt.” Andy pointed to one of the boys with Down syndrome. “He’s Kimmie’s brother.”
It was coming back to me. Mom had told me Kimmie was one of five kids, all adopted, all special needs. Kimmie wasn’t on the swim team herself, though. Just her brother.
“And this is me and Kimmie.” Andy clicked on another picture.
“She’s so cute!” I said. Kimmie stood a couple of inches taller than Andy. Her dark hair was coming loose from a long ponytail. Ethnically, I couldn’t even guess. Her eyes were sort of Asian. Her skin was nearly as dark as Letitia’s, but she didn’t really look African-American. She wore rectangular glasses and behind them, her eyes were very green. She was beyond cute, actually. She was beautiful. I wondered what her special needs were.
“One of her legs is short,” Andy said as if he knew what I was thinking, which I knew he didn’t. “She was born with a funny foot. They did an operation but it made her limp.”
“Are you in love?” I grinned.
The tops of Andy’s ears turned red and I put my arm around him, hugging him with a giggle.
“Yes,” he said.
“Does she love you back?” She’d better.
“Yes. She helps me. She keeps my stuff in her calendar in case I forget.”
Mom had told me Kimmie’d taken on a sort of second-mother role with Andy, keeping track of his schedule, making sure he remembered things. That used to be my job.
“I can’t wait to meet her, Panda,” I said.
“Don’t call me Panda anymore,” he said. “It’s a baby name.”
For a second, I felt like he was stealing something from me. But I got it. Panda was a baby name.
“Okay, Andrew,” I said, and he laughed.
Suddenly, there was a loud crash from downstairs, followed by a thud. Andy and I looked at each other, frozen like statues.
“Laurel!” Uncle Marcus shouted from somewhere downstairs. “Call the police!”
Andy raced out of the room before I could stop him. I followed him into the hallway, trying to grab his arm.
“Don’t go down!” I said. He was too fast for me, though, and he went flying down the stairs.
“Stay out of there!” I heard Mom yell at him. “There’s glass everywhere.”
“Mom?” I called from the top of the stairs. “What happened?”
“Stay up there, Maggie.” Mom came into view in the downstairs foyer. She was holding the phone to her ear and looking toward the family room. “Someone threw a…I don’t know what it is. A rock, Marcus?”
Uncle Marcus answered her, but I couldn’t hear what he said.
“A ch
unk of concrete or something,” Mom said. “Someone threw…Yes. Hello?” She spoke into the phone, and her voice was shaking. “This is Laurel Lockwood,” she said. “Someone just threw a piece of concrete through our front window.”
I walked into my bedroom, the teddy bear clutched in my arms. Maybe I should have gone downstairs to help clean up, but I was too freaked out. Things like this didn’t happen on Topsail Island, and I knew it wasn’t any random act of violence. It was me they were after, but it was my family getting hurt.
From my bedroom window after dinner, I could see two of the news vans still outside. What were they going to do, sit there all night? All week? I bet they loved seeing the cops arrive and watching Uncle Marcus put the storm shutters over the broken window.
I closed my blinds. After a while, I got up the courage to turn on my TV and put on the news. Then I sat on my bed, waiting, my chin resting on the teddy bear in my arms. I didn’t have to wait long. Suddenly the screen was full of the people outside the prison, the ones shouting and holding signs.
“Amid protests,” a woman reporter who looked no older than me said, “Maggie Lockwood was released from Kawatchee Women’s Correctional Institution today after serving a twelve-month sentence for the attempted burning of Drury Memorial Church in Surf City.” She went on for a minute about who I was and what I’d done. Then she started interviewing people in the crowd. The first was a dark-haired man who was so angry, little bits of spit flew out of his mouth when he spoke.
“She gets twelve short months in prison and then goes on with her life like nothing happened!” he said.
“I wish,” I said out loud.
“My uncle is dead,” a young woman said. Her face was twisted into a mask of hatred. For me. “He was such a good man. And that girl just scoots out of here with her slick lawyer and everything,” she said. She had to be Mr. Eggles’s niece, since he was the only adult killed in the fire. I thought of my own uncle. Imagined him dead, the victim of someone like me. No! I shuddered, waving my hand in front of my face to erase the thought.
Reverend Bill was on the screen then. I gasped. I so didn’t want to have to look at him! He stood in front of a brick church. The new Drury Memorial? Wow. Totally different. “Many people are angry,” he said. “We’ve managed to rebuild Drury Memorial. We’re nearly finished. But we can’t rebuild those lives that were lost or shattered, and that’s hard for a lot of people. I hope, though, that this can be an opportunity to practice forgiveness.”
Forgiveness? Reverend Bill? What a hypocrite. He hated me. Hated my whole family.
Someone knocked on my bedroom door.
“Come in,” I said.
Mom poked her head inside, glanced at the TV.
“Oh, Maggie. Don’t watch that.”
“It’s all right,” I said.
“Come downstairs and have some ice cream with us. Chocolate-chip mint.”
I shook my head. My stomach hurt. “Stay away from the windows down there,” I said. I was afraid that first chunk of concrete wouldn’t be the last.
“Come on,” Mom insisted. “We want to be with you tonight.”
It was weird in the family room with all the draperies pulled shut. We never closed those draperies, but we didn’t want anyone to be able to look at us while we sat—away from the windows—eating ice cream. At least everyone else was eating, while I pushed the melting green stuff around in my bowl. The phone rang, and Mom picked it up. She looked at the caller ID and shrugged as she handed the phone to Uncle Marcus. I guessed he was the family spokesperson.
“Hello?” he said, then, “Hey. Is everything okay?” I watched a line appear between his eyebrows and wondered who he was talking to. “Okay,” he said. “She’s right here.”
I was afraid he meant me, but he covered the mouthpiece and looked at Laurel. “It’s Keith. He sounds shaken up.”
We were all quiet as Mom took the phone. I tried to picture how Keith looked now. The last time I saw him was in the hospital, when his arms looked like giant white tree stumps, thin steel rods sticking out of the bandages covering the fingers of his left hand. More bandages had covered half his face. I knew he was scarred. No one had told me exactly how bad it was. I could guess, though.
Mom held the phone away from her ear and looked at Andy.
“When Sara…Miss Sara said she was going to the store, did she say when she planned on getting home?” she asked.
Andy licked his spoon. “I don’t think so.”
“Did she say what store? What kind of shopping?”
“I don’t remember.”
She spoke into the phone again. “He doesn’t know anything, Keith,” she said. She stood up, turned her back toward us and walked toward the kitchen. She lowered her voice, but I could still hear her. “Why don’t you try Dawn?” she asked. “Maybe she’ll know something.”
Dawn Reynolds was the woman Ben had cheated on me with. Or, as I admitted to myself this past year, I was the woman—the girl, really—Ben cheated on Dawn with. He’d lived with her, after all. Thank God he’d gone back to his wife in Charlotte and I wouldn’t have to worry about bumping into him. Oh my God. That would be the worst.
“What’s up?” Uncle Marcus asked as Mom hung up the phone and sat down again.
“Keith got home around five, and Sara wasn’t there and she’s still not home.” She picked up her empty ice-cream bowl like she was going to get up and carry it to the kitchen, but she didn’t budge from her seat. “He saw the note I left, thanking her for watching Andy.”
“She probably told him she’d be out and he forgot,” Uncle Marcus said.
“Kind of strange, though.” Mom frowned. “What time did she leave, Andy?”
“Leave where?” Andy asked.
“The trailer. Their mobile home.”
Andy shrugged. “I was killing Mega Warriors,” he said.
Uncle Marcus laughed. “What was your score?”
“My best was 52, 341,” Andy said proudly.
Uncle Marcus smiled at my mother. “The boy has his priorities when it comes to what he remembers and what he doesn’t,” he said. “I’m sure Sara’s fine.”
I listened to the conversation, feeling apart from them all of a sudden. I felt as though I wasn’t really there. Like I was only dreaming that I was home. It was a dream I’d been longing to have all year.
Around ten-thirty, Uncle Marcus went upstairs and I realized he was staying over. I was glad. I didn’t feel safe in our house, and I liked having him there. I thought the news vans were finally gone, but I still felt as though people were sneaking around outside, maybe looking in the windows, maybe carrying something to throw. Oh, God! What if someone torched the house with all of us inside? They might think that perfectly fit my crime.
I went upstairs myself, and for the first time in a year, put on the soft old drawstring shorts and T-shirt I liked to sleep in. The shorts just about fell off me. Wow, I’d lost weight this year. Big-time.
Before I went to prison, I used to always watch some TV from my bed at night, but I’d had it with TV for today. I lay in the darkness for a half hour, imagining I was hearing sounds outside. If someone set fire to our house and it blocked the stairs, what would we do? Andy and I both had these roll-up ladders in our closets that we could hook onto our windowsills, but there was nothing like that in Mom’s room. I started to cry just thinking about how awful it would be.
Finally, I went downstairs, teddy bear in my arms, to make sure everything was locked up tight. I walked barefoot into the dark kitchen. Through the glass door, I could see the moonlight on the sound and our pier. I wanted to go out on the pier and breathe in the smell of the water and feel the salty air on my skin and in my hair. No way did I dare go outside, though.
I walked into the family room and saw that the door to the porch was open, and I froze. I tiptoed toward the porch and peeked around the door frame to see my mother sitting on the glider in the darkness.
“Hi,” I said.
“Can’t sleep?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Come sit with me.”
I glanced toward the street.
“No one’s there,” he said. “Even if they were, they couldn’t see us here, it’s so dark. Sit.” She patted the cushion next to her on the glider.
I sat down. It felt strange to sit next to her like that. I bet I hadn’t sat so close to her since I was a kid. Maybe not even then.
“I’m just biding my time until midnight,” Mom said.
“What’s happening at midnight?”
“I decided if I haven’t heard from Keith by then, I’m calling him to be sure Sara got home all right.”
“She probably did.”
“Probably.”
“Do you know if he talked to Dawn?” I wanted to say her name out loud to let Mom know I could take it. She didn’t need to get weird about it.
“I don’t know. I hope so.” She rocked the glider a little. “You know, Maggie, I’ve gotten to know Dawn better this year.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just…she and I had to clear the air after everything that happened. She was hurt, too, by the situation with…by the triangle between you and her and Ben.”
“I know.” I still felt some leftover hatred for Dawn. It wasn’t her fault, but I couldn’t help it.
“She’s a decent person,” Mom said. “She has a new man in her life now. Frankie. He works at this boat-rental place, and he moved in with her last month. I don’t know him well, but he seems nice.”
I hugged the teddy bear tighter.
“She’s worked very hard to help the victims and their families, getting financial support for them and making sure they had counseling or whatever else they needed.”
“I know,” I whispered. “I saw some of them on the news. Mr. Eggles’s niece was…” I shook my head, not wanting to remember the ugly look on the woman’s face.
“Mr. Eggles’s family is very angry,” Mom said. “A lot of people are still angry. Marcus got a call from the police a little while ago and they said they caught the boy who threw the concrete through our window. It turns out he was a friend of Henderson Wright’s.”
Secrets She Left Behind Page 3