The Secrets We Keep

by Trisha Leaver

  “No,” I said. Truth was, I was exhausted, more tired than I ever remembered feeling. But falling asleep, reliving the few details I could piece together, was destroying me.

  “My sister. Ella,” I whispered, hoping not to wake Alex or my parents. “Can you tell me anything about her? Was she even alive when they brought her in?”

  The nurse’s eyes darted toward my parents.

  “They won’t tell me,” I said. I’d already asked them a thousand times. They kept shaking their heads, telling me not to think about that right now. I asked Alex during one of the rare moments my parents stepped out of the room. All he could say was that it wasn’t my fault. As if that was somehow supposed to make me feel better, less guilty.

  “Please, I need to know something. Anything,” I continued.

  “I don’t work in the emergency room, so I don’t know how much I can tell you.”

  “Can I see her? I mean, I know she’s not…” I paused, unsure of how to explain the urgent need I had to see my sister. A sister I didn’t remember having. “Please, I want to see her.”

  She wavered for a minute, her hand tapping nervously on the rail of my bed. “All right,” she finally said, and I simultaneously felt relief and dread. I needed to do this. I wanted to do this, but the thought of coming face-to-face with what I’d caused had me wishing I’d never asked.

  I sat up, wincing as my bare feet met the cold tile floor.

  “Here,” the nurse said. She handed me a pair of socks, but I pushed them away. I liked the chill, the jarring sensation reminding me that I was alive.

  Alex heard the nurse’s muffled words and stirred, his eyes opening as I stood up. “What’s going on? You good?” he asked, his eyes darting between me and the nurse. “Why are you out of bed?”

  I put my finger to my lips to shush him. “I’m good,” I whispered. “She’s gonna take me to…” I trailed off, unsure of how to explain the desperate need I had to see my sister or the overwhelming sense of loss that plagued me.

  “She’s gonna take you where?” Alex asked as he put his hand around my waist to keep me steady.

  I lowered my eyes, then let the words fall from my lips. “To see my sister.”

  Alex’s eyes widened in shock, his arm tensing around me as the color drained from his face. “What? Why? No.”

  He let go of me and turned to wake my parents. I stopped him. “Please, I don’t want them there.” I don’t even want you there, I added silently.

  “Maddy, listen to me. Seeing Ella won’t bring her back. It will only make things harder for you, make it more real.”

  “It already is real,” I said. “I miss her, Alex, and I don’t know why. I don’t remember anything about her. Not what her voice sounded like. Not what her favorite TV show was. Not even if she preferred chocolate or vanilla ice cream. All I know is that something inside me is missing, gone, and I need to see her to make sense of it.”

  I didn’t expect him to understand. I didn’t get it myself. But what I wanted, what I needed was for him to let me do this.

  9

  The nurse insisted on wheeling me down to the family viewing room that was attached to the morgue. I wanted to walk and went to tell her as much, but Alex picked me up before I got the chance and deposited me into the wheelchair, then pushed me toward the elevator himself.

  I expected to be led into a dark basement room where the walls were lined with steel cubbies for bodies. I wasn’t prepared for a quiet room with two metal chairs and an altar for praying. One of the orderlies wheeled in a metal gurney, the still body underneath it covered with a plain blue sheet. Funny, I thought the sheet would be white and starchy, and have PROPERTY OF CRANSTON GENERAL emblazoned on it, but I guess it didn’t make a difference either way.

  The orderly looked at me, then to Alex, before handing the nurse a clipboard and a pen. She signed her name on the form, pausing once to check the time on her watch before logging it on the paper.

  “Do you need anything else?” the guy asked, and I shook my head. “Then I will … uh … give you some privacy.”

  The room was silent. Too silent. The nurse was still there, tucked in the corner watching … waiting. I couldn’t move, couldn’t bring myself to get up from the wheelchair and take those few steps to where Ella’s dead body lay. I had begged the nurse to bring me here, and now I wanted to leave.

  “Maddy?” Alex questioned as he knelt in front of me. “You don’t have to do this. Nobody expects you to do this.”

  I could hear the offer in his voice, the hope that I would change my mind and retreat to my hospital room and the promise of more mind-numbing drugs.

  “I’m fine,” I said as I got up and willed myself to take that first step and then another until I stood next to the steel bed, staring down at the impossibly still form.

  “You ready?” the nurse asked.

  I nodded and she reached for the corner of the sheet, easing it down to where my sister’s shoulders met her neck. Even staring at the floor, I could feel her there, as if she was calling to me, daring me to look at her. My hands started shaking, my entire body drenched in a sweat that contradicted the chilled air of the room. I steeled my resolve, had to count to five three times before I found the courage to look up.

  “Where are her clothes?” I don’t know why I asked that. I knew her clothes were probably bloodstained and covered in glass. But I thought perhaps seeing them—the color, the brand, something as simple as whether she wore tank tops or bras would jar my memory and connect me to her in some way.

  Alex shrugged. “Don’t know. I guess they probably gave them to your parents.”

  “Do you know what she was wearing? Did you see her when they brought us in?”

  “No,” he said, and looked away. His answer was curt and filled with an anxious quality I hadn’t heard from him before. I briefly wondered what he was hiding, what he was afraid to tell me. “Your clothes were gone by the time I got here. They’d cut everything off to get to your injuries.”

  I nodded. It made sense, I guess.

  “She had one of her shoes on. Blue sneakers, I think, if that helps.”

  It did, actually. I could picture them. They were light blue with gray laces. There was writing on the side, like somebody had signed them with a black Sharpie. And comfortable. “What was I wearing?”

  “Nothing. You left your shoes at my house. I found them on the lawn next to a chair. Why?”

  “No reason,” I said, and stared down at my sister. Her eyes were closed, the skin surrounding them a dusty blue. Maybe it was bruising from the accident. More likely that’s the way dead eyes looked.

  Her lips were parted as if she were trying to say something, but no sound came out—not a whisper, not a weak breath. I could see her wounds, where her head had met with the shattered windshield, where a stray piece of glass had embedded itself in her shoulder. She was pale, ashen white, and her tangled hair was splayed across the steel, parts of it streaked with blood. But even like this, bruised and smeared with death, she looked exactly like me.

  “I … me … we’re the same.” I choked out the words, and Alex hurried to my side. His entire frame shook next to mine as he looked down at the same dark reality. That could’ve been me. That should’ve been me.

  “Of course,” Alex said. “You’re twins.”

  She didn’t just look like me; I had a distinct feeling she was me. I ran my hand across the gash outlining her cheek. It cut across the bone, a jagged mark stretching to her ear. I tucked a darkened strand of hair behind her ear and bent down to kiss her cheek, to beg for forgiveness and promise that I’d keep her memory alive. That’s when I saw them … the two tiny dots marring her right ear.

  Without thinking, I reached for my own ear, running my finger across the earlobe, knowing what I’d find: One hole, one minuscule depression.

  “What’s wrong, Maddy?” Alex asked. When I didn’t answer, when I didn’t so much as blink, he grabbed my hand and pushed me toward the door.
He could drag me out of here, he could remove me from this room, from this hospital, from this world, and it still wouldn’t stop the memories from flooding my mind.

  My sister and I were thirteen and away at summer camp. It was the last year we went, the last year I remembered spending hours at night talking about anything and everything until the batteries of our flashlights died. The girl in the cabin next to ours was evil; in seventh grade she already was what Jenna would become in high school.

  She’d been making fun of us for days. Apparently, one-piece bathing suits were for losers who chose to take art classes over sailing and volleyball. Didn’t bother me—the total influence that girl had on my life would last two weeks, then I’d never have to see her again. But Maddy … she was peeved and wanted to prove that she was as good as, if not better than, that girl. Somehow, Maddy decided a second piercing in each of her ears was the way to do it.

  Maddy handed me a needle from the sewing kit Mom had stashed in her trunks and an ice pack she’d snagged from the nurse’s office. Everybody else in our cabin was asleep, had drifted off hours ago. We hadn’t told them about our plan. This was our secret … a secret sisters would keep.

  Maddy squinted, her eyes shut so tightly that her face scrunched up, making her look painfully amusing. I told her to relax, but she didn’t. She grunted for me to get it over with, then dug her nails into the wooden frame of our bunk bed.

  We were naïve back then and assumed five minutes with an ice pack would numb her ear enough for there to be no pain. I never did get to pierce the other ear; she swore and jumped the second I jabbed the needle through her skin.

  “Jesus, Ella. That hurt,” she yelled, and shoved me away.

  Maddy made me swear to never tell Mom, and only wore an extra earring when we were at school. She stopped wearing the extra one altogether a few years back. The hole was nearly closed now, the pinprick-sized mark almost invisible.

  I remembered her words clear as day. It was the first time she’d ever yelled at me, the first time she’d ever physically pushed me away. I also distinctly remembered her calling me Ella. Me. Ella.

  Seeing my sister lying there on that steel table unlocked a piece of my mind I’d lost a few short days ago. A history, dreams, a future that belonged solely to me. They came back … every memory I ever had, hurtling to the surface. The My Little Pony lunch box I got the first day of kindergarten. The matching dresses we wore for Christmas each year until we were ten. The day we graduated from junior high—Maddy in heels, me in flip-flops. Josh arguing with the pizza guy last week over whether or not he should get his steak-bomb pizza for free because it took them more than thirty minutes to deliver it. And Maddy, yelling at me in the car because she thought I was a loser, someone to be ashamed of.

  I turned my head toward the hallway, half-expecting my parents to walk through that door, to have somehow come to the same horrifyingly insane conclusion I had: that they were so completely wrong. That it was Maddy who was dead. That it was me—Ella—who had survived.

  “Maddy, this was a bad idea,” Alex said. “I shouldn’t have let you do this, not without your parents here at least.”

  My parents. Mom was so excited when she realized Maddy was the one who had survived. Dad standing there next to her, immersed in the same joy. They didn’t see me; they saw Maddy. Everybody saw Maddy.

  “Josh?” He was the one person who knew me, who would see me. “Where’s Josh? I want to talk to Josh.”

  Alex’s hand tensed around mine, his eyes looking everywhere but at me. “He’s at home, Maddy. After Ella … he’s home.”

  “What?” That didn’t make any sense. Josh and I had been inseparable since ninth grade. I had to kick him out of my house most Saturday nights, and he’d be back first thing Sunday morning with a new anime movie or some extra-credit project for physics. The only reason he wasn’t at my house the night of the accident was because I’d kicked him out. I’d needed to finish my last sketch and the constant chiming of his phone with incoming texts from Kim had been distracting me. But why wasn’t he here now? “This doesn’t make any sense. None of this makes any sense.”

  “He came to the hospital with me, Maddy, but by the time they got you settled into your room…”

  “No, wait.” The burning in my chest amplified and panic began to wash over me. I yanked on his hand until he stopped. I wasn’t ready to leave. Not yet.

  “Miss Lawton, we need to get you back upstairs,” the nurse said. She stood up from her seat in the corner and grabbed the wheelchair I’d left sitting in the middle of the room. “I want to take your vitals and give you something to calm down.”

  I waved her off and took a step closer to Alex. I didn’t want to sit down and be wheeled away. I wanted an answer. “Why did Josh leave? Why didn’t he stay?”

  Alex hesitated as if weighing his words. He started to step back, but I reached for his wrist, holding him in place. The tears had begun again, my body shaking with frustration over the truth that everybody refused to see. How could I make him understand that I was Ella? That the hand he was holding on to was not his girlfriend’s but her sister’s. Mine.

  “Alex?” There was a demand in the nurse’s tone, a plea to him to do something to calm me down, or she would.

  “Don’t worry about Josh,” Alex said as he gently guided me into the wheelchair. “He knows it wasn’t your fault.”

  Oh, it was absolutely my fault. I remembered everything now, every last gruesome detail of how I’d killed my sister. My sobs echoed through the hall as he wheeled me onto the elevator, the sound so hollow, so pitiful, that I winced. But it wouldn’t stop: not the tears, not the sobs, not the pain.

  “Nobody blames you, Maddy. Nobody,” he continued as the nurse leaned over to take my pulse. She looked worried, scared even. Alex looked like he was going to be ill.

  I pushed the nurse away and turned toward Alex: “Look at me. Stop telling me it isn’t my fault and look at me!”

  He circled around to the front of my wheelchair and looked into my eyes. “I’ve been looking at nothing but you since the accident, Maddy, and I still see the same strong, beautiful girl I always have. This … what happened to your sister doesn’t change that.”

  I couldn’t help but wonder what he would say when he figured out that it was Ella and not his precious Maddy he was taking care of.

  10

  The elevator doors opened at my floor and Dad rushed toward them at the sound of my cries. Mom was there, too, hollering at Alex for not waking them up.

  “Not Alex’s fault,” I managed to sob out. “Ella.”

  That last, heavy word took an enormous amount of energy, and I felt myself slipping, my mind closing in on itself.

  “Maddy?” Alex said, the fear I felt pouring off him rivaling my own. I didn’t want to see the hope in their eyes die as I forced them to realize that I was Ella.

  I studied my dad, my own father, the man who I’d had breakfast with every day for the past seventeen years. The man who coached my middle school soccer team. The man who tried to teach me how to ride a bike one afternoon when I was seven and sat with me in the ER later that same day as they splinted my sprained wrist. Years of time together … of experiences, and my own father didn’t even recognize me.

  Or maybe he didn’t want to. Maybe he wanted it to be Maddy who had lived, so that was who he saw.

  Horror flashed through his eyes as he took the wheelchair from Alex and pushed me into my room. Distantly, somewhere in the remote crevices of my mind, I remembered that he still thought I was Maddy and that the soothing words he whispered weren’t meant for me.

  “What were you thinking?” Mom had Alex by the collar of his shirt and was yelling at him. “Why would you let her go down there? Why didn’t you wake us?”

  “Please. He didn’t do this. I did,” I protested.

  Realization of who I was and what I needed to tell them set in. I started to shake, every inch of my body freezing. Cold. I tried so hard to say the w
ords, to tell my parents I was Ella, but I couldn’t get a sound past my lips.

  Dad helped me out of the wheelchair and back into bed, then sat down next to me. “We’re gonna get you through this, Maddy. I promise.”

  Get through this? The phrase sounded so foreign to me, an unattainable solace that I had absolutely no right to hope for. I had been tired and angry and jealous that things came so easy for her. I’d screamed at her. The last words I said to her, the last words she would ever hear came from me, and they were bitter and mean.

  “What have I done? Oh my God, what have I done?” I wanted nothing more than to trade places with Maddy, to give her back the life I’d taken. I didn’t want to be here. Not without her.

  “We are not angry with you, baby girl. We could never be angry with you.”

  Dad never called me that. He called me Bellsy when I was a kid or Isabella when I was in trouble, but mostly he called me Ella. Baby girl was Maddy’s nickname, one she both hated and used to her advantage when she wanted a curfew extension or extra money for shoes or a new pair of jeans.

  “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean for her to die.” I shrank backward, the weight of those words settling deep in my core. Pressing my aching shoulders deeper into my pillow, I wished, for a moment, that I could dissolve into the bed and never come back.

  “We know that,” Mom said. “It was a terrible accident, but you are here with us, Maddy. You’re alive and you have your whole life ahead of you. Your whole life. I want you to think about that, concentrate on getting stronger. That’s what your sister would want.”

  I looked at Dad, wondering if he felt the same way, if he believed that, too. He smiled and nodded, but I could see the anguish behind his eyes, the battle he was waging to keep his emotions in check. “Ella wouldn’t want you to waste a single minute of your life feeling guilty. She’d want you to live, to do everything you ever dreamed of and more. Do it for her, Maddy. Live for her.”