The Secrets We Keep

by Trisha Leaver

  “Umm, yeah, not so much anymore.”

  Dad shook his head. He knew we’d grown apart these last few years. Everybody who spent any time with us knew that. “She’s the same Ella she was back then.”

  “Maybe,” I said, hoping that was true, that somewhere beneath this lie was the real me. I picked at the tattered edges of the picture I was holding, mindlessly dropping the shreds of paper to the ground. “Dad, have you ever made a mistake, done something that you didn’t intend to but couldn’t take back?”

  “Of course. Everybody has, but you can’t change the past, Maddy. You can’t change what happened.” He pulled me into his arms, and I knew he thought I was referring to the accident, that I was finally starting to talk. “You can’t go back. You have to try to make peace with what happened and move forward. We all do.”

  His arms tightened around me as if he was willing me to believe him, to forgive myself and move on. I pulled away. It felt wrong to be forgiven.

  “If you are looking to learn more about your sister, perhaps you should start with Josh. He was her best friend. He spent more time with her than any of us.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “Go,” Dad said, nudging me toward the road. “Go talk to him. He’s hurting as much as you.”

  26

  I traced a circular pattern on the driveway with my foot. I could see the pavement through the spot I’d cleared, the puddle of rain trying to ease its way back as I continued to swipe it away. I’d been standing in Josh’s driveway for over twenty minutes trying to talk myself into knocking on his door, and I still couldn’t find the courage to move.

  “Stop being a chicken, Ella. It’s just Josh.” I took one long, fog-filled breath and made my feet move, willed them to walk those last few steps up the slate walkway to his front door.

  The bright motion-sensor porch lights came on as soon as I hit the bottom step, announcing my arrival to anyone sitting in the living room. I couldn’t even apologize to Josh in privacy.

  Mrs. Williams opened the door as my hand was about to ring the doorbell. “El—” She stopped mid-name and took a step back, the color draining from her face as she grabbed the doorknob for support. I couldn’t blame her. The rain had washed any trace of makeup, and my hair hung in matted locks around my face. Like this, I guess I did look like me.

  I should’ve said something, corrected her initial reaction or walked past her, but I couldn’t. I just stood there, my feet glued to the porch, my mouth forgetting how to form words.

  “Maddy?”

  I didn’t know whether she was asking me what I wanted or questioning who I was, so I opted for number one. “Hi, Mrs. Williams. Is Josh here?”

  She stepped aside and motioned me in. “He’s upstairs. I’ll go get him.”

  “No.” The last thing I needed was an audience. “I’ll find him.”

  I made for the stairs, forgetting that Maddy had never been in this house. She’d picked me up here a few times. She would sit at the curb and honk her horn until I came out, but she’d never been closer than that. She wouldn’t know which room was Josh’s, never mind jog up the stairs like she owned the place. “Uh … which room is his?”

  “Last one on the right. You sure you don’t want me to go get him?”

  I shook my head and took the first few steps two at a time. “Maddy?” Mrs. Williams’s voice halted me, and I turned, my eyes dancing across the front door before settling on her. There was still time to leave, still time to walk out that door and keep pretending.

  “I’m sorry about your sister,” she finally said.

  “Me too,” was what I came out with—a weak, pathetic me too.

  The upstairs hall was empty, the lights off except the one flowing out from underneath Josh’s door. I knew where the light switches were, knew that if I turned to my left there would be three switches, the middle one a dimmer. I didn’t bother to flick one on; I didn’t need it. This was my second home. I could navigate my way up the stairs to his room with my eyes closed.

  I walked the hall on instinct alone, my feet knowing exactly how many steps to take, my hand automatically knowing which door to tap on.

  “It’s open,” he called.

  I slowly turned the brass knob. Part of me knew I would regret this—admitting to a lie I had every intention of continuing to live. The other part of me, the part guiding my hand, knew I owed Josh an explanation.

  I opened the door enough to peek in, still wavering between staying and leaving. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, his History notes sprawled out in front of him.

  I shook my head in self-disgust. I’d spent countless nights here on that floor, in that exact same position, poring over Physics notes or copying Latin translations. This was the same Josh I had always known, the same one I went to in the past with stupid problems. Why did I want to hide from him now?

  He looked up from his homework, his expression guarded. “Hey, Ella.”

  I’d heard him utter my name a thousand times before. Heard him yell it at me last month when we were fighting over which indie film to feature in the anime club’s October newsletter, and whisper it to me the next day in school when he was trying to get my attention during class so he could apologize. But never before had it sounded so flat … so matter-of-fact.

  “What have I done?” With those whispered words I lost it, the tears I’d been fighting finally fell, poured from my eyes as my entire body shook violently with sobs. Josh’s reaction was instantaneous. He got up and closed the door before dragging me close and pulling me into his arms. I didn’t fight him as he guided my head to his chest. I no longer had the strength or the desire to lie to the one person who’d ever truly known me.

  The steady, rhythmic beat of his heart thrummed beneath my cheek as his palm moved soothingly up and down my back. His cheek warmed the top of my head and the constant lull of his voice was peaceful, perfect. For the first time since the accident, I felt safe and warm, and I wanted to stay here, locked in his arms, forever.

  It seemed like hours before my sobs quieted to a whimper. His shirt was soaked from my tears, his hands shaking on my back. I didn’t pull away to see if he was crying. I didn’t want to know.

  “You’re soaking wet,” he said as he brushed at his now-damp shirt.

  “What?” Surprise and confusion swirled inside me. I had just admitted to pretending to be dead and taking over my sister’s life, and the only thing he thought to comment on was my wet clothes?

  I stared down at my shoes. They were squishy, the leather strap leaving a smudge across the top of my feet. “I walked here. It was still drizzling when I left the cemetery, but it has stopped now.”

  “Here,” Josh said. He stripped off his sweatshirt and gave it to me. “None of my jeans will fit you, but I’ve got a pair of sweatpants you can borrow.”

  I took the sweatshirt, and he dug through his dresser for a clean pair of pants. He handed them to me and looked at the floor until I was completely changed.

  On top of my pile of wet clothes, I laid the earrings and the locket I’d found in Maddy’s jewelry box, plus the five thousand silver bangles I’d put on this morning.

  “You look like you now,” he said, and I smiled. For the first time in weeks, I actually felt like me.

  “How’d you figure it out?” I asked.

  “Figure what out?”

  “How did you figure out it was me … that I was Ella and not Maddy? I mean, Alex hasn’t figured it out. Not even my parents have questioned it.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s Alex. Your parents…” Josh paused and shrugged as if he couldn’t explain that one. “They’re upset, probably grieving too much to look that closely.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said, quite sure that wasn’t the case. They had the daughter they wanted, or at least that’s what I was telling myself. “But how did you figure it out?”

  “You told me.”

  “What? No I didn’t.” In fact, I had gone out of my way to make sure I hadn
’t let anything slip in front of him. With the exception of that small slip of my voice in the stairwell today, I’d stayed completely in part.

  “You have that drawing I left in the cemetery?”

  “Yeah.” I pulled it out of my pocket and handed it to him.

  He unfolded it much the way I had, but using his leg to smooth it out. “This told me,” he said, waving it in my direction.

  “I don’t get it. I’ve drawn hundreds of those. What’s so special about this one?”

  “Exactly,” he said. “I … we have AP English in the same room as Maddy. One period later, after she has American Lit. I found it crumpled up by the desk you were sitting in. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but you’ve been drawing that same tree since the day I met you. You do it whenever you zone out.”

  He was right. That gnarly old willow tree sat in my front yard. It had been beaten down a few times by winter storms and the occasional hurricane. That’s why I always drew it—it either cracked a limb or lost a branch every week. It was always changing, a constant, inanimate object that gave me something new to capture each day.

  “You found this on the floor?” I remembered finishing my test early, rereading my answers, and still having a good ten minutes left to kill. I must have drawn it while I was waiting for the bell to ring, mindlessly putting pencil to paper.

  “Umm hmm, and I’d like it back if you don’t mind.”

  “Why?” I asked, handing it to him.

  “Because right now, or at least until you change your mind about this game you’re playing, it’s the only thing I have left of you.”

  27

  I sat on his bed watching, waiting for him to say something. I thought about leaving. The anger I had seen less than thirty minutes ago was not something I wanted to deal with. But I’d wait him out, like he’d done for me.

  “What do you remember about that night?” he finally asked.

  “You don’t understand, Josh.”

  “You’re right, I don’t.”

  “It didn’t make any sense,” I said, struggling to explain. “When I first woke up, I had no clue who I was … where I was. I didn’t even know I had a sister. It was Alex who told me my name and what had happened.”

  Josh got up from his desk chair, hesitating for a minute before he sat down next to me on the bed. I could feel his breath on my cheek, the warmth of his hand as he nudged me to look at him. “And when you figured it out, when you finally got your memory back, why didn’t you ask to see me? If you’d asked for me, had so much as said my name, they would’ve called me. Alex would’ve gotten me that first day, and I would’ve come, talked you out of this. Why didn’t you ask for me?”

  I stayed silent, my attention focused on a small rip in his comforter. I counted the threads, tried to gauge how many stitches it would take to repair it. Fifteen, I figured. Twenty, tops.

  “Ella?” Josh said when I didn’t respond. “Look at me. Look at me and tell me what you were thinking.”

  I blinked long and hard, then did as he asked, steeling myself for his anger before opening my eyes. It wasn’t there. No anger, no hatred staring back at me, not even a bit of annoyance. What I saw was forgiveness and unwavering faith.

  “I did ask for you.”

  “What? Wait, what are you saying?”

  “I wasn’t thinking. I woke up and everything hurt. Everything. He was there, holding my hand, whispering for me to wake up. And when I did, he was so happy to see her, like his whole—”

  “And you didn’t think I would be?” Josh interrupted. “You think that if I had any idea that it was you lying in that hospital bed I wouldn’t have been there? That it wouldn’t have been my hand you were holding, my eyes you saw first?”

  “I didn’t know who he was, who I was. And when he told me, when Mom and Dad told me I was Maddy, I believed them.”

  “They told me you were dead, did you know that? When the police showed up at his house, Alex and I went to the ER. We had to pass Maddy’s car on the way. It was still there, wrapped around the tree. The nurse at the front desk wouldn’t let me see you. She told me nobody but your parents were allowed in the trauma room, and they weren’t there yet. I kept thinking of you, hurt and alone.”

  “Don’t,” I begged. “Please don’t.” No amount of explanation was going to change this, no amount of anger or guilt could undo what I’d done.

  “You know what Alex did?” Josh’s gaze locked on mine, forcing me to see, to understand every single word he said. “He sat down. Right there in the hospital waiting room, he sat down and waited. He didn’t argue with the nurse, or fight his way past the security guard to get to Maddy. He stayed there and didn’t move, like he was frozen in place. You know what I did?”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t have spoken then even if I’d wanted to.

  “I ignored them—the security guard, the nurse, everyone, and pushed my way through until some big orderly stopped me. But I got to see you, both of you, lying there hooked up to everything. The alarms on your sensors were going off. Hers … hers were silent.”

  I didn’t remember any of that—not the emergency room, not the doctors, not Josh being there.

  “You were both in the same room, your clothes piled up on the floor. I remembered the coat you had had on and the sweatshirt from RISD you never took off. I saw them in the pile of clothes. I knew you had them on when you came to pick up Maddy. I asked the nurse which one of you had been wearing that, and she pointed to Maddy. So that is where I went. Toward her. Toward the person I thought was you.”

  I nodded. I’d given her both in the car. She was cold and wet and shivering and I didn’t know what else to do.

  “One of the doctors asked if I knew you, and I gave him your names. He told me you were gone, that you had died instantly when you hit the tree. That you probably hadn’t suffered. Like somehow that was supposed to make me feel better.”

  I knew what he meant. They’d told me the exact same thing, over and over. It didn’t help. Not one single bit.

  “At first I didn’t believe them. I begged them to try again, to do something. But then the paramedic who pulled you—I mean Maddy—from the car came over and told me he’d done everything he could but she was already gone when they got there.”

  He paused and swiped his arm across his eyes. He wasn’t crying but his eyes were heavy, and the hitch in his voice said he didn’t want to relive this memory any more than I did.

  “You know what I did, Ella?” I shook my head, and he continued. “I stayed there. I refused to leave. I sat there on the floor next to you—next to Maddy’s body—until your parents arrived so you wouldn’t be alone. Even then, I wouldn’t go.”

  “Mom and Dad were so happy to see me when I woke up,” I blurted out. “Everybody was. Alex was. I have never seen them like that, Josh, never seen any of them so scared and excited and relieved to see Maddy.”

  “You’re kidding me, right? You based your decision to become your sister on your parents’ reaction to seeing you? On Alex’s relief that you were alive? I sat there for four hours holding Maddy’s cold hand while Alex sat in the waiting room. In the waiting room, Ella! Being coddled by Maddy’s friends. I was the one who was there with you … with her!” He waved his hand in the air, pissed. “It was me, not him, with you the whole time.”

  “But you didn’t see my parents,” I said, remembering Mom’s tears, her whispered words about how she couldn’t lose Maddy, too. “You didn’t see Jenna or those people in the hall. Her friends. They were so happy that it was her who survived. I couldn’t tell them it was a mistake, take back the one person they had begged fate to let live. Plus, I owed her. I’d killed her, Josh. My own sister. I killed her, and I owe her my life in return. I owe her that much.”

  Cursing my tears, I brushed them away. “She’s the one they love. She’s the one they were praying would survive.”

  “Is that what you think?” Josh asked, and I flinched at the fury I could hear in his voice
. His entire body was vibrating, the tears I had seen earlier gone, replaced with pure, unadulterated anger.

  “Answer me, Ella! Do you honestly think that your parents didn’t … don’t love you? That our group of friends wouldn’t have spent two days in the hall waiting for you? That if everybody had a vote on who died that night, they would have chosen you over Maddy?”

  I nodded. What else was I supposed to think?

  Josh stood up and slammed his fist into the wall. Then he laughed, this broken cackle that had my emotions doing a complete one-eighty … going from guilt-ridden and confused to as irate as him.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You are.” His amusement faded, the resentment I’d seen seconds ago slipping back into place. “They had to sedate your mom when she found out you were gone. That’s why Alex was sitting with you. Not because he loved Maddy or wanted to be there, but because your dad made him, told him not to leave your side until he could get your mother under control and could come back and sit with you himself.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. There was no way that could be true. Mom adored Maddy. She went to her field hockey games, every one of them. She had pictures of Maddy lining her bureau and went out of her way to buy the healthy crap Maddy insisted on eating.

  “And you know that how? You were out of it, Ella. For two days. You have no idea what went on. Take a good look at your mother now. You think she’s happier believing Maddy is the one who survived? Are you saying that if she had a choice, your mom would’ve chosen your sister over you? If you honestly believe that, then you’re an idiot.”

  “She did everything, everything for Maddy!” I yelled.

  “Because you wouldn’t let her do anything for you.”

  I flinched at his words. I didn’t believe him. My parents, the kids at school, Alex, everybody loved Maddy more than me.

  “This summer, when your mom wanted to get a family picture at the beach, what did you say?”

  I remembered that. Mom had brought Josh along so that he could take the picture. I was angry about Dad refusing to let me drive to Savannah with Josh to see some art schools. I told them I didn’t want to be in their family picture. Eventually Mom stopped arguing with me and handed me the camera, telling me to take the picture. I did, and now there was a picture of my parents and Maddy, without me, sitting on the mantel.