Every Single Secret

by Emily Carpenter

  “You thought they were vitamins, Daphne. You didn’t realize what you were doing.”

  “No. I knew. Somewhere . . . somewhere inside, I knew. And I wanted something terrible to happen to her.”

  He was quiet. Still studying me with that look that cut through my very soul. But I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t want him looking at me that way—full of pity or judgment or whatever it was he was feeling. I turned so I couldn’t see his face.

  “What happened then?”

  I rolled onto my back and laced my hands over my chest. “The police questioned everyone who was there on the trip. The kids from Piney Woods and Maranatha. All the houseparents. Then they showed up at the house. They just talked to Mrs. Bobbie, though, I think just to find out if she knew where the pills were. No reason to talk to me and Omega, since we hadn’t been on the trip. It was an accident, they said. Chantal forgot her pills and she had a seizure, simple as that. It was terrible. But it was just an accident.”

  “What did you do with the pills?” he asked.

  I hesitated. To say the words aloud . . . what would that feel like? For the truth to finally come out of my mouth? Would it change things? Would I feel at peace with the fact that I was a monster who had hated a young girl? Who had wanted her dead? Wished her dead and made her die?

  “Daphne?”

  I had to force the words out of my mouth. “Mrs. Bobbie had given Chantal her pills to pack in her bag before the trip. I just pushed them up under the dresser, so it looked like they rolled there and she had forgotten them.”

  He was quiet.

  “They took all us girls in the brown house to see a child psychologist in Macon. They brought us in, one by one, to talk to her. She asked questions about Chantal and our life at home. At the ranch and the house. She asked about Mr. Al. About . . .”

  “What?”

  I cleared my throat. “Apparently, the night of the camping trip, the night Chantal wandered off, he and a couple of the older girls had left their tents to go smoke weed in the woods. Chantal found them. They made her leave, and on her way back to the campsite, she lost her way.” I touched my forehead. A sharp pain had begun to stab me right behind my left eye.

  “That’s terrible.”

  I inhaled. “She pushed, the psychologist. She kept asking me questions. What kind of father was Mr. Al, what did he do with us at the ranch? Did he spend time alone with us? Did he find ways to get us away from Mrs. Bobbie?” I shook my head. “I was a kid, and surprisingly still pretty innocent. I didn’t understand what they were getting at. And to tell the truth, I don’t think they had anything on him other than the whole weed-smoking business. But . . .”

  “They fired him.”

  I nodded. “He went to prison.”

  “Good God. Seriously?”

  “The judge was up for reelection and needed someone to prove she was tough on drug crime.”

  He waited.

  “Mr. Al was an idiot for doing what he did, yes, but he loved us girls. And he was always kind to me. But everything good he did got lost in the chaos of Chantal’s accident. He was the convenient scapegoat, the one who prevented the ranch from having to deal with any major repercussions. I don’t know specifically how it all went down, but I do know that’s what happened. Believe it or not, in that whole world of child-welfare services, there’s a lot of money at stake. Plenty of winking and nodding and looking the other way. At least, there was back then.”

  “Did you ever look him up? Try to find out what happened?”

  I shook my head. “Even if I could find him, I don’t think I could face him. Not after what I did. It was my fault he went away.”

  “It was his fucking fault he smoked weed with a bunch of minors,” Heath said flatly.

  “Mrs. Bobbie left the ranch,” I went on. “And we were all redistributed—Omega, Shellie, Tré, and me. My new house was fine. Nice parents, sweet girls, and I was safe. Reasonably happy, I guess. And no one ever found out that Chantal’s death was my fault.”

  He touched my face. Then he kissed me, tenderly. And as he did, I began to cry. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t stop myself. I’d finally ventured down that dark hall, pushed open the door, and told someone. The relief was enormous.

  “Daphne,” he said. “Look at me.”

  I did.

  He held my face. “You were a child. A little girl. You couldn’t have known she was taking medication for epilepsy. And you were probably confused by the questioning about Mr. Al. Did you even understand what marijuana was?”

  “I knew it was more than cigarettes that they were smoking outside the clubhouse, and I had the feeling that if Mrs. Bobbie had found out what was happening, she would have killed them. But it felt wonderful too—like a happy secret they all shared together. And I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to belong.”

  I shifted on the bed. Our legs were entwined now.

  “The child psychologist said if I knew anything at all about how Chantal had died and didn’t tell, I was an accessory to the crime. I didn’t know what she meant exactly, just that it sounded like Mr. Al had committed a crime, and it was possible that they could put me in jail too. I was scared. But I should’ve done the right thing. I should’ve told the truth.”

  “They would’ve put you in jail. Or some hellhole of a detention. You did the smart thing.”

  I sighed. “Maybe. Maybe not, I can’t know for sure. I never actually talked to a lawyer, but my understanding is, if they ruled the death a homicide, the DA could have prosecuted me as an adult. Some of these guys are known for taking a really preemptive approach with juvenile offenders. Maybe the worst they could’ve come up with was criminal negligence, but still, prison was a possibility. The fact that everybody knew I hated her. That certainly would’ve been used against me.”

  “Okay, Daphne, so let’s say you wished Chantal was dead. Somewhere in your eleven-year-old brain, you understood the law of the jungle was in play—that it was either you or Chantal. So, yes, you struck first, but that doesn’t make you a criminal, it makes you a survivor.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. It definitely makes me a liar.”

  “Not anymore. You just told me everything.”

  I swallowed, feeling something delicately reaching a balance between us. Then he smiled.

  “Daphne.” He lifted his eyes to meet mine. “I want to be involved in this. I want to be with you. Everywhere you are. That’s why I am alive. The only reason.”

  “You really mean that, don’t you?” I whispered.

  He nodded. “And we will be safe together, no matter what we meant to do or not do. No matter what we’ve done. We will be always us.”

  I bit my lip.

  “Say it.”

  “Always us.”

  He pressed his lean body against mine, and I felt his lips on mine, his tongue in my mouth. I closed my eyes. The room was warm and dark, and I let myself relax against him. I imagined the protective armor I’d always worn falling off me, joints breaking, pieces of metal clanking to the ground. I felt the distance between us evaporating, its dense black form shrinking until there was nothing left. I watched it go—sensed it going, rather—without a shred of remorse. It was easy to let Heath come close now. An easy, beautiful, shining thing to lie next to him and be fully known.

  . . . what we’ve done . . .

  That’s what he had said.

  Sleep started to nibble away at the edges of my consciousness. The bed felt like a boat that was rocking gently over waves. I’d forgotten to take off my earrings and ring, so I pulled them off, dropping them on the nightstand. I was drifting, drifting, drifting—back to the apartment where I lived with my mother. To the small pink room, my white-painted bed with the spindled posts and daisy-chain comforter. The purple lampshade. The little TV on the chest of drawers.

  I was six or seven. Or, I don’t know, maybe I was older. Mrs. Tully, our down-the-hall neighbor, had used her extra key to let me in. She’d persuaded the su
per to let her cut a spare after the first half a dozen times my mother stayed out all night and Mrs. Tully had seen me boarding the school bus the next morning in the clothes I’d been wearing the previous day. Mrs. Tully unlocked the door and told me to go put on my pajamas and brush my teeth. She would gather some of my dirty clothes she could throw in her washing machine.

  I heard her from the bathroom, talking in a low, urgent voice. When I came out, toothbrush sticking out of my mouth, I saw my mama hunched over the recliner. She’d dropped her purse on it, pulled off the scrunchie that had held back her yellow-blonde hair, and dragged her fingers tiredly over her scalp. She was wearing a denim miniskirt and a ruffled eyelet halter top that showed a strip of doughy skin between the two. She leaned over to shuck off her sandals—the high-heeled brown strappy ones I used to like to clomp around in. I wondered what had made her have such loose skin. It was like some of her insides had been pulled out, and left her body like a week-old balloon.

  “Where have you been?” I wanted to ask, but I didn’t. After Mrs. Tully left, Mama finally noticed me standing in the hallway, the toothbrush still in my mouth.

  “You want to come along next time?” she said. “I bet I could get a stack of pesos for your hot little ass.” She laughed, a loud, honking noise, and I melted back into the bathroom.

  As I spat into the sink, I thought it over. Since she was high, it would be easy to push her off our second-floor apartment balcony, up and over the railing, and down to the cracked, weedy parking lot below. Maybe she would hit a car. Or crack her head on the concrete. I wondered what she would look like, dead, all that pale, flabby skin below the balcony.

  And then I wondered how bad a child must be to think things like that about her own mama. Children were supposed to love their mothers, even I knew that. Good children.

  Maybe I wasn’t good. Maybe I was a monster . . .

  In our room at Baskens, sometime later in the night, I woke to use the bathroom. Back in bed, I was restless. Had my mother really said such a horrific thing to me, or had I, through the haze of years and bitterness, painted her more of a villain than she really was? Our minds were tricky things, manipulators of time and space, coloring events with our personal palette of rage, fear, or desire.

  I wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep, I thought, not now. And I couldn’t bear to lie here, being recorded by the extra cameras Cerny had hidden in our room. I decided to go outside, let the night air wash over me. Maybe I’d sit on the metal chaise on the patio, try to get a glimpse of the stars, and fall asleep there. Let Luca cover me with a quilt when he found me in the morning. I fumbled for my glasses, wrapped myself in the fuzzy throw from the foot of the bed, and crept down the stairs.

  The moon was high and bright, and frost had crystallized on the velvet grass of the backyard. But between the two, just above the ground, a layer of fog hovered, wispy and spectral. At the far end of the yard, it shrouded the barn. Down the terraced levels to my left, it gathered thickly over the bird garden. How strange, that the sky above me should be so clear but down here, all was obscured.

  It was cold and I was barefoot, but I felt myself pulled to the bird garden. Something worrying at the edges of my mind, an insistence. I picked my way past the vegetable beds and down to the redbud trees, each step filling me with greater dread, until the weight of it was as tangible as the mist I was passing through.

  Just as the birdhouses materialized through the haze, I felt a lump of something under my bare foot—soft and solid at the same time. I jumped, then looked down to see a dead bird on the grass. My hand flew to my mouth, but then, after another moment, I had to adjust my glasses. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

  The grass beneath the birdhouses was strewn with dead birds. Dozens of them.

  I was standing in a graveyard.

  Friday, October 19

  Night

  In the bathroom of Mama June’s restaurant, I press against the floral-papered wall. But the three women don’t even look my way. Chattering nonstop, they head to the single sink and crowd around it. One woman, with long, carefully curled red ringlets and a knee-length crocheted vest, jabbers as she washes up.

  “I told her, I said, ‘Dee, if you don’t do something, he’s just going to stay up all night looking at porn, chatting with those inter-sluts.’”

  “Inter-sluts,” cackles another, yanking paper towels out of the dispenser.

  “Lord, Natasha,” the third one says. “That man is not chatting with women. He’s a pastor.”

  They rotate places. Natasha flips back her curls and points a French-manicured finger at her friend who’s now at the sink. “That man hasn’t stuck it in her in over six months. Mark it, he’s either sticking it somewhere else or talking about it. You know as well as I do, you gotta watch them pastors.”

  When they’re finally finished, I follow them back into the restaurant. Natasha and her friends settle at a table in front of the long, plastic-shielded buffet where three men—their husbands, I guess—are working on plates of pie, locked in on the boxy TV.

  I sit at a small table a couple of yards away. There’s a check printout and a five-dollar bill near a plate with a couple of soggy fries in a pool of ketchup and an uneaten biscuit. I pull the iPad out and start to open it, then stop.

  Across the room, Natasha has her arm draped around a man I recognize. Round, shiny face, swoop of mud-brown hair. Dr. Reggie Teague. The face is the same, but he looks different from when I last saw him. He’s not dressed in a suit and bow tie or wearing the preppy glasses.

  He’s wearing a firefighter’s uniform. All three of the men are.

  I am shaking now. Reggie Teague, or whoever this man is, is a firefighter. Not a therapist who was called back to Dunfree on a family emergency. Not Matthew Cerny’s jovial associate.

  I’m shaking so hard, I’m not even sure I can move. I close my eyes and try to slow my breath. If I have a panic attack in this diner, Reggie Teague will see me. I’m not sure where his loyalties lie—how deeply involved in this thing he is or how far he might go to protect his own interests—but I can’t risk getting caught. If he stops me from getting to the police station, I’m done. This much I know.

  I resist the biscuit, despite my gnawing hunger, but I slip the five-dollar bill out from under the plate. The familiar act of self-preservation gives me a boost of adrenaline, which turns out to be the necessary motivation to get my legs working. I stand up as inconspicuously as I can and make for the door.

  The bell jangles, and back in the restaurant I hear Reggie and his two firefighter buddies cheer lustily in response to something wonderful that just happened on the TV.

  Chapter Twenty

  Thursday, October 18

  The Day Before

  Heath’s breakfast dishes were already cleared from our room. My plate, still covered, waited on the table.

  I yawned. The clock said it was past ten—which was hard to fathom. I hadn’t slept this late in years. I nestled farther under the covers, warm and contented, until a wave of nameless anxiety washed over me. I bolted up, remembering last night.

  The fog. All those dead birds.

  When my brain had finally registered what I was looking at, I’d bitten back my screams and run back to the house. I’d woken Heath and told him what I’d seen. He explained that it was probably a coyote or some other predator that had gotten after them, that I should try and get some sleep, and he’d tell Cerny about it in the morning. I was so distraught I’d almost told him about the Sinatra song I’d heard in the hallway. But I stopped myself. Something told me it wasn’t a good idea.

  Maybe it was the fact that Luca and I had been together when we’d heard the song—sneaking around the house like some kind of detective duo—and Heath might misread the situation. Or maybe I worried he was beginning to doubt my stability. Last night, as I’d ranted about the dead birds, the expression on his face had seemed so patient. So completely unconcerned, like dead birds in the yard were an ent
irely normal situation, and he was merely allowing my neuroses to spin themselves out.

  He’d held me until I’d finally fallen asleep, which hadn’t been until around three in the morning, reassuring me that everything was fine. His voice had remained calm. The voice of reason in the midst of my hysteria.

  I returned to bed and drifted back to sleep almost instantly. When I awoke again, light in the room had shifted, and the room shimmered in the cold. I burrowed deeper under the blankets and looked up at the ceiling, at the unseen camera that was, no doubt, recording me. I felt the tension creeping back into my neck and shoulders. I needed to run. I needed to sweat, to feel my heart swelling and pounding like it was going to explode. To feel my jaw ache with the lack of oxygen, taste the trace of blood in my mouth.

  I rolled over and looked at the clock. One forty. I cursed aloud. Glenys and I were supposed to meet at two thirty at the top of the mountain, that’s what we’d agreed at the creek yesterday. She’d be glad to hear I’d finally talked to Heath and told him everything about Chantal. And she’d probably want to hear the story too. I owed her that much. If it wasn’t for her, I didn’t think I would’ve ever been brave enough to come clean with Heath. If I threw on clothes now and sprinted up the mountain, I’d only be a few minutes late.

  I pulled on running tights and a zip-top, then inspected the meal under the cover. The eggs had gone cold, but the bacon was still good and the fruit too. I pulled apart a biscuit and stuffed a flaky half in my mouth. At the nightstand, I stopped. My earrings and ring were gone, probably swept to the floor in the chaos of last night. I peeked under the table, but the floor was bare. I’d just have to search for them later. I popped a beanie and gloves on and stepped into the empty hall. It was freezing. The temperature must’ve dropped fifteen degrees since yesterday.

  I glided down the front staircase and across the foyer, ducking into each of the front rooms for a quick check. No one was in the library, dining room, or salon, but as I retreated to the rear of the house, I could hear voices in the doctor’s office. I stopped and let them roll over me. In a strange way, the sound of humans talking was the most warming, comforting sound in the world. Life went on, didn’t it? On and on and on.