I'll Never Tell

by Catherine McKenzie

  “Well,” Kate said lightly, trying to distract herself, “at least now we know where you got it from.”

  “Oh, ha. Ha, ha, ha. I never did anything like this.”

  “Not far off though, right?”

  “We both agreed to that, Kate.”

  Kate’s mind filled with memories. Swimming silently through the black water. Seeing the man in the canoe that sat too low if there was only one person in it. Their teeth chattering as they crossed the lake again in stunned silence, trying to figure out what they’d seen, what to do.

  She shook her head. They’d sworn to never speak of it, to never tell anyone. She turned to leave but was stopped by the loud ringing of the bell. Not the usual eight beats for breakfast but the emergency signal, a succession of quick pings that meant: Come to the lodge immediately.

  “Fire drill?” Liddie asked.

  “I guess we’d better go find out.”

  • • •

  Within a minute, everyone was assembled at the lodge. Sean was standing on the balcony, the bell rope still in his hand. Ryan and Margaux arrived together, coming from the direction of the house. Amy exited from the kitchen, an apron tied around her waist, sweat on her brow. And Mary, who was in jodhpurs, leaned casually against the building.

  “What’s going on?” Ryan asked.

  “We’ve got a hundred people coming tomorrow,” Sean said.

  “Yeah, we know.”

  “We’ve got to get ready.”

  “Aren’t the caterers taking care of everything?” Kate asked Amy.

  They made eye contact. Amy looked tired, defeated. Was that because of her? Did she wish Kate hadn’t come back? But she knew she would; it was her parents’ memorial weekend. Amy could’ve been elsewhere, asked for the weekend off. Or maybe she couldn’t. Amy’s finances, or lack thereof, were never something they discussed. Because at camp they were equals . . .

  Even as she thought this, Kate knew it was ridiculous. They weren’t equals. She was the owner’s daughter and now an owner herself. Her parents had paid her a meager salary equivalent to Amy’s, but it wasn’t the same. She didn’t have a kid, for one. Even when she’d essentially been fired, she’d dusted herself off and moved on fairly easily. She was the manager of the organic grocery store where she’d ended up. She even had a small stake in the business, and they were talking about opening another location. She didn’t know struggle; it was one of the things that kept them apart.

  “Under my supervision,” Sean said. “Yes.”

  “So,” Ryan said. “It’s all taken care of.”

  “Not quite everything. We have to do a safety check on the water.”

  “What? Why?”

  Sean spoke in an exasperated monotone. “Because the regulations say that there can’t be a free swim unless the lifeguard staff has done one. And since camp officially closed when the campers left, we need to do it again before the guests come tomorrow. You know those guys and their cold-water challenges. Someone’s gonna end up in the water.”

  “Will you listen to yourself?” Ryan said angrily. “What are you even talking about?”

  “He means practicing sweeping the lake. You remember,” Kate said. “We used to do it in precamp.”

  “Why do we need to do that?”

  “You know why, Ryan. In case someone goes missing in the water.”

  • • •

  Twenty minutes later, they were assembled on the beach. It was a cold, cloudy day, and Kate was already shivering in the one-piece swimsuit she usually wore to swim laps. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her family in so few clothes, all their flaws and differences exposed.

  Ryan was wearing a long pair of shorts—he hadn’t brought a bathing suit—and sporting a beer gut that his clothes hid well. His skin was the white of someone who didn’t get outdoors much, and doughy. Margaux was lean and hard from years of running, her bathing suit the same two-piece she’d worn for years. Mary’s rump in her one-piece navy suit was flattened out from all that riding. Liddie was wearing what looked like a sports bra and a pair of men’s swim trunks. She had a disconnected set of tattoos along her ribs, some in script, some in block lettering, and a bird across her shoulders. It was odd to see her own body looking so similar and so different, though they both sported the same tattoo on the inside of their left arms.

  I’ll never tell, it said, a reminder to keep what they knew to themselves. They’d gotten the ink deep into the night of their eighteenth birthday after they’d completed their first pub crawl.

  It had been guided by Ryan—“a brother’s duty,” he called it—but they’d ditched him around two in the morning and found themselves at a rooftop party, their legs dangling over the edge of a building, a beer in each of their hands. Down below, they could see a river of people and a neon sign that said simply Tattoos.

  “Do you think Ryan thinks we’re getting raped or something?” Liddie had asked, her long-necked beer rattling against her teeth.

  “Why do you always say things like that?”

  “Why are you always so shocked?”

  “Because it’s not normal. I’m allowed to be shocked by a lack of normalcy.”

  “You should be used to it by now. Especially with everything.”

  “Everything?”

  Liddie looked at her. “Dude. Amanda. It’s her birthday today, too, remember?”

  Kate hadn’t remembered. Maybe she’d never known. She wasn’t a collector of facts about people, this birthday, that anniversary. She cared more about the content of a person.

  “You seriously didn’t know we had the same birthday?”

  Kate raised her shoulders. She’d had too many shooters at that last bar, and her head swam.

  “Sometimes I think you have an erase button on your brain,” Liddie said.

  “I have selective memory.”

  “Must be nice.”

  “I bet we both forget this evening.”

  “I always remember everything,” Liddie said. “It feels like a fucking curse.”

  Later, she’d woken up in Liddie’s apartment with her head feeling as if an explosion had gone off inside it. And the inside of her arm killed. What the hell had she done to herself? She rolled over and lifted it up. It was covered with a bandage. She peeled it back and read the message in its trailing script, and then it all clicked into place.

  She remembered.

  A whistle blew.

  “Everyone get into formation,” Sean said, a yellow whistle dangling from his neck.

  “Why is he in charge?” Liddie grumbled next to her.

  “It was his idea.”

  Liddie rolled her eyes. Mary came and stood next to Kate’s other shoulder; Margaux was to Liddie’s left.

  “You, too, Ryan,” Sean said.

  Ryan clenched his fists but obeyed. Kate watched goose bumps rise on her arms.

  “You know the drill. We’re simulating looking for a missing person. Walk slowly through the shallow section with your hands spread out. When you get to where the water hits your chest, you need to dunk, take a step, and sweep with your eyes and arms.”

  “I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Mary said. “The water’s freezing.”

  It was brutal. Kate could feel the cold seep into her bones as it lapped against her toes.

  “Move forward!”

  Though it was the last thing she wanted to do, she obeyed Sean’s command, as did the rest of her family. Each step forward was a monumental effort, the ice creeping up her legs, her teeth chattering. When it hit her stomach, it felt like a punch, knocking the wind right out of her. Was this what it used to be like, every year doing this? Was this another instance of her selective memory, deleting every unpleasant thing that had happened to her in her life?

  Was she her own unreliable witness?


  When the water touched her breasts, she wasn’t even sure what she was doing anymore. She heard Sean yell, “Underwater!” and she obeyed, buckling her knees and dragging her head and shoulders under. The shock opened her eyes. She looked around. All she could see was a sea of blurred white legs. She rose to the surface, gasping for air. She felt panicked and dizzy. What was happening to her?

  She followed Sean’s instructions automatically. “Dunk,” he yelled, and there she was in the freezing dark again, moving her hands in front of her, searching for something missing. She surfaced when she couldn’t breathe anymore, then went down again. Usually, the longer you stayed in the water, the more used to it you got. But not this time. Each time she went under seemed to make her colder, dizzier, her breath ragged and desperate.

  She broke the surface. She didn’t know how long they’d been at this, but the water was up to her neck now; if she went under one more time, she wouldn’t be able to surface.

  Everyone bobbed down again, but she stood still, her body numb, unable to will herself to do it. She was cold, so cold. Maybe she’d be warmer if she closed her eyes. If she closed her eyes maybe she’d be able to breathe.

  She felt herself fall.

  Was this how Amanda felt as she took her last free breaths?

  CHAPTER 26

  RESCUE OPERATION

  Ryan

  “Kate!”

  Ryan turned as he broke the surface of the water. It was Sean who’d yelled from the dock, pointing. Although the water came only to Kate’s shoulders, she was drowning. Ryan reached her at the same time as Mary. They’d spread out of formation once they started dunking up and down. He reached for his sister, holding her to him. She felt like a block of ice.

  “I think she’s hypothermic,” he yelled to Sean. “Get some towels.”

  He carried Kate out of the water in his arms like one of his girls. The wind whipped against his skin. His own teeth were chattering, but Kate’s were clacking against one another like automatic gunfire. Her whole body was shaking and blue, and her breath was raspy and shallow. He vaguely remembered reading about hypothermia when he’d done his lifeguard training a zillion years ago, but he wasn’t sure what to do about it. Get her warm, obviously, but wasn’t there something about doing that too quickly? What if they did more harm than good?

  “We should take her to the hospital,” he said to Mary when he got to the beach. She was shivering too; they all were.

  “No, no hospital,” Kate murmured.

  He lowered her to the towel that Sean had placed on the ground. His sisters gathered around him, hovering behind him, brushing up against his shoulder.

  “We should get her out of her suit,” Liddie said. “You two turn around.”

  Ryan thought of protesting, but why? Did he want to see his sister stripped of her clothing, cold and shaking? No. The answer was no.

  He met Sean’s eye, and then they both pivoted away. He picked up his towel and tried to dry himself off as quickly as he could as he listened to Liddie speaking in a soothing tone to Kate as she removed her bathing suit and wrapped her head to foot in the others’ towels. He felt guilty for using his, but when he turned around, she looked like a mummy encased in a tomb; even her head was wrapped up.

  “Let’s get her to the lodge,” Mary said.

  Ryan bent down to lift her again. She was limp now, where she’d been rigid before, but he could feel the cold seeping through the towels. Her lips were still blue. He fought it, but there was no keeping the thought of another girl and her blue lips from blooming in his mind.

  • • •

  “Put some hot chocolate on, Amy!” Ryan yelled as they stumbled into the lodge, his sisters pushing up against him. He wished he could tell them to back off, that they weren’t the only ones concerned, and he knew what he was doing. His whole life he felt as if his family never gave him credit for anything, never let him have the space to make things right on his own.

  “I’ll start a fire,” Sean said.

  “Good idea. Can you grab me that chair, Margaux?”

  She went to the rocking chair in the corner and dragged it closer to the fireplace.

  “What’s happening?” Amy asked, coming out of the kitchen. The bridge of her nose had a streak of flour across it. “Oh my God. Kate. Katie, what’s wrong?”

  “She’s hypothermic,” Ryan said as he gently placed her into the rocking chair. Her head lolled to the side, though her eyes were open. They seemed to be focused on something no one could see. Ryan wished with all his heart that his sister didn’t look quite so close to dead. “Can someone go get some blankets from upstairs?”

  “I’ll go,” Margaux said. “Sean, you don’t mind, do you?”

  “Course not,” he said unconvincingly.

  Ryan shot him a look. He’d never thought of Sean as selfish, so why did he care about his blankets all of a sudden? Besides, they probably belonged to camp, which belonged to . . . Ah, fuck.

  Amy knelt at Kate’s feet and picked up her hands. “It’s okay, mon coeur. You will be okay.”

  She started rubbing Kate’s hands with her eyes locked on Kate’s. Ryan felt something unfamiliar rise up in his chest. More than ­surprise—he understood at once what the meaning of this exchange was, and did it . . . disgust him? He looked away, ashamed. All those liberal pretensions, all that banging the gong in social situations about how everyone was equal, and he wasn’t equal to a shared look of love and a term of endearment between a woman and his sister.

  “Where are those blankets?” he bellowed.

  “I’ve got them,” Margaux said. “Oh, Amy.”

  Ryan was further ashamed by the shared surprise of his sister. Maybe that’s all it was. If this were Liddie, he wouldn’t think twice about it. But Kate . . . Kate had always been . . . like him, he was about to think, then quashed it.

  Amy looked up defiantly. “I’ll take the blankets.”

  Margaux held them out. Amy took them and gently removed the towels from Kate. Ryan knew he should look away like he had on the beach, but it was all done so quickly that it didn’t matter. Kate seemed to come back to herself at Amy’s touch. She watched Amy silently as she wrapped the worn army surplus blankets from Sean’s bed around her.

  “My feet are so cold,” she said, barely above a whisper.

  Mary walked past him, sat on the floor, and took one of Kate’s feet in her hands. Amy took the other. They rubbed them gently as they turned slowly from white to pink.

  Sean lit the fire. When it was crackling, he stepped back and placed the screen in front of it. Ryan approached, holding out his own frozen hands toward the flames. Kate was probably going to be okay, but this never would’ve happened if it weren’t for Sean.

  “That was a stupid idea. We all could’ve died.”

  “The regulations say that—”

  “Enough with your fucking regulations. Jesus. Don’t you care about Kate?”

  “Of course I do.”

  Liddie emerged from the office. “I just called 9-1-1, and they said to keep her dry and to give her warm liquids. You’ve got the fire going, good. I’ll go make her some tea.”

  No one answered her, but Ryan walked away from Sean before he punched him and followed her into the kitchen. She was busying herself looking through the cupboards, slamming them shut when she didn’t find what she needed.

  “I think it’s in the pantry. I’ll get it,” Ryan said.

  “No, it’s fine. I’ll do it.”

  She walked down the long galley kitchen and disappeared into the pantry. Ryan waited for her to come out, and when she didn’t, he went looking for her. He rounded the corner and saw nothing. He looked left, and there she was, huddled in a corner by the milk fridge, sobbing.

  “What’s going on?”

  She shook her head and wiped at her eyes. “I’m fine. I’m fine.”<
br />
  He sat down next to her. The ground near the fridge was cold, but not as cold as the lake. “Come on, this isn’t like you.”

  “I know, right? I actively plotted Kate’s death a bunch of times growing up, so . . .”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I’m usually a cold, callous bitch, and the fact that I might cry over something that happened to my sister is shocking.”

  Ryan kept quiet.

  “I know, I know, okay?”

  “It’s all right to cry. It was scary. I was scared.”

  “You were?”

  “Of course.” He kicked his feet against Liddie’s. She pushed her shoulder against his. “I didn’t do it, you know,” he said. “Amanda . . .”

  “Is this the right time for this?”

  “Probably not. But give me a chance later, all right? When we know Kate will be fine.”

  “She’s going to be okay, right?”

  “She is.” Ryan patted her knee. “Why don’t we get that tea?”

  “Yeah.”

  He stood and held out his hand to her. She took it, and he popped her up, a move he used to do when they were young. She played along, landing and throwing her hands up in the air as if she’d just pulled off a gymnastic feat.

  “Still sticking the landing,” Ryan said.

  “At least I’m doing something right.”

  CHAPTER 27

  FEELING SMALL

  Liddie

  Liddie couldn’t believe she’d broken down like that, and in front of Ryan of all people. It was scary to see your sister, a carbon copy, looking so lifeless. But she knew Kate was going to be all right. Well, she probably knew. Okay, she didn’t know, and the thought of that, the thought of maybe a world with no Kate in it, that’s what broke her. Also, if she was being honest, the tenderness between her and Amy bothered her. She felt excluded, pushed out of Kate’s world in a way she never had before. Because even if they were with other people, even people they loved, they always came first. That was the bargain of being a twin. You didn’t need to talk about it; you simply knew that sometime in the not too distant future, you’d be living together in some old-age home, dressed alike the way you’d been as children.