Secret Sins: (A Standalone) (15 page)

Six hours before I crawled out from under Indy, I’d been a drug-free virgin. But in the early morning hours after Hawk got kicked out of the house and I fulfilled a fantasy I didn’t know I had, I had a sore asshole and a sour feeling in my bones. I’d seen Lynn’s grouchy ass after she was luded, and I empathized for the first time.

The Palihood house was dead quiet and lit only by the moon through the windows. I padded to the kitchen naked, bold in my crankiness. I wasn’t doing that blue shit again. Feeling scrambled and rancid afterward wasn’t worth the happy hornies. I could get horny on my own, thank you. And happy was pure bullshit anyway.

At least that was done. I didn’t have a single virgin part of my body anymore.

I filled a glass with water and slogged it. Refilled. Drank. Refilled. Drank more slowly.

The pool lights were on under the perfectly flat bean shape. Maybe a swim would cheer me up. It wasn’t until I got to the screen door that I saw the orange pin of a lit cigarette making an arc from Strat’s mouth to the side of the couch.

“I hear you, Cin.”

“How did you know it wasn’t Indy?” I asked from behind the screen.

He arched his back and neck until he could see me. “He walks like a fucking elephant.” He lay flat again. “You’re naked.”

I opened the door. “Yeah. My ass hurts.”

“Bad?” He looked over the pool and dragged on his cigarette.

I took his pack off the table. “No. Just irritated.” I sat and lit one.

“That can’t happen again.”

“Did I blow your mind?” I dropped his lighter on the table with a
clickclack
.

“That guy’s like my brother. He cares about you. Really cares about you.”

He had a towel over his waist, but the rest of him was bare. The musical staffs on his chest rippled. I hadn’t tasted them. I hadn’t done much of anything but received him. I felt cheated.

“And what about you?” I said.

“He and I have a deal.”

“Oh yeah?”

“You’re his.”

“You flip a coin or something?” I said it without breathing, half joking, half too far on the wrong side of a lude to be anything but negative. I emptied my lungs, letting the nicotine rush make my hands tingle.

“Played a few hands.”

“You serious?”

“He pulled a straight.”

I leaned back on the couch. “You could have asked me.”

He stretched his arm out to the ashtray. The muscles were given definition by the tattoo. What a gorgeous thing he was.

“Nah.” He stamped his butt out with a flutter of orange embers. “We didn’t want to fight.”

“How do you explain your dick in my ass then?”

He shrugged. “One night.”

I leaned on the arm of the outdoor couch and stuck my cigarette in my teeth. Fuck them. I wasn’t a baseball card to be traded around. “Fuck you guys.”

“You did.” He got up and stood over me. The towel was gone, and his cock stood straight and hard between us.

“One night,” I said. “Did you agree ahead of time?”

“If the situation came up, yeah. That was part of the agreement.”

“Fuck you twice.” My voice dripped with honey. I hadn’t intended it, but the sore feeling in my ass had abated, and the poor judgment of my cunt went live.

We regarded each other, above and below, half-drugged and young, looking for stupid excuses to do stupid things.

“You might get your chance. It’s still night.”

“For a few hours. Then, yeah, I’m his.”

He touched the inside of my knee. No pressure, just a touch. “Open your legs, Cin.”

I pulled my knees apart slowly. He kneeled on the couch and spread them, tilting forward to kiss me. He kissed like a man. As if he was marking territory with his tongue. I wrapped my arms around him.

Just once, I told myself. Just the once, I could trade them the way they’d traded me.

I let Strat take me. There was no other way to describe the way he held me down, pushed on my clit until I was close, then slowed down to keep me on the edge, kissing me tenderly right before I came and he exploded inside me.

Only then was I satisfied.

1994

The wine was going to my head. It seemed as if Drew pulled the Bullets and Blood masters out with special reverence. I’d laid a towel out to soak up the water, and he placed the boxes on them gently.

I was going to have to tell him that the baby that had split us apart might not have been his. We’d been careless with our bodies then.

But when I saw him pull an envelope out of the box and I felt the bond that he’d had with his friend, I felt a real pull to tell him and a stronger pull to just bury it forever. Why bring it up? To what end would I risk hurting him with his friend’s betrayal? I didn’t fool myself into thinking I meant so much to him that my betrayal was equal to Strat’s. The only thing I risked by telling the truth was damaging his memory of his best friend. I didn’t want to turn that bond into a lie.

I was a coward. I owed him the truth.

“Drew. Indy… I—”

A young man’s voice came from the top of the stairs, yelling in French. Orry shouted back. The door slammed. Feet scuffled along the wood, and a boy barreled into the room, shirt half untucked, ginger hair askew.

“What the—?”

“Jonathan,” I said, noticing his frozen, terrified features.

“Margie. When did you get here?”

“This is Drew. He works with me.”

They nodded at each other, practically grunting like apes. Little Jon was a man already, too tough for his own good.

“What’s wrong?” I said. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”

He swallowed. The kids came to the wine cellar when they needed to get away from the bullshit of the huge house. Sometimes to hide. Sometimes to sulk. I knew where to find Fiona during report cards’ week, Leanne every twenty-eight days, Carrie whenever Dad was home.

“I’m all right.” He started back upstairs.

Drew thumbed through an envelope.

“Wait,” I said to Jonathan. “Try this.”

I handed him my glass of wine. He was in fifth grade, but he was allowed to sip, and I wasn’t ready to let him go back up to whatever was bothering him. He took the glass. Treating him like a grown-up worked, and he seemed calmer when he handed it back.

“It tastes fine,” he said.

“Come in the storage room with me for a sec. I want to talk to you. Drew, do you mind?”

“It’s fine.” He looked up from a wet, runny note for a second and locked eyes on Jonathan.

I thought nothing of it. Not Indy’s slack jaw or the way his eyes went a millimeter wider. I just pulled my brother into the inner chamber and sat him on a case of ancient vintage.

“What’s wrong?” I whispered.

“Nothing.”

“Jon.”

“What?”

“Let’s be efficient with our time. You’re going to tell me. Might as well get it over with.”

He pursed his lips, crossed his arms, jutted his jaw. I leaned on a low shelf and waited.

“You can’t tell,” he said.

“You know I won’t.”

“You need to really swear.”

Jesus. To be in grade school again. To make the big little and the little big. To think you had control when you didn’t and adulthood was just childhood layered over with manners and privilege. When lies seemed like easy answers to uncomfortable truths.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s do this. Let’s take a pledge. We hold our hands up and swear anything we say is secret. When we put our hands down, we lock it closed and go back to normal.”

He thought about it for a second, then with a short nod he said, “Okay.”

“But there’s another thing. We cannot lie. Not when the pledge is open.”

“Fine.”

I held my hand up, and he mirrored me.

“Pledge open,” I said. “What happened?”

He took a deep breath and looked at the corner of the room. “Kerry and I were outside when it started raining, and we got stuck in the pool house.”

Kerry was the daughter of one of Dad’s associates. She was a year older than Jonathan and pretty smart.

“Go on.”

“We started doing stuff.”

Jesus Christ, use a condom.

He’s not ready
.

He glanced at me, tearing his attention from the corner for half a second, then planting it back. I didn’t answer the glance or egg him on. I knew what was coming, more or less. Mom and Dad weren’t very forthcoming about sex with the kids, thinking my early knowledge led to my early downfall.

He spit out the next line. “I think she broke it.”

“Broke what?” I knew the answer, but my mouth ran before my brain caught up.

He wouldn’t say but pointed at his crotch with both hands.

Do. Not. Laugh. Do. Not. Laugh
.

“What makes you think it’s broken?”

“She touched it. It got… it got weird then…” He looked at the ceiling.

I had to finish for him. Putting him on the spot wasn’t working. He was in fifth grade, and though he’d started getting big, he was still a child.

“It got hard then felt tickly then white stuff came out?”

His eyes went wide. “Yes.”

“It’s not broken.”

“How do you know?”

“Aren’t you and your friends talking about this amongst yourselves? Girls? Sex?”

“I didn’t have sex with her!”

I waved it away. “I know. Okay. I’m just going to assure you, it’s not broken. You’re fine. But tomorrow, let me take you to lunch and I can tell you why. All right?”

He took a deep breath of reprieve. “Yes.”

“Until then, keep away from Kerry O’Neill.”

“All right.”

“Tuck your shirt in.”

He did it, jamming the shirttails into his waistband as if Daddy was in the other room. He took a step toward the doorway.

“Jon. Stop.”

“What?”

I put my hand up then down. “Close pledge.”

“Close pledge.”

We went back into the tasting room. Drew leaned on one of the benches, hair flopped over his face like a rock star, shirt dry like a lawyer, with a manila envelope in one hand and a white rectangle in the other. He looked at it then Jonathan.

“What?” I said.

Drew just shook his head as Jonathan bolted up the stairs with barely a wave.

“Strat mailed stuff to Audio City. I don’t know why.” He put down the manila envelope. Old stamps. Crap handwriting. He laid out the contents. “A note for me, and pictures of when we were kids. He was… he was so hurt. He couldn’t show it because you were mine. But…” His voice drifted to silence.

“Drew?”

“When you left, he acted like it was nothing.” He pushed the runny letter toward me.

I couldn’t see much but my name, my real one, and phrases…
she was yours but… never wanted this… like a brother to me…

“I knew about you and Strat. He told me in pledge,” Drew said.

“In Nashville.”

“Yes, but I—”

“That’s why you were such a dick when you got back.”

“I regret that.”

“I deserved it.”

He looked at the picture, shook it, pressed his lips together, and gave it to me as if it was the hardest thing he’d had to do in his life. I took it but kept my eyes on his. I had no idea what he could look so distressed about.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Just tell me what you see.”

I looked at the picture.

Two boys about twelve years old, arms over shoulders, a suburban sidewalk stretching behind them. I recognized young Drew McCaffrey by the flop of his hair and the shape of his eyes.

And the other boy? I recognized him. I knew who he was. He was Stratford Gilliam, a kid with only a few more years to live, but that wasn’t the kid I recognized. He looked like the three-dimensional kid had been transported from my house onto a two-dimensional surface.

I swallowed. None of this computed.

“It’s a coincidence,” I whispered.

Not unless Stratford Gilliam fucked your mother
.

I couldn’t do the math in my head.

Twelve-year-old Strat was a clone of my brother, Jonathan.

No. The other way around. Jonathan looked exactly like Strat.

I looked up from the picture. Drew stood above me, confident and together as if he knew something I didn’t.

“Your family name came up in the Dublin office. Your baby’s adoptive family is suing your father for breach of contract.”

“I don’t understand.”

Don’t you
?

“They never had your real name. I presume it was to protect you. It took that long to find him.”

“There would be two babies.”

“We checked the public records. Your mother’s eighth child was stillborn.”

I took a step back, covering my mouth so I wouldn’t scream. The calculus suddenly made sense. A sick fucking sense.

“I didn’t know what I’d find here,” Drew said. “But I didn’t think this. I thought it was simpler. Not until I saw—”

I didn’t hear anything else. Just my little brother’s—

son’s

—voice in my head as he spoke French with a perfect ear for tone. As I saw the lines of his body superimposed on Strat’s—

his father’s

—and the face which was unmistakably from the same gene pool.

I did the math with my senses. Heard the voice and saw the face. Smelled the new baby smell that seemed of my own body and knew, just knew, he was mine.

“I can’t.” My breathing got choppy. I was shaking.

Drew grabbed my wrists. “Margie.”

“I can’t tell him.”

“You don’t—”

“Oh, God.”

“
Shh
. It’s going to be all right.”

He tried to gather me in his arms, but I pushed him away and I ran. I flung myself up the narrow stairs into the chaos of the kitchen. How many people were in the ballroom? Fifty? A hundred?

“Margie?” Orry asked, a piece of raw fish in his thick hands.

Everyone in the kitchen was looking at me, sauté pans frozen mid-agitation, break knives up, colanders dripping starch-thickened water into drains.

I heard Drew clop a couple of elephantine steps up from the cellar.

Cornered.

Your brother is your son
.

I didn’t even know what I was running from. I was a spider in a tub. I couldn’t get up the sides. Couldn’t get away, even on eight legs, from the glass bowl coming down.