Secrets She Left Behind (28 page)

Sara
A Morning by the Chapel
1996

I
T HAD BEEN YEARS SINCE I’D BABYSAT FOR MAGGIE AT FREE
Seekers, and three years since I’d completed the cushions for the pews, yet I still spent part of nearly every day in or around the building because I could never get enough of the setting. Sometimes Jamie was there and sometimes not. While I loved seeing him, he was not the only thing that drew me to the chapel. I wanted some of what I experienced on Sundays to carry me through every day. That spiritual pull. It erased any negativity I might be feeling and left peace in its place.

With Keith in kindergarten, I’d taken an office job working for an accountant on the mainland, but I kept my schedule to three days a week so I would still have time for myself at Free Seekers. I didn’t need to work. I had no rent. The two thousand dollars Jamie gave me every month easily covered my expenses, and when something unexpected came up, such as my own medical care or my car breaking down, he was quick to give me more. But I needed to feel productive, and I didn’t want people wondering how I was managing financially without a job.

One morning in June, I dropped Keith off for his last day of kin
dergarten, then drove to the chapel. I sat in the sand behind the building, leaning against the cool concrete with my knees up to my chin, watching a sailboat cut through the inlet toward the ocean. I dug my fingers into the warm sand and shut my eyes.

“I thought I saw you walk past the window.”

I looked up to see Jamie coming toward me. “Hey,” I said.

“Is Keith glad it’s his last day of school?” He sat down next to me.

“I don’t think he understands yet,” I said. “He can’t conceive of a day without school.”

“Ah, how quickly they forget.” Jamie laughed. Keith had sobbed on his first day of kindergarten. I had sobbed myself, once I was out of my baby boy’s sight.

“How are things going with Marcus?” I asked. After four years away from Topsail Island, Marcus had come back for the funeral of his and Jamie’s mother. I knew that, while Jamie had been looking forward to seeing his brother, he also felt anxious about his return. They hadn’t parted the best of friends.

“It’s going really well, actually,” he said. “The kids love him.”

“And he’s sober?”

“He told me he got sober even before he left the island. That he didn’t tell me then because he…I don’t know. I guess because he needed to be sure it’d stick.”

“So it’s been almost, what? Five years?”

Jamie nodded.

“That’s fantastic.”

“I think Marcus is Andy’s father.”

“What?”
I leaned away from him, wondering if I’d heard him correctly. “Why would you think that?”

He rested his head against the side of the building, eyes shut. “Because,” he said.

“Because
why?
” The morning sun was golden on his skin. His thick, dark eyelashes, so much like Keith’s, rested on his cheeks. I turned my head back to the inlet. It did me no good to look at him too long.

“Way back when they were drinking together, I wondered about it,” he said. “I wondered if they could be sleeping together, too. A couple of times, I picked up…
vibes
between them. It’s hard to describe. It was just a feeling.”

“You never said a thing about it to me back then,” I said.

“Well, I didn’t know for sure, and I didn’t want to…I knew you weren’t thinking too highly of Laurel to begin with. I didn’t want to make you feel worse about her.”

I laughed. “Jamie. I was your
lover.
I didn’t have much room to throw stones.”

He smiled at me. “Good point,” he said. “Anyhow. As soon as Marcus showed up the other day, I saw how much Andy looks like him. Seeing them side by side. It just…It gave me a shock.”

“Well, they
are
related,” I said.

He shook his head. “Then I overheard him and Laurel talking. Just…I could be reading way too much into it, but we—all of us—were talking about him possibly moving back here for good. And after dinner, I heard him ask Laurel if she’d be comfortable with that.”

“Probably because he was her drinking buddy,” I said.

Jamie shook his head. “It was more than that. Laurel hushed him up.” He let out a sigh. “Andy’s not mine. I mean, in my heart he’s mine. He always will be. But I’m not his father.”

“You sound so sure.”

“It all fell into place for me last night. I
am
sure.”

I sat up tall so I could put my arm around his shoulders. “Are you okay?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Is Marcus going to move here? Would you be all right with that?”

“I’m encouraging it,” he said.

“How come?”

“Because of you.”

I lowered my arm and dug my fingers into the sand again. “You’re not making a whole lot of sense today, Jamie Lockwood,” I said.

“You still love me?”

“Do you need to ask?”

“I want you back,” he said. “I want
us
back. We’re great friends, but I want the rest of it. I want all of it.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I’d long ago given up on anything more than friendship with him. “Jamie, I don’t understand,” I said. “After Andy was born, you…you recommitted yourself to your marriage. In four years, you haven’t even hinted to me that you wanted to start things up again.”

“Oh, I’ve wanted to,” he said. “But you’re right. I made a decision to give Laurel and Maggie and Andy my all, and I did. But it’s never felt…right. Laurel’s wonderful, don’t get me wrong.”

“She’s amazing,” I said. She was. It was undeniable. In the three years since Andy was returned to her, Laurel had become a spokesperson on fetal alcohol syndrome in addition to being the best mom imaginable—at least to Andy. Maggie often seemed to get the short end of the mothering stick, which I have to admit bothered me. I still thought of Maggie as part mine.

“No argument from me on that,” Jamie said. “She’s become a dynamo. But I didn’t marry a dynamo.”

“She’s grown,” I defended her. It was easy to defend Laurel at that moment, because my pounding heart knew where this conversation was going. Finally.
Finally.

“And growth is good,” Jamie said. “But we’ve grown in different directions. With you, it’s so much better. I mean, look at this!” He turned his hand palm side up, running it through the air next to my body as if using me for an illustration. “You come here even when you know I’m not around because you can’t stay away from this spot any more than I can. You painted the damn place yourself. You made those cushions. You come to the service every week. When’s the last time Laurel came to a service? You
understand.
You’re a great mom to Keith—to our
son—
but you have another side to you, too.”

I drank in his words. They filled up the huge empty place I’d tried to pretend was no longer inside of me. I was afraid I was going to cry.

“I don’t want to hurt her,” Jamie said. “I have to see how things play out with Marcus here.”

“What do you mean?”

“He loves her. I’m sure he does. He gets all goo-goo eyes around her.”

I laughed, brushing away the tear that ran down my cheek. “Really?” I felt almost giddy.

“Yeah,” Jamie said. “I’m less sure how she feels about him. But…” He rested his head against the wall again. “I should have thought this all through better before talking to you about it,” he said. “I saw you out here, and once I started talking to you, it just came pouring out.” He looked at me. “What do
you
want? Do you want us back again?”

I nodded, but slowly. “Not sneaking around, though.” I realized as I said that how my self-respect had grown since the end of our affair. I was a mother now, too. Keith needed a man who would be a real father to him. “I can’t do that again, Jamie.”

“I know,” he said. “That’s no good. Give me some time to think about how to do this, okay? I can’t be far from any of my kids. I…That’d kill me.” He looked toward the water. “I have something for you,” he said.

“What?”

He reached in his jeans pocket. “I’ve been carrying this around since I got back from my parents’ house.” He pressed something into my hand.

I opened my fingers and saw a necklace. An
amazing
necklace. I lifted up the gold chain and watched the sunlight glitter on the nine stones. Four diamonds and four emeralds, with one teardrop diamond in the center. I didn’t know much about jewelry. I wouldn’t have known a real diamond from a rhinestone. But I knew beauty when I saw it.

“Jamie!”

“It was my mother’s,” he said, lifting it from my hand and undoing the clasp. “When my father made his first million, he bought it for her, but she just wasn’t a diamond-and-emerald kind of gal. She never wore it, so you don’t need to worry about anyone recognizing it.”

I turned my head as his fingers worked the clasp at the back of my neck. I felt the light weight of the stones against my throat and shivered. “What if the clasp breaks and I lose it?”

“It’s got this double clasp on it, so it’s fine. You should get it appraised so you can insure it.” He turned me toward him. “Let me see,” he said.

He looked at my throat, where I could feel my pulse thrumming harder than it had been an hour earlier. “Beautiful,” he said, smiling. “It’s right where it belongs.”

I wanted to kiss him. Just put my hand on his cheek, lean forward
and let our lips touch. But that could only lead us down the path we’d just agreed to avoid. So I rested my head on his shoulder instead, and together we watched the choppy water in the inlet, our backs against the chapel we both loved.

Andy

W
E WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO TEXT ANYBODY IN CLASS. MOST
kids did anyhow. I got caught once, so I waited till lunch if I could stand it. If my phone vibrated in my pocket, though, I couldn’t wait. It was always Kimmie texting me. How could I wait?

I was in my Life Management class, where I’m a very good student except for the reading part. My phone vibrated, and I put it on my lap so Mr. Drexler couldn’t see.

R U going to call him Dad now? she wrote.

I told Kimmie about the whole birth-father thing on the phone last night. “That’s so cool!” she kept saying. She meant it was cool we both had a birth father and an adopted father. “Now it’s like we’re totally equal.”

I wnt 2 call him Uncle Marcus, I texted back. It would feel funny to change that.

The whole thing confused me. Maggie made me a chart. Not like the get-ready-in-the-morning chart. And not like Mom’s stick-people chart. Maggie made a chart with lines and things, but she cut out pictures of Daddy and Mom and Uncle Marcus and Miss Sara and me and Keith and her and all the lines showed how we were related. I still didn’t understand, though. I tried explaining it to Kimmie, but she was confused, too, and she was really smart. I
couldn’t wait to show her the chart. The important thing was Uncle Marcus was really my dad, though I could keep calling him Uncle Marcus. And Maggie was still my sister. She said that. She said, “Don’t even
think
about that half-sister stuff.” And Keith was my cousin. We had some of the same blood. That was hard to believe because we were totally different, but it was true.

The night before, I dreamed about the stick people Mom drew. There were zillions of them all running around the beach. The girl ones had those little stick-people dresses on. I was normal, though. Not a stick person. They were nice and we played volleyball and just ran around. Then I realized we were by Keith and Miss Sara’s trailer. I looked over and saw a stick boy sitting on the railing of the deck. He was alone, watching all the people have fun on the beach. I knew it was Keith. My cousin. I felt sad he was alone. Miss Sara was gone. Maybe dead. Also, he was poor. I was rich, but I wasn’t supposed to brag about it.

I wanted to tell Kimmie about my stick-people dream and how fun it was, except for the seeing-Keith-alone part, but that was definitely too much to text. I started to try anyway.

I dremt about stick—

“Andy?” Mr. Drexler said suddenly.

I was so surprised, I actually jumped and my phone fell on the floor.

“Put your phone away,” he said.

I picked up my phone. I wanted to type later, but I didn’t want to get sent to the office, so I put my phone back in my pocket. Kimmie would understand.

Mom drove me home from school since she was the elementary-school nurse today, and I told her all about the stick-people dream.

“What a happy dream,” she said after I said about the volleyball and the nice people.

“Except then I saw a boy alone—he was a stick boy—on Miss Sara’s deck. I think it was Keith. I mean, it wasn’t
really
Keith because he was a stick boy, but I…I don’t know how to explain it.”

“In the dream,” Mom said, “you sensed that boy was Keith. The stick figure represented Keith.”

Mom always got what I meant. “Exactly,” I said.

“We all feel sad about Keith,” she said. “He’s had a very hard year and a half, hasn’t he?”

“’Cause Miss Sara disappeared,” I said. “And because of being hurt in the fire. And because of finding out he’s a cousin.”

“Yes,” Mom said. “That shook him up, too, I’m sure.”

“I like having a cousin,” I said. I never had one before and it was fun to say
I have a cousin
even if Kimmie was the only person I got to say it to so far. It was just too bad my cousin had to be Keith.

When we got home, I told Mom I was going for a bike ride and she said be home by dinner. She didn’t like me to ride on the main road in the summer because of too many cars, but now was okay. I saw hardly any cars. I was a good biker because my legs were very strong from swimming. I rode to the bank in Surf City. I had my own ATM card and was allowed to take out twenty dollars at a time. But when the screen said how much do you want, it also said other numbers, including one hundred. So even though I wasn’t allowed, I hit the button for one hundred. It came out all in the twenty-number bills. Five of them. Five times twenty was a hundred, so that was right. I got back on my bike and rode to Keith and Miss Sara’s trailer. That was the totally spooky part. When I got close to the trailer, I saw Keith sitting on the deck, practically right where the stick boy had been!

His back was to me when I parked my bike by his car. I climbed up the steps to the deck. There he was, sitting like the stick boy on the railing.

“Hi, Keith,” I said.

His body jumped a little like I scared him. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I had a dream you were on the deck.”

He just shook his head. “You’re so weird.” He got off the railing and sat down by the table.

“I really did.” I wouldn’t get angry at him, even if he called me a retard. My brain was really thinking hard. If we fought on the deck, one of us could fall over the railing and die. “You were a stick boy,” I said. “I mean, the stick boy repasented you.”

He looked toward the beach. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I brought you money.” I moved closer to hold out the five twenty-number bills and he looked at them.

“Is that from your mother?” he asked.

“No. I got it from my savings account. You can get to it from the ATM.”

“That’s from
your
savings?”

“Yes.”

“Why would you give me money?”

“Because you’re my cousin and you need it.”

“I don’t want your money.”

“That’s stupid if you need it.”

“Not as stupid as you are,” he said.

I wanted to hit him so bad!
Stop,
I said inside my head.
Think. Act.

“I’ve got to go,” I said. “I have to be home by dinner.”

I started walking down the stairs.

“Hey, Andy,” he said when I was partway down.

“What?” I turned to look at him. His face was leaning over in a shadow and I couldn’t see the scars.

“Thanks for the offer, dude,” he said. “But I’m good.”

“Okay.”

I went down the stairs to my bike. I had a hand in my pocket and could feel the bills. I wasn’t sure what to do with them now. I knew how to get them out of the ATM thing, but nobody ever told me how to put them back in.