Secrets She Left Behind (45 page)

Maggie
Two Days after the Fire

I
MISSED THE HOSPITAL. I FELT SO USELESS, JUST SITTING AROUND
the house. I had to keep my leg up, so Mom rented a recliner and I sat in the family room watching TV and movies and playing games on my laptop.

I wasn’t sure how I got injured. I had this big bloody gash on my leg that I didn’t even know was there until they got us to the hospital. They treated Keith and Andy and Kimmie for smoke inhalation, and I was thinking how lucky I was to be fine, when a nurse asked me why my jeans were all wet. Blood. Ugh. Twenty-two stitches.

Nobody else was hurt, thank God—except for Jen. They found her body by the back door of the tower. At first, they thought she’d trapped herself when she lit the fire. That sliding glass door was always tricky to open, and I didn’t like to think what it must have been like for her as she tried to escape. I was angry at her for betraying me, and beyond furious that she’d tried to hurt Andy, but I still didn’t want to imagine her struggling with that door. Then they discovered she’d shot herself. Keith said she’d kept a gun in her car. Wow. That girl had some secrets.

They found lots of paintings in the bedroom at the house where
she was staying, and most of them had that blond girl in them that was probably her sister, Jordy. Jen was crazy with grief over her sister and mother. It didn’t excuse what she did, but it explained it. All I knew was that I wasn’t the right person to judge someone else’s temporary insanity.

I was in the middle of watching
You’ve Got Mail
when the doorbell rang. Mom answered it, and I almost jumped out of my chair when Reverend Bill walked into the room. Mom left to get him something to drink, and he sat down on the sofa and folded his hands on his knees.

“I heard you got hurt,” he said.

“My calf,” I said. “I’m supposed to keep it elevated.”

He stared at me in that creepy way he had. “Always some kind of drama with you Lockwoods,” he said.

It was an insult, but I had to admit it was also the truth. “I guess,” I said.

“I thought you could start out with our visitation program.”

“What?”
What was he talking about? “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Visiting sick parishioners. Making sure they have the resources they need. Three meals a day, extra help around the house. That sort of thing.”

“Reverend Bill, I don’t—”

“You’re coming to work for me,” he said with that hideous, unflinching, unsmiling look he was so good at. “You’ll do your community service for me.”

I knew the hospital was never going to take me back. Cathy Moody had called yesterday to tell me as much. But work at Drury Memorial? That was nuts.

“I’m not religious.”

He smirked. “I’m well aware of that,” he said.

“Wouldn’t your…your parishioners…Would they even let me inside the church?”

“They’ll adjust.”

I frowned. “But you
hate
me,” I said.

He rubbed his chin like he needed to think about that for a minute. “Help me get over that, will you?” he asked.

I stared at him. Then I started laughing. He may have smiled. With Reverend Bill, it was very hard to tell. All I knew was that I had my new community service placement, and it was going to be the hardest one yet.

I was halfway through the movie when Keith showed up at the house.

“Hey,” he said to me as he carried a box of stuff into the living room. “Marcus asked me to drop this off. Where should I put it?”

“By the stairs, I guess,” I said. Uncle Marcus was going to store some of his things with us while his tower was being gutted. “How’s the cleanup going over there?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Fire sucks, you know that?” He coughed as he lowered the box to the floor.

“Yeah,” I said. “I wish I could help.”

I wanted to talk to Keith about Jen, but the right moment hadn’t come up. Maybe this was it.

“Why don’t you take a break,” I said. “Stay here and watch a movie with me. I’m totally bored.”

“And
I’m
totally busy.” He headed back to the door. “I’m not going to desert Marcus just ’cause you’re bored.”

“Right,” I said.

He opened the door. “’Later,” he said.

Through the window, I could see him get into his car. So, today would not be the day I talked to him about Jen. One of these days, maybe. I understood how he felt. I’d thought I had a friend in Jen, but
he
thought he had a girlfriend, somebody who accepted him, scars and all. He was probably torn up over losing her—or at least what he thought he had with her. He lost the person he thought she was. Someday I’d tell Keith that I knew how it felt to be duped like that. To lose someone you never really had in the first place.

But Keith was never going to be all that easy to talk to. He was not exactly the receptive type. The night of the fire at Marcus’s, though, I saw his soft side. Until then, I didn’t know he had one. Uncle Marcus said Keith was afraid of heights, and of course he was terrified of fire. He could have stayed on the ground and let me climb that shaky metal ladder to the roof alone, but he was determined to get to Andy. That surprised me. Maybe it even surprised
Keith.
Now, two days later, he had his don’t-get-too-close-to-me armor back on. That was okay. Keith was never going to be the nicest guy on the island, but after that night, I definitely knew what he
was:
part of my family.

My other brother.

Keith
Three Days after the Fire

A
T THE TRAILER, I STARTED GOING THROUGH THE THINGS FROM
my mother’s car. Plenty of people offered to do it for me. Dawn. Laurel. Marcus. Even Maggie. But I wanted to do it myself. Alone. I knew it was going to totally suck, and I didn’t want anyone around me if I lost it.

But I didn’t lose it.

I went through the papers first, because Marcus was badgering me about them. There could be a will, he said. Maybe a bank account I didn’t know about. Something important. So I dug through the box of papers. There weren’t all that many, and nothing important. Just bank statements and the information about my college fund and my health-insurance stuff and some other things that didn’t mean much to me.

Then there were the notebooks. The so-called memoir. I went into Mom’s room with the stack of them, laid down on her bed and started reading, and it was like having her there with me. I could hear her voice. I was probably the only person in the world able to read her handwriting, and that was just as well. I learned more about my mother than any boy should know.

Some things were really shockers. It was weird reading about
always-in-control Laurel Lockwood as a total wreck. Same with Marcus, although he’d pretty much prepared me for that revelation. I had no idea my mother’d had a baby before me. My older half brother, Sam. I could really tell how lonely she was, not being able to talk about Sam to that Neanderthal, Steve Weston. She needed somebody to open up to. She needed my father.

I read the parts about Jamie Lockwood over and over until I finally felt as though I knew him. I loved him and I hated him. I supposed that if he’d lived, that’s exactly how I would have felt about him. Sort of normal for a teenager, that love-and-hate thing. That’s the way it’d been with my mother and me. I’d put her through hell the last few years. Some of it wasn’t my fault, but a lot of it was. And she never stopped loving me. I got that. The notebooks were full of me and what I meant to her.

I was closing the last notebook, thinking about my mom and wishing I’d had the chance to really know my father, when something I’d read suddenly clobbered me over the head.

She had a safe-deposit box? And a
ten-thousand-dollar necklace?

Andy
Two Weeks after the Fire

A
REPORTER LADY CAME TO THE HOUSE, AND MOM ASKED IF
I wanted to talk to her. I said, “Sure!” So the lady came in the house and me and her sat in the living room with Mom.

She asked me all the regular things, like was I scared in the fire at Uncle Marcus’s and stuff like that. She asked me if I thought Keith was brave to go into a burning house after already being messed up by a fire. I told her, “Definitely, yes!”

Everybody knows that Keith is a hero now. He’s going to go on the
Today
show with me and Maggie. The
Today-
show people say things have come full circle, but I don’t remember what that means, even though Mom explained it to me.

“Why were you and Kimberly Taylor in your uncle’s house when the fire broke out, Andy?” the lady asked.

“Marcus had asked them to organize his CD collection,” Mom said before I could answer. Which was a good thing. I kept forgetting about the CD-collection thing Uncle Marcus made up, because it was a lie. I think Mom knows the truth, though.

I had to explain to Uncle Marcus why I was in the tower when the fire happened. Even though he was very sad about his house burning up, he laughed when I told him.

“Why are you laughing?” I asked.

“People always remember their first time,” he said to me. “And in your case, you’re going to have a whopper of a story to tell.”

I didn’t get it. I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody on account of sex being private. He must’ve forgot he told me that. I was happy he was laughing, though, so I laughed, too.

“You must have been so relieved when you saw Keith and your sister on the stairs, ready to lead you to safety,” the reporter said.

“Yeah,” I said. “That was definitely the best part.”

She asked me another question, but I wasn’t listening. I was thinking how I was wrong about that being the best part.

“I thought of an even better part,” I said.

“Better than knowing you were going to be rescued?” the reporter asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “After we ran up the stairs, we popped out the door onto the roof and we kind of fell in a pile and everybody had their arms around everybody.”

Mom leaned forward on the sofa. “That was the best part, sweetie?” she asked.

“Definitely.”

“I don’t understand,” the lady said.

Mom smiled and leaned back against the sofa again. “It’s a family thing,” she said.

“Yeah.” I remembered Keith’s arm around me even though he was coughing and choking. He didn’t let go of me even when we heard the sirens coming. “Keith’s last name is Weston,” I said to the lady, “but that doesn’t matter. He’s a Lockwood, whether he wants to be or not.”

Sara
The Lioness
September 15, 2008

S
HE WAS TIRED AND VERY, VERY ANXIOUS.

She’d barely slept the night before, thinking about Maggie getting out of prison sometime the next day. Long before sunrise, she heard Keith’s alarm go off. He had to go in early for a makeup exam. She got up in the darkness and made pancakes dotted with frozen blueberries. Keith’s favorite. He stumbled into the kitchen, looking surprised, and—she thought—pleased, by the platter of pancakes. He grabbed a couple of them in his hand and headed for the door.

“Thanks, Mom,” he said as she handed him a napkin.

“Love you,” she said, and he grunted something past the food in his mouth as he pushed open the screen door with his good shoulder.

She watched him drive off, his headlights picking up the sea oats before he turned onto the dark, empty main road toward the bridge. Then she walked, still barefoot in her robe, down to the beach and sat in the sand to watch the sunrise bleed into the sky.

Walking back to the trailer a short time later, she spotted three vans on the sandy road in front of it. As she got closer, she saw the network logos on the sides of the vehicles. She started to run, and
by the time she reached the trailer, six reporters, some of them wielding cameras, had gotten out of their vans and were descending on her.

“Has Keith left for school yet?” one of them asked.

Her face burned with anger. She ignored the reporters as she marched toward the deck of the trailer.

“We’d like to talk to him about Maggie Lockwood’s release today from prison,” another said, close on her heels.

“How do
you
feel about her getting out today?” a third asked as she climbed the steps.

“Can you ask Keith to come out to speak with—”

“No!” she shouted, turning toward them from the deck. “No, I will
not
ask him a thing about Maggie Lockwood, and neither will you! Get out of here!” She pointed in the direction of the mainland, the sleeve of her robe ballooning in the breeze.

“Is he upset that—”

“Don’t you think he’s been through enough?” Her voice sliced through the pink morning air, echoing off the other trailers. “Don’t you dare…don’t you dare…go near my son.
Ever.
Do you hear me? And don’t you fucking
dare
go near his school, either!”

The reporters stared up at her, jaws hanging open. Some of them knew the mild-mannered Sara Weston. This woman was someone different. A lioness protecting her cub. They must have realized she would kill for him.

Sara’s hands were knotted up in fists. “Don’t you dare, or I
swear
I’ll come after you all. Every one of you!”

She ran inside the trailer, slamming the door behind her, sinking to the living-room floor as her trembling legs gave out. She pressed her face into her hands. Thank God he’d had to go in to school early today! Though maybe she shouldn’t have let him go at all. Maybe
she should have hidden him inside with her. She’d been trying to treat this day like any other, but she hadn’t counted on the damn media. They would hound Keith. They’d show his scars on TV. He’d never be able to take the public exposure. The
exploitation.
He was holding on to his sanity by a thread.

She knew all at once she’d made a grave error by not moving away when they had the chance. Her unwillingness to leave the island had kept them there, and now it was too late.

Or was it?

She got to her feet, suddenly energized, and began to formulate her plan as she tossed the leftover pancakes in the garbage. She had no appetite for them now.

The phone rang, and she stared at it a moment, answering it only because it might be Keith.

“I’m so sorry to ask you this.” Laurel sounded breathless. “I don’t know where else to turn. Andy was sick during the night, and Marcus and I need to pick up Maggie. Is there a chance you could just keep him at your house for a few hours? I’m desperate, Sara.”

For a moment, Sara could think of nothing to say. How dare Laurel ask a favor on this day! Was she completely dense?

“Please, Sara,” Laurel pleaded. “I’m sure it’s just a twenty-four-hour bug. I know it’s a huge favor to ask, but I can’t leave him alone. It’ll only be for a few hours.”

Sara thought of all Laurel had done for them after Keith got out of rehab. She remembered the way she’d used her, taking advantage of Laurel’s guilt, and she heard the rare panic in her old friend’s voice. Could she really say no to her now?

“What time will you be back?” she asked.

“We should be able to pick him up by one. One-thirty at the very latest.”

One-thirty. That would be all right. She could pack while Andy was there. He wouldn’t have a clue what she was doing, and she didn’t need to take much. She’d come back in a few weeks to get the rest of their belongings. The important thing was getting away from the island now.
Today.

“All right,” she said. “But I need to run an errand and I won’t be back until about ten-thirty. Will that still work?”

“Yes, yes!” Laurel said. “That’ll be fine.”

“All right,” Sara said. “I’ll see you then.”

She was at the bank the second it opened. She didn’t look inside the jewelry case, not wanting to see the necklace or to remember Jamie fastening it around her neck. She slipped it into the box she’d already prepared for it, then rushed to the post office and mailed it to the online auction house—insured for a thousand dollars. She would have felt conspicuous insuring it for any more than that.

She raced home just in time for Andy’s arrival. He was groggy and wan, and she parked him on the sofa and was glad when he quickly fell asleep.

She left a message on Keith’s cell to come straight home after school and to ignore any and all reporters. She thought about waiting to leave until she could explain everything to him in person, but he might argue with her. He was going to be shaken up by the whole thing, and she wouldn’t have time for a lot of back-and-forth with him. It would probably take her five hours to get to Charlotte, and she needed to get there early enough to find a decent motel in the daylight. She had a few hundred dollars in cash, which would get them through a couple of days before she’d need to hit an ATM. Tomorrow, she’d call Western Carolina Bank to see if they had any new job openings. She’d look for a place to live. They wouldn’t be
able to start out in that grand apartment complex, but that didn’t matter. Maybe someday.

Andy woke up, and she gave him some ginger ale and hooked him up with Keith’s video games, so he barely knew she was in the trailer, much less that she was packing.

Suddenly, though, the plan began to unravel.

Laurel called to say they’d be late. Four-thirty or five. Sara was livid. She’d have no choice but to leave before they returned. Andy would be fine. He was sixteen, for heaven’s sake. She wrote the note for Keith, explaining everything, then she told Andy she was going to the store. She left the trailer, got into her car and drove away. With her, she had some clothes, some toiletries, the notebooks she’d never get the chance to write in again and the cell phone she always forgot to charge.

She made it over the bridge before she started crying. Turning the car around in a parking lot, she headed back the way she came. She wasn’t going to her trailer, though. No. Instead, she drove to the northern tip of the island.

She parked at the very end of the road. Then she kicked off her sandals and walked across the sand until she reached the crumbling concrete walls of the chapel, all that was left of Free Seekers.

Did tourists who walked out to this slender bit of sand speculate about the remains of the chapel? Of the five walls, only two still stood, and even they were nothing more than jagged remnants of concrete. They rose a few feet above the sloping sand dunes that had formed around them over the years. Any sign of the chapel’s roof, pews and flooring had long since disappeared. Visitors probably thought the remains had something to do with Operation Bumblebee, maybe debris from one of the old towers. They probably wondered why a tower would have been built in that spot,
surrounded on three sides by water, but they’d shrug off the question a moment later. Who cared? Who, besides Sara, cared about this barren spit of land? She’d come often to this spot over the years, the place where Jamie’s ashes had mixed with the water and the sand. Sometimes she could swear he was there with her.

She sat down on the sand, resting her back against one of the remaining chapel walls. She thought about all the days she’d spent inside the small building. Painting the walls the color of wet sand. Sewing yards and yards of fabric for the pew cushions. Taking care of Maggie.
Oh, Maggie.

The turbulent water of the inlet blurred in front of her. Digging her hands into the sand, the full impact of what she was doing hit her. Her soul was tied to this place. How could she leave?

She thought of how different her life would have been if Jamie’d had the courage to leave Laurel and marry her early on. He never would have been on Marcus’s boat. He’d still be alive, still a part of her future as well as her past. But it was stupid and pointless to think about what might have been. She had to focus on what was best for Keith. She thought Jamie would approve of her plan for their son.

Getting to her feet, she lifted her face to the sky and drew in air from the ocean and inlet and Intracoastal all in one breath. She would never stand there again. She was losing this, letting go of one more fragile thread that connected her to the man she’d always loved.

Bending over, she scooped up two handfuls of sand and folded her fingers carefully around the grains. There had to be some container in the car that would hold them. She could keep the sand forever, she thought as she walked away from the chapel ruins. She’d take this small part of the island, this small part of Jamie, with her.

But as she walked, she felt the sand spilling from the crevices in her fists. The tighter she held on to it, the more it slipped through her fingers, until by the time she reached her car, her hands were nearly empty…but not quite. Opening her hands, she looked at the thin layer of powdery sand coating her palms. She studied the grains of sand for a moment, those beige and white and brown bits of her past. Then lifting her hands close to her face, she leaned forward and blew them away.