The Deepest Secret (33 page)

He throws up his hands. “Where the hell is this coming from? What do you call my decision to live away from this family? You don’t call that a hard choice?”

She laughs, a bitter sound.

He stares at her. Her face is contorted, unrecognizable. Unlikeable. “What do you want me for, Eve? You don’t let me touch you. You don’t talk to me. What am I to you?”

She looks at him. He sees nothing in her eyes, no warmth, no love. She doesn’t answer.

Later, they drive to the airport. He can’t wait to get back to DC. In all ways, it’s the opposite of how it should be. As they drive down the ravine road, they pass a line of police cars parked along the berm, uniformed officers walking up and down the shoulder, studying the ground. He glances at Eve and sees that she’s watching them, too.

SECOND BASE

“You know what second base is, right?” Zach spins around in Tyler’s computer chair. He’s wearing those cool shorts with all the pockets that go down to his knees. His mom’s offered to get him some, but Tyler can only wear them at home in his bedroom, so what’s the point?

“Sure.” Tyler’s watched baseball on TV.

“That’s how far I got with Savannah.”

Oh. He should’ve guessed. Savannah’s all Zach ever talks about, her and Amy. Only now he’s not talking about Amy. He hasn’t said one word about her since
hit-skip
.

“Cool.”

“Yeah. I’m thinking about asking her to Homecoming.”

Melissa went to Homecoming when she was a freshman. She’d
worn a shiny red dress with sparkles sewn around the waist. She’d looked like a flower. “Cool,” he says again.

“You’d have liked that movie. We got to rent it when it came out.”

He and Zach have seen a million movies together. They can recite lines and get each other laughing before they’ve even said more than a few words. They’ve debated which are the Top Ten Movies of All Time, and whether
The Mist
sucked or was genius. Zach’s a good friend. Maybe he
can
help him figure out what to do. “Listen,” he begins, but Zach says, “Savannah’s got a friend. Tiffany? You know her.”

Tyler shakes his head. He doesn’t know Tiffany.

“Sure you do. She came over with everyone else when Amy was found. Hold on.” Zach swings around to Tyler’s computer. “I’ll show you her picture.”

“I don’t want to see her picture.”

“Sure you do. She’s super hot.” Zach taps keys, and the screen blooms from black to full color. “Dude. How come you’re watching this crap?”

It’s the driving tutorial Tyler found, showing how to change gears. His parents both drive automatic cars, but Tyler thinks he’d like manual. “Why not?”

“Because … you know.”

Tyler wants him to say it. “What?”

“Well, it’s not like you can drive.”

“Who says?”

“I don’t know. When can you get out of here? We can jump on the trampoline.”

Tyler doesn’t want to jump on the trampoline. “Who says?”

Zach frowns. “Jesus. What’s the big deal?”

“Tell me.”

“My mom, okay? She says not to talk to you about this kind of stuff.”

Zach’s been watching what he says around him? “Your mom doesn’t know anything.”

Zach looks mad. He’s going to say something mean, and Tyler wants to hear it. But all Zach says is, “Come on, man. Let’s do something. Wanna game?”

Zach’s being careful. Like Tyler’s going to cry or something? “Get out of here.”

“Seriously?”

Tyler kicks the chair Zach’s sitting in, sending it rolling. Zach pushes himself up. “Whatever.”

Tyler listens to the sound of Zach’s running footsteps on the stairs, the slam of the front door.

When he goes downstairs, his mom’s at the sink, washing lettuce. “Hey, stranger,” she says, giving him a smile that doesn’t reach all the way across her face. She hasn’t really smiled in days. “Why did Zach leave in such a hurry?”

“He had football practice.”

“Really? At this time of night?”

“I guess.”

“Well, it was nice to see him. I was going to ask him to stay for dinner. I could have given him a ride home.”

“Maybe next time,” Tyler says, though he knows there won’t be a next time.

The evening’s purple and filled with the green smell of cut grass and the sweet smoke of barbecuing. Voices come over fences; windows are opened to let out the sound of televisions playing. Holly’s standing on her front porch, talking to a man. “Who’s that?” Tyler asks.

“Oh, those are our new neighbors, Mark and Holly. I’ve forgotten you haven’t met them yet. Want to say hi?”

Mark the Cop’s bigger than he’d expected. His blond hair’s
shorter than it was in his wedding picture, and his low voice rumbles all the way across the street to where Tyler and his mom are walking. Holly lifts her hands to her face and pulls back her hair. She looks unhappy. Are they fighting? “That’s okay.”

Mark turns and goes down the steps. He nods as he crosses to his car. Holly sees Tyler, but she doesn’t wave or smile. She leans in the doorway with her arms crossed.

“They seem like a nice couple.” His mom’s face is puffy, like she’s been crying again, but she’s smiling, hard. “They have the cutest little boys.”

She’s already told him this, when she came back from asking them if they’d use regular light bulbs. “Uh huh.”

Sophie’s in her front yard, crouching by the flowers around her maple tree. She’s wearing her floppy-brimmed hat tied beneath her chin and long gardening gloves. Her black hair falls over her shoulders. She looks like an old lady, nothing like what she looks like at night, dressed in black leather. She keeps her head down as she digs in the dirt, even though they’re walking right past her. Tyler’s mom doesn’t say anything to Sophie, either. She just keeps on talking to Tyler about those two little boys, Christopher and Cameron, even though it’s not Cameron, it’s Connor. Tyler glances behind him and sees Sophie watching them from beneath the brim of her hat. Quickly, she moves around so that her back is to them, and he can’t see her face at all.

Dr. Cipriano’s unloading a box from the backseat of his car. It’s covered with plastic. When he sees them, he sets the box on the ground and flexes his muscles, makes a face for the camera. It’s a lame picture, but Tyler takes it anyway. “Nice to have those reporters gone, isn’t it?” he says, coming over. He’s wearing a short-sleeved green shirt and black jeans that look brand new.

Tyler backs away. That thing in his basement is a
python
. No one’s allowed to have them. They swallow things whole—crocodiles,
monkeys, deer, even people. He eyes the box on the driveway. He bets anything there’s a live, frightened animal inside.

“I keep waiting for them to return,” his mom says.

“Let’s hope they don’t. It’d be nice to have our street back to ourselves. I’m sure Charlotte hated it. How’s she doing?”

Pythons can grow to be more than twenty feet long. They kill their prey by wrapping around them and squeezing. He realizes his mom’s looking at him. Dr. Cipriano, too.

“Next month, right?” his mom asks.

His dentist keeps an illegal snake. His mom has no idea. “Yeah.” She’s circled the date on the calendar in black
—dental checkup
.

“See you then.”

“Thanks, Neil.”

Albert’s standing in his front yard, frowning down at the ground.

“Hi, Albert,” his mom calls, and Albert looks over.

“Hey. Got a minute? What does this look like to you?”

So Tyler and his mom walk over and look down. It’s dark now, and hard to make things out. It looks like Albert’s pointing to a heap of small brown pellets. Tyler crouches, and his mom grabs his arm. “Don’t,” she says, and he looks at her with surprise. “It’s just cat food,” he says. It’s exactly like what Rosemary used to scoop out into Sugar’s bowl.

“No, it’s not. That’s poison.”

Tyler’s fingers curl to his palms. He’d almost touched it. But he’s wearing gloves, the way he always does.

She’s looking all around the ground, toeing the leaves with her shoe. “It looks intentional.” Her voice is worried.

“Nah,” Albert says. “Who would do something like that? Had to be carelessness.”

“I don’t know, Albert,” she says, but Tyler sees her glance to where Mr. Farnham’s washing his car, rubbing the sponge down the hood. “But you’d better keep Sugar inside.”

“I hate to do it. She loves chasing chipmunks.”

“Listen to my mom,” Tyler says fiercely, thinking about that huge python curled up in its cage, doing nothing but
watching
. “Rosemary would.”

Albert looks at him. “I suppose you have a point. Oh, before I forget, tell Melissa congratulations. I see she got her license.”

“I will,” his mom promises.

Mr. Farnham is spraying his car with great arcs of water. Suds run down the gutter to the drain. It makes Tyler think of that last stormy night, when Amy died. Mr. Farnham waves, the way he always does, pretending they’re friendly. Tyler’s mom doesn’t wave back.

They turn onto the bike path. “How come the Farnhams don’t have any kids?” he asks.

“I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t want children, or maybe they couldn’t have them. Your dad and I were lucky.” She puts her arm around his shoulders and squeezes. She’s smiling at him, and he pulls away.

“What if one of them wanted children but the other one didn’t?”

She sighs. “Well, that would be really sad for the person who wanted children. Why, Tyler? Have they said something to you?”

It’s not a lie to tell her. “No.”

Kids are playing football in the field. They’ve got lanterns rigged to light the area and his mom moves over to block him. Tyler and Zach used to throw around a glow-in-the-dark football his mom got him. Once Zach threw the ball too far and it landed in the creek, and they had to run after it, laughing the whole time, as it swept along in the current. Tyler wonders how long it takes to make a memory go away. He wants this memory to disappear and take Zach with it.

They reach the playground. When Tyler was little, he used to think this place was just for him because no one else was ever around. He holds up his camera and focuses on the abandoned plastic bucket sitting on its side.

“You used to love playing in the sandbox,” his mom says.

He’d dig in the sand that looked hard in moonlight but wasn’t, and turn up the most amazing things. A matchbox car, a yo-yo, rubber balls, and polished pennies that gleamed like gold. It made him think the world was filled with treasure. Now he knows his mom must’ve done it, pulled the toys out of her pocket when he wasn’t looking and dropped them in. What a dumb little kid he’d been.

“Let’s sit down for a minute.” There’s an empty bench facing the basketball court. “I need to talk to you about something.”

Melissa?
He almost gasps this out loud. Instead, he aims his camera at the kid who’s bouncing a ball and jumping high to dump it through the hoop.

“I talked with Nori the other day,” his mom says.

He’s been focusing on the strings hanging from the basket, trying to trap all of them within his viewfinder, and now he lowers his camera and looks at her.

“Yoshi’s pretty sick,” his mom says.

He’d been expecting this, but the words crawl through his skin and clutch his insides. He feels a little lightheaded. “How sick?”

“They’ve stopped the chemo.” His mom puts her arm around his shoulders gently. “I’m sorry.”

Yoshi’s always been different. She knows the deal as much as any of them, but she never let it get to her. She just makes jokes. She’s always made him feel better. It’s impossible to think of her just … stopping. “How long?”

“Maybe a few weeks.”

Weeks. It doesn’t seem real. “I just talked to her. I never even tried on her stupid mask.” They were going to celebrate when she turned twenty-one, that magical, defiant number. They were going to eat cake together on Skype and drink Dr Pepper. But she wasn’t going to make it. He knows only two kids who did.

“It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not.”

“It won’t happen to you.”

He pulls away. “You don’t know that.”

“We’re going to find a cure, honey. It’s just a matter of time. Until then, we’ll stick to the plan, okay?”

Sunscreen applied every two hours. Vitamin D pill taken with every meal. Ibuprofen, too, after his mom found that study that showed it reduced the risk of skin cancer. Stay inside; keep the drapes closed. “You think following the rules will save me. Yoshi followed the rules. She was careful.”

“I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

“You can’t stop it!”

“I won’t give up. I’ll never give up.” She reaches over and pats his hair the way she always does, combing the curls with her fingers. “I’d do anything for you, honey.”

He thinks of Yoshi, how she’d been hoping, too. Melissa has everything,
everything
. But she’s the one who goes and does a stupid thing like drive drunk.

Holly’s front door hangs open, leaving only the thin screen standing between the inside of her house and the outside. She must be around somewhere close. People just don’t leave their doors hanging wide open in the middle of the night. Tyler cups his hands around his mouth and whispers into the darkness. “Holly?”

Silence.

“Holly!”

A sleepy voice drifts down. “Who’s there?”

Relief washes over him. He steps off the porch and looks up the blank face of the house. He can’t see her anywhere. “It’s me. Tyler.”

“Just a second.”

He paces and she appears, a pale shape coming down the stairs that resolves into Holly, long bare legs flashing beneath the short
nightgown she wears. She comes to the door and pushes it open, and he sees it’s not a nightgown at all. It’s a large T-shirt. She brushes hair out of her eyes. “Hey.”

“Sorry,” he says. “Your door was open.”

“Was it?” She yawns. “You okay? You need to talk?”

He wants to tell her how terrible it’s been, how confused and lost he feels, but an ocean of grief suddenly swells inside him. He’s going to drown in all the words he wants to say. He will sob right in front of her.

“Hey,” she says in a different voice. “Let’s sit down.”