The Secrets of Tree Taylor (24 page)

And now, in some way, into mine.

Chuck laughed and headed for the exit.

Penny stayed where she was. She watched him. Even after he was out of sight, her chest heaved in and out. Her rasping breath silenced every other sound.

After what felt like minutes, I broke the silence. “Penny? Has he been hurting you?”

Tears streamed down her face, but her expression didn’t change. She could have been a soldier in battle, eyes fixed, mouth a thin line of determination.

“Tell me!” I begged.

Finally, she said, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” She ran for the nearest exit, through the girls’ locker room.

This time, I raced after her. She didn’t get her basket. Her clothes. Her shoes. I followed her out to the front. She was walking on gravel. Stomping. Barefoot.

“Penny, stop!”

She didn’t.

And then Chuck. He drove up beside us in his old Chevy. He stopped so short that gravel flew. Then he leaned over and opened the passenger door. “Get in!” he commanded.

Penny kept walking. She didn’t even glance up.

He rolled along beside us. “Don’t be an idiot. Get in the car, Mouse! I’m driving you home.”

I turned to him. “She’s not going home with you! Penny’s going home with me.”

He glared at me. Then he looked once more at Penny and slammed the door. When he took off, his tires squealed like they’d been stabbed.

“Penny, tell me. You have to tell me.”

She shook her head furiously and kept walking. “Nobody would believe me.”

“You’re wrong.
I
believe you.” I wasn’t sure what it was that I believed. Chuck was a bully. He was scaring her. Terrifying her. Hurting her? And Penny was on the edge because of it. She was about to jump over.

“Penny, come home with me. Please? I believe you. So will my dad.”

“Your
dad
?” she shouted. “Keep him out of this!”

“Why? You have to tell some—”

“No! I can’t!”

“Yes, you can. I’ll go with you. We’ll go together. Dad can help. He can talk to your mom. He can make Chuck stop.”

While I talked, sputtered, tossing out words to her, her head shook back and forth, hard enough to rattle her brain.

“You can’t just let him keep on bullying you, Penny. You have to tell. Don’t keep this a secret any longer!” I cringed at the word.

She glared at me. “It’s
my
secret! Not yours! Just leave me alone!”

Tires screeched behind us. I whirled around in time to see Chuck’s car bounce over the grassy path. I thought for sure he was going to run over us.

Brakes squealed. The car stopped right next to Penny. Before I could open my mouth to scream, Chuck slid across the seat, threw open the passenger door, and reached out to grab Penny’s arm. He pulled her off her feet and into the car. The door slammed, and they took off, weaving through the grass and back onto gravel.

The last sound I heard, above spitting gravel and squealing tires, was the sound of Chuck’s King Kong victory yell.

I collapsed onto the grass and held my head in my hands. What was I doing? What had I done?

I hadn’t asked to see into Penny’s life. I’d just stumbled into her web of fear and pain. And now I’d caused her even more pain.

Maybe I’d gotten it all wrong. What did I know about how she felt? I didn’t have my imaginary compassion machine. Maybe the whole thing really was brother-and-sister fighting, and I’d just fanned the flames. I would end up making Penny’s life even harder if I made a big deal out of nothing. Penny had a point. It was
her
secret.

Only what if I wasn’t wrong?

I went back to the pool for my shoes, then walked home, still not sure what I was going to do about anything.

A tiny circle of light in the garden told me Dad was weeding by flashlight. I headed for the light. When he spotted me, he waved. In his dirty overalls and muddy garden gloves,
my dad may never have looked less like a doctor than he did right then.

Still a few feet away from him, I said, “Dad, I need to tell you something.”

Fifteen minutes later we were driving to Penny’s house. Dad didn’t want me along, but he finally agreed to let me ride with him as long as I didn’t try to go inside.

We didn’t talk. We’d done our talking in the garden. I’d spilled every single thing I knew about Penny, about Chuck, about Penny’s mother and stepfather. I’d tried hard to keep what I knew separate from what I thought, what I suspected.

Dad hadn’t interrupted me or asked a single question until I had everything out. Then he nodded, like maybe he’d already suspected something without me telling on Penny—or maybe I just wanted to believe that.

We were almost there when he turned to me and asked, “Do you think Penny knows you’re talking to me?”

“I don’t know. She told me not to. She said it was her secret, not mine.”

Dad looked right straight at me then, like I was the one being hurt. “Some secrets belong to everybody, Tree. Sometimes the truth matters more than anything else. You did the right thing.”

Tears clogged the corners of my eyes. It was what I needed to hear, what I wanted to be true. Only I didn’t know if it was true or not.

Dad parked at the far end of the Atkinsons’ narrow gravel drive. I watched him take his long strides up the lane toward
their house. No hat, no doctor’s bag. He hadn’t even bothered to change out of his garden clothes.

I lost sight of him when he was still a few yards from the house. Darkness closed around the car like a giant gloved hand. It got so dark that when I tried staring out my side window, all I could see was my own reflection. I turned away. I couldn’t stand to look at myself.

What if I’d done the wrong thing? What if I’d messed up everything for Penny … 
and
for Dad?

He was in that house so long that I started getting scared. I didn’t see Chuck’s car, but what if he was in the house? I wanted to go in and make sure Dad was okay. But I knew he’d kill me if I showed up at the door. So would Penny.

I tried to think who lived out this way. In ten more minutes, I told myself, I would run to the nearest house and phone the sheriff.

Then I remembered. Did Hamilton even have a sheriff?

The door opened, and my dad came out alone. His face didn’t give me the slightest hint about what had happened inside that house. He climbed into Buddy, but he didn’t start the engine right away. He just grabbed the steering wheel and squeezed it so hard that even in the dim light I could see the whites of his knuckles. Then he hit the steering wheel. I cringed. He hit it again. And again. And again, the sound echoing inside the car like thunder.

My whole body shook with every slap.

Silently, I watched my dad and wondered how many secrets he’d had to carry in his life—how many he was carrying right at that moment, as he slammed the steering wheel in the
dark of night. A picture of Dad and Mrs. Kinney flashed through my head—both of them sitting on the porch, sharing the gun, sharing the secret of what really happened inside that house.

Dad stopped beating the steering wheel. But I could still hear the slapping sound in my head. He stared out the windshield like he couldn’t remember where he was or where he was supposed to go.

Finally, he turned the key in the ignition and backed out of the driveway before he thought to turn on his lights.

We were halfway home before either of us spoke. I couldn’t stand the silence another second. “Dad, I’m sorry. Did I do the wrong thing? Should I have stayed out of it and let Penny keep her—”

“No, Tree.” He didn’t take his gaze off the road. “You did the right thing. It may not feel right for a while. I don’t think Penny’s going to be thanking you any time soon. But her mother might … or might not. I think she knew more than she wanted to believe. She needed to hear what you had to say. She’s a good woman. And I guarantee that Penny’s stepbrother won’t be hurting her anymore. He’s leaving tonight … for good. You did the right thing.”

“Did I?” Swallowed tears made my voice come out rough, salty. “It was
her
secret. Maybe I didn’t have any right to tell.”

“This was her secret. But once you saw into it, this was one secret you couldn’t leave alone. You had to push to the truth.”

“But how do you know? How can I tell which secrets to leave alone and which secrets not to? I didn’t know for sure he was hurting her.”

Dad looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time. “That’s the problem, Tree. We don’t always know. Only God sees everything. There aren’t any secrets with him. The rest of us have to do the best we can.”

A firefly smashed into the windshield, leaving a glowing smudge.

Again, I thought of the promise I had made to Randy to write about Mr. and Mrs. Kinney. It had sounded so easy … until I got to know her, Mrs. Kinney, a real live person. “What if I become a writer and dig for the truth and uncover all these secrets? How am I supposed to know which ones to write about and which ones to leave alone? I don’t get it, Dad.”

“I think you do get it, Tree. Or you’re starting to.”

Was I? Was he right?

Dad glanced over at me with the saddest smile I’d ever seen. “Nothing weighs on us so heavily as a secret.”

I knew that quote. My dad recited it like he didn’t have to think about it. Like he’d already thought about it more years than I’d been alive.

Like he’d already written it.

Because he had.

Nothing weighs on us so heavily as a secret
.

That was one of my anonymous notes. All the notes, the
anonymous
notes, fanned through my mind, swirling words across my brain like a Missouri tornado. Notes about truth and life, about gossip … about secrets. “Dad? The notes … that was you?”

He took a minute before answering. “There were things I
wanted to say to you, Tree. Only I knew you needed to find out for yourself.” He let out a one-note laugh, if you could call it that. “I got the feeling you wouldn’t have appreciated the thoughts if they’d come right from me. I couldn’t blame you. I haven’t exactly had my head on straight lately.”

“Me neither.”

Dad took in a big breath and let it out so long, it filled the car. “I guess all we can do is make sure that when we do reach into other people’s lives—or when we don’t—we act with the best motives we can.”

I tried to look inside myself and make sure I’d told Penny’s secret—or what I knew about it—for the right motive. Not from gossip or curiosity but because I was afraid Penny was being hurt.

From the frown of concentration on my dad’s face, he might have been looking inside himself too. “I don’t always get it right, Tree,” he admitted. “I try. I really do. And if I get it wrong, that’s something I have to live with.”

“Then maybe stepping into other people’s truths isn’t worth it.”

“I hear that,” Dad said. “Maybe that’s why most Americans don’t really want to know the truth about Vietnam. They’re content to call a war a ‘conflict.’ They want to hear ‘The casualties were light.’ I suppose that’s why every day so many folks skim over the secrets they just might uncover if they went deeper.”

I thought about Eileen and the way she managed to stay out of things like the Kinneys or Vietnam or even Butch and Laura.

“Sometimes I envy those people who can ignore all the uncomfortable secrets,” Dad said. After a second, he smiled over at me. “But you and I aren’t like those guys, Tree. We can’t look away. Some can.
You
can’t. You need to know things. You have to get to the truth … even if it means proving other people wrong. And that’s okay. That’s just the way it is. Only once you unwrap a secret, whatever you choose to do with what you uncover—that becomes your responsibility, Tree.”

Dad and I hadn’t once mentioned the Kinneys, but they were right there in that car with us. I wished it weren’t so, but I had to know what Mrs. Kinney did and why she did it. Even if I never wrote about that shooting, never told another living soul, I had to know the truth. I hadn’t just stepped into her secret—I’d stepped into her life.

“Dad, I need to ask Mrs. Kinney what really happened.”

In the dark, I felt Dad’s arm slip around my shoulder. “I know, Tree. I know.”

Jack proved true to his word about reuniting the Adams-Taylor quartet, although it took him a week longer than he planned. When the Adams family finally showed up at our house Sunday night, I could have blown the trumpet myself. I yearned for
normal
, if only for a night.

I’d been feeling like the Lone Ranger minus Tonto. I missed Sarah already. Her parents made her go with them to look at houses in Kansas. I schlepped baskets alone all week, or with the help of D.J., who made a better manager than a basketgirl.

Eileen had gone back to Butch—not that she’d ever admitted a separation. When she wasn’t out with him, or waiting by the phone, she was holed up with her textbooks.

And Penny. Penny wouldn’t talk to me. She wouldn’t come to the phone. The last time I called her house, Karen relayed the message that her sister would not be coming to the phone—or to the pool—ever again.

Dad told me to give her time.

It was hard not to keep thinking about her and wondering if I should have done something different, or
not
done something, or done it sooner, or …

And I missed Mrs. Kinney and our talks over hot chocolate with nutmeg. I hadn’t been to see her because I knew that when I did, I’d have to ask her about the shooting. I’d finally know the truth, and I didn’t know what would come after that.

I needed Sunday night with the Adams family. When the grown-ups settled into making music together, Jack and I exchanged victory arm punches.

“You did it!” I shouted.

“I did.” Jack took my hands, and we did a rock-’n’-roll bridge, both swinging under.

Eileen folded her arms and tilted her head at us. But even she couldn’t hide a grin. “Can’t you wait until they start playing music before you dance?”

“Guess not.” I back-stepped into the mashed potato, with a little monkey thrown in.

Jack gave the signal, and we broke into the madison, the coolest line dance ever.