Lock and Key

by Sarah Dessen

  I’d found the photo on the island when I came downstairs, and I picked it up, carrying it over to the table to look at while I ate my breakfast. By the time Jamie came down twenty minutes later, I should have long moved on to the paper and my horoscope, but I was still studying it.

  “Ah,” he said, heading straight to the coffeemaker. “You found the ad. What do you think?”

  “This is an ad?” I asked. “For what?”

  He walked over to the island. “Actually,” he said, digging around under some papers, “that’s not the ad. This is.”

  He slid another piece of paper in front of me. At the top was the picture I’d been looking at, with the words IT’S ABOUT FAMILY in thick typewriter-style block print beneath it. Below that was another picture, taken in the present day, of a bunch of twenty-somethings gathered on what looked like the end zone of a football field. They were in T-shirts and jeans, some with arms around each other, others with hands lifted in the air, clearly celebrating something. IT’S ABOUT FRIENDS, it said underneath. Finally, a third picture, which was of a computer screen, filled with tiny square shots of smiling faces. Looking more closely, I could see they were same ones as in the other pictures, cut out and cropped down, then lined up end to end. Underneath, it said, IT’S ABOUT CONNECTING: UME.COM.

  “The idea,” Jamie explained over my shoulder, “is that while life is getting so individualistic—we all have our own phones, our own e-mail accounts, our own everything—we continue to use those things to reach out to each other. Friends, family . . . they’re all part of communities we make and depend on. And UMe helps you do that.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Thousands spent on an advertising agency,” he said, reaching for the cereal box between us, “hours wasted in endless meetings, and a major print run about to drop any minute. And all you can say is ‘wow’?”

  “It’s better than ‘it sucks,’” Cora said, entering the kitchen with Roscoe at her heels. “Right?”

  “Your sister,” Jamie told me in a low voice, “does not like the campaign.”

  “I never said that,” Cora told him, pulling the fridge open and taking out a container of waffles as Roscoe headed my way, sniffing the floor. “I only said that I thought your family might not like being featured, circa nineteen seventy-six, in magazines and bus shelters nationwide.”

  I looked back at the top picture, then at Jamie. “This is your family?”

  “Yep,” he said.

  “And that’s not even all of them,” Cora added, sticking some waffles into the toaster oven. “Can you even believe that? They’re not a family. They’re a tribe.”

  “My grandmother was one of six children,” Jamie explained.

  “Ah,” I said.

  “You should have seen it when we got married,” Cora said. “I felt like I’d crashed my own wedding. I didn’t know anybody.”

  It took a beat for the awkwardness following this statement to hit, but when it did, we all felt it. Jamie glanced up at me, but I focused on finishing the bite of cereal I’d just taken, chewing carefully as Cora flushed and turned her attention to the toaster oven. Maybe it would have been easier to actually acknowledge the weirdness that was our estrangement and the fact that my mom and I hadn’t even known Cora had gotten married, much less been invited to the wedding. But of course, we didn’t. Instead we just sat there, until suddenly the smoke detector went off, breaking the silence.

  “Shit,” Jamie said, jumping up as ear-piercing beeping filled the room. Immediately I looked at Roscoe, whose ears had gone flat on his head. “What’s burning?”

  “It’s this stupid toaster oven,” Cora said, pulling it open and waving her hand back and forth in front of it. “It always does this. Roscoe, honey, it’s okay—”

  But it was too late. The dog was already bolting out of the room, in full flight mode, the way he’d taken to doing the last week or so. For some reason, Roscoe’s appliance anxiety had been increasing, spurred on not only by the oven but anything in the kitchen that beeped or had the potential to do so. The smoke detector, though, remained his biggest fear. Which, I figured, meant that right about now he was probably up in my bathroom closet, his favorite hiding place of late, shaking among my shoes and waiting for the danger to pass.

  Jamie grabbed the broom, reaching it up to hit the detector’s reset button, and finally the beeping stopped. As he got down and came back to the table, Cora followed him, sliding into a chair with her waffle, which she then nibbled at halfheartedly.

  “It may be time to call a professional,” she said after a moment.

  “I’m not putting the dog on antidepressants,” Jamie told her, picking up the paper and scanning the front page. “I don’t care how relaxed Denise’s dachshund is now.”

  “Lola is a Maltese,” Cora said, “and it wouldn’t necessarily mean that. Maybe there’s some training we can do, something that will help him.”

  “We can’t keep coddling him, though,” Jamie said. “You know what the books say. Every time you pick him up or soothe him when he’s freaking out like that, you’re reinforcing the behavior.”

  “So you’d prefer we just stand by and let him be traumatized? ”

  “Of course not,” Jamie said.

  Cora put down her waffle, wiping her mouth with a napkin. “Then I just think that there’s got to be a way to acknowledge his fear and at the same time—”

  “Cora.” Jamie put down the paper. “He’s a dog, not a child. This isn’t a self-esteem issue. It’s Pavlovian. Okay?”

  Cora just looked at him for a moment. Then she pushed back her chair, getting to her feet, and walked to the island, dropping her plate into the sink with a loud clank.

  As she left the room, Jamie sighed, running a hand over his face as I pulled the family picture back toward me. Again, I found myself studying it: the varied faces, some smiling, some not, the gentle regalness of the elderly women, who were staring right into the camera. Across the table, Jamie was just sitting there, looking out at the pond.

  “I do like the ad, you know,” I said to him finally. “It’s cool.”

  “Thanks,” he said, distracted.

  “Are you in this picture?” I asked him.

  He glanced over at it as he pushed his chair out and got to his feet. “Nah. Before my time. I didn’t come along for a few more years. That’s my mom, though, in the white dress. It was her wedding day.”

  As he left the room, I looked down at the picture again, and at the girl in the center, noticing how serene and happy she looked surrounded by all those people. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be one of so many, to have not just parents and siblings but cousins and aunts and uncles, an entire tribe to claim as your own. Maybe you would feel lost in the crowd. Or sheltered by it. Whatever the case, one thing was for sure: like it or not, you’d never be alone.

  Fifteen minutes later I was standing in the warmth of the foyer, waiting for Nate to pull up at the mailbox, when the phone rang.

  “Cora?” the caller said, skipping a hello.

  “No,” I said. “This is—”

  “Oh, Ruby, hi!” The voice was a woman’s, entirely perky. “It’s Denise, Cora’s old roommate—from the party?”

  “Right. Hi,” I said, turning my head as Cora came down the stairs, briefcase in her hand.

  “So how’s life?” Denise asked. “School okay? It’s gotta be a big adjustment, starting at a new place. But Cora did say it’s not the first time you’ve switched schools. Personally, I lived in the same place my whole entire life, which is really not much better, actually, because—”

  “Here’s Cora,” I said, holding the phone out as she got to the bottom step.

  “Hello?” Cora said as she took it from me. “Oh, hey. Yeah. At nine.” She reached up, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear. “I will.”

  I walked over to the window by the door, looking for Nate. He was usually right on time, and when he wasn’t, it was often because Gervais—who had
trouble waking up in the morning and was often dragged to the car by his mother—held things up.

  “No, I’m all right,” Cora was saying. She’d gone down the hallway, but only a few steps. “Things are just kind of tense. I’ll call you after, okay? Thanks for remembering. Yeah. Bye.”

  There was a beep as she hung up. When I glanced back at her, she said, “Look. About earlier, and what I said about the wedding. . . . I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable. ”

  “It’s fine,” I said just as the phone rang again. She looked down at it, then answered.

  “Charlotte, hey. Can I call you back? I’m kind of in the middle of—Yeah. Nine a.m. Well, hopefully.” She nodded. “I know. Positivity. I’ll let you know how it goes. Okay. Bye.”

  This time, as she hung up, she sighed, then sat down on the bottom step, laying the phone beside her. When she saw me watching her she said, “I have a doctor’s appointment this morning.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Is everything—are you all right?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied. Then she quickly added, “I mean, I’m fine, health-wise. I’m not sick or anything.”

  I nodded, not sure what to say.

  “It’s just . . .” She smoothed her skirt with both hands. “We’ve been trying to get pregnant for a while, and it’s just not happening. So we’re meeting with a specialist.”

  “Oh,” I said again.

  “It’s all right,” she said quickly. “Lots of people have problems like this. I just thought you should know, in case you ever have to take a message from a doctor’s office or something. I didn’t want you to worry.”

  I nodded, turning back to the window. This would be a great time for Nate to show up, I thought. But of course he didn’t. Stupid Gervais. And then I heard Cora draw in a breath.

  “And like I was saying, about earlier,” she said. “About the wedding. I just . . . I didn’t want you to feel like I was . . .”

  “It’s fine,” I said again.

  “. . . still mad about that. Because I’m not.”

  It took me a moment to process this, like the sentence fell apart between us and I had to string the words back together. “Mad?” I said finally. “About what?”

  “You and Mom not coming,” she said. She sighed. “Look, we don’t have to talk about this. It’s ancient history. But this morning, when I said that thing about the wedding, you just looked so uncomfortable, and I knew you probably felt bad. So I thought maybe it would be better to just clear the air. Like I said, I’m not mad anymore.”

  “You didn’t invite us to your wedding,” I said.

  Now she looked surprised. “Yes,” she said slowly. “I did.”

  “Well, then the invitation must have gotten lost in the mail, because—”

  “I brought it to Mom, Ruby,” she said.

  “No, you didn’t.” I swallowed, taking a breath. “You . . . you haven’t seen Mom in years.”

  “That’s not true,” she said simply, as if I’d told her the wrong time, something that innocuous. “I brought the invitation to her personally, at the place she was working at the time. I wanted you there.”

  Cars were passing by the mailbox, and I knew any moment one of them would be Nate’s, and I’d have to leave. But right then, I couldn’t even move. I was flattened against the window, as if someone had knocked the wind out of me. “No,” I said again. “You disappeared. You went to college, and you were gone. We never heard from you.”

  She looked down at her skirt. Then, quietly, she said, “That’s not true.”

  “It is. I was there.” But even to me, I sounded unsure, at the one time I wanted—needed—to be absolutely positive. “If you’d ever tried to reach us—”

  “Of course I tried to reach you,” she said. “I mean, the time I spent tracking you down alone was—”

  Suddenly, she stopped talking. Mid-sentence, mid-breath. In the silence that followed, a red BMW drove past, then a blue minivan. Normal people, off to their normal lives. “Wait,” she said after a moment. “You do know about all that, don’t you? You have to. There’s no way she could have—”

  “I have to go,” I said, but when I reached down for the doorknob and twisted it, I heard her get to her feet and come up behind me.

  “Ruby, look at me,” she said, but I stayed where I was, facing the small crack in the door, feeling cold air coming through. “All I wanted was to find you. The entire time I was in college, and after. . . . I was trying to get you out of there.”

  Now, of course, Nate did pull up to the curb. Perfect timing. “You left that day, for school,” I said, turning to face her. “You never came back. You didn’t call or write or show up for holidays—”

  “Is that what you really think?” she demanded.

  “That’s what I know.”

  “Well, you’re wrong,” she said. “Think about it. All those moves, all those houses. A different school every time. The jobs she could never hold, the phone that was rarely hooked up, and then never in her real name. Did you ever wonder why she put down fake addresses on all your school stuff? Do you think that was some kind of accident? Do you have any idea how hard she made it for me to find you?”

  “You didn’t try,” I said, and now my voice was cracking, loud and shaky, rising up into the huge space above us.

  “I did,” Cora said. Distantly, from outside, I heard a beep: Nate, getting impatient. “For years I did. Even when she told me to stop, that you wanted nothing to do with me. Even when you ignored my letters and messages—”

  My throat was dry, hard, as I tried to swallow.

  “—I still kept coming back, reaching out, all the way up to the wedding. She swore she would give you the invitation, give you the choice to come or not. By that time I had threatened to get the courts involved so I could see you, which was the last thing she wanted, so she promised me. She promised me, Ruby. But she couldn’t do it. She upped and moved you away again instead. She was so afraid of being alone, of you leaving, too, that she never gave you the chance. Until this year, when she knew that you’d be turning eighteen, and you could, and most likely would. So what did she do?”

  “Stop it,” I said.

  “She left you,” she finished. “Left you alone, in that filthy house, before you could do the same to her.”

  I felt something rising in my throat—a sob, a scream— and bit it back, tears filling my eyes, and I hated myself for crying, showing any weakness here. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “I do, though.” And now her voice was soft. Sad. Like she felt sorry for me, which was the most shameful thing of all. “That’s the thing. I do.”

  Nate beeped again, louder and longer this time. “I have to go,” I said, yanking the door open.

  “Wait,” Cora said. “Don’t just—”

  But I ran outside, pulling the door shut behind me. I didn’t want to talk anymore. I didn’t want anything, except a moment of peace and quiet to be alone and try to figure what exactly had just happened. All those years there were so many things I couldn’t rely on, but this, the story of what had happened to my family, had always been a given, understood. Now, though, I wasn’t so sure. What do you do when you only have two people in your life, neither of whom you’ve ever been able to fully trust, and yet you have to believe one of them?

  I heard the door open again. “Ruby,” Cora called out. “Just wait a second. We can’t leave it like this.”

  But this, too, wasn’t true. Leaving was easy. It was everything else that was so damned hard.

  I’d only just gotten my door shut and seat belt on when it started.

  “What’s wrong with you? You look like crap.”

  I ignored Gervais, instead keeping my eyes fixed straight ahead. Still, I could feel Nate looking at me, concerned, so I said, “I’m fine. Let’s just go.” It took him another moment, but then he was finally hitting the gas and we were pulling away.

  For the first few blocks, I just tried
to breathe. It’s not true, I kept thinking, and yet in the next beat it was all coming back: those moves and new schools, and the paperwork we always fudged—addresses, phone—because of bad landlords or creditors. The phones that were never hooked up, that graduation announcement my mom had said was just sent out automatically. Just you and me, baby. Just you and me.

  I swallowed, keeping my eyes on the back of the bus in front of us, which was covered with an ad reading IT’S A FESTIVAL OF SALADS! I narrowed my focus to just these five words, holding them in the center of my vision, even as there was a loud, ripping burp from behind me.

  “Gervais.” Nate hit his window button. As it went down he said, “What did we just spend a half hour talking about with your mom?”

  “I don’t know,” Gervais replied, giggling.

  “Then let me refresh your memory,” Nate said. “The burping and farting and rudeness stops right now. Or else.”

  “Or else what?”

  We pulled up to a red light, and Nate turned around, then leaned back between our seats. Suddenly, he was so close to me that even in my distracted state I couldn’t help but breathe in the scent of the USWIM sweatshirt he had on: a mix of clean and chlorine, the smell of water. “Or else,” he said, his voice sounding very un-Nate-like, stern and serious, “you go back to riding with the McClellans.”

  “No way!” Gervais said. “The McClellans are first-graders . Plus, I’d have to walk from the lower school.”

  Nate shrugged. “So get up earlier.”

  “I’m not getting up earlier,” Gervais squawked. “It’s already too early!”

  “Then quit being such a pain in the ass,” Nate told him, turning back around as the light changed.

  A moment later I felt Nate glance at me. I knew he was probably expecting a thank-you, since he’d clearly gone to Mrs. Miller that morning to talk about Gervais because of what I’d said, trying to make things better. But I was so tired, suddenly, of being everyone’s charity case. I never asked anyone to help me. If you felt compelled to anyway, that was your problem, not mine.