When Secrets Die

by Lynn S. Hightower

  Blaine got up and looked out the window. She did not care if she woke Stanley up. He had introduced himself as “Stanley the Manly,” and she had smiled really hard, unable to even force out a laugh.

  No sign of her mother. She made a point of not looking at Stanley. Just being in the room with him brought on more intimacy than she liked.

  She had eaten two of the peanut-butter–stuffed celery sticks that Amaryllis had brought her on a plastic plate. Blaine felt like a snob, but her mother never used plastic plates, and if you stayed at their house, her mother cooked or took you out and did not just give you peanut butter all the time—even though the peanut butter was homemade. Amaryllis always gave out jars of the homemade peanut butter like it was a kidney she was donating, and always with that aura of the overworked, perfectionist housewifey. But looking around this place, that was a joke. Dust, dirt on the carpet. Dishes with dried-up food stacked in the sink. It smelled. It smelled like garbage. Blaine felt a bit of nausea back in her throat, and she took slow, steady breaths. Please God she was not going to be sick again, not like last night. It was just a wave of stress nausea, she got that sometimes.

  She looked out the window again. It was getting dark. Lunchtime had passed to dinnertime, and where was her mom? She should have been here by now. Please come, please come, please come.

  It had been raining hard, since before Stanley the Manly had driven up. She’d overheard him talking in the kitchen to Amaryllis. He didn’t sound happy she was there—Blaine wasn’t any happier about it.

  It made Blaine uncomfortable, knowing he was just sitting there waiting for her to leave. She should be home by now, in the cozy little house Great-Aunt Jodina had given them so they would always be safe and have a place to live. She thought of her room, and the new furniture she and her mom had bought, the mahogany desk they’d found. She shut her eyes hard, trying not to cry. She should have called Aunt Jodina for help, or even Franklin. Why had she ever called Amaryllis Burton?

  Blaine wanted to go home, to hear her mother in the kitchen chopping away at cloves of garlic, slicing onions, and playing her old-lady jazz music on the CD. She wanted to zone out in front of the TV with eight hundred cable channels instead of the ridiculous four Amaryllis and Stanley got with that stupid antenna on top of a television that was so old it was in a faux walnut veneer console cabinet. She wanted to go home to her mother’s weird but wonderful kitchen, where her mom would be pulling out the iron skillet and sloshing it slick with olive oil, and probably making some pasta and singing to herself, and asking Blaine how her day was. Just the two of them. Normal. Ned was gone, and they’d always miss him, but it was okay, just her and Mom, and better than okay when Franklin was there.

  She liked Franklin a lot. She knew he was crazy about her mother. They actually smoked cigars together and watched old movies in their sweatpants. What a cool relationship. And the best part was that it was the three of them hanging out, not a couple with a kid in the way. Sometimes Blaine and Franklin got on so well that her mother left them to whatever they were doing—usually killer backgammon or chess. Franklin was a fantastic chess player, and Blaine was still learning. And Mom would cook while they played, and it was just kind of easygoing and nice, and then Blaine could go out later with Twyla or something and not worry about leaving her mother alone. And Franklin liked to take the two of them places. His girls, he would say, clearly so happy to have two girls to call his own.

  Had her mother told Franklin what had happened between them? Had she told him about how Blaine had gone berserk and “attacked” her in the Jeep? Maybe Franklin hated her now. Maybe he’d take her mother’s side against her and never like her again.

  Blaine pictured the two of them, Mom and Franklin, driving up in front of the house to pick her up. Maybe the rain was slowing them down. She heard a car outside and got up to look out the window again. Some car she didn’t know, that didn’t slow down. She was standing on tiptoe, trying to see farther down the street, when the pain hit again, sudden and hard, stabbing just under the rib cage on her right side. Any minute now she was going to throw up.

  She wanted to run to the bathroom in her bedroom, but the pain was so bad she could hardly stand up, so she moved carefully, carefully and slowly. Stanley didn’t even wake up. Amaryllis was in the kitchen, back turned, when she headed past the doorway and down the hall, but she was aware, on some level she was sure, that Amaryllis watched her while she held her side and bent double, and Blaine expected, even dreaded, some kind of concern, a question, a Do you feel all right? But there was nothing but silence, and Blaine was in too much pain to turn around and look.

  She left the bathroom door open because she knew that Amaryllis would probably be in to see about her any minute. As expected, the vomiting was violent, so deep and so violent that Blaine felt she should be vomiting blood. There went the peanut butter, the celery, and that was all she had in her stomach. Bile next, then the white milky froth.

  She knew that she was really bad off. She knew she needed help. She threw up, again and again, as if a vomit switch had been thrown and her body could not stop no matter that there was nothing left in her stomach. And the pain up under the ribs was so bad, she could not call for help. She had no breath for it. She could not speak.

  The chills came, like they had the night before, and now she was seriously scared. It was like her body was going into shock or something. She curled up on the floor, head next to the toilet. If she didn’t move, maybe she would stop throwing up. But no, that didn’t work, and she was back up on her knees, until she could not get back up again, and she just vomited, sideways out of her mouth, on the floor.

  Where was her mother? Why didn’t she come? Why didn’t one of the adults out there come back and put her in a car and take her to an emergency room somewhere? She had always hated going to the doctor, had cringed when people even spoke about surgery, and had thought after dark thought about the things Ned had suffered in the name of medical science. She didn’t like remembering all the red marks and bruises on his little puffy arms when he came back from the hospital. But right now she would give anything to see a brightly lit emergency room, and she would tell a doctor to do whatever kind of surgery he wanted, just make the pain go away, make the vomiting stop, get her a blanket.

  Footsteps, finally, and someone in her room. A heavy tread, then Stanley’s face in the doorway. Help, she wanted to say, but it hurt too much to talk to him, and he looked at her with a certain amount of pity, but also a certain amount of shocked revulsion. What, she wanted to say, have you never seen barf? But she could not talk, she could barely breathe, with the pain that radiated beneath her ribs.

  More footsteps, soft sliding ones, and Amaryllis was there right behind Stanley. Blaine closed her eyes, then heard the bathroom door close and realized that Amaryllis had shut it. They were just leaving her there, in a pile of spew. Her throat went very tight, and she could not stop herself from crying. None of this made any sense. Why would nobody help?

  She shut her eyes tight. She could hear them.

  … needs a hospital, Amaryllis …

  … no, no, it’s the drug … the Antabuse. She has a drinking problem, this kid, and she’s violent, and she attacked her mother and refuses to go to school. Poor poor Emma Marsden, she was just at her wit’s end. And couldn’t afford the Charter Ridge thing again …

  Again? She’d never been to Charter Ridge. And she didn’t have a drinking problem, her mother did. Did her mother really say those things about her? Had she really betrayed her that way? It made no sense.

  And Stanley was getting angry. Going on about how Amaryllis let people take advantage of her good nature, and they weren’t running a halfway house for teenage delinquents, and Emma Marsden was taking advantage, and for his peace of mind he was pushing on to Orlando, he could make it by early tomorrow morning and pick up a load down there.

  The voices faded. The bedroom door shut. And Blaine, who was a very smart young woman, figured it out,
sick as she was. No, she did not have a drinking problem, and neither did her mother. Amaryllis was lying. Lying about Mom—after all, there were no other signs. The only sign had been her mom getting sick—sick just like Blaine was sick right this minute. Mom was not a drunk, and Blaine was not a drunk, and Amaryllis … Amaryllis was an evil bitch and up to no good, but what exactly she was up to was hard to figure.

  But the worst thought was that if Amaryllis lied about all those other things, had she lied about her mom being on the way to get her?

  Blaine remembered the wind kicking up before the storm, the way the breeze had felt, so warm and so inviting, and something inside her had wanted to just take off then and there, and oh, God, why hadn’t she gone? In her mind she saw that open front door, and knew how far away it was, for a girl who did not even have the strength to sit up when she spewed. She closed her eyes tight because she knew one other thing too. She knew that her mother had no idea where she was.

  CHARLIE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Charlie had been with Child Protective Services for seven years, though back when he and Janine had first located in Kentucky, Child Protective Services had been the enemy. Charlie was still career army then—a sergeant major. He’d been offered OCI three times, and his wife had gone doe-eyed at the notion of him going to Officer Candidate School and leaving for work every day in the color and confabulation of the management uniform. Neither one of them cared so much whether or not the family moved up in the social pecking order that rules military life, and Charlie had never seriously considered it. He was a rescuer, and a molder of young men, and his calling was to nursemaid teenage boys throbbing with the hormone dumps, inexplicable rages, and confusion that came with the territory. He knew when to take them seriously, when to ignore them, and he knew how to earn their respect. Better still, he knew how to motivate them, inspire them, and, most particularly, how to scare them utterly shitless.

  And all that wonderful knowledge, all that experience, all that ability to be objective, to reassure the parents of his charges and to bask in their gratitude when he worked wonders with the kids who had baffled, enraged, and grieved them since puberty … yeah, all that shit had gone right out the window when it came to his own sons, most particularly the oldest, most particularly Kirby.

  The trouble began with the transfer to Kentucky. Oh, Kirby had shown the usual teenage flickers before then, but it was the move that shifted everything into high gear. No teenager wants to leave his friends and his school, but army brats know the drill, and this transfer was going to be a good one. The army was going to reward Charlie and thus Charlie’s family with a few years in a recruiting assignment—a nine-to-five, and crucial to a military that was converting to an all-volunteer army. They needed someone who could find the right kind of recruit, and then inspire said recruit to commit to a job that wasn’t just a buck ninety-five an hour, and wasn’t just the chance to become a servant to the whims of the U.S. government, it was the opportunity to become an indentured servant with benefits. Lots of benefits.

  They’d moved from Denver, Colorado, to Lexington, Kentucky, settling into an apartment complex near Tates Creek High School and Tates Creek Middle School. The rent was cheap. Kirby was enrolled as a sophomore at the high school, which shared a parking lot and campus space with the middle school, where Mitchell was placed in the seventh grade and where his wife Janine got a job teaching geometry to advanced ninth-grade students. It had seemed perfect.

  The cost of living in Lexington was high, housing in particular, but the economy was humming. It was horse farm country, which put land prices at a premium, kind of like Los Angeles, although this town was nothing like California. It was pretty here. The horse farms that circled the town would take your breath away, and the people weren’t as conservative and Bible Belt as they were farther south in Tennessee. Everything was pretty, nothing junky, just miles and miles of rolling hills ankle-deep in green grass, four-plank wood fences painted tarry black, houses that just made you shake your head, and horse barns that would have been impressive on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

  So they’d signed a lease, unconcerned and in fact smugly pleased that their home was enmeshed with project housing. Charlie wasn’t a snob, and he and Janine believed in helping people when they needed it. Charlie figured the projects would be nothing to a man whose family was used to base housing, and who worked with teenage boys and now girls every day of his career. For a man who’d handled himself pretty well during Desert Storm, it was no big deal to imagine a life where he was happy to help the single moms who might need some man-work done around the place; and the gang kids, he’d be happy to kick their butts. Charlie and Janine had never lived near project housing, and Janine’s best friend, Natasha, who had grown up in the projects, told Charlie he was being an ass.

  But he and Janine blithely ignored Natasha and her sour attitude and figured they’d buy or rent a house later on, after they’d had time to get acclimated to the city. They’d have time to find a place they liked and more importantly could afford in the Tates Creek School District, where the housing prices weren’t so bad. They could have gone on and bought a house, they’d found one they liked on Boston Road, but Charlie had been swept up in the beauty of the farmland around Lexington and was toying with the idea of living in the country. Janine was dead set against it—said it would be hard on the boys at their age. Said they had enough trouble in the move-every-minute world of the military dependent and no point making it harder. So they’d rented and decided to wait and see. They were going to be more particular this time. Charlie was getting close enough to retirement that they were thinking about digging in someplace and staying put. Teenagers were difficult enough without moving them every six months. They’d seen a lot of that. A lot of their friends with families on the move—people with highly developed coping skills and tight family camaraderie, and all of it going to hell when the kids hit the age of the enemy.

  In retrospect, Charlie often wondered if they’d been able to settle somewhere a couple of critical years earlier, maybe Kirby wouldn’t have hit the wall like he did. Not that Charlie had been in a position to have made such a thing possible. It was just one of those guilt-inducing parent thoughts that he countered with the example of other parent-veterans he’d talked to—many of whom never moved once, but still went through a lot of shit with their kids, so who knew? The hardest thing he’d learned was that he didn’t know.

  He’d eaten a lot of crow. The man who had been understanding on the outside but sneering on the inside when he saw the shit storms some of these moms and dads took from their kids—he’d become one of those bewildered dads. He’d joined that club of Parents Without a Clue—the club he and Janine had joked about since before they’d even had children. They sure as hell weren’t going to put up with any crap. They were going to be loving, but firm. They weren’t going to be weak. Their kids weren’t going to walk on the other side of the mall because they were embarrassed to be seen with Mom and Dad. Their kids wouldn’t slink down in the car and will themselves invisible. And they’d know better than to mouth off—in public or private.

  Just listing the kind of stuff he and Janine used to think had often helped them keep a sense of humor, helped relieve the tension and make them laugh, but it also made them cry. Ignorance is bliss, Janine said. Sometimes he could hear the echo of his own voice, when he’d said something stupid like “Any parent who thinks disrespect from their child, and the way they act, isn’t their fault for being a weak or a stupid example is just kidding themselves.” He’d eaten those words every day for six years. They didn’t taste any better now than they had the first time.

  Now the boys were out of the house and into the dorms. Both Kirby and Mitchell had survived, and Charlie and Janine had made it through with their marriage intact and better than ever. Now they were on their own. The phrase “Sergeant Dad” had acquired an almost affectionate ring. The boys came home to hang out maybe one weekend out of si
x, not counting finals week, and once in a great while some problem might be approached in that side-angled subtle way young men have of skirting around an issue that could make or break them, something worrisome enough to mention in an offhand way to Dad.

  The boys’ mother had it even better. Janine, hell, Janine was a goddess as far as Kirby and Mitchell were concerned, and anybody who said the empty nest was a tragic place was either greedy for some sympathy to go along with the good life, female, or maybe just mentally ill.

  Mitchell was a freshman at the University of Central Florida now, and continually wondering if he could cut an architecture degree while he kept up an A average, and he had trouble making friends. He’d posed the architecture question to Charlie during the spring of his senior year at Creek—which had gone much better than. Kirby’s senior year, mainly because Mitchell had been in the band. Put your kid in the band, that’s what Charlie told anybody who would listen. Mitchell had played on the drum line, which was what Kirby should have done, but at the time Kirby was just trying to stay alive, and band was the least of their worries.

  Charlie’s first reaction to Mitchell’s question was to say, “Hell, boy, if you want to cut it, then put your nose to the dirt and make it happen, don’t sit around whining about ‘what if.’” Luckily, that wasn’t what he’d actually said. Reactions like that typified the kind of mistake he’d made with Kirby, and his oldest son had come so close to going over the edge that Charlie had been motivated by sheer parental terror into squelching those first reactions. It was almost a habit, these days, being careful with his opinions, and it had the unexpected benefit of keeping things cool with Janine. He didn’t make quite so many dumb-guy mistakes.