The Secret Keepers

by Trenton Lee Stewart

  The next morning, for the first time he could remember, Reuben woke up wishing his mom had to work. He felt rested now and eager to use the watch again. Instead he had to apply himself to a slew of Saturday-morning chores, then sit through an hour of designing dream houses with his mom—an activity that, under the circumstances, required a supreme effort of patience and offered none of the usual satisfactions. His mom did make him a hearty omelet, though, using up the last of the sale eggs. And though he’d had to feign his cheerfulness all morning, he felt so joyous when she left for work in the afternoon, his goodbye hug was genuinely affectionate and enthusiastic. His mom went out with a puzzled smile, and Reuben flew to his closet.

  For the rest of that Saturday, and indeed for the entirety of the next few days, Reuben could think about almost nothing except his newfound ability. He went to bed at night exhausted, thinking about the watch, and he woke up in the morning excited, still thinking about it. He spent every waking hour practicing, testing the limits of his skills and all the time improving them.

  More than once he thought of Mrs. Genevieve. Wouldn’t she be amazed if she knew what the watch could do? Reuben rather wished he could go and show her. But having the power of invisibility was the sort of secret you kept from absolutely everyone if you could. It was the secret of a lifetime.

  Reuben had grown used to feeling different from other kids. He hadn’t liked it, but he’d made the best of it. Now, all of a sudden, he was not just different—he was special. This was an entirely new and wonderful thing to feel, and he had no intention of spoiling it. The more adept he became with the watch, the more special he felt, and as a result he worked harder at mastering it than he’d ever worked at anything in his life.

  Reuben’s skills improved so rapidly, in fact, that when on Tuesday afternoon he spied the Directions turning down an alley behind the neighborhood hardware store, he abandoned his long habit of observing the men from a safe distance. Instead, quickening his pace to catch up, he followed them.

  Instead, quickening his pace to catch up, he followed them.

  Almost at once he realized his mistake. He had figured the Directions were taking a shortcut to the next street, when in fact they were just taking a break and evidently didn’t care to do so in public view. They stopped not far into the alley and now, as well as he could make out, were simply standing around or leaning against walls. One was lighting a cigar. That would be Righty. The sight of Righty smoking cigars was familiar to Reuben, who could actually hear him puffing on it now to get it going. Its acrid, sweet smoke drifted over him in the alley. That’s how close he was.

  Reuben wanted to scream at himself. He’d been following hard on the men’s heels, counting on their heavier footsteps to mask the sound of his own. Now he was much too close, and they were so watchful by habit he was afraid to make any movement. Would they notice a strange irregularity in the alley floor? Or spot a hazy patch in the air, like a faint shimmer of fumes with no apparent source? Had he been lucky enough to stop moving in one of the alley’s shadier spots? In the darkness of his invisibility, Reuben had no idea.

  Lefty sighed. “It’s like having two jobs.” He seemed to be taking up the thread of an ongoing conversation. “Like the Lower Downs isn’t enough? We don’t even know that other neighborhood.”

  “You’ve already said that,” said Frontman in his familiar drawl. “Fact, you’ve said it about a million times. We get it. And we all agree. Complaining doesn’t help anything.”

  “It does me,” Lefty said. “It makes me feel better.”

  “It’s temporary,” said Righty, speaking around his cigar.

  “That means it isn’t forever,” said Lookback in his reedy voice.

  “I know what ‘temporary’ means. And I don’t care. It’s still exhausting. We have to do our usual thing here, then hustle over there and knock on doors all evening? It’s too much.”

  “You don’t even have a family,” said Lookback. “What are you going to do, anyway? Watch TV all evening? I’ve got a wife and kids. I’ve got a puppy, for crying out loud. A sweet little thing, too—you should see how he wriggles around. So cute! But do you hear me complaining? No.”

  “Well, it makes me feel better,” said Lefty again.

  “You ought to feel pretty good by now, then,” said Frontman. “You ought to feel wonderful.”

  “It’s not like we’re the only ones having to do it,” said Righty, and Reuben heard him snipping off the lit end of his cigar with a little pair of scissors. He never smoked an entire cigar at once. “It’s everybody. Like Mr. Faug says, we all do what we’re told, even him. It isn’t easy for anybody.”

  “So you think we’re like this big happy team?” Lefty scoffed. “We’re all in it together?”

  “Let me ask you,” Frontman interjected. “Do you want to not be in it? You want to tell Mr. Faug that you’re out? You want him to tell the boss that you were just too tired to do it anymore? Be my guest. It was nice knowing you.”

  “Yeah,” Righty added in a low voice, “I hear The Smoke loves it when people quit. I hear he’s very forgiving.”

  “Hey, I’m just complaining,” Lefty said. “I’m not saying I want out. I’m not stupid.”

  “Prove it,” Lookback muttered.

  Ignoring him, Lefty changed his tone and said, “But say, did you really mean that? That it was nice knowing me? Because seriously, sometimes I can’t tell—”

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” Frontman said with a sigh. “Let’s get going.”

  Reuben heard them gather themselves and start to walk again. They had turned around. They were coming back up the alley. He was directly in their path. He sidestepped once, then twice, then held still. Righty passed so close to him that Reuben could smell his sweetly smoky breath.

  He listened to them go, then backed himself up against a wall and reappeared. “Okay,” he said, trying to calm himself. “Okay, you’re good. You’re fine.” He wiped his sweaty palms on his sweatshirt. “Just don’t do that again. Stop being stupid.” He shook his head and exhaled with relief.

  And suddenly Reuben found himself smiling. He had spied on the Directions themselves, had heard them talking business when they thought they were alone. Now, that was something to be proud of! He was surely the only one who had ever done that. Imagine what else he could do!

  He wondered what they had been talking about, though. Why did The Smoke have them going around some other neighborhood? And not just them but “everybody,” which he assumed meant all the other Directions in New Umbra. The thought of all those men moving in their strange formations up and down the sidewalks, knocking on people’s doors for reasons unknown to him, filled Reuben with misgiving. He’d never heard of such a thing before.

  At length he let it go. Whatever was happening, it was happening elsewhere. And ever since he’d discovered the secret of his miraculous watch, Reuben had found it impossible to think of anything else, much less worry about it. So it was in a cheerful, unworried frame of mind that he went home that afternoon, unaware of how precious his mood was—as all fine things are precious when they are coming to an end.

  His mom had the evening off, so Reuben made sure to be home in time to put away the watch and key before she arrived. As he tucked them gently inside their elegant box, he took a moment to admire them and to reflect that these last several days had been the best of his life. And there were more to come, he thought. So many more.

  Before he closed the box, Reuben’s eyes lingered on the inscription, as they sometimes did, and once again he found himself wondering about P. William Light. How long had he owned the watch? And how had the watch passed from Light to its next owner, and then to its next, and so on—and what had become of them all? Reuben wondered how many people had known the watch’s secret. It was quite possible, even likely, that a person could treasure the watch for its rarity and beauty without ever being aware of its secret power. He liked to think that it took a special kind of person to discover the hi
dden truth.

  From the apartment doorway came the sound of jingling keys, and with a little sigh he put the box away and closed his closet door.

  Preoccupied as he was, it took Reuben a while to realize that something was the matter with his mom. Not until she’d shuffled into the kitchen and begun frying fish for their dinner did he suddenly notice how tired she looked. Exhausted, in fact. He could see it in her slumped posture, the untidiness of her ponytail, the darkness under her eyes. That was when it hit him that she hadn’t made a joke of any kind since—well, he wasn’t sure when. Yesterday, maybe, or even the day before.

  At once the lightness of mood in which Reuben had been skipping obliviously along transformed into something else. It was like the cave-ins he’d seen in old westerns about mining towns—in a matter of seconds, everything was dark. And he was buried under a mountain of guilt. His mom had sensed a change in him, he thought, had noticed how he was always eager to be alone. Naturally, she was feeling quite hurt, and probably lonely, too. Reuben wanted to pinch himself. He was all she had. He needed to do better.

  “Hey, I’ve been thinking,” he ventured, taking a seat at the kitchen table. “What if we had the mansion built on the water—I mean literally on the water, with support beams or whatnot to keep it from sinking—and every room on the bottom story had glass floors? And they’d all have submarine hatches you could climb up through, so you could swim from room to room if you wanted.”

  He saw his mom nod thoughtfully as if considering the idea. Then she flipped the fish with her spatula. For the first time Reuben could ever remember, she made no reply.

  “Mom? What’s wrong?”

  That was all it took. His mom turned off the stove, shifted the pan to a different burner, and came to sit down across from him. She looked absolutely miserable.

  “The thing is,” she said quietly, “prices are up. People are buying less.” She cleared her throat and scowled at the tabletop.

  Her words and her manner were so confusing that Reuben felt a prickle of alarm. “What are you talking about?”

  His mom placed her palms flat on the table, took a deep breath, then looked up to meet Reuben’s eye and let it all out in a gush. She was being let go at the market. They needed a smaller staff, at least for the time being. She lacked seniority there, and besides that her employer had sniffed out the fact that she’d recently applied for a different job, and was none too pleased about it. The Friday of next week would be her last day.

  As his mom talked, Reuben’s first reaction was one of relief. He was just glad her unhappiness wasn’t his fault after all. Then what she was saying really sank in, and his stomach sank along with it. Her troubling words from last week returned to him: behind on the rent. The discovery of the watch’s incredible secret had temporarily swept them to the back of his mind.

  “Are we going to have to move again?” he asked.

  “Maybe?” His mom shrugged noncommittally. “It depends on whether I can find another job that pays as much as I make at the market.”

  Reuben could tell that she was forcing herself not to look away. She was meeting his eye, but it took a real effort. “You don’t think you can, do you?”

  She looked at him. She shook her head. “There’s nothing out there,” she said in a strange voice. Her throat was tight. She was trying not to cry.

  Reuben reached for her hand. “Mom, it’ll be okay. There’s always another way, right? That’s what you’re always saying.”

  “Yes, and I’m very wise,” she said, trying to sound smug. But her voice cracked, and she shut her eyes tightly and tears rolled out from under her closed lids. “This place of ours,” she said in her choked voice, “it’s rough around the edges, I know. It’s no great shakes, right? But, Reuben, we’re not far off from something really hard, and I didn’t want that for you.”

  Reuben knew what she meant. In his rambles around the neighborhood he had seen some pretty terrible places. Places he couldn’t believe people had to live in, and yet they did. For there was no place lower down than the Lower Downs to go. You just sank to the bottom, and the bottom was awful.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he said. “No matter what.”

  His mom still had her eyes closed. She nodded vigorously and squeezed his hand. Then she wiped the tears from her face and looked at him with shining eyes. “Yes,” she said firmly. She nodded again. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “I’ll say one thing,” Reuben said, testing the air. “They’d better not try to kick us out.”

  “No way,” said his mom. “We’ll cling to their legs.”

  Reuben thought for a moment. “We may have to rob a bank, you know. We should get some masks.”

  “Masks are expensive, honey,” his mom said, and Reuben felt a wave of relief. She was getting back to herself. “We can make our own. We’ll use brown paper bags. We can cut out eyeholes.”

  “We should paint scary faces on them. To show that we mean business.”

  “That’s smart thinking. We don’t want them to try any funny stuff.”

  So went their conversation throughout dinner, his mom feeling better now that she was no longer keeping a big secret from him. Reuben knew that she was still seriously worried, though, and so was he. Partly about where they would have to live, but mostly about her. She must always have been keeping one anxious eye on the precipice, he thought, always afraid that one day they would stumble and fall off. He had simply been too young to realize it.

  Before he went to sleep that night, Reuben sat for a long time with the watch in his hands. He had found it himself. Against the odds he had found it, and he had figured out its secret. He could turn invisible. Surely this wasn’t all for nothing, he thought. Surely with this miraculous watch he could work a miracle himself.

  The next morning Reuben wandered all around the neighborhood, deep in thought. He kept out of sight, as usual, but he wasn’t using the watch. He wanted to remain alert and clearheaded. He was trying to think of what to do. He wasn’t getting anywhere, unfortunately. His mind, like his feet, kept circling around, sticking to the same paths, and inevitably it always returned to the joke he’d made about robbing a bank.

  He suspected that with the watch in hand and a certain amount of planning, he could pull it off. But it was one thing to indulge in silly daydreams about robbing a bank and quite another—quite a frightening thing—to imagine actually doing it. Anyway, though he had to admit he was not exactly the most shining example of proper behavior, Reuben had no interest in becoming a real criminal.

  Still, his mind kept going back to the idea, and so he kept getting nowhere. The morning became one long exercise in frustration. He went up to the community center roof, where he lay on his back and stared at the sky, which was weirdly striped with the white vapor trails of jet airplanes. Reuben imagined the bars of a jail cell, the stripes of a prisoner’s uniform. He got up and headed home for lunch.

  Not far from the hardware store, he saw the Directions emerge from a neighboring business and amble in his direction. It was Wednesday. Reuben was already ducking into an alley to avoid their attention when he noticed Officer Warren coming out of the hardware store. That made no sense. Officer Warren knew the Directions’ routines as well as Reuben did, probably even better, so why would he risk bumping into them? Police officers always avoided the Directions as much as possible. They did it to avoid humiliation, for not even they dared to oppose the Counselor’s men. Yet here stood Officer Warren, and it was clearly no accident. He stood under the awning, his thumbs hooked in his belt, gazing down the street. Waiting.

  Reuben surveyed the empty street. He slipped his hand into his sweatshirt pocket and vanished. Moving carefully, his heart racing, he made his way to a sidewalk trash can near the hardware store entrance and crouched behind it. Something in the trash can smelled horrible. He pinched his nostrils closed and waited. He wasn’t worried about anyone coming by and stumbling over him, not on this stretch of street at lunchtime on a Wed
nesday. It wasn’t just the police who avoided the Directions. Everybody did.

  A couple of minutes passed as Reuben breathed through his mouth. He could still kind of smell whatever it was. He wondered if a raccoon had crawled into the trash can and died there.

  Finally he heard the footsteps and the voices of the Directions. The men approached, slowed, stopped. Their voices died away. Reuben imagined their looks of surprise to see Officer Warren.

  “Afternoon, gentlemen,” he heard the young police officer say. “How are you all doing?”

  Frontman replied tersely, forgoing his usual drawl. “We’re working, that’s how we’re doing. Can we help you with something, Officer?” It wasn’t a real question. It was an expression of irritation.

  “Actually,” said Officer Warren, “I was hoping that you could. I’ve just been inside, speaking with Mr. Carver. I’m sure you know he isn’t in the best of health. What you might not know is how bad he’s struggling lately. He can barely keep the doors open. He’s living on beans and water.”

  “Everybody’s got their problems,” muttered Lefty.

  “That’s true, that’s true,” said Officer Warren. “But I was just wondering if you all might give Mr. Carver a break this week. I’m worried about him. It can hardly make a difference to your employer, but it will make a great deal of difference to Mr. Carver.”

  “I’m amazed,” said Frontman. “You actually want me to say that to Mr. Faug? And what do you suppose Mr. Faug will say to his boss?”

  There was a silence. Then Officer Warren said, quietly, “Nobody has to say anything, do they? It isn’t much money, we both know that. It would be easy to overlook it.”

  “No, it would not be easy,” snarled Frontman. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. If we made an exception for Mr. Carver, we’d have to make exceptions for the whole neighborhood, and we’re not going to do that, understand? We’re not sticking our necks out, we’re not taking any chances, we’re not making exceptions. Do you intend to pay Mr. Carver’s share yourself? If not, you need to stand aside. Now.”