The Secrets We Carried

by Mary McNear

  A Dedication for Three Young Men Who Died Ten Years Ago

  A special ceremony is scheduled for Saturday, March 25, 11:00 A.M., at the Shell Lake Beach and Picnic Area off Birch Road. A dedication stone will be unveiled and Jack Mulvaney, the Northern Superior High School principal; Jane Steadman, the Butternut mayor; and Jeffrey Dobbs, Dominic Dobbs’s father, will all speak.

  A short article followed this, but Quinn didn’t read it now. She folded the clipping and put it back in the envelope. Who sent this to me? she wondered, not for the first time. Someone who wanted her to know about the dedication, obviously. Someone who wanted her to come back to Butternut for it. But who? It was getting dark outside now, and she considered turning on some lights but instead lay back down on the bed. She wanted to rest for a minute. Then she’d get up and find some dinner.

  It must have been more than an hour later when she woke with a start. The room was dark now and the light from the motel’s parking lot cast a yellow band onto the floor beside the window. She sat up. She felt feverish. She’d had one of the dreams.

  Jake sat in the front seat of his old blue Ford truck. It was nighttime, and the truck’s headlights illuminated the leafless birch trees and the frozen expanse of Shell Lake before it. Smoke from the truck’s exhaust pipe drifted into the starry sky and mixed with burning filaments of ash from the nearby bonfire. Jake’s window was rolled down and music from the radio sounded tinny in the cold night air. Quinn stood a short distance away. Someone, a shadowy presence, stood somewhere behind her. Jake leaned out of the truck window and called to her, “Quinn. Quinn! Don’t let me die.”

  But she had. She shivered now, violently. She already knew how that night had ended.

  Chapter 2

  The next morning, after a restless night’s sleep, Quinn picked up the “continental breakfast”—a Styrofoam cup of coffee and a plastic-wrapped Danish—from the motel’s office and drove the few blocks into town. With one hand holding her too-hot coffee and the other hand on the steering wheel of her Subaru, she cruised down Butternut’s Main Street. It had changed since her senior year in high school. Or, more likely, she had changed. Back then, it had still held all the small-town attractions of childhood; the rubber ball vending machine outside the variety store; the spinning red leather stools at the counter at the local coffee shop, Pearl’s; the always fascinating collection of glass animals at Butternut Drugs.

  But now she noticed, as if for the first time, how pretty it was, with its candy-colored striped awnings, cheerful window boxes, and painted wooden benches. In another couple of months or so, when the piles of old snow had melted and the window box flowers were in bloom, it would be even prettier. And that would go for Butternut Lake, too. Less than a mile from town, it was a spring-fed, twelve-mile-long lake that Butternut residents firmly believed was the most beautiful lake in a state that had thousands of them. And the tourists and the summer people who flocked there between Memorial Day and Labor Day agreed.

  Stopped at the only stoplight in town, Quinn checked her reflection in the rearview mirror. Her long, honey-brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and her hazel eyes were green in the morning light. Well, at least she didn’t look as if she’d barely slept last night, she thought, as the light changed and she turned left on Glover Street, heading in the opposite direction of Shell Lake. The dedication ceremony wouldn’t start for another hour, and there was something she wanted to do first.

  As she drove out of town, the businesses and then the houses thinned out and then Glover Street turned into Route 89, and she saw the TOWN OF BUTTERNUT, POPULATION 1,200 sign receding in her rearview mirror. Then the countryside opened onto fields patchy with almost melted snow that were edged by pine trees and punctuated by the occasional farmhouse. As promised, the day was cold, and while the weather report was calling for sunshine later, it was overcast now, and the light that fell on the fields and trees had a muted, gray quality to it.

  Quinn knew this road by heart. There was the tepee-shaped school bus shelter at the end of a farmhouse’s long driveway, there was the funny crooked oak tree in the middle of an otherwise empty field, looking as if someone had been in a hurry and had left it behind, by accident, and there was the hand-painted billboard for a snowmobile dealership that had closed before she could even remember it being open. She’d driven this route every day from the time she’d gotten her license at sixteen to the time she’d graduated from high school.

  Quinn slowed as she drove past the TOWN OF WINTON sign and the high school came into view. It wasn’t an imposing building, but in a landscape this flat, with so little else to compete with it, it nonetheless had that effect. Northern Superior High School had been built in 1930, when Americans still had a reverence for public education, and the two-story brick building, with a white stone arch over the entranceway and two white stone columns flanking it, spoke to the seriousness of the work to be done inside. A less visible, modern addition, consisting of a cafeteria, a gymnasium, and science labs, had been added in the 1970s. The nearby towns of Butternut, Auburn, Baldwin, and Red Rock all fed into the high school, bringing the student body to almost six hundred.

  Quinn had intended to drive by the high school, but once she saw the building she wanted, suddenly, to go inside. She turned into the driveway, hoping there would be someone there who could let her in, but when she pulled up in front she saw that one of the front doors was propped open. She parked and hurried up a front walkway lined with bronze-based light posts with white globelike lamps and up the wide, stone steps.

  “Hello?” she called inside. Her voice echoed in the empty front hall, but, a moment later, a maintenance man came into view down one of the hallways, wheeling a garbage can ahead of him.

  “Yes?” he called back.

  “Mr. . . .” Quinn ransacked her memory. “Watts?” she asked, as he came closer.

  “Uh-huh,” he said, rolling up to her. He looked slightly more gray, and grizzled, than he had a decade ago.

  “My name is Quinn LaPointe,” she said. “I was in the class of 2007. I’m back in town and I wanted to take a look around.” She smiled. “You know, old time’s sake, that kind of thing.”

  He stared at her, inscrutably. “Yeah. Okay,” he said. “But just for a few minutes. I’m about to lock up.”

  “I’ll hurry,” she promised, coming into the front hall, a high-ceilinged room with pale pink marble walls, and a red-and-brown-tiled floor shiny with wear. Mr. Watts disappeared down another hallway, and Quinn walked, her high-heeled boots clicking on the tiles, past the administrative offices on her left, and the entrance to the auditorium on her right, to the far wall, where there was a series of glass display cases.

  The first of these featured the high school’s “Wall of Fame,” and Quinn paused to look at the photos and bios of several illustrious alumni. More recently, these had included: a graduate of the class of ’97 who was now a state senator; a woman, class of ’04, who was now one of the hosts of a local morning show in the Twin Cities; and a member of the class of ’06 who’d played baseball, briefly, in the major leagues. Quinn smiled. At Northern Superior High School, you had to take your heroes where you could find them. The rest of the cases were devoted to the school’s athletic glories, and while Quinn hadn’t bothered to pay attention to them while she was there, now she moved down the row of them, trailing her fingers over the polished glass. “Go Bobcats,” she whispered to the photographs of championship teams, and to the pennants, the plaques, the trophies, and the two or three retired jerseys on display in them. The 1950s were obviously the heyday for the Bobcats, but every subsequent decade had brought some honors with it, however fleeting. When she got to the ’90s—the boy’s wrestling team had held sway—she felt a heaviness settling into her limbs. Coward, she scolded herself, pushing on.

  She stopped in front of the second-to-last case, where, on the fourth shelf, right at eye level, in a silver frame leaning against the back of the cabinet, there was a color photograph of
the 2006–2007 cross-country team. Twenty-four boys, in three rows of eight, each of them exuding youth and health from every pore, and, in the middle of the middle row, team captain Jake Lightman. She leaned closer, her breath clouding the glass in front of her. Jake must have just taken a shower; the habitual cowlick to the right of his part, the cowlick that Quinn had loved, was still combed down. Otherwise, the picture was pure Jake, so vital, so full of life. His head tilted back, his dark gold eyes staring straight into the camera as if he had nothing to hide, and his smile, his smile as natural, and as easy, as his running form had been. She wanted to slide the glass door open and get a closer look at the photograph. Years ago, she’d put away her photographs of Jake—most of them were in a storage box in her father’s garage—and seeing this one now made her wish she could look at all of them again.

  “I’m sorry,” Quinn whispered to Jake’s photograph. “Can you forgive me?” She felt a tightness, a pain, building in her chest, a feeling that, most of the time, she had learned to breathe through. She looked to the right of the photograph, where a trophy announced the team as State Champions, Boys Cross-Country, 2006, and a plaque next to it read Jake Lightman, 2006, Runner of the Year.

  Then she forced herself to keep moving, and she walked down the long corridor to the left, her heels click, click, clicking on the tiled floors as she passed rows of pea-green lockers, several bulletin boards, and classroom doors. There was something else she wanted to see. She stopped in front of a door labeled Communications Room and tried the handle. It was unlocked. Once again, she’d gotten lucky, if luck was in fact what it was. She turned on the lights and scanned the room. It looked totally different. Updated, reordered, and rearranged. She went inside anyway, to the back of the room, where she and Gabriel Shipp had had their newspaper “office.” This had consisted of a blue couch with the stuffing leaking out, a scuffed coffee table to put your feet up on, a poster on the wall from the movie The Shawshank Redemption, with the quote “Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying” on it, and a uniquely ugly ficus tree that had been watered mainly with Diet 7UP.

  These were gone now, though why wouldn’t they have been? How could any of them have meant as much to anyone as they’d meant to Quinn and Gabriel? She went over to the one familiar-looking piece of furniture left in the room, an old walnut cabinet pushed back between two sets of windows. She reached down and ran her fingers under the edge of one of its shelves. That at least was still there. She knelt to see it. G-A-B-R-I-E-L was carved into the wood, the letters pale against the walnut’s exterior. She smiled in spite of herself, remembering the winter afternoon Gabriel had carved this with his geometry compass. It had been a very un-Gabriel-like thing to do. He hadn’t had a shred of sentimentality, or so she’d thought at the time. She wondered if he would be at the dedication today. She rose, slowly. Better get going. She didn’t want to be late.

  She checked her watch as she got into her car. That had taken longer than she’d expected. Instead of returning the way she’d come, she could take the Scuttle Hole Road shortcut. But the thought of taking this route to the dedication filled her with dread. It was on this very road that she’d seen Jake’s truck parked outside a run-down house, ten years ago, on the day of the accident, and even now the memory of it troubled her. She was pretty sure he’d lied to her about why his truck had been parked there, but she’d never found out why. No, I’m not going to take that shortcut, Quinn thought. I’ll take the long way. If I’m careful, I’ll get to the dedication with a couple of minutes to spare. She started the car, pulled out of the driveway, and headed toward Route 89.

  Chapter 3

  When Quinn took the turnoff for Shell Lake Beach and Picnic Area, she was surprised to discover that the parking lot was full. She parked behind a dirt-coated pickup truck on the rutted shoulder of the road and followed a stream of people down a paved trail to the picnic area. There was an unmistakable solemnity in their progression. The other guests hardly spoke to one another, and, when they did, their voices were low and serious, as though they were already practicing the gravity they felt the occasion required. When Quinn reached the clearing, it was more of the same. The group assembled there—at least a hundred strong—had a formality to it, a weightiness, that provided an odd juxtaposition to the picnic tables, barbecue grills, and fire pits in its midst. Indeed, she couldn’t imagine a typical summer afternoon unfolding here, an afternoon of fluttering gingham tablecloths, burnt hot dogs, and half-gnawed watermelon rinds. The only thing that could have made this scene feel any more portentous, Quinn decided, would be a funeral dirge playing in the background.

  She moved through the crowd, searching for a place to stand so that her back would be to Shell Lake. This would be easier if she didn’t have to look at the water, she thought. The problem was that other than the dry pine needles carpeting the ground, the slender birch trees that ringed the clearing—some with snow clumped at their bases—and the overcast sky above, the slate-gray lake was one of the few things to see from here. And it was a pretty enough lake, too, on a nice day. But in a part of the country with so many lakes to choose from, Shell Lake was considered something of a poor cousin to Butternut Lake, which, at its closest point, was a little less than a mile away. Shell Lake was smaller, shallower, and, as part of a national forest, less developed than Butternut Lake. There were no houses or resorts on its shores, only the rustic picnic area. And, unlike Butternut Lake, there were no businesses, either, no places to rent kayaks, or buy bait, or order an ice cream cone. What Shell Lake did not have to offer, though, was also what it did have to offer. Its lack of amenities guaranteed the visitors who did come here—mainly locals—a degree of privacy they wouldn’t find on the busier lakes in the area. And so it had become something of a refuge for families in the summertime, ice fishermen in the wintertime, and high school students year-round. The last group was most prevalent here, at least on weekend nights. After all, if you wanted to have a party at a lake with a beach, a fire pit, and no one nearby to complain about the noise, then Shell Lake was the lake for you.

  Quinn found a place to stand. From here she could see a few local dignitaries who, facing the crowd, had gathered on an incline that put them slightly above everyone else. Her eyes rested, for a moment, on the memorial stone. It was covered with a drop cloth, which was secured against the wind with a series of large rocks around its base. She saw then, to one side of the stone, Jake’s parents, Maggie and Paul Lightman. Maggie, she thought, looked a little thinner, and Paul a little grayer, but both still looked basically the same as they had ten years ago. This surprised her. Well, what did you expect, Quinn? That after the loss of their son they’d become . . . unrecognizable? But, in truth, a part of her had thought that. She felt a surge of affection for them; she’d always liked them and she’d known from the first time she’d met them, the summer she and Jake had started dating, that they’d liked her, too. A man standing next to them caught Quinn’s eye. He gave her a nod of recognition, and then smiled at her, a smile of unmistakable encouragement. We’ll get through this, it seemed to say, and Quinn felt a jolt of recognition. Tanner. Tanner Lightman. Jake’s older brother. He reminded her so much of Jake that she felt a little disoriented. She pulled her coat more tightly around herself and smiled back at him. She thought that ten years had done nothing to diminish his good looks, though, under the circumstances, it occurred to her that this thought might not be entirely appropriate.

  She concentrated instead on the other people standing around the memorial stone. There was Mr. Mulvaney, Northern Superior’s longtime principal, who had even less hair now than he had had when she was in high school, but who wore the same wire-rimmed glasses, which still had a tendency to slip down his nose. And there was Mr. Drossel, who had been the high school’s cross-country coach, and, for all Quinn knew, still was. And Pastor Hanson, of course, the minister at Butternut’s Lake of the Isles Lutheran Church.

  She scanned the rest of the crowd for familiar faces. There were more than
a few. Some of them Quinn had known well. She gave a small wave to Veronica Malley. She’d had six siblings and when Quinn was in second grade she’d told her dad she wanted to “borrow” some of them for their family, which had made him laugh. She’d been Quinn’s chemistry lab partner in eleventh grade, and Quinn could see her as she had been then, her eyes squinting with concentration behind safety goggles as she bent over the Bunsen burner. Now, she held a chubby baby, dressed in a light blue snowsuit. He babbled, loudly, blissfully unaware of the somber mood around him. Quinn also smiled at Joe Gardella. She’d had a major crush on him in middle school. They’d grown up on the same street and had waited at the same school bus stop, and Quinn remembered the almost drunken pleasure with which the two of them, on rainy days in grade school, had stomped violently in the puddles that had formed on the sidewalk.

  Not everyone in the crowd looked familiar. There were a couple dozen teenagers—high school students, obviously—shuffling in the cold. Why are they here? she wondered. They were too young to have been friends with the three boys who’d died. One, a girl with heavy blue eye shadow, stood to the left of Quinn, scrolling down her iPhone screen with rapt attention. Quinn, annoyed, looked away from her and swept her eyes around the assembled guests once more. She was looking for just one person now. No, she decided finally. He wasn’t here. Gabriel, once her closest friend, was nowhere to be found in this crowd.