The Secrets We Carried

by Mary McNear

  “After that,” Quinn said, “he stopped by the Butternut Express office and asked if I wanted to go for a swim.” It had been a sultry afternoon, and she was alone in the office, the air conditioner on the fritz, as usual, and she’d had nothing to do. Before he’d shown up she couldn’t stop yawning. Afterward, she’d felt like she’d drunk three iced teas, each with five packets of sugar in it. The two of them had gone to the town beach, and after they’d come out of the water, they’d lain on a blanket. As the sun was setting, Jake had leaned down and kissed her. She’d never been kissed like that before; it wasn’t your usual polite or tentative first kiss. It was so sexy. The next week, she’d gone out on two dates with him, and after that they’d started seeing each other several times a week. By mid-August, they’d fallen into a pattern, a pattern both languorous and thrilling. Late-afternoon swims at the beach, after she was done working and he was done training. Evenings driving over to another town for dinner. Nights spent back at the beach, on a blanket, under the stars, or, weather not permitting, at his house, on the couch, watching DVDs in his family’s basement rec room. He’d told her during their time together that she was beautiful and intelligent and utterly unlike anyone else he’d ever known. He’d told her he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Couldn’t wait to be with her. And when he was with her he couldn’t be with her enough. If Quinn were to be blunt—he wanted her. And here was the thing: she wanted him right back.

  “Are you there, Quinn?” Gabriel asked, breaking into her reverie.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “So that’s it. You went for a swim with him. That must have been one hell of a swim,” Gabriel said now.

  Quinn rolled her eyes and helped herself to another french fry. She knew that her having a boyfriend was an adjustment for Gabriel, the same way that his having a girlfriend would have been an adjustment for her. After all, she and Gabriel had spent all their time together. That might change now. Maybe, she reasoned, it would be easier if the three of them, she and Jake and Gabriel, did something together, something outside of school. They could come here. But then she remembered that Jake didn’t like Pearl’s. He wouldn’t even come in here with her to get an iced tea.

  “Look, Quinn. Forget it,” Gabriel said. “I don’t need to know the details. I just . . . I mean, it doesn’t matter if he’s your type, or whether I think he’s your type. But do you think you can trust him? Is he, you know, trustworthy?”

  “Well, yeah. I think so. Why would you even ask that, though?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.” He polished off the rest of his hamburger.

  “It does matter. You wouldn’t have said anything about it if it didn’t. Why did you ask me if I could trust him?” she persisted.

  He pushed his plate away as if he already regretted saying this. “Because I saw something once. Or I heard it.”

  “What? Tell me.”

  “It was last year. Like, in September, I think. I was studying in that alcove outside the library and I heard Jake and Ashlyn arguing in the hallway.” Ashlyn was a girl that Jake had gone out with in tenth grade and had broken up with sometime last year. “She said . . . she said a lot of stuff to him. But the thing she kept saying was that he was lying to her.”

  “And you just happened to remember this now?” Quinn asked, suddenly tense.

  “I remember it because Ashlyn was crying, Quinn. I felt sorry for her.”

  Quinn shook her head. She didn’t want to hear this. She didn’t want to hear about Jake’s past relationships. “Gabriel, we don’t know what happened between them,” she said now. “We don’t know the whole story.”

  Gabriel looked at her for a long moment. “You’re right,” he said, picking up his camera from the seat next to him and putting it on the table. “Maybe Ashlyn was wrong. Besides, I can’t imagine a guy lying to you anyway. Not Quinn LaPointe.” He gave her a playful kick under the table, and Quinn smiled and kicked him back. She was relieved. The tension between them had dissipated. Gabriel would see, her being with Jake didn’t have to interfere with their friendship. She honestly didn’t know how much time she could spend with Jake anyway. At least during cross-country season. He trained all the time. He was training right now, running eight miles outside in this weather. She glanced out the window where a car was driving down Main Street, sending a cascade of water up onto the sidewalk. She would have to drive back to school in this rain soon. She was picking Jake up after practice. And if this was like yesterday, there would be making out, she knew, in the parking lot when they got into her car, and more, again, before she dropped him off at his family’s house, the rain sheeting down the car’s windows, the music barely audible on the radio.

  “Are you done with this?” Annika asked Gabriel, reappearing at their table. She was joking; the only thing left on his plate was a tired scrap of lettuce.

  “Yep. Thanks,” he said, smiling at Annika. Was he flirting with her? Quinn wondered. Annika picked up his plate and, ignoring Quinn, whisked her still half-full glass of iced tea away. Quinn almost called after her.

  “I wasn’t done with that,” she said to Gabriel instead.

  “I told you she doesn’t like you,” Gabriel said.

  “I think you might be right. I have no idea what I did to her. Or what you did to her to get her attention.”

  “She’s pretty.” Gabriel shrugged. For some reason this annoyed Quinn. She raised an eyebrow at him.

  “What? She is.” He picked up his camera and popped off the lens cap. “I think she’s a lifer, though. Like my brothers.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s what I call someone who never leaves here,” Gabriel explained.

  “But how do you know?”

  “It’s just a feeling,” he said.

  “Well, I love Butternut,” Quinn said. “But I don’t want to be a lifer.”

  “Me neither. Another year, and I’m gone,” he said. He looked at her through his camera and adjusted the lens.

  “Don’t forget about me,” Quinn said.

  “How could I,” he said, still fiddling with the lens.

  “I missed you this summer. It’s been weeks since I’ve been in one of your photo shoots.”

  “Look at me,” he said. “Look right into the camera.”

  Chapter 13

  Quinn finished writing. She slid her computer into its bag and rounded up her things, then took a last look around room 6 of the Butternut Motel. It would be good to get out of here. Just the thought of waking up in a cabin at Loon Bay, the morning light reflecting off Butternut Lake, was enough to cheer her up. A little.

  “Did you have a nice stay?” Carla asked when Quinn set her room key down on the reception counter. “I mean, as nice as it could be, under the circumstances,” she amended. Carla was so pale in the late-morning light streaming in through the office windows that Quinn could see the spidery web of veins at each of her temples, like tiny bluish bruises.

  Quinn smiled politely but didn’t answer the question. It had only been nice if by “nice” Carla meant “depressing as hell.”

  “So you’re heading home to Chicago?” she asked Quinn. “That’s, what? A twelve-hour drive?”

  “Closer to ten,” Quinn said, glancing over her shoulder at her car. Her packed suitcase was already in the trunk. “But I’m not leaving yet. I’m moving over to Loon Bay Cabins,” she added, hoping Carla wouldn’t be offended. She wasn’t.

  “Oh, I love Loon Bay,” she said. “Especially the bar there. They have great pizza. I mean, it’s frozen and everything, but they put it in this special oven, or maybe it’s not special, but, anyway, they put it in this little oven, and it comes out really good.”

  “I’ll have to try it,” Quinn said, wondering at her enthusiasm. Then again, if all Carla had at the Butternut Motel was chicken-flavored soup, frozen pizza might be delightful in comparison.

  “So have you decided to take a vacation here in Butternut?” Carla asked.

 
; “Not exactly. I have some things to do here,” Quinn said. It was at this moment, however, that Quinn felt something nudging at her ankle and looked down to see Hank Williams there, a leash looped around his neck. She let out a little yelp and jumped back.

  “Oh, sorry,” Carla said, blithely, picking up the other end of his leash and reeling him back over to her. She picked him up and put him under her arm, like a ferret pocketbook, and tickled him under his chin. “He’s being very frisky today, aren’t you?” she chided him.

  This was Quinn’s cue to leave.

  “Quinn?” Carla asked, as Quinn was pushing open the door. She paused and turned back.

  Carla hesitated. “I hope it’s all right if I say this. But I remember you and Jake together,” she said, almost shyly.

  “You do?”

  She nodded, snuggling Hank Williams. “Uh-huh. I remember once, when I was in middle school, I was supposed to meet my brother at the high school, and I saw you and Jake in the locker-room tunnel. You guys were like . . . wow. You were . . . so hot. Just . . . making out, basically, I guess, but acting like there was no one else around. Which there wasn’t, I guess, except for me. I had to walk by you to get to my brother’s football practice. Anyway, after that, I couldn’t wait to get to high school. I thought, when I do, I want to have a boyfriend like Jake.” She smiled, some welcome color coming into her face, but Quinn must have been looking at her strangely, because Carla caught herself and said, “Oh, sorry. I don’t know why I’m bringing that up.”

  “No, it’s fine,” Quinn said, buttoning her coat. “I’d forgotten about that day. I’ve got to get going, though.”

  “I hope . . . I hope I didn’t upset you,” Carla called after her, but Quinn let the door swing shut behind her and hurried to her car. She wasn’t upset. Not exactly. She was dazed, instead, by the sudden specificity of that memory, by the almost granular recall of an autumn afternoon she hadn’t thought about in years. Sitting in the front seat of her car, a minute later, the engine humming and the heat piping in, Quinn tried to envision the memory before it slipped through her fingers.

  October, Senior Year, Meeting Jake in the Athletic Tunnel

  Autumn comes early in northern Minnesota, and, by mid-October, as Quinn stood in the late-afternoon chill in the tunnel that led from the high school’s locker rooms to its playing fields, she regretted not wearing anything warmer than a jean jacket. Still, she loved this time of year. Loved the way the golds and oranges and reds of fall first touched, as though casually, and then consumed, completely, the leaves on the trees, loved the way the air smelled like some combination of damp earth, gentle rot, and sour apples, even loved the way her Converse sneakers crunched over the early-morning frost in the grass as she walked out to her car on her way to school.

  She’d been leaning against the side of the tunnel, but she straightened up now as, several yards away, a locker-room door swung open and a few boys straggled out, gym bags slung over their shoulders. Their hair was still wet and Quinn imagined that they trailed shower steam and the smell of industrial soap behind them as they came into the tunnel.

  “Hi, Quinn,” one of them said. The other two nodded at her. She was Jake’s girlfriend, and his cross-country teammates, out of respect for him, treated her with politeness. She waved back at them, then edged farther down the tunnel.

  “Jake will be out soon,” one of the boys, Griffin, called to her over his shoulder.

  “Thanks,” she said, a little self-consciously. She looked ridiculous standing here, she knew, waiting for Jake after practice. He’d already told her that when it was over, he’d come find her in the communications room, where she’d stayed after school to put the finishing touches on that week’s edition of the paper. But the truth was, she didn’t want to wait that long. Besides, she couldn’t stop thinking about him long enough to concentrate on proofing that week’s articles. So she did something she’d done once before; she’d come down to the athletic tunnel to wait for him. The last time she’d done this she’d caught him between his practice and his trip to the locker room for a shower. He’d been a little sweaty—okay, a lot sweaty—but Quinn hadn’t minded. Even his sweat, she’d discovered, was somehow clean. The football team had been at an away game that afternoon, and Quinn and Jake had gone under the bleachers and made out, until he’d had to tear himself away and go shower before they closed the locker rooms for the evening.

  Quinn shivered in the damp tunnel and kicked at a wayward crimson leaf that had blown in. Gabriel was right, she thought. She’d become a cliché. (He’d teased her about this recently.) Making out under the bleachers. Cheering for Jake at his cross-country meets. Sitting with him and his friends, Dominic and Griffin, at their table in the cafeteria. Even going to a bonfire at Shell Lake on a Saturday night and sipping cheap beer—Jake abstained—as music blasted from iPod speakers and everyone piled more wood onto the fire. Later, couples took blankets and made their way down to the beach, into the woods, or back into the cars in the parking lot.

  As she was thinking this, the locker-room door popped open one more time and Jake came out. He smiled when he saw her.

  “Hey,” he said, swinging his gym bag up on his shoulder. “How long have you been here?”

  “Not long. I tried to catch you after practice but . . .”

  He dropped his gym bag at their feet and reached for her, his hands sliding under the hem of her T-shirt and around to the small of her back.

  “I hope you don’t think I’m stalking you,” she said, as he pulled her toward him and kissed her.

  “I don’t. But I wish you would. Stalk me, I mean,” he said. “Because I would love to be stalked by Quinn LaPointe.”

  She laughed, and as she pressed herself to him, she felt the wetness of his chest through his cotton T-shirt. “Didn’t you dry off?” she asked.

  “Not very well. I didn’t have time. I wanted to see you.”

  He backed her up a little and she felt the concrete side of the tunnel, smooth and cool, against her back.

  He kissed her again, in that way that he had, that way that told Quinn there was nothing else in his mind, nothing else but her and his kissing her. It reminded her of what he’d told her that day in the bleachers about running, the day she’d interviewed him. There were at least two things, then, that he did like that. Did with total concentration.

  She shivered.

  “You’re cold,” he said.

  “A little, but I don’t care,” she said, because she wanted to keep kissing him. His hands slid into her back pockets, and she put her hands into his wet hair. He’d combed it down in the locker room, but already that familiar cowlick was starting to pop up. She rumpled it, then reached around him and pulled him closer, seeking warmth through the dampness of his T-shirt, under which she felt his heart beating, as smooth and fast as it did after he’d stopped running.

  “Quinn,” he said, “I talked to Griffin.”

  “Griffin?” she repeated, as though she’d never heard of Jake’s friend before.

  “Griffin Hoyer, Quinn. I talked to him about the cabin.” This was Griffin Hoyer’s family cabin on Butternut Lake. The Hoyers had a house in town, but like a few of Butternut’s more well-to-do citizens, they kept a cabin for hunting season and for ice fishing and for summertime.

  “Oh, right, the cabin,” she said. She put her cheek on his chest.

  “He said it’s fine. He said they almost never use it anyway. We can go there this Saturday night.”

  Quinn nodded. “Okay,” she said.

  “We don’t have to,” he said. He kissed the top of her head. “And if we do, we don’t have to . . .”

  “No, it’s not that,” she said, looking up at him. She wanted to be alone with Jake. And there weren’t many places they could be alone together. “I don’t know what to tell my dad,” Quinn said.

  “About where you’ll be?”

  She nodded.

  “Couldn’t you, like, make something up?” Jake asked. “L
ike, make up that you’re going to a girlfriend’s house, or something.”

  “No, I can’t. I don’t lie to him.”

  “Ever?”

  She shook her head. “It’s different with us. We’re honest with each other. But not so honest that . . .” She shrugged. “Not so honest that I can say, ‘Oh, by the way, Jake and I are staying at Griffin’s family’s cabin so I can lose my virginity.’”

  Jake laughed. “Well, if you’re going to put it that way.” But the words she’d said had had their effect on him. He started kissing her again, differently this time. With more urgency. “Isn’t there something you can say to him?” he asked, a few minutes later.

  “I’ll think about it,” Quinn said, as he kissed her again. But what she was thinking about was how she was going to get from the tunnel back to where she’d left her backpack in the communications room when she didn’t want to stop kissing Jake for even one single second.

  Chapter 14

  Would you like some more tea, dear?” Mrs. Lightman asked.

  “No, thank you,” Quinn said. “I’m still drinking this.” She picked up her half-full cup for emphasis. Taking a sip, she smiled at Mrs. Lightman. “It’s wonderful, by the way. I’ll have to get the name of it before I leave.”

  “It’s Lipton’s English Breakfast Tea,” Mrs. Lightman said.

  “Oh. Well, it’s delicious. Good old Lipton’s,” she said, with a cheery smile, thinking that everything she’d said since she’d arrived at the Lightmans’ house fifteen minutes ago had sounded inane. Which was unusual. Quinn was good at talking, both talking to other people and getting other people to talk to her. Neither of these traits was in evidence now, though. And that was a shame, because it was so quiet in the Lightmans’ living room that it made her want to fill the silence or, if not fill it, at least break it. She put her cup back in its saucer now, just a little too hard, and its clinking sound startled Mrs. Lightman.

  “Sorry,” Quinn said, in something close to a whisper. She’d finished writing about Jake an hour earlier in the parking lot of the Butternut Motel but the memory of that fall afternoon had lingered: the vivid patch of blue sky at the tunnel’s end, the crunch of leaves beneath her feet, the feel of Jake’s warmth against her. Having summoned it forth, she found that she didn’t want to let it go. But the present was calling, and it was the present that had prompted her to go visit Jake’s grave at Prairie Oaks Cemetery in Winton. She’d visited it several times in the spring of her senior year, and she had little trouble finding his gravestone. It was at the end of a long row, flanked on either side by small black spruce trees. Jake Lightman, “taken from us too early, forever in our hearts,” the epitaph read. She’d brushed some fallen twigs off the gravestone. Then she’d made the short drive to the Lightmans’ house. It wasn’t until Mr. Lightman had answered the door, smiled, and hugged her warmly that the spell of that fall afternoon was broken. She’d felt grateful and relieved that Mr. Lightman was happy to see her.