The Secrets We Carried

by Mary McNear

  “No.” Quinn shook her head. “I want to wear it here,” she said, twisting it around on her finger. It was a little loose.

  “I didn’t know your ring size,” Jake said.

  “I don’t know it either,” Quinn said. She couldn’t stop looking at the stone. It was so bright. So beautiful.

  “We can go back to the store together,” Jake said. “They can make it smaller.”

  “Where did you get it?” Quinn asked, looking up at him.

  “In Duluth. I went last week. The day practice was canceled.”

  “I thought . . . you said you got it today?”

  “I ordered it last week. I picked it up today,” he clarified. “No more questions, though, okay?” He took her right hand, turned it over, and kissed her palm.

  And then he smiled at her, as only Jake could. And, suddenly, it was almost too much. The fire, the wine, the ring, and the warmth of the room. She felt a little dizzy. Was she drunk? No, she’d taken one sip of her wine. But she still felt as if she could float away. Jake held her against him now, and his mouth found hers. It was quiet in the room, except for the crackling sounds of the fire.

  Chapter 16

  When Quinn finished writing, she sat for several minutes in her car. It was overheated now and smelled like stale coffee. She turned off the heat and opened the window a few inches before backing out of the parking space. She was less aware of the sun glinting off the lake and the melting snow in the parking lot than she was of the memory of Jake giving her the ring. She’d loved that ring, she thought, as she pulled onto Butternut Lake Drive. What had become of it? Was it even now somewhere in the shallows of Shell Lake, a narrow band of gold resting among the silt and fallen leaves and waterlogged birch tree branches? She’d never know.

  And here was, perhaps, another unanswerable question: Had Jake been lying to her that day? About where he’d gone after school? She’d never know this, either. Thinking this, though, reminded her of the day of the accident. Why had Jake’s truck been parked outside that house on Scuttle Hole Road? When she’d asked him why, his answer had been improbable. She was pretty sure he’d lied. But even this, she couldn’t know for certain. And Quinn was still thinking about this as she turned down Gabriel’s driveway. She saw him, at the end of it, getting into his pickup truck, and she pulled up beside him and rolled down her window.

  “Hey,” she said. “It looks like I caught you just in time.”

  “I didn’t know you’d be coming by again,” he said, coming over to her car. Quinn sensed his wariness.

  “Well, neither did I,” she said, aiming for breezy. “You didn’t think you’d be getting rid of me that easily, though, did you?” She rolled up her window, turned off her engine, and got out of the car. She wanted to give him a hug but he seemed so unapproachable that it wasn’t possible.

  “How long are you staying?” he asked, and she realized he’d left his pickup truck door open, as if he thought he might still make a quick getaway.

  “A couple of days, at least. I’m checking in to Loon Bay.”

  His eyebrows quirked up. “Really?”

  “Uh-huh. I’m going for the midweek rate, but I’ll stay for the frozen pizza. Word on the street is, it’s good. As in, not to be missed.”

  He looked at her for a moment, his expression unreadable. She couldn’t help but feel that he was holding back something. And she missed, more than ever, the easy rapport they’d once had with each other.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” he asked. “Staying at Loon Bay?”

  “Why? What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing. I never go there, though,” he said then, as if washing his hands of the subject. “I’ve got to get going.”

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “I need to open a cabin,” he said, zipping up his jacket. “The owners are coming up for the season this weekend.”

  “It’s a little early in the season, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “They’re from Arizona,” he said, as if this explained everything.

  “Do you always work on Sundays?” she asked.

  “Whenever I need to.”

  “All right, well, mind if I come with you?”

  “To open the cabin? It’s not going to be fun, Quinn.”

  “Who says I’m looking for fun?” She smiled at him. He didn’t smile back, but something in him relented, because he gestured at the truck. “Get in. You can leave your car here. But this is work, all right? I’m not promising any witty conversation.”

  “Got it,” she said, and she hurried to get into his truck before he changed his mind. As they bumped along the gravel driveway, Quinn yanked her seat belt on and Gabriel fiddled with the radio. He said no witty conversation. He didn’t say no conversation. But she wondered what to talk about. She wanted to ask him, again, why he hadn’t gone to RISD, but she had a feeling he’d give her the same answer as yesterday. And they couldn’t talk about the accident, either. Discussing that yesterday, even obliquely, had been much more upsetting than she’d imagined it would be. She’d never told anyone what happened between her and Jake that night, and she didn’t think she was ready to do so now. She decided to stick to a safer subject.

  “How’s your family?” she asked.

  “All right.”

  “Parents still live in Butternut?”

  “Yep,” he said, settling on an oldies station. It was something he would never have listened to in high school, when he was always scouring the internet for new music.

  “What about your brother?”

  “Uh, which one?” he asked, pulling onto the main road.

  “I don’t know. I don’t have a favorite, Gabriel. How about all three of them? What are they doing?”

  He sighed. “Aiden is married, has three kids under five, and works at the lumber mill in Ely. When I see him at my parents’, during the holidays, he’s asleep on the couch and there are a couple of kids crawling all over him. Colin got a job, lost a job, got married, got divorced, had a few more things not work out for him. Now he lives with my parents and works with my dad at the shop. And Brody is married, has three-year-old twins, lives in Bemidji, and works on a loading crew at a warehouse there. How’s that?” he asked when he’d finished this recitation. Quinn wanted more details, and ten years ago, she would have gotten them. But this would have to do for now, she thought.

  “It’s a start,” she said. “God, I can’t believe your parents have five grandchildren.”

  He nodded. “Oh, yeah. A few years ago, there were babies all around.”

  “I take it you’re not a hands-on uncle?” she asked, in a gentle chide.

  “No,” he said, after a pause. “I don’t see my brothers that often. We don’t have that much in common.”

  “But more than you used to, right?”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Well, your jobs . . .” She trailed off, feeling self-conscious.

  “Oh, I see. You mean because we all work with our hands?” he asked, putting a mocking emphasis on the words with our hands.

  “No, I didn’t mean that,” she said, more irritated with herself than with him. “I meant, now that you’ve all grown up, maybe you’ve found more . . . common ground with one another.”

  “No,” he said. “It didn’t happen that way.” He didn’t sound angry, though, and Quinn, relieved, didn’t ask him any more questions. She told him, instead, about her dad and Johanna, and about the Airstream trailer and the quilting shows, and about their Thanksgivings together in southern Minnesota, during which her father always insisted on grilling a whole turkey, with mixed results.

  “My father always liked you, Gabriel. You know that, don’t you?” she asked, watching his profile. He said nothing, but he nodded, in acknowledgment, which was probably the best Quinn was going to get from him right now. That didn’t stop her, though, from wanting to break through his aloofness, and she made a silent pledge that she wasn’t leaving him today until she did.<
br />
  “By the way, I visited the Lightmans this morning,” she said. “You know, Jake’s parents.”

  “I know who the Lightmans are, Quinn,” Gabriel said, casting her a wary glance.

  She looked over at him but he was watching the road. “Mr. Lightman seemed okay,” she said. “But Mrs. Lightman . . . It broke my heart to sit there with her. I don’t think she’s ever recovered. It’s as though her life is at a standstill.”

  “Of course her life is at a standstill,” he said, with an intensity that surprised Quinn. “She lost a child. Could anything be worse? Nothing will ever fix that.” She stared at him, trying to read his expression, but once again his eyes were fixed on the road.

  “Have you ever talked to her? I mean, do you ever run into her?” she asked, thinking that his comment implied some kind of connection to Mrs. Lightman.

  “God no,” he said. “Of all the people in Butternut, she’s the one I’d most like to avoid.”

  “Why?” Quinn said.

  “Quinn, I need to focus on the road. Okay?” he said, impatiently, as he took a sharp turn. He reached over and turned up the radio. And Quinn, who’d brought them up, was not sorry to stop talking about the Lightmans. She and Gabriel were quiet for the remainder of the drive.

  “Here we are,” he said, as he turned down a driveway and the cabin came into view. Quinn frowned at it, disapproving. It was big, new, and, to her mind, ugly, its pine siding still not yet darkened by the elements, its sprawling design making it look more like a resort than a home.

  “Do the people who own this call it a cabin?” she asked Gabriel. “Because the last time I checked, the word cabin connoted something small, and, preferably, quaint.”

  “I try not to argue semantics with my clients,” Gabriel said, as he pulled up in front of it. He cut the engine and grabbed some work gloves out of the glove compartment. He got out of the truck and lifted a ladder out of the back, and Quinn scrambled after him as he headed around the side of the cabin. “What are we doing?” she called out, stepping over a tree root, and stopping to untangle a low-hanging branch that had snagged on her hair.

  “Checking the power lines and the phone lines,” he called back, not slowing down. “Checking to see if any trees came down, checking to see if there’s any damage to the roof or the gutters, making sure the back deck’s in good condition.”

  “Okay,” Quinn said, determined not to bother him as he worked, and she watched, at a respectful distance, as he positioned the ladder under the cabin’s eaves, and climbed up on the roof, only to reappear a moment later and drop down the ladder in one fluid motion. God, he is fast, she thought. Whatever he was doing with his free time, he wasn’t sitting on the couch watching TV. She followed him up the steps to the cabin’s back deck, which was huge. Why so big? she wondered.

  “How many trees do you think they had to cut down to get this view?” she asked Gabriel, at one point, but he ignored her. And Quinn forgot to be critical, for a moment, and simply admired Butternut Lake’s unsurpassed blueness. Gabriel was oblivious to its beauty, though, and soon they were off again, down the steps and around the other side of the cabin until Gabriel had completed his inspection.

  “Now what?” Quinn asked, as he put his ladder back in the truck. “Are we done?”

  “No. Now we go inside,” he said, pulling a key ring out of his pocket as he headed for the front door.

  “Oh, good,” Quinn said, anxious to get a look at the cabin’s decor, which, from the outside, was hidden behind shutters and blinds and curtains. She looked over Gabriel’s shoulder as he unlocked the door, but when he pushed it open, he gestured for her to enter first. “It’s cold,” she said. And it was dark, too, and gloomy, with no sunlight coming in through the windows. She squinted and, several feet to her left, almost at eye level, she saw a bear’s face.

  “Jesus,” she said, giving a little start backward, right into Gabriel.

  “It’s okay, Quinn,” he said, amused, and, as he flipped on a set of light switches, the bear’s head revealed itself to be attached to a bearskin rug hanging on a nearby wall. “Have you forgotten about North Woods decorating?” he asked her, with the closest thing to a smile she’d gotten from him since she’d turned down his driveway that day.

  “I haven’t forgotten,” she said. “I just don’t see the aesthetic value of it. I mean, who wants to bump into that thing in the dark?” She gestured at the rug. But Gabriel had walked over to a wall-mounted thermostat, the complicated kind where you could program different temperatures for different zones, and he’d started punching numbers into it.

  Quinn felt the heat begin to kick in as she trailed him through the cabin’s many rooms. She watched as he turned on lights and checked for leaks and mice. Everything in the cabin was oversized—enormous fireplaces, gargantuan couches, a banquet-sized dining table—except for all the tchotchkes scattered about. There were signs that listed CABIN’S RULES (“Eat s’mores” and “Count the stars” were two of them), and log cabin tissue box covers, pinecone bookends, birchbark cocktail coasters, and hand-painted duck decoys.

  As Gabriel checked the damper in a fireplace almost large enough for him to stand in, Quinn wandered over to the couch and retrieved a needlepoint pillow from it. “Look,” she said, holding it up to Gabriel. “It says If you’re lucky enough to live by the water, you’re lucky enough.” She smiled at him.

  Gabriel barely glanced at it. He came out of the fireplace, wiping his hands on his jeans. “I’ve got to go down to the basement,” he said. “You can wait up here if you want.”

  “What, and be alone with him?” she said, of the bearskin rug mounted on the wall. “No, thanks. I want to come with you.”

  He headed down a set of stairs into the basement, a utility and storage room with concrete floors, cedar storage cabinets, and enough oversized pool toys to fill up the entire bay the cabin was on. Quinn hoisted herself up onto a washing machine and watched as Gabriel checked the pilot light in the hot water heater.

  “So,” Quinn said, bumping her heels against the side of the machine, “other than being a caretaker—which, by the way, I can see you’re good at—what have you been doing over the last ten years?”

  Gabriel kept working, but he spared her a single, inscrutable look.

  “What?” she said. “You can’t have spent all your time with pilot lights. Come on, tell me one thing you’ve done since I’ve been away. One thing”—she held up a finger—“that didn’t involve work. Really, I want to know.”

  “Hmmm,” he said, turning a valve on the hot water heater. “Okay, how about . . . I got married. The marriage only lasted for about a year, though.”

  She thought, for a moment, that he was joking, but when he saw the skeptical expression on her face, he shrugged and kept working.

  “Gabriel, you were married?” she said. You were in love? she thought.

  “Yep,” he said, not looking at her.

  “And you’re just going to drop that fact, casually, into our conversation?”

  “You wanted to know something I’d done.”

  “I did. But is that all you’re going to tell me about it?”

  “You were always so curious,” he commented, replacing the cover on the water heater’s access panel.

  “That’s right, I was. I am. But now I get paid to be. So what happened? Tell me the story.”

  “It’s a pretty short one,” he said, adjusting the thermostat.

  But she was too impatient for him to tell it to her in his own time. “Who was she? How did you meet her?”

  He came over to the big sink beside the washing machine and dryer and turned on the hot water tap. Nothing happened at first, and then there was a gurgling sound and a spit of brown water from the faucet.

  “Her name was Callie,” he said. “Short for Callista. I met her at a diner. In Hibbing. She was waitressing there.”

  “And?” she prompted. “You started dating . . . ?”

  “Uh, no,” he said
, looking down at the sink. The water was running clearer now. “Not exactly. She came home with me that night. The night of the day I met her. And then . . . she stayed. Six months later, we got married.”

  “Wait. Back up. She moved in with you before you’d ever been out on a date with her?”

  “Technically, yes. But it didn’t feel like that, though. It felt kind of natural.”

  “In what way?” Quinn frowned.

  “In every way, I guess. I mean, you don’t need to make it more complicated than it was, Quinn.”

  “I think moving in with someone is pretty complicated, though. Don’t you? Or, if not complicated, then at least serious.” And she thought about a couple of boyfriends she’d had over the years who had casually suggested eventually moving in together. But the thought of taking that next step had filled her with anxiety. Then again, neither relationship had lasted long enough for them to have a more serious discussion anyway. “Didn’t you think that living with her was a big step?” she asked Gabriel now.

  “In retrospect, maybe,” he said. “But not the day I met her. I came into this place for a cup of coffee, and I ended up staying all afternoon. She was . . . she was pretty and funny and easy to be with. She still is, I’m sure. And she was new to the area. She didn’t know many people. She’d moved out here from Colorado with her boyfriend and then they’d broken up. She was renting a room in someone’s house and hating it, so I said, ‘Get your stuff, I’ve got more than enough room for both of us.’”

  Quinn considered this, wanting, and, at the same time, not wanting, to ask him more questions. Had they been romantically involved, right from the start? Had they just fallen into bed with each other that first night? But of course they had. And was that so surprising? Gabriel had said she was attractive, and God knows he was too. She wondered if he had brought her back to the same cabin she’d been to. And if he had, had it been different with her there? And Quinn tried to imagine the cabin looking if not cozy, then at least lived in. Another towel hanging on a hook in the bathroom, a bra trailing out of a top dresser drawer, or a magazine open on the kitchen table, a half-drunk cup of coffee beside it. It was almost impossible, though, to imagine Gabriel living intimately with anyone in that cabin, that cold, impersonal cabin, but it made her feel better to think that, for a little while anyway, he might have.