The Secrets We Carried

by Mary McNear

  “I’m glad you’re so confident.” She bumped her knee against his. “I want to see your portfolio,” she said. He’d promised to show it to her before he submitted it with his application, but somehow he’d kept putting it off.

  “It’s standard art school stuff,” he said with a shrug.

  “Gabriel, nothing you do is standard. Come on. Please? I want to see what the admissions committee saw,” she said.

  He got up and started to go toward his desktop computer and then changed his mind and reached instead for a portfolio case on the shelf above his desk. He stood there for a moment, as if debating whether or not to let her see it, then handed it to her. He sat back down on the floor across from her. She unzipped the portfolio, extracted the stack of photographs from it, and started to shuffle through them carefully, so as not to leave any fingerprints.

  “Gabriel,” she said, looking up at him. He was watching her.

  “These are . . .” she murmured. “These are of me.” There were twenty of them, all eleven by fourteen inches, all black and white, and all of them, every single one of them, of Quinn. What amazed her, though, was how different they nonetheless managed to be. They were taken during different seasons, at different times of day, in different settings, and in different lighting. And the different moods they captured ranged from serious to playful, melancholy to joyful.

  “You remember my taking them, don’t you?” he asked.

  “Most of them,” she said, feeling distracted. Because Gabriel was always taking photographs. Of everything. There was never a time, it seemed, when he wasn’t taking them. Yes, she’d known some of them were of her. But she’d gotten the impression, somehow, that he took these when he was experimenting with different lenses, or different filters, or different lighting. She had no idea that he’d developed so many of them, or that they looked so polished, or, in one or two cases, so deliberately unpolished. And yet all of them were astonishingly professional. This wasn’t yearbook stuff. This was in a different category altogether.

  She held up one he’d taken in the winter of their junior year. Quinn, in the lower left-hand corner of the photograph, was running in the snow, her hair a blur, speckles of hoarfrost on the branches of the pine tree behind her glinting in the sun, a fence in the background dividing the photograph on a diagonal, leading, almost like an arrow, to the upper right-hand side of the frame where a crow, all blackness against the sky, was sitting on a branch. She put the photo back into the stack and selected another one, this from the spring of that same year. In it, she was sitting on the blue couch in the communications room, bars of light and shadow from the window blinds alternating across her. Her hazel eyes, though, were in a slice of sunlight, and they stared dreamily out into the room beyond. She remembered that day; she’d wanted Gabriel to put away his camera so their meeting could begin. She was glad he hadn’t. Another photograph, from early last summer, was taken before Gabriel left for Chicago. The two of them had spent a lazy Sunday afternoon driving around in her car, listening to the radio, and stopping, at one point, to explore an abandoned barn. Gabriel had taken pictures of her then, and here was one of them. Quinn was standing next to an empty horse stall, her hand resting on the open gate, a broken chair overturned in front of her, drifts of hay scattered around on the floor, and pinpricks of sunshine coming through the holes in the barn wall behind her, casting a spectral light. The last one was a photograph of Quinn sitting in a rowboat on Butternut Lake. It was taken the previous June, at dawn, a few days before Gabriel left for Chicago. The mist was still rising from the lake, and the sun was lighting up Quinn’s hair and part of her face. She had one hand resting on the oarlock, and she was looking away from the camera. She wanted a copy of this one.

  She looked up at him. “Gabriel, I look beautiful in this.”

  “That’s because you are beautiful.”

  She shook her head and shuffled the pictures around a little more. “Why are they all of me?” she asked. And when she looked back at Gabriel, she was struck by how different he looked now. Maybe it was the light in the room, but it was as if he’d changed, in some way she couldn’t put her finger on. He had an opaqueness, a mysteriousness, that was new, or perhaps she’d never noticed it before. She wondered what it would be like to reach over and touch his face, but she pushed the thought away.

  “I wanted to do a photo essay,” Gabriel said. “One person. Over time. And you’re the person I saw the most. You know, took the most pictures of. The photo essay is called Quinn, by the way. That was a tough one.”

  She smiled and looked back down at the photographs. “You’ve immortalized me. When you’re famous, I’ll say, ‘His RISD application was of me.’” She put the photographs back in the portfolio and handed it to him. They both stood up, and she gave him a hug. “God, I’m going to miss you,” she said into his shoulder. “I love you,” she added, without thinking. And she did.

  If her words threw him off-balance, it was only for a moment. “I love you, too,” he said, still serious.

  “I gotta go,” Quinn said. They pulled away a little awkwardly. She was meeting Jake at his family’s house for dinner. At the moment, though, she wanted to stay here, in Gabriel’s room, with him. But instead she grabbed her backpack and waved good-bye and ran the gauntlet past his brothers, who were wrestling now, or maybe just throwing each other up against the walls with as much force as possible. By the time she got back into her car, it was almost dark outside.

  Chapter 19

  Quinn, startled by a knock on the cabin door, flipped her laptop shut. “Who is it?” she called out.

  “It’s Annika.”

  Quinn rubbed a kink in her neck. If she was going to write this much, she’d have to start doing it at a desk, she thought, getting up and going over to the door.

  “Wow, Annika,” she said, when she’d opened it. “I’ve seen you more in one day than I saw you all during high school.” Annika looked embarrassed and Quinn realized that she might have sounded sarcastic. “I mean, come in,” Quinn said, with a smile.

  “I brought you these,” Annika said, holding out a stack of towels. “The housekeeper told me that you needed a couple more.”

  “Thanks,” Quinn said, taking them from her. “These are great.”

  “I didn’t wake you up, did I?” Annika asked, with a slight frown, looking over Quinn’s shoulder into the cabin. Quinn turned to look too. It did look as if she might have been napping. When she’d started writing, it had been light outside, and the only light she’d turned on was the bedside table lamp. Since then, though, dusk had fallen outside, and, except for the pool of lamplight around the rumpled bed, the cabin was full of shadows, and its corners had receded into darkness.

  “Oh, no. I wasn’t sleeping,” she said. “I lost track of time while I was writing. I’m a journalist,” she explained. Annika nodded. Quinn moved around the room, setting the towels down on a chair, turning on lights, and straightening the blanket.

  “Would you like to come in for a minute?” she asked Annika, who was still standing in the doorway.

  Annika came in, a little tentatively, closing the door behind her. “Do you write every day?” she asked.

  “Usually,” Quinn said, sitting down on the bed. “I’m not compulsive. It doesn’t have to be something weighty or long. But I want to, I need to, write almost every day. Even if it’s a short description of a person or a place or a conversation. I feel kind of off-kilter if I don’t write, kind of out of balance. I feel the same way when I don’t run. Which, unfortunately, I haven’t gotten to do since I’ve been in Butternut.”

  Annika cocked her head, as if she was considering this. She was one of those rare people, Quinn realized, who was a good listener. As a journalist, listening—listening actively and thoughtfully—without interrupting was something that Quinn had had to learn how to do. But some people did it naturally.

  “Annika, please sit down,” Quinn said. She was making Quinn nervous standing there, like a fugiti
ve about to take flight. Quinn pointed toward one of the chairs in the sitting area and Annika moved away from the door and sat down on the edge of it.

  “Could I ask, though, what you’re working on now?” Annika said. “I’ve read some of your articles in the past.”

  “Really?” Quinn was flattered. “Where did you come across them?”

  “Online. I read one about a woman’s professional softball team.”

  “Oh, the Chicago Bandits,” Quinn said, smiling. She’d really wanted to write about them and had had to convince a reluctant Theo to let her. “I had a blast writing that article. Mainly because I got to go out drinking with some of the team at a bar in Rosemont. Suffice it to say, they can hold their own,” she said of them. Quinn, on the other hand, had had to be poured into a cab at the end of the night and had woken up the next morning with a deadly hangover.

  “It was fun to read, too,” Annika said, her animation overcoming her reserve. “And so was the one about the Cape Cod Room closing. I mean, that one wasn’t fun. It was sad. But it made me feel like I was there, in those final days.”

  Quinn nodded. “Say Good-Bye to the Cape Cod Room” was an article she’d written for Windy City Today, about the last days of the iconic seafood restaurant in Chicago’s Drake Hotel. Her dad had actually taken her there once when she was a kid, when they were visiting Chicago. It was dark and cozy—the tables covered with red-and-white-checked tablecloths and copper pots hanging from the ceiling—and despite the fact it had been known for its seafood, an eight-year-old Quinn had wanted a hamburger.

  “You’re a good writer,” Annika said. “I felt like I was right there in the Cape Cod Room.”

  “Thank you,” Quinn said. “I’m glad you liked my articles. I wonder sometimes if anyone reads them. I’m not writing one at the moment.” She went on, “Right now I’m writing about my senior year of high school. I’m trying to re-create it. Not everything, just the most important parts. I’ve been especially prolific today; I’ve already written four memories of that year.”

  Annika looked surprised. “Why do you want to write about your senior year?” she asked.

  “I guess I’m trying to understand it better. Writing is the best way I know how to do that. Maybe the only way,” Quinn said. “But I’m doing it for me. It’s not for publication.”

  Annika was sitting very still in her chair, almost too still, Quinn thought. The lamplight shone on her blond hair.

  “That must be really hard, writing about that year,” she said to Quinn. She stood up then and started moving in the direction of the door.

  And Quinn, who’d been sitting on the bed, got up too. “It is hard. Sometimes I want to write about it. And sometimes I don’t. But I’m pushing myself to anyway. So far, I’ve only written about the good parts of that year. I haven’t gotten to the accident yet . . . That will be the hardest part . . . It was a terrible time.”

  Annika, standing with her hand on the doorknob, nodded in agreement.

  “Was it hard for you?” Quinn asked, realizing that all three boys had been from Annika’s hometown, and she must have known them, at least tangentially.

  Annika put her head down, as though considering this question. “It was a hard year for everyone who lived in Winton,” she said. “But I was pregnant with Jesse. So I had to think about that.” Checking her watch, she opened the cabin door as she said, “I’d better be going. I told Jesse he could watch a program, but it’s almost over now. It was nice talking to you.”

  Quinn smiled. “Thanks for the towels,” she said.

  After Annika closed the door, Quinn went to the window and watched her walk away into the darkness. She’s an enigma, Quinn thought. A bundle of contradictions. She was friendly but guarded, polite but abrupt, interested but not forthcoming. In fact, even as she had settled into the armchair she’d had one foot out the door.

  Quinn turned from the window and thought about picking up her writing where she’d left off. She’d lost the thread of it, though, and besides, she’d gotten most of it down, hadn’t she? Instead, she wandered around the cabin a little and ended up standing in front of the dresser, staring at her face in the mirror that hung above it. This wasn’t Quinn’s favorite thing to do, but she looked at her reflection now as if she were searching for something. Had Gabriel kept those photographs he’d taken of her? Were they stored somewhere in that solitary cabin of his? Or were they gone now, another casualty of life? And she wondered what he had seen in them, in her, when he’d taken them. What had he seen in them that she hadn’t been able to see in herself?

  Chapter 20

  When Quinn drove over to Gabriel’s cabin the next afternoon, his pickup truck was gone and he didn’t answer the front door. She looked through one of the windows. Nope. Nobody home. The living room looked as impersonal as it had the last time she’d been here. She checked her watch. It was four o’clock. She was right on time. He, on the other hand, seemed to have disappeared into thin air. And you thought that was your trick, Quinn, didn’t you? she chided herself, knocking again.

  Still, something was bothering her. Something other than Gabriel not being here. Why hadn’t they exchanged phone numbers yesterday? That would have been the normal thing for two old friends to do. She gave up on knocking and stuffed her ungloved hands into her jacket pockets. The problem was, their friendship wasn’t normal. Hence, the normal rules did not apply. What was more, she now understood, Gabriel wouldn’t have given her his number anyway. He didn’t trust her. Not yet. And he didn’t know if he wanted her back in his life.

  Rather than let this knowledge deflate her, though, she paced a little. She had always been lousy at waiting. After a few minutes she walked around to the back of the cabin. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but she wanted to take a closer look. Was she looking for some clue about Gabriel and his life here? Maybe. That was a journalist for you. Part detective. And part voyeur, she admitted, climbing onto the cabin’s back steps and looking in at the kitchen window. But once again, there was nothing to see. Not even a coffee mug on the counter. It was strange. Even her room at Loon Bay, which she’d occupied for less than twenty-four hours, showed more signs of human habitation than this cabin.

  She left the back door, planning on returning to her car—she was getting cold—but she caught sight of a shed in his backyard and went to investigate. It was a woodshed, and it was full to overflowing, with more wood stacked at its side and covered under canvas tarps. Was he selling the wood? she wondered, noticing the woodcutting stump he used to split logs on. He certainly wasn’t using it himself. He’d had stacks of wood on either side of his fireplace, when she’d first visited him a couple of days ago. But his cabin had been chilly and there’d been no sign of him having had a fire there recently.

  She left the woodshed now and headed back around the side of the cabin, passing what she assumed was his bedroom window. It was too high up for her to see into easily. She stopped, kept walking, and stopped again. Damn it, she was so curious. And if he came back while she was trying to look into his window? Well, she’d hear him. She glanced around for something to stand on, and, when she didn’t see anything nearby, she hurried back to the woodpile and chose a wide-bottomed oak log from it. She balanced this under the window, stepped up onto it, and steadied herself on the windowsill. There were curtains—an ugly brown-and-orange check that she knew must have come with the rental—but they were open wide enough for her to see into the room. She pressed her nose up against the windowpane, her breath fogging the glass.

  His bedroom, she saw, was like the rest of the cabin. She sighed, relieved. If there’d been anything personal in it, she would have felt . . . icky. Like she was stalking him or something. But, no, it was bare. Minimalist. Almost monastic. A bed. A dresser. A closet, the partly open door revealing a few things hanging up inside of it. She started to get down from the log, but before her foot touched the ground, she frowned, and stepped back onto it again. What was on the wall to the left of the
window, the wall that she had to crane her neck to see? Yes, it was photographs. A whole series of them—maybe twenty or more—posted on the wall. And she couldn’t make them all out, either, but she could see that they weren’t of people. They were of landscapes, and houses, and buildings. And although she couldn’t get any closer to the photographs, she had a feeling they were beautiful. So you’re still taking photographs, Gabriel? And knowing this, she felt oddly elated.

  She climbed down from the log and carried it back over to the woodpile. And then, even though she knew, somehow, that Gabriel wouldn’t be meeting her here today, and that he hadn’t forgotten and wasn’t simply running late, but that he was intentionally avoiding her, she went back and sat in her car for another forty-five minutes, feeling her mood grow heavier. She found a scrap of paper in her shoulder bag and scribbled a message on it. Gabriel, I missed you. Quinn. She left it under his door knocker and drove back to Loon Bay.

  As she took the turns of twisty Butternut Lake Drive, she felt a sadness she couldn’t shake. The note, she realized, hadn’t been entirely accurate. She’d written that she’d missed him. Past tense. The truth was, she was missing him, and everything they had had, right now. Present tense.

  Chapter 21

  Even after she returned to Loon Bay, this feeling of melancholy clung to Quinn. She tried to stay busy. She went for a long run and took an even longer shower. Then she built a fire in the fireplace, thinking to herself that her ability to build a perfect fire—thanks, Dad—should have, but didn’t, please her.

  After that, she settled into the reading chair to answer her emails, and, later, remembering the novel she’d tossed into her suitcase at the last minute, she lay down on the bed and tried to read it. But she was restless. She wasn’t used to this much downtime. Or, rather, this much in-between time. She knew how to work. She knew how to relax, sort of. It was this other thing she didn’t know how to do. This indistinct thing in the middle that left her feeling dependent on other people.