The Secrets We Carried

by Mary McNear

  Quinn lingered for a moment on the beach and then walked over to the dock, following it out to the boathouse, a two-story gray-shingled building with several boat slips. “Tanner,” she called, poking her head into the open door. It was shadowy inside, but she saw him hanging canoe paddles on the far wall.

  He turned and smiled. “Quinn,” he said. She felt relieved. She’d worried there would be tension between them, or, at the very least, awkwardness, but as he wiped his hands on his jeans and came over to her, she saw that this wasn’t the case.

  “Gunner told me you were down here,” she said, as he gave her a friendly half hug and kiss on the cheek.

  “I brought some new paddles down,” he said. “It’s that time of year. Annika needs to start thinking about gearing up for the season.”

  “She’s lucky she has you to help her do it,” Quinn commented.

  “I try,” he said. “I’m not as good as the handymen she uses, but, then again, I’m free. How are you doing?” he asked, leaning in the doorway.

  “I’m doing okay,” she said, sipping the tea she was still holding. Tanner looked unconvinced. “Long day,” she added, by way of explanation.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.

  “Actually, I wanted to talk about the other night.”

  “Right. Yes. We need to talk about that,” he agreed. He took a zip-up hoodie off a peg near the door and pulled it on. “I’m done for now,” he said. “I just need to lock up the room upstairs.”

  “You mean the classroom?” Quinn said.

  “Have you been up there before?” Tanner asked. He turned off the boathouse lights and locked the heavy padlock on its door.

  “My dad signed me up for Sunfish sailing classes there when I was, I think, nine.” The room above the boathouse was where they taught all the skills you could learn on dry land. She remembered her utter lack of aptitude at tying even basic knots. “Now that I think of it,” she added, following Tanner up a flight of steps on the side of the boathouse, “I might not have actually made it onto a sailboat.”

  “They still teach those classes,” Tanner said, opening the door. “I think it’s more about giving parents free time than it is about teaching the kids to sail,” he said, with a quick smile. He let Quinn into the large room and she saw it had hardly changed. One wall had a row of windows facing out over the lake; the other walls were strung with sailing pennants. In one corner of the room, a bookshelf was stuffed with nautical books, and, in the center of the room, a handful of small wooden tables had director’s chairs grouped around them.

  “Is it the same?” Tanner asked.

  “Pretty much,” Quinn said, thinking she had liked the room better than the class. Even now, the sunlight filling it turned the wooden walls and floors a warm, honey color and sent playful, watery shadows onto the ceiling. From inside the room, you could just barely hear the occasional, rhythmic slap of the water against the dock’s pilings.

  “Do you want to talk here?” Tanner asked, indicating a couple of the director’s chairs.

  “Why not?” Quinn said.

  They sat down, Quinn still holding her tea. And before she could formulate what to say, Tanner pulled his chair closer and began, “About the other night. I feel bad about it.” He quickly amended, “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I loved hanging out with you, Quinn, and spending the night with you. Under any other circumstances, I’d want to see you again. But I feel like, I feel like Jake is just sort of hanging in the air between us.”

  She nodded. She knew what he meant. Quinn believed in ghosts. Not the kind on reality TV ghost-hunting shows. The other kind. The kind you couldn’t see, or hear, but that you could feel. They were the ones who were always with you. The way Jake must always be with Tanner. And, in a way, with Quinn, though she’d been slower, perhaps, to understand this than Tanner. Sitting here, across from him, she was afraid she was going to cry again.

  “Oh, God,” Tanner said, seeing her expression. “I didn’t mean to upset you. You’re the last person in the world—”

  “No,” Quinn interrupted, realizing he’d misunderstood her expression. “It’s not that, Tanner. I agree with you. That night was so fun. But I don’t think it should happen again either. And I’m not upset about that, I just had a horrible day.”

  “What happened?”

  “I had a run-in with Theresa Dobbs. In the bread aisle at the IGA, no less.” She tried to smile, but she was too tired.

  “Ah,” Tanner said, “Theresa.” She was reminded of how Gabriel and her dad had reacted when she’d first mentioned Theresa’s name to them. “Was she drunk?” Tanner asked.

  “She wasn’t sober,” Quinn said, not knowing how much to tell him about their confrontation.

  “She rarely is,” he said. “Except for the dedication ceremony. Someone—Jeffrey, I guess—got her sobered up for that. Honestly, though, sometimes I don’t know that I blame her for her drinking. Dom was her only child. And Jake? She loved Jake. He was at her house almost every day of his life from the time he was five years old. She used to call him ‘my other son.’”

  “Did she?” Quinn murmured. Her chest tightened. She’d felt almost repulsed by Theresa that morning, but seeing the compassion in Tanner’s expression now, and hearing it in his voice, she felt differently. After the accident, she realized, Theresa had had to bury not one son, but two.

  “Yeah,” Tanner said. “Ten years out, and she’s still a wreck. She’s the opposite of my mom, in some ways. Mom’s hurting on the inside, but she doesn’t want to be a burden to anyone else. Theresa, on the other hand . . .” His voice trailed off. He looked at Quinn closely. “Why? What did she say to you?” he asked.

  “Um, do you really want to hear this?” she said, not knowing if she even had the energy to tell him.

  “I do want to hear it,” Tanner said. “So you’re going to need to tell me. Without the benefit of one of those airplane bottles.”

  Quinn almost laughed. “That’s all I need,” she said. “Twelve more of those. No, I’ll tell you what happened. But I’m going to give you the abbreviated version.” Even this version, it turned out, was difficult for her to tell. Theresa, after all, had basically blamed Quinn, and her argument with Jake, for the accident. Quinn told Tanner this, but she was careful to leave out Theresa’s mention of the ring. She figured Tanner wouldn’t know anything about it and she couldn’t bring herself to tell him what she’d only just recently told her dad.

  “Jesus,” he said, when she was done. “That was inexcusable on her part. I hope you know, Quinn, that she’s not thinking logically these days.”

  “Maybe. She’s right about Jake and I getting in a fight, though. And we didn’t just fight, either. We broke up. I broke up with him,” she made herself say, never taking her eyes off Tanner.

  He looked surprised. “I didn’t know that.”

  “That’s because I didn’t want to tell your parents,” she confessed. “I didn’t want to add to their unhappiness.” Not then, and certainly not now. “But I’ve often wondered, Tanner, whether I might have . . .”—she struggled with this next word—“contributed to the accident. He’d been drinking before I got to the lake, and, I don’t know, I’m pretty sure he was drinking after I left it too. But if I hadn’t broken up with him then, if I’d stayed with him at the bonfire—”

  “Quinn, don’t,” Tanner said, though his tone was gentle. “Trust me. There’s no point in doing what you’re about to do. I’ve done it too. I’ve replayed that night in my mind a million times.”

  “You weren’t there,” Quinn pointed out. “You were, what, over four hundred miles away at college? I’m not sure there’s anything you could have done to change things.”

  He got up and walked over to the row of windows. The late-afternoon sun had lowered, just since they’d started talking, and Quinn, watching him, lifted a hand to shield her eyes.

  “I was there,” he said, glancing over at her. “Not literally, but . . .” He star
ted to lower the wooden-slatted blinds, easing the intensity of the sun and projecting their shadows onto the wall behind her. “Did Jake ever tell you how competitive we were?” he asked, when he was done, still looking out at the lake.

  “Yes,” she said. “He told me that the first time I ever talked to him. Well, ever really talked to him. I was writing a profile on him for the Butternut Express.”

  Tanner turned from the windows. “That’s framed and hanging in his bedroom now,” he said. “My mom’s read it about a million times.”

  Quinn was silent. She was thinking, for some reason, of Mrs. Lightman putting on her lipstick in the morning. With great care, the way she must do everything now.

  “So you know how it was between me and Jake,” Tanner said, coming back and sitting down across from her again. “He was always trying to find a way to one-up me, and vice versa. Mostly it was a game. Sometimes . . . I think, it wasn’t.” He looked down at his hands and Quinn was struck, once again, by how similar this mannerism was to one of Jake’s. They were so much alike, she thought, setting her now-empty cup down and tucking her legs up under her in the canvas chair.

  “Jake knew that I’d driven out on Shell Lake my senior year,” Tanner continued. “It was on April first. I did it on a dare. But it wasn’t much of a dare. It had been a cold spring. They were predicting a late ice-out. So even my underdeveloped, risk-seeking teenage brain knew it wasn’t that much of a risk. The ice was solid. Afterward, though, I bragged about it to Jake. How I’d done it so late in the season. How it was a record. I mean, how idiotic was that?” He looked up at Quinn for confirmation. She didn’t give it to him. An only child, she’d long since stopped judging sibling relationships. “I was such a cocky son of a bitch,” he went on. “And Jake had it in his head that he was going to do the same thing in the spring of his senior year. Wait as late in the season as possible and . . .” His voice trailed off.

  Quinn shook her head. “What are you saying? That Jake did what he did because he was competing with you?”

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure. He texted me that night.”

  “When?”

  “At 11:58 P.M., to be exact,” he said. That was long after she’d left the beach, but not long before Jake drove out on the ice. She looked questioningly at Tanner. She wanted to know what the text had said, but she was afraid to ask.

  He looked down at his hands again. “He texted me I’m driving across Shell Lake tonight! Lightman brothers rule!”

  “Did you text him back?” she asked. It was so quiet in the room she could hear the whir of a boat engine somewhere out on the lake.

  “I was at a party,” he said. “Doing shots of tequila. Flirting with some girl. It was noisy. And I remember being, you know, annoyed. Like, why is he texting me now? I read it, I guess, but I didn’t give it a lot of thought. But I texted him back Go for it. That was it. I put my phone away and didn’t give it another thought until the next morning when my dad called.” He paused. “I could have stopped him, but instead I encouraged him.”

  “Oh, Tanner,” Quinn murmured. She could barely breathe. “Did he . . . text anything back?”

  “No. Nothing. That was it,” he said. Tanner’s face, though still young looking, was etched with grief. “As far as I know, that was the last time he talked to anyone other than Dom and Griffin. Other people were there, at the bonfire, but they didn’t know Jake was going to drive out on the ice until they saw him doing it.” Quinn felt the hair on the back of her neck prickle.

  “I didn’t know he texted you that night,” Quinn said, almost in a whisper. “I’ve never heard anyone mention it before.”

  “Only a couple of people know about it. My parents, for one. And a few years later, I told someone else. And now you . . .” She tried, now, to imagine what it had been like for Tanner after the accident, but she couldn’t. It was almost unimaginable. She asked him about it now.

  “There were some bad years there,” he admitted. “And my parents and I . . . we don’t always get along. I’d told them about the text right after the accident. My mom didn’t speak to me for months; she basically blamed me for the whole thing. My dad came around, though, and the summer after the accident, my mom finally called me. She broke down and cried. She said I was her only son now. And that I had to be careful. But even now, there’s a strain between us.

  “Anyway, after that summer, I finished college and moved to Minneapolis. I was working way too hard and probably drinking way too much. And, like I said, I replayed that night a thousand times. If I had been alone, if I had been sober, would I have texted him back: Don’t. It’s too risky this time of year.? Or would I have called him, and heard he was drunk, and talked him out of it? Or would I have asked to talk to Dom or Griff? I don’t know. But then again, I can’t understand why they decided to go with him. They must have been drunk too. And Dom would have followed Jake off a cliff. Still, I’ve imagined every possible scenario of how I could have stopped him.”

  “Could you have, though? Would he have listened to you?” Quinn asked.

  “I don’t know. He didn’t always listen to me. I know because I tried to steer him away from some things in high school and I couldn’t. But my mom, she thought I was the one person he would have listened to.”

  “But she’s forgiven you, hasn’t she?”

  “As much as she can. And, in the meantime, I do what I can to make up for it. I take care of . . . things. The things that would have been important to Jake.”

  He looked down at his hands again.

  “Have you forgiven yourself, though?” Quinn asked now, knowing that this was much harder, in some ways, than forgiving someone else.

  “I’m working on it,” he said.

  “Tanner,” Quinn said, with a new urgency. He looked up. “You know it’s not your fault, don’t you? That there were other things happening that night too? Jake getting drunk, something he never did. Jake and I breaking up.” My telling Jake I’d lost my ring out on the middle of the lake. “What I mean,” she said, “is that there’s no way to separate everything out. No way to know what was going through his head.”

  “Well, Jake had a lot on his mind that night. That much I know. But I share some of the responsibility for what happened.”

  Quinn nodded, slowly. She wouldn’t argue with that. Not when she felt the same way.

  Tanner smiled at her then, a sad smile. How a smile could be so sad, she didn’t know.

  After they’d finished talking, he walked her to her cabin, and they hugged before she went inside. Quinn skipped dinner and went to bed early. And her sleep that night was deep and dreamless. It left nothing in its wake, not even the ripple of a memory.

  Chapter 30

  The next morning, Quinn sat at one of the café tables on the deck outside the resort’s bar and grill, drinking coffee and eating a poppy seed muffin. The morning sun was dazzling on the lake, and it was warmer today than it had been since she’d arrived in Butternut a week ago. True, she was the only guest who’d chosen to bring her breakfast outside, and she’d left her coat on, but she nonetheless felt optimistic about the arrival of spring. Gone now were the shrunken piles of old snow in the resort’s driveway; gone, too, were the clumps of snow that, a few days ago, had still been visible in the woods. Before long, the earliest of the spring wildflowers—snow trillium, white trout lilies, and bloodroot—would sprout up on the edges of the woods, in thickets, and on the slopes of the lakeshore. And then, a little later, Quinn’s favorite wildflower, the yellow lady’s slipper, which did indeed look like a lady’s slipper, like a puffy, rounded yellow silk shoe with long purple ribbons trailing behind it, would bloom.

  She broke off a piece of her muffin and popped it into her mouth. It was delicious, as good as, if not better than, the muffins they sold at the fancy bakery in her neighborhood. It was funny, she hadn’t missed her apartment for a couple of days. Evanston seemed very far away right now, she thought, noticing a solitary loon gliding past the dock below. She
watched as it traced the shoreline of the swim area. When it reached a rocky outcropping, it ducked under the water and disappeared. Quinn squinted at the sunlit lake, watching for it to resurface.

  She finished her muffin and brushed some crumbs off the tabletop and onto her plate. There was that loon, she noted with satisfaction, as it resurfaced on the other side of the dock. It was nice here, watching the water, but there was something she needed to do today.

  When she’d woken up this morning, she knew she had to see Gabriel again. She needed to talk to him. Really talk to him this time. She’d been afraid, before, to push too hard, go too deep. She’d avoided being personal—she hadn’t fully opened up to him, either.

  Quinn gathered up her things and headed for the parking lot. Of course, this reticence with Gabriel was not new. Ten years ago, in the aftermath of the accident, she’d shied away from him and from talking to him about what had happened. And the way she’d done this was simple: she’d avoided him. The same way she’d avoided everyone else in those days. Everyone but her father, who wouldn’t let himself be avoided.

  As Quinn got into her car a few minutes later, she reflected on how narrow and self-focused her perceptions of Gabriel had been since she’d returned to Butternut. Initially, she’d thought that his life was diminished because it wasn’t the life she’d imagined for him. How judgmental, she thought, as she drove down the resort’s driveway. It was as though she, and she alone, could determine whether his life was fulfilling. When, in fact, only he could do that.

  It was more than that, though. Her initial impulse with Gabriel was to try to recapture their high school friendship and their easy rapport. But as she navigated her way down twisty Butternut Lake Drive, she understood now that that was never going to happen. That friendship was gone. They were different people now; they’d changed, they’d grown. She should have understood that the moment he’d opened his door to her last Saturday. Instead, she’d kept comparing him to the “old” Gabriel, and she’d kept trying, absurdly, to find him. She had refused to look at the person he’d become. She’d had blinders on. And what about her need to understand why Gabriel had never left Butternut, why he’d given up on his high school dreams? Here, she’d treated him as a mystery to solve. But he wasn’t a profile she was writing, a knotty story she was trying to untangle for readers. Whatever had kept Gabriel here all these years wasn’t for her to uncover but for him to tell, if he chose to.