The Secrets We Carried

by Mary McNear

  Something else occurred to her now. Since she’d returned to Butternut she’d fostered a belief that seeing Gabriel was important to understanding her past. As though spending time with him would help her come to terms with her unresolved feelings about the accident. But this initial belief had been stealthily replaced by something altogether unexpected. Seeing him, spending time with him, had made her realize how much she still cared about him. So even though he’d told her not to come back, she still needed to talk to him. She needed to apologize to him for not being there for him in the years after high school. And she wanted to tell him how much she cared about him. She knew she couldn’t make up for lost time now. But she wanted him to hear her out anyway. Even if it was years late in coming, some things needed to be heard. And if, after this, good-bye was what Gabriel wanted, then it needed to be a proper good-bye, she thought, as she turned into his driveway.

  WHEN QUINN PULLED up in front of Gabriel’s cabin, his pickup truck was parked out front. She got out of her car and headed over to the front door, but she heard something that made her pause and listen. Thwack. The sound was followed by silence, and then, a second later, another thwack. It was coming from behind the cabin, where she’d seen the woodshed several days ago.

  “Gabriel?” she called out, walking around the side of the cabin. She saw him then, standing in the clearing, next to the tree stump. He was positioning a log, and when he glanced up at her and shook his head, she could have sworn that he almost—almost—smiled. Then he straightened up and, in the patch of sunlight he stood in, swung the ax in one fluid, graceful motion, splitting the log in half.

  “I guess I wasn’t clear the last time you were here,” he said, tossing the logs he’d just split onto the woodpile.

  “Clear about . . . ?” Quinn said, stalling.

  “About you not needing to come here.”

  “No, you were clear.” She looked for a place to sit down but couldn’t find one. “But I’m not here now because I think I ‘need’ to be,” she said. “I’m here because I want to be here. There are some things I want to tell you, before I, you know, say good-bye.”

  “Shoot,” he said, setting up another log to split. “Let’s hear what you’ve got to say, Quinn.” He didn’t say this unkindly, but she got the distinct impression he wanted her to get it over with as quickly as possible.

  “Would it be possible for us to talk without you holding an ax?” she asked, after he’d split the log.

  Gabriel flashed her a quick smile as he set the ax down and chucked the logs he’d split over onto the woodpile. His smile transformed his face, for a moment, and she was struck again by how handsome he was.

  “Can we, maybe, sit down somewhere?” Quinn asked, when he came over to her, wiping the perspiration off his brow with his flannel-shirted sleeve. He didn’t smile again, but he indicated the cabin’s back steps. Quinn sat down on one of them but was disappointed when he chose to stand and lean against the step railing instead. She took a deep breath, preparing her words, but for some reason she saw an image of the photographs she’d seen hanging in his bedroom. Would she ever get a closer look at them? Focus, Quinn.

  “The first thing I want to say is that I’m sorry,” she began. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you our senior year, or after I went away to college.”

  “Quinn.” He shook his head. “I told you the other day, that was my fault too. Our losing touch. When you came over here, that first day, I shouldn’t have put all the blame on you. That was wrong of me.”

  “Well, then I want to apologize for my half of it,” she said. “But the truth is, Gabriel, that when I got to college, I missed you. I missed you so much.” She kept her voice and her gaze level, trying to control her emotions. “And the few times I did talk to you on the phone that fall, afterward, I would cry. Just . . . cry. So when you didn’t call me back after the last time we talked, a part of me felt relieved. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it hurt, Gabriel. But I didn’t know what to do with you. With us.” She paused, caught her breath, and pushed on. “I told myself I had to stay focused. I threw myself into my classes. I had a campus job. And I volunteered for an after-school literacy program. I did everything I could to stay busy. It’s not like I wanted to fall out of touch with you. I wanted to hold myself together. The best way to do that, I thought, was to stay in motion. All the time.”

  “Did it work?” he asked.

  “For a while,” she said. The wind blew, shaking the branches of the pine trees and moving Gabriel in and out of the shadows. “It worked until it didn’t work anymore,” she said. She picked at a loose thread on the knee of her blue jeans.

  “Quinn?” he said. She looked up. “Keep going,” he said, and for some reason Quinn didn’t understand, these words made her heart beat faster.

  “I was okay, sort of okay, until I had some kind of a . . . breakdown,” she said, stumbling a little over this word. “It was the fall of my junior year.”

  “What happened?” he asked. He held himself still now, as still as he used to ask her to hold herself when they were having one of their photo sessions and he wanted to get the right shot.

  “Well, that fall, I was taking five classes,” she explained. “Against the advice of my adviser. I was working, volunteering, all of it. And one afternoon, in the library, after I’d pulled an all-nighter, it all caught up with me. I collapsed.”

  “What do you mean, ‘collapsed’?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember. I fainted, I guess. Someone helped me back to my dorm room. I got into bed. My roommate, Isabelle, thought I was sick or something. She and my other friends kept bringing me stuff. You know, food, magazines, lecture notes. What have you. They’d never seen me like that before. At first, I think, they were waiting for me to pop back up again, and then, when I didn’t, they made me go to the student health center. When they couldn’t find anything wrong with me, and I didn’t get better, my friends got scared.” They weren’t alone. Quinn was scared too. The trouble was, she didn’t have the energy to do anything about it.

  “Did they call your dad?” Gabriel asked.

  “Not right away,” Quinn said. Some hair had worked its way loose from her ponytail and was blowing in her face. She tucked it back behind her ear. “That took a couple of weeks. By then, I’d stopped going to class. Stopped leaving my room. Stopped leaving my bed,” she said. Those days were still a blur to her. She’d spent most of her time sleeping. “I was barely eating,” she continued. “I think that was the last straw for Isabelle. I’d begged her not to call my dad, so she called the dean instead. He called my dad.” This memory was painful, painful because she could still remember how afraid her father had been when he’d arrived at school to pick her up and how ashamed she’d been to realize she was the source of his fear.

  “What happened?” Gabriel asked.

  “I withdrew from school. I went to live with my dad and Johanna in Winona,” she said, thinking of those first difficult days at their house. But she was still grateful to Johanna for that time. It was Johanna who’d best understood what Quinn needed. Not what she’d wanted—which was to be left alone—but what she’d needed. Johanna hadn’t addressed what Gene referred to as Quinn’s “problem”; she seemed to take it for granted that Quinn would be all right. Instead, she’d insisted, gently but firmly, that Quinn “pitch in” around the house and, before Quinn knew it, she was helping Johanna cut quilt squares, or bake bread, or make apple butter. And Quinn, the least domestic of people, had found first distraction and then comfort in these chores.

  “How long did you stay with them?” Gabriel asked.

  “About three and a half months,” she said. “Just long enough, I suppose, to put myself back together again.” She smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back.

  “Did you get help, Quinn? Professional help?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yes, Gabriel. I got help. I’m not a Neanderthal. Well, that and Dad and Johanna said that was the deal. I needed to see a the
rapist. So they found me a therapist, Mrs. Wasser, a friend of a friend of theirs, or someone from their church, I forget which.” Quinn remembered what she’d looked like, though. She’d favored dangling earrings and floaty skirts and fringed ponchos, and she’d sometimes seemed to Quinn as if she might simply float away. Her office, too, was odd. It was full of shapeless, primitive-looking ceramic sculptures Mrs. Wasser made in her free time. She had been kind, though, at a time when Quinn had needed kindness. “I don’t know if she was a brilliant therapist,” she finished. “I don’t think I dealt with everything.”

  “I don’t see how you could have, in three and a half months,” he pointed out.

  “Maybe not,” she agreed, wrapping her arms around her calves and pulling her knees up under her chin. “Just talking to her, though, was good. Just telling her, you know, how sad I felt about Jake’s death.” She rested her chin on her knee. “How much I cared about him.” She frowned, remembering something. “But I realized in talking to her that my feelings for Jake might have been more of an infatuation, a physical attraction that at that age may have felt like love, but maybe . . . wasn’t love. I was only seventeen,” she said. Quinn looked at Gabriel as she said this, but his expression gave nothing away. “And, let’s see, what else did Mrs. Wasser and I talk about . . . We talked about the fact that I felt guilty that I’d fought with Jake that night, that I’d broken up with him, and that I’d left the bonfire without him.” That I’d left the bonfire with you.

  But even as she told Gabriel these things, about her “breakdown,” about her talks with Mrs. Wasser, there were, even after all these years, things that happened the night of the accident she still wasn’t ready to talk about. She’d never told Gabriel that she’d lost her ring the day of the accident. And she’d never told him about how she’d fought at the bonfire with Jake about why his truck had been parked outside the house on Scuttle Hole Road. And, of course, she’d never told Gabriel what she finally revealed to her dad yesterday, that she’d lied to Jake about having lost her ring out on the middle of the lake.

  “Did you talk to your therapist about me?” Gabriel asked, breaking into her thoughts.

  “Yes,” she said, surprised by his directness. “I did. I talked to her about how you were my best friend. About how much you meant to me. And how you were a part of the guilt I felt about leaving Jake that night.” She resisted the urge to look away from him now as she said this next thing. If it was hard for her, she figured, so much the better. “I talked about us, and about how much I loved being with you that night, after the bonfire. But that it couldn’t work. Not after Jake died.”

  Gabriel shook his head when she said this, and Quinn, her face heated, hurried on. “Gabriel, you have to understand, if I hadn’t left the bonfire with you that night, they’d all still be alive.”

  “And if you’d stayed at the bonfire, Quinn, you might have been in that truck too. Did you ever think of that?” he asked, with a flash of anger that was as pure and as fleeting as lightning, gone almost before she could register it.

  “No,” she said, her voice rising. “That would never, ever have happened, Gabriel. I would never have driven out on the lake with Jake. And I wouldn’t have let Jake get in that truck either. Not when he was that drunk.”

  “So, after you stayed with your dad and Johanna for three and a half months, you went back to Northwestern, didn’t you?” Gabriel asked. Quinn couldn’t help but feel he was steering the conversation onto safer ground.

  She nodded, feeling somewhat deflated. “That next semester, spring semester, I went back. I took a light course load, including ceramics, if you can believe it.” This had been Mrs. Wasser’s suggestion, and it got an almost smile from Gabriel. He knew that Quinn, who loved art, had no talent for it herself. “I stopped working and volunteering. I just tried to, you know, take care of myself.” It was then that she’d started running—so out of shape, at first, that she had trouble jogging a mile. By the end of the semester, though, she was running in 5K races.

  “Did you keep seeing someone? A therapist, I mean.”

  “I did. I talked to Mrs. Wasser on the phone for a while. But at some point, I decided I just needed to move on.” A gust of wind blew, flapping the edges of the canvas tarp that was covering one of the woodpiles.

  Gabriel’s gray-blue eyes looked dark in the bright morning light. “And did you?”

  “I tried to. But recently, I started having trouble again.” She told him then about the aftermath of the accident she’d witnessed this past winter and how she’d worried it was triggering the beginnings of another breakdown.

  “I’m sorry, Quinn,” Gabriel said, quietly, when she’d finished. And his voice had real warmth in it.

  “That’s the reason I came back here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If I could fall apart after seeing an accident on the highway, then I obviously hadn’t dealt with Jake’s death. And I thought if I came back here, I’d be forced to deal with it.”

  “Yeah, I can see that,” Gabriel said. He kicked at a tree root and she noticed the dried mud flaking off his work boots.

  “All right, I’ve talked about myself enough,” she said. “Now it’s your turn.” When he didn’t respond right away, she said, “Come on, Gabriel. Talk to me. What’s going on with you?”

  “Nothing’s going on, Quinn. Nothing I want to talk about,” he said, zipping up his jacket. “I’m glad you talked, though.” He looked over at her. “And I’m sorry about your breakdown. I wish I’d known about it at the time.”

  “That’s okay,” she said, but she couldn’t hide her disappointment. Gabriel was willing to listen, nothing more. Still, she wasn’t done yet. “There’s one more thing I have to say,” she told him.

  “What’s that?”

  “I care about you,” she said, simply. The words caught in her throat. No. No crying now. Get this out first. “I love you,” she said, steadying her voice. “I want you to know that. I’ve never stopped caring about you. And I don’t know why you never left Butternut, or why you seem like you might be unhappy, but if it’s somehow my fault, even a little bit, I’m sorry.” Her eyes burned with tears, but she tried to smile at him.

  “Quinn,” he said, and for a moment, he looked stricken. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for saying that.”

  Quinn wiped at the corner of her eye. She stood up and dusted off her blue jeans.

  “Come on,” he said then. “I’ll walk you to your car.” And Quinn came down the two steps on the porch and they walked together to the front of the cabin. He stopped beside her car. Quinn came up close to him, close enough to feel the almost gravitational pull he exerted on her. He reached for her then and hugged her for what seemed like a long time. Quinn hugged him back. She savored the feel of his hands, firm on her back, and the softness of his flannel shirt against her cheek.

  “Is this good-bye?” she said.

  “I think so.”

  Chapter 31

  Quinn picked up the glass animal, a caramel-colored doe with tiny white spots on it, and turned it over in her fingers. She’d owned one almost exactly like this when she was a child. She put it back on the mirrored shelf, with the rest of the glass animals on display, and looked around Butternut Drugs. Why, exactly, had she come here? She wasn’t sure. But after she’d left Gabriel’s cabin, this was the place she’d wanted to be. And she’d thought, Why not? It wasn’t as if she was in a hurry; she’d decided she would leave Butternut tomorrow morning. Now she had the whole rest of the day to fill.

  The drive into town had been interminable. She’d cried, silently, the whole way, letting the tears drip down her cheeks. She picked up another glass animal now, this one a blue jay, and then gently put it back down. There was a little dust on her fingertip, and she blew it off and wandered over to another display, this one a selection of North Woods–themed shot glasses. She wanted to be with Gabriel. How exactly she wanted to be with him, she wasn’t sure. But the knowledge th
at he didn’t want to be with her brought with it a fresh wave of pain. She picked up a shot glass with a loon on it, thinking that she might give it to her dad and Johanna, who, for some reason, collected shot glasses, but when she went to the register to pay for it the man behind the counter was giving directions to an older couple.

  “You know how I’d get there?” he was saying to them. “I’d take Scuttle Hole Road. It’s not well traveled, but it’s fast. Mostly, it’s just locals who use it. You go down Main Street, take a right, and . . .” Quinn didn’t hear the rest. She returned the shot glass to its shelf and headed for the door. She’d thought all she had left to do before tomorrow morning was to pack, tell Annika she was checking out, and say good-bye to Tanner. But it turned out there was one more thing she needed to do. She was going to the house on Scuttle Hole Road, the house where Jake was parked on the day of the accident. If possible, she was going to find out why he’d been there that day. And if she couldn’t find that out, she’d at least find out whose house it had been then.

  QUINN SAT IN her car, parked on the shoulder of Scuttle Hole Road, and looked out at the house’s desolate front yard. She was nervous. This place looked even worse than she’d remembered it looking ten years ago. Then it had been a small gray ranch house with peeling paint, a junk-strewn yard, and a mailbox with the name McGrath painted on it. And although those features were still evident, at this distance she also noticed the grayish bedsheets tacked up in the front windows in place of curtains, and, in the side yard, a disemboweled washing machine that someone had left open, as if they’d recently tried to put a load of laundry in it. Why didn’t I come here after the accident? she asked herself. But, in truth, the thought had never even occurred to her. Somehow the reason for Jake being here that day had become unimportant after his death. And besides, in the aftermath of the accident, Jake’s and Dom’s and Griffin’s deaths made the lie Jake had told her seem almost trivial. How could it possibly compete with what had happened next? No, all she could think about back then was keeping herself pulled together long enough to graduate from high school and leave Butternut.