The Secrets We Carried

by Mary McNear

  She got out of the car now and started up the front walk, careful to step over some broken glass. When she pressed the doorbell, she heard it ring inside the house, barely audible over the blare of a television set. But someone heard it. A moment later, a corner of one of the bedsheets in the window moved, and then the front door swung open. A woman whose age Quinn couldn’t determine—forty? forty-five?—stood in front of her. She was thin and dressed in a dirty sweatshirt and blue jeans. Her long blond hair was lank, her blue eyes bloodshot, and her eyelids were heavily lined with black liner. She had the complexion of someone who’d spent too many days in the sun, and too many nights drinking. Still, there was a kind of ruined beauty about her, and an odd familiarity, too, that Quinn found so disorienting she wasn’t even aware of the woman’s hostility until she spoke.

  “What do you want?” she asked Quinn, and then she stuck her head out of the house and looked around, as though Quinn might have brought company with her. “If you’re here to sell me something or talk about God, I’m not interested,” she added, closing the door a few inches.

  “No, wait,” Quinn said quickly. “I’m not here to do either of those things. I know this is going to sound a little strange,” she said—and she smiled, hoping to put this woman at ease, but she only looked blankly at Quinn. “Do you know who lived here ten years ago?”

  “Yeah. I lived here,” the woman said. “I’ve been here for eleven years now. Why?” She sounded defensive, suspicious even.

  “I’m from Butternut,” Quinn explained, backtracking. “I went to Northern Superior High School and—” But the woman’s implacable hostility stopped her midsentence. “Did you know Jake Lightman?” Quinn blurted out.

  “Who?”

  “Jake Lightman.”

  “I don’t know anyone by that name,” the woman said. “And, like I said, I’m busy.” She gestured back into the house, where Quinn could hear Judge Judy on TV. The woman closed the door a few more inches, but then paused and watched, eyes narrowed, as a car came around the bend and drove past the house. “Huh,” she said, as if something about this car or its driver confirmed a suspicion she’d already had. She looked back at Quinn now and started a little.

  “What do you want again?” she asked Quinn now, with slightly more interest, and slightly less unfriendliness than before.

  “I’m sorry. I won’t take up much more of your time,” Quinn said. “My name is Quinn LaPointe and ten years ago, on March twenty-third, my boyfriend, Jake Lightman, came here and I was wondering why.”

  The woman tilted her head. “What? Hell if I know why. Ten years ago? March? I can’t remember two weeks ago. A lot of people came and went back then,” she added, searching in her back pocket for something.

  “But Jake would have been in high school, his last year. You don’t remember him?” Quinn persisted.

  “I told you, I don’t know who that is,” the woman said. She extracted a crumpled pack of Pall Malls from her back pocket and jiggled the contents, pulling out one slightly bent-looking cigarette. “Maybe he was a friend of my sister,” she conceded. “She stayed here sometimes then. Before she moved.” She put the cigarette between her lips but didn’t light it.

  “Your sister?” Quinn repeated. But even as she said this it dawned on Quinn who her sister was. Of course. That’s why she looks so familiar.

  “Annika Bergstrom. She’s my sister,” the woman said, leaning on the doorframe. “She lived here with me for a while once. Maybe it was around ten years ago. Now she lives at Loon Bay. I think. I don’t know. We don’t talk much. Are we done here?” she asked, the unlit cigarette still between her lips.

  But before Quinn could say anything, the woman slammed the door shut. Quinn heard her retreating footsteps, and the television set being turned up louder. She backed away, then, trying to make sense of what she’d just learned.

  So, that was Hedda, the sister whom Annika had mentioned a couple of nights ago. Had Jake been here to see Annika? Had he been cheating on her with Annika? No, she couldn’t picture this. He’d never even mentioned her before. Or had he, for some reason, been here to see Hedda, and she couldn’t remember him? Or was Jake here to see someone else, one of the people who “came and went back then”? Quinn went down the front steps and almost tripped on some debris as she crossed the ragged yard to her car. She had to talk to Annika. She might shed some light on this.

  Chapter 32

  One day. Two sisters. Three houses, Quinn thought, as she walked from the parking lot at Loon Bay to Annika and Jesse’s cabin. She paused on their front steps. Theirs was a larger version of the guest cabins scattered around the resort, but it boasted some individual touches that set it apart. It had, for instance, window boxes that Quinn imagined would soon be planted with geraniums, and a brass pinecone door knocker that someone kept polished, and floral-print curtains hanging in the windows. This is a home, everything about it seemed to say. As opposed to a house. And, picturing Hedda’s house, still so fresh in her memory, Quinn knew that whoever had taught Annika how to make a house a home, it hadn’t been her sister.

  She used the pinecone door knocker, and, almost before she’d let go of it, Annika opened the door.

  “Quinn,” she said, her blue eyes widening.

  “I need to speak to you,” Quinn said, dispensing with formalities. And, if Annika had begun to let her guard down the last time she and Quinn were together at the bar, it went right back up now.

  “It’s not about your cabin, is it?” she asked.

  “No,” Quinn said.

  Annika hesitated, making some internal calculation Quinn wasn’t privy to. “Okay,” she said. “Why don’t you come in. Jesse’s home sick so . . .”

  “Do you need me to come back?” Quinn asked. She’d assumed Jesse would be in school.

  “No, he’s fine. Just a sore throat. He’s in his room. We can talk in the kitchen.” She gestured Quinn inside and, closing the door behind them, led her through the living room and dining room and into the kitchen. The interior of the cabin, like the interior of the guest cabins—which Quinn now knew Annika must have had a hand in decorating—was devoid of clutter, or cuteness or decorative objects. Instead, like its smaller counterparts, it had a utilitarian feel that nonetheless managed to be both appealing and comfortable.

  “Why don’t you wait here,” Annika said, gesturing at the kitchen table. “I’ll be right back. I want to check on Jesse.” Quinn sat down and looked out the window. The view from here, of the resort’s basketball court, was unremarkable.

  “Sorry about that,” Annika said, reappearing. “Jesse’s good on apple juice. What about you?” she asked. “Can I get you anything? Coffee?” Her hand hovered over a coffeepot on the counter.

  “No, thank you,” Quinn said.

  Annika seemed at a loss. “Well, I think I’ll have some,” she said, bustling about. Annika was nervous, Quinn realized, with surprise. And, what was more, she was stalling. “Okay, let’s see,” she said, bringing a mug of coffee over to the table. “What else? Oh, I forgot.” She left and came back again with an egg timer, which she wound up and set down on the table between them. “For Jesse,” she explained. “For playing his video games. He gets half an hour. If I set this, he can’t argue with me.”

  Annika pulled out a chair and sat down across from her, and Quinn was struck by the resemblance between her and her sister. Indeed, Hedda was Annika’s doppelgänger, she realized. Her ruined doppelgänger, but her doppelgänger nonetheless. If you could subtract years from Hedda’s age, and a lifetime of hard living—of living hard—from her, you would arrive back at Annika. Annika with her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, her unblemished skin devoid of makeup, and her clothes, though casual, effortlessly neat and, somehow, ironed looking. Did Annika, with everything else she had to do, take the trouble to iron the button-down shirts she seemed to favor? Quinn wondered. She had a feeling that she did. Right after she polished the brass door knocker.

  The egg timer
sounded loud in the silent room. But now it was Quinn’s turn to stall as she searched for the right words. “Look, I’m sorry,” she said, finally. “I don’t know how to ask you this, so I’m just going to do it as directly as possible. I should tell you, first, that I came here from your sister Hedda’s house, in Winton. I went there to ask her why Jake was at her house the day he died. I know he was there,” she added. “I saw his truck parked outside that afternoon.”

  Whatever Annika had thought she might say, it was obviously not this, and she pushed her chair back a few inches, its feet scraping against the linoleum floor, as if to get farther away from Quinn.

  “I need to get something,” Annika said, standing up. “I’ll be right back.” Quinn stared after her, bewildered, and, for some reason, an image of Annika came floating back to her. It was of her stopping to talk to Tanner at the dedication. Odd that she should think of that now. But then Annika returned to the kitchen and set something—a little twist of tissue paper—down on the table. Was that for Quinn? She had no idea. She felt a flicker of annoyance, though, as Annika sat down across from her again. Whatever had sent her out of the room was a mystery. But, for the first time since she’d opened the door, Annika had regained her customary composure.

  “Annika,” Quinn said, ignoring the tissue paper on the table. “Do you know why Jake was at your sister’s house that day? Hedda was no help.”

  “She never is,” Annika said. When Quinn didn’t respond to this, though, Annika folded her hands, pale and smooth, and placed them on the table in front of her. She looked down at them before she spoke. “He was seeing me. I asked him to meet me there after school,” she said, softly. “I was pregnant with Jesse.” She looked up at Quinn now, as though these words would explain everything, but she must have seen from Quinn’s expression that they didn’t.

  “Jake was the father,” she added. “I was four months pregnant, and I needed to tell him.”

  At first, Quinn was only aware of the ticking of the egg timer. It sounded, now, obscenely loud. Annika’s voice, on the other hand, as she continued to talk, sounded as if it were coming from far away. Either that or it was muffled, a cottony whisper spoken through layers of fabric. Or maybe snow.

  “Jake was the father?” Quinn asked, when Annika stopped talking. She rephrased it. “Jake is Jesse’s father?” Annika nodded. And for the second time since she’d sat down at this table a recent memory came back to Quinn. In this one, Annika was standing on the sidewalk outside of Pearl’s, two days after Quinn had gotten to Butternut, and she was telling Quinn that Jesse would be ten in August. Her mind was working unusually slowly. Sluggishly. But, yes. It added up. Jake’s death. Jesse’s age. It was possible. And, for some reason, knowing this was like putting her finger on a jigsaw puzzle piece and moving it into place.

  “I was right,” she said, almost to herself. “Jake was cheating on me. He denied it, that night at the bonfire, but that’s what the lying was about . . .” It hurt now, she realized. A decade after it had happened, the knowledge of his lying and cheating still hurt. But not like it once might have. It wasn’t a sharp pain, but a dull, amorphous ache, a slow spilling, spreading through her.

  “But, Quinn? Jake was cheating on me, too.”

  “What do you mean?” Quinn asked, startled.

  “I started seeing Jake a year before you did. We were still together the summer he started seeing you.”

  “What?” Quinn asked, incredulous. She was almost indignant. She remembered that summer now. The things she and Jake had done together—swimming in the lake at sunset after he’d picked her up from the newspaper, lying on a blanket in a meadow on a stolen Sunday afternoon, pretending to watch a movie in his family’s rec room—but also the way Jake had made her feel while they were doing them. He’d made her feel like she was the only girl in the world. Boy, had she been wrong.

  And despite feeling disoriented, Quinn’s curiosity got the better of her. “When . . . I mean how, did you start seeing him?” she asked now, wanting but at the same time not wanting to know.

  “I went to school with him and Tanner my whole life. But I never paid attention to Jake. He was two years younger than me. The summer after I graduated from high school, things changed,” she said, tracing the rim of the coffee cup with her finger. “One afternoon, I was driving on one of the county roads, and I passed Jake. He’d been running but he’d gotten a cramp and he was walking home. I stopped, and I offered him a ride. He didn’t want to go back to his house, though. It was a beautiful day. He said he wanted to go to Butternut Lake. I said . . . okay. I could drop him off there. On the way, we talked. He asked me out. I said no, he was too young for me. But he asked me again . . .”

  Quinn nodded. Jake’s powers of persuasion, or seduction, were not at issue here. That didn’t mean Quinn wanted to hear about them, though, and, to her relief, Annika said no more about that day. But she kept talking. She needed to talk. Quinn could see that. In fact, it was as though Quinn had opened the floodgates. And whether she wanted to hear everything Annika had to say or not, she was going to listen to it anyway. You need to know this, she told herself. You’ve wanted to know for years why Jake lied to you. Now you’re finding out.

  “No one knew about us,” Annika continued. She went on to tell Quinn that her and Jake’s relationship had unfolded, almost entirely, in secret. There was no question of Annika’s father finding out about them. As long as his daughters were living under “his” roof, they were not allowed to have boyfriends. Once, Annika told Quinn, when Britta was still living at home, her boyfriend made the mistake of dropping her off at their house—not in front of it, but down the road from it—and her dad had seen him and had run after his car with a rifle. He’d managed to get a few shots off before Britta’s boyfriend sped away.

  So the first summer that Annika and Jake started going out, they met at Hedda’s house on Scuttle Hole Road, or if no one was home, at Jake’s house. Sometimes, they’d go to Ely to a movie or a restaurant, but they didn’t do that very often, and finally they didn’t do it at all. When summer ended, things got even harder. Annika got a job, working the night shift at a hospital cafeteria in Duluth. Jake went back to high school, and to the cross-country team, which he was captaining as a junior. They still tried, when they could, to see each other, but it was never enough. For Annika, at least. And she suspected, too, that there were other girls Jake saw, other girls before Quinn. Annika had a faraway expression on her face as she talked. She seemed almost unaware of Quinn’s presence. And the pain that Quinn had felt earlier subsided, a little, in the shadow of Annika’s story.

  “If you thought he was cheating, why didn’t you break up with him?” Quinn asked, remembering how Jake had been dating a girl named Ashlyn in the fall of their junior year. But she felt a surprising protectiveness for Annika now, almost as if she were forgetting her own connection to all this.

  “I couldn’t break up with him,” Annika said, lifting her shoulders, as though, even after all these years, she was still defenseless in the face of Jake’s unfaithfulness. “I fought with him about it. About him cheating. And I tried to end it with him. I did. But I couldn’t let go. I loved him.” Her cheeks pinkened now with some memory of that love. “I know it must be hard for someone like you to understand,” she said. “Someone from a normal family. When I met Jake, though, I thought I was . . . nothing. He told me I was beautiful. And smart. He made me feel good about myself. He told me he loved me. No one had ever said that to me before. Not even my mom. Not even when I was little. I mean, not that I could remember.” She looked away, struggling to control the feelings this memory brought with it.

  How could Jake have been so duplicitous? Quinn thought now. He’d been willing to have a relationship with two women at the same time. Wooing them both, making them both feel special, and desired, and loved. And yet he’d been lying to them both about his feelings. Or he hadn’t—an even stranger possibility. Of course, it was hardly unusual; infidelity was the olde
st crime in the relationship book. But Quinn, not knowing she was being deceived at the time, had been spared the pain that came with that knowledge. Annika, on the other hand, had not. And Quinn’s initial feelings of hurt and indignation underwent a kind of reversal. Annika had suffered from the same transgressions as she had. The surprise was that Quinn herself was one of the unwitting agents of this. Faced with this now, she felt an unexpected empathy for Annika.

  It was quiet in the kitchen again, but for the ticking of the egg timer, until Annika, in a fit of pique, snatched it up off the table and turned it off. “I need more coffee,” she said, getting up. “I think I’ll switch to decaf, though.”

  “Decaf sounds good,” Quinn said. And sitting at the breakfast table, watching Annika make a new pot of coffee, she realized she had more questions to ask. “So . . . the whole time I was with Jake, he was with you, too?”

  “No, not the whole time. He broke up with me in mid-December,” Annika said, sitting back down at the table. Yes, it made sense, Quinn thought. Those last three months with Jake, she hadn’t sensed he was lying to her. Not in the way she had in the early months of their relationship.

  “Is that when you found out about me? In December?” Quinn asked.