The Secrets We Carried

by Mary McNear

Annika shook her head. “No, I knew about you from the beginning. Since I started working at Pearl’s the summer you started seeing him. I was standing in the window one afternoon, when business was slow, and I saw you two drive by in his pickup. I recognized you,” Annika added. “From high school and from Pearl’s, too. You used to come in there with your friend who had the camera. I asked Jake about you and he said you were friends. I wanted to believe him. And part of me did, but part of me didn’t. When he broke up with me in December, he told me he was in love with you. He admitted he’d been seeing you since July. I knew then that he’d been lying all along,” Annika said. She paused for a moment and looked at Quinn before continuing. “He told me he was giving you a promise ring. He showed it to me the day he broke up with me. He told me he was giving you the ring that night.”

  “He showed you the ring?” Quinn was stunned. “Why would he do that?” she asked.

  “So I would believe him, I guess,” Annika said.

  “But wait a minute. When did you find out you were pregnant?” Quinn asked.

  “About two weeks after he broke up with me. At first, I pretended it wasn’t happening . . . Oh, God, I was so scared about my dad finding out. When I was three and a half months pregnant, though, Hedda said I could move in with her. About a week later, I started to show.” Quinn closed her eyes, for a moment. It was hard to think about.

  Annika got up now to pour two cups of coffee and brought one over to Quinn.

  “What did Jake do when you told him?” Quinn asked.

  “He was so upset,” Annika said. “He was pacing up and down my sister’s kitchen. He kept saying he was in love with you. He said he’d already planned everything out. He was going to go to the University of Wisconsin, and then he was going to marry you. He didn’t really say all that to me. He was more thinking out loud.” Her cheeks flushed with something. Anger, maybe. “And I said, ‘Well, I can’t do this alone, Jake. It’s your baby too. And you’re going to have to help me.’ Finally, I think, it sank in. He stopped pacing. He got quiet. He sat down and he put his head in his hands. I thought he was going to cry. But he didn’t. He was like that for a long time. Then he said you’d break up with him. He said everything was over. His life was over. Then he got up and said he was going to get drunk. Then he left. I never saw him again.”

  “Oh my God,” Quinn said, staring at Annika.

  “Yeah. It was pretty terrible. But Caroline helped me through it,” Annika said with a wistful smile. The first smile Quinn had seen since they sat down. “She was the only person then who knew about me and Jake. Even now, not that many people know. It’s not a secret. Jesse knows his dad’s name. He knows he drowned. But I haven’t told him how. I should, probably. He’s getting older. I should tell him before someone else does . . .” She trailed off.

  “Tanner knows all this, doesn’t he?” Quinn said, wondering at how much he’d withheld from her.

  “Yes, I told him the summer before Jesse was born. He helped me too. A lot. He helps us a lot,” Annika said. Quinn looked, reflexively, out the window at the basketball court. She’d watched Tanner and Jesse shoot baskets there. And remembering her own misguided night with Tanner, Quinn hoped, no, prayed, that Annika and Tanner had only ever had a platonic relationship. The possibility of her and Annika sharing not one, but two brothers filled her with dread. But she didn’t have the courage to ask Annika this now. Instead, another question came to her.

  “Annika, you weren’t going to tell me any of this, were you?” Quinn asked now. “I mean, if I hadn’t come here today, I’d have gone home without ever knowing about you and Jake and Jesse.” And Quinn couldn’t help but feel stung by the realization that if she hadn’t stumbled upon Hedda she might never have known any of this.

  “I wanted to tell you,” she said, looking abashed. “I really did. That’s why I sent you the clipping about the dedication. I was hoping you would come.”

  “You sent that?” Quinn shook her head. “So . . . you wanted me to come, but when I did, you avoided me,” she said, remembering running into a reluctant Annika outside of Pearl’s.

  “I know. Weird. Right? But as soon as I saw you, first at the dedication and then in front of Pearl’s, I couldn’t tell you. I was scared. I didn’t know how you would react. Each time I thought about telling you, I just couldn’t do it.” Quinn was silent.

  “There’s something I want to give you,” Annika said now. She seemed nervous. She untwisted the piece of tissue paper in front of her and took something small and gold out of it. Quinn leaned closer and instinctively held out her hand. Annika placed it in her palm. It was the ring with the aquamarine stone. It felt cool, and light, almost insubstantial. She stared at it. And all this time she’d thought it was on the bottom of Shell Lake.

  “Where did you find it?” Quinn murmured, looking up at Annika.

  “The day of the accident, you dropped it in Pearl’s. When you paid for hot chocolate. I saw it fall to the floor, and after you left I picked it up. Once I saw what it was, I should have given it back to you. But I didn’t want to. I was angry at you. Later, after Jake died, I just put it away. I was a mess. I felt like the accident was my fault. I know that Jake got drunk because I told him I was pregnant. Then, when Jesse was born, I had to stop thinking about it. I thought about sending it to you. But I couldn’t. And then I thought that if you came back here, I’d tell you about Jake and then I’d give it to you. But I didn’t have the guts. I was afraid you’d get angry . . . And I liked you,” she added, with some of her old reserve. “I didn’t know that I would.”

  “I’m not angry,” Quinn said, closing her hand over the ring. And it was true. She felt many things, but anger at Annika was not one of them.

  “Mom?” Jesse said, as he pushed open the kitchen door. Quinn and Annika both looked at him at the same time. “I need more apple juice,” he said.

  Annika got up, and Quinn took in his pajamas, his messy hair, and his sleepy eyes. He was a cute kid, she thought. More Annika than Jake. He smiled at Quinn. And that was the first time she saw it. If he’d smiled at her sooner, she might have known he was Jake’s son.

  Chapter 33

  Quinn slipped her tattered cashmere sweater off the hanger, folded it, and placed it on top of her already full suitcase. There. She was packed. All she needed to do was take one last look around the cabin for those things that seemed to delight in being left behind: the forlorn sock under the bed, or the lipstick tube that had rolled under the sink. She opened the top bathroom sink drawer and glanced inside it. It was empty, but for an extra bar of the lavender-scented hotel soap. And the smell of it, oddly enough, reminded her of a trip she’d once taken with her dad.

  By the time Quinn was seven, her maternal and paternal grandparents had all died. But before that, right after she’d turned six, her dad had taken her to visit his mother, Estelle LaPointe, in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where he’d grown up. For the two nights they stayed there, Quinn slept in her father’s childhood bedroom.

  She’d been disappointed it no longer looked like a “boy’s” room, but instead had been turned into a “guest room,” a new concept for Quinn. Still, as a consolation prize, she found a few Happy Hollisters mysteries in its bookshelf that had once belonged to her dad.

  Almost all her memories had to do with her grandmother’s house. There’d been a glass paperweight with a butterfly inside it on Estelle’s coffee table, white lace doilies on the arms of the armchairs, a lamp with a shepherd girl statue attached to it in the dark master bedroom, and the smell of lavender, always lavender, in the front hallway. Estelle was almost eighty by then, and to a little Quinn she seemed ancient. She’d spent most of her time in a big armchair in the living room with a TV tray next to her, watching game shows or listening to a ball game on an old-fashioned transistor radio, nibbling on shortbread cookies. During the day, her dad took Quinn around the city to show her the sights. At night, they sat at the white Formica-topped table in the kitchen and had dinner with Es
telle. After her grandmother said grace, these meals were largely silent, and Quinn, swinging her feet beneath the table as she balanced peas on her fork, kept looking back and forth from her dad to her grandmother. Why didn’t they say anything to each other? she’d wondered.

  When Quinn and her dad were on the train back to Minneapolis—the train ride had been Gene’s idea of an adventure for Quinn—she’d asked him if he would miss his “old home.” And he’d explained to her that home wasn’t always a house, or even necessarily the place you’d grown up. “Home is the place you choose,” he told her. “The place you want to be. It’s where love grows.” A home, he said, could be anywhere. It could be in the middle of the wilderness or in the heart of a big city, or even on Webber Street in Butternut. He’d kissed her on the forehead then. “Right now, Quinn,” he’d said, “home for me is wherever you are.” She’d spent the rest of the train ride eating the shortbread cookies her grandmother had packed for her and looking out the window at the towns and the backyards and the cornfields speeding by.

  Quinn turned off the light in the bathroom and went to look out one of the cabin’s windows. It was a gray day. A fretful day. Where was home for her? She wasn’t sure she knew anymore. One week in Butternut and her whole center of gravity had shifted. She loved this town, and this lake, with all her heart, but it was no longer home. There was Evanston, the place she’d lived for the last ten years. But she no longer felt the pull of that, either. Of course, she had an apartment there. And a bicycle and clothes and books and houseplants and friends. Friends she could meet for coffee or a drink or, like Katrina, for a run, or, like Annie, to hear an indie band play. So, yes, she had friends. Good friends. But not great friends. Not close friends. In the six years since she’d graduated from college, she hadn’t made any of those kinds of friends, nor had she had any lasting romantic relationships. She’d liked men, dated them, and even, in a few instances, graduated beyond the “dinner and a movie” to a weekend trip (or a Thanksgiving dinner with her dad and Johanna), but on the emotional level, she’d tried to keep her relationships uncomplicated. Mostly what she’d done since college, she realized, was to work hard at her writing. She’d had a routine there, a schedule, an orderly life. But Evanston? It wasn’t home, not in the deepest sense of the word.

  Quinn noticed now, from the window, the resort’s swing set. It was right beyond the basketball court and a couple of its slatted swings were stirring in the wind. Annika had made her home here, at Loon Bay, she thought. And despite all the difficulties of her life in Winton, she’d chosen to settle—for now—only ten miles away from there, on Butternut Lake. She hadn’t had to run far to find a life. A home. After all, she’d had Jesse here with her. And Quinn remembered that yesterday, after Jesse had gone back to his video game, Annika had apologized for taking the ring. Quinn, feeling so many disparate emotions, not only about the ring but everything else, too, had said nothing. She’d hugged Annika instead.

  After she’d left their cabin, Quinn had stopped by Tanner’s. She didn’t stay long; she didn’t have the energy to. But she wanted him to know that Annika had told her about Jake and Jesse. She scolded him, then, for not telling her sooner. Tanner had apologized. He’d felt that, on this point, he’d needed to defer to Annika, and she hadn’t been ready to tell Quinn yet. Quinn had asked him about his parents then. She assumed that they knew Jake was Jesse’s dad, and she was hurt that they hadn’t told her either. Had they, like Tanner, been willing to let her leave Butternut without knowing the truth? “Quinn, my mom didn’t think any good would ever come of telling you,” Tanner had said. “They thought it would only upset you. And truthfully, my mom has never fully accepted Annika, anyway.” He’d explained to her that when Annika first came to his parents, after Jesse was born, his mom didn’t believe that Jake was Jesse’s dad. And when Tanner had interceded, and his mom finally did believe it, she’d blamed Annika for the accident, and for making Jake behave irrationally that night. It had taken months for her to come around, months for her to apologize to Annika. Eventually, his parents had worked out an arrangement where Jesse came over to their house one Sunday a month. They’d also set up a savings account for him, and a college account. But they weren’t close to Annika.

  Tanner, on the other hand, was. He’d done everything he could, short of moving here, to support both her and Jesse. He talked to them each by phone a couple of times a week, came up once a month, sometimes more, and spent his holidays and long weekends here. It was being with Jesse, not being at Loon Bay, that made him feel close to Jake.

  And Quinn told him something she’d wanted to tell him at the boathouse the day before. She told him about the lie she’d told Jake that night, about the ring being lost out on the lake. She wanted Tanner to know, for his own sake, that the accident was probably caused by a convergence of many things, instead of any one thing. He’d acknowledged this might be true, but it didn’t change his conviction that he bore some responsibility for the accident. All he could do now, he said, was to make sure that he watched out for Jesse and Annika. Quinn had one final question for him as she was leaving his cabin. Had he and Annika ever been romantically involved? He’d shaken his head. “No, never,” he’d said. “We’ve never been more than friends.”

  Quinn left the window now and went to zip up her suitcase, but before she could finish even this simple task, someone knocked on the cabin’s door. Annika, Tanner, or housekeeping, she decided, going to open it. Gabriel was not on her list. But it was Gabriel who was standing on the other side of it now.

  “Hey,” she said, not bothering to hide her amazement. This time, he had come to her, she thought. He looked strange, though. No, not strange, different. Even in this chilly weather, he was wearing only a white T-shirt and blue jeans, and, maybe it was the day’s gray light, or maybe it was Quinn’s ruminations on the concept of home, but it seemed to her that his skin had a pale nobility to it, the bluish circles under his eyes an undeniable romanticism.

  “Can I come in?” he asked, looking over her shoulder into the cabin.

  “Of course,” she said, stepping aside. She felt suddenly, irrationally, happy. Gabriel walked past her and looked briefly at Quinn’s half-zipped suitcase, sitting on the bed.

  “You’re leaving?” he asked, turning to her.

  “I am,” she said. “But I don’t know where I’m going,” she added, surprising herself.

  “You’re not going back to Evanston?”

  “Eventually, I’ll have to. I have an apartment there. I’m not sure I’ll stay, though. I don’t know if it’s the right place for me anymore.” She caught sight of herself in the mirror above the dresser and looked quickly away. She looked different too. Her eyes were shining, and her cheeks were flushed. “Maybe I’ll travel,” she said. “It’s been years since I’ve taken a real vacation. Maybe I’ll take a road trip.”

  “A road trip?” Gabriel repeated. He tilted his head a little and smiled at her. Why is he here? Quinn wondered, happiness spilling through her.

  “Come with me,” she said, impulsively. Gabriel looked surprised. He shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “Quinn, there’s something I need to tell you,” he said. He walked over to the sitting area and chose one of the red leather armchairs. “It’s about the accident.”

  “Okay,” she said and sat down in the armchair opposite his. She assumed by the accident he meant the night of the accident, as opposed to the accident itself. But the question he asked her next surprised her.

  “Do you remember the teachers’ basketball game at the high school that night?”

  “Of course. I didn’t go to it, though.”

  “I know. But I did. For the first hour. Jake was there, you know that, right?” She nodded. “He and Dominic and Griffin were sitting in front of me in the bleachers. They’d been drinking, obviously, and they were being loud. And obnoxious. Just yelling things that weren’t funny, but that were borderline mean. Anyway, it bothered me. I can’t
explain it. I wouldn’t have cared if . . .” If Jake hadn’t been my boyfriend, Quinn thought. “Anyway,” he said, “I was watching the game and wondering where you were and then, just like that, you texted me. You asked me if I’d give you a ride to the bonfire.”

  “You texted me right back,” Quinn said. “I remember because I was upset that night. It made me feel better, I think, to know I was going to see you.”

  “I felt the same way,” Gabriel said, “though maybe with a little more . . . intensity than you did. I was all about the intensity in those days. But I’m getting off track. I left the game after that. Once I realized you weren’t coming, I didn’t see any point in staying.” He paused and rubbed his eyes. “I went out to the parking lot,” he continued. “I’d driven my dad’s truck, and it was parked in back. When I got to it, I saw Jake had parked his truck right behind it.”

  He stopped and looked up at the ceiling, as though he’d find some kind of guidance up there.

  “Go on,” Quinn said.

  He cut his gray-blue eyes back to her. “I don’t know what I was thinking. No, wait, that’s not true. I do. I was thinking if I drove you to the bonfire and Jake never made it there, I’d get to hang out with you that night.”

  Quinn cocked her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “I siphoned the gas out of his tank, Quinn. Right there in the parking lot. I had the tube and a gas can in my dad’s truck. I’d used them earlier in the day.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “It was one of those stupid ideas you have when you’re seventeen. I was full of them in those days. They’d just pop into my head. I mean, I didn’t always act on them. This time, though, I did. My plan wasn’t very well formed, but I thought if I siphoned the gas out of his truck, he’d get out of the game and he’d be stuck. He’d get a ride to a gas station eventually, or get someone to bring him a can of gas, or whatever, but by then, it’d be late. Maybe he wouldn’t even come out to the bonfire.”