Every Secret Thing

by Laura Lippman

  “Isn’t that nice,” Maddy’s mother said, as she had said twelve times already, with just the same inflection.

  Ronnie’s gift was a Barbie, and no one in the fifth grade at St. William of York had played with a Barbie, not in public, for at least a year. When they did play Barbie, they played Soap Opera Barbie, in which Ken gets Barbie pregnant and they then have lots of serious talks about what to do, and whether it was wrong to have so much sex, and how they would never do it again if God would just take the baby away. The whole point of Soap Opera Barbie was the beginning, where you put Ken on top of Barbie and had them make funny noises. But that was a secret game, played in twos. In public, the only proper response to a Barbie was polite boredom, as if you couldn’t quite remember what she was for. As if you’d never seen her under Ken, going Oh! Oh! Oh!

  So a Barbie was bad enough. But this was a black Barbie, which was weird, because black Barbies were for black girls, they just were, and not because of prejudice, which the St. William of York girls knew was wrong. Maybe if a girl had, say, ten Barbies, one of them would be black, because then a girl could really branch out, have an apartment house full of Barbies. Maddy, in fact, was just the kind of girl who might have her own Barbie town. Her parents were that rich. So, although she was too old and the Barbie was black, that wasn’t the worst thing.

  No, the worst thing was that it was a Holiday Barbie. In July.

  She wore a red gown and a fur-trimmed cape, and even Alice, who was sometimes slow to understand what other girls seemed born knowing, realized the doll was some Toys for Tots leftover. Ronnie’s father was always bringing home stuff like this—heart-shaped boxes of candy in late February, chocolate bunnies in May, new lawn furniture in October. Alice had heard her mother say that Mr. Fuller’s Coca-Cola truck came home fuller than it went out. She wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, but she had figured out it wasn’t good, much less exquisite.

  “Very pretty,” Maddy’s mother said, as if she meant it. “Say, ‘Thank you.’ ”

  “Thank you, Ronnie.” Maddy was the kind of girl who could make “That’s a pretty dress” or “I like your hair that way” sound more evil than anything heard in an R-rated movie. In school, she had a habit of saying, “Yes, sister,” so it sounded like a curse word. Alice, who sometimes got in trouble for saying the right thing, had studied Maddy and tried to figure out how to get away with being so rude. It had to do with getting your mouth and your eyes not matching, so one—the mouth—looked pretty and right, and the other—the eyes—had this hard glitter, but nothing extra. No wink, no raised eyebrow. Ronnie, on the other hand, did it backward. Her eyes were always wide and confused-looking, while her mouth was twisted and sneering.

  Ronnie knew Maddy was making fun of her.

  “It’s a stupid nigger doll,” Ronnie said, grabbing it from Maddy and throwing it into the baby pool. “My mom picked it out.”

  “Ronnie.” Maddy’s mom had to search for Ronnie’s name, or so it seemed to Alice. “Please go get your gift out of the pool.”

  “I’m not going into the baby pool,” Ronnie said. “There’s so much pee in there it will take your toenails off.”

  Twelve little girls looked at their toenails beneath the table, for almost all of them had walked through the water at least once that day. Alice’s toenails were robin’s egg blue, which matched her blue jellies. Wendy had pink polish. Ronnie didn’t wear polish, not since the time she had tried to paint her fingernails and come to school with red streaks all the way to her knuckles.

  “Ronnie, please.” Maddy’s mother put a hand on Ronnie’s wrist. Instinctively, Ronnie yanked her arm away and up, hard. Alice knew it was an accident, nothing more—an accident that Ronnie’s hand was clenched in a fist when she pulled away, an accident that the fist hit Maddy’s mom on the underside of her chin.

  But Maddy’s mother cried out, louder than any kindergarten baby, as if the blow really stung, and the girls screamed as if they had just seen a car come crashing over the fence of the wading pool area.

  “You hit my mom,” Maddy said. “Ohmigod, she hit my mom.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ronnie said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

  “You hit my mom. You hit a grown-up.” The other girls’ voices bubbled up, shrill and shocked, but a little excited, too.

  When Maddy’s mother spoke, it was in that quiet, scary tone that adults use so effectively: “I think we should call someone to take you home.”

  “I said I was sorry. I didn’t mean to fight. It was an accident. You touched me first.”

  “You must be tired from all the sun and excitement. Is there someone at your house I can call to come get you?” Cell phone out, at the ready.

  “I came with Alice,” Ronnie said, grabbing her arm. “We have to go home together.”

  Alice was caught off guard, unprepared to wiggle out of this. Yes, technically she was supposed to go home with Ronnie, but not if Ronnie misbehaved. Why should she have to leave just because Ronnie was bad? She hesitated, and that was when Ronnie told her story, about the aunt and the Oreos and everything else.

  “Very well,” Maddy’s mother said. “Actually, I feel better about two of you walking. Now, you are going to your aunt’s house, right? On this side of Edmondson? Good.”

  It wasn’t good and it wasn’t well and it wasn’t fair. Alice peeled herself away from the bench, grabbed her towel and her shoes. Wendy’s sympathetic glance only made it worse. Ronnie walked into the pool and grabbed the doll, dropping it twice on the way back. Water had seeped through the cardboard. The doll’s dress clung to her hard little body, drops of moisture beaded on her brown limbs. Alice wished she could dip her feet in the wading pool, rinsing them, because she knew what Ronnie said was only half true. The little kids did pee in it, but that wouldn’t take your toenails off. In fact, Alice’s mom said pee was good for athlete’s foot and jellyfish stings.

  And so they went, leaving those two sets of wet footprints, one slightly ahead of the other, together yet apart, linked by the sheer unfairness of things, the usual daily accidents. Up the stairs, across the vast black parking lot, up the long hill to Edmondson, where Ronnie beat on the silver button for the Walk sign, even though everyone knew it would change in its own good time and the button was just for show.

  “I thought we were going to your aunt’s house,” Alice dared to say, and Ronnie simply stared, her lie forgotten.

  “My aunt works,” she said. “In the summer she works at the crab house on Route 40. Besides, she doesn’t like me to come around right now. She and my dad are in a fight about something.”

  Crossing Edmondson was easy, as it turned out, the Walk sign staying white their entire way across the broad, busy street. Alice knew they were breaking a rule, but it was exhilarating, a reminder of the new things that would come with leaving St. William and going to middle school. Her mother had promised she could wear makeup—well, lipstick—and get her hair cut at a salon, instead of trims in the kitchen. Even though school was a long way away, Alice began to think longingly of the trip to Office Depot to buy supplies. And clothes—she would need clothes if she wasn’t wearing a uniform every day.

  Once safely across Edmondson, Alice had assumed they would walk west to the jagged leg of Nottingham, where they both lived. But Ronnie wanted to take what she called a shortcut, which was really more of a long cut—past the bigger houses, the ones that sat back on large green lawns with little yellow signs warning dogs and children to stay away because of the chemicals.

  They were halfway down Hillside, the grandest of all the big-house streets, when Ronnie stopped. “Look,” she said.

  It was a baby carriage, sun sparking off its silver handles, perched at the top of the stairs.

  “The metal must be hot, sitting in the sun like that.”

  She seemed to expect an answer, so Alice said: “And it’s too close to the stairs. It could tumble right down.”

  “Just roll
right down.”

  “Unless the brake is on,” Alice pointed out.

  “Even if the brake is on, that’s not right,” Ronnie said. “You’re not supposed to leave a baby like that.”

  “Her mother is probably right inside.”

  Ronnie grabbed Alice’s elbow and gave it a wrenching pinch on the tip. Alice glanced at the bruise from an earlier pinch, remembered the clink of Maddy’s mother’s teeth as Ronnie’s fist struck her jaw. No, this was not a day to contradict Ronnie.

  “Not even for a minute,” Ronnie said. “Anything could happen. Someone has to look after that baby.”

  They crept up to the door. The screen was heavy metal mesh, so dense that it was hard to see much in the cool dark house beyond. But they heard nothing. No footsteps, no voices. Did you call out? Later, they would be asked that question so many times, in so many ways. Did you knock? Did you ring the bell? Sometimes Alice said yes, and sometimes she said no, and whatever she said was true at the moment she said it. In her mind, there were a dozen, hundred, thousand versions of that day. They called out. They rang the bell. They knocked. They tried the door and, finding it unlocked, marched inside and used the phone to call 911. The mother was so happy that she gave them twenty dollars and called the newspaper and the television stations, and they were the heroes on TV.

  Most of the time, Alice was sure of two things—they knocked on the door, the screen door, with its mesh so tight and small that it was almost impossible to see anything in the shadowy house. It was a screen over the screen, an intricate metal design, like something on a castle. It ended in tall thin spikes, higher than their heads. They said: “Hello? Hello?” Maybe not very loudly, but they said it.

  “This baby is alone,” Ronnie said. “We have to take care of this baby.”

  “We’re too little to baby-sit,” said Alice, who had asked her mother about this at the beginning of summer, when she was trying to figure out a way to make enough money to buy her jellies and other things she wanted. “You have to be in high school.”

  Ronnie shook her head.

  “We have to take care of this baby.”

  The baby in question was asleep, slumped sideways in her carriage, so her full cheeks were flat on one side, full and puffy on the other, like a water balloon whose weight had shifted. She wore a pink gingham jumper with matching pink socks, and a pink cap of the same gingham.

  “Baby Gap,” Alice said. She loved Baby Gap.

  “We have to take care of this baby.”

  Later, alone with her mother and the woman with the spotted face—exquizits, Alice finally got Ronnie’s joke—they would ask her again and again just how Ronnie said this. WE have to take care of this baby. We have to TAKE CARE of this baby. We have to take care of THIS BABY. But Alice could not, in good faith, remember any emphasis. Eight words, requiring no more than five seconds to utter. We have to take care of this baby. We have to take care of this baby. We have to take care of this baby. Wehavetotakecareofthisbaby. They were being good, they were being helpful. People like children who are good and helpful. That’s what Alice kept explaining. They were trying to be good.

  What did Ronnie tell her grown-ups—her parents, the handsome man with the shiny blond hair and the suit with the funny name? Seersucker, Alice’s mom had said, looking at the blond man in the hallway. Seersucker. Alice knew, from her mother’s tone, that this was a good thing, as good as classic or vintage, even exquisite. What did Ronnie tell Mr. Seersucker, what did he believe when it was all over?

  But that was the one thing that Alice never knew, never could know, and still did not know almost seven years later when she was released by the State of Maryland for her part in the death of Olivia Barnes.

  Part I

  The

  Usual Daily

  Accidents

  Monday,

  April 6

  1.

  “Interesting,” the ophthalmologist said, rolling away from Cynthia Barnes in his wheeled chair, like a water bug skittering for cover when the lights went on in the middle of the night.

  “Not exactly my favorite word in a doctor’s office.” Cynthia tried to sound lighthearted. The metal apparatus was cold and heavy on her face, and although it wasn’t literally attached, she couldn’t help feeling as if she were in a vise. Each flick of the doctor’s wrist—Better here? Or here? Here? Or here?—seemed to tighten the machine’s grip on her.

  “Good interesting,” he said, rolling back to her. “Now, is it clearer with the first one or”—he flipped something, inserted something, she had never been sure what he was doing—“or this one.”

  “Could I see those again?” She sounded tentative, even to her ears, which shamed her. Cynthia still remembered what she was like back when she was always sure about things.

  “Absolutely. This one”—the letter O, bold but a little wavy around the edges, as if it were underwater—“or this one.” This O was not quite as bright, yet it was clearer.

  “The second one?”

  “There are no right answers here, Cynthia. An eye exam isn’t a test.” He chuckled at his own wit.

  “The second one.”

  “Good. Now is it better with this one or”—another flip—“this one.”

  “The first one. Definitely the first one.”

  “Good.”

  She felt a little glow of pride, then embarrassment for caring at all. She had arrived at the doctor’s office on a wave of apologies, having skipped her annual exam for the last three years, despite the friendly little postcards that arrived every spring. She was AWOL from the dentist, too. And she might have passed on this eye exam, if it weren’t for her younger sister’s sly observation that Cynthia was squinting more often these days. “You keep straining like that, you’re going to have one of those little dents,” said Sylvia, who had never forgiven Cynthia for getting the one pair of green eyes in their generation. “Better reading glasses than Botox.”

  Cynthia had almost snapped: Get off my damn back, I’ve earned that dent. Instead she had made this appointment with Dr. Silverstein, who had moved to the northern suburbs since she saw him last.

  Satisfied, Dr. Silverstein swung the machine off her face, returned her contact lenses to her, along with a tissue to catch the saline tears that flowed from the corners of her eyes. He was younger than she, it dawned on her. He must have just been starting out when she first went to him thirteen years ago. She wondered how those years had treated him, if his life had gone according to his expectations and plans.

  “Well, I’ve seen this before,” Dr. Silverstein said, smiling so broadly that his dimples showed, “but I’ve seen few cases as pronounced as this.”

  Cynthia was not comforted by the smile. She had known too many people whose expressions had nothing to do with what they were about to say.

  “What? What?” I’m going blind, I have a tumor behind one of my eyes, which explains the headaches. But she hadn’t told Dr. Silverstein about the headaches. Should she?

  “Your eyes are getting better, Cynthia. We see this sometimes in people who have worn contact lenses for a long time. Nearsightedness improves. You’ve been having trouble focusing on things because your contacts are old and pocked by protein deposits, not because you need a new prescription.”

  “What about reading glasses?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Good. I’ve heard that if you get reading glasses, your close-up vision gets worse and worse.”

  “Ah, yes, that old wives’ tale. It doesn’t quite work that way.” Dr. Silverstein picked up a model of the human eye, which Cynthia found disgusting. She hated to visualize what lay beneath the fragile veneer of skin, always had. She was nauseated at the sight of flattened squirrels and cats in her neighborhood, and a passing glimpse of one of those surgery shows on cable could send her into a near faint.

  “There’s a muscle that controls the lens of your eye, if you will. It gets rigid with age….” His voice trailed off when he realized Cynthia was star
ing over his shoulder, refusing to make eye contact with him or his plastic model. “Anyway, no reading glasses yet, just a new contact lens prescription. These should be ready in a week. Should the nurse call you at home or at work?”

  “Home. I haven’t worked in years.”

  Dr. Silverstein blinked, suddenly awkward. He was one of the people who had never had a chance to say, “I’m sorry,” because the tragedy was almost a year in the past by the time he saw her at her annual exam. Cynthia’s life was full of such acquaintances, well-meaning types who had been left stranded by the tenuousness of their connection. Doctors, mechanics, accountants. She remembered the April immediately following, when Warren asked the accountant how one calculated for a dependent who had not survived the calendar year. Did they take the full credit, or did Olivia’s death mean they had to prorate the deduction? For Warren and Cynthia, who had already asked a thousand questions they had never planned to ask—questions about burials and caskets and plots and the scars left by autopsies—it was just another dreary postscript. The accountant had looked so stricken she had wanted to comfort him.

  She was beyond that now.

  Cynthia went blinking out into the bright day, remembering, as she always did upon leaving the eye doctor, that first pair of glasses when she was ten. The wonder of finally seeing the world in sharp, clear focus had been dwarfed by the fear of her classmates’ taunts. The other girls at Dickey Hill Elementary, even her friends, were always looking for a way to prick the self-importance of Judge Poole’s oldest daughter. Another girl might have begged her mother to let her carry her glasses in a case, putting them on only as necessary. But to take them on and off would be an admission of weakness. So Cynthia wore those tortoiseshell frames wherever she went, holding her head high.