I looked down at Kimmie. Part of the bedspread was down, and Kimmie’s long hair was on top of the blue-and-white pillow. Her shoulders were jumping up and down, like when you cry. She was even sadder than me. I suddenly really, really got what Uncle Marcus meant about not pushing a girl.
I picked up her shirt from the floor and put it over her shoulder. Then I lied down behind her and put my arm around her. She turned and looked at me.
“Are you mad at me?” she asked.
“No.” I wasn’t mad anymore. I just didn’t want her to cry or be sad.
“I just got scared,” she said.
I wanted to ask her, of what? But that would be a kind of pushing her.
“That’s okay,” I said.
“Maybe we should go back to your house,” she said. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”
“Okay.”
We got dressed and walked down the metal stairs that went round and round to the living room. We were partway through the living room when a car door slammed.
“Uh-oh,” Kimmie said. “Is that your uncle?”
It better not be. I’d be in a lot of trouble. We might have to sneak out the door by the deck. Or maybe we could hide on the roof. I went to the kitchen window and peeked out. “His car place is empty,” I said. But then I saw Keith’s car.
“It’s stupid Keith,” I said.
“Should we hide?” Kimmie asked.
I wasn’t sure. Would Keith tell Uncle Marcus he saw us there? I took too long figuring it out, because all of a sudden Keith and a girl came in the front door. The girl was laughing and kind of hanging on him. Me and Kimmie froze perfectly still, like they wouldn’t notice us if we didn’t move. And for a minute, they didn’t. Keith was too busy kissing the girl.
All of a sudden, the girl saw us and stopped kissing Keith. She pointed at us, and Keith turned around.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked.
“I wanted to show Kimmie the Operation Bumblebee tower,” I said.
“Yeah.” Keith laughed. “I bet that wasn’t the only tower you wanted to show her.”
I didn’t know what he meant, but the girl laughed, too. She had gigantic eyes that were blue and black hair with a red plastic clip thing on her head. I knew her. When she turned her head, I saw that funny spot below her ear. Like a heart tattoo. I waved to her.
“Hi,” I said.
She just smiled at me. She looked really different than the other time I saw her.
“This is Kimmie,” I said. You’re supposed to introduce people when they didn’t know each other. Keith didn’t introduce the girl, though. Probably because I sort of knew her already even though I didn’t know her name.
“I’m going upstairs,” she said to Keith.
“Right behind you,” Keith said. He looked at me. “You’d better get out of here,” he said.
I wanted to ask him not to tell Uncle Marcus me and Kimmie were there, but he was mean. Mean people sometimes did the opposite of what you asked them to.
“Okay,” I said. “We’re going.”
We walked outside to our bikes.
“Will he tell?” Kimmie undid the kickstand on her bike.
“I don’t know.” I could get in so much trouble and we didn’t even have sex. That would be totally not fair.
Kimmie put her hand on my arm before I could get on my bike. I hated that her eyes had water in them and her nose was red. “Will you still be my boyfriend after today?” she asked.
It was a crazy question. “I’ll always be your boyfriend,” I said.
She smiled and even though her nose was still red, I knew she was finally done crying for now.
Chapter Forty-Six
Sara
Losing Jamie
1997
JAMIE’D PROMISED ME THAT THIS WOULD BE THE WEEK HE’D tell Laurel he wanted a divorce.
A year had passed since Marcus’s return, and I had done nothing to pressure him—although the thought of an ultimatum swept through my mind a few times. How could it not? A year! But if I told him it was now or never, that if he didn’t ask Laurel for a divorce, I would take Keith and leave…well, he’d know I was lying. I’d never leave the island.
Granted, it had been a terrible year for him. For everyone, really. Hurricane Fran had swept across the island, demolishing homes and roads. It lifted my trailer up and spun it around, setting it down again on a sea of beach grass. Of course, we’d all evacuated, so we were safe, but it took months to get my home back where it belonged, and the Sea Tender, while still standing, was wobbling on its foundation of stilts. The Lockwoods would not be able to live in it much longer, so Jamie was building a gorgeous new house for them on the sound. As I tried to put my dented trailer back in order, I felt my envy of Laurel creeping back in. She still had it all.
Jamie wanted to talk to Marcus about the divorce before he said anything to Laurel, he told me. He wanted his brother to be ready to give Laurel emotional support, because he knew she was going to need it.
“I’m dreading telling him,” Jamie’d told me.
“It’ll be okay,” I’d reassured him. I just wanted him to get this over with. I’d been waiting so long. He’d asked me months earlier why I never wore his mother’s necklace, and I told him truthfully that I was saving it for our wedding day. He promised me that day would come soon. “Everyone’s going to be shocked at first,” I said, “but they’ll be all right, Jamie. You know they will be.”
Finally, that Friday night, Jamie called to say that he and Marcus were going out on Marcus’s boat in the morning and he would tell him then. Then a quick “I love you.” It was the last I’d ever hear.
In the morning, Laurel called me in hysterics. There’d been an accident on the boat. A whale lifted it into the air, she said, tossing Jamie into the water. He was gone. Lost. Dead.
I raced over to the Sea Tender to stay with the children, while Laurel joined Marcus at the police station. Maggie was eight, and she had some understanding of what was going on. Keith, at six, less so. And five-year-old Andy was in the dark, as usual. I took the children out to the beach and huddled there with them in the sand, thinking, This has to be a mistake. It has to be.
But in my heart, I knew it was not a mistake at all.
The memorial service was held at the chapel, and there were so many people that they spilled from the doors. A Wilmington minister Jamie’d respected performed the service, but everyone knew it was too flowery and regimented for a man like Jamie Lockwood. Afterward, Laurel and Maggie and Andy tossed Jamie’s ashes into the inlet, while Keith and I—his second family, the one no one knew about—hung back with the others.
That was the hardest part of being the other woman, I thought in the days to come: grieving alone. While friends reached out to Laurel in huge numbers, no one said a word to me except a passing “Shame about Jamie Lockwood, isn’t it?” In addition to my grief, I was fearful about what would happen when Jamie’s will was read, remembering what he’d said about “making arrangements” in case something happened to him. Everyone would know about Keith and me then. But days passed and I never heard a word about anything being left to us. There was no call from Jamie’s attorney. No outraged call from Laurel. And I knew that nothing had been left to us after all. Nothing to me, and nothing to Keith.
We were on our own.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Keith
WELL, ONE THING I HADN’T FIGURED OUT ABOUT KAYAKING was that I wouldn’t be able to paddle with my screwed-up arm. That meant we had to rent a double kayak, and that Jen had to do all the paddling, which was humiliating, but she just kissed me and said she didn’t care at all. Even after she discovered paddling wasn’t as easy as it looked, she didn’t complain. I felt like a total loser, though, just kickin’ back while she did all the work. Adding to that was the fact that I’m not supposed to do sun, and of course, I didn’t think about that, so I didn’t have a hat or sunscreen. So Jen gave me her straw hat to wear and s
lathered her sunscreen all over my face and hands. Oh, and we had to wear these dorky life preservers. Dawn got Frankie to rent us the kayak for free. She probably paid for it, but whatever. Anyhow, Frankie said, no life preservers, no rental, so that’s why we looked like total wusses as Jen paddled us through the narrow waters of the sound.
Except for all that, it was pretty cool being out on the water. You get so used to living someplace that you don’t notice how amazing it is sometimes. We were so close to the birds in the marsh that we could practically see the pupils in the eyes of the blue herons. It was like I didn’t have to think about all the shit in my life for a while. Jen was into the exercise part of it. She liked seeing how fast she could paddle.
“Where does that Maggie Lockwood girl live?” she asked, as Stump Sound widened in front of us. She was studying the houses along the shoreline. There weren’t that many. “You said she lives on the sound, right?”
“Yeah. She lives in a little shack we should be coming up on soon.” I looked to my left, but the world was totally different from the water and I felt disoriented. Finally, I pointed ahead of us. “That’s it,” I said.
“Wow,” she said as we floated past the end of the Lockwoods’ pier. “It must really piss you off to know she lives in a house like that.”
“Royally.” I couldn’t even look at the place. My burned left hand had felt fine up until that moment, but suddenly I could feel the sun hitting it. Stinging it. I pressed it between my knees.
“Well.” Jen sounded down all of a sudden. “My arms are telling me it’s time to turn around.”
I felt kind of depressed, too. It was like seeing Maggie’s house had killed the fun we’d been having up till then.
Jen paddled us back to the boatyard, and we thanked Frankie and gave him our life preservers, then walked across the parking lot to Jen’s car.
“Let’s get a burger somewhere,” she said, opening her car door.
“Cool.” I took off the straw hat and tried to put it on her head, but she was already ducking into the car. The hat caught on the door frame and fell to the sand. When I bent over to pick it up, I saw something shiny beneath her seat. “What’s that?” I asked, reaching for it. I wasn’t sure what I thought it was, but the second I touched it, I knew. I pulled my hand away.
“What the…There’s a gun under your seat!”
“Shh!” she said, although there was no one nearby to hear us. “Don’t worry. It’s not loaded.”
I left the gun where it was and stood up straight. “Why do you have a gun?” I asked. I knew lots of people who owned guns, but it still shocked me that Jen was carrying one around in her car. I hadn’t figured her for the gun type.
“If you were a girl, you’d understand,” she said. “Driving alone at night and all that.” She nodded toward the passenger seat. “Come on,” she said. “Get in. I’m hungry.”
I got into the car, leaning over to get another look at the gun, but with the doors shut, it was too dark to see it.
“Don’t get obsessed,” she said. “I told you, it’s not loaded. I just like having it in case I need to scare somebody off.”
“Where’d you get it?”
She didn’t answer right away. “My father gave it to me,” she said. “He’d take me to the range. Said if I was going to have it, I needed to know how to use it.”
She’d never mentioned her father before, and I suddenly pictured this tall, skinny black-haired dude, teaching his daughter how to shoot a gun. I wanted to know more. Did he live in Asheville? Was she close to him? To her mother? Did she have brothers and sisters? I didn’t know a thing about this girl except that she was dynamite in bed and the best thing that had happened to me in a long time.
“Is your father in Asheville?” I asked.
She turned to me with a smile. Pressed her fingertip to my lips. “Let’s talk about where to get our burgers,” she said.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Maggie
IT WAS DOWNRIGHT HOT FOR AN AFTERNOON IN EARLY OCTOBER, and Jen said to come over and we’d go for a swim. The front door of her cottage was unlocked, and I walked in when she didn’t answer my knock.
“Jen?”
“Hey!” she called from upstairs. “I’m in the bedroom. Come on up.”
I walked up the stairs. It was the first time I’d been to the house in the daytime and I was totally mesmerized by the view. At the turn in the stairs was a humongous window and it framed the beach and ocean like a photograph.
I walked into Jen’s big, citrusy-smelling bedroom with its king-size bed, and found her standing near more huge windows that looked out over the water. She wore a bikini—tiny triangles on top and a string bottom—with little pink stripes of sequins sewn to the fabric. Pure Victoria’s Secret, and the kind of bathing suit only a girl like her could get away with wearing. She had one foot up on the windowsill and was slathering lotion on her leg.
She lowered her leg when I walked in. “You’re smokin’ in that tankini, girlfriend!” she said, and I wondered how someone who looked as incredible as she did in her bikini could even notice how another girl looked. I did think I looked pretty good in the green-and-white tankini, though, especially since I lost my belly fat in prison, but if there were guys on the beach, it was no contest which one of us they’d be looking at. Not that I cared.
Jen held out the tube of sunscreen. “Want some?” she asked.
“I’m good,” I said. I’d put some on before I left the house, though not her SPF 40, that was for sure. I was dying for some color.
“I’ve got towels for us downstairs,” she said, “but I have to use the loo, so I’ll be with you in a sec.”
She disappeared into the bathroom, and I stood at the window for a bit. There was no one on the beach—at least not behind the cottage. The waves were smooth and low and I felt suddenly relieved. I hadn’t realized until right that moment that, even though I’d agreed to Jen’s suggestion like I was totally happy about it, I’d actually dreaded going swimming. I hadn’t been in the ocean since the night of the storm, when Andy and I nearly drowned and the Sea Tender was destroyed. I used to love swimming in the ocean. I’d practically been raised in it. Now it seemed so…so malicious to me. Stupid.
I wandered into the attached sunroom and immediately noticed that something was different. The painting on the easel—the painting that had only sea and sky the last time I saw it—now had seagulls in the air. White froth on the waves. I lowered myself to the lounge chair and stared at it.
I heard the bathroom door open. “All set!” Jen called. “Where’d you go?”
“I’m in here,” I said.
She came to the wide arched entrance to the room. I pointed to the picture.
“The picture’s changed,” I said.
I could see the wheels turning in her head. She opened her mouth to speak, then bit her lower lip. “Busted,” she said.
“This is yours?”
She nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell me? You’re so good.”
She crossed the small room and reached between the arm of the sofa and the wall to pull out another canvas. It was the same size as the one on the easel, but this painting was complete. It showed a girl sitting alone on the beach. She was looking at the water, so you could only see her from the back, and she wore a green tankini not all that different from mine and a wide-brimmed straw hat. Her hair was long and blond down her back. There was a tiny little crack where her tankini bottom didn’t quite cover her butt. In the ocean, there were dolphins. In the sky, clouds were like cotton balls.
“Jen! I can’t believe how good you are.” I really couldn’t. I was shocked.
“I’m not great at people,” she said with a laugh. “Which is why I usually draw them from the back. Cheating, I know.”
I pointed to the painting on the easel. “You told me this was done by the owner of the house. I don’t get why you’d lie about something like that.”
“Just…modest, I g
uess.” Was she blushing? The light from the window was behind her and I couldn’t really tell. “I hate…I don’t know. The attention.”
“But this is crazy!” I said. “You were trying to figure out what to study in school when it’s totally obvious.”
“This is just a hobby,” she said. “I mean, how can you make any money as an artist?”
“Probably as easily as you can a fashion designer.”
She shrugged. “Well, I don’t have to figure it out right now,” she said. “And I’m hot, even in here with the AC on. Let’s swim, okay?”
The beach was very narrow behind the cottage, a scary sign of erosion I remembered from the Sea Tender. Or maybe it was just high tide and I was being paranoid. I saw a few people in the distance north of us, but behind Jen’s cottage, it was deserted. The air was thick and muggy and I knew my hair was turning to frizz. We dropped our towels and headed into the chilly ocean. Jen was way ahead of me as we ran through the shallow water. Or rather, she ran. I walked like the water was made of glue. I understood phobias all of a sudden. How people got them. How they could suck you down. But I would not let this totally calm water have that power over me.
Jen was in the deep water now, stroking like crazy, and I dived in and started toward her. I’d gone swimming nearly every day in the pool at the prison, and once I was able to shake off the heebie-jeebies about being in the ocean again, I felt good and strong. Jen kept swimming, though, farther out than I ordinarily would have. She was from Asheville. What did she know about swimming in the ocean? Rip currents and undertows and all that? I didn’t know why I felt such a need to keep up with her, but I did. I was relieved when she finally stopped stroking. She rolled into a sitting position, treading the water with her hands.
I started treading myself, turning to face the beach. When I saw how far we were from shore, it reminded me in one frightening nanosecond of the day Andy and I had been pulled out to sea. I suddenly shivered with panic, so far from the beach with nothing to grab on to. Except Jen, I reminded myself. If I needed to, I could tell her I was panicking and I knew she’d let me hang on to her. But I didn’t want to be such a baby.
Secrets She Left Behind Page 27
