Secrets She Left Behind

by Diane Chamberlain

  “Is Keith all right?” she asked suddenly as we sat side by side at the soccer game.

  I looked at my son. He was running with his teammates toward the goal, but he was undeniably sluggish, as if he was trying to run through mud. I bit my lip, wondering if I should pull him out of the game. Before I could decide, he stopped running altogether and bent over from the waist, fighting for air.

  I was instantly on my feet, running toward him. “Keith!” I yelled.

  A whistle blew when I ran onto the field. I reached him and only then realized that Laurel was at my side. Keith looked up at me with his big Jamie Lockwood eyes. He opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something, but couldn’t find the breath to get the words out. Before I knew what was happening, Laurel had scooped him into her arms and was carrying him off the field, with me close on her heels.

  She set him down in the grass near the bleachers. People brought us water and orange slices, but I knew he needed far more than that: he needed surgery to repair the hole in his heart. I fought back tears, running my hand over his hair as Laurel took his pulse and counted the number of times his chest rose and fell in a minute. Sometimes I forgot she was a nurse.

  “Hi, Keith!” Andy walked over to us and sat on the grass next to Keith.

  “Hi,” Keith managed to answer. Was I imagining it, or were his lips a little blue?

  Laurel let go of his wrist. “I think he’s okay,” she said, “but we should take him to the hospital just to be sure.”

  I felt grateful to her for saying “we” instead of “you.” I needed someone with me.

  She found another parent to watch Andy and arranged a ride home for Maggie, then she drove Keith and me to the hospital. I was a wreck. I kept turning around to touch Keith’s leg. He stared out the window and I was terrified by the blank look in his eyes.

  “Has this happened before?” Laurel asked, peeking at him in her rearview mirror. She spoke quietly and I knew it was so Keith couldn’t hear.

  I didn’t answer right away. I felt like a bad mother, ignoring symptoms that never should have been ignored. “Not like this,” I said after a while. “But I have noticed him getting winded more easily recently.”

  “When was his last cardio checkup?”

  “October,” I said. “His doctor seemed to think he was okay.”

  “Did they do an echo or what?”

  “Just an EKG.”

  She looked over at me. “Maybe it’s time for some more intensive testing,” she said.

  I pressed my lips together to keep from crying. Laurel reached over and squeezed my arm. “It’ll be all right,” she said. “I’ll help you.”

  Laurel meant what she said about helping me. She went with us to Keith’s appointment in Chapel Hill, and she actually held my hand as the cardiologist told me about the surgery Keith needed. He talked about cutting open his chest and about the heart-lung machine that would keep him alive during the hours it would take to repair the hole in Keith’s heart. He described the weeks of recovery. My brain spun around and around inside my head, and it was Laurel who asked the questions I couldn’t seem to formulate. What were the risks of the surgery? (Death, of course.) What were the risks of doing nothing? (Decades cut off his life span.) When the doctor left the room, Laurel took me in her arms as I cried, and I leaned against her, leaned on her, as I would in the months to come.

  The surgery was scheduled for the second Tuesday in July. Laurel set up child care for Andy and Maggie because she planned to stay in Chapel Hill with me. She reserved a hotel room for us near the hospital, brushing away my weak protests about her footing the bill for it. Five days before the surgery, though, she invited me over for lunch, telling me there was something she needed to talk to me about.

  “I want to show you something,” she said when I arrived. She pulled me by my arm through the living room, where swatches of different-colored fabrics were spread across the sofa, and upstairs to the bedroom she used as a home office. “Have a seat.” She pulled a second chair up to the desk where she had a computer with a connection to the Internet. I barely knew what the Internet was, but she was always talking about it.

  “I’ve been doing some research ever since we saw the surgeon,” she said. “I didn’t want to tell you about it until I had to, in case I hit a dead end.” She pressed some buttons on the keyboard and a document appeared on the screen. “This is an e-mail from a doctor in Boston,” she said. “They’re doing clinical trials of a less invasive way to repair atrial septal defects. I’ve been communicating with him and he thinks Keith might be a good candidate.”

  She leaned to the side so I could read the e-mail. Keith would need to be examined in Boston to determine if the procedure would be right for him, but from what Laurel had told him, the specialist thought it would be. Laurel used the mouse to go to a Web site where I read about the procedure itself. They’d go in through the artery in his groin and carry a tiny umbrella-shaped device up to his heart, where it would open up, lock in place and cover the hole. My own heart thumped as I read.

  “That’s it?” I asked. “They wouldn’t have to open him up?”

  “Right.” Laurel smiled. “There’s always a chance the procedure won’t work, and then he’d have to have the surgery. But so far, they’re having really good success with this. If you want to try it, we should go up there soon.”

  That we again. I knew how hard it was for Laurel to leave her children—Andy in particular—with someone while she was away. When Jamie was alive and could watch the children, she’d travel the country speaking to groups about fetal alcohol syndrome, but she never went away anymore. Here she was, though, ready to drop her own life to help my son.

  Downstairs, my heart light with the hope she’d given me, I studied the swatches of fabric for her new sofa without a shred of bitterness or resentment.

  “I like this yellow better than the green,” I told her, and I meant it.

  It turned out Keith was a perfect candidate for the procedure. We didn’t even need to make a second trip to Boston. Laurel waited with me while they slipped the little umbrella into his heart and popped it open, telling me the whole time that it was going to work. She could feel it, she said. We had to stay up there four days to be sure the umbrella wasn’t going to budge, and by that time, Keith was already breathing like a normal boy, bored by his confinement and begging to go home. Laurel and I played games with him in his hospital room, and when he slept, we talked about our own childhoods and our dreams for our children. In those hours, I grew to love her. We were like sisters, sharing everything about our lives.

  Everything, that was, except the one deep pain we would always have in common.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Maggie

  MONDAY MORNING, I WAS LOADING A MOVIE IN THE DVD PLAYER for the little boy sitting at the table, when Mr. Jim walked into the playroom.

  “Can you come in the hall with me for a second, Miss Maggie?” he asked.

  I started the movie and followed Mr. Jim into the hall.

  “Madison’s back,” he said when we’d walked a little bit away from the playroom.

  “Oh, no,” I said. She’d been home for more than a week, and I’d hoped she’d had some kind of miracle.

  “They think this is it,” Mr. Jim said.

  “You mean…she’s dying?”

  He nodded. “Her mother said that while they were driving in, Madison asked if you’d be here.”

  “She did?” I was so touched by that.

  “I don’t know if you want to see her or not,” he said, “but I thought I’d tell you and let you decide. I know you felt a special…a connection to her.”

  Yes, I wanted to see her. Of course I did.

  “Okay,” I said.

  He touched my arm. “You don’t have to, honey. She may not even know you’re there, so if you don’t want to, you—”

  “I want to,” I said. “Can you watch the playroom?”

  He nodded. “Taffy’s her nurse
today,” he said.

  I found Taffy, and we walked together toward the little girl’s room. I had a lot of questions I wanted answered before I saw her.

  “What about her father?” I asked. I didn’t want to run into him again.

  “I think he’s locked up,” Taffy said. “At least he was. Drunk and disorderly and a few other things.”

  “Is she awake?”

  Taffy shook her head. “She’s getting a lot of morphine to keep her comfortable. Her mama’s in there with her and I know she’s completely wiped,” she said. “Would you be okay sitting with Madison for fifteen minutes or so to let her mother take a break?”

  I nodded, but inside, my anxiety kicked up a notch. “What if she dies when I’m with her?”

  “Well, I don’t expect that to happen,” she said. “But the truth is, sometimes kids—and adults—seem to wait until their relatives are out of the room to go. It’s like they don’t want to distress them more than they have to.”

  Oh, right, I thought. “Do you really believe that?”

  She smiled. “I’ve seen lots stranger things than that happen, Maggie,” she said.

  Madison’s mother, Joanna, her face ashy gray and her eyes red, sat in the recliner with the little girl on her lap. She handed her over to me as if Madison was a delicate flower. Silently, we sorted out all the leads and the clear plastic tubes that ran to this bag and that. Then Joanna smoothed her hand over Madison’s head, and without a word to me, walked out of the room.

  The recliner rocked, something I hadn’t noticed the day I’d read to her in her room. I rocked her gently, knowing the motion was to soothe myself more than to soothe her. She was so medicated, I doubted she had much of a sense of anything going on around her.

  I shut my eyes and rocked and rocked, and I didn’t even open my eyes when I sensed Daddy in the room.

  “I wanted a miracle for her,” I whispered to him.

  I know you did.

  “She’s too young.”

  She’ll be fine.

  I pressed my cheek to the warm skin of Madison’s temple. Against my chest, she slept, barely breathing. She wasn’t struggling, though. She didn’t seem to be suffering at all. I wasn’t kidding myself that I had anything to do with how calm she seemed. Anyone could have been holding her at that moment, and she would have seemed just as peaceful. But it wasn’t just anyone. It was me. And I felt strangely lucky to be able to hold her life in my arms that way.

  She’d felt light the last time I’d held her here in her room. Now she seemed to become lighter by the second, and it took me a moment to understand the reason: circled by my arms, she was already turning to dust.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Keith

  I’D BEEN BACK TO THE TRAILER TWICE IN THE WEEK AND A HALF since I moved to Marcus’s tower. The first time, I needed to dig up the name of the doctor who prescribed my Percocet. This second time, I needed to find the textbooks I’d never returned to the school. They were after me for them. Not only that, Marcus had it in his brain that he was going to get a tutor for me so I could try to get a GED since I refused to go back to school. I told him I didn’t care if I finished high school or not, but he just kept saying “we’ll see.” That was what Marcus always said when he figured he’d get his way eventually. I was onto him. Jen was on his side. Though they still hadn’t met each other, they were coming at me from different angles, pushing that damn GED. I knew I’d have to cave or else DSS would start making noise about foster care again, and that was the last thing I wanted.

  I pulled up in front of the trailer and climbed the steps to the deck. A month had passed since my mother disappeared, and she was quickly dragging Mister Johnson’s eighty percent success rate down toward seventy-nine. Even after all these weeks, it still felt weird to walk into the trailer and know she wasn’t going to be there. Rationally, I knew it, but that didn’t stop me from calling “Mom?” when I walked in the door.

  Of course there was no answer, though I thought I heard a sound coming from her bedroom. I pulled a knife from the knife block and went into the room. Nobody there. Nobody in the whole double-wide except me. And somewhere, those damn textbooks.

  I started hunting for them and found two of them—chemistry and this book of short stories—sticking out from under the sofa. I was pawing through the pile of stuff on the end table when I saw the blinking light on our answering machine. I dropped the books I was carrying and hit the play button, my finger jumping all over the place. The mechanical female voice said, “One message.”

  Mom, Mom, Mom.

  I didn’t even realize how hard I was hoping the message would be from her until I heard a stranger’s voice on the tape. Disappointment raced through me so fast I felt like I was going to pass out.

  “This is Barbara McCarty,” the woman said, “and I’m trying to reach Sara Larkin.”

  Huh? Larkin was my mother’s maiden name. I had no idea who Barbara McCarty was, and I thought that was all she was going to say, but then she kept going.

  “Ms. Larkin, we have a three-bedroom available on the first in case you’re still interested. I’ll need to verify your employment at Western Carolina Bank, though, so if you can get back to me ASAP, that’d be great.”

  My brain was numb as I listened to the woman give her number, twice. I started dialing it on our landline, but my hand was shaking like crazy. What was going on? I unplugged the answering machine and carried it out to my car. The textbooks could wait.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Keith

  I CARRIED THE MACHINE INTO THE FIRE STATION.

  “Where’s Marcus?” I asked the first person I saw, a new volunteer whose name I didn’t know.

  “In the garage,” he said.

  I put the machine down on the desk in Marcus’s office, then went out to the huge garage where three of Surf City’s fire trucks were parked side by side.

  “Marcus?”

  “Yeah!” His voice came from somewhere in the middle of the garage.

  I walked around the first truck and saw him up on the second, doing who-knew-what with a piece of equipment.

  “Gotta talk to you,” I said.

  He stood up on top of the truck and wiped his hands on a rag. “Can it wait?”

  I shook my head, my voice suddenly stuck somewhere in my throat.

  “Okay,” he said. “Go in my office. I’ll be right in.”

  In his office, I sat in the chair in front of his desk and stared at the machine like it might get up and walk out of there. He showed up a few minutes later with two bottles of Coke. He pulled a couple of tubes of peanuts out of his desk drawer and held one toward me.

  “Want some?”

  “No, man.” I plugged the answering machine into his wall outlet. “This is from the trailer. You’ve gotta hear this.” My hand looked like I had one of those shaking diseases as I pressed the play button again.

  He was pouring the peanuts into his Coke, but when the woman started talking, his hand froze in midair.

  “What the…?” he said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Larkin?”

  “Her maiden name.”

  Marcus frowned at the answering machine. “It’s got to be the wrong Sara Larkin.”

  “Oh, right. And it’s just a coincidence that this lady called our number.”

  “Good point.” He let the peanuts fall, fizzling, into the Coke. “Does this make any sense at all to you?”

  “Hell, no. And what’s this employment-at-a-bank crap?” And why was she keeping everything from me?

  “Was that area code 704?” Marcus asked.

  “I think so.” I could hardly remember my name.

  He picked up the phone.

  “You going to call the lady?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “We need to get Flip over here.” He held the phone between his chin and shoulder as he typed something into his computer. “Charlotte,” he said.

  “Charlotte what? The area code is Cha
rlotte?”

  “Did she ever talk about Charlotte?”

  “Hell, no!”

  “Hey, Flip? It’s Marcus. Come over here, okay?”

  Flip showed up in about three minutes. I must’ve said “I don’t get it” about a hundred times by then.

  “What’s up?” he asked when he walked into Marcus’s office. He saw me. “You okay, Keith?”

  “Just listen.” Marcus hit the play button, and Flip looked as weirded out as I felt.

  “You wrote this down?” he asked Marcus when the McCarty woman gave her number again. I was starting to hate her voice.

  “Got it.” Marcus clicked off the machine.

  “Let’s do this on speakerphone,” Flip said.

  Marcus hit a button on his desk phone. “Ready for me to dial?” he asked Flip, who nodded. It was me who wasn’t quite ready. My mother had a secret—one, at least—and I didn’t know if it meant she was still alive or not. If we didn’t talk to this woman, at least I could hang on to a little bit of hope.

  The phone rang on the other end. Flip checked his watch.

  “Failey Hill Apartments,” a woman answered.

  “Barbara McCarty, please,” Flip said. “This is Philip Cates of the Surf City Police Department in North Carolina.”

  I rested my head on my arms on the top of Marcus’s desk. The room spun, and I shut my eyes.