“Did you hear that?” she whispered.
“What?” I didn’t hear anything. Actually, my ears were kind of ringing. “What did you hear?”
“Shh!” She put her finger on my lips.
I did hear something then. Somebody was walking around downstairs.
“We better get dressed!” I whispered. I got up real fast and tried to find my clothes in the dark.
“I can’t find my underpants,” she said.
I reached onto the table thing and turned on the light. Kimmie was naked in the bed and she looked so pretty I wanted to do it all over again, but then I heard some thumping downstairs.
We got dressed and opened the door. We started down the stairs that went around in a circle. I was trying to figure out what I would say to Uncle Marcus if it was him down there instead of Keith. All of a sudden, there was a big whoosh sound and I saw everything downstairs turn gold. Then I heard a big loud pop, like a firecracker.
“It’s a fire!” Kimmie grabbed my arm.
It was a fire! “Stay calm!” I said.
I heard crackling noises and smelled smoke. It was just like at the lock-in, only there wasn’t a boys’ room at Uncle Marcus’s. Just bathrooms and I didn’t think they had air-conditioner boxes outside them. I could use a different window, maybe, but we were on the stairs and there were no windows there at all.
“We need to call the fire department!” Kimmie said. “Do you have your phone?”
My phone was up in the bedroom, but smoke was starting to fill the air up there. Smoke was all around us. We needed a window to get out of. From where we stood, I could see the window in the sliding back door downstairs, but there was a big fire in front of it. There was fire everywhere.
I put my arms around Kimmie. She was crying and shaking.
This wasn’t like the lock-in at all.
Chapter Seventy-Five
Keith
I SPOTTED THE GLOW OF THE TOWER WINDOWS FROM HALF a block away. On my way there, I’d convinced myself I was getting worked up over nothing. The tower was made out of concrete, for Christ’s sake. It wasn’t going to burn. But as I screeched to a stop in front of the building, I knew that Jen had done her damage inside. I only hoped Andy and Kimmie had left before she got there.
The front door was halfway open and I could see a wall of yellow flame inside. I dialed Marcus’s number at the fire station. “Your house is on fire!” I shouted when he answered.
“What?”
“Seriously. Hurry!” I hung up, then stood in the street by my car. No way was I getting any closer than that. Man, I hoped Andy was gone. I got back in my car and pointed the headlights at the front of the tower. No bikes. Good. I moved my car to the street so there’d be room in the driveway for the fire truck. I started to turn off my lights, but my hand froze on the switch. Illuminated against the side of the house, end to end, were two bicycles. Shit! I turned off the lights and jumped out of the car.
I ran around the back of the tower, but the fire was even worse in the rear of the building. It had blown out the sliding glass doors and was lapping at the deck. I felt the heat on my face and I backed away from the tower. Maybe they got out, I thought, pressing my back against the wall of the house next door. Maybe they took off running and just left their bikes here. But Jen wasn’t that dumb. She wouldn’t go to all this trouble and let Andy escape.
The ladder! I ran a few yards toward the beach so I could see the roof. If they could get to the roof, they could climb down the ladder.
I cupped my hands around my mouth. “Andy!” I screamed toward the tower, but I knew he couldn’t possibly hear me. The only sound now was the fire. It even drowned out the breaking waves behind me.
I ran toward the side of the building. I was going to have to do this. No choice. No fucking choice.
I should’ve left my car lights on. The side of the house was in darkness, the only light the sickening orange glow from the windows. I felt along the wall until my hands hit one of the skinny metal rails. I can’t do it, I thought, but I was already grabbing the sides of the ladder and had a foot on one of the rungs.
“Keith!”
I was a few yards off the ground when I heard Maggie call my name. I glanced down just long enough to see her standing at the foot of the ladder, glowing in the flickery orange light. The world spun around me and I quickly shut my eyes, hugging the thin rails of the ladder.
“Oh my God!” she shouted. “Don’t go up there!”
“I think Andy and Kimmie are inside!” I managed to shout.
“Andy?”
I felt her grab the ladder beneath me and start to climb.
“Stay down!” I shouted. I wanted to tell her the ladder wouldn’t hold both of us—it was shaking and creaking—but I felt like if I opened my mouth to speak again, I’d puke.
“Go! Go!” she yelled.
I forced myself to put one foot above the other while the smoke rose around us. That smell. Oh, God. I’d forgotten about that smell. I kept feeling blindly above me for the roof. Come on! Come on! All my hands touched was the wall of the tower. Up and up and up. It went on forever, and my lungs hurt as bad as my shoulder. Finally, I saw where the pale wall of the tower met the black of the sky. I scrambled onto the flat roof on my hands and knees, every muscle in my body quivering. I half crawled, half ran to the center of the roof to get away from the edge, dry heaving all the way. Then I got to my feet and ran over to the slanted door.
I felt it for heat, scared shitless to pull the door open and find that flaming yellow dragon on the other side, waiting to finish me off.
“Is it hot?” Maggie was suddenly next to me.
“No.” I pulled it open and we raced down the metal stairs, shouting for Andy.
We got to the first landing. The fire was right below us. I felt the heat of it on my scars. Smoke filled the stairwell. It caught in the back of my throat and I started to cough.
“Andy!” Maggie shouted from behind me. She tried to move past me on the stairs, but I grabbed her.
“You can’t—”
“Maggie?” He was here. Not far from us.
“Andy!” I shouted. “Come this way. Come to the stairs!”
“We can’t go down!” Andy said. “There’s too much fire.”
“Come up!” Maggie shouted.
I saw the two of them then. They were so close together, they looked like one person as they moved toward the stairs. I reached down my hand.
“C’mon!” I tried to shout, but it came out as a croak.
Andy grabbed my hand, and I pulled him and Kimmie onto the stairs.
Maggie tried to reach for him, but I gave her a shove. “Up! Up!” I shouted.
I was coughing and choking as we staggered up the winding stairs. At the top, I pushed open the door to the dark roof, and we fell together in a mound, my arms around Maggie and Andy, hanging on to them with all my strength. That’s when I heard one of the most beautiful sounds in the world: sirens.
Chapter Seventy-Six
Maggie
Two Days after the Fire
I MISSED THE HOSPITAL. I FELT SO USELESS, JUST SITTING AROUND the house. I had to keep my leg up, so Mom rented a recliner and I sat in the family room watching TV and movies and playing games on my laptop.
I wasn’t sure how I got injured. I had this big bloody gash on my leg that I didn’t even know was there until they got us to the hospital. They treated Keith and Andy and Kimmie for smoke inhalation, and I was thinking how lucky I was to be fine, when a nurse asked me why my jeans were all wet. Blood. Ugh. Twenty-two stitches.
Nobody else was hurt, thank God—except for Jen. They found her body by the back door of the tower. At first, they thought she’d trapped herself when she lit the fire. That sliding glass door was always tricky to open, and I didn’t like to think what it must have been like for her as she tried to escape. I was angry at her for betraying me, and beyond furious that she’d tried to hurt Andy, but I still didn’t want to imagin
e her struggling with that door. Then they discovered she’d shot herself. Keith said she’d kept a gun in her car. Wow. That girl had some secrets.
They found lots of paintings in the bedroom at the house where she was staying, and most of them had that blond girl in them that was probably her sister, Jordy. Jen was crazy with grief over her sister and mother. It didn’t excuse what she did, but it explained it. All I knew was that I wasn’t the right person to judge someone else’s temporary insanity.
I was in the middle of watching You’ve Got Mail when the doorbell rang. Mom answered it, and I almost jumped out of my chair when Reverend Bill walked into the room. Mom left to get him something to drink, and he sat down on the sofa and folded his hands on his knees.
“I heard you got hurt,” he said.
“My calf,” I said. “I’m supposed to keep it elevated.”
He stared at me in that creepy way he had. “Always some kind of drama with you Lockwoods,” he said.
It was an insult, but I had to admit it was also the truth. “I guess,” I said.
“I thought you could start out with our visitation program.”
“What?” What was he talking about? “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Visiting sick parishioners. Making sure they have the resources they need. Three meals a day, extra help around the house. That sort of thing.”
“Reverend Bill, I don’t—”
“You’re coming to work for me,” he said with that hideous, unflinching, unsmiling look he was so good at. “You’ll do your community service for me.”
I knew the hospital was never going to take me back. Cathy Moody had called yesterday to tell me as much. But work at Drury Memorial? That was nuts.
“I’m not religious.”
He smirked. “I’m well aware of that,” he said.
“Wouldn’t your…your parishioners…Would they even let me inside the church?”
“They’ll adjust.”
I frowned. “But you hate me,” I said.
He rubbed his chin like he needed to think about that for a minute. “Help me get over that, will you?” he asked.
I stared at him. Then I started laughing. He may have smiled. With Reverend Bill, it was very hard to tell. All I knew was that I had my new community service placement, and it was going to be the hardest one yet.
I was halfway through the movie when Keith showed up at the house.
“Hey,” he said to me as he carried a box of stuff into the living room. “Marcus asked me to drop this off. Where should I put it?”
“By the stairs, I guess,” I said. Uncle Marcus was going to store some of his things with us while his tower was being gutted. “How’s the cleanup going over there?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Fire sucks, you know that?” He coughed as he lowered the box to the floor.
“Yeah,” I said. “I wish I could help.”
I wanted to talk to Keith about Jen, but the right moment hadn’t come up. Maybe this was it.
“Why don’t you take a break,” I said. “Stay here and watch a movie with me. I’m totally bored.”
“And I’m totally busy.” He headed back to the door. “I’m not going to desert Marcus just ’cause you’re bored.”
“Right,” I said.
He opened the door. “’Later,” he said.
Through the window, I could see him get into his car. So, today would not be the day I talked to him about Jen. One of these days, maybe. I understood how he felt. I’d thought I had a friend in Jen, but he thought he had a girlfriend, somebody who accepted him, scars and all. He was probably torn up over losing her—or at least what he thought he had with her. He lost the person he thought she was. Someday I’d tell Keith that I knew how it felt to be duped like that. To lose someone you never really had in the first place.
But Keith was never going to be all that easy to talk to. He was not exactly the receptive type. The night of the fire at Marcus’s, though, I saw his soft side. Until then, I didn’t know he had one. Uncle Marcus said Keith was afraid of heights, and of course he was terrified of fire. He could have stayed on the ground and let me climb that shaky metal ladder to the roof alone, but he was determined to get to Andy. That surprised me. Maybe it even surprised Keith. Now, two days later, he had his don’t-get-too-close-to-me armor back on. That was okay. Keith was never going to be the nicest guy on the island, but after that night, I definitely knew what he was: part of my family.
My other brother.
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Keith
Three Days after the Fire
AT THE TRAILER, I STARTED GOING THROUGH THE THINGS FROM my mother’s car. Plenty of people offered to do it for me. Dawn. Laurel. Marcus. Even Maggie. But I wanted to do it myself. Alone. I knew it was going to totally suck, and I didn’t want anyone around me if I lost it.
But I didn’t lose it.
I went through the papers first, because Marcus was badgering me about them. There could be a will, he said. Maybe a bank account I didn’t know about. Something important. So I dug through the box of papers. There weren’t all that many, and nothing important. Just bank statements and the information about my college fund and my health-insurance stuff and some other things that didn’t mean much to me.
Then there were the notebooks. The so-called memoir. I went into Mom’s room with the stack of them, laid down on her bed and started reading, and it was like having her there with me. I could hear her voice. I was probably the only person in the world able to read her handwriting, and that was just as well. I learned more about my mother than any boy should know.
Some things were really shockers. It was weird reading about always-in-control Laurel Lockwood as a total wreck. Same with Marcus, although he’d pretty much prepared me for that revelation. I had no idea my mother’d had a baby before me. My older half brother, Sam. I could really tell how lonely she was, not being able to talk about Sam to that Neanderthal, Steve Weston. She needed somebody to open up to. She needed my father.
I read the parts about Jamie Lockwood over and over until I finally felt as though I knew him. I loved him and I hated him. I supposed that if he’d lived, that’s exactly how I would have felt about him. Sort of normal for a teenager, that love-and-hate thing. That’s the way it’d been with my mother and me. I’d put her through hell the last few years. Some of it wasn’t my fault, but a lot of it was. And she never stopped loving me. I got that. The notebooks were full of me and what I meant to her.
I was closing the last notebook, thinking about my mom and wishing I’d had the chance to really know my father, when something I’d read suddenly clobbered me over the head.
She had a safe-deposit box? And a ten-thousand-dollar necklace?
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Andy
Two Weeks after the Fire
A REPORTER LADY CAME TO THE HOUSE, AND MOM ASKED IF I wanted to talk to her. I said, “Sure!” So the lady came in the house and me and her sat in the living room with Mom.
She asked me all the regular things, like was I scared in the fire at Uncle Marcus’s and stuff like that. She asked me if I thought Keith was brave to go into a burning house after already being messed up by a fire. I told her, “Definitely, yes!”
Everybody knows that Keith is a hero now. He’s going to go on the Today show with me and Maggie. The Today-show people say things have come full circle, but I don’t remember what that means, even though Mom explained it to me.
“Why were you and Kimberly Taylor in your uncle’s house when the fire broke out, Andy?” the lady asked.
“Marcus had asked them to organize his CD collection,” Mom said before I could answer. Which was a good thing. I kept forgetting about the CD-collection thing Uncle Marcus made up, because it was a lie. I think Mom knows the truth, though.
I had to explain to Uncle Marcus why I was in the tower when the fire happened. Even though he was very sad about his house burning up, he laughed when I told him.
&
nbsp; “Why are you laughing?” I asked.
“People always remember their first time,” he said to me. “And in your case, you’re going to have a whopper of a story to tell.”
I didn’t get it. I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody on account of sex being private. He must’ve forgot he told me that. I was happy he was laughing, though, so I laughed, too.
“You must have been so relieved when you saw Keith and your sister on the stairs, ready to lead you to safety,” the reporter said.
“Yeah,” I said. “That was definitely the best part.”
She asked me another question, but I wasn’t listening. I was thinking how I was wrong about that being the best part.
“I thought of an even better part,” I said.
“Better than knowing you were going to be rescued?” the reporter asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “After we ran up the stairs, we popped out the door onto the roof and we kind of fell in a pile and everybody had their arms around everybody.”
Mom leaned forward on the sofa. “That was the best part, sweetie?” she asked.
“Definitely.”
“I don’t understand,” the lady said.
Mom smiled and leaned back against the sofa again. “It’s a family thing,” she said.
“Yeah.” I remembered Keith’s arm around me even though he was coughing and choking. He didn’t let go of me even when we heard the sirens coming. “Keith’s last name is Weston,” I said to the lady, “but that doesn’t matter. He’s a Lockwood, whether he wants to be or not.”
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Sara
The Lioness
September 15, 2008
SHE WAS TIRED AND VERY, VERY ANXIOUS.
She’d barely slept the night before, thinking about Maggie getting out of prison sometime the next day. Long before sunrise, she heard Keith’s alarm go off. He had to go in early for a makeup exam. She got up in the darkness and made pancakes dotted with frozen blueberries. Keith’s favorite. He stumbled into the kitchen, looking surprised, and—she thought—pleased, by the platter of pancakes. He grabbed a couple of them in his hand and headed for the door.
Secrets She Left Behind Page 39
