by Scott Carter
Barrett
Fuller’s
Secret
a novel
Scott Carter
To Keri, Harlow, and Clive
One
Let’s be honest. For most people, the best part of secrets is telling them, not keeping them. The thrill of sharing other people’s private information, the sense of importance that comes from letting someone else in on this precious information, the implication that in a world that wants to know tomorrow’s news today, you are special enough, connected enough, and liked enough to be the conduit.
Barrett Fuller’s mentality is the antithesis of these people. Barrett prefers to keep secrets. To remain a mystery, to be the sole keeper of truth, in control and completely free to create whatever past, present, or future a situation demands. Over the years, this mentality has served him well, proving to be not only convenient but also lucrative.
When Barrett was twelve, his English teacher asked him what he wanted to do with his life. She meant what did he want to do for a living and suggested computers, banking, firefighting. Barrett took the question literally, blew a bubble of Bazooka Joe, and said, “I want to be rich.”
Twenty-five years later, he definitely is. Barrett should be at a library today, where his pseudonym, Russell Niles, is being honoured as man of the year for his charitable donations for the building of schools across eastern Africa. He should appreciate the room full of journalists and children that buzz about as if waiting for a rock star to appear. He should be there to hear the grey-haired host praise him not only for his impact on the minds of millions of kids as one of the world’s leading children’s authors, but also for his tireless commitment to literacy and disadvantaged communities. Instead, his agent is accepting the award on his behalf and telling the crowd he is in Ghana working with impoverished children while Barrett lies beside a brunette woman fifteen years younger than him in a bedroom the size of most peoples’ apartments.
This is a man who basks in his wealth. Sixteen-foot high ceilings, glass doors leading to a balcony overlooking a ravine, heated floors guiding the way to a hot tub at the other end of the room. This is a life only multimillionaires can afford. This is the dream that actually came true.
Sweaty and winded, Barrett clasps his hands over his chest. He’s not fat, but it’s clear he doesn’t work out. The brunette had too much red wine flowing through her yesterday evening when they’d met to care. And not just any red, of course, but the better part of two bottles of Petrus Pomerol, the merlot that Kennedy made popular during his White House years. Barrett unclasps his hands to light the cigarette dangling from his lips.
“What do they feed French women that makes them so amazing in bed?”
Another body stirs beside Barrett and removes a pillow from her face to reveal milky skin, large eyes, and a canopy of red hair.
“Arrogant, rich men,” she says, not fully awake.
“Confident, rich men,” Barrett says after a cloud of exhale. “Arrogant is just nasty.”
The redhead pulls the pillow back over her face and rolls over.
Barrett turns to the brunette, who is now on her feet.
This is the first time he’s got a sober look at her standing, and from this angle, he’s even more impressed than the night before. Her body is lean, but not model skinny. Her shoulders are too strong for the runway. He finds himself wondering if she used to be a gymnast when her voice breaks the silence.
“Oh my god.”
She stands in front of a bookshelf with a smile that seems to fill her face. Barrett pushes himself up on his elbows to a get a better look before cringing. She’s looking at the second shelf, the space reserved for books he keeps because he has to.
“What?” he says, playing along.
A book is now in her hand, and everything about it looks out of place inside the grip of silver rings and manicured nails. “You have the Russell Niles books.”
Barrett drops his weight back onto the bed, clearly unimpressed with her interest. “Some of them.”
“I’ve read these books to my nephews ten times each.”
“They were a gift.”
She removes another so that there is now a book in each hand and steps closer to the bed. Barrett notices that her shadow on the ceiling looks like some sort of lobster-clawed monster.
“You don’t have to be embarrassed,” she says, holding up the books like he’s never seen them. “These stories are the best. Every kid in the country’s reading them.”
Every kid in the world, he says to himself.
“They’re brilliant.”
The swell of his ego brings out a grin as he sits up again to put out his cigarette and taps the bedstand, where there’s a thick envelope. “I left both of you an extra hundred this time.”
The woman leans in to kiss him. “Thank you.”
Somehow, after a night of boozing and a pack of cigarettes, she still tastes like cinnamon. As they kiss, he takes the book from her hand and drops it onto the floor.
“No, thank you.”
The truth is, he picked a brunette because two nights before that it was a Korean woman named Cindy and three nights before that a blonde with streaks of pink named Shyla. The brunette is the first woman he has ever had sex with without knowing her name, and it adds too much of a rush of excitement to ask. He ordered his first escort one evening when he was watching porn and it occurred to him that it was pointless to watch other people have sex when he could buy the real thing. There’s no shame for him in escorts. From his point of view, buying fantasies is something many people would do if they could, so he does his best to enjoy it for everyone.
This is how Barrett flows through life. Compulsion over reason, lust over responsibility. He is perpetually the kid in the toy store with no rules, boundaries, or financial limits, and yes, he is ethically suspect and full of moral cavities. A week ago, after far too many drinks and a few Vicodins, he had returned home and pushed his dining room table against the wall to fully open up the massive space. Hunched in front of a chair on either side of him, he wore only goalie pads, a jock, a catcher’s glove, and blocker while a woman in a black lace thong took slap shots at him. That night he said he was an investment banker.
Two days later he got in a scuffle on the rooftop patio of one of the city’s most prestigious art galleries. Barrett had invited a real estate tycoon’s wife home, turned to get another drink, and received a fist in the face. There was nothing macho about this fight. This was awkward, drunken flailing at its most laughable. Barrett left with a split lip, an eighty thousand dollar painting of a woman’s eye, and an Italian art dealer named Bridgette. That night he said he owns a company that manufactures sexual lubricant.
The next night involved proposition betting: five grand on the table, an apron that said “Look into my eyes” printed in the middle wrapped tightly around his body, and five minutes to eat three six-ounce ribeye steaks. That night he said he owned a chain of restaurants in Vancouver. That night he lost five thousand dollars.
And then there’s the reason for his new, close-cut hair. A friend’s thirty-eighth birthday, half a bottle of sixty proof scotch, an eight-ball, a third-floor patio, and six men and women in a turtle pool led to Barrett sitting on a stool while a woman with cornrows hovered over him with an electric razor. Two more shots of Scotch later, he let out a roar that would have made any frat superstar proud as the woman shaved beehive layers into his hair before peeling the sides of his head altogether. That night he said he owned a mining company.
Immature. Irresponsible. Inane. Don’t think he doesn’t notice those that judge him, he just doesn’t care. And being worth millions of dollars, revered, and written about daily, it’s not hard for him to feel
as if he has earned a little levity.
Before all the money, Barrett assumed he would be married by twenty-five, thirty at the latest. It wasn’t a plan, just something he figured was generally a given in life, like graduating high school or getting a driver’s license. But marriage hadn’t happened by thirty, partially because he never focused on more than the moment, mostly because he put his career before everything and entirely because he didn’t care enough. When the big money started coming in, women did everything short of proposing to him, but by then his assumptions had changed. He knew why they were with him and he accepted that love was never going to flow under those circumstances. It became easier to have a good time than to care, more practical to choose his interests over romance.
A quick glance at the clock shows it is past noon. Time to get to work, time to generate some ideas. He has learned over the years that his best brainstorming happens at the beach. In the winter, the solitude helps to open up his mind, and in the summer it feels like he could be anywhere in the world. Sky blue water, sailboats, and a sun that gives everything new detail make him feel like anything is possible.
He takes a seat on his usual bench beside the boathouse and begins writing feverishly. The words flow fluently, if uninspired. This is the reward of surviving years in a genre. The outline is as clear as neon and all he has to do is fill it in with what the market desires. And the market craves the three A’s: adventure, adversity, and achievement. At this point in his writing career, it’s like counting sheep. Forget the story’s impact, morality, or the genre’s tradition, he does this for the money, and more specifically for the luxury, excess, and travel the money buys.
The sky is surprisingly bright for April and the waves hit the sand at a steady pace. He opens a bag of potato chips and stares out at the water until a boy of no more than nine approaches him holding an orange tennis ball with Velcro on one side.
“What are you eating?”
Barrett takes a moment to realize the boy is speaking to him. “I’m sorry?”
“What are you eating?”
“Potato chips.”
“What kind are they?”
“Sea salt. You wouldn’t like them.”
The intrusion unnerves Barrett. This is his time to work and he doesn’t need pointless distractions. He appraises the boy.
Wearing a blue hooded sweatshirt and oversized grey track pants that make his frail body look even smaller, he looks like a waif. Barrett doesn’t see a cute, innocent kid filled with curiosity — he sees two food stains on the kid’s sweater and holes in his pants exposing nasty-looking scabs on both knees. He glances past the boy to see a woman farther down the boardwalk playing with an even smaller child. No one else is around, so he assumes she’s the mother.
“I’ve never tried that kind,” the boy says, pointing to the chips.
“Yeah, well you’re not going to.”
“What’s sea salt?”
Barrett looks at the boy for a moment, then past him to his mother, before looking back at the boy.
“Fuck off, kid, you’re weirding me out. Go on back to your mom.”
The kid’s face contorts first into fear and then into sadness before he runs down the boardwalk. Barrett pops another chip in his mouth. This is not the tone you would expect from a man who makes his millions captivating kids, and this not the type of behaviour you would expect from a world famous children’s author. Yet there he sits, munching on chips as if he just shooed away a seagull instead of traumatizing a boy.
Two
Richard Conner has a secret too. And it’s not the type of secret any eleven-year-old should be burdened with. In fact, it’s the type of secret that few kids his age have ever had to bear. The type of secret that carves one’s character.
Eleven months ago Richard left school with thoughts of playing video games and eating zesty corn chips. It was a Wednesday and he was supposed to go to badminton after school, but it was cancelled because of repairs to the gym floor. He broke into a full smile when he saw the sign on the gym doors, because no badminton meant more video games. Specifically, more video games before five o’clock. This was his favourite time of the day. The hour and a half before his mom or dad came home from work, when he had the place to himself. It was only ninety-minutes, ninety-five if he ran home, but they were his minutes and he basked in the freedom. He blasted music while he played his favourite war video games, drank straight from pop bottles, and ate his chips directly out of the bags. He made the rules — he was king.
When Richard thinks about that day now, he realizes a lot of things were off. The temperature was bizarrely warm for February. At eighteen degrees, it was hot enough that some people actually walked outside in T-shirts. The traffic lights were out on the corner before his building, which caused a chaotic blur of honking, screeching, and yelling, and his cat limped by him into a bush beside the building with trickles of blood littering each step. The cat his parents had given him on his birthday three years after he begged for a puppy.
“Diamond,” Richard called with concern, but the cat disappeared. He ran over to the bush, bent down, and did his best impersonation of his father.
“Come here, girl. Come on, Diamond.” But she didn’t. Her brown coat made her difficult to spot behind two rotting fir trees, so he went in after her. A branch scratched the side of his neck as he bent down but he pushed on. Scared, the cat hissed at him until he picked her up and she burrowed into his armpit, careful to leave the injured, bloody leg dangling.
Richard looked down at the leg and adrenaline shot through him. Blood matted the fur, and not the red blood he saw in movies but a thick, brownish red appropriate for pain. The wound was too perfect for a bite; from the length of the gash he guessed she was raked by a piece of the chain-link fence she climbed under regularly to get to the apartment’s garbage bins. He ran into the building and down the hall to his apartment on the first floor, when music from inside stopped his momentum. A tingle of discomfort rippled up his spine. Neither his mother nor father would ever leave the apartment with the music on. He believed this with confidence due to how often both of them nagged him to turn off any light he left on before leaving a room. Images of two men wearing Halloween masks as they robbed the place flashed through his mind until the upbeat tone of the music forced his imagination back to reality. This was happy music, the type his parents played when they had parties.
After struggling to hold the cat while he fished the key from his pocket, he opened the door grateful to have help. “Mom? Dad?” But no one answered. The music blared but the room was empty. He charged down the hall into the bedroom, but it was also vacant. That left the bathroom. The shower wasn’t running, so he approached the door slowly in an effort to hear something that could clarify the situation, but the music played so loud, it dominated. Blood dripped from the cat’s leg onto the tile, so he wiped at it with a shoe, but it only smeared the blood into a streak.
He put an ear to the door and relaxed when he heard his father’s deep voice. The bathroom door was already open a crack, so he pushed it all the way in and entered cat-first.
“Dad, Diamond’s hurt. She’s bleeding. I think she cut it on a ...”
Only his father wasn’t on the toilet. Richard’s head bobbed back as if he had come too close to fire, and his eyes focused on the floor where his father kissed another man. The image startled him so much that the details were hard to make out, but the bottom line was clear. His father lay on top of a man with blond hair, a beard, and a hairy chest, and they were kissing.
“Shut the door,” his father said, with an index finger pointing in panic. But Richard was too shocked to move. The image jarred his reality and his thoughts slowed to a pace that made a verbal response impossible. “Shut the door,” his father yelled again until he scrambled to his feet and slammed the door on Richard himself.
The look in the blond man’s eyes still haunts Richard. The irreverence, the way his neck arched to get a good look at the disturban
ce, the way his face contorted in disappointment when they made eye contact. Richard thought the man should be as startled as he was, but that wasn’t the case. The blond man wasn’t flustered, he was bothered.
Richard remained in the hall for a minute as the moment washed over him. Kissing a man? He didn’t fully understand what this meant, and he didn’t need to in order to know how this would affect his mother. He knew that married people didn’t kiss other people, at least not the way his father and the blond man kissed, and he knew that this put his idea of the family in danger.
The sound of his father approaching the door pulled Richard into the moment.
He didn’t want to look at him, let alone talk with him, so he ran down the hall to his bedroom, pulled the door shut and held the cat tight. Fear surged through his body for the first time he could remember in that apartment. His father didn’t have a bad temper and never yelled at him or hit him, yet there Richard sat on his bed with trembling hands and a heart beating out of control. He may only have been ten, but he was old enough to know that this was a life-changing event, and that realization made him cry like he hadn’t cried in years.
His father eventually entered the room, took the cat from Richard’s arms, said only that he was going to the vet and left. A week later his father moved out. No warning, no explanation, just a short letter saying he was sorry, but he couldn’t live with the family anymore. Richard still hasn’t told his mother what he saw that day. That is his secret. He watched his mother cry every night for the first month; he listened to her rant on the phone to anyone that would listen; and he never told her that he saw her husband kiss another man.
Three
Barrett never planned on being a children’s author. What he wanted to be was rich, so he enrolled in Economics at McGill University, finished his first year on the dean’s list, and got a summer job with one of the largest investment companies in the country. Everything was on course, but Barrett has never taken pride in outworking people, so in an effort to do whatever necessary in order to have Fridays off his second year, he signed up for a Twentieth Century Literature class. And as stories from the likes of Morrison, Hemingway, and Albee washed over him, something happened, something that went against every one of his instincts. He fell in love with words. Until then he had never been a big reader. He read what he had to in high school and a couple of autobiographies about entrepreneurs, but he was far from avid. By the end of the Twentieth Century class he was obsessed with books, and by the end of his second year of university he was writing drafts of short stories.
