I'll Never Tell

by Catherine McKenzie

  “You feeling as rough as I am?” he asked. Truth be told, he’d had trouble making his routine that morning. He’d woken at 6:45 as usual, but his tongue felt thick in his mouth despite the vigorous brushing he’d given his teeth the night before. He’d felt like turning over and going back to sleep, but he’d made it. Rung the bell on time, greeted the day with regret. He needed to start exercising, he thought. Do something to push back against the number fifty, which was closer than he liked to think. He didn’t have a father to model himself on, as far as what could happen to his body if he didn’t take care of it. It was better if he erred on the side of caution.

  “I’m fine,” she said, though her lips were cracked and still slightly stained from the red wine.

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Thanks.”

  She was holding a book. The Secret Garden. He recognized it right away. It was his mother’s copy, or one that looked exactly like it. She’d tried to get him to like that book, but it was a “girl book,” he’d said. He still regretted telling her that.

  “I bet Ryan’s a mess,” Mary said. “And Margaux.”

  “It was stupid. We shouldn’t do that again.”

  “I had fun,” she said, jutting out her chin. The long blonde braid of her hair was hanging over her shoulder. When she had her back to him, she could’ve been fifteen again. But front on, she was the one who’d aged the most of them. Or maybe that was him. Why was he up in his head so much this morning? It had to be the alcohol, still working its way through his system.

  “What about you?” she asked. “Did you have fun?”

  “It’s always fun to hang out with you guys. You know that.”

  Mary frowned. Sean was pretty sure he knew why. He never used to notice her much, growing up, his attention always pulled to Margaux. Was that a mistake? Mary was much more like him. Compact. Quiet. Maybe they could’ve—

  “You don’t have to say that.”

  “I mean it.”

  “No, you don’t, but that’s okay. You got to hang with Margaux, right? That must’ve been nice.”

  Sean felt the heat rise in his cheeks. Did everyone know, then? What was in his heart? What he’d wished for for so long? What he’d risked everything to get?

  “Has it been weird for you, living here without them?”

  Sean considered her question as he watched her hands on his mother’s book. She’d been so mad at him when he’d refused to let her read it to him. “I don’t want to hear about stupid Mary and her garden!” Those were maybe the last words he’d said to her.

  They’d been living in what must’ve originally been a garden shed in back of the Twilight. There were places like that in small towns all over Quebec, ones they’d visit every three months or so, as his mother shifted through the circuit. She’d always measure his height right when they arrived, searching for the mark they’d left the last time.

  Sean hadn’t understood it at the time, their peripatetic life. That was the word Mr. MacAllister had used—peripatetic—and Sean had to look it up. “Traveling from place to place, especially working or based in various places for relatively short periods.” That’s what the dictionary told him. And he supposed that was right, once he pieced his childhood together. All the seedy bars they lived near or above. His mother’s odd wardrobe, made up mostly of fishnet stockings and long white shirts. How there was always mascara in the corners of her eyes even if she’d just taken a shower. That smell that clung around her like a perfume, only it was skunky, masculine.

  And the men. Always so many men.

  “Sean? Did you hear me?”

  “Yes, sorry. It’s been different, that’s for sure.”

  “You miss them.”

  “Is that so weird?”

  “No, it’s the rest of us who are weird.”

  “You don’t miss them?”

  “Honestly? No, not exactly. That’s pretty awful, isn’t it?”

  “I’ve never understood you kids.”

  “We aren’t kids anymore.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  He was angry now. The MacAllister children were a bunch of . . . selfish . . . ungrateful . . . This was the kind of language his mother had always used. His mother, the prostitute. It made him sick to think of her that way. To imagine all the men who’d used her, and the awful truth that he was probably the reason she needed to do that in the first place. And then to be confronted with the fact that Mary and the others couldn’t care less about what happened to camp. It was too much.

  “What did you want to say?” Mary asked.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “No, come on. You want to say something, I can tell.”

  Sean looked down at his hands. They were balled into fists, the knuckles white on the outside.

  “I just don’t understand you. You grew up in this great place and went to good schools, and your parents, they weren’t perfect, but they did the best they could. They stuck around. They fed you. They loved you. And you’d have thrown that all away, all of you, to have different parents. Just because your dad was weird sometimes, and maybe your mom wasn’t the most maternal person. Yeah, I know what you all thought about them. They did, too, you know? And it hurt them. You hurt them.”

  Sean felt out of breath but exhilarated. He’d wanted to say something like this for so long. And Mary’s reaction—eyes staring out of her head—was also worth it. He was only sorry that everyone hadn’t been around when he finally let go. He wasn’t sure he could get the words out again.

  “Tell me how you really feel,” Mary said quietly. “Don’t hold back.”

  “I’d like my book back.”

  “What?”

  “That book,” he said, pointing to The Secret Garden. “That’s mine.”

  “This is mine from when I was a kid.”

  “No. It was mine first.”

  He crossed the distance between them in a bound and took it from her hands. This felt good. He should’ve done this years ago. Decades.

  “See?” He flipped it open to the cover page where his mother’s name—Dorothy—was written in faded ink. Someone had crossed through it and written the name MacAllister. Of course they had. That’s exactly what had happened to him.

  Crossed out and replaced by a MacAllister.

  “Who’s Dorothy?”

  “That’s my mother.”

  “Oh,” Mary said, and Sean knew that someone had told her all about his mother, the thing he thought no one knew except for Mr. and Mrs. MacAllister, who’d saved him when she’d died in one of the squalid rooms above the Twilight, a needle in her arm, vomit trailing down her chin.

  Sean had found her like that, early in the morning, when he’d awakened in the potting shed and hadn’t been able to find her. He hadn’t woken up anyone else in the building, hadn’t called the police, even though his mother had told him to always find a grown-up and how to dial the numbers that would bring help if he needed it. Instead, he’d taken off running down the road and had almost collided with Mr. MacAllister’s car.

  “She was a good person,” Sean said.

  “I didn’t know her.”

  “She was a good person. And this was hers.”

  Sean was standing too close to Mary now. She smelled like the barn, like hay and horses and manure. It wasn’t unpleasant, not to Sean, but there was something else mixed in that hit him like a gut punch.

  Fear.

  CHAPTER 23

  BINGO

  Liddie

  “Ryan’s up,” Kate said, about half an hour after the morning bell had rung.

  Liddie stopped what she was doing and listened. Kate was right; she could hear the murmur of Ryan’s voice through the grate in the ceiling.

  “Who’s he talking to?”

  “Kerry, I think.”

&nbs
p; Liddie walked over to the phone on the desk. She lifted it gently. This was one of the bad things about cell phones; the opportunities to listen in on other people’s conversations were greatly diminished since everyone had given up their landlines.

  “Liddie!”

  “Shhh!”

  Kate made a slashing motion across her throat, then mouthed, Cut it out. Liddie mouthed back, What? Kate took the receiver from her hand. She put in back in the cradle gently.

  “Why’d you do that? Now we won’t know what he’s saying to Kerry.”

  “We’re not supposed to know. It’s private.”

  “Please.”

  “We should get out of here.”

  “But we haven’t found what we’re looking for yet.”

  “I think I found it,” Kate said. She went to the box she’d been looking through and pulled out a file that was thick with newspaper reports and the distinctive color-coded stickies their father used to note important facts. “Everything in here is about Amanda. Well, and the rest of us, it looks like, but lots about Amanda.”

  “Why didn’t you say so before?”

  “I didn’t have time. Anyway, let’s go, okay? I don’t feel like talking to Ryan right now.”

  Liddie couldn’t help but smile. “Are you scared of him?”

  “No, not exactly.”

  “You are.”

  Kate grabbed Liddie’s arm and tugged her toward the exit. An hour ago in reverse. They were the inside out of each other, for good or for bad.

  “That hurts!”

  Kate kept pulling, so Liddie had no choice but to follow her or twist away like she’d been taught in her self-defense class. She’d already used a self-defense move on one member of her family this weekend; two in two days seemed excessive.

  When they were outside, Kate let her go. It was already much hotter out than an hour before, a blast of Indian summer. But were they even allowed to use that term anymore? Liddie didn’t know and didn’t care.

  “If I’d known you were this assertive this whole time, I would’ve used you more.”

  “Used me more for what?”

  Something caught Liddie’s eye. She looked up. Ryan was standing in the window, shirtless, looking down at them. She waved out of instinct, then dropped her hand.

  “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  • • •

  They headed for the Craft Shop but stopped short and hid behind a tree when first Sean, and then a few moments later, a shaken-looking Mary emerged.

  “What do you think that’s about?” Kate whispered into her ear.

  “No idea.”

  “Why are we hiding?”

  “I don’t want to get into it with them.”

  They stayed quiet, watching Sean walk toward the beach and Mary into the lodge. When everyone was out of sight, they scurried to the Craft Shop. Liddie felt like she used to when they were kids and she was dragging Kate around camp during off hours to get up to some harebrained scheme. Like the morning they found Amanda in the boat on Secret Beach. Working on a craft project was what they’d told their parents and the police they were doing, but that wasn’t the truth.

  It was cooler in the Craft Shop; the bare bulb in the ceiling was still on. Liddie shivered. A ghost walking on her grave. That’s what they used to call it when they were kids. But there weren’t any ghosts. There were only the things you couldn’t leave behind.

  “Everything okay?” Kate asked.

  “It’s fine. Let’s do this.”

  “What is this, exactly?”

  She looked at the box Kate had placed on the floor. Newspaper clippings; photographs; colored pieces of paper; thick, official documents. Where to begin?

  “Dad used to look for patterns. Maybe if we tack all this stuff up, we can figure out what he saw?”

  “Like on CSI?”

  “You have a better idea?”

  “Nope.”

  “I guess we have a plan, then.”

  Liddie began clearing a space on the wall, taking down leftover finger paintings and intricate macramé wind catchers that might’ve been in place since they were children, based on the faded shapes left on the wall.

  Maybe there were ghosts, after all.

  “Can you find some thumbtacks?” she asked Kate, who was standing in front of the bookshelf. “The Bookshelf of Lost Books,” they used to call it when they were children, because it was a collection put together from all the books other kids had left behind over the years. Nothing was new, they always said. Nothing was only theirs. They always got the leftovers. The things left in the lost and found.

  If Liddie wrote a biography of her childhood, it would be called Nothing Was Ever Mine.

  Kate brought over a rainbow container of thumbtacks, and they started pinning random pieces of paper onto the wall. As Kate had said, the files weren’t exclusively about Amanda, at least not obviously. There was information about all of them. Liddie pocketed a couple of pieces of paper that surprised her while Kate was riffling through the box. She wanted time to decide what to do about them.

  “Look,” Kate said as she tacked up an article about Owen to the board.

  “That’s Owen.”

  “You gonna marry a rock star?”

  “I don’t know, maybe.”

  “What does he have to do with any of this?”

  “Nothing. He didn’t even come to camp till the summer after.”

  Liddie met Owen when they were thirteen. She’d followed him around like the snoop she was, sensing even then that there was something exciting about him. Something from the future, though she would’ve killed anyone who said that out loud, including herself. In fact, once she’d had that thought, she spent the next three summers deliberately not talking to him, because if she talked to him, then maybe he’d know how she felt or Kate would or, worse, Margaux or Mary, and that wasn’t something she could tolerate. So she stayed out of his way and watched him when no one was looking. Most of the time, she was sure he didn’t know she existed.

  He’d worked one summer as a groundskeeper, and then moved on. That’s that, Liddie thought as she watched the staff bus drive off, and tucked him away.

  The next time she’d seen him was years later in Grand Teton National Park. It had been a weird day; two strangers had offered her leftover items of food as they were packing up their camps. Some garlic butter, cheese, mayonnaise. That was one lady. Then lighter fluid from a grungy guy who was driving a $120,000 camper van. She felt weird taking the things—what was this, a commune?—but did it anyway because it seemed like the right etiquette. And then, when she was sitting by Jackson Lake, the air full of the smell of melting snow, staring at the most amazing view she’d ever seen in her life, she’d heard her name.

  “Liddie MacAllister. No way.”

  She’d shielded her eyes, certain she was dreaming. It was Owen. He looked the same, only grown up. Long limbs. Russet hair that half covered his eyes in the same surfer dude cut he’d sported at fourteen. He was standing on a paddleboard that was gliding toward her, which did nothing to diminish the dream effect.

  She’d stood, wishing for once in her life that she wasn’t wearing men’s clothing.

  “If it isn’t the famous,” Liddie said, her heart knocking, “or should I say infamous . . .”

  He grinned and walked off the end of his board effortlessly. It came to rest on the rocks, vibrating gently. When she thought back to that moment, she could’ve sworn she fell into his arms right then, which was ridiculous. That hadn’t happened till six hours later, high on red wine and campfire smoke and all the memories he seemed to have of her.

  That was two years ago. These last twenty-four hours were the longest they’d been away from each other since. She didn’t know why she’d told Kate anything different, that lie about how they were “off and on
.” Sometimes lies came easier to her than the truth, even when the lies were easily discovered.

  “So why did Dad have him in his file?” Kate asked, breaking into her thoughts.

  Liddie stood back to look at their work, trying to find a pattern. There were clippings about each of them and the people they were connected to. Sometimes it was simply a printed-up copy of a tweet or a Facebook post. Other times—like with Owen—it was a concert review that had been in the paper, a show Liddie had attended, the first.

  She shuddered. “I think Dad was spying on us.”

  She and Kate looked at the wall again. Liddie was sure they were doing the same thing: searching for the oldest entry.

  She followed the trail back and back, a flip book of her life in reverse. She watched the years peel away, like one of those shots in a movie of the pages flying off a calendar, only backward in time. Backward through her life. All the way back to 1998.

  Her father had been spying on them.

  All of them.

  For twenty years.

  Amanda

  July 23, 1998—12:30 a.m.

  “Whoa, whoa, hold up,” Ryan said. Another thirty minutes had gone by. I was back in his lap, his hands down my pants, me rocking against his fingers. I’d reached down to unbutton his shorts, and that’s when he stopped me.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t . . .” He sighed and leaned his forehead against mine. He withdrew his fingers, wiping them casually on the side of his shorts. I tried not to think about how he’d smell like me because of it. If other people would catch the scent and know . . . what? “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

  “You don’t want to?”

  “Of course I do, but . . . there’s Margaux.”

  I leaned back, almost tipping, then righted myself. “Margaux?”