I'll Never Tell

by Catherine McKenzie

So she hesitated, then dialed the number she knew by heart, because she might forget some things but never numbers. It rang once, twice, and then the voice of a small girl said, “MacAllister residence. How can I help you?”

  • • •

  When she got off the phone, Kate hesitated again. Now she had to go confront another reality. All because of Liddie. Stupid Liddie. Years and years of silence and tattoos about never telling, and all it took was one pissy afternoon and she was blabbing all over the place. Well, it couldn’t be helped now. She’d have to explain herself to Margaux, once and for all.

  Margaux was standing on the porch with Amy. They were making small talk, which was ridiculous because they’d known each other forever, but there was a new reality now. Amy and Kate together. She could tell that this was what Margaux was adjusting to. Only it wasn’t reality; it was the past. Margaux might be catching up on past episodes, but Kate knew the end, the date they were canceled. There wasn’t going to be some groundswell of fan support to bring the show back for one more season on Netflix. They’d always been a cult hit, and nothing had changed in the intervening years except they were both older now and knew better.

  “We should get to the hospital,” Kate said.

  “You want to take my car?”

  “I don’t have one, so yeah.”

  “Right,” Margaux said. “Forgot, sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Where’s Liddie?”

  “She went with Sean and Mary.”

  Kate felt her anger at Liddie growing. She always acted as if she were so brave, and yet, here she was scurrying off. Was she feeling guilty? If Ryan died tonight, if his heart gave out, would she blame herself? Kate’s own heart constricted. Ryan couldn’t die, no, not Ryan. Whatever he did, he couldn’t do that.

  “You want to come, Amy?” Margaux asked.

  “I’ve got to meet with the caterers in an hour.”

  “That’s still happening tomorrow, isn’t it?”

  “Too late to cancel, probably.”

  “Yeah,” Kate agreed. “Too late.” She reached out and touched Amy just below the elbow. “I’ll see you later?”

  “Sure.”

  Margaux coughed, a sign of discomfort. She wondered what Margaux would do if she saw them kissing. And then she realized that she didn’t have to imagine it; she could find out. She leaned over and kissed Amy full on the mouth, wrapping her arms around her. Amy resisted briefly, then reciprocated the hug, if not the kiss.

  “He’s going to be okay,” Amy said.

  “I hope so.”

  • • •

  Margaux’s car bumped over the rough road. It was old and comfortable, kind of like Margaux. Not that Margaux was old, only she seemed old a lot of the time, older than their mother had in many ways.

  Of everyone in their family, the person she’d understood the least had been her mother. When Kate thought of her, she always seemed diaphanous. Like one of those Instagram filters had been applied to her, washing her out, smoothing away the lines. Nothing ever seemed to stick to her, not criticism or her children, not even her husband. She simply floated around, photographing it all, removed. What must it have been like in her mind? Living inside those thoughts? Did she have any clue what impact her behavior had on those around her? Kate could only hope that she’d had no idea, because the alternative was too terrible to think of. That she knew but continued on anyway.

  “Are we going to talk at all?” Margaux asked as they pulled off the camp road and onto the highway. “Or just sit here stewing in our own thoughts?”

  “I guess you want to talk about what Liddie said.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  Kate looked out the window. It was still light out, coming up on dinnertime. She felt a rush of hunger, then felt guilty. Ryan could be dying, and here she was craving a cheeseburger.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Is it true that Ryan was on Secret Beach that morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you knew? This whole time you’ve been lying for him?”

  Kate turned away from the window. “No, we’ve been lying for you.”

  The car swerved, cutting into the gravel on the side of the road before it righted itself.

  “Do you need me to drive?”

  “I’m all right. Only, what do you mean? Lying for me?”

  “That’s what Ryan told us, that we had to keep it secret for you.”

  Margaux’s hands gripped the wheel tightly. Kate watched her. She was focused on the way ahead, the turns in the road. Kate knew that none of what she was saying made sense, but then it had never made sense. Not that frantic swim in the night. Or later, as they picked their way along the path to Secret Beach in the early morning, blisters forming on her feet where she’d shoved them, wet, into her boat shoes. They hadn’t known what they were going to find when they got to the beach, or what they’d seen before then, but they were expecting something.

  What they didn’t expect was Ryan.

  They’d almost run into him as they’d turned the last corner to Secret Beach. He looked terrified.

  “What are you doing here?” he’d asked. “Turn around. Go back.”

  “We saw . . . ,” Liddie said. “What’s going on? Who’s on the beach?”

  “What do you mean, you saw?”

  Ryan seemed wild, undone.

  “We saw someone swimming, pushing a boat. And someone was in the boat . . . Was that you?”

  Ryan covered his face with his hands. His knuckles were grazed. “Oh my God. Oh my God.”

  “What’s happening?” Kate had asked. “Are you in trouble?”

  His breath was ragged. “Something . . . something happened to Amanda.”

  “Amanda?” Liddie said. “What?”

  “She . . . I don’t know, okay, I don’t know what happened to her, but I think . . . I think she’s dead.”

  Kate fell to the ground, not fainting, just exhausted. It was hard and full of roots, and what was happening? Amanda was dead? She’d been alive at dinner the night before, stopping to ask Kate a question about how her skit was coming for talent night. “Let me know if you need some help,” she’d said. “Anytime.” And Kate had blushed because she had a crush on Amanda, a crush that no one knew anything about, not even Liddie.

  “Whaddaya mean?” Liddie said. “There’s a dead body back there?”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  “We need to get an ambulance. Or Mom and Dad.”

  “No! Not Mom and Dad . . . They’re not here.” Ryan crouched down to Kate. “You okay, Katie?”

  She started to cry. “I don’t want Amanda to be dead.”

  “Me neither. I’m not sure . . . I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Why can’t we get the grown-ups?” Kate asked.

  “Yes, maybe . . . Maybe you can do it.”

  “Why can’t you do it?”

  “Because I . . . People might think I did it.”

  “You hurt Amanda?”

  “I didn’t. But they might think so, do you see?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t know how to explain it, Katie. But listen. How about this? Can you and Liddie be brave? Really, really brave?”

  “Maybe?” Kate said as Liddie said, “Of course!”

  “Okay, okay, maybe this will work. I’m going to leave now and go back to my cabin. You count to a hundred, and then you run back to camp, and you find whoever you can and tell them you found Amanda in a boat on Secret Beach, and you’re not sure if she’s okay. Tell them to call an ambulance. Don’t tell them I was here, okay?”

  “But what are we doing out here? We’re going to get in trouble.”

  “You were . . . you were looking for flowers or something, for a project. I don’t know, make up a s
tory.”

  “I’m not good at that.”

  “I am,” Liddie said proudly.

  “Listen to Liddie, okay? Just say whatever she tells you to.” Ryan stood, helping Kate up. “I’m going to go now, all right? I’m going to leave, and you count and then you do as I said.”

  Liddie stood in front of him, her hands on her hips.

  “Why should we? What’s in it for us?”

  “I’m not enough, huh?”

  Liddie gave him a look, an are-you-kidding-me smirk.

  “Do it for Margaux, then.”

  “Margaux?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “You’re doing this for Margaux.”

  CHAPTER 33

  FLATLINE

  Liddie

  Liddie had a horror of hospitals. This wasn’t a rational reaction. How could it be? Somehow she’d managed to survive an entire reckless childhood without ever needing a cast or stitches. The same with Kate. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was, exactly, that made her feel this way. Why she was full of dread. It wasn’t only Ryan’s condition or the fact that she was a large part of the reason he was in the ambulance whose lights were rotating in front of them. She shouldn’t have pushed him like that. What had she hoped to achieve?

  Sean was driving, and Mary was in the back seat. She kept waiting for them to say something. To blame her or ask her what she meant in the lodge. But they said nothing. Why had she chosen that moment, of all of them, to finally out her brother? Was it because of the lifetime of guilt she’d felt about how she and her sister had acted that night? No. It was the way she’d acted that night, that morning, all of it.

  The car hit a bump, and Liddie’s head cracked against the glass.

  “That sounded like it stung,” Sean said, glancing at her. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  She rubbed at the lump forming on her forehead.

  “Ryan’s going to be all right,” Mary said.

  Liddie turned around in her seat. Mary looked calm, her hands lying loosely in her lap. “How do you know?”

  “Forty-year-olds don’t die of heart attacks. If that’s what it was. Probably more like a panic attack.”

  She was suddenly furious. “Shut up, Mary.”

  “Hey, now,” Sean said. “That’s not necessary.”

  “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

  “She’s trying to make you feel better.”

  “I don’t need her help.”

  “Fine, then,” Mary said. “Fine.”

  Liddie turned around, and they lapsed into silence. She thought back to that morning, all those years ago. The shock of what they’d seen out there on the water. But what had they seen? A figure, a boat, a flash of long hair. Then, finding Ryan in the woods. Ryan, who knew what was on the beach they were going to investigate. Who told them Amanda was probably dead. Who wasn’t sure if they should tell anyone. Then his plan. Counting to a hundred like they were playing hide-and-seek, then going and getting the help Amanda needed, if she weren’t beyond help already.

  “This is stupid,” Liddie had said to Kate after Ryan was out of earshot. Kate had reached twenty in a low voice, counting like she was in a time-out.

  “What?”

  “We should go see Amanda.”

  “Ugh, no. I don’t want to.”

  “Come on, let’s go.”

  She grabbed Kate’s hand, but Kate resisted. “I told you, I don’t want to. Remember Stand by Me? That dead body they saw. That was horrible.”

  “That was a movie.”

  “Right, this will be worse.”

  “I’m going. You coming?”

  Liddie turned her back on Kate and started running down the path. She knew Kate would follow. There was no way she would go off on her own. She never had. As Liddie pushed through the bushes, she wasn’t sure why she wanted to see Amanda so badly. Part of her was hoping that what Ryan had said was a joke, that they’d find nothing and they could tell him his trick hadn’t worked. Another part of her was excited.

  Then the last branch snapped aside, and there was the boat, Amanda laid out in it like when Anne of Green Gables had played Ophelia. Her skin was white. Blood oozed from a gash on her head. Liddie swayed on her feet.

  Kate arrived. “Omigod, omigod.”

  “Shhh.”

  “Stop saying that.”

  They’d stopped talking then, and Liddie didn’t have a clear memory of what had happened next. The shock, the fog of time, she didn’t want to remember. They’d looked at the body. Touched it, even. Fingers searching for a pulse? A hand laid over her mouth to see if they could feel breath? Had they made things worse? They’d lost time, that was for sure. Then they were running back through the woods, tumbling up the stairs to the lodge, yelling for someone to wake up.

  And much later, after a day of drama, when they were in their bunks, she’d heard Kate’s small voice whispering in the dark.

  “Did Margaux do that?”

  • • •

  They spent the next hour and a half waiting on uncomfortable chairs for an update about Ryan. Before they knew anything, Kerry arrived, her three daughters in tow: Maisy, Claire, and Sasha. Kerry’s flats clacked against the old tile floor, while the kids swirled around her, looking wild-eyed.

  “Where’s Ryan?” she asked. She was wearing old jeans and her hair was in an untidy bun. Liddie had never seen her look so disheveled.

  “They took him back there,” Mary said, pointing over her shoulder to where Ryan had been wheeled through a set of swinging doors. “We haven’t gotten an update.”

  “Have you asked?”

  Her voice was grating, high-pitched. Liddie couldn’t blame her; she’d spent an hour and a half in a car with three children wondering if her husband was dead.

  “I’ll go,” Liddie said.

  Kerry looked at her to protest, then nodded and collapsed into a chair. The girls surrounded her, and Sasha, the youngest, climbed into her lap.

  Liddie went to the triage area. A nurse in printed scrubs was pecking away at a computer.

  “Hi, um, I’m looking for an update about my brother?”

  “Name?”

  “Ryan MacAllister. He came in the ambulance . . .”

  She pecked at a few keys. “There’s nothing here. Hold on.”

  The nurse left and went through the door at the back of her cubicle. Liddie half listened to the conversation behind her. Her nieces talking to Mary and Sean and asking what happened. Mary doing her best to tell a less scary version of the story, leaving out how Ryan keeled over, the way he was sweating, the hard grasp he had on his arm. No one mentioned the whiteboard, still sitting there in the lodge, half–filled in, explaining nothing.

  The nurse came back. “The doctor’s with him now. The family should be able to go back shortly.”

  “So he’s going to be all right?”

  “I’ll let the doctor tell you.”

  The nurse smiled at her. She was redheaded and freckled, and Liddie knew that her smile meant it was going to be okay, Ryan was going to be okay, even if she couldn’t say that now.

  “Thank you.”

  • • •

  They were called back twenty minutes later.

  They all stood in the doorway of Ryan’s room. He looked large in the bed, too large almost, with leads attached to machines taped to his chest, something beeping incessantly. There wasn’t room for the whole family in the room, and Liddie hung back. She wouldn’t be wanted anyway. Not by Ryan. He was going to be okay. It was a mild infarction. He’d be put on medication and monitored, and he’d have to change his diet. For now, no surgery. He could go home shortly.

  Kerry started to cry, and Sasha wanted to climb into bed with him. Liddie found herself backing out of the room, feeling claustrophobic. She tri
ed to go to the waiting room but took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up at the entrance of another wing of the hospital. Long-term care. She pushed through the doors automatically. She didn’t know where she was heading until she got there: a row of rooms where the push and pull of respirators was the predominant sound. Liddie marveled at how all the doors were open, how anyone could walk in without being asked what they were doing or who they were going to see. Whether they had the right to be there at all.

  She stopped at the third door. Had she been here before? Or had she simply heard it described enough times back when Margaux used to visit regularly?

  She stepped into the room. There was a picture from camp on the wall, a beautiful sunset captured in a style she recognized as her mother’s. Beneath it, Amanda lay on the bed, not quite frozen in time. She was thin, so thin, and her hair had faded. Her chest rose and fell with regularity. The monitor next to her showed an even line of brain activity. Or no brain activity. No, not quite. Minimal, yes, that was the word she’d heard all those years ago. Amanda was alive but only minimally. A persistent vegetative state that couldn’t be undone, until one day, sometime in the unpredictable future, when even the machines could no longer keep her alive.

  Either way, whatever she knew would stay inside her, evidenced only by that small heartbeat of movement on the screen.

  Amanda

  There’s so much about that night I remember. The taste of Ryan’s mouth.

  The salt in my tears.

  The whiffling sound right before the blow.

  Then darkness. The muffled cry of the person who discovered me. The lilting of the boat.

  Have I told you this before?

  It’s hard for me to tell. Time stopped for me that morning with the twins. I remember shouting, the wail of a siren. Needles and tubes and people crying.

  That’s how it’s been since then.

  The same bed.

  The same room.

  Needles and tubes and people crying.

  I’m not awake. I’m not asleep either.

  Not alive but not dead.

  I’m left with only these memories. That last night of my life playing over and over like a loop.

  Is this hell?