I'll Never Tell

by Catherine McKenzie

  “I can’t believe there are a hundred people coming here in a couple of hours.”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  “We should cancel.”

  “No,” Kate said. “We can’t do that.”

  “I know.”

  “So why suggest it?”

  “You know me,” Liddie said. “Any excuse to get out of an obligation.”

  She felt the laugh bubble up within her. “Oh God, Liddie. Things are so messed up.”

  Liddie unbuckled her seat belt, reached over, and hugged her. “It’ll be okay.”

  Kate hid her eyes in the crick of Liddie’s neck, like she used to do with her mother when something scared her as a child. See there. Their mother hadn’t been that bad. What was wrong with them that they thought she was?

  “How can it be?”

  “Don’t know. I just feel it. Shall we go?”

  “Sure.”

  Liddie let her go, and they got out of the car. She pretended not to see the streak of tears across Kate’s cheek, and Kate pretended she couldn’t feel it. She didn’t like crying. But then again, did anyone?

  It was still more dark than light. Liddie took her phone out of her pocket and enabled the flashlight function. Kate wished she’d turn it off. Standing in the dark under the domed sky, listening to forest talk—she’d missed this.

  “You go ahead,” Kate said. “I’ll be along in a bit.”

  Liddie’s eyes rested on hers. “Waiting for someone?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Kate thought she’d receive more resistance, but instead, Liddie turned and aimed her light at the trees. Kate watched her disappear. Then Kate turned around and tapped on the side of the truck.

  “Your sister’s loud,” Amy said, sitting up as Kate climbed over the side of the flatbed.

  “She is.”

  “Makes it hard to be a sneak.”

  Amy was wearing a dark puffy jacket and a knit hat. She was sitting on a Hudson’s Bay blanket, its distinctive white stripe like a strip of neon. Kate remembered this blanket well. How many nights had they hid under it in this very spot, trying to keep the world at bay?

  “Don’t call her that.”

  “You have enough times.”

  “That’s different,” Kate said. “I’m allowed to call her whatever I want.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  Kate sat down next to Amy, then lay on her back. Amy lay down next to her, probably out of reflex, maybe thinking back, like Kate was, to when they’d come to watch the stars and get lost in each other.

  “Thanks for meeting me,” Kate said when Amy was settled next to her.

  “Your text said it was important.”

  “I want . . . I want to tell you what happened that night.”

  “With Amanda?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the only person I’ve ever shared it with is Liddie, and I didn’t even choose to do that.”

  She could feel Amy’s eyes on her. She turned her head so they could look at one another. The sky was lightening by inches, so Amy wasn’t clear, even though she was close. But Kate could tell Amy didn’t want to hear what she had to say.

  “It’s not going to change anything between us,” Amy said. “Whatever it is.”

  “We weren’t the ones who did that to her.”

  “No?”

  “You think we did?”

  “You tell me, Kate. If you want to, I’ll listen.”

  She turned away and settled onto her back. She couldn’t see any stars anymore; it was too light out.

  “It was Liddie’s idea,” Kate said.

  “Of course it was.”

  “Hush,” Kate said. “Listen.”

  Kate told Amy what she remembered, telling it like a story, a recovered memory, something she’d rehearsed, even though she hadn’t. As she spoke, she felt transported back, drawn by her own voice, which sounded, in the rough of the morning, so much like Liddie’s.

  She remembered how Liddie had forced her from bed in the middle of the night with promises of fun and surprising the other kids from their cabin on the Island. They’d wanted to go on the overnight, but they were grounded because they’d been caught in the boys’ section a few days earlier (Liddie’s fault again). By the time Liddie had convinced her and they got changed into their swimsuits, it was four a.m. Camp was silent as they walked down to Boat Beach; every twig they walked on made a sound so loud she was sure everyone could hear.

  The lake was cold at first. She was shivering hard until they got their rhythm going. It took about an hour to swim to the Island normally, but they never made it there. Instead, when they were about halfway, Liddie grabbed her arm.

  “Look there,” she’d said.

  Liddie pointed in the direction of the Island. Kate blinked the water from her eyes. It was hard to tell what she was looking at, exactly. A canoe. A man—a boy?—was sitting in it, paddling. Who was it? He looked familiar, but it was hard to tell from his outline against the dark night. Maybe it was Ryan. All these years, whenever she let herself think about it, she convinced herself it was him, then dismissed it. She thought that if it was Ryan, she’d know for sure. But instead, she had doubts.

  They treaded water silently. Somehow, they knew not to talk, even in a whisper. They watched whoever it was paddle the boat. His head was down as he leaned in to what he was doing. He wasn’t heading directly toward them. Secret Beach, she thought. That’s where he’s going. When he was about ten minutes out from Secret Beach, he stood, then dove into the water, the splash surprising both of them. Kate wanted to ask what he was doing, but it became clear soon enough. He was pushing the canoe toward shore.

  “Let’s go,” Liddie whispered in her ear.

  “Why?”

  “There’s someone in that canoe.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw an arm in the water.”

  That was enough for Kate. They turned and swam as fast as they could toward Boat Beach without drawing attention to themselves. When they reached it, they could barely move their arms. They lay on their backs, the rocks pushing against their skin, trying to catch their breath. Kate was exhausted and terrified. She started counting stars out loud to try to calm herself.

  “Stop that,” Liddie said.

  “I can’t help it. What are we going to do?”

  “We should get off the beach.”

  Kate had agreed, and they’d pushed themselves up, wrapped their towels around their waists, and shivered their way to their cabin, getting there at a quarter after five.

  “I was shivering so hard,” Kate said, “that I could barely change into dry clothes. Like yesterday with that safety check on the beach—”

  “But you went to Secret Beach,” Amy said next to her in the truck, impatient.

  “We did.”

  “Why?”

  “We fought about that. What was the right thing to do? I said we’d get in trouble, and we didn’t know for sure what had happened. Maybe Liddie was wrong, and it was nothing.”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  “I know that now. I’m just telling you what I thought at the time.”

  “If you’d gone to find an adult right away, then maybe Amanda would be okay. Maybe they would know who did this to her.” Amy’s accent crept back when she was upset.

  “You think I don’t know that? I’ve felt guilty about that for twenty years. But we were twelve and exhausted and scared and—”

  “Have you felt guilty?” Amy sat up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I can’t do this.”

  “We weren’t doing anything.”

  “Come on. That’s why you called me here, right? Because you wanted t
o confess and start over. You thought if you told me about this, then, what? We’d have something between us again, something private, like we used to?”

  Kate didn’t know what to say. What could you say when your base motivations were exposed so clearly?

  “Okay, yes, I was probably hoping that would happen.”

  “God, Kate.”

  “I miss you, okay? I love you.”

  Amy stood. She loomed large above Kate. “You say you love me, and yet you thought that confessing to being an accessory to what happened to Amanda would bring us back together?”

  “Please lower your voice.”

  “Who’s going to hear us?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the problem.”

  Amy threw her arms out wide. The old truck creaked beneath her. “I’m here with Kate!”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m telling anyone who cares to listen that we’re here together. And you’re . . . you’re embarrassed, aren’t you?”

  Kate stood up. “I’m not embarrassed,” she said quietly.

  “Please. You’re thirty-two years old, and until today, no one in your family even knew you were gay.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “If they know, it’s not because you’ve told them. You never told them about me. It was always hiding. Everything had to be hidden.”

  “I thought you wanted things that way?”

  “No, Kate. That was you.”

  She felt frozen. Was this possible? All these years, had Amy simply been waiting for her to make the first move? To proclaim her love to the world?

  “Amy, I . . .”

  “You don’t know what to say.”

  “Yes.”

  “You never did,” she said, then climbed down from the truck and walked away.

  CHAPTER 38

  FAMILY TIES

  Liddie

  It wasn’t often that Liddie felt as if she were totally alone, but today was one of those times. They’d all felt helpless at the hospital, but this was something different. Mary had her horses, and Kate had Amy, and Liddie had . . . Well, she had things, she had someone, but still, in this moment, it was nothing. It felt like nothing.

  She was grimy from the hospital, but the shower in the French Teacher’s Cabin wouldn’t warm up, so she went to the lodge because it was closer than her parents’ house and showered upstairs. Sean’s shower, she always thought of it, because it smelled like him: simple soap and the woods.

  She peeled the clothes from her body and stood under the spray. She wanted to scrub the hospital smell out of her hair, her nostrils. That mix of disinfectant and sadness that was impossible to forget. God, she hated hospitals. And camp. She hated camp too.

  That thought stopped her. Was it true? Yes, in many ways, she did hate it. It was a family member she’d never chosen to have and wouldn’t choose if she could. But here she was fighting over its survival, taking part in who would get a share of it—Ryan or Sean. Why? Did she think Ryan had hit Amanda? All the evidence pointed toward him. Out there, in the water, twenty years ago, she’d been certain that’s who was in the canoe, rowing away from the Island with whoever was on the other end of that trailing arm. Finding Ryan at Secret Beach later had confirmed it. And all the times he’d insisted they keep his secret . . . he’d said it was to protect Margaux. But Liddie knew in her bones Margaux hadn’t done it. So who did that leave? Could Ryan have been innocent all this time?

  Liddie shivered in the scalding water. If he was innocent, then one of them did it. Not her. Not Kate. They were each other’s alibi. She’d never believed that it could’ve been those college boys living on the other side of the lake. What possible motive could they have? So that left someone she knew and was probably related to. Someone she cared about. And if that was true, then that person was a stranger to her, and she didn’t know what that meant. Her mind turned to the documents she’d swiped the day before. Her family had so many secrets. In all the chaos, she hadn’t had time to puzzle out what the documents meant. She should do that before the vote this afternoon.

  She turned off the water. She could hear Sean snoring when she got out and wrapped her towel around herself tightly. She wondered about him. What was his role in all this? Because when you cleared away the obvious, the Ryans of the world, you were left with the Seans.

  She went downstairs. The whiteboard was where they’d left it. All those boxes with that half-filled in information, none of it new. Not to Liddie. But the crucial hours, the hours before they’d set out on their swim and the hours that encompassed it, they were blank. They were where the puzzle would be solved.

  Liddie returned to the cabin and pulled on some clothes she’d filched from Owen. She fetched the documents she’d hidden from Kate and read them carefully. She felt weary with the weight of them. She lay down to try to sleep. She surprised herself by drifting off quickly, but then woke every half hour as if she had a plane to catch. When the bell rang at eight thirty, the Sunday time for bell ­ringing—did Sean ever miss the chance to ring that thing?—Liddie gave up and rose. She looked out the window at the lake. It was choppy, the clouds low and threatening. It would rain later, in all likelihood. A perfect day for a funeral, perhaps, but not for a hundred people to be tramping around.

  What would they do, for instance, with all the mud?

  • • •

  Liddie found Sean at Boat Beach. The door to the boat hut was open, and he was carrying paddles down to the beach.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting some canoes out. What’s it look like I’m doing?”

  “Planning your escape.”

  Sean looked up at her from the water’s edge. A patch of sun broke through and hit the back of his head, creating a halo effect. That orange-red hair. He used to wear it longer, until kids started calling him “Clowney.” Then he shaved it close, an act that made it look darker except for when he stood in the sun.

  “Escape?” Sean said. “What for?”

  “To get away from us.”

  “I should’ve done that a long time ago.”

  “Probably.”

  “What’d you come down here for, Liddie?”

  She still wasn’t sure. Back in the cabin, she’d thought she needed to face him. But looking at him now, standing there with a paddle in his hand, the legs of his pants rolled up, almost in shadow, gave her the shivers.

  She put her hand into her pocket and felt the rough edges of the pieces of paper she’d taken. “I found something.”

  “What?”

  “Shouldn’t you ask where?”

  “Okay, where, then?”

  “My dad had it.”

  Sean didn’t react. Liddie thought he might have an idea of what was coming. But it seemed as if he didn’t. Or he was a fantastic actor.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s about you.”

  Sean walked toward her. He was swinging the paddle, his thumb and forefinger making a U around it.

  “Why would Mr. MacAllister have a paper about me?”

  “He had papers on all of us.”

  “He did?”

  “You don’t sound that surprised . . . Wait. Did you take the papers?”

  “What papers?”

  “From the Craft Shop. The ones Kate and I hung up yesterday. You did, didn’t you?”

  “What if I did?”

  The paddle swung again, higher this time so that it whiffled by Liddie’s face, a few inches from touching her.

  “Watch it.”

  “Sorry.”

  Sean swung the paddle down and buried its tip into the sand.

  “Why would you take them?”

  “Like you said, they were about me. I wanted a chance to look at them in private.”

  “But you took all of them.”<
br />
  “I didn’t have much time.”

  A light went off. “You . . . you made up that shit about the water search, didn’t you? It was a distraction so you could get the papers out. Kate nearly died!”

  “I didn’t know that would happen.”

  “Jesus.”

  Sean took a step closer. He was breathing hard, like he’d been running. Liddie’s pulse quickened in response.

  “What do you have that’s mine?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You said you did.”

  He was standing over her now. Liddie felt small. Scared. Somehow, she’d never noticed before how much bigger than her Sean was. The powerful arc of his muscles under his shirt.

  “I said I found something about you. Not that it was yours.”

  “If it’s about me, then it’s mine.”

  Liddie wished she hadn’t come down here, but it was too late for that. She made a quick calculation about which of the papers in her pocket was the least dangerous for her, figuring out which was which by feel. When she touched the edges of the seal, she knew. She pulled out the thick vellum paper and unfolded it.

  “This is what I found.”

  “What is it?”

  “Your birth certificate. Why would Dad have that, you think?”

  • • •

  When she left Sean ten minutes later without any answers, she went to go and find Kate. They needed to talk this through and come up with a plan. But instead, she ran into Margaux in the road, holding a large Parking sign. She was wearing a black cocktail dress with a gray sweater and tights. Her hair was blown out, and she even had some makeup on. Liddie had seen her sister dressed up before, but it felt off in this setting.

  “What’s that for?” Liddie asked.

  “What do you think?”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “Honestly, Liddie?”

  “What?”

  “You and Kate hid the fact that Ryan was on Secret Beach for twenty years, and you’re asking me that?”

  “And you knew he was on the Island, and you didn’t tell anyone that either.”

  “That’s different.”

  “How? Because it was your secret and not ours? Typical.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”