The Secrets We Keep(37)

“Maddy?” Mom said again. Her hand grazed my chin as she lifted my face to look at her. I felt the sting of tears threatening to break free. I wanted nothing more than to run and hide. “What’s wrong? Why are you home from school?”

What I came out with was a lie. “I got a headache and felt sick to my stomach.”


I don’t know whether it was relief or fear I saw in my mother’s eyes, but she kicked into action, cleared the table of the hospital bills she was studying, and motioned for me to sit down.

“Take one of these,” she said as she shook a pain pill out of the bottle and into my hand. “I’m going to fix you something to eat.”

I wasn’t hungry, and no amount of painkillers was going to still the chaos that cluttered my mind. What I wanted was answers—clues—a road map for how to navigate my sister’s life.

“I’m going to lie down,” I said, heading for the stairs.

“After you eat,” Mom insisted. She waved me back in and opened a can of soup. “Did you drive home? Does the school know you left early? Does Alex know you left early?”

I said yes, hoping my answer to the first question would carry over to the other two. I hadn’t told anybody I was leaving. I climbed down off that windowsill and kept going until I found myself behind the wheel of my sister’s new car, driving the same roads I had that night, my mind lost in an abyss of unanswered questions, until I found myself here, still pretending, but now at home.

Instinctively, I pulled out the chair I always used and sat down. If Mom noticed, she didn’t say anything, but Bailey did. He came up to me and laid his head down on my lap, his tail wagging. He let out a low whine and started nosing my hand, practically climbing into my lap when I petted his head. I pushed him down, but he kept coming back, refusing to leave me alone.

Mom dumped the soup into a bowl, not bothering to measure the amount of water before she poured it in and placed the soup in the microwave. I counted the seconds, then heard her open and close the microwave door before she dropped an ice cube in and placed the bowl in front of me.

That was what I needed to do. In order to survive, I needed to focus on the ordinary stuff in Maddy’s life. The color of her nail polish. The placement of pictures on her mirror. The way her shoes always matched her belt. If I concentrated on the little stuff, the pretty stuff, eventually things would get better, being Maddy would become easier.

I took two spoonfuls and then, ignoring my mother’s pleas that I eat more, stood up and headed for the stairs. The headache I had lied about was quickly appearing, burrowing its way into my head, taking with it any sense of control I had left. I grabbed the tiny white pill Mom had given me and let it dissolve in my mouth, the bitter taste a stinging distraction before I swallowed. I’d give it ten minutes to work, then I’d add some NyQuil and sleep my way through this living nightmare.

The door to my room was open, the light on my nightstand casting an odd glow across the floor. My iPod was in the player, the random mix of songs each carrying with it a memory long buried. I pushed the door wider and walked in. I hadn’t been in my old room this morning, yet my iPod … Ella’s iPod was playing music.

My pillow was gone and the contents of the box of personal effects the police had given my parents was strewn across the bed. Next to everything lay dozens of my sketchpads, some going as far back as elementary school, when my artwork consisted of nothing more than a stick figure with a balloon for a head. I gathered them up in my arms, a few stray drawings falling to the floor. Circling the room, I looked for a place to hide them, to store them out of sight. The last thing I wanted was to look at them, to find myself absorbed in the sketches I’d poured my heart into as I replayed a past that was no longer mine.

The door at the end of the hall clicked shut, and I dropped my stuff on the bed, worried that Mom had been watching me. I knocked on her door and waited a half second to see if she would answer before I quietly turned the knob.

Mom didn’t hear me come in. She was busy picking up stuff from her floor. My pillow was there and my favorite pair of jeans—the ones I wore so often that they were frayed at the bottom and had a hole in one knee. My most recent sketchbook was there, the one that had the drawings I’d been working on for RISD. She had one torn out, half-taped to black cardboard matting, a glass frame sitting next to it.

I watched her for a minute, her hands shaking as she struggled to tear a strip of tape off. Tissues littered her floor and five half-drunk cups of coffee ringed the area she was sitting in. Mom was exhausted—I could tell by looking at her—but fighting sleep.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Mom looked up at me, her gaze distant, as if she were seeing something that wasn’t there. The smile that eventually came to her face was sad and full of haunted hope. I knew that look, understood it more than she knew. Every morning when I woke up, for those first few seconds when my mind was still hazy with sleep, I would forget that Maddy was gone. Within minutes my mind would clear, reality setting back in, leaving me with the dark truth. Yet I lived for those precious few seconds, longed for them every time I closed my eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I choked out. I had no idea what to say, no idea how to wipe away the torture I could see flooding her eyes. “I’d do it differently if I could. You know that, right?”

That wasn’t a lie. I didn’t want to be Maddy. I wanted her back. I’d redo that entire night. I’d answer the phone the first time Maddy called. I’d refuse to go get her. I’d text Josh and make him bring her home. I’d do any of those “what ifs” were I given the chance.