Hidden Pictures(61)
Adrian stops at the corner of Eighth and Shunk. I’m guessing he found my address online because we’re right in front of the short squat rowhouse I used to call home. The bricks have been repointed, the shutters have a fresh coat of paint, and there’s bright green grass where our white gravel “yard” used to be. Next to the front door is a man standing on a ladder; he’s wearing work gloves and scooping dead leaves from the rain gutters.
Adrian shifts into park and turns on his flashers. I haven’t seen any of my neighbors since high school and I’m afraid of being spotted. The houses are all packed tight together and it’s easy to imagine everyone opening their doors and streaming outside to gape at me.
“Please just drive.”
“Is this where you grew up?”
“You already know it is.”
“Who’s the man on the ladder?”
“I don’t know. Just drive, all right?”
The man turns to study us. He’s middle-aged, balding, not too tall and dressed in an Eagles jersey. “You need something?”
I’ve never seen him before. Maybe my mother has hired a handyman. More likely, she’s sold the house and moved away and this man is the new owner. I wave an apology and turn to Adrian. “If you don’t go right now, I am getting out of this truck and walking back to Spring Brook.”
He shifts into drive and we move through the green light. I direct him through traffic to FDR Park, South Philly’s go-to spot for picnics, birthdays, and wedding party photography. Growing up, we all called it “the Lakes,” because it’s speckled with ponds and lagoons. The largest one is Meadow Lake and we find a bench with a good view of the water. Off on the horizon, against the gray sky, we can see the elevated roadways of Interstate 95, six lanes of cars hurtling to and from the airport. And for a long time we don’t say anything, because neither of us knows where to start.
“I wasn’t lying about the scholarship,” I tell him. “In my junior year, I ran a 5K in seventeen minutes, fifty-three seconds. I was the sixth-fastest girl in Pennsylvania. You can google it.”
“I already googled it, Mallory. The first day we met, I ran home and searched for every Mallory Quinn in Philadelphia. I found all your high school stats. Just enough to make your story feel credible.” Then he laughs. “But nothing on Twitter, nothing on social media. I thought it was cool—this aura of mystery. The girls at Rutgers, they’re on Instagram twenty-four/seven, posting glamour shots and fishing for compliments. But you were different. I thought you were confident. I never imagined you were hiding something.”
“I was mostly honest.”
“Mostly? What does that mean?”
“I only lied about my past. Nothing else. Not the pictures from Anya. And definitely not the way I feel about you. I was going to tell you the truth last night, over dinner, I swear.”
He doesn’t say anything. He just stares out over the lake. Some nearby kids are playing with a drone; it looks like a miniature UFO with eight furiously spinning propellers, and every time it passes by, it sounds like a swarm of bees. I realize Adrian is waiting for me to continue, that he’s giving me the chance to come clean. I take a deep breath.
“All right, so—”
21
All my problems started with a simple sacral stress fracture—a tiny break in the triangle-shaped bone at the base of my spine. This was September of my senior year of high school, and the recommended treatment was eight weeks of rest—right at the start of cross-country season. It was bad news but not a complete disaster. The injury was common among young women runners, easily treatable, and wouldn’t impact my offer from Penn State. The doctors prescribed OxyContin for the pain—a single forty-milligram tablet twice a day. Everyone said I would be fine for winter track in November.
I still went to all the practices and I lugged around equipment and helped to tally everyone’s scores—but it was hard to watch my teammates from the sidelines, knowing I should be running alongside them. Plus, since I had more time on my hands, my mother expected me to do more around the house. More cooking and cleaning and shopping and looking after my sister.
Mom raised us single-handedly. She was short, overweight, and she smoked a pack a day—even though she worked at Mercy Hospital, as a billing administrator, so she knew all the health risks. Beth and I were always after her to quit, always hiding her Newports under the sofa or other places she would never look. She would just go out and buy new ones. She said they were her coping mechanism, that we needed to get off her case. She was always quick to remind us we had no grandparents, no aunts or uncles, and there was definitely no second husband on the horizon—so the three of us had to show up for each other. That was our big refrain growing up: showing up for each other.
Three or four Saturdays a year, the hospital would summon my mother for “Surprise Mandatory Overtime” to plow through all the outstanding billing disputes that nobody could make sense of. One Friday evening Mom got the call and told us she had to go to work the next day. Then she told me I had to drive my sister to Storybook Land.
“Me? Why me?”
“Because I promised I would take her.”
“Take her Sunday. You’re off Sunday.”
“But Beth wants to bring Chenguang, and Chenguang can only go Saturday.”