Every Secret Thing Page 13

  A heavyset blond woman. It took a beat to reconcile this figure with the image Cynthia carried in her head—a milk-bland little girl, her eyes wide and her mouth set, looking more amazed than anything else. Cynthia made a sudden right turn, glancing into the backseat to see if the abrupt movement had awakened the sleeping Rosalind, then turned back onto Nottingham.

  So this was Alice Manning at eighteen. Fat, listless-looking, and paler than ever, although her arms had a pinkish hue, the beginning or the end of a bad sunburn. These things should have pleased Cynthia, but they just made her angrier. Because fat was a sign of life, proof of something that continued to live and grow and even thrive, however unattractively.

  I could kill her, she thought. I could turn the wheel to the left and kill them both. Sure, it would be suspicious, but let the authorities try to prove it was anything other than an accident. Make them prove intent. After all, the ambiguity of intent had been so crucial in Olivia’s death. Warren would make sure she had the best criminal defense attorney in the city, assuming it went that far. Cynthia was willing to bet that a grand jury would no-bill her.

  But Rosalind was in the backseat, so Cynthia drove sedately by, her gaze fixed on Helen Manning. What was it like for an attractive woman to have an unattractive child? Did a good-looking woman ever reconcile herself to having a child whose face did not invite loving coos and fond glances? Of course, Cynthia knew the answer to those questions.

  The thought came and went so quickly, she could have pretended never to have had it. But something akin to heartburn fanned out in her upper chest and throat. Cynthia drove miserably home, where she tried to be a little cool to Rosalind for the rest of the afternoon, as if that could compensate for the momentary betrayal of Olivia.

  Alice noticed the BMW, but only because it was shiny and big, moving so slowly up the street, and then doing the curious turn and circling back, like someone who was lost. Helen didn’t notice the SUV at all because she was staring with dismay at Alice’s sunburn—pressing her fingertips into the soft flesh of her daughter’s upper arms, shaking her head at the white marks that appeared.

  “A girl with skin like yours should never go out without putting on something with an SPF of 15 or higher,” Helen said. “Now, I have a little olive undercoat to my complexion, even though my hair has so much red in it. In my day, I could lie out with nothing but baby oil on and not get burned. But you have your father’s skin.”

  In my day was another Helen-ism, her day being defined, whether she realized it or not, as the months between college graduation and Alice’s birth. But she almost never mentioned Alice’s father, in any context, and it gave Alice a rare opportunity.

  “What was he like? My father?”

  “Handsome. Big—broad-shouldered, very tall. Hair a shade darker than yours.”

  This was how Helen always described Alice’s father, in physical terms, and Alice seldom pressed her for more information.

  “I mean, what kind of person was he?”

  “Well, very…capable. He was all alone in the world, had been since he was seventeen. An orphan, with no brothers and sisters.” Her mother was always adamant on this point. Her father had no relatives, not even a cousin, that Alice could hope to find. “Strong. If he had gone to college, he might have been an architect. As it was, he built houses, from the ground up.”

  “I’d like to be an architect,” Alice said, then realized she was saying this only to test the idea. Once she gave voice to the desire, she knew she’d like nothing less.

  Helen continued to press on Alice’s arms, ghostly fingerprints appearing only to disappear again. Her touch felt unexpectedly good on Alice’s scorched skin, for her mother’s hands were cool and greasy with the lotion she had applied for her late-afternoon sunbath, a habit of long standing. She would spread her towel in the backyard, near the fence overhung with honeysuckle, between the hours of four and five—never any earlier, and never for a second more than an hour—and always with an exotic drink at her side. Over the years, Helen had fixed herself piña coladas and Mudslides and daiquiris, Cosmopolitans and Appletinis. This summer’s drink was a julep, made with mint that grew wild in the yard. Helen prepared her juleps with a sterling silver muddler, and the preparation of the drink took almost as long as the sunbath.

  “Speaking of what you’d like to be,” Helen said, “have you found a job yet?”

  “No, but that’s what I’m doing. Looking for a job.”

  “I know the economy isn’t as flush as it was, but you sure are having a hard time of it.”

  “Yes, I am,” Alice agreed.

  She had no intention of finding a job, and had not been looking for one on this hot Saturday. A few weeks back, she had made inquiries at the county’s social services department, which had a job placement program. But she didn’t hear what she wanted to hear, so she left. Alice was, however, following Sharon’s advice. She walked up to six, seven miles a day, yet she didn’t appear to be losing any weight. She walked morning and night, usually west, until her feet were sore and cracked at the heels. She walked along Frederick Road and ended up at the community college, where she took home course information for the fall semester. She detoured through the pretty old neighborhoods along Frederick Road—Ten Hills, North Bend, Catonsville—and made up stories about the families she saw in the old Victorian houses, with their big porches and cupolas.

  Today, she had walked to Westview Mall, drawn by the memory of the G. C. Murphy’s. Alice had loved the old dime store, with its smells of fresh-popped popcorn and wooden floors. She used to buy chocolate-covered peanuts there, and she had never found ones that tasted quite the same, even as her mother brought her Brach’s and Russell Stover’s, Fannie Farmer and See’s on visiting days at Middlebrook. Exasperated, Helen finally told Alice that her memory was playing tricks on her, but Alice trusted her mouth’s insistent recall. G. C. Murphy was long gone, but she had a theory that the dollar store that had taken its place might be the best place to find a similar treat, that the flavor had been captured in the walls, in the floorboards.

  She had not headed out with the plan of seeing Ronnie. But she couldn’t forget Helen’s mention of Ronnie’s job, at the bagel place over by Westview. The Ronnie she had known had no talent for routine. The most basic requirements at school—bringing permission slips, milk money—had defeated her. She wondered what Ronnie looked like, how she had changed, if at all. If she saw Ronnie, she might understand what people felt when they looked at Alice. Her mother and Sharon had seen her pretty regularly over the past seven years, so it wasn’t as if they had to adjust to a whole new Alice when she came home. But they acted as if they had, as if they expected a little girl, and didn’t know what to do with this heavyset eighteen-year-old who looked so much older than she was. It wasn’t Alice’s shape that made her look old so much as the way she moved, dragging her feet as if her legs were swollen. Store clerks called her “ma’am,” and she probably could have gotten served in a bar if she were so inclined. She wasn’t. But seeing Ronnie—yes, seeing Ronnie had a definite allure.

  She wasn’t sure what feelings might surge up if she saw Ronnie again. Hatred, of course. Time had dulled that emotion somewhat—Alice’s stomach no longer twisted at the mere thought of Ronnie, and the girl was largely gone from her dreams—but hatred was still there, along with the desire to see her punished, really and truly.

  Once, just once, Sharon had come close to saying what Alice needed to hear, but she had said it in the odd roundabout way she used with Alice. This was just a few years ago, when Alice was forced to go back to the chaos of Middlebrook after a year in a smaller, much more pleasant juvenile home. She was upset about leaving the old stone building where she thought she would get to stay until she was eighteen, and in her hurt she had lashed out at Sharon. Why had the law treated Alice and Ronnie as if they were the same kind of girl, guilty of the same things, when everyone should know they were not?

  “Well, imagine Ronnie was someone w
ho went swimming and got a cramp,” Sharon began.

  “In her stomach or her leg?” Alice asked.

  The question seemed to catch Sharon off guard, although it seemed reasonable to Alice. It would make a big difference, where the cramp was. “In her stomach, I guess. And she begins to drown, and you’re swimming nearby, so you go over and try to help her. But sometimes drowning people get panicky and they grab the people who are trying to save them and drag them down, and they both end up drowning.”

  “Does it happen a lot?”

  “Um, no. Because lifeguards are trained to handle panicky swimmers. I was a Water Safety Instructor.” Alice was used to Sharon’s tendency to bring every subject back to herself, so she barely noticed this stray bit of information. Besides, Water Safety Instructor didn’t sound very cool, not like being a lifeguard, on a high chair with a white-creamed nose. “But if you’re just another swimmer passing by, you might not know what to do when someone grabs you.”

  Alice thought about this. It still sounded as if it was her fault, then.

  “If you’re not a lifeguard and the person grabs you, are you allowed to push them off you? Is it okay to leave them to drown?”

  The question left Sharon uncharacteristically silent. She placed her hand on her left cheek, rubbing her spots. Alice had noticed that Sharon reached for that part of her face whenever they came close to discussing how unfair everything was. Perhaps it was unfair that Sharon Kerpelman, a not unpretty woman, had been born with those spots on her face. But that was nothing compared to Alice’s life. Besides, Sharon’s story made Ronnie sound almost normal, doing what anyone might do, in order to survive.

  Alice could have told Sharon the story of how Helen had taken her and Ronnie out to the Baskin-Robbins on Route 40 one summer night and bought them both double-scoop cones. This would have been the summer between third and fourth grade, when Ronnie had attached herself to the Mannings like a stray cat they had made the mistake of feeding. Helen didn’t seem to mind that she was always around, but Alice did. After all, she was the one who would have to distance herself from Ronnie when school began again in the fall, peeling her off like a piece of gum on her shoe.

  At the Baskin-Robbins, Alice had gotten vanilla and chocolate, despite Helen’s urging to be more original, while Ronnie had opted for chocolate chip and orange sherbet, a truly gross combination that she copied from Helen. Only Ronnie’s top scoop, the chocolate chip, rolled to the floor with her first lick.

  “Oh, baby,” Helen began. But before anyone could say anything else, Ronnie turned around and knocked Alice’s cone to the floor. “Don’t laugh at me,” she had shrieked at Alice, who had not made a sound. She had smiled, perhaps just a little bit. But Ronnie’s back was to her, so how could she know that? Helen had wheedled the counterman into giving both girls new cones, but the evening’s happy promise was gone. A second cone simply made Alice aware of losing the first one, which meant this one could be lost, too. She ate her ice cream with such tiny, cautious licks that more melted down her arm than ended up in her mouth.

  All these memories had crowded into Alice’s head as she sat on a curb with her just-purchased bag of chocolate-covered peanuts, studying the Bagel Barn. The restaurant sat off by itself on the edge of the parking lot, not quite part of the mall, not completely on its own. The Bagel Barn had been many things, even in Alice’s short memory of what she thought of as the before time. It had been a White Castle, a Fotomat, then a taco stand. At some point, while she was gone, it had been expanded from its original little hut shape, so it now had a seating area, and the roof had been painted red. But it didn’t have a lot of customers, and Alice bet it would be something else within a year or two. That was the kind of place that would hire Ronnie Fuller, a place on its way down.

  She couldn’t go in, of course. It was one thing to see Ronnie, another thing to let Ronnie see her. And the restaurant’s placement made it hard to get too close to it. So she sat back on the curb near the mall. She should give up, go about her day. Her horoscope for this morning had said “Finding the right answers depends on knowing the right questions,” which had sounding promising, but also demanding.

  Even as she told herself to leave, Alice sat for five more minutes, then ten, then twenty. The day was hot, and she was tired from all her walking. Shortly before 2 P.M., she saw two girls come out of the Bagel Barn and light up cigarettes. One was a short girl in an apron, one of those people who could be anything—black, Spanish, Italian. The other was a thin girl with dark hair. Ronnie.

  She was taller, but not by much, and although she had a bust, she still had a way of carrying herself as if she just didn’t care about her body. Her posture was bad, a little stooped, and she folded her arms across her breasts as if they annoyed her. Her dark hair was worn in the same way—a bang across the front, the rest hanging to her shoulders. If she had tried to style it in any way, it didn’t show. Alice reached for her own hair, which had remained pale blond and stick straight. It was quite the prettiest thing about her. Helen had said so, years ago, in just those words, and it remained true. “Your hair is beautiful, baby. Quite the prettiest thing about you.” Alice thought her blue eyes were a nice color, but Helen said blue eyes were even more striking on a brunette. Like Ronnie.

  Ronnie stared across the parking lot, straight at where Alice was sitting. But Alice didn’t panic or try to run away. People couldn’t see what they weren’t looking for. She had the advantage of knowing that Ronnie worked here. But Ronnie had no expectation of seeing Alice on the edge of the Westview Mall parking lot. It was almost as good as being invisible.

  The aproned girl said something and Ronnie appeared to laugh. She hunched up her shoulders and bobbed her head, looking as if she was enjoying herself. She dragged hard on her cigarette, throwing back her head on the exhales. When had she learned to smoke? You couldn’t smoke at any of the places Alice had been. Not even adult prisoners were allowed to smoke these days. Had Ronnie smoked when they were little? Alice had no memory of it. But she had always suspected that Ronnie knew all sorts of things she didn’t tell. That was what Alice had been trying to get the grown-ups to understand back then: Ronnie had secrets. Ronnie knew things she wasn’t supposed to know, which was what made her so dangerous.

  Ronnie took the cigarette from her mouth and dropped it into a low ceramic pot, what Helen called a “butt beach,” one of those little containers of sand outside restaurants and movie theaters. Helen hated these fixtures, not because she objected to smoking, but because they were always ugly and cheap looking. The butts sticking up in sand, some with lipstick-smeared ends, made Helen shudder.

  Now Alice shuddered, too. But it wasn’t the cement basin that bothered Alice, it was seeing Ronnie use it. The very neatness, the orderliness of this act was disorienting. It was natural for Ronnie to smoke. But once her break was over, she should have flicked her butt into the air in a careless arc and let it fall where it may. Ronnie was the kind of girl who littered, dropping candy wrappers and soda cans in the gutter. At least she had been. Ronnie was the bad one. There shouldn’t be any confusion about this, even now. Especially now.

  Her latest attempt at chocolate-covered peanuts, forgotten while she was watching Ronnie, had melted to mush in the brown paper sack in her hand. It was just as well. They weren’t going to taste like the old ones. Nothing did. Strange, when she tried to stand, her breath caught in her throat and her lungs seemed to slam shut, as if she were the one who was drowning.

  14.

  Daniel Kutchner eased himself out of Sharon Kerpelman with the sweet-but-sheepish air of a man who had just had sex with someone he might never see again. Sharon didn’t mind. She had made a similar decision about Daniel before they ended up in bed, but the evening had a little momentum going for it. At least she would be able to tell her mother with a clear conscience that she’d really tried. She would not be explicit, of course, telling her mother that she and Evelyn Kutchner’s son had—what was the hideous phrase she had
heard a twenty-something toss off the other day—landed the deal. But her mother would figure it out, and appreciate the codes that Sharon used to convey such information. Nice enough. No real chemistry.

  “Bathroom?” he asked.

  “The first door on your right, when you go out in the hallway,” she said. Was he a washer, she wondered. Or did he just need to pee? Both, as it turned out. She listened as one stream of water followed another. She rather liked his fastidiousness.

  So what was wrong with Daniel Kutchner? Some women, aware that they had dated their way into an instantaneous dead end, might have turned the question on themselves, but Sharon never would. She got up, comfortable enough in her skin so that she didn’t feel the need to put on a robe or T-shirt, and headed out into the hall, knocking on the bathroom door as she passed by.

  “Do you want anything? I’m going to fix myself a drink.”

  This interrupted the third stream of water—probably from the faucet. Daniel Kutchner must be washing his hands now.

  “You mean, like a glass of water, or a soda?”

  “I have those, too,” Sharon said. “But I was thinking of a drink-drink, truthfully. I like to have a glass of white wine, or Bailey’s on the rocks before I go to sleep. I’ve got a full bar.”

  “How not-Jewish,” Kutchner said through the door and they both laughed, for it was the theme of the evening, the pleasant bond they had established over dinner, making a list of what was Jewish and what was not. “Okay. Sure. Whatever you’re having.”

  Sharon wandered through her apartment, which would have surprised her coworkers if they had ever been invited to see it. Her apartment was the only clue to Sharon’s secret: She could afford to work at the public defender’s office because there was family money. Not a lot, but enough to close the gap between the barely middle-class lifestyle afforded by a government wage and the upper-middle-class life to which she was accustomed. That’s why it was nice, bringing home someone like Daniel, who knew about the Kerpel-mans and the small foundations company that had made everyone permanently comfortable when it began catering to postop breast cancer patients.