Every Secret Thing Read online

  Helen had given Alice the sex talk in bits and pieces over the years, so Alice wasn’t scared. She was so placid, so composed, that Helen couldn’t help trying to shake her up, make her treat the moment as more of a milestone.

  “In my day, we didn’t have these adhesive-backed pads. We had to wear little belts,” she said. “With teeth.”

  The image startled Alice, sitting on the toilet with a sanitary napkin in her hand.

  “Did the teeth bite?” she had asked, eyes round, and Helen regretted mentioning it.

  “No, they weren’t teeth-teeth. Just little holders, for the napkin’s tabs. You’re lucky. But remember, you have to be responsible now. You’re still a little girl, but your body thinks it’s a woman. Don’t forget that, okay?”

  That damn song popped up again, lodged in Helen’s brain the way only an unwelcome melody can burrow in. Girl—you’re a woman now. Strangely, it brought a memory with it, but not of when Helen first heard it. Instead, she saw herself sitting on the edge of that useless kidney-shaped pool at the apartment complex off I-83, the summer after her first year of graduate school. Suddenly, anachronistically, she could remember everything—the seat of her suit pulling at the rough-textured concrete, the sun on her back, the baby oil cupped in her palm, ready to anoint her lovely freckled shoulders. And then Roy surfaced, shaking his hair, so long by today’s standards, water streaming down his well-formed chest, looking almost as good as he thought he did.

  “You live around here?” he asked, and she smiled at the sheer stupidity of his come-on, delighted that he was dumb, because then she wouldn’t fall in love with him, she could just fuck him for the summer and move on, happy and carefree. She had been right about that much, at least. She hadn’t fallen in love with him. For all she knew, he could have come and read her meter over the past decade, and she wouldn’t have recognized him.

  Had he recognized Helen, in her sunglasses and piled-up hair seven years ago, racing across his television set? Had he realized his daughter was one of the “pair of eleven-year-old killers” mentioned incessantly on the news, in the paper, until the phrase lost its ability to shock? Even if he had, Helen couldn’t fault him for not coming forward and confessing to Alice’s paternity.

  She probably wouldn’t have either, given the choice.

  5.

  2 P.M.

  “Don’t you want dessert? They make great sundaes here.”

  Alice looked up from her plate, where half of her cheeseburger and most of her french fries still sat. She wasn’t trying to impress Sharon with her willpower—she never worried about impressing Sharon—and she wasn’t self-conscious about her appetite. She plain didn’t like this cheeseburger, which had come with Cheddar instead of American cheese, or these fries, which were too real to Alice’s way of thinking, with the skins still attached, and soft, lumpy insides, damp with oil.

  “I bet you didn’t have anything like this at Middlebrook,” Sharon had said when their meals arrived, clasping her hands together as if she might say grace.

  No, Alice thought. What we had was better. Thin, crispy fries, which went straight from the freezer to the fryer. Not as good as McDonald’s fries, which were the best, but better than these flabby things. Actually, the food at Middlebrook had been pretty good all-around. It may have had the worst reputation in the state, but it had the best food.

  “Really,” Sharon said, “have a sundae.” Sharon loved that word: really. Really, Alice, you have to trust me. Really, Alice, this is for the best. Really, Alice, I believe you. But what did really really mean when Sharon said it? Did it indicate that everything else Sharon said was fake? Or was it supposed to show that what followed was extra-real, really-real, super-size real?

  “I don’t need a sundae,” Alice said. “Really.”

  “Today’s not a day to worry about calories. Treat yourself.”

  Oh, so she should worry about calories, just not today. “I guess I have to go on a diet,” Alice said, head lowered over her plate, maintaining contact with Sharon’s puppy-brown eyes through the fringe of her pale lashes.

  “No, no, that’s not what I meant at all,” Sharon said. “Everyone has to worry about calories. Just not every day. It’s important to build a treat day into your schedule.”

  “But I’m fat,” Alice said. “Didn’t you notice? I got really fat while I was in Middlebrook.”

  She loved this word, adored making cruel pronouncements about herself. I’m fat. I’m ugly. I’m clumsy. She wasn’t looking for automatic contradictions. In fact, she didn’t actually hold herself in such low esteem. No, she just liked the way adults panicked when she spoke this way, enjoyed their frantic reassurances. Sticks and stones, grown-ups said when you were little. Turned out they were the ones who feared words.

  “Oh, no, honey, you shouldn’t talk that way. You’re just…big-boned, like I am. And the diet was so starchy there, and you didn’t get enough exercise, and, well, what with everything, you put on what some people call the ‘freshman fifteen.’ ”

  “Only I’m not a freshman,” Alice said. “I’m a graduate. I got my GED.”

  “Freshman year of college,” Sharon said. “Because that’s when most kids are away from home for the first time, making their own choices….” Her voice trailed off miserably.

  “So I’m precocious,” Alice said.

  “Yes,” Sharon said, clearly not getting it. “Yes, you are.”

  “I’ve got the freshman fifty—and I won’t start college until the fall.”

  “You’re going to go to college, then?” Sharon bobbed her head. She was so easy to please, there was no joy in it. “Where? What do you plan to study?”

  “Community college. I have to get a part-time job and help pay my way.” She gave Sharon a sly look. “It’s hard to get scholarships, coming out of Middlebrook.”

  Sharon took this as a rebuke. Alice knew she would. No one had ever wanted Alice’s approval as much as Sharon Kerpelman did. The slightest suggestion that Alice’s life was less than it might be was wounding to this woman, who seemed to feel Alice owed her gratitude and affection, if not downright love. Sharon cared about Alice, she announced often, a note of pride in her voice. Sharon’s pride was what kept Alice from returning her affection. Sharon could not think so well of herself for sticking by Alice unless sticking by Alice was a weird thing to do.

  “You know what you should do?” Sharon asked, changing the subject.

  Alice was interested in spite of herself. She was quite keen to know what she should do. She always had been. She liked those magazine articles with rules and checklists. She tore them out and tried to follow them, but it was never as easy as it looked. There was always something—an ingredient, an assumption—that kept her from completing everything as prescribed. Kosher salt, for example, for homemade pedicures. She wasn’t sure what that was, and how it was different from other salt. Not that she would have been allowed to give herself any kind of spa treatment at Middlebrook, but she had been looking ahead to a day when she could.

  Sharon leaned forward. “You should walk,” she said triumphantly. “You’d be surprised what it does for the body. Just lots and lots of walking. Whenever I go visit friends in New York, I can eat whatever I want because I walk everywhere.”

  Sharon beamed at her own brilliance, nodding and smiling, looking for some kind of response. Alice felt stranded, the way she often did in conversations, as if she were standing on an ice floe and needed to leap to another one. The whole sequence mystified her: Walking. Friends. So Sharon had friends? Friends in New York, no less. Why did she have friends in New York? Wasn’t she from Baltimore? Hadn’t she told Alice that a hundred times, how she had grown up less than a mile from Alice, on the other side of the park, in that place with the stupid name?

  “My grandparents live in Connecticut,” Alice said at last. Connecticut was right next to New York. It was all she had to offer, conversationally. She had never been there herself, but she had heard her mother speak of i
t. It was known as the Nutmeg State. To spell it, you have to Connect i to Cut. Connecticut.

  “Yes, I remember your grandparents. Have you talked to them lately?”

  “No.” Sharon frowned, full of pity. “But then, I never did. Talk to them much. I only saw them once a year, before. They came down a couple of times, at first, but my grandmother said it was too hard.”

  “How selfish.” Sharon almost yelped the last word, and people nearby jumped, as if a glass had tumbled to the floor.

  Alice thought about the word selfish, turned it over and over in her mind. Certain words had an almost hypnotic effect. Always candid Helen had told Alice about her own “youthful experiments”—Helen’s phrase—with marijuana and other drugs, and how a single word could become the funniest thing in the world for no reason. But you didn’t have to be high to latch onto a word. Selfish. Related to the self, of course. But ish was usually reserved for those things that were inexact—oneish, warmish, newish—or kind of gross. Oh, ish, her friend Wendy would squeal when something offended her. It was cute, even the boys thought so, but only Wendy, who was petite, could get away with that kind of baby talk. Alice would have been mocked for lisping.

  “Alice?” Sharon prompted.

  “They’re not really selfish,” she said, now that she had worked the word out for herself. “They just live so far away.”

  Which was, of course, what Helen had said to Alice, as if she were trying to convince herself. They were old, older than most parents, and Da hated to fly, and Ma-Ma hated Da to drive, and it was such a pain taking the commuter train into Grand Central, then getting on Amtrak over at Penn Station, so they just couldn’t visit that often. Alice understood.

  “Well, I’m sure they love you very much,” Sharon said.

  “They do.”

  “That’s what I just said.”

  “Not as if you believed it.”

  Alice stared hard at Sharon until the woman finally looked away, pretending to study the toy airplanes hung from the ceiling of the restaurant. Her lawyer had changed very little over the seven years. Of course, Alice had changed so much that everyone else’s changes seemed inconsequential. But she had noticed the subtle differences in her mother’s face, even though she saw her far more often than Sharon. Helen had kept herself up. That was her term, another phrase that had stuck in Alice’s brain, for it suggested an image of her mother in scaffolding, men working away with paint and brushes. She kept herself up.

  But over the past two years, Helen had begun to look her age, no more, no less. She knew it, too, and claimed to be complacent about it. “The French actress Catherine Deneuve said a woman over forty has to choose her face or her fanny,” Helen had said to Alice on her last visit to Middlebrook. “I’m going the fanny route.” And she had patted her slender hip—her “yoga butt,” as she had taken to calling it—and laughed. Alice had laughed, too, for it was her favorite version of Helen. Breezy, a little silly, talking about things that no one else on Nottingham Road could make sense of.

  And as long as Helen worried about her own looks, she didn’t worry too much about Alice’s. She was philosophical when Alice started putting on weight two years ago, said the body knew what it needed and that Alice’s body was probably reacting instinctively to needs Alice didn’t even realize she had.

  “It’s like your body thinks you’re a bear, in hibernation. Maybe it’s because they have you on this rigid eating schedule. You don’t get to eat when you’re hungry, you have to eat when they say you do, so your metabolism slows, in case they start starving you.”

  Alice had a different theory. She believed she had a tumor. Someone had left behind a newspaper—a real newspaper, not one of those shameful things from the supermarket racks—with a story about a woman at Johns Hopkins who had a 180-pound tumor in her stomach. No one could figure out why she was gaining weight. Then they took the tumor out, and she was normal again.

  The local newspaper did not have a photograph of the tumor, but the writer described it as—the words were burned into Alice’s memory—“an onion-shaped growth the color of a brown egg and covered with fine, silky hair.” Alice took to pressing her fists into her abdomen, looking for signs of a growth. The skin was soft, yielding, yet she thought there might be something unwanted beneath its folds. Finally, she went to the infirmary and asked if there was a tumor test. The doctor was kind, listening intently with no expression on her tired face. She took notes, prodded Alice all over, asked her questions.

  “I’m afraid that it’s just, uh, a fairly normal weight gain, given your circumstances,” she had said apologetically, as if she, too, had wanted to find a tumor. “It comes down to arithmetic—calories expended subtracted from calories consumed.”

  “I’m good at math,” Alice told the doctor. “I always was. I’m doing Algebra II, but if I were in a regular school, I’d probably do Trig and even Calculus.”

  “I bet you are. So here’s what you do—keep a little notebook, jotting down what you eat. You’ll see that you’re taking in more calories than you think. Don’t try to change the way you eat at first. Just observe yourself.”

  “Like the woman who watches the monkeys?” Alice had seen a special about a famous anthropologist, although she couldn’t remember when, or what the woman learned from all her notes.

  “Yes. No. I mean—take notes for a week or two, and include how you feel when you eat. Learn your own patterns, and then adjust accordingly. Portion control is half the battle. It’s not what we eat so much, but the fact that we eat so much of it.”

  Disappointed that she did not have a tumor inside her, with or without fine, silky hair, Alice had never even started the notebook. But now, sitting in this too-cheery diner with Sharon, she considered the idea. Girls in books were always keeping notebooks, or diaries. She could do that, she supposed. But she knew she wouldn’t. Not because she lacked discipline. She had plenty of discipline. But she wouldn’t want to tell anyone, even a book, everything about herself. Before a day passed, she knew she would be hiding things. Because someone else would read it. She had never heard of anyone keeping a diary that someone didn’t read.

  “So what’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get home?” Sharon asked out of the blue.

  “Open the door?”

  Sharon threw back her head and laughed her startling thunder-clap of a laugh, although Alice had not meant to make a joke.

  “Very good. One point for Alice. No, I mean are you going to look for a job, or enroll in summer school? Have you learned how to drive? I could teach you, if you like. You’ll need to know.”

  “Why? We only have one car, and my mom uses it for work. She teaches art in a summer program, you know.”

  “Well, you may have a job one day, and you’ll need to drive to work.”

  Alice thought about this. “I can take the bus.”

  “Sure, for now. Depending on where the job is. But don’t you want to learn to drive?”

  She should say yes. Yes would be the normal answer, and Alice was so keen to do and say the normal things, the expected things. Which were not, of course, always the truthful things, or the things she really wanted to do. She was back on her ice floe, looking for a place to jump. Or maybe a conversation was more like a game of Twister, which Helen sometimes played with Alice and Ronnie on rainy summer weekends. Right arm—red. Left leg—blue. You had to figure out how to keep your balance, how not to fall over, while still following directions. You could twist yourself up some, but not too much.

  “I like those new Volkswagen Beetles,” she offered.

  This pleased Sharon for some reason. She squealed with delight, bobbed her head. “Me, too.” Then her gaze shifted and her eyes widened, a sign that Sharon was about to become Very Serious. “What are you not going to do, Alice?”

  It was true, Alice thought. Almost no one’s eyes are the same size. And Sharon’s right eye was a lot bigger than her left.

  “Alice?”

  “I’m
not going to do anything…bad. Never again.”

  “I know you won’t. But specifically, what’s the one thing you should not do?”

  Not kill anyone? But not even Sharon would ask Alice such a question. Sharon believed in Alice, always had. You didn’t have to understand a person in order to believe in her.

  “I’m not going to”—she struggled, trying to figure out what would be the worst thing she could do—“be idle.”

  “That’s a good idea. Idle hands…” Sharon laughed, an apologetic bark, although Alice couldn’t see what was funny. “I think the key thing is that you shouldn’t see, or talk to, Ronnie.”

  Alice looked up, amazed. How could anyone think she wanted to see Ronnie?

  “Her family moved. My mom said.”

  “Yes, but they’re not that far away. They’re just off Route 40 now, in those row houses near the old Korvette’s.”

  “Korvette’s?”

  “It’s a Metro now. But when I was a kid, it was a discount department store, like Kmart or Target. I bought my first record album there.” Sharon seemed on the verge of going off into one of her long stories about her childhood, stories that mystified Alice, for they seemed to be told to show how much alike Sharon and Alice were. Yet they always ended up proving the opposite.

  Luckily, Sharon didn’t succumb to one of her odd reveries this time. “Look—Ronnie had really serious problems. That’s why she went to a different place than you did.”

  “Harkness.”

  “What?”

  “She went to Harkness, right? The one near D.C.” The old grievance still gnawed. Ronnie had gone to Harkness. Alice had been stuck in Middlebrook.

  “She started out at Harkness. She finished somewhere else. Anyway, all I’m saying is that she deserves a new start as much as you do. But I don’t think you two can be friends again.”

  “We weren’t friends,” Alice said. After all these years, she couldn’t let this pass. She didn’t always mind when people got it wrong and said she killed Olivia Barnes, but she wasn’t going to be known as Ronnie Fuller’s friend.