Secrets She Left Behind. Diane Chamberlain

green stuff around in my bowl. The phone rang, and Mom picked it up. She looked at the caller ID and shrugged as she handed the phone to Uncle Marcus. I guessed he was the family spokesperson.

      “Hello?” he said, then, “Hey. Is everything okay?” I watched a line appear between his eyebrows and wondered who he was talking to. “Okay,” he said. “She’s right here.”

      I was afraid he meant me, but he covered the mouthpiece and looked at Laurel. “It’s Keith. He sounds shaken up.”

      We were all quiet as Mom took the phone. I tried to picture how Keith looked now. The last time I saw him was in the hospital, when his arms looked like giant white tree stumps, thin steel rods sticking out of the bandages covering the fingers of his left hand. More bandages had covered half his face. I knew he was scarred. No one had told me exactly how bad it was. I could guess, though.

      Mom held the phone away from her ear and looked at Andy.

      “When Sara…Miss Sara said she was going to the store, did she say when she planned on getting home?” she asked.

      Andy licked his spoon. “I don’t think so.”

      “Did she say what store? What kind of shopping?”

      “I don’t remember.”

      She spoke into the phone again. “He doesn’t know anything, Keith,” she said. She stood up, turned her back toward us and walked toward the kitchen. She lowered her voice, but I could still hear her. “Why don’t you try Dawn?” she asked. “Maybe she’ll know something.”

      Dawn Reynolds was the woman Ben had cheated on me with. Or, as I admitted to myself this past year, I was the woman—the girl, really—Ben cheated on Dawn with. He’d lived with her, after all. Thank God he’d gone back to his wife in Charlotte and I wouldn’t have to worry about bumping into him. Oh my God. That would be the worst.

      “What’s up?” Uncle Marcus asked as Mom hung up the phone and sat down again.

      “Keith got home around five, and Sara wasn’t there and she’s still not home.” She picked up her empty ice-cream bowl like she was going to get up and carry it to the kitchen, but she didn’t budge from her seat. “He saw the note I left, thanking her for watching Andy.”

      “She probably told him she’d be out and he forgot,” Uncle Marcus said.

      “Kind of strange, though.” Mom frowned. “What time did she leave, Andy?”

      “Leave where?” Andy asked.

      “The trailer. Their mobile home.”

      Andy shrugged. “I was killing Mega Warriors,” he said.

      Uncle Marcus laughed. “What was your score?”

      “My best was 52, 341,” Andy said proudly.

      Uncle Marcus smiled at my mother. “The boy has his priorities when it comes to what he remembers and what he doesn’t,” he said. “I’m sure Sara’s fine.”

      I listened to the conversation, feeling apart from them all of a sudden. I felt as though I wasn’t really there. Like I was only dreaming that I was home. It was a dream I’d been longing to have all year.

      

      Around ten-thirty, Uncle Marcus went upstairs and I realized he was staying over. I was glad. I didn’t feel safe in our house, and I liked having him there. I thought the news vans were finally gone, but I still felt as though people were sneaking around outside, maybe looking in the windows, maybe carrying something to throw. Oh, God! What if someone torched the house with all of us inside? They might think that perfectly fit my crime.

      I went upstairs myself, and for the first time in a year, put on the soft old drawstring shorts and T-shirt I liked to sleep in. The shorts just about fell off me. Wow, I’d lost weight this year. Big-time.

      Before I went to prison, I used to always watch some TV from my bed at night, but I’d had it with TV for today. I lay in the darkness for a half hour, imagining I was hearing sounds outside. If someone set fire to our house and it blocked the stairs, what would we do? Andy and I both had these roll-up ladders in our closets that we could hook onto our windowsills, but there was nothing like that in Mom’s room. I started to cry just thinking about how awful it would be.

      Finally, I went downstairs, teddy bear in my arms, to make sure everything was locked up tight. I walked barefoot into the dark kitchen. Through the glass door, I could see the moonlight on the sound and our pier. I wanted to go out on the pier and breathe in the smell of the water and feel the salty air on my skin and in my hair. No way did I dare go outside, though.

      I walked into the family room and saw that the door to the porch was open, and I froze. I tiptoed toward the porch and peeked around the door frame to see my mother sitting on the glider in the darkness.

      “Hi,” I said.

      “Can’t sleep?”

      “Uh-uh.”

      “Come sit with me.”

      I glanced toward the street.

      “No one’s there,” she said. “Even if they were, they couldn’t see us here, it’s so dark. Sit.” She patted the cushion next to her on the glider.

      I sat down. It felt strange to sit next to her like that. I bet I hadn’t sat so close to her since I was a kid. Maybe not even then.

      “I’m just biding my time until midnight,” Mom said.

      “What’s happening at midnight?”

      “I decided if I haven’t heard from Keith by then, I’m calling him to be sure Sara got home all right.”

      “She probably did.”

      “Probably.”

      “Do you know if he talked to Dawn?” I wanted to say her name out loud to let Mom know I could take it. She didn’t need to get weird about it.

      “I don’t know. I hope so.” She rocked the glider a little. “You know, Maggie, I’ve gotten to know Dawn better this year.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “Just…she and I had to clear the air after everything that happened. She was hurt, too, by the situation with…by the triangle between you and her and Ben.”

      “I know.” I still felt some leftover hatred for Dawn. It wasn’t her fault, but I couldn’t help it.

      “She’s a decent person,” Mom said. “She has a new man in her life now. Frankie. He works at this boat-rental place, and he moved in with her last month. I don’t know him well, but he seems nice.”

      I hugged the teddy bear tighter.

      “She’s worked very hard to help the victims and their families, getting financial support for them and making sure they had counseling or whatever else they needed.”

      “I know,” I whispered. “I saw some of them on the news. Mr. Eggles’s niece was…” I shook my head, not wanting to remember the ugly look on the woman’s face.

      “Mr. Eggles’s family is very angry,” Mom said. “A lot of people are still angry. Marcus got a call from the police a little while ago and they said they caught the boy who threw the concrete through our window. It turns out he was a friend of Henderson Wright’s.”

      I remembered the poster of Henderson Wright at the memorial service for the fire victims, how he looked like a scared little rabbit. I remembered Reverend Bill saying his family lived in a car.

      “Henderson’s family, though, has been more understanding,” Mom said. “They’ve been quite forgiving.”

      “Really?”

      “Dawn was able to get them into an apartment, and they’re the kind of people who just…” She rocked the