Secrets She Left Behind. Diane Chamberlain

so she didn’t get out much. Dawn said she hadn’t talked to my mother since the day before at Jabeen’s Java, where they worked together.

      I tried to do my exercises by myself. I got out the exercise bands. My mother would pull against them while I pulled back, working all the muscles in my arms and trying to keep the scar tissue from tightening up. It was brutal shit. Without my mother there, I wrapped the bands around the leg of the heaviest chair in the living room, but every time I pulled on the band, the chair moved. My mother would always kind of cheer me on. You can do it. I know it hurts. Keep going. I hated her rah-rah stuff, but without it I wasn’t doing all that good.

      I sat like I was supposed to, with my legs stretched out wide on the floor, and got the red band into position on my left arm. I pulled, leaning way back, and the damn chair flipped over on my ankle.

      “Goddamn it!” I managed to push the chair off my foot. I threw the band to the floor and stood up, grabbing my cell phone again, punching the number for my mother’s phone.

      “Where the hell are you?” I shouted, then rammed the phone into my pocket. Screw the exercises. Screw them. Now my ankle was killing me on top of the whole arm agony. I took a Percocet even though it was a couple of hours before I was supposed to.

      I went outside and ran down the deck stairs to my car, moving fast in case the reporters were still hanging around. She went to the store, Andy’d said. Not that I trusted Andy to remember things right, but what else did I have to go on? I couldn’t believe Andy and I were now in the same year when he was dumb as a toad. What did I care, really? School was a waste of time. My mother kept pressuring me, like, what do you want to do when you graduate? I didn’t know the answer to that question before the fire. Now it was as if my choices had been reduced by thousands. Everyone at school was talking about college and how they were going to visit different ones this year, and since so many kids were poor—like us—how they’d get loans or try to get scholarships and all that crap. My counselor said if I could get my grades up, I might be able to get a scholarship myself, but the whole time he was talking to me, he was looking at my right eye so he could avoid the left side of my face. Didn’t want to be caught staring at the freak. Pretending it was a normal dude he was talking to. I was thinking, oh sure, buddy. Once I was out of Douglas High, the last thing I wanted was more school with more kids staring at me. I didn’t bother telling him that if I wanted to go to college, I didn’t need a scholarship. I had a college fund. Guilt money given to me by Marcus Lockwood after Jamie Lockwood—my real father—died. I could only use the money for college, but if I didn’t do college, I could have it when I was twenty-five. Twenty-five! What was I supposed to do till then?

      So I headed toward the Food Lion in Hampstead where my mother usually shopped, checking the ditches along the side of the road for her car. It was dark and I had to use a flashlight and I thought, this is so lame. So fucking dramatic. Like what did I think, I was in some movie or something? But then I kept coming back to the fact that it didn’t make sense she was gone. I called her, like, fifteen times. Maybe her cell battery was shot, but still, couldn’t she find a phone somewhere?

      Her car wasn’t in the Food Lion parking lot. Then I drove back to the island and checked out the parking lots at Jabeen’s and the restaurants and anyplace else I could think of, mostly because I didn’t know what else to do. I wondered if I should call the police, but that seemed like even more drama. I went home after a while and sat in front of my computer and got online. We didn’t have high-speed Internet, but I could piggyback on someone else’s connection nearly every time I tried. I did what I usually did online. I Googled stuff like suicide and burns and ostracism and grief and all that shit. Sometimes I went to porn sites, but that was so pathetic. I didn’t like thinking about how those sites would probably be the only place I’d get any for the rest of my life. Instead, I liked reading about how burn victims like me felt. Most of them were older. Some of their wives and husbands left them. Couldn’t take the stress, they said, but I bet it was more like the embarrassment of having a partner who looked like a monster.

      Most of the burn victims I read about took antidepressants. So did I. If I didn’t, I probably would have offed myself months ago. I still thought about suicide, but not like I used to. Back then, I thought about how I could do it. Get a gun. Hang myself. OD on meds. Every time I thought about my mother finding me dead, though, I’d start crying. Pathetic. I’d turned into a sissy this year. Then I got on the Zoloft and stopped feeling like I wanted to die, but I still wasn’t sure why I should want to live. My mother was worried because they said some kids on antidepressants were more likely to kill themselves. I thought that was interesting and paid attention to how I felt. The truth was, I wanted the Zoloft to push me over the edge. To give me the guts to do it. I started thinking that I could hang myself from this tree over by the police station. I could do it at night so no one would see me until it was too late, and then the cops would be first to find me and they’d cut me down before my mother could see me like that. But on the Zoloft, I started losing the urge. I got more pissed than sad. I felt more like hanging other people than hanging myself. It was Maggie Lockwood I wanted to see dead. Not myself.

      I was still surfing the Net around midnight when the phone rang. The caller ID said it was the Lockwoods’ house and I stared at the number for a few seconds, worried it might be Maggie calling to say she was sorry or something. But around the fourth ring, I thought maybe it was Laurel and she knew where my mother was, so I picked it up.

      “Did your mom get home okay?” Laurel asked.

      “No,” I said. “I don’t know where she is. Dawn doesn’t know either.”

      Laurel was quiet. “Did you try her other friends?”

      I wasn’t going to let her know there were no other friends. “Nobody knows where she is,” I said.

      “Keith, you should call the police. Or if you want, I’ll call them for you.”

      “No.” I didn’t want Laurel Lockwood to do anything for me.

      “Will you call them, then? Please? I’m worried.”

      “Yeah, I’ll call,” I said. It was like she was giving me permission to dive into the drama. Like it wasn’t just me overreacting.

      “Let me know what happens, Keith,” she said. “Do you want me to come over there and stay with you?”

      Right, I thought. That’s just what I want.

      “No. I’m good. I’m getting off so I can call the police.”

      

      A cop showed up half an hour after I called. Must’ve been a slow night in Surf City.

      “Hey, Keith,” he said when I opened the door. “I’m Officer Pryor.” His name didn’t register. He was an old guy, and he seemed to know me. But then, everyone knew who I was: the most damaged living victim of the fire. My claim to fame. “Okay if I come in?” he asked.

      We sat in the kitchen. He took off his hat, leaving ridges in his gray hair. He knew my mother from Jabeen’s, he told me. Nice lady. Where did I think she was?

      “If I knew, I wouldn’t’ve called you,” I said.

      He asked me the expected stuff about her description, even though he knew her. A couple of inches shorter than me, I told him. Blue eyes. Short blond hair. Tan. She had that kind of skin that went dark just from walking between the trailer and her car. She’d looked exactly the same my whole life. Never changed that hair or the way she dressed or her routine or anything. She never changed anything. That thought freaked me out. Made me realize how serious this was.

      “She’s always home at night to do my exercises with me,” I said. “My physical therapy. And she always makes dinner, unless she’s working and she didn’t work today. Makes no sense.”

      He wrote things down on a notepad as I talked. He had fat hands and a gold band on his ring finger.

      “Does she have any medical conditions?” he asked.

      “No.