Tell Me a Secret (14 page)

The Impala had cleaned up nicely since the crash that killed my sister. If the inside smelled like ashes and dead meat, the outside looked brand-new. The windows were lighter than I remembered, when I peered out my bedroom window to see Andre’s and Xanda’s shapes moving in the shadows like dark fish in a murky pond.

All I could think about was the fact that I was sitting in Xanda’s seat, soaking her into my body the way a flower soaks up sun and air. The echo of her life impressed itself into my very bones. The baby could feel it, too, I thought. It had to be why she kept pressing to come out.

The front seat was one big uni-seat—no console or stick shift or even a cup holder. Just seat, all the way across, with
nothing to stop Andre from grabbing me and sliding me over to him if he wanted to, like he must have done with Xanda a thousand times. The pain came in another, shocking wave, as though it were channeling Xanda’s spirit telling me
Stay away, stay away
.

And we could have turned around. I still had my cell phone. But for all I knew, he had taken Xanda all the way to Hollywood and she was waiting for me. Maybe he was taking me there now. I wanted to ask him, but his mouth looked like a prison door. Locked. Why hadn’t he gone to prison, if what my parents said was true?

Andre started to light up a cigarette in the car, then gave my belly a bitter look and rolled his window down to toss it out.

“I said I wanted you to take me to where Xanda died,” I said, hoping he could only hear the resolve in my voice and not the panic in its undercurrent. He picked up speed. Had he been drinking? I didn’t want to get close enough now to find out, but I could smell something. Something that wasn’t quite right. I wondered if Xanda had smelled the same thing before she plunged to her death.

Somewhere I remembered hearing that smell was the only sense connected directly to memory. The combination of wind and smoke and sweet sourness transported mine to the middle of the night long ago, to my bedroom window peeking out onto the street, close enough to the front porch to hear voices as they crept toward the house, kissing, rustling,
sharing a cigarette. I peered from the darkness to see her hair dusted with moonlight, blue reflection on slick, black hair, slick, smacking lips, giggling and wafting in the sweet, sour smell that whispered secrets and freedom and sacred plans.

And then, I remembered, a different kind of smack broke through the whispers.

Smack
. And, “What the hell was that for?” from Andre’s lips.

I remembered the words because I knew how much trouble I would be in if the word
hell
ever crossed my lips the way it regularly crossed Xanda’s. My mother would have smacked me the same way Xanda had just smacked Andre, with about as much mercy.

“You know what that was for.” It was the voice she used when you didn’t know what she was going to do—the one that made you hide in the closet and hope her wrath would pass as quickly as it came. I hid scars from that voice even from myself, swaddling them up and tossing them out the window like the cigarette Andre was tossing into the street now. The landscape screamed past us in his Impala.

My demand still hung in the air.
Take me to where Xanda died.

“Yeah, yeah, I heard you,” he said to me.

“So where are we going?”

His eyes narrowed. What once looked brooding and sexy looked almost menacing now. “You Mathison girls are all the same. Trying to trip everyone up with accusations and…
whatever. I told her. I told her, and she couldn’t handle it.”

And then I remembered what had happened while I spied on them from my window.

She had slapped him. Hard. And he said, “What the hell was that for?” And she said, “You know what that was for. That was for you and
her
.”

“What
her
?” he mocked, exaggerating the word in a high, breathy imitation of my sister’s throaty voice. I remembered feeling angry, because I imitated her voice, too. Practiced her laugh, still had it to this day, the kind of laugh you get when you’ve just gotten over laryngitis. It sounded hateful, coming from him at that moment, and then my sister said, “The
her
I smell all over you. The
her
that’s in your pocket.” A crackle. The sound of someone backpedaling for his life. And me, feeling excited and angry and terribly clever for being at the right place at the right time and inserting myself so seamlessly into Xanda’s secret universe. Every nerve in my body on fire, ready to flee in case of detection and avoid certain death.

“What, you mean
her
?” Andre’s voice had changed into something else, something resembling my own voice, or my father’s—soothing, pacifying, lulling my sister with its apologetic tones. “You’re crazy. She’s no one.” We all balanced on the edge of this knife blade. Was it truth? Was it fiction? What would my crazy, spectacular sister do next?

Nothing. Or at least that’s how it sounded to me. Only shuffling, rustling, smacking, but the soft smack of kisses, like the
hugs she would give me after one of her explosions. I could barely remember those explosions now. I wondered if Andre still did. I stayed a long time under the window, balancing on that knife and hoping for something more until I was too sleepy to balance any longer and crept back to bed and dreamed of sweeter things, like Christmas. And the safety-pin necklace I made to go with her dress. I knew she would love it.

Andre’s Impala slowed as we approached a long stretch of road leading down to the airport, streams of cars on the highway lighting up the night.

We veered toward the embankment. It seemed tragically ordinary, that slice of pavement littered with butts and weeds and sparkling glass dust.

He stopped the car and wouldn’t look in my direction. Instead, he watched the traffic snaking beneath us under the bridge just ahead.

“Here we are. Where Xanda died.”

The sound of her name in his mouth was like an explosion in my mind.

For so long I had thought about this moment, the secrets of Xanda’s life and death flayed open for my inspection. For five years, my parents had been stitching the secret back in place, but here it was. Open. Bleeding.

“So, do you want to get out of the car?” Andre was looking at me. I could feel his eyes on my face as I avoided his gaze.

“Not yet,” I said, staring at the place he had pointed to:
a bleak span of concrete streaked with long black scrapes, a collage of metal and rubber left by decades of unsteady drivers. I imagined the moment the Impala struck the rail—the smashed windshield, her blood seeping into the foam and seams. I wondered which scrape was Xanda’s.

We sat together in the silence, time passing like the stream of cars whizzing beneath us on the highway. Another wave of pain threatened to engulf me, and I isolated it in my mind. It began the size of a marble and swelled into a watermelon, pink and fleshy and throbbing. Giving in would mean going back, something I wasn’t ready to do yet. Not until I knew everything. Not until he told me the truth.

“I’m ready,” I said, reaching for the Impala handle.

A cloud of city sounds enveloped us outside the car. Maybe Andre would take me to Hollywood if I asked him to. I could do animation, painting backgrounds. Or paint scenery, or draw storyboards for big-name directors. If I had a tenth of Xanda’s courage, I could do any of those things, taking her place at Andre’s side. I could pick up where she left off, except with Lexi, too.

But looking at the concrete sobered me up. I half expected to see a pool of blood where she must have flown through the window, or maybe the safety-pin necklace still dangling off a reflector.

As we stood there together, looking at the spot of not-blood, not-Xanda, Andre reached over and took my hand. Suddenly I felt like the twelve-year-old again with the crush on my big
sister’s boyfriend who was nice to me long before any other boy was.

“My parents told me you killed her.” Even as I said it, I could see this was an old wound for him, too. “I want you to tell me the truth.”

“It was Christmas Eve, remember?” It seemed absurd, standing by the side of the road and speaking of the living and the dead. The rain stopped, leaving rivulets of water threading through the gravel and glass like veins.

“Yeah, I remember. I could start with the fact that I hate your f—” He stopped himself, looking down at my belly. “Excuse me,” he muttered. “I hate your parents.” Then he was silent, and the traffic noise rose up between us again. He rummaged through his pocket and found his pack of cigarettes, lighting one up after moving downwind.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go somewhere? Denny’s or something?” He gestured toward his car—at once an object of his allure and the instrument of my sister’s death.

“Not Denny’s,” I replied, disgusted. “I don’t want to be hearing about Xanda at Denny’s.” A long, loud honking pierced the air and faded as it trailed down the highway—someone even more impatient than me. I felt myself resenting Andre for taking Xanda here to die. I wanted it to be a sacred place. Xanda deserved that, at least.

“I’m starving,” he said. “D’you mind if we find a drive-through or something?”

I was about to shout,
Do you think I asked you to bring me here so that you could go get a burger?
when a cramp gripped me again and all I could muster was a weak “No.”

A group of girls I recognized from school drove past in a beat-up Toyota—dressed in tight tops and tighter curls, wearing fur-lined jackets exactly like the one I had tossed into the donation pile last year. They were laughing together, even the one that had a belly like mine—the only thing I had in common with any of them. I turned away from the road, hoping they wouldn’t recognize me. But they were too busy looking at Andre to notice me.

The memory of Andre and Xanda’s fight slapped me back into the present, just like I wanted to slap his attention back from the girls to me. “Where were you going that night? Were you running away? Were you going to Hollywood?” I demanded.
Tell me a secret, and I’ll tell you one.

“I wasn’t running away, that was all Xanda. I didn’t have anything to run from. Not like her. She had…well, I guess you would understand.”

“Running from my parents?”

Andre shrugged, taking another drag and blowing the smoke into the street. “Uh-huh. But not all of it. It wasn’t all about running away. Some of it was running
to
something. Your parents didn’t get it. Or they didn’t want to. Xanda used to say she and I were so much like your parents that they should understand.”

“What do you mean, like my parents?”

“You know—rich girl and the construction guy.”
Chuck is a trailer-park name,
I could hear my mom laugh. My dad, who had worked his way from an apprenticeship all the way up to being a well-respected contractor, was still just
Chuck
in my mom’s mind.

“But you and Xanda…,” I prompted.

Andre’s brow furrowed in frustration. “She wanted…she wanted more than I could give. I mean, I was all up for going to Hollywood and everything, but she wanted…”

“More?” I asked. And suddenly, I could understand wanting more. Like my mom wanting more from my dad. Like I did with Kamran.

Andre continued, “Yeah. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I loved your sister. She was just so…insistent. You know?”

Yes, I knew. It was one of her most prominent qualities. “But then what happened that night, after you left our house?”

Andre blew the last of the smoke from his lips and tossed the butt into a puddle, where it hissed and went out. I used to imagine what it would be like for those lips to touch my
lips. The thought seemed completely foreign now. “You probably won’t believe this,” he said, “but I have asked myself that so many times, wishing I did something different. I mean, I warned her about…”

A pause. “About what?”

He wouldn’t look at me.

“
Con leche
,” I said, as much to myself as to him.

“She told you about that?” I could tell by the look on his face he was embarrassed. I had nailed something, even if I didn’t quite know what it was.

“Yeah. I mean, no. Just that you were…well, she said you were a letch. Did you cheat on her?”

“No! That was the whole f—uh, the whole thing,” he added, looking toward Lexi again. “I wouldn’t cheat on her. I
looked
. I never, ever did anything more than looking.” He slammed his fist on the hood, sending his cigarette pack flying and me jumping while he swore under his breath. “I swear to God, I didn’t cheat. And it still wasn’t enough for her.”

He wouldn’t look at me. Wouldn’t look, even when I put my hand on his arm, like he was crying and didn’t want me to see. It made him even more real to me. Not a
con
or a
leche
. Just a person whose well of loss ran as deep as mine. “I’m sure she knew you didn’t,” I said gently.

“All I had to do was
look
at someone, and your sister freaked out and accused me of cheating on her. Do you know why she died?”

He gave me no time to respond.

“Because she was pissed at me. Because we were headed to L.A. and we were on the road and I looked over at a woman driving next to me—and I didn’t even
see
her looking at me, I swear, I was going to change lanes or something—and your sister flipped out. And I said I wasn’t so sure we should be going to L.A. together, if she thought I was going to be screwing around on her all the time, and she started screaming at me more and threatening, and I said I was going to turn around, and…and you’re probably not going to believe me, but after she threatened, she did it. She jumped from the car.
She jumped from the car
.”

And he kept on talking, yelling and crying and I was listening and crying and trying to imagine my sister putting the gun to her very own head, opening the door and jumping out of a moving car, with the pavement whooshing past, whooshing hard and fast and her throwing herself away from him, and being so angry and throwing herself out onto that hard, fast place—

“And your parents, they couldn’t let the facts speak for themselves. They had to come after me, like I was some kind of criminal, and they wouldn’t listen when I told them your sister jumped. No, they tried to tell the police I’d been drinking—I guess I had, a bit—but
we did not crash
, and I did not throw her out of my car like they tried to pin on me. They would not let it go. Your mother would not let it go. And she was going to kill me herself, for killing her daughter, her precious daughter, who when she was alive she called
hell on
wheels
. But all of a sudden when she was dead, she was Xanda the Angel, and I was the devil.”

Xanda the Angel. Andre the Devil. I had lived with these archetypes for most of my life, twisting them into my own images.

But I couldn’t make myself twist Xanda into the architect of her own death.

Because she loved life. She risked everything to live it. I couldn’t imagine her choosing so flippantly to end it. “She couldn’t have,” I wanted to say.

But I knew she could. I knew, from the hole in the wall behind my door, when she threw a book at my head. I knew, from living with the fear that she might one day impale me with her stiletto, if she got mad enough. I knew, from the way she defended me to Mom, as if my life were more important than hers. I knew, even if I didn’t want to know. And that was enough to break my heart.

Andre was still talking, as if his own personal dam had burst and was flooding me with all of his unspoken truths. “I was really sorry about your sister. I wanted to tell you, because I really liked you. You were a good kid. And your mother swore if I ever came anywhere near you, she would kill me herself. With your dad’s nail gun.”

I was crying, and Andre was crying, but we both laughed at the mental image of my mom wielding a nail gun, like she had ever wielded anything in her life more dangerous than a nail file. I did remember the police coming to our house. The
reports. Being told to go to my room, and sneaking through the passageway to get closer, to catch snippets of conversation that would give me some clue as to why my sister died. I came away with one answer. Andre killed her. And somehow it was all my dad’s fault.

Only it wasn’t Andre. Somewhere in the branches of Xanda’s life, something had taken a wrong turn, sending Xanda spiraling and then everyone else.

And then there was Lexi. How did she fit into these tangled strands? Could she still be Xanda’s angel?

Andre turned toward me, his eyes rimmed with red and tears. “God, I still miss her sometimes,” he said.

“Me, too.”

“Sometimes, I think, maybe if I had done one thing different. Like if I didn’t change lanes, or if I didn’t look over…If I had been better about…I don’t know. It’s hard not to think about.”

“I know.” I took his hand—rough and dry, from building things up and tearing things down. Like my dad’s, or a big brother’s.

“It’s strange to look at your face.” He held my hand gently.

“Why?”

“Because it’s like she is there, a part of you.” He searched my face just like I did in the mirror—for signs of Xanda.

“Oh,” he said, dropping my hand, “I forgot. There’s something I have of hers that you might want. She had it with her when we left your parents’ house.”

Andre leaned into the passenger side of the car to dig through the glove compartment and came out with a chain dangling on his fingers.

The safety-pin necklace. The one I made, five years ago, and gave to her the night she died. I turned my face away, not wanting him to see what might lie there. My burning eyes fell on the place where she had jumped.

With my toe, I began to swipe away the gravel and glass, cigarette butts from a thousand drive-bys. And the more I cleared away the debris, the more I realized this should have been done a long time ago. Andre reached into the back of his car for a pile of fast-food napkins, and we set to work in silence, wiping away layers of grit and neglect.

I was wrong about Andre. About so many things. The Andre in my mind had been the one who would fly her away from our family bonds. The Andre before me couldn’t even fly himself away from his own guilt.

In the back of the Impala, Andre had a hammer, nails, and a couple of white trim pieces. He fashioned them into a memorial and leaned it against the concrete with a few stones. I unlinked a few of the safety pins and encircled the wood, then put the rest of the necklace around my own neck.

But something was missing. Words. A picture. A name.

All I had with me was the photograph I stole from Dylan—and the pen-and-ink drawing of Xanda, the mazes in her hair leading to her face. Her eyes. The secrets hidden in her mind.
Here, with Andre, it seemed like I had reached the end, or at least the end of one mystery. Though some things about Xanda I would never know.

Together, we pinned my drawing to the cross.