Tell Me a Secret (20 page)

The bus wound through the hills of our neighborhood as I made a mental list of everything I would need: money, food, clothes, cell phone charger. All of it would have to fit in Dad’s camping duffle bag, still stashed in the laundry room.

I would have to clean out my bank account, just in case they started looking for me. After saving every penny from my job, I had enough to keep us in diapers and milk for a while. Then there was Dad’s quarter collection, the bond from Uncle Brit, and the pearl necklace Mom’s parents gave me for my seventeenth birthday. Hard to believe it was nearly a year ago.

There was so much I would have to leave behind—drawings, photos, letters. I touched the safety-pin necklace around my neck, wishing I could take the dress. If I had time, I could
plop my portfolio onto a disk so I’d at least have
something
to show when I looked for a job. Painting movie sets? Coloring sci-fi eyes? Whatever I could do that would keep Lexi and me afloat. If we could get there, find someplace to sleep, I could figure the rest out later.

I asked the bus driver the time. Eight forty-three. Perfect—they would have just left for church, giving me a good three hours.

Our house looked the same, but infinitely different. Same driveway, same car, same door, same windows, same bars. I wondered if my key would work.

It did.

When I caught a glimpse of the foyer mirror, I barely recognized the pale, haunted person I saw, except for the eyes—like Xanda’s, Mom’s, and now Lexi’s. If only I could find another path, Lexi would be different.

I hurried to find the duffle bag.

The carpet on the stairs felt familiar under my feet, though the art on the walls had changed completely. My drawings, gone. Erased. Just like Xanda.

My door stood closed and Xanda’s room—the office—was open a crack. My bedroom was exactly as I’d left it: maternity clothes draped over the chair, shoes cluttered in the bottom of the closet, books stacked on the desk next to a binder full of class notes. Here was life before Lexi, splayed out like that corpse.

Everything looked the same, except for a small, pink bundle
placed neatly on the bed. A package of fluffy pink baby sleepers. As if that was supposed to make up for everything.

I stuffed them into the duffle bag and got to work—underwear, jeans, hoodie. A dress, for interviews. A blanket, for Lexi. I’d have to get her some real clothes, and diapers. I plugged in my phone and it blinked to life. Carefully, I gathered the photos from my bulletin board—me and Essence. Me and Kamran. I would call him once we got there, if he would still talk to me. Maybe his parents would like to know they had a grandchild.

I surveyed my room one last time, the briefest of goodbyes to my old life.

Next stop: the office, where I would transfer my files and erase my electronic existence. I’d be giving my parents a head start.

The office would always be Xanda’s bedroom to me, no matter how the furniture was arranged. Her purple walls had been painted a nice celery green, to draw attention to the view. But when I stood in the doorway, I wasn’t taking in the view.

Instead, I took in the hundreds of photographs spread across the floor, the couch, the desk—pictures traveling the length and breadth of the Mathison family. Photographs I thought my mother had destroyed. Every one of them was a window, a chronicle of lost time and space.

I went into the room and picked them up one by one—Mom and Dad, about my age, holding up a squashed, purple baby who looked exactly like Lexi, only bigger. Mom and
Xanda the toddler, playing tea party. Xanda as a little girl, missing her two front teeth and clutching a baby, perilously balanced on her spindly knee. Me, looking half delighted and half terrified.

Someone sniffled behind me.

My mother stood in the doorway in her robe, eyes red and puffy and hair gathered into a loose ponytail. “What are you doing here?”

There would be no disk now.

I knew what I looked like to her—hair ratted, swimming in this yellow First Washington T-shirt, getting my fingerprints all over her secret stash. The duffle bag lay open next to me, clothes and sketchbook stuffed inside.

“I came to get a few things.”

Mom’s eyes sealed up.

“Going to stay with your dad?”

I gave her a blank look. “Dad’s gone?”

She shrugged. “He left. Cleared a few things out while I was at opening night and you were running around Seattle.”

“I was hospitalized!”

“Not on my watch. You left my car. You got out, just like—”

She stopped. Her eyes fell on the picture I held in my hand. I remembered when it was taken—when we’d all taken a car trip down the coast and Xanda had disappeared into the redwoods at the Trees of Mystery with some boy, and when she’d come out a half hour later, Mom had come unglued.
We
thought somebody grabbed you
.
If you ever do anything like that again, Dad’s going to chain you up in the trunk, understand?
But before she’d disappeared, someone had shot a picture of the four of us, smiling, on Paul Bunyan’s ginormous shoe. I’d forgotten that picture existed.

“Mom, I know what happened to her.”

“Andre,” she spat. “I saw you with him. If it wasn’t for that boy—”

“Stop blaming Andre! Stop blaming Dad!”

We both jumped at the sound of my voice.

Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t know how you think you can judge me. You’ve spent the last year doing everything possible to decimate your life and head down the same path as your sister. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

My baby had spent the last three months in the hospital, her life dangling by a thread while everyone looked to me, the teenage train wreck. I had every idea.

“And you have no idea,” she continued, much more softly now, “what it’s like…” She broke off, not willing—or maybe able—to finish the sentence.

Instead, she took up one of the photos—the one of her and dad in the hospital with baby Xanda. I knew where this was going. Xanda was the preemie, the reason we were all here now.

“That was the day your sister was born,” she said. Seven months after the wedding, as my mom’s parents were quick to note. Xanda peeked out of the blanket like she was already
sizing up the world. If anyone could survive preemiehood, it was her.

“But she looks huge,” I gasped, and Mom frowned. Where was the IV? “She looks so…healthy, for a preemie.” I thought of Lexi, fighting her way out of the tubes and wires in order to come home. Only two pounds at birth, now up to a fighting weight of just over five.

Mom bent over the pictures until her hair covered her face and her shoulders bounced, hugging herself to keep from bursting. Laughing. At me? At Lexi?

“What?” I snapped. I didn’t have time for this. I had a bus to catch.

She put her hand on my arm, about to tell me where I could go. I’d tell her I didn’t care anymore about her judgment. She could heap coals of fire, and they wouldn’t even touch me. I had Lexi now.

I looked at the photo again, and I realized I’d never seen it before.
Seven months after the wedding
. And Xanda looking as fat and healthy as the hematoma baby, who could have eaten Lexi for a snack.

You know—rich girl and the construction guy,
Andre had said.

Xanda wasn’t a preemie. She never was.

“You were pregnant when you got married? Pregnant with Xanda?”

Mom’s hair parted as she nodded. And I could see all at once that the mask of her face, always seeming too tight, covered a
vast sorrow—maybe even as vast as my labyrinth—and a terrible secret. The blame she doled out so easily grafted over a deeper, quieter voice.

Shame.

“I’ve been…I haven’t felt like myself for a long time, wondering what I did or didn’t do, what I could have done to change what happened to your sister. I wanted to do better with you.” I thought of Shelley in the hospital, how she said sometimes sadness only looked like anger and judgment. Maybe fear did, too.

Her eyes met mine. “Do you think it was my fault she died?”

If someone had asked me yesterday or even ten minutes ago, I would have known the answer. But now I wasn’t so sure.

My thoughts raced back through the tangle of events to the moment of
why.
It was easiest to blame my mom for Xanda’s death and everything that had happened since, because then I’d never have to look too closely at myself. At what I had done to Essence. Kamran. Shelley. Blaming Essence for what happened to our friendship. Using Kamran and then Shelley as a means of escape.
Maybe you think this baby is going to make up for everything,
Delaney had said.

Was I doing the same to Lexi? Would my choices now affect the pattern of her future?

My breath caught as the thought sunk in. I thought of the time Xanda let me try on her safety-pin ensemble. “You don’t
want to be like me,” she said. “You’d be better off being like Mom than me.” I had spent so long trying to act like Xanda that I didn’t notice myself acting like Mom—feeling shame and blaming everyone else.

Mom’s question still hung in the air, and I thought of the last thing Shelley said.
We try to learn to forgive
. Blame was not forgiving other people. Shame was not forgiving yourself. We each had a little of both.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think it’s your fault.” It felt like a part of me flew up into the sky and away like the bird in my drawing—the part carrying around a weight for a long, long time.

“But it is. Xanda died, your father left, you…” She didn’t finish, but I knew she was going to say something about Lexi.

“Lexi isn’t a punishment,” I said gently. “If you could see her…” My duffle bag lay in my lap, sketchbook tumbled at an angle. In the hospital, I’d drawn Lexi over and over until her face was as natural to my pencil as labyrinths had ever been. “I took pictures. And…I could show you my drawings.”

“Lexi,” my mom echoed. I held my breath, waiting for her to pass judgment. “It’s beautiful.” Another part of me took flight, the one waiting to hear those words.

As we looked at the drawings together, she held her breath, too—first at the tiny creature dwarfed by the blankets and monitors, then as she grew each week. The only labyrinths were the tubes and cords, which gradually disappeared as she made huge steps toward self-sufficiency. In the last one, she
wore the pink hat Essence brought from my mom, her head swamped in the soft cotton and her eyes bright.

“I know why you did what you did,” my mom said softly. “I wouldn’t have given Xanda up, either.” She sighed as she looked over the photos and picked up the one of her and Dad at the hospital with baby Xanda. “You probably won’t believe this, but everything I’ve done, I did because I was trying to protect you and your sister—from making the mistakes I made. Maybe you can understand, after what you’ve been through. Andre is so much like…”

“Like Dad? Mom, you act like he’s spent the last fifteen years drinking beer on the couch instead of working so hard for all of us. Don’t you see who he is? He’s not
Chuck
. Chuck doesn’t even exist.”

Mom nodded, her eyes shining. “It’s funny. I didn’t think your dad would be the one to do the leaving. But now that he’s gone…” She sniffed, shaking her head. “I just…didn’t think I would miss him this much.”

“You have to talk to him.” Even as I said it, I felt a pang of guilt about Kamran. I hadn’t been fair. I hadn’t talked to him about anything, especially about what was most important. Even if it was wrong, I could understand why he’d broken up with me. Just like Dad did to Mom. Was it even possible to make things right?

Mom nodded. “Things have been so different, since…” She paused, looking to me before continuing. “Since Xanda died. I don’t know how it will go.”

I closed my sketchbook. “Maybe you can tell him what you told me.” Maybe there was a chance to start over—with Lexi. I knew forgiveness wouldn’t be simple, but if anyone could help us with it, she could.

I picked up one picture, then another, and Mom joined in. Together we gathered the scattered threads of our lives.

I became an older sister the day I turned eighteen.

It felt strange to finally leave Xanda behind, frozen in memories and photographs. After we sorted pictures in the office, Mom and I framed and hung them in the stairwell—Xanda, me, my parents, our friends, and she added more of Lexi every day. Is this what forgiveness looked like? I didn’t have much time to think about it, with Lexi crying on one side and Mom making suggestions on the other.

“You’d better hurry up—your dad’s going to pick you up any minute for the Cornish tour.”

I assessed my reflection in the bedroom mirror. Totally sleep deprived. Too thin for my skinniest jeans after staying up with Lexi and running on nothing but fingernails and
adrenaline, wearing Xanda’s fuzzy red sweater in an attempt to look like a serious student. I didn’t have to try too hard. I already looked like I’d lived a whole life.

I shifted my satchel away from my stomach, still not quite used to being only myself. Sometimes I even felt a phantom baby kicking as I was falling asleep—a notion that burst the second I heard Lexi’s snuffling through the darkness, a cry holding the power of a thousand tiny electrical currents connected to my nervous system. In all the fantasies I had about Lexi before she was born, the connection between us now—invisible and excruciating—never crossed my mind. That, or the way she would have no sense of time, if she should be asleep or awake at any given hour. Especially at night.

“It’s all par for parenthood, Miranda,” Mom would say. “It’s what you signed up for, remember?” Smug. But not so smug that she didn’t give me two seconds of sympathy and maybe even pancakes after a particularly long, wakeful night.

Things had been difficult in the hospital, but bringing Lexi home was something else altogether: putting her on a strict two-hour feeding schedule to keep her from losing precious ounces; monitoring her for signs of jaundice; listening to her breathing, waiting for the skipped gasp that would send us back to the NICU.

In the hospital, I’d had help. At home, it was all me.

“At least you’re young and can handle a few all-nighters,” Mom had joked. After ten or twelve all-nighters, though, it got considerably less funny. After a month, it came across as
simply hostile. Then she would shock me by following up with a brief, stiff hug and, “Why don’t you go take a nap? I can watch the baby for a while.”

Not that this perpetual state of awakeness would change my feelings about Lexi. You know you love someone when you willingly give up that much sleep for them.

Dad arrived a few minutes later in his beat-up construction truck to take me on a tour of Cornish College of the Arts.

He and Mom still had a lot to work out, but at least they were trying. She was trying, especially—reaching out where she hadn’t before. Taking on responsibility as forgiveness moved in. Looking in corners that, after lying unnoticed for the five years since Xanda died, needed serious spring cleaning. Luckily, Mom hated dirt. And she loved my dad, more than she’d realized, I guess. Enough to look into the darkest corners of her own heart.

“Here, take this,” Mom said, handing me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She straightened my sweater and brushed off a fleck of lint. Then she sighed. “Good luck,” she said, giving me a quick squeeze.

It was one of those rare April days where the sun came out of hiding and shone brilliantly on Seattle and the surrounding lakes.

“Don’t worry,” Mom called from the front door with Lexi tucked into her arm like a football, “I’ll take good care of the baby.”

That lasted about five minutes—enough time for me to get
into the truck, up the hill, and into my own personal panic attack. What if something happened while I was gone?

Dad gave me a knowing smile and turned the truck around. I knew what that smile said.
Sometimes you’re just like your mother.
But I was glad he didn’t say it.

After we’d swapped cars, packed the diaper bag, and got a wailing Lexi fastened into the car seat, we were on our way.

Cornish itself looked like a medieval castle on one of the highest hills in the city, with Lake Union and downtown on one side and a network of neighborhoods—including ours—on the other. In the unexpected brightness of the sun, we could see it all, churning, winding, and sparkling.

We escaped the crisp air through a pair of great, ancient doors and into a maze of halls leading in every direction. I could see exactly why Essence wanted to come here and why she thought I should, too. It was like one big drama class. Everyone bustled through the tunnels, their talking and laughter bouncing off the walls. Individuals headed off to sketch or journal in the garden while groups sprawled in the common spaces.

“This is an amazing place,” the student at the info desk told me as he handed over a stack of papers. “When you come here—well, I can tell you, it will change your life.”

My life had already changed so much, and it was still changing in drastic, immeasurable ways.

When I had dialed Kamran’s cell phone a few weeks before, he’d picked up halfway through the first ring.

“Miranda,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you.” And it was like all the time and space between us, over these whole last nine months, compressed into one moment—not of perfection, but of something sweet and familiar and real.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call,” I said, the words tripping over themselves. There was so much more. Like Essence pointed out, no one in my family told the truth about anything. Maybe it was time for me to start.

He picked up Lexi and me with his parents’ car. I strapped Lexi into the back, where the leather upholstery smelled clean and new, with a hint of his dad’s sandalwood aftershave. Kamran watched from a distance, as if somehow his proximity could shatter her. I knew better. However delicate she looked on the outside, inside she was stronger than wire.

“We should go for a walk,” he said. “Talk about things.” The future, with him on one end of the country and me on the other. What was there to talk about?

He parked near the University Bridge, and we struck out on the Burke-Gilman Trail, a footpath sweeping past the university and along Lake Washington. We were close, not touching, reminding me of the
pat pat pat
he had given me when we first saw each other last fall. Neither of us wanted to be the first to speak.

Lexi protested when I tucked her into the front pack, then quieted with the rhythm of my steps. The University of Washington loomed ahead, bright in the March light, with the path rolling out before us.

We stopped at a bench under the astronomy building with
the sundial clinging to the outside of it like a copper-green spiderweb, a lazy figure eight marking months and minutes, patterns of time.

“There’s a reason I brought you here,” Kamran began, looking as though he might have to spring any second to catch Lexi if she slipped out of the carrier. Beneath her, my heart thudded, waiting for the words to tumble out of his mouth. “I’m not going to MIT.”

I sat there beside him, letting it sink in. “Not going?”

“I didn’t get in. Too focused. Or not focused enough. The letter didn’t really go into it.”

“But…what about…”

“Harvard? Well, that’s what I wanted to talk with you about. I’ll be here, at the U.” He glanced up at the sundial. “I got into the Aeronautics and Astronautics program. After MIT, it’s one of the best in the country, plus there’s a scholarship, so…I’ll be around, is what I’m trying to say.”

In an instant, everything had changed, yet again. “I’m going to Cornish,” I said.

“I know.”

“Essence,” we both said at the same time. He smiled, that smile that had captured me yesterday, today, and the days to come—not because it was like Andre, but because it was his very own.

“So…I’ve been thinking,” he was saying. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. And…we’ll both be here…” His knee bounced up and down the way it did when he was worried.
“…and I was thinking maybe you were right, maybe we should—”

Here he was, about to say the words I had always hoped to hear. And yet, it was all wrong—the right words spoken at the wrong time, in the wrong place, in the wake of all the wrong reasons. There was nothing else I could say but, “No.”

“No?” He blinked, a quick kiss of lashes.

“No.” My voice felt stronger, more solid. When he looked puzzled, I closed my eyes. What would Xanda say? I didn’t know. I only knew what I had to say.

On the bench under the sundial, I told him what I’d wanted to tell him the night of the Winter Ball: that in him, I’d been looking for the door to unlock my sister’s life, that I’d made him into someone else’s image, and most of all, that I was sorry.

Since that day at the university, he’d already been over to the house a few times—getting to know Lexi, and getting to know my parents. I was getting to know him—the real him, not what I wanted him to be.

“He’s a good kid,” my mom said, after he tried teaching her how to make lamb kebabs while I gave Lexi a bath in the kitchen sink. At first he was nervous, but now he held Lexi all the time.

Here, at Cornish, Lexi snuffled and fussed, signaling imminent meltdown. I looked over at my dad, who seemed to be waiting for me to decide what to do.

“Thanks,” I said to the student at the info desk, dashing out the front doors with my dad close behind.

The air smacked us, but in the way that makes you feel like it’s just been cleaned by a good, hard storm. Lexi’s crying gained momentum in the wide-open space while I bounced, swayed, shushed, anything I could to get her to quiet down for the tour.

“It’s too bad your mom didn’t come with us,” said my dad—still uncomfortable in his new roles. Father, revisited. Husband in revision. Grandfather in training.

“It’s okay,” I said, though I was anything but sure as I continued to bounce. “I can handle it. Besides, she’s probably writing notes for next year’s montage.” It was going to be different this year, she promised. “I won’t even ask you to be in it,” she said in an uncharacteristic flash of shyness, “unless you want to. You and Essence. And Lexi.” I wondered what part she’d already dreamed up for Lexi—only my mom could get away with giving baby Jesus a gender change.

My bouncing wasn’t working. “I’m going to try walking instead,” I said, and we headed for the garden.

“It’s time for the big college tour,” I sang, but Lexi clearly wasn’t listening, unless she was listening to the sound of her own impressive pipes.

Maybe this tour hadn’t been such a great idea. I switched to a sway, sway, sway that I hoped would rock her back to sleep. I could see myself sway, sway, swaying through class, at the easel, handing in my portfolio, getting my diploma…all the
while swaying to keep Lexi from having a small eruption.

A couple of girls walked past, giggling and sharing a look at a magenta cell phone, slinging their messenger bags with their hips as they walked. I could have been one of them, I thought, if I had made some other choice. They cooed at the baby as they walked past.

Without the pregnancy to keep me warm, I had to pull my jacket and scarf closer around the two of us. Dad put his arm around me. Across the sound, the Olympic Mountains—a force risen out of the depths—now rested under a layer of clean, white snow. “I don’t say it much, Miranda, but I thought you should know I’m really proud of you. It’s a hard thing to protect what you love. Sometimes you can’t. But it’s a good thing when you try. I know Xanda would be proud, too.”

“Thanks, Dad.” I hugged him back. The future was going to be difficult—I was still catching up with school in time to graduate, not to mention slowly repairing my friendship with Essence and figuring things out with Kamran.

But maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. Because now we had Lexi.

“We’d better go in for the tour,” Dad said, steering me gently toward the double doors—complete with stained glass, shimmering with shadows and light. A stream of bodies rushed from one class to another, worlds unfolding in front of them in this castle of crossed destinies. I stood on the threshold. It was hard to imagine myself knowing where to go without Xanda going before me.

Would we really be able to do this?

It’s the grit that makes the pearl,
Shelley said when I called, right before she offered me my old job back. She’d even stopped by a couple of times, just to visit.

I started to sway Lexi again when I realized she was quiet. Waiting. Both of us paused on the cusp of the unknown. I couldn’t go backward or even retrace my own steps, let alone Xanda’s. I could only go forward. The threads of time weren’t unraveling but weaving into a tapestry—a future, and a hope.

The only way to discover was to step into it.