Grave Secret

Two

AT the Texas Roadhouse the next night, we’d already put our name on the list for a table when Mark arrived. Mark looks like he’s Tolliver’s brother, all right; they have the same cheekbones, the same chin, the same brown eyes. But Mark is shorter, thicker, and (an observation I have kept to myself) not nearly as smart as Tolliver.

I had so many great memories of Mark, though, that I knew I’d always be fond of him. Mark had done his best to protect all of us from our parents. Not that our parents had always intended to hurt us… but they were addicts. Addicts forget to be parents. They forget to be married. They’re only addicted.

Mark had suffered a lot because he had more memories of his dad when his dad was a real person than Tolliver did. Mark remembered a father who’d taken him fishing and hunting, a father who’d gone to teacher conferences and football games and helped him with his arithmetic. Tolliver had told me that he remembered that passage in his own life a little, but the last few years in the trailer had overlaid most of that memory until the hurt had extinguished the flame that kept it alive.

Mark had recently become a manager at JCPenney, and he was wearing navy slacks, a striped shirt, and a pinned-on name tag. When I spotted him entering the restaurant, he looked tired, but his face lit up when he noticed us. Mark had clipped his hair very short and shaved off his mustache, and the cleaner look made him seem older and more confident, somehow.

Tolliver and his brother went through the guy greeting ritual, thumping each other on the back, saying “Hey, man!” a number of times. I got a more restrained hug. Just at the right moment, we got a buzz to tell us we could be seated. When we were in a booth and supplied with menus, I asked Mark how his job was going.

“We didn’t do as well as we should this Christmas,” he said seriously. I noticed how white and even his teeth were, and I felt a stab of resentment on his brother’s behalf. Mark had been old enough to get his teeth aligned, unlike Tolliver. By the time Tolliver should have been getting his middle-class-American-teen complement of braces and acne medicine, our parents had started their downward spiral together. I shook off that unworthy twinge of resentment. Mark had just been lucky, on that count. “Our sales weren’t as high as they should’ve been, and we’re going to have to scramble this spring,” he said.

“So what do you think happened?” Tolliver asked, as if he gave a rat’s ass why the store wasn’t performing as well as it ought to have.

Mark rambled on about the store and his responsibilities, and I tried to show a decent interest. This was a better job than his previous position managing a restaurant; at least, the hours were better. Mark had put himself through two years of junior college, and he’d taken night classes since then. Eventually, he’d earn a degree. I had to admire that dedication. Neither Tolliver nor I had done that much.

The truth was that though I made sure I looked like I was listening, and I truly was fond of Mark, I was bored silly. I found myself remembering a day Mark had knocked down one of my mom’s visitors, a tough guy in his thirties who’d made a blatant pass at Cameron. Mark hadn’t known if the guy was armed (many of our parents’ buddies were), and yet Mark hadn’t hesitated a second in his defense of my sister. This memory made it easy for me to pretend I was hanging on Mark’s every word.

Tolliver was asking relevant questions. Maybe he was more into this than I’d thought. I wondered, for the hundredth time, if Tolliver would have enjoyed having a regular life, instead of the one we led.

But I figured he’d pretty much set that fear to rest the day before.

We’d left Iona and Hank’s in a very subdued state. We’d been stunned equally by Iona’s news. Though we’d tried to congratulate her and Hank with enthusiasm, maybe we hadn’t sounded excited enough. We’d been a little shaken by their reaction to our relationship, and it had been hard to be delighted for their good news since they’d been so aghast at ours.

Of course the girls had picked up on all the stress and anger. In the course of a few minutes, they’d gone from being happy for us to being confused and resentful about all the emotions swirling around. Hank had retreated to his tiny “office” to call his pastor and consult with this unknown man about our relationship, which had made something tiny in my head explode. He’d taken Tolliver with him, and Tolliver had emerged looking indignant and amused.

Since we’d left Hank and Iona’s, we hadn’t said another word to each other about the marriage issue, which had popped up like a jack-in-the-box.

Oddly, not talking about it felt… okay. We’d gone to the workout room for some treadmill time and then watched a Law and Order rerun. We’d been comfortable with each other and relieved to be by ourselves. While we’d been walking on the treadmills, I’d realized that every time we visited our sisters, it was the same emotional wringer. After a short time in that cramped house, we needed to retreat, regroup, and refresh ourselves.

I worried about the bad feelings between my aunt and myself until I reflected that all was well between Tolliver and me, and that was the only relationship I really cared about… well, other than the one I was trying to form with my little sisters.

Still, at odd moments during the past evening, I admit that the uncomfortable situation occupied my thoughts. I know it was naïve of me, but I was shocked every time I thought about Iona’s pregnancy. I’d lived through my mother’s two pregnancies with my sisters, and it still seemed amazing to me that Gracie had been born with all the correct physical attributes and no apparent mental or neurological problems, considering my mother’s extensive drug use. She’d had enough will left to restrain herself somewhat during the time she was carrying Mariella, but with Gracie… Gracie had been awfully sick when she was born, and many times after that.

I was thinking about those bad days after our treadmill workout the night before. After I’d had a break, I’d taken our hand vacuum out to the car to give the trunk a once-over. I’d taken a shopping bag with me for the trash. When you’re in your car as much as we are, it tends to get pretty junky in a short time. While I tossed old receipts and empty cups into the bag, and got all the corners with the vacuum, I worried about my aunt. Iona was healthy, as far as I knew, and she never drank or used drugs. But she was definitely on the older side to be experiencing a first venture into motherhood.

While part of my brain had been trying to remember if I’d seen an oil-change place down the access road, the other part tried to pooh-pooh my own fears. I told myself that lots of women were waiting until later in their lives to start their families. And more power to them, waiting for financial security or a good relationship to form a foundation for child rearing. The problem was, I knew from personal experience how exhausting caring for an infant was. Maybe Iona would be able to quit work.

While I pretended to listen to Mark and sipped the drink our waitress had brought me, I was reliving our little sit-down at Iona’s kitchen table. Something I’d seen had troubled me, something I hadn’t been able to recall after the hubbub over our family revelations.

As Mark and Tolliver spent way too long discussing retail, I mentally examined every person who’d been sitting around the table. Then I reviewed my memory of the objects on the table. Finally, I succeeded in tracking down the source of my unease. I waited until the brothers fell silent before I obliquely introduced the subject.

“Mark, do you go over to see the girls very often?” I asked.

“No,” he said, ducking his head in a guilty way. “It’s a long drive from my house, and I work horrible hours. Plus, Iona always makes me feel bad about something.” He shrugged. “To be honest, the girls just aren’t that interested in me.”

Mark had left the trailer and started living on his own as soon as he could, which we’d all agreed was the best thing for him to do. He came by when our parents weren’t there-or when they were out cold-and he’d (God bless him) brought us supplies whenever he could. But that meant he hadn’t been present like we had when the girls were babies, and he hadn’t had as much opportunity to bond with them. Cameron and Tolliver and I had taken care of Mariella and Gracie. On the nights when bad memories woke me up and wouldn’t let me sleep, I got scared all over again when I thought of what might have happened to the girls if we hadn’t been there. That wasn’t the girls’ concern, though-and it shouldn’t be.

“So you haven’t talked to Iona lately.” I had to think in the here and now.

“No.” Mark looked at me, a question on his face.

“You know that Iona’s heard from your dad?” It was my stepfather’s handwriting I’d seen on the letter protruding from the stack of mail.

Mark would never be a successful poker player, because he didn’t look anything but guilty. I had to smile at his obvious relief when the waitress picked that moment to take our orders.

But that smile didn’t sit on my lips for long. I was scared to look sideways at Tolliver.

When the waitress had bustled off, I opened my hands to Mark, indicating it was time for him to come clean.

“Well, yeah, I was gonna tell you about that,” he said, looking down at his silverware.

“What were you going to tell us, brother?” Tolliver asked, his voice even and pleasant and forced.

“I got a letter from Dad a couple weeks ago,” Mark said. No, he confessed it. Then he waited for Tolliver to give him absolution-but Tolliver wasn’t about to. We both knew Mark had responded to the letter, or he wouldn’t be so hangdog.

“Dad’s alive, then,” Tolliver said, and anyone but me would have called his voice neutral.

“Yeah, he’s got a job. He’s clean and sober, Tol.”

Mark had always had a tender heart for his father. And he’d always been incredibly gullible where his dad was concerned.

“Matthew’s been out of jail how long?” I asked, since Tolliver wasn’t responding to Mark’s assertion. I’d never been able to call Matthew Lang “Father.”

“Um, a month,” Mark said. He folded the little paper ring that had circled his silverware and napkin. He unfolded it and folded it again. This time he compressed it into a smaller rectangle. “He got early release for good behavior. After I wrote back, he called me. He wants to reconnect with his family, he says.”

I was sure that (entirely coincidentally) Matthew also wanted money and maybe a place to stay. I wondered if Mark truly believed his father, if he could really be that foolish.

Tolliver didn’t say a word.

“Has he been in touch with your uncle Paul or your aunt Miriam?” I asked, struggling to fill the silence.

Mark shrugged. “I don’t know. I never call them.”

While it wasn’t technically true that Tolliver and I were each other’s only adult family, with the exception of Mark it might as well have been. Matthew Lang’s siblings had been hurt and disgusted too often by Matthew to want to maintain any relationship with him, and unfortunately that exclusion had spread outward to include Matthew’s kids. Mark and Tolliver could have used help-could have used a lot of help-but that would have entailed dealing with Matthew, who had been too difficult and frightening for his more conventional siblings. As a result, Tolliver had cousins he barely knew.

I wasn’t sure exactly how he felt about Paul’s and Miriam’s self-preserving decisions, but he’d never made any attempt to contact them in recent years, when Matthew had been safely behind bars. I guess that spoke for itself.

“What’s Dad doing?” Tolliver said. His voice was ominously quiet, but he was holding together.

“He’s working at a McDonald’s. The drive-through, I think. Or maybe he’s cooking.”

I was sure Matthew Lang wasn’t the first disbarred lawyer to work the drive-through window at a McDonald’s. But given the fact that while I’d lived in the same trailer with the man, I’d never seen him cook beyond popping something in the microwave, and I’d never seen him wash a single dish, that was kind of ironic. Not enough that I’d bust out laughing, though.

“What happened to your dad, Harper?” Mark asked. “Cliff, was that his name?” Mark felt it was time to point out that Matthew wasn’t the only bad dad around.

“Last I heard, he was in the prison hospital,” I said. “I don’t think he knows anyone anymore.” I shrugged.

Mark looked shocked. His hands moved involuntarily across the table. “You don’t go see him?” He actually sounded amazed at my heartlessness, which I found almost incredible.

“What?” I said. “Why would I? He never took care of me. I’m not going to take care of him.”

“Wasn’t it okay before he started using drugs? Didn’t he give you a good home?”

I understood this wasn’t about my father at all, but it was still really irritating. “Yes,” I agreed. “He and my mother gave us a nice home. But after they started using, they never thought twice about us.” There were lots of kids who’d had it worse, who hadn’t even had a trailer with a hole in the bathroom floor. Hadn’t even had siblings who were willing to watch their back. But it had been bad enough. And later, awful things had happened when my mother and Tolliver’s father had had their crappy “friends” over. I remembered one night when all of us kids had slept under the trailer, because we were so scared of what was happening inside.

I shook myself. No pity.

“How’d you know to bring up Dad, anyway?” Mark asked. He looked sullen. Mark had always been a transparent sort of guy. It was clear I wasn’t his favorite person at the moment.

“I saw a letter from him on Iona’s table. It took me a while to remember where I’d seen the handwriting. I wonder why he wrote her. Do you reckon he’s trying to get Iona to let him see the girls? Why would he be doing that?”

“Maybe he thinks he ought to see his daughters,” Mark said, and he flushed, a sure sign he was angry.

Tolliver and I looked at our brother, and neither of us said a word.

“Okay, okay,” Mark said, rubbing his face with his hands. “He doesn’t deserve to see them. I don’t know what he’s asking Iona for. When I saw him, he told me he wants to see Tolliver. He doesn’t have an address to send Tolliver a letter.”

“There’s a reason for that,” Tolliver said.

“He’d seen some website that tracks her,” Mark said, nodding toward me as if I were sitting far away. “He said you-all’s website had an email address, but he didn’t want to contact you through her website. Like he was a stranger.”

The waitress came up with our food then, and we took the little ritual of spreading napkins and using salt and pepper to regroup.

“Mark,” Tolliver said, “is there any reason you can think of that I ought to make any effort to include that man in my life? In Harper’s life?”

“He’s our dad,” Mark said doggedly. “He’s all we’ve got left.”

“No,” Tolliver said. “Harper’s sitting right here.”

“But she’s not our family.” Mark looked at me, this time a little apologetically.

“She’s my family,” Tolliver said.

Mark froze. “Are you saying I shouldn’t have left you-all in that trailer? That I should have stayed there with you? That I let you down?”

“No,” Tolliver said, astonished. We exchanged a quick flicker of a glance. “I’m saying Harper and I are together.”

“She’s your stepsister,” Mark said.

“And she’s my girlfriend,” Tolliver said, and I smiled down at my salad. It seemed such an inadequate term.

Mark’s mouth hung open as he stared at us. “What? Is that legal? When did this happen?”

“Recently; yes, it is; and we’re happy, thanks for asking.”

“Then I’m glad for you,” Mark said. “It’s good that you have each other.” But he still looked doubtful. “Isn’t it kind of weird, though? I mean, we grew up in the same house.”

“Like you and Cameron,” I said.

“I never felt like that about Cameron,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “But this is the way we feel. We didn’t start out this way, but it’s the way we ended up.” And I smiled at Tolliver, suddenly feeling ridiculously happy.

He smiled back. Our circle closed.

“So what do you want me to tell Dad?” Mark said. There was a little desperation in his voice. I couldn’t imagine how Mark had pictured this conversation going, but it had not turned out to his satisfaction, obviously.

“I thought I’d made myself clear. We don’t want to see him,” Tolliver said. “I don’t want him to get in touch with me. If he emails us through the website, I won’t answer. That last year… you were lucky you were out on your own, Mark. I’m glad you were old enough to leave, to start your life. I’ve never blamed you for leaving, if that’s what you’re thinking. Even if you’d been in the trailer, you couldn’t have stopped anything that happened. And you brought us food and diapers and money when you could. We were glad one of us had made it out into the real world. My job at Taco Bell wouldn’t have been enough.”

“You don’t think I was just running away?” Mark sawed on his steak, his eyes on his knife.

“No, I think you were saving your life.” Tolliver put down his fork. His face was serious. “That’s what I really believe. And that’s what Harper believes.”

Not that Mark was so concerned with my opinion, but I nodded. It had never crossed my mind to think any differently about it.

Mark tried to laugh, but it was a pretty pitiful attempt. He said, “I never intended this evening to get so intense.”

“It’s your dad reappearing. Not your fault.” I smiled at him, trying to will him to lighten up.

But that seemed to be a lost cause. “You really haven’t visited your dad?” he asked me. He was wrestling with my attitude.

“No,” I said. “Why would I lie about that?”

“What is his illness?”

“I don’t know.”

“Has he heard your mom died?”

“I have no idea.”

“He know about Cameron?”

I thought about that for a moment. “Yeah, because some of the newspeople tracked him down and talked to him when she went missing.”

“He never came to see…”

“No. He was incarcerated. He wrote me a few letters. My foster parents gave ’em to me. But I didn’t answer. I don’t know what happened to him after that. More of the same, I expect. I never heard from him, or about him, until he got so sick. Then the prison chaplain wrote me.”

“And you just… didn’t answer?”

“I just didn’t answer. Tolliver, can I have a bite of your sweet potato?”

“Sure,” he said and slid his plate sideways toward me.

He always orders one when we’re at a Texas Roadhouse, and I always have one bite. I swallowed it. It wasn’t as good as it usually was, but I didn’t think that was the staff’s fault. I thought it was Mark’s.

He was shaking his head, his eyes turned down to his plate. He looked up, meeting first Tolliver’s eyes, then mine. “I don’t know how you two do it,” he said. “When Dad comes calling, I have to answer. He’s my dad. If my mother was alive, it’d be the same way.”

“I guess we’re just not as good as you, Mark,” I said. What else could I say? He’ll drain you and leech off of you. He’ll break his word and your spirit.

“I don’t guess you’ve heard anything from the police since the last time I talked to you?” Mark said. “Or from that private eye?”

“You’re determined to push all the buttons tonight, Mark,” I said, and now it was a struggle to sound even civil.

“I have to ask. I keep thinking someday there’ll be news.”

I let my anger go, because I sometimes thought the same thing. “There’s no news. Someday I’ll find her.” I’d said it for years, and it had never happened. But one day, when I least expected it-though on some level I always expected it-I’d feel her nearness, like I’d felt the proximity of so many dead people before. I would find Cameron, and I would know what had happened to her that day.

She’d been walking home alone after helping to decorate the high school gym for the prom. I had become the kind of girl who doesn’t do things like that, by that time. The lightning had done its job on me. I was still settling into my new skin, terrified of my new and weird ability, recovering from the physical damage. I was still limping, and I tired easily. I’d gotten one of my terrible headaches that day.

It had been in the spring, and we’d had a cold snap. The night before, the temperature had dropped below forty. That afternoon, it was only in the sixties. Cameron had been wearing black tights and a black and white plaid skirt and a white turtleneck. She looked great. No one would have guessed she’d pieced the outfit together at the thrift store. Her blond hair was long and shiny. My sister Cameron had freckles. She hated them. She made all As.

While Mark and Tolliver made conversation, I tried to imagine what Cameron would look like now. Would she still be blond? Would she have gained weight? She’d been small, shorter than me, with thin arms and legs and a will of iron. She’d run track with some success, though when the paper had called her a “track star” after she’d vanished, we’d all looked at each other and rolled our eyes.

My sister hadn’t been a saint. I’d known Cameron better than anyone else. She was proud. She could keep a secret till it screamed. She was smart. She studied hard. Sometimes she resented our situation, our fall from affluence, with such anger that she screamed out loud. She hated our mother, Laurel, hated her passionately, for dragging us down with her. But Cameron loved our mother, too.

She couldn’t stand Matthew, who was Mother’s second husband but her hundredth “boyfriend.” Cameron had had this persistent delusion that our father would return to his pre-drug self, and that he would show up at the dismal trailer someday and take us off with him. We would go back to living in a clean house, and someone else would wash our clothes and cook our meals. Our father would show up at the school for PTA meetings, and he’d talk to us over the supper table about where we might want to go to college.

This was Cameron’s fantasy, her happy one. She had some that were darker, much darker. She told me, one morning on our walk to school, that she also dreamed one of our mother’s dealers would show up at the trailer while we were gone and kill our mother and stepfather. After they were dead, we’d be put in a nice foster home. Then, when we’d graduated from high school, we’d get jobs and rent an apartment and work our way through college.

That was as far as Cameron’s dream had gone. I wondered what she’d imagined would happen after that. Would we each have found a good and prosperous man, and lived happily ever after? Or maybe instead we’d have continued living together (in our modest but clean apartment), wearing our new clothes (a very important part of Cameron’s tale), and eating our good food that we’d learned how to cook.

“Honey?” Tolliver said. I turned to him, startled. He’d never called me that before.

“Do you want dessert?” he asked. I realized that the waitress was waiting, smiling in that pained way that said she was being so, so patient.

I almost never eat dessert. “No, thanks,” I said. To my irritation, Mark ordered pie, and Tolliver got coffee to keep him company. I was ready to go; I wanted to get away from all this remembrance. I shifted a little to a more comfortable position, stifling a sigh.

When Tolliver and Mark resorted to talking about computers, I was once more free to think about other things.

But all I could think about was Cameron.