Keep No Secrets Page 13

  molding that connects the

  bottom of the cabinet to the tile floor. It doesn't real y. The

  molding just covers the gap

  behind it. It gives easily, just as I've fixed it to.

  I stretch my arm toward the

  back of the space, feeling

  around for the smal Ziploc bag

  where I keep my most important

  supply. I hate doing this. I hate to touch the floor behind the

  molding. The space under the

  counter feels dirty and I always

  expect a roach or something to

  scurry over my hand.

  I feel the bag way in the back,

  exactly where I last left it, just in case, and pul it from its dark

  hiding spot. In the light, I see

  the razor blades are stil neatly wrapped in toilet tissue. After

  opening the bag, I set it on the

  bare counter—I don't want to

  soil my towel with any debris

  from under the cabinet—and

  then for the second time I wash

  my hands with soap and water. I

  dry them on the large bath towel

  hanging over the shower curtain

  rod.

  Careful y, so I don't touch the

  outside of the bag, I retrieve the wrapped blades and move them

  to the center of the towel.

  I lower myself onto the toilet

  lid, take a deep breath and then

  let it out. Only then am I aware

  how tense I was as I set up my

  work space. My hands tremble

  as they always do, but I know

  they wil stop once I have the

  blade between my fingers and

  am poised to act. The heady

  anticipation of the relief waiting for me just on the other side of

  the cut has a way of stil ing my

  nerves and calming my fear.

  He sits back and stares at the screen. He tries to comprehend what he's just read, and why it's on Michael's computer. He moves the cursor, clicks "File" on the toolbar, then "Properties." The document was created in October, almost five weeks ago. Celeste is the author. He can't tell when it first showed up on Michael's system, though. He doubts she wrote it while at their house; he assumes she wrote it at home and sent it to him. Is she a cutter? Or is this meant to be fiction?

  Jack prints the document, closes it, and moves to the folder entitled "Pix." He hesitates, the cursor resting on the folder, blinking. He fears what he'll find. The lawyer in him asks whether pictures might be relevant. If he were in front of a judge, could he reasonably make the argument that he should be entitled to pictures? But the father in him doesn't care. Relevant or not, he wants to know what kind of pictures his son has on his computer.

  He clicks on the folder and waits as the photo software loads. He's aware of his racing pulse and the tight nervousness in his stomach. Closing his eyes, he tries to calm himself. Whatever he finds, it can't be that bad, can it?

  But nothing prepares him for what he sees when he opens his eyes.

  Small photo squares form an array across the screen. Four across, four down.

  He blinks, he tries to swallow the emotion welling up in his throat.

  Otherwise he doesn't move. As much as he knows he should, he can't pull his eyes away from the woman in the pictures. In most, she gazes directly at him, smoky-eyed and eager, beckoning him to come closer. I'm all yours, she seems to say, her eyelids heavy and her lips slightly parted.

  In others, she looks away from the camera, but still posing brazenly. Most of the photos show her scantily clad in lacy attire lifted from the pages of a Victoria's Secret catalog, but in a few, she's completely nude.

  His body responds even though his brain tries to send it a different message.

  He closes his eyes, but that only brings more attention to his physical reaction.

  Finally, his right hand obeys and he moves the mouse. But instead of closing the whole folder, he clicks on the first photo. It quickly expands to fill the screen.

  It's Celeste. She appears older than her sixteen years, but there's no doubt the woman in the pictures is Celeste. Yet it's not Celeste that Jack sees.

  It's Jenny.

  The ring of his cell phone on the desk startles him. He sees that it’s Claire calling. He takes a deep breath. Despite his attempt to answer with a simple hey, he hears the false note in his voice.

  Claire doesn’t notice; she gets right to business. "Can you pick up Michael today?" she asks. "The Dean called an impromptu meeting. I won’t get away until late this afternoon."

  Before Jack’s arrest, he and Claire had agreed that part of Michael’s punishment for breaking curfew was the loss of his car. Even after the full account of Michael's role that night came to light, his punishment, through mere inertia, remained the same. But Jack has noticed it’s not Michael, but Claire, who suffers the punishment. If Michael can’t drive, someone else has to. So far, that has been Claire. Jack wonders if she really has a meeting or if she's simply decided it's time for him to bear some of the burden.

  "Sure," he agrees readily. "I'll be out and about anyway"—no need to tell her he already is—"so I’ll swing by and get him."

  Jack can’t imagine Michael will be glad when his dad picks him up, but after what he just saw on the computer, he doesn’t care. He’s anxious to have a talk with his son.

  Practice ends at five, but Jack shows up at four fifteen. He parks Mark's car in the lot outside the new gym and walks past the double glass doors at the main entrance. He heads instead to the single metal door at the rear, which he knows is mostly obscured by the bleachers. During the school day the door is locked from the outside, but after school the students who stay for sports prop it open with a brick so they can go in and out with ease.

  Sure enough, the brick is in place. He slips into the gym undetected. For a moment he stands hidden behind the bleachers and waits until he thinks he can turn the corner and climb to the top without being seen. His chance comes when the coach hollers for the boys to gather round him for a talk. Climbing the bleachers two steps at a time, Jack quickly reaches the top. It’s darker up here; he sits at the end of the highest bench with his back against the gym wall, confident he’s invisible.

  He watches his son. Unlike the

  slumped stance Michael affects at home, on the court he stands as tall as a Maasai warrior and moves as gracefully as a gazelle on the plain. He traverses from one end of the court to the other, moving from side to side to evade an opponent.

  He makes it look so simple that Jack wishes he could join them for a few scrimmages.

  Michael’s face is always tight with intensity while he plays. Today is no exception, but Jack notices that his sideline countenance is different: his usually quick smile is scant and the good-natured teasing of his teammates is nonexistent.

  A gaggle of shrieking young females interrupts Jack's worrying. The

  commotion comes from the direction of the same door Jack used. The volume grows as the girls' volleyball team emerges from the side of the bleachers into the open gym. They must have been practicing in the old gym. They head across the lacquered wood floor to the locker rooms at the south end. Several of the girls stop at the bleachers. Only then does Jack register the jumble of

  backpacks scattered on the lowest two benches below him. Each girl who stops digs inside her bag and checks the screen of a cell phone. As the last of the group turns the corner and enters the gym, Jack spots Celeste and the volleyball coach at the back of the bunch. He scoots back farther, pressing his back harder against the wall as if he can disappear into it, but his fears about being seen by Celeste are unwarranted. She walks past the

  backpacks and focuses on the basketball team. Michael's attention to his game lapses, and he waves to her. Jack doesn’t hear him, but the coach must chastise Michael, because he quickly turns back to the gam
e.

  Jack relaxes only after the last of the volleyball team has disappeared into the locker room. Minutes later, the boys take off in the same direction and vanish into the boys' side. The two coaches chat as they bring up the rear and then part to follow their respective teams. Except for the distant laughing and shouting coming from the locker rooms, the gym falls silent. Jack is left alone with the backpacks. He wastes no time moving to the bottom of the bleachers. He scans the backpacks quickly. If Celeste's bag is here, he'll recognize it.

  The emerald green ribbon she ties to a strap helps him locate it easily. Despite his rapid pulse that warns against doing this, he unzips the largest compartment.

  A clean conscience won't save him from being locked up; what he finds inside might.

  He pushes past textbooks to the spiral notebooks. She has several, each a different color, and each titled by subject: Pre-Calc, History, LA, Chem, CW,

  Spanish, Psych. He figures it's a long shot to find anything helpful with her schoolwork, but he pulls out the LA notebook anyway and flips through a few pages. He sees pages and pages of vocabulary words and literature notes.

  Nothing, though, that appears to be her own creation.

  Next up, the Psych notebook. But he finds more of the same: class notes about Freud, Jung, Adler, Skinner and others Jack has never heard of or forgot as soon as he graduated. He wishes he had the time to peruse the notes closely; he'd love to see what gems she's picked up from her studies. She could probably write her own psychology how-to manual: How to Play Mind Games with the Men in Your Life.

  He has no idea what CW stands for, but he chooses it next. On the inside, he discovers the answer: CW is the acronym for Creative Writing. He finds page after page of stories, journal entries and poems.

  He scans the gym. He's still alone, but he knows someone could walk in at any time. He has three choices: leave and never know what she's written, read the journal now and hope no one sees him, or take the whole thing with him. He doesn't like any of the options, but after he scans the gym one more time, he chooses one anyway.

  Unlike the other notebooks in her backpack, the Creative Writing notebook has nothing to do with school. Instead, it appears to be a journal for her eyes only.

  Much of it reads like the musings of a melancholy amateur poet, but one post, if he assumes memoir instead of fiction, tells him immediately that someone has messed with her.

  He came at me from behind.

  He tugged roughly on my hair,

  like I was a horse and my hair

  was the reins. It hurt. And

  afterwards, he wouldn't even

  look at me. Even when I started

  crying. He just zipped up his

  jeans, told me how great I was,

  and started the engine. He didn't say anything else, not even

  when he dropped me off in front

  of my house.

  It wasn't like that at first. He

  started out by just kissing me.

  His lips were rough, and I could

  smel whiskey on his breath. I

  didn't like it, but he looked me

  right in the eye and told me I

  was beautiful, so I didn't think

  he'd hurt me. I thought if I just let him kiss me a minute, he'd

  feel like he gotten something

  and would leave me alone. But

  that's not what happened.

  Instead, he started to unbutton

  my shirt, and I tried to scoot

  away. Al of a sudden he

  changed. It was like he became

  a different person. Al of a

  sudden his fingers were digging

  into my arms and he was

  pushing me against the seat. I

  turned my head side to side so

  he couldn't kiss me again, but

  that's when he grabbed my hair.

  He twisted it, wrapped it around

  his hand so I couldn't get away.

  He yanked it, pul ing my head

  back, and told me to look at him.

  I wouldn't at first, but he said

  "We can do this the easy way or the hard way" and that

  scared me, so I final y did what

  he said. I looked at him. He

  smiled and said, "That's better."

  He finished unbuttoning my

  shirt, and then he used a pocket

  knife to cut my bra. He asked

  me how it felt when he caressed

  the sides of my breasts, and if I liked it when he touched his

  tongue to them. I think I

  whimpered, I was so scared, but

  he liked that, when I made

  noise, because he encouraged

  me to make more. If I didn't

  answer his questions, or do

  what he said, he would start to

  get angry again. He stuck his

  finger in my mouth and told me

  to suck on it. It tasted salty. I'd heard that guys liked that sort of thing, and I think he did

  because he grinned at me, and

  then he grabbed one of my

  hands and jammed it between

  his legs.

  But then he slipped his hands

  up my skirt and asked me in a

  strange voice if I was ready for

  him. Without waiting for an

  answer, he slipped his finger

  under my panties to find out for

  himself, I guess. I told him no,

  but he wouldn't listen. His

  actions became faster, and his

  touch even rougher as he

  pushed my skirt up and pul ed

  my panties off. He rol ed me

  over and issued instructions for

  how I should position myself. I

  told him I didn't want to do it, but he kept on, and threatened me.

  After that, I gave up. I just gave up and let him do what he

  wanted.

  Jesus. Jack rereads it, searching for some evidence, some assurance, that the piece is nothing more than the overactive

  imagination of a hormonal teenage girl.

  But a hormonal teenage girl with an overactive imagination would, he hopes, write about consensual sex, not rape.

  Because if he's sure of anything, he's sure the words in front of him describe a rape.

  He's not sure why, but Jack doesn't think what he just read is about Celeste's dad, the man he originally feared was hurting her. But nothing in the journal suggests who it might be. She neglected to date the entries. Without more information, it's impossible for him to determine whether she wrote it before or after she moved to St. Louis. Even worse, it's impossible to determine whether she wrote it before or after the night he drove her home.

  His first instinct, his prosecutor's instinct, is to call the abuse hotline immediately. Self-preservation kicks in, though, and he quickly understands the hotline is not an option, not yet.

  Because without proof that the words he just read came first, the journal entry has the power to seal the State's case against him.

  Hands trembling and sensing the

  opportunity is about to expire, he rips the incriminating page from its home, replaces the notebook in Celeste's backpack, and slips out the rear door.

  Michael stops short as soon as he comes out of the gym and sees his uncle's car instead of Claire's minivan. To Jack's relief, Celeste isn't with Michael. He wonders why not.

  "Hey," Jack says when Michael opens the door and tosses his gym bag and backpack on the floor. He plops into the passenger seat and buckles the seatbelt. "I thought you were Uncle Mark," is all Michael says, reminding Jack he still wears his brother's clothes. Michael took a shower—his hair is wet, his skin is dry and he's dressed now in jeans and a sweatshirt—but the sour odor of male, teenage sweat leaks from the gym bag and fills the Porsche. "How was practice?"

  Michael pulls his phone from his back pocket and giv
es his full attention to the screen.

  "You played—" Jack catches himself.

  He was about to comment on Michael's performance, but since Jack is confident no one saw him, he thinks it's best not to tell his son he was there. It will be the first thing that comes to his mind if Celeste notices the page missing and shares the discovery with Michael, which Jack is sure she will.

  "I played what?" Michael practically grunts the question with looking at Jack.

  His fingers rapidly work the small touchpad.

  Jack can't come up with a cover fast enough, so he lets it die. Instead, he says,

  "Mom had a late meeting so she couldn't pick you up."

  If this information interests Michael, he doesn't show it.

  The ride home is short—ten minutes at most—and the closer they get, the nearer the questions Jack wants to ask come to leaving his tongue. He doesn't know when he'll next have Michael as a captive audience.

  "Mike, can you put the phone down for a minute?"

  Michael gives a teenage sigh, but he complies. He then reaches over, turns the radio up loud and punches at buttons to find a song he likes. Jack turns it off from the controls on the steering wheel.

  Another grunt from Michael.

  "I want to ask you something," Jack says.

  Michael simply stares forward. Jack decides he can't do this while the car's in motion, so he pulls into a small

  playground parking lot near their house.

  It's vacant; at this time of day, all the stay-at-home moms and their children are home for naps or dinner.

  "Is there something you know that you're not telling me? About Celeste?"

  Even as he questions Michael, he thinks of Earl's warning about how his

  communications with his son won't be privileged.

  Michael lowers his eyes.

  "Remember when I asked you whether her dad was hurting her? If you knew something, you'd tell me, wouldn't you?"

  "I told you, he's not hurting her." He still won't look at Jack, but at least he answered.

  "Is someone else hurting her, then? Or has her dad or someone else hurt her?"

  Michael crosses his arms.