Page 2 of The Secrets We Keep
“Shit,” he whispered and then replaced the phone in his soaking-wet pants pocket.
He needn’t have worried about calling for help, however, because it seemed the universe had done it for him. On the other side of the overpass, a fire truck, lights on but no siren, pulled up to the water’s edge. Then two police cruisers. And finally, surprisingly, a news van with a satellite antenna on top brought up the rear.
The rest was kind of a blur. Through a bullhorn, one of the firemen advised them to come back toward them but to use the median instead of slogging through the flood. The concrete divider was only a few inches above the sloshing water.
Somehow, Rob and his driver managed a tightrope walk across the lake the underpass had become, balancing on the concrete divider.
When they reached the other side, one of the newscasters, a guy in a red rain slicker, stuck a microphone in his face and asked him to tell him what happened. Was he afraid? Stunned, Rob shook his head and moved toward the cop cars. Behind him, he could hear the driver talking to the reporter.
At the first police car, a uniformed officer got out from behind the steering wheel. She shut the door behind her and held a hand above the bill of her cap to further shield her from the rain. She was young, maybe midtwenties, with short black hair and a stout and sturdy build.
“You okay, sir?”
Rob nodded. “Yeah, I guess.” He smiled. “Didn’t expect a swim this early in the morning.”
The officer didn’t laugh. “Where were you headed? We might be able to take you, or at the very least, we can summon a taxi for you.”
And Rob opened his mouth to say, “To the airport” and then shut it again.
One thought stood out in his head.I could have drowned. He looked toward the Lincoln, which was filled now with water up to the middle of the windshield.
“Sir? You need us to get you somewhere?”
Rob debated, thinking of a young man, perhaps out in this same rain, getting almost as drenched as he was. He opened his mouth again to speak, unsure of how he could or should answer her question.
What he said now could very well determine the course of the rest of his life.
Chapter 1
“THIS ONEtime, my dad and I were fighting. This was when I was, oh, about sixteen, I guess, and we were going round and round about some damn thing—who remembers now?—but I very clearly recall getting exasperated with him and asking, ‘What do youwantfrom me?’
“And you know what he said? He smiled very sweetly, and for a moment I was taken in by it. See, Dad was pretty stingy with the smiles. So I smiled back, completely innocent. And then he says, without ever losing that sweet smile, ‘What do I want from you? Your absence.’
“And then he turned and walked out of the room. Three weeks later, I was out of there.” Jasper poured another cosmopolitan for Lacy from the pitcher on the glass coffee table.
“Whoa!” She cautioned him as he filled the tumbler higher and higher. “I want to be able to walk out of here tonight.” Lacy flipped a curtain of black hair back from her face and took a sip. “Ah, you do have a kind of magic touch. I put the same ingredients together and I swear, it’ll come out nothing like this.” She took another sip and closed her eyes in ecstasy. “Damn.” After a short pause, she asked, “Now, tell me for real. Is that story even true? Was your father really that mean?”
It was Jasper’s turn to close his eyes. What rose up behind his eyelids was an image of his father—dark wavy hair, pale blue-gray eyes, and perfect teeth—smiling so kindly, so lovingly. Jasper had hardly ever been the beneficiary of a smile like that growing up, and its effect was powerful, almost jarring, bringing for the tiniest of moments a certain joy. And then Dad said what he did.
How Jasper wished he could say it was all made-up, an attention-getting fiction, a melodramatic tale of family dysfunction.
A lump formed in Jasper’s throat, and his eyes began to well. He told himself,No, I’m not giving the man that power. I won’t.He took a big gulp of his cocktail and swallowed. When he opened his eyes, he drew in a big breath and smiled at his best friend and roommate, Lacy, and said, “I’m just being dramatic.” He snorted with laughter that wasn’t really real and then told her, “My dad never got over what happened in our family. So it was always kind of hard for him, I think, to give me the love I wanted so bad. I think of him now as someone swimming in grief and never able to rise up from it, you know?”
Lacy smiled—and her smile was truly kind and loving, so Jasper had no fear that her next words would be anything other than supportive and sympathetic. “That poor man.”
“Yeah, that poor man.” Jasper turned his gaze to the big flat-screen in front of them. People always felt sorry for his dad when Jasper was growing up alone under his care. In fact, many of them said those very words, “That poor man, left to raise that little boy all alone.” And itwassad, but was Jasper wrong to feel that he had somehow gotten lost in the shuffle, nothing more than an excess coda in the story of his family’s tragedy? “Sh,” he hushed Lacy. “It’s starting.”
As one, they both set down their drinks to watch the series finale of Ryan Murphy’s FX series,The Assassination of Gianni Versace. Jasper and Lacy had been recording the series since it began a few weeks ago and would sit down every Tuesday, the only night they both had off at the same time, to watch the latest edition of Murphy’sAmerican Crime Storyopus.
It was no secret that Jasper had a huge crush on series star and portrayer of murderer Andrew Cunanan, Darren Criss.
When Lacy found out about Jasper’s pining for the formerGleestar, she’d joked, “Isn’t that kind of masturbatory?”
“What do you mean?” Jasper asked, batting his lashes innocently.
“Oh, don’t pretend. You can beat off to a picture of Darren Criss, or you can look in a mirror. Same difference, just about.”
They’d both laughed. Inside, Jasper was thrilled that Lacy thought he looked like the TV star. Even though Criss was Asian American and Jasper himself was Italian American, he conceded that maybe there was a passing resemblance.