The Thing About Secrets

The thing about secrets is that they can’t stay hidden forever. They may stay bottled up for a while, but eventually the pressure builds up inside and just explodes indiscriminately, like emotional shrapnel. 

I’ve had a secret for a long time. Ever since the day Dev walked into The Little Luncheonette with his floppy jet-black hair, almond-shaped eyes and lopsided smile. His teeth were white. His Converse high-tops were worn. His jeans were faded. He asked my dad for a job. Anything would do, he said, he just wanted a place to do homework on his break and be able to stay ‘til closing. My dad hired him on the spot, and from that moment on, Dev showed up every day, torturing me with the way he walked with such ease, as if he was a celebrity showing up for a late-night interview, charming everyone who walked in, not just me.

That was the big mystery about Dev: When you make everyone feel special, is anyone really special? And if so, how could you tell? Those questions took up most of my waking hours, whether I was surviving another friendless day at school or flipping burgers and taking orders at the Luncheonette. They were on repeat as I lay in bed at night, running through every glance and compliment, searching for a sign that his esteem for me was just a little higher than for the customer who asked him to refill the toilet paper in the ladies’ room. Dev smiled while he did his homework and mopped the floor. He smiled when he showed up and his smile only dimmed a little when he left for the night. I liked to think it was because he was leaving me, but I knew it was just because he was headed home to an empty house. Dev had no secrets. He was an open book about the fact that his parents worked late and he hated to be alone.

The night of the storm, I tried to close up early, but the line of customers kept flowing. Dev stayed, too, even though I sent the cook home. I didn’t have the heart to turn them away, though I wouldn’t have blamed him if he left. It wasn’t his family business, after all. But I didn’t have time to ask, nor would I have drummed up the courage to.

We filled orders side by side in a wordless rhythm. Fry, flip, slap, wrap, next burger, over and over until the smell of grease felt like it was imprinted on my DNA. I was one with the grill, like my parents and two generations of my father’s family before him. Our regular customers flooded in as if filling up on their last meal before The End. I fed every last one, until we were out of patties. Even then, we fired up grilled cheeses for the last few customers until there was no one left but us.

I locked the door and flipped the sign to “closed”. Dev wordlessly fried two more grilled cheeses and stuffed them with the last of the caramelized onions, a handful of my grandmother’s sliced pickles and a slathering of sauce, and handed me one. We sat at the counter and ate them in silence as we stared out the window at the darkening sky. I hadn’t realized how hungry I had gotten until the infusion of calories cleared my foggy brain and I thought to check the time. Six minutes to eight. “We’re not going to get out of here in time,” I mused out loud.

Dev glanced at his phone as if he didn’t believe me and then looked back at the door. I worried he was going to try to make a run for it to make it home to his parents’ house across town. Being stuck at the diner in the storm with Dev was a very different kind of panic than the prospect of being stuck at the diner in the storm alone. The town emergency alarm pierced the silence of the moment, signaling that we had five minutes before lockdown. 

Dev squared his shoulders as if making a decision, but I couldn’t read his thoughts. Was he going to run for it and head home, or stick it out here? I never had a clue what was going on behind those beautiful eyes -- I called it Dev Blindness. And even in an emergency, all my senses were on high alert for the wrong reasons. Stuck. In a storm. All alone. With Dev. My arms covered with goosebumps. I hugged myself with an involuntary shiver. 

Dev grabbed his backpack and shrugged, breaking the silence of the moment. “Guess we’re stuck here for the duration.” He opened the cellar door and looked over at me. I was still standing by the window, holding my dirty napkin. “You coming, Miller?”

What’s the feminine word for emasculated? That’s what I felt when Dev called me by my last name. Like I was a teammate or drinking buddy. He had said my name only once, when we first met, with that adorable British-Colonial lilt of his. Geraldine. It was the only time I had actually liked my first name. After that, it was just “Miller”, like the beer, if he called me anything at all. “I just have to lock up,” I replied.

Dev helped me cover the windows and glass door with storm boards. We secured the last bolt when the quarantine siren sounded. We were officially locked in. I just hoped the bulkheads would hold when the waves hit. And I hoped my protective emotional barriers would hold up as well.

The Little Luncheonette looked different with the windows boarded up. My family’s diner had been standing since the turn of the twentieth century, and though it had been updated many times, we had kept the original countertop and stools. Reviewers marveled at how entering the luncheonette felt like time traveling back to simpler days.

As I shut the main light, I took one longing look around the room, hoping this wouldn’t be the last time I’d see it like this. Even though I was afraid, in my heart, I knew this “storm of the century” wasn’t going to be the thing that pulled this old building down. It had weathered worse storms. In 1912, an even bigger Nor‘easter had blown in with waves crashing over the barriers, flooding the town. The sheer power had rocked the foundation of the Little Luncheonette, leaving a crack from below cellar level up to the roofline. Much of the town had fallen that day, including many of its residents. The luncheonette became a legend that day. A symbol that life goes on despite the biggest hardships. Not because of the crack, but because of what came afterward.

The story goes that a young man had been separated from the woman he loved in the storm. When the storm cleared, he was going mad, wondering if she was safe. He wrote her a note and, with nowhere else to put it, poked it into the hole of the only building still standing. She found the note and they were reunited. It was a love story for the ages.

After the dust settled and the city’s grief faded to a distant pain, the city was rebuilt but the story endured. The fissure was left untouched as a symbol of hope. Even the streets were renamed. Our building, once sitting on the corner of Main and Third, was now situated at the corner of Hope and Mercy.

The crack was too deep to repair, so it was left. Some time in the 1970’s, someone had painted a heart around the hole. The police had considered it an act of vandalism, but his parents loved it and encouraged others to paint their own messages. By the time I was born, the mural was a tourist attraction. On the hundredth anniversary of the storm, the building became an official landmark. People now came from all over to write notes and stuff them into the crack in the wall. Secrets, wishes, prayers, confessions, promises… everything goes in and stays there, locked in the walls forever. The building didn’t just hold the hopes and dreams of my family. It literally held a hundred years’ worth of secrets.

I followed Dev to the stairs and after a final survey around the room, closed the door behind me.

As my eyes adjusted to the dim light of the stairwell my thoughts spiraled. Locked in. No windows. No way out. I put my hand on the railing to steady myself. Dev actually took notice. “You okay?” he asked tentatively. 

I pursed my lips and nodded. I dared not speak, fearing that opening my mouth would release the panic that was suddenly building up inside me like the head of a baking soda volcano. I had always hoped Dev would actually be forced to notice me someday, but a forced quarantine in a Nor’easter was definitely not what I had in mind.

Down in the cellar, Dev and I looked at each other. “What should we do?” I asked.

“We wait.” Dev flopped down into an old armchair, which burped a cloud of dust as he settled in. He coughed, waving his arms. “Didn’t think that part through,” he laughed. Nothing fazed that guy. 

I had too much restless energy to sit. I had been in the cellar countless times in my life. I walked to the back wall and touched the tiny fissure that had been left by the Great Storm so many years ago. I imagined my great-grandmother hiding down here with her family when the storm hit, and suddenly felt as if I could reach back through time by tracing my fingers down the jagged scar. If these walls could talk, I thought, they would spill all the secrets of one hundred years and connect us together. Those secrets would be our bond. It sounded both easy and impossible at the same time.

I looked over at Dev, who had already settled in. He had the forethought to bring a comic book. I had to know whether it was Marvel or DC. You could tell a lot about a person by which one they favored. Marvel stories are grounded in reality, where crazy stuff happens to normal people who live in real cities. DC characters are basically born heroes. To paraphrase Shakespeare, some people are born superheroes, some become superheroes, and some have superpowers thrust upon them. I think the stories you choose say a lot about you. 

I’d have pegged Dev as a Marvel guy--bold and confident--so when the superpowers show up, he’s ready to accept the mantle of responsibility and look like a chiseled god in his super-suit, and… oh. Right. That’s my version of Dev the superhero. Which is why I was surprised that, with everything going for him, he was reading Superman, the unattainable, unrealistic Boy Scout god. I wondered: if he ever could see himself as I saw him, would he think more of himself or less of me?

I went around the storeroom, exploring the cellar as if seeing it for the first time. It was really my parents’ domain. They owned the shop, took care of the inventory and storage. My responsibility was to take mind it when they went away. Right now, they were on a cruise ship in the Caribbean, blissfully unaware of the storm. It was easier knowing they weren't worried. This was not my first emergency at the helm, though it was my first time hiding in the cellar instead of at home with my stockpile of books and supplies. 

I pulled up the news feed from our local TV station on my computer. A reporter in a windbreaker was getting battered by the rain. The fact that she was still out there meant the storm hadn’t hit full force yet. That’s all I needed to know. The directive was to shelter in place until it was over. It was literally all we had to do, although many workers were out there on the front lines – emergency technicians, doctors, first responders, volunteer firemen. We lived in a small, unsheltered New England town on the water. We get at least one big storm out of the Northeast every year, so these volunteers knew what they signed on for. Even so, their dedication to keeping us safe was a real life superhero feat in itself. 

Still, as the storm began to pick up onscreen, it was hard to imagine that it was all taking place just above us. Here, in the cellar, the world was as still as the dust that settled in a small film over everything. I tried to clean, but the more filth I moved with my cloth, the dirtier everything else seemed to be, as if the earth was trying to reclaim the space because our lease was finally up. 

I vacillated between feeling safe and feeling hemmed in, my rational mind fully engaged in taming the raw animal thoughts that kept threatening to break through and take over. I swished the rag over surfaces, essentially just rearranging the dirt as the real work went on inside my skull, years of civilization and education beating back my fight or flight responses like a lion tamer with a whip and a chair. 

And suddenly, with a crack that shook the very foundation of the building, stronger than any whip I could imagine, the lights went out. We were plunged into darkness.

Instinctively, I crouched down and tried to be as still and as small as possible. The crack in the foundation had never felt like a concern before, but suddenly it rushed in like a forgotten worry. Was the building safe? Was it going to crumble around us? Would we become just two more lost secrets the building held. “Dev?” I asked in a small voice.

“Here,” he said just as quietly. “You ok?” He sounded like he hadn’t moved either.

“Yeah,” I answered. “You?”

I heard him shift in his chair, and heard his feet tap the floor. The rustle of his backpack. A click. A column of light sprang from a large utility flashlight. The kind that you can set on the floor and it could illuminate half a room. He was prepared. Just like a boy scout Superman. Dust swirled in the warm glow of the light, then settled. Whatever made that cracking sound had rattled the building, but it was still standing around us. “I’m ok.” He answered. His voice trembled just a little. 

But the building wasn’t okay. There was another moment of stillness, and then the rumbling started. We both turned sharply toward the sound as the line I had just traced in the foundation grew larger until it opened. A hole the size of a golf ball appeared. Rubble poured through the opening-- clumps of dirt and pebbles and pieces of crumbled brick. The hole grew to the size of a baseball, then a basketball, and it continued to open like the mouth of a cobra as its jaw unhinged to engulf its prey.

Silently, slowly, we both backed up to the opposite wall, our instinct taking us as far from the danger and as close to each other as possible as we watched the wall disintegrate. “The hole is opening,” I said dumbly.

“Uh huh,” he replied. We ended up next to each other by the wall. Dev was so close, I could feel him breathing next to me. We watched the wall continue to open in slow motion, transfixed. I felt his fingers reach out to mine and I inhaled sharply, wondering if he was looking to comfort me or to be comforted, but without a thought, my fingers sought out his instead. Didn’t matter. His fingers were warm and human and solid. The touch of flesh was real and familiar although we had never even shaken hands before. In the solidarity of that moment, his touch was enough to keep me from unraveling right then and there. The wall continued its slow crumble, as though the earth behind the brick had finally grown patient after all the decades of slow, even pressure. The earth had won, and now it had all the time in the world to reclaim its space.

“Do you think it’s going to burst? Should we head up toward the stairs?” I asked Dev as if he was a structural engineer, not a handsome student by day and fry cook by night. 

Dev barely shrugged, his eyes still on the debris trickling from the crumbling wall. “Dunno.” I forced myself to look away from the wall into Dev’s eyes and they were wide with fear. So much for turning into a superhero when danger was thrust upon him. I did an inward survey of my own mental and emotional state and discovered I felt… calm. Curious. Alert. Ready. 

I didn’t have time to wonder what I was ready for. 

Then, just like that, it happened. 

The crack in the wall burst. A wad of paper shot through the hole and fell to the ground. Dev and I looked at each other, then back at the wall as suddenly a flood of paper poured from the opening, not unlike the scene in the Harry Potter movie where Harry’s invitation could no longer be ignored, and hundreds of envelopes rumbled and poured into the room. Only these weren’t envelopes, and this was no magic trick. One hundred years of hopes and dreams and fears flooded into the room like a never-ending wave, then finally trickled to a stop at our feet. I hadn’t realized I had been holding my breath as the papers continued to pour out of the wall. I breathed heavily at last, processing what lay in front of me.

“The secrets,” Dev said in awe. “They’re all coming out.”

“All secrets all have to come out sometime.” I replied, squeezing his hand. 

He held up our hands, still intertwined, and looked at them, then up at me with a shy smile. “Yes, Geraldine. I guess they do.”