All the Things We Didn't Say by Sara Shepard Page B

anyway, Skip was from a couple towns away. First time we met, we were in ice-skating lessons together. Our mothers couldn’t pry us apart. But he thought I was too coarse for him. He liked girls who wore twinsets, who didn’t swear. We were friends until twelfth grade, when he started going steady with Muriel Johnson.I hated her-she was a twinset girl. And you know what her yearbook motto was? She is pretty to walk with and witty to talk with .’ Stella snorted and shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t speak to Skip when he was with her. Then there was that accident.’
    â€˜Accident?’ It couldn’t have been the same accident my father was in. She had to be talking about a different era.
    Stella nodded. ‘Muriel went out on the Doyle boys’ pond that November, because she’d bought a new ice-skating skirt that would twirl around when she spun-of course she knew how to spin, Muriel. So she was out there, wearing a twinset and that skirt, spinning, and everyone was watching her and saying how pretty she was, and then the ice cracked.’ Stella clucked her tongue. ‘Muriel knew just as well as the rest of us that the Doyles’ pond takes a while to freeze all the way through. But she just couldn’t wait to start the skating season.’
    â€˜What happened?’
    â€˜Oh, she fell through.’ Stella waved her hand. ‘One minute she was spinning, that gray skirt all twirly, the next she was under the water. The boys made a human chain to get her, but by the time they got out to the middle, it was too late. They had to wait to get her body out until the ice thawed- months , really. That skirt didn’t look quite so pretty, all soggy and covered in frost.’
    I gaped. ‘They waited until spring? They didn’t drain the pond and get her out that day?’
    Stella blinked rapidly, as if I’d awakened her from a dream. ‘Oh. Well. I don’t know, really. It was so long ago. Anyway, I consoled Skip at Muriel’s funeral, and the rest is history.’ She coaxed another cigarette from the pack. ‘We weren’t apart until he died.’
    The room was starting to fill with blue smoke. In Stella’s stories, a story about a girl plummeting through thin ice toher death was on an emotional par with, say, someone waiting in a line at the DMV. I swallowed hard. ‘My dad was in an accident a long time ago, right? A car accident?’
    â€˜That’s right.’ Stella turned her neck toward the kitchen, as if she’d heard a noise.
    I shifted positions. ‘So was he…hurt from it?’
    â€˜No…’ Stella didn’t meet my eye. ‘I don’t think there was a scratch on him.’
    â€˜He talks about it sometimes,’ I said quietly.
    Stella extinguished her cigarette in the pea-green ashtray. ‘So I bet you miss your mom, huh?’
    I sat back. ‘Ex cuse me?’
    She kept grinding the cigarette out. ‘I hope you know it had nothing to do with you, whatever it was or wherever she is. But you’re okay now, aren’t you?’
    â€˜Sure,’ I said weakly.
    â€˜And your father, too?’
    â€˜Yeah. I guess.’
    Stella smiled. ‘Well. Wonderful.’
    In some ways, I wasn’t lying. Aside from the snow globe incident, my father seemed okay. He went to the lab every day now. He saw a therapist named Dr North, and I had a feeling Dr North had him on some drug. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to have to think about it. Sometimes Dr North called Steven and me. ‘If you ever want to talk, the door is open,’ he said if he happened to catch me on the phone, as if he were my roommate and was talking about the door to his bedroom. Several times, I’d dialed the first six digits of Dr North’s office number, wanting to ask him if the time I’d blamed everything on my father could have led to what happened. I always hung up, though,