The Secrets She Keeps (2 page)

“I’m going! I’m going right now.”

“It’s no big deal. She can wait,” I said.

He had that look, the one he often had when he came home from work and it was an endless day of weighing what was best for whom, studying zoning laws and park space and the height of bus-stop shelters, making decisions when there were no real right answers. He’d had that look quite a lot lately. Clearly there was a greater thing on his mind. A greater thing that made all other things irritating intrusions.

And that’s when it happened. He palmed a sodden business card and crushed it into a ball. This alone did not make me understand that life as I knew it was changing before my very eyes. It was what he did just after that—the way he glanced up to see if he’d been caught. All it takes to unravel or undo is one lost stitch, one tiny tear, and that’s what that glance was.

You know way too much about each other when you’re married; that’s one of the problems. Another is that you know way too little. Still, I’d have recognized that look on anyone. On Shaye when we were kids, or on my own children, or a stranger, for that matter. Even Hugo. He’d had that same look whenever he tried to run off with someone’s Kleenex.

Our eyes met. Thomas dropped his away.

“Mack?” I said. It was my love name for him. I felt a little sick inside.

“What?”

“What is that?”

“What?”

“In your hand.”

“Garbage.”

“Some secret?”

He shook his head, as if I’d been the one to do something disappointing. “Jesus, Callie,” he said. A
Je-sus
of disgust, drawn out to two syllables to underscore how irrational I could be.

More than anything, more than
anything,
I wanted my life to stay as it was. I loved my life. I loved Thomas and our daughters. I loved my house. I loved that house so much. Sometimes, you’d put up with almost anything if it meant not losing that brick pathway you’d planted with perennials. It could get confusing. Whether you really did want things to stay as they were, or whether you just didn’t want things to change.

Thomas grabbed his license and a credit card and a few still-wet bills and he stormed out of our bedroom. The storming felt like something you’d see on TV. The boat on his back, K
AILUA
Y
ACHT
C
LUB
, from the last trip we took as a family before the kids got too old for that kind of thing, sailed down the hall in a sitcom huff.

I didn’t follow. I didn’t ask him questions or demand answers. Not right then, anyway. I kept my suspicions to myself, as if I had a plan. That’s the thing about change. Sometimes you think it’s something that happens to you, when actually you’re right there, acting as its naïve yet diligent assistant.

—

Late Sunday afternoon, we dropped Amy off at the airport. I wasn’t used to seeing her hair so short. She looked even lovelier, changed already, with her eyes shining and that enormous backpack on the floor next to her.
Don’t
worry,
Mom
, she’d said.
I’ll be
fine.
I’ll be great!
The group had all just graduated from high school, but the girls still snuck self-conscious glances into reflective surfaces, and the boys still punched the arms of their friends. We’d known a lot of these kids since kindergarten, and they mostly seemed their same selves, only larger. I remember when Sam lost his lunchbox and cried so hard he threw up, and here he was, with those same vulnerable shoulders. Amy looked back at us and gave a last wave, and for a moment it was like my heart had walked off and I was left with a vacant body. For a second, I wasn’t sure what to do. I was at a total loss. Thomas and I stood there together like we were college freshmen just dropped off by their parents and assigned to room together.

We picked up some Thai food and watched a movie Thomas ordered. I had moments where I forgot all about that guilty look he gave me, until the ugly memory butted back in. My head spun, and then the hit of denial kicked in, as helpful and soothing as any sedative. I love denial; I admit it. It’s the best drug—plentiful, and free, besides. Thomas, scooping pad kee mao out of a Styrofoam container, looked like old Thomas.

That night, after we turned out the light, the red digital numbers of the bedside clock stared me down. I tried to ignore it, but of all household objects, bedside clocks are the most insistent, more than beeping refrigerators and door alarms, more than kitchen timers and even blaring radios. It’s the strong silent types that get you.

“Thomas?”

“Mmm.”

“Are you awake?”

“No.”

“If you’re talking, you’re awake.”

“I wasn’t talking.”

“I don’t want you to get mad, but I’ve got to ask you something.”

“Cal, what, it’s almost midnight.”

One of the digital numbers blinked, six to seven, and then stared. Okay, all right! I set my hand on the hill of Thomas’s hip. “Yesterday, when you washed your wallet…You crumpled something up.”

“I don’t remember.” His voice was clear now. It had lost the muffled quality of near sleep.

“I think you do.”

He sat up then. Actually, he didn’t just
sit up
; he rose with a pissed-off tussle of blankets, yanked the quilt to cover him. I could see the outline of his face turned to me in the dark, and I knew by the set of his jaw how upset he was. “Jesus, Cal. Really? Why are you going on about that again? Do you think I’m having some
affair
? It was a
piece
of
paper
.”

Should I have stopped there? Would that have ended it? Well, I couldn’t, because if it were nothing, I’d still be seeing the motionless curve of his body, the hump of him, under the covers. He would not have sat up like this, fuming now. He’d have stayed close to sleep, offering the tired explanation that would finally settle the matter.

“What kind of piece of paper?”

“A business card.”

“Whose?”

“Do you think this is in any way reasonable? You wake me up at midnight to interrogate me about a stupid card from some…I don’t know what his name was, Jarret? Jarret Smith? Some guy who came by the office offering
financial services
. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

He punched his pillow, made his feelings clear through fist and down feathers, and then dropped his head again. I knew he was awake, though. I had that heightened awareness that speaks of possible danger, the feeling you get after there’s been a wrong sound in the house and you wait, just as I was doing then, to see if you might hear it again. After a while, there was the familiar rhythm of his breathing. He’d fallen asleep. But I lay awake for a long time, the glowing red numbers of that clock sending their steadfast message, telling me something I was sure I already knew.

—

The next day, I was finally alone. It was the kind of alone I hadn’t been in a long, long time, with Melissa out on her own and Amy away, and Hugo, my companion and my greatest protector, gone to wherever good dogs go when they die. Denial is never fond of
alone
; it tends to flee then.

The house was eerily quiet. Time loomed before me, too, since I’d recently left my job. I blamed the management change, but, truth be told, I had long ago lost my enthusiasm for photographing kayaks and hiking shoes when I didn’t even kayak or hike. My true feelings about Thomas and that crumpled card had apparently been waiting for this most empty and defenseless moment, because they stormed the gates, and I was trampled. I felt queasy and panicked. I poured a cup of coffee and stared out the kitchen window for a while, waiting for the row of mailboxes and the newly mown lawn to send me some courage. Unless Thomas threw that little ball out the window as he sped down the highway to pick up Amy, it was here somewhere.

And Thomas wasn’t the type to throw anything out a window, even something he might want to hide. He was the law-abiding sort who was burdened by other people’s recklessness—the one who picked up after a neighbor’s dog and who trimmed the overgrown trees that impaired visibility next to the stop sign. He always did more than anyone else, including me, and then said he didn’t mind. He appeared to mind a great deal, though. There was the huff of overwork, the passive–aggressive complaint of various physical maladies brought on by overexertion, the plain old undercurrent of displeasure, and yet, much to my bewilderment and frustration, he continued on this ever-spinning wheel, being the bothered good citizen and burdened husband and father. It seemed simple: Get off the wheel. Still, those simple things—they’re never simple to the poor soul wrestling with them. Think of the energy we spend in our private, raging battles that seem downright ludicrous to everyone else.

I respected that man, more than I can say. Did I mention he was a vegetarian, too? And he always recycled. All that goodness—a lifetime of it—it would get tiring, wouldn’t it? Being such a prince of a man would be exhausting. Honestly, I was exhausted by it. Each was a hallmark of moral superiority in Seattle—the good-neighborliness, the abundant vegetables, the reusable bags; we only needed to open a microbrewery or start using the words
farm-to-table
and we could rise to the ranks of religious leadership in the Emerald City, hit the hip, slick pages of
Seattle
magazine. I never confessed my own lapses in judgment, though: the times I’d forgotten a plastic bag for Hugo on our walks, the containers I didn’t want to rinse and sort, the beef—the fast-food beef, no less—that I devoured. Here, you could maybe get away with eating beef as long as the cow had a good life and you sent him to college beforehand.

Not that Thomas would have cared about these transgressions. He wouldn’t have. He might have edged toward maddening self-sacrifice and a stubborn insistence on being underappreciated, but for the most part, he was also truly generous. I’m not even sure why I couldn’t admit my own imperfections, aside from the fact that a person’s constant goodness can feel like recrimination. You hide your little failings.

I set my cup in the sink. I had to find out what was going on. The house was so quiet that I could hear the upstairs hall clock ticking. I knew deep inside, or maybe not so deep at all, right at the surface, that Thomas had given up the grueling goodness and morality. I knew it because it made sense—it made a lot of things clear, because he hadn’t been himself for a while. Those long runs he’d been doing, for one. He hadn’t run since just after Amy was born, but lately he’d lace up his shoes and put on the kind of loose running shorts people didn’t wear anymore, and he’d be gone for hours.
Gotta watch my heart
, he’d say.
What was Dad, fifty-five?
He’d also turn his back to me in bed after saying good night. You get used to that when you’ve been married awhile, the various meanings of his back. The back that shouted your wrongdoings or that punished with its slightly freckled silence. But this was
more
back. Or, at least, a back that kept its secrets. A back that was a wall.

And I’d hear him wake up in the night. He’d be down in the kitchen. The pantry door would squeak open, and then, next, the cupboard where we keep the glasses. I thought he was depressed. His mother had recently passed away, so of course he would be. His eyes welled up during Amy’s graduation, too, and in all the time I’d known him, I’d seen him cry only once before, at his mother’s funeral. Our friend, Dan Fallon, of Jan and Dan Fallon, told us at a barbecue one night after too much wine that he couldn’t even walk past his daughter’s room without bawling after she, their youngest, had left for college.

We didn’t talk about this, the soundless weight that had moved in, bringing silky jogging shorts and morose stares out sunny windows. We should have, I know. But we didn’t. I made a few tries at it, but it was apparently large enough that we had to step around it. It became a
thing
. You know the ones. The particular, unspoken entities you feel at every curt
good night
or aloof
how was your day
. The thing follows the two of you around to every room and breathes down your neck, but you pretend with some degree of frost and unspoken fury that it’s not there. Sometimes, marriage is just too intimate for intimacy.

I tried the pockets of the jeans Thomas had worn on Saturday, which were upstairs, neatly folded on a shelf in our bedroom closet. Then I opened his underwear drawer and fished around in there, and felt inside the satin pouches of his suit jackets. I looked in the bathroom garbage can, which Thomas had recently emptied, and then headed back down to the kitchen, straight past that ticking clock. I don’t know when it happened, but recently that hallway had begun to slope—the porch off the kitchen, too—and I could feel the unsettling tilt under my feet, a little metaphoric jab. Mike Murphy, from Phinney Contracting, said it was an issue of settling and rot, and that the foundation “needed work.” This kept me awake at night. The house I loved suddenly seemed to have a mind of its own, and I pictured it slipping farther until it sped like a toboggan (pages 30–31 of the REI catalog:
ski equipment–sleds
) down into Carkeek Park ravine. Shaye once had a segment of her roof collapse, back when she was married to crazy ex-husband number one, and she still slept in the house that night. I could never do that. As it was, the fact that our house had begun to shift felt like a betrayal. After all I’d given it over the years.

The most obvious places to look for that horrible business card awaited. Of course, I didn’t want to actually find it. Outside, summer was starting and the sky was wrongly blue, and I watched the innocent petal of a magnolia blossom drift to the ground like a line in a poem. I turned my back to the window and leaned against the dishwasher and gave a disappointed look to the canisters of flour and sugar, to the cup of pencils next to the pad of paper where we wrote the grocery list, all that orderliness that had not come through for me. I shouldn’t even tell what I did next, but I will. I called for Hugo. I called out his name in the high-pitched voice that usually made him come running. I know it sounds nuts, and I didn’t expect anything from it, of course. He wasn’t going to come trotting around the corner, hoping for a treat. His ghost wouldn’t appear holding his orange ball in his mouth. That boy—I just missed him so much, my chest ached. He’d have never let anything happen to me if he could help it, and every FedEx man around knew it. He would have even protected me from this, if it were in his power.