The Secrets She Keeps (20 page)

Now Jack emerges from the water behind her. Nash cannot avert her eyes from the muscles in his chest, which fall in ridges down his abdomen to his narrow hips and dangling penis. Two white towels are folded on the end of one chair, but they don’t reach for them yet. No. Instead, there is one moment where they both stand naked at the pool’s edge, a moment where everything is revealed. To Nash, certainly, right here, right now. And in time to other people, as well. People who will consider this private moment in the Tamarosa moonlight their business. Most definitely, this is their business.

There’s the flash. White light illuminates the scene briefly, making Nash blink in the sudden brightness. At first, Nash is sure this is lightning. But it’s soundless. The whole night is soundless except for the settling water of the pool, until Lilly Marcel shrieks and Jack swears loudly and grabs a towel and takes off running. That photographer is faster than Jack is, though. No wonder—finally he’s got something that will make Stuart Marcel happy, or full of rage, which was maybe the same thing to him. Proof of Lilly’s betrayal would give him delicious reason to do what he wanted to do anyway—destroy a few people using his fists and his power.

Now there are lots of sounds. Footsteps, people running, Nash’s own voice in the night. Her furious, scared voice, yelling. The photographer’s car starting up. Hadley’s cabin door slamming behind her as she calls, “Is everything all right?”

Mrs. Morris Shumley would complain in the morning that she couldn’t sleep one wink, what with all the racket.

I’m not sure who was happier to see the delivery truck that morning, Tex or me. The sun had barely come up. The light was yellow orange, making the hills yellow orange and the trees and the shrubs yellow orange, too. It was that kind of sweet, magic morning glow you wanted to sip from a cup to start the day.

It was a dangerous thing to do, but after I opened the package, I crept outside, still wearing my nightgown, the one Thomas had given me for my last birthday. I ran and hid behind that big, old shaggy eucalyptus tree. I snapped my first image of Tamarosa—
flash
—a buffalo grazing poolside.

He was a very photogenic buffalo and apparently easygoing about having his picture taken. It felt good, having my camera in my hands again. How long had it been since a camera felt good? No idea. Creativity—an elusive beast anyway, seen only in the wild—had taken off a long time ago. A switch had turned off, the lights had dimmed, the curtains closed, and I only viewed things in the practical way anyone does. A tree was a tree, and rain on windows was just rain on windows, and snow was for skis, sold on pages six to eleven in the winter catalog. For a good long time, I didn’t see a buffalo as art, when as a young woman I used to see everything as art. That girl, a lost version of me, didn’t have the necessary passion and wherewithal to make a life as an artist, but she did have the simpler, daily pleasure of inspiration. Still, something wore even that down—life, kids, the practicality of pictures of backpacks and packets of freeze-dried foods. Creativity dies, sure as love does, when not handled with tenderness and respect and sometimes firmness.

I ran like hell back to the house. I was excited. I felt giddy, like a child who’d just galloped down a grassy hill. I didn’t end up mauled for the sake of art, either, and that victory of survival, the way parts of us endured after all, it called for a celebration of coffee and donuts with Nash and Shaye, who was heading inside, carrying a large pink box. You had to love a woman who loved food.

I had my hand on the screen door when I saw a large package sticking up from one of the trash cans by the side of the house. I walked back down the porch steps to investigate. The return address was protected with such a sizeable amount of tape, I was sure I could tell the personality type of the sender—proprietary and paranoid. The name was clear, though.
Leonard Petit, Beverly Hills
. The box was still full. The black-and-white photos—men with slicked-back hair, looking dapper, women gazing off toward the heavens, elegant actors and actresses in drawing rooms and on balconies—had now been discarded in a messy heap. Poor Leonard Petit would be destroyed if he saw this.

I let the screen door slam behind me. I heard Nash and Shaye chatting in the kitchen. I smelled coffee, that warm rise of morning joy. “Nash!” I called.

“No need to shout,” she shouted.

It all seemed so innocent, and Nash looked strangely well sitting with Shaye at that table with the checked cloth.

“I’m keeping you girls around, after all,” Nash said. She eyed that rectangle of pink cardboard as if it were a chest with a million dollars inside. “I haven’t eaten this well since we let the cook go.”

“You eat like a bird,” Shaye said, as she lifted a square of sticky tissue paper off the top of a maple bar.

“I saw that box out there in the garbage, Nash. The one you just got. The one full of old Hollywood photos.”

“Mmm-hmm?” Her mouth was full, cheeks fat as a baby’s.

“You’re throwing all that away after you ordered it? The entire thing?”

She took a swallow of coffee. “I got what I needed.”

“The whole box is in the trash?” Shaye asked.

“I can spend my hard-earned money any way I please. That’s why it’s called
my
hard-earned money.”

“This is the kind of thing that makes us worry,” I said.

“Stop it. You’re spoiling the morning. Eat a donut. It’ll change your outlook.”

I didn’t know what to make of any of it. She was either crazy or quite sane, which was much the way I felt about myself right then. We skipped the plates and ate off napkins, dropping bits of donut to Tex, who couldn’t believe the way his luck had turned. He sat so still to keep the goodness coming that he nearly looked taxidermied. I remembered Hugo’s own version of this determined goodness, the way he’d use his soulful eyes to his advantage. My heart cracked whenever I thought of those eyes and the way I missed them.

“Of course,” Shaye said. “That’s it! Your Jack. He was a Hollywood film star.”

Nash snorted.

“No?”

“He was a cowboy. One of our wranglers. Film star,” she scoffed. “I was just reminiscing about the golden age of Hollywood.”

The slurp of coffee on her part was unnecessary. No senile person would be that conniving and take such pleasure from it, too.

“Which reminds me. I forgot to ask you about using your computer,” Shaye said. She had frosting on her cheek.

“Ha. I don’t think so.”

“No, seriously. My laptop is useless. I can’t sign on here, and I’ve got to answer mail. And I want to write to Eric. I’ve got some things to say to him.”

“So write a letter.”

“Come on, Nash. Me, too,” I said. “Amy sent me all these pictures, and they’re too small to see on my phone.”

“Hack in to Harris’s network. Look for
Horndog.
”

Shaye cringed. “Oh, that’s scary.”

“Password,
Stallion.
”

“Jesus. I’ll never look him in the eyes again,” I said.

“Wait,” Shaye said. “You know about networks? I don’t even know about networks.”

“What do you think, I live in the dark ages?”

“Shaye, did you eat the chocolate sprinkle?” I asked.

“I buy the chocolate sprinkle, I eat the chocolate sprinkle. Nash, come
on
.”

“I know what you people want. You want to snoop.”

Shaye looked at me and shrugged. I shrugged back.

“We could take you to see him,” I said.

“Who?” Nash licked maple icing from one old finger.

“Jack!” I said.

“What makes you think I want to see Jack?” she said.

“Nash, really,” Shaye said. “You’re telling us it’s some sort of coincidence you get a letter out of the blue from that guy? All that stuff in your room, it isn’t about trying to find him? And now that you have, you can get on with the reunion.”

“A reunion? I told you girls. I’m working on the family tree. To leave behind after I’m dead.”

“Family tree? You said it was about running the ranch,” I said.

“You’re trying to tell us he just writes you a letter out of nowhere?” Shaye narrowed her eyes.

“He didn’t write me a letter out of nowhere. I wrote to him first. At the last address I had. I didn’t know whether he was even alive or not. I wanted to share some news I recently got. About a person we once knew.”

“Who?” I said.

“Just a joint acquaintance. Am I on trial here?”

“Sounds like an excuse to get reacquainted, to me,” Shaye said. “I wrote Jay a letter like that once, telling him our old math teacher died, just to see if we could start things up again.”

“You did?” I asked. “Ha-ha. You loved those vests. All these years later, still thinking about that three-piece.”

Shaye ignored me. “It’ll be a road trip to see our friend Jack! We could help you, Nash, if you’d stop being so stubborn.”

“You’re fixing my fence; that’s all the help I need. You’re bringing me food. You’re keeping a nice elderly lady company.”

“Uh-huh,” Shaye said.

“Who says I’m being stubborn? Family tree, the ranch—what difference does it make? It isn’t your business.”

It didn’t escape my notice that I had said the same thing to Melissa. But this was what happened, wasn’t it? The generations just kept on and on, figuring it all out from the start, even if it had been figured out a hundred times before—swapping roles, playing the younger, playing the older, over and again as the sun went up and the sun went down.

“Secrets make you want to find out secrets,” Shaye said.

Nash didn’t even bother to look at us. I waited for another weak justification, or an outright denial. But she gave us neither.

“Too bad,” she said.

—

I found four new boxes of nails in a paper bag in the storage shed with a receipt from early 2004, and with the energy and determination brought on by fat, sugar, and the lingering kind words from a man I barely knew, I worked outside on that endless fence. The year 2004 seemed like yesterday. With the sun beating on the back of my tank top, I thought about what Thomas had said about the woman at work. I thought about my own body, if I could ever let another man see it. I thought about all of the things I owned, too, the drawers and cupboards full of serving trays and tiny forks for appetizers and miniature plastic corns with spikes to stick in the ends of cobs. There were candleholders that looked like turkeys, and some long-dead relative’s embroidered pillowcases; there were yellowing paperback bestsellers and datebooks from 1998. I felt the weight of it all. I wondered how many garbage bags it would take to haul it all out to the curb.

I wiped sweat from my face with the bottom of my shirt. Things could end, whether your body was in any shape for it or not. Things could end, no matter how many platters you had.

Not long ago, Thomas and I were in bed together. The smooth white skin of his back was under my hands and he was breathing heavy in my ear, and it was in out, in out, and he was saying slightly pornographic things in my ear, and I’d never even told him after all these years that I didn’t like it when he said slightly pornographic things in my ear. I found it distracting and even disingenuous, to be honest. Can you imagine never admitting a truth like that to the person who saw you give birth and would likely see you die? But I hadn’t. More important, the TV was on. A Swiffer commercial was playing. A woman expounded the virtues of throwaway pads and a swivel arm. His breathing quickened while dog hair under a sofa was removed with ease. Daily life had left us vulnerable; that was clear. Daily life snatched things from a couple. Mattress sales stole intrigue; shirts ruined by that damn spot of bleach grabbed desire and wrung its scrawny neck.

The word
husband
, the word
wife
—on a summer day when a ring slipped on a finger, those words shimmered with promise. But they evolved; they turned and changed and turned again, adding facets with each rotation. Sometimes, those words were contentment itself; sometimes, frustration beyond imagining. You spoke them with sarcasm and wrote them on a valentine; you relaxed in those words and were chained to those words and cherished those words. Too, the words could become an item on a list, a thing that must be done, another burdensome object that needed dusting.

Yet that was the beauty of it, wasn’t it? The whole complicated mess of two lives, side by side. Love was elusive
and
stubborn. It could hang in there even when you hated his guts. Passion could sometimes feel like a false compliment, but there were the other nights Thomas and I had. The honest and connected ones, which were as close to forever as you got. Neither of us should forget those.

Of course, those thoughts and that heat made the fence a grand impossibility. There was just too much of it. My muscles hurt already, and I was getting a blister where palm met fingers. I really wasn’t that great with a hammer, in spite of what Kit Covey had said. Nash would die soon, and the place would be sold, and none of my efforts would matter anyway. But a person did what a person could do against all lost causes.