The Secrets She Keeps (25 page)

“I hate to tell you, but redemption is a lousy reason to stay.”

“Believe me, I’ve stayed before for way worse reasons. That one sounds pretty good.”

I could hear Nash in the kitchen, her voice sounding as high-pitched and effortful as a chain saw cutting through stubborn wood. Both of us were shrill, with matched anxiety ratcheting up. I don’t know what I expected. Of course Shaye and I couldn’t remain at the ranch forever, cradled by the past, held in our limbo by the force of days gone by. “If you go home, I think I have to go home.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Shaye said. “You can stay however long you want. But I can’t justify it anymore. We’re going to have to come back, too, when her health gets worse. I mean, she’s got Harris. She’s not acting right, but she doesn’t seem like a danger to herself. We probably don’t need to do anything yet.”

“She bought a car she can’t drive! She rode a tractor all the way into town!”

I was being selfish, and I was fully aware of that. I just didn’t want Shaye to go. I was the one who walked her to school on her first day, who gave her my lunch when hers got stolen, and who helped her pick a dress for a dance I didn’t even go to. She stayed on our couch after her first divorce, with Joshie and Emma on blow-up mattresses in the girls’ rooms. But I needed her now.

“I feel like we have unfinished business here,” I said. It was the best I could do.

“I’m not ready to go home, either. But business is always unfinished, Cal.”

I sat silent, but she was right. Our real lives waited. It was time to face Thomas.

“What is that noise?” Shaye said.

“What noise?” It was hard to hear much of anything over the roiling of my own confusion.

“Sounds like rustling.”

“Maybe it’s the mustangs again.”

“Man, I hope not. Those things are terrifying. Have you noticed how dark it is out here? Darker than regular dark. It makes me nervous.”

“You’re just feeling weird after that earthquake. Pull the curtains,” I said.

“She always leaves them open! Why does she do that? It gives me the creeps. I feel like someone’s staring in.”

“Then close them. She won’t mind.”

Shaye wedged herself behind the piano, reached up to yank the drapes shut. And then she screamed. A glass-shard, high-altitude cry of fear that caused Tex to fly to his feet and bark like mad.

“Shaye!” I was on my feet, too. Whatever it was, I wanted the nearest exit.

Nash had ditched our mother on the phone and was now in the living room, looking fierce enough to tackle an intruder. “Is everyone all right?”

Shaye’s hand was to her chest. “Oh, my God.” Her voice quavered.

“Tex,
shush
!” He was whining with urgency, his nose to the glass. I tucked him under my arm. Someone had to handle this. I was afraid to look out that window, but I knew I had to. When I did, I saw two green glowing eyes looking right into mine, and I screamed, too.

“Girls!” Nash said. “Stop! My goodness! That’s just Rob!”

Who knew the buffalo had a name? “Rob?”

“He’s completely harmless. Shoo, Rob,” she yelled. She clapped her hands and waved her arms. “He’s just a busybody, same as the two of you.”

Shaye cowered in a corner of the room. She clutched a pillow from the couch, proving that we McBride sisters both feared the wrong things and always looked to useless places for protection. “Jesus, he almost gave me a heart attack! Get him away from here.”

“Go on, Rob,” Nash yelled.

“Git, Rob,” I said. I pounded on the glass, but that window was even closer than I wanted to be to the creature. “We don’t want you here.”

He turned, large and slow, and then ambled away. That old buffalo seemed as dejected as big Tommy DelFonso in the second grade, when April Barker and I told him he couldn’t play with us.

Nash sighed and rubbed her temple with her fingertips. She didn’t look very well. Her skin seemed the wrong color, the yellow of a healing bruise. “Are you all right, Nash?” I asked.

“I’m just exhausted. I think I might go lie down.”

“Everything okay with Gloria?” Shaye said.

“She’s trying to talk me into a condo in California.”

Nash made her way down the hall and up the stairs oh so slowly, holding that bannister with a tight grip.

“Dinner will be ready soon,” Shaye called after her. “Will you join us, or should I bring you a plate?”

“I need a little rest. I’ll eat later.”

In the kitchen, Shaye shut the curtains. She pulled out that pot roast with an oven mitt that had seen better days. We sat at the large wood table, just Shaye and me, with enough food to feed several ranch hands and divorcées. The pot roast was delicious, and handsome enough to make the cover of any
Good Housekeeping
magazine from the childhood we never had.

“Neapolitan ice cream for dessert,” she said. “Dibs on the chocolate.”

I’d eaten so much, I could barely move. I had started to clear the dishes when Nash appeared in the doorway. She held the frame with one hand. In the other, she held a blood-soaked towel.

“Something’s wrong,” she said.

“Something’s wrong,” Hadley says.

Nash stops stroking Bluebell’s nose, and although Bluebell nudges her hand so she’ll start again, Nash jumps down from the ring fence, where she’s been waiting for Mrs. Shumley. The old ox probably can’t get her stockings over her fat legs, and now they’re going to be late for her appointment with Fred Cox, the Reno lawyer Nash dislikes the most. He has yellow teeth and calls her “sweetheart.” Every time Nash has been there, half of a pastrami sandwich sits on his desk on a square of waxed paper, making the room smell like tired meat and mustard.

“Plumbing problems again?” This is always a safe guess when something is amiss. Bluebell gives up on the idea of more nuzzling and begins to trot. She’s in a good mood, unusually relaxed and happy. Her tail bounces as she prances in a circle, her feet
clip-clopping.

“It’s Lilly.”

There’s a slam in Nash’s chest. “What’s happened?”

“We need to call a doctor. There’s been a little…” Hadley is reluctant to say it. The word is indelicate. “Bleeding.”

“Oh, no,” Nash says. “That fall?” It’s been days since Stuart Marcel was at the ranch, but this is her first thought.

“No, no. Not likely from that, not now. I don’t think this is even any cause for alarm, but we best be sure.”

Nash is already jogging ahead. Hadley tries to keep up with her, urging her to slow down, suggesting that this is likely nothing, but this is no time to take chances. Nash races up the porch steps and into the kitchen. She calls Doc Henry Bolger, who promises he will be on his way after he is finished with Mrs. May Sortie over at Flying W, who’s having palpitations. Dr. Bolger has been at the ranch many times, when Gloria was sure her appendix had burst after a particularly spicy meal and when Mrs. Lee Gilvey broke her leg after falling from old Stormy. They saw him frequently when Gina Francesca was a guest, since she was perpetually injured or dying for attention. But Alice has always been there during a medical emergency.

Alice will not be there every time Nash needs her, she reminds herself. Alice is there every time Gloria does, but Nash does not want to be Gloria. Gloria dreams of men who lean down to cup a hand around hers when lighting her cigarettes, men who shout out compliments across a busy city street. Gloria thinks that sucking the alcohol from the maraschino cherry in her drink and checking her reflection in her compact is bigger than this, bigger than acting as a desert midwife, bringing women from one life to another.

“I’m sure it’s just…I don’t know,” Hadley confesses, as they now hurry toward the cabins. “What would I know about having a baby.”

The poolside is empty. The door to Avalon is open. Nash can hear the clatter of voices before they reach the steps. Veronica is in there already, and Ellen, too.

“Ellen’s arrived,” Veronica announces when they walk in.

“Doc Bolger is coming,” Nash says.

“Ellen says this isn’t unusual in the later weeks.”

“She should just rest a little with her legs up.” Ellen has finally found her area of expertise. Her chin is raised, and her voice is clipped with authority. She pats Lilly’s suitcase, which has been covered in towels and is now under Lilly’s knees.

“Everything seems fine,” Lilly says. “And Beanie is turning circles like an Olympic gymnast.” Her hands are folded sweetly above the covers. She wears a lilac satin nightgown. Right there—those are the delicate, feminine things that Jack wants, things fragile enough to protect. With Nash’s strong shoulders and stubborn head, her own capability—lilac satin pajamas would seem ludicrous on her.

“It’s not uncommon for this to happen when there’s been…a little too much…” Ellen’s hands are suddenly busy, loose in the air around her as she searches for the right word. “Excitement.”

Veronica snickers.

“Things sometimes…” Ellen tidies up the nightstand, arranging the water glass and the box of Kleenex. She makes the cloth Little Lulu doll sit upright again against the wall. “Become more…delicate. In the later weeks. Womanly…parts.”

Nash has no idea what becomes more delicate and how, but she knows by the look on Veronica’s face that this has to do with Jack and sex and Lilly’s round, ripe body. She’s upset all over again. First there was that swim and those pictures, and now this. How could they take such risks with the baby? She can’t imagine anything like what they’re suggesting while Beanie is right there, practically watching.

“Sometimes there’s just too much said,” Lilly says. She sets her hand on Nash’s arm. The gesture asks forgiveness. Lilly is as pretty as a note of music, with her eyes especially vivid against the hue of that satin nightgown, and her cheeks flushed pink under the sheet Ellen has insisted she be tucked under even in this heat. Lilly’s softness and that curved lump of her—it does Nash right in. Lilly is too lovely to be mad at. Nash’s anger collapses in on itself, like a poorly made cake, and relief takes its place. If Lilly and Beanie are all right, as Ellen says, that’s all that matters.

“Too much unsaid, I think,” Hadley says. “It’s positively Victorian.”

“You’re such a modern woman,” Veronica teases. Thanks to Ellen’s expert prognosis, they’re all feeling it—the giddiness that comes after a false alarm.

“Don’t get wise with me, sweetie,” Hadley says.

“I am going to spank the both of you right here in public if you keep up this bickering,” Ellen says.

“Please,” Veronica says, winking.

When Dr. Bolger comes, they all leave and gather by the side of the pool, waiting for him to finish with Lilly. Nash should make sure that Danny got the message she left with Cook about driving Mrs. Shumley to Reno, but there’s no way she’ll chance missing the doctor.

Veronica pulls several deck chairs together, and they scrape against the cement in a way that makes Hadley’s palms fly to her ears. Ellen sits down on one and sighs, as if she’s had a hard day’s work. Hadley slips off her shoes and rolls up the cuffs of her trousers to her knees. She sits at the edge of the pool and puts her feet in. “I can’t stand the sight of blood,” she says. She swirls one foot in a circle.

“Weren’t you a nurse before the whole writing thing?” Veronica asks.

“A nurse! I could never be a nurse.”

“During the war.”

“I was wife to a creative genius during the war. That was my contribution.”

“You’re thinking of Mrs. Loughton. She left just after you and Hadley came,” Nash says. Veronica is remembering the story Mrs. Loughton told, of being in the Philippines and hiding under the surgery bench when a bomb dropped. Mrs. Loughton had made the whistling noise of the bomb with her teeth, but Veronica had already had a couple of mules by then.

“Well, I guess I was a nurse of sorts,” Hadley says.

Nash listens to the
shlump-ump
of the pool-filter door opening and closing.

They wait for Hadley to say more, but Nash doesn’t expect her to. Hadley is curiously protective of the great Joseph Bernal, even if Nash has heard her occasionally say that he stole her best lines.

But then she does say more. “Every day, when he’d just lie in bed, I was a nurse. I’d coax him up. I’d feed him soup. I bandaged his wrists myself when he tried to slice them open with a letter opener.”

Ellen, in the chair next to Nash, covers her mouth with her hand. They are all silent until Veronica finally says, “A letter opener? Was he intent on failing?”

Hadley’s back is still to them. Beside her, her sandals point in opposite directions. She nods, as if it is she and the pool that are having the conversation. “Better believe it,” she says. “He was always intent on failing! Of course, by then I’d hidden all the real knives.”

Ellen lets out the kind of sound that an animal makes when injured. Nash feels the same—as if she’s been suddenly bruised.

“I loved his archness. He was so witty and sharp-tongued! To the point of cruelty sometimes. But cynicism was just ego masking insecurity.”

“Nothing makes a person meaner,” Veronica says.

“I am feeling mighty lucky that all I had was a plain old philanderer,” Ellen says. She doesn’t mean to be funny, but it is somehow perfect and hilarious. They are all laughing. Nash, too, and even Hadley herself. Veronica is chortling so hard, she holds up her hand as if to say,
Stop, no more
, and Hadley has faced them again and her eyes are watering. “Oh, darlings,” she manages to say.