The Secrets She Keeps (26 page)

—

Nash carries Lilly’s suitcase. Veronica has gathered a few loose items, shoes and a cardigan and a book,
Under the Volcano
, which Lilly had on the dresser. This is more proof that Lilly is the sort of woman Nash wishes she was but could never be—Nash tried to read that book but couldn’t manage it.

Ellen decides Little Lulu is coming along, and her tight black curls and red dress flop under Ellen’s arm as they accompany Lilly back to the house. Dr. Bolger has announced that Lilly is fine, that she should just rest a little with her feet up, that this sometimes happens when there’s been too much…excitement. Their shared diagnosis will cause Ellen to be nearly intolerable for the rest of the day.

As she carries that suitcase, Nash’s insides crawl with guilt and failure. Dr. Bolger had made himself clear—how anyone ever allowed a woman in Lilly’s delicate condition to reside in one of the cabins was beyond him. It shouldn’t have mattered how much she insisted. Alice was going to be furious that Nash let her have her way. She watches Lilly, the curved profile that is Beanie. If anything happened to the baby, she would never forgive herself.

Lilly shakes off Ellen, who tries to take her elbow. Instead, she links her fingers with Nash’s; they are cool and thin and soft. It’s another gesture that fells her. Lilly and Beanie—they take her right down. Who could fault Lilly, really, for seeking refuge with Jack? Jack has taken on mad bulls with red murderous eyes, and what a comfort that would be.
She’s one of ours
, he said. Yes. She and Beanie both are, yet neither Nash nor Jack has done the right thing to keep them safe. She made a bad decision about the cabin, but Jack made a much worse and more selfish one.

“If you hadn’t let me have my way, I would have threatened to leave,” Lilly says. Like most people who’ve lived with villains, she can read every expression and guess every thought.

“Nash, I’m a stubborn girl, you know that,” Lilly tries again, teasing with the care and sweetness of friendship.

Of course, it makes Nash smile. The fingers are like a butterfly that drops into your palm and then flutters away. Jack is up ahead. Lilly’s focus changes. Nash can feel the beam of light turn away from her.

“Riding lessons began ten minutes ago. I didn’t know there was a party,” Jack jokes. His tone, the lightness—he is so untroubled that Nash could smack him.

“We all need a little rest today,” Ellen says.

“Too much excitement.” Veronica winks.

“Well, that’s a darn shame. I know how much Jemima was looking forward to taking Miss Ellen for a loop around the ring.” He ambles. He does. As if he hasn’t a care in the world. The word
excitement
works its way under Nash’s skin and prickles there.

Hadley stops. “Uh-oh. Guns from your holsters, ladies.”

It’s that ox, Mrs. Shumley, who rises from her place on the porch swing. She stands with her hands on her ham-hock hips.

Oh, terrific. Nash pulls on Jack’s arm in alarm, holds him back to whisper privately, “Where’s Danny?”

“He tried to find you. The Mrs. refuses to drive alone in the car with him after yesterday. She says he reeked of tobacco. And that three-eyed snake is still waiting for her.”

This is more than Nash can take. She has no idea how her mother does it. The ranch is so much weightier than horses and cowboys and cocktails, and the job just feels too large for her. She wants to go to her room and shut the door, to disappear into the understanding silence and faithful comfort of a book, but Mrs. Shumley’s eyes are nearly bulging from her head. Nash is so angry with Jack that she doesn’t even want to ask, but she can’t help it. “Three-eyed snake?”

“That attorney, Cox. One eye at the back of his head.” Jack grins.

Oh, what that grin could do to her. Yet it leaves her cold right now. It’s odd. Something has shifted. Maybe loyalty. Maybe even love.

“You hurt her,” Nash snaps.

—

“He was chewing tobacco in my company. It was hideous! I smelled it on him. It made me light-headed.”

“It’s probably the altitude. It takes some getting used to.”

Nash keeps her eyes on the road. A rabbit jets across, and Mrs. Shumley gasps. She leans forward from the backseat. Nash can feel Mrs. Shumley’s hot, sour breath on her cheek, and her gloved hands squeak as they grip the leather of the Styleline Deluxe.

“It’s the tobacco. He doesn’t have the decency to smoke a proper cigarette. And those women! Let’s not call them ladies. Barely ever out of trousers!”

“It must be very different for you here, compared to Chicago.”

“How I will ever tell a soul I was in a place like this is beyond me.”

Every single day will be over, Nash tells herself, even ones so hard and terrible. She tries to stay composed. The Mrs. Shumleys are rare. Nash hopes Mr. Shumley has fallen in love with a showgirl, who loves him back madly.

“And don’t think I don’t know what’s going on after hours. That young woman in her condition!”

Mrs. Shumley’s perfume is choking Nash. Her fat face falls, forming two jowls, same as a bloodhound. Danny is one thing. Nash couldn’t care less what Mrs. Shumley thinks about him. He couldn’t care less, either, knowing Danny.

“We respect the privacy of our guests,” Nash says. She speaks with more bite than she intends, but Mrs. Shumley’s words poke at her, a finger jabbing an injury.

“It’s her business that the baby isn’t even her husband’s? The blonde told me. The aging socialite.”

For God’s sake! And can’t Veronica keep her mouth shut? Nash forgets that Veronica is smart. Veronica knows a big, fat gossip when she sees one. A gossip can be very useful.

“You should be more careful about who you allow in, before it becomes a house of ill-repute. A married woman with another man’s child. She ought to be put away.”

Nash has had enough. Her pride blazes, and so does her desire to protect, and it is all much showier and easier to recognize than the quiet envy she will wonder about only later. Jack is right: Nash is naïve. She doesn’t think far enough ahead. She’s still young enough to react to what’s on the surface, trusting whatever feelings arise, not looking above or beneath or beyond them to their impact or even to her own soundless but lurking motivations. She’s the impetuous gambler, putting every chip on red and letting the wheel fly, even if the game is rigged
.

“Stuart Marcel is that baby’s father, and I’ll swear on a Bible to that fact,” Nash snaps, as the stunned Mrs. Shumley finally sits back in her seat and huffs through her nose.

The one who is hurt, the one who hurts—it’s a tangled story, always, and every human being can be small and mean and can do bigger harm than they intend. Nash reminds herself often: We all make mistakes. She has to tell herself this again and again. In acts large or small, with outcomes, too, that are large or small—we step forward with our imperfect choices; we set the timer ticking for sometimes terrible and often inevitable conclusions. How could she have known what a small world it really was when it seemed so very large to her, living her whole life on that ranch?

Still. What she said that day in the car with Mrs. Shumley’s hot breath on her neck—it’s something she will never, her whole life long, forgive herself for.

—

Mrs. Shumley waits until Nash gets out and opens the door for her. Now she’s some kind of chauffeur? Fine. She will wait by the car with her arms folded, same as the chauffeurs at the Riverside Hotel. Mrs. Shumley can make her own way into Mr. Cox’s office. Good luck to her. Better luck, please dear God, to Mr. Shumley. May the showgirl have a headdress of feathers and a leotard of sequins and an undying love for the man. And, most of all, may someone save the poor children of that bitter woman. This is another problem of divorce, as far as Nash can tell. The spouse gets to flee the crazy husband or wife, but the children will be stuck with them for the rest of their unlucky days.

Nash waits and waits. She’s wearing a suit, as they always do for trips to see an attorney, and the suit is hot. Her girdle is hotter still. She unpins her hat. It is boring, standing there like a chauffeur. She strolls down the street until she gets to the Wigwam Café, and then returns. She strolls a bit farther, and each time farther still, like a toddler from its mother. She passes Union Federal Savings and Orchid Florist, then the new Eldorado Club, and Harold’s. She is nearly all the way to the Riverside Hotel when she sees a livestock truck. It’s parked along the street. It’s a strange sight, especially there. It has wood slats and a canvas top and a mean-nosed cab in front. Union Stockyards is written on the side in white curled letters. Something else brings her attention to the truck. There is a fluid dripping and gathering from the back, and a bad smell.

She knows that’s the smell of blood, and yet somehow she can’t help herself. She’s in her nice suit, but she sets her hat and her handbag on the curb and climbs up one large tire and peers in. What she sees there—it’s beyond horror. Nash is not squeamish, not after growing up on a ranch. She has seen foals being born and bad wounds in flesh that has battled wire fence, but this is so far beyond that, she might be sick. Mangled bodies, torn hooves. Hides ragged and in ribbons from bullets. A foal, still alive, his eyes full of fear.

She has heard about the hunters who use airplanes to run the mustangs into pens. There, they shoot them, haul them away, and then sell their bodies to companies that make dog food. She’s also heard of the government bounty hunters, who trap and kill the horses because they think of them as vermin, feral vermin, grazing on land that rightly belongs to cattle. And now she is seeing the evidence with her own eyes. How can this be? These are the very same horses held in high esteem in stories and lore and songs. Locations are named after them—Mustang Ridge and Wild Horse Canyon. How can you viciously destroy something so revered? They say that if you see those mustangs, you will never be the same, and now it’s true that Nash will never be the same.

She hurries away from that truck. She is crushed at the wreckage. Her stomach turns, from what she’s seen and also with a dread that’s becoming insistent. She retrieves her hat and handbag and returns to the white building where the attorney’s office is. Strangely, it is not Mrs. Shumley who appears but Mr. Cox himself. He holds a pocket watch in one hand, looking ever so much like the white rabbit in
Alice in Wonderland.

“Mrs. Shumley will be moving to the Riverside Hotel.” He speaks quickly, obviously in a hurry.
Late, late, for a very important date.
“She find the conditions at Tamarosa unsuitable.” He holds his hands toward the sky as if he is giving up. Nash is grateful for that small act of generosity. “You can tell one of your boys to deliver her things.”

He doesn’t wait for a reply. His shoes
scuff-scuff-scuff
up the stairs. Her mother would have offered Mrs. Shumley the hotel before she’d even asked. Alice didn’t over-tend to the fussy and miserable. She washed her hands of them, for her own sake and for the sake of the other guests. Nash’s mother had always believed that some folks relished their unhappiness, preferring to stay right where bitterness met envy, and she had no patience for those kinds of people. Nash remembers what happened after Mrs. Abigail Coldicott, who found the meals too heavy and the company tawdry, left. Alice had sat on the sofa, reading but not reading a
National Geographic,
flipping through the pages in irritation before tossing it to the pile with the others.
Let her stew in her own juices somewhere else
, she said.

So Nash should perhaps be celebrating on the drive home, being rid of that ox. When she gets back, she should suggest that they all raise their glasses in a toast, to freedom from hypocritical acrimony. But she won’t. This is not the mood riding with her now as she heads back to the ranch, following the banks of the Truckee River out of the city of Reno. There was that trickle of blood from that trailer, and those terrified eyes. There are hunters and the hunted, cruelties both small and large, trickles of guilt, too.

Mrs. Shumley, still in Fred Cox’s office, is already likely brimming with glee, though Nash doesn’t know this yet. In only a few days, the Whittakers will be visiting Reno, and if anyone will be interested to hear the latest about Stuart Marcel and that dreadful ranch, it’s Phyllis. What a delicious little nugget Mrs. Shumley will have to bring when they meet for dinner!

Nash heads down River Road, past the last Chevron. The turn signal
click-click-clicks
. Right then she’s unaware of Mrs. Shumley’s twitch of eagerness, unaware of the Whittakers, unaware of just who knows whom. It’s no wonder, though, that she can’t shake the dark sense that things are going terribly, terribly wrong.

We’d been sitting there for a good hour, waiting for the nurses to roll Nash back into her room. It was her second day in the hospital. The cancer often invaded the walls of blood vessels, we were told, which could cause these kinds of symptoms. All they could do was give us a status report with various scans and make her comfortable. Cells multiplied, expertly tending to their evil business as we fumbled daily life. I was hungry. Shaye was getting cranky. She tossed the
National Geographic
onto the stack of magazines on the green padded bench, after flipping through the pages in irritation. “Same old volcanoes,” she said. “Remember Grandma Shiny? She had piles of these things, going back centuries.”