The Secrets She Keeps (29 page)

“Boys,” she says.

“Boys,” Nash agrees. Honestly, she doesn’t know much about them. There’s Jack, of course, and then there was Vincent Henry, from school. They went to a dance once, and he told her the entire plot of a film he’d seen, as sweat poured from his underarms. These are her two experiences, and…well, she couldn’t exactly come to any conclusions.

Lilly is on the bed, where, earlier, Nash had set down a tray. There is tea and toast and the dewy curve of a melon slice. Nash wrapped the silverware in a napkin, and she found a shot glass in her mother’s cupboard, in which she set a white flower, a desert evening primrose, that she cut near the acacia.

Lilly is wearing a yellow smock dress with white dots, and her hair is back again in a pearl clip. Her feet are bare, and one leg is tucked underneath her. She raises the last triangle of buttered toast and bites. “After they go, we’ll have the place to ourselves,” she says. “We should raid Hadley’s candy dish.”

“The gold ones are caramels,” Nash says. She’d never do such a thing but plays along. Hadley keeps a saucer of foil-wrapped confections by her typewriter. She says it helps tempt the muse.

Lilly lifts her eyebrows with delight, as if she and Nash are in on something together. “Caramels are my favorites. We should do it.”

Under the Volcano
is open on the bed, set up like a tent to hold Lilly’s place. Nash taps the book. “Do you like it?”

“Honestly, it bores me to tears. I can’t finish.” Lilly has dispensed with all manners. She’s picked up the melon and is eating it straight off the rind.

Nash laughs. She’s happy. She’s so happy that it takes her by surprise. In spite of Stuart Marcel, those horses she saw, Gloria and their mother off somewhere—it’s just her and Lilly, talking like girls, like real sisters. “I couldn’t finish it, either,” Nash admits.

“I am so glad you said that! Stuart gave it to me. Do you think
he
read it? Of course not! He can barely read the Sunday comics.”

“Really?”

“His lips move!”

“That’s awful!”

“And slowly, too. How can a person be so afraid of a man who can’t even read
Blondie
?”

They are snickering, but this quiets them both. This: the word
afraid.
Danny heard from Ella Broderick at the casino that Stuart Marcel was still in town, staying at the Riverside, driving around in that car and asking people what they knew about his wife and a cowboy.

“My father was the same way,” Lilly finally says.

“Slow reader?”

“Mean. I got out of there first chance I could. Changed my name, even. To Lilly Edwards, my mother’s maiden name. Two years later, my father was hit by a train.”

“Oh, my God. That’s awful,” Nash says.

“For the train.”

“What about your mother?”

“She got sick. But she gave me things I still have. She liked to read. She liked to tell stories using all the voices.”

“She was an actress,” Nash says.

“Exactly. Stuart gave me things, too, so many things! But nothing I needed. Jewelry! I gave some to Eve; she’s a true friend. And then I left the rest behind.”

“Good.”

“You should have seen how much jewelry.”

“Wait right here,” Nash says. She dashes to her own room. There’s a pile of books by her bed that’s rapidly becoming a nightstand. She wants to be a good book matchmaker, and she thinks she knows just the one. Something joyful and light, for both Lilly and Beanie. It may not be the best choice, really, but it’s the best she can do in a pinch. The whole pile slides over as she takes the book from the center. She doesn’t even bother setting them right again.

She holds the book out to Lilly. “For you.”
The Egg and I.
“It’s silly,” Nash promises.

“I like silly.”

“You do? Well, you should get rid of this thing, then.” Nash grabs Stuart Marcel’s book and hurls it like a boomerang right out Lilly’s open window.

Lilly bursts out laughing. Then it hits the ground with a smack and they both giggle like mad. “I can’t believe you did that!” Lilly’s eyes are wide and delighted. Nash can’t quite believe she just did that, either, but it feels marvelous.

“Gone, like the jewels,” Nash says.

“The Egg and I,
” Lilly reads. “Like me and Beanie. My little egg.”

“It’s about a newly married woman who follows her husband to the Seattle wilderness to start a chicken farm. You will laugh so hard, your stomach will ache.”

“Oh, dear, I don’t know how much more Beanie can take. He’s going to get seasick.”

Nash loves this thought—that inside Lilly, Beanie rides the watery swells of laughter.

“You’ll hate the husband.” Nash has almost forgotten this part.

Lilly turns her dark brows down in a scowl. “If you say so, I already do.”

“But don’t worry,” Nash says. “It has a happy ending.”

“She leaves him?”

Nash clamps her lips shut, lifts her chin as if she’ll never tell.

“Those are such beautiful words, aren’t they? Happy ending?” Lilly says.

They are. They so are. But after all she’s seen, Nash doesn’t know if she believes in those particular words. She believes in something more intricate and thorny, she thinks then. What she believes is that the story goes on.

—

Nash’s trousers are rolled to the knee, and she sits on a large, flat stone on the bank of Washoe Lake. She dangles her feet in. She’d like nothing more than to take off her clothes and jump in, same as Lilly and Jack had done that night in the pool, but she’d never do that. She wishes she could, but there are just some things we’ll never be and never do no matter how much we wish.

It is cool by the lake. The sun dapples the water through the leaves of the trees. Nash watches the light prance and speckle. Silence is her favorite sound, she thinks. She feels a blessed moment of peace. Lilly is at the house, where she belongs, under the watch of Cook, and the ladies right now will be nearing Treetop Ridge, where they will turn and set out for home.

She could almost sleep, and she shuts her eyes, loops her arms around her knees. It’s not sleep but that sweet, contemplative place of wakeful rest, where thoughts drift to dreams. The whistle startles her. It’s not a shrill whistle, the kind that Cliff might make when he calls to Danny, but a playful one. A whistle pretending to be birdsong.

“What are you doing here?” Nash asks.

“I can’t stay cooped up all day. I’ll go mad.”

Lilly shouldn’t have walked all the way out here, let alone by herself. There was that bleeding, and that private investigator, and the cuckolded Stuart Marcel. “I shouldn’t have left you.”

“Nonsense,” Lilly says. “I brought you something.”

She brings her hands around from behind her back. She has a book. It’s an old one, red leather, with gold writing on the cover, the title set inside a gilt square.
Sense and Sensibility
. “This is for
you,
” she says. “It’s one of my favorites.”

Nash is speechless. She has never gotten something like this from one of the women before, a gift that gives her the thing she loves best. She will keep this book forever to remember Lilly by, she thinks, and this is true. She’ll do just that.

“Wait ’til you meet them. The Dashwood sisters,” Lilly says. She wiggles her eyebrows. It’s a promise of romance and intrigue.

“I’ll give it back in perfect condition.”

“Oh, no. A good book should be well loved, not pristine. Keep it as long as you need it.”

Nash knows what it means to give your favorite books—it’s like handing over a part of yourself and asking the person to understand it, maybe even treasure it. She holds the book close to her chest. “Thank you,” she says.

“Don’t you wish you could live inside a book sometimes?”

“All the time.”

“I’d live in this one.”

“Does it have a happy ending?”

“Very.” Lilly slips off her flat shoes and steps toward the bank of the lake, where small rocks lead to the water.

“Be careful,” Nash says.

Lilly reaches out her hand. Nash sets the book down and takes it, providing the balance. Lilly steps in. “Ahh,” she says. “I wish I grew up here. I could be you right now.” She bends her big belly forward, splashes her face and neck. Nash holds her fingertips, keeping her steady on the rocks. Lilly stands straight. She moves Nash’s hand to Beanie. She unfolds Nash’s fingers so that they lay flat.

“Feel what a clown he is,” Lilly says. “A swimming baby.”

Something rounded orbits under Nash’s hand. It is hard, with the curve of an elbow or a heel. It juts out and rolls. Nash sets her other hand there, too. Her heart fills. She feels so much. For Lilly, and for that tumbling baby, for herself, even, and for the way hopeful things keep happening, no matter what. A yearning overtakes her, though for what exactly she couldn’t say. With her hands on Lilly like that, on Beanie, a life at its most elemental, she simply
wants
. She wants so much. Passion, flesh, beating hearts, pain, beauty, love, everything under her hands, she wants it all. She and Lilly stand in the water like that, as the hem of Lilly’s dress soaks.

—

That evening, Ellen walks around with pretend bowlegs and complains that every part of her aches. But Veronica and Hadley have a surprise—a certificate they’ve made on one of Hadley’s pieces of parchment paper, awarding Ellen the Riding Prowess Prize. They bestow it upon her during cocktails, along with a jeweled pin in the shape of a galloping horse that Veronica bought in town. Ellen beams and even gets misty-eyed. Veronica gives her a hug and actually lifts her a half inch off the ground while Hadley shouts,
All for one, and one for all!
and pops a bottle of champagne, lifting the cork with an expert thumb.

Later that night, the house is quiet again, except for Boo’s occasional exhale and the ticking of the clock. Nash can’t sleep. When she closes her eyes, she sees those horses in that trailer again. Every time she closes them, there they are. This time, though, the image clicks between other pictures—men in airplanes, Jack and Lilly in the pool, a dying mother, a champagne cork flying. She feels too much life, and not nearly enough of it her own. The restlessness burns through her body, tangles the sheets. She gets out of bed and tosses on her clothes and sets her ear against Lilly’s door. Yes, she hears the quiet in-and-out of her breaths, and so Nash takes the stairs oh-so-quietly and goes outside. She is hit with the cool slap of night air and the sharp smell of sage and wet earth. Someone has set
Under the Volcano
on the porch swing, which rocks gently in a gust of wind. It is raining.

She runs, because it is coming down, a rare summer downpour. Now she is thinking of her hands on Lilly’s round stomach, and that longing overtakes her again, a deep, confused longing, because she wishes so badly to be Lilly that she’d even take Lilly’s terrible history, the father, that train, the terrible husband, and the jewels. She wants to be a woman who is desired, a woman who needs a lover to save her, who has frail wrists and a tortured past, and, dear God, yes, with a being moving inside her. She wants so many things she never wanted before.

She needs to talk to Jack. She’s been so angry with him, but she can only feel the words
need
,
talk
. She has to tell him about what she saw in that trailer, because he’ll help her understand it. This is why she’s here at this hour; this is what she tells herself, even if she feels the half-truth of it like knuckles rapping on a door.

The path is already getting muddy. She hopes Hadley will not need the bathroom on this night. Jack’s light is still on. She knocks. She’s at his cabin for the second time in only a few days. Her life is so different with Alice gone. It’s her own, for once; that’s the thing. It may be exactly what the women who come here feel.

“Nash?”

He looks tired, and his face has grown dark bristles since the morning. But it’s a striking, familiar face. “I’m sorry,” she says.

“What’s the matter?”

“I have to talk to you.”

“What?”

“I saw something. Something horrible. When I was in town.”

“What? Come in. You’re soaked.”

There is a towel by the basin, and when she sits at the edge of the bed, he stands over her and dries her hair. It is such a gentle, caring gesture that Nash feels like she could weep. “Tell me,” he says.

No matter how angry he’s made her, he’s still Jack, their Jack, the man who jokes around to horses as if they can joke back, the man who can trade his natural firm grip for a tender one, as he does with Zorro, as he does with her right now. “I saw some mustangs, in a trailer in Reno. It was horrible, Jack.” She lets it out, all the images she’s been holding in. There’s been so much she’s been holding back. “They were mangled, and there was blood everywhere….I saw bare bone. Their skin…Jack, it was shredded.”

“It’s the horse runners. The mustangers. They’ve been running them down with planes.”

“There was a colt…”

“They sell them to the stockyards.”

“The blood was dripping from the back, a river of it, into the gutter.” She can barely speak. She remembers the flow of that blood, and the young animal’s half-dead eyes, and the way the fences they’d been run into had cut and gashed their hides. She can’t help herself. The sorrow of it, no, the disbelief—her throat constricts. Her eyes fill.

“Oh, girl,” he said. “Oh, don’t cry.”

“How could they?”

His arms are around her.

“I don’t understand this, Jack. How?”

She smells the alcohol coming off him. She sees a bottle on the table and the empty glass. She shouldn’t like that smell, but it draws her, she wants it, wants
in
it. It speaks of the dark and unapproachable layers of him. “You said…” She is crying hard now, into his shirt, into his dusky smell.

“What? I said what?”

“You said it would change me when I saw them. I’m afraid it’s changed me.”

“No, no,” he says. “No.” He strokes the back of her head. “When you see them alive and running. The way they’re supposed to be. That’s what I meant. That’s all.”