The Secrets She Keeps (36 page)

In the corral, the mustangs twitched and settled themselves or else continued to bang their huge bodies against the gates in protest. Some looked afraid, just as I’d worried they would, yet some already seemed settled into the fate the day had brought. Mostly I saw their raw, intense energy, and that energy filled me, too. I felt euphoric.

A gloved hand gripped my arm where I stood, and I spun around. Kit was there beside me, and he lifted me off my feet. I could feel his own elation. He spun me around, midair.

And there, right then, was where we might have kissed. I felt the electric possibility of it. I would have put my mouth on his and he would have held me hard, and it would have been a mad and a passionate kiss, a kiss of the sun rising and setting, a kiss with all the frightening risk and glorious rewards of being alive. We would have knocked Kit’s hat to the ground. We would have looked at each other and seen the future.

But that’s not what happened. Something immeasurably more remarkable and important occurred instead. He set me on my feet, and my tricky, secret heart revealed itself, because there I was once again, wishing that my stupid, infuriating Thomas, my own husband, the one I loved, had been beside me to see what I just had. Oh, I was much, much more of a romantic than I ever knew. And that unknown part of me, the fact that it existed at all, well, it filled me with joy. Look at that. I believed in things that lasted.

Around us, around Kit and me, there was the scuff and scrubble of activity, the need for action. I could feel the raw, animal force, the vitality. Kit put his hands on the sides of my face, and our eyes locked. I looked at him for a long moment, and in that moment I gave him everything I was able to give. I could feel him do the same.

“Just this,” he said. “Just for this one second.”

“And I’ll never forget it,” I said.

That morning I’d thought that my story was insignificant, but once again I’d been proven wrong. No life was ever ordinary, and no story of love was, either, not even mine. Whether tragic or commonplace, each attempt at the damn thing, each shot at love and life itself, was brave. Every effort at it was flawed and messy, complicated, oh, yes, occasionally triumphant, often painful, because how else could it be? Look at the mission we were given, look at the stunning, impossible mission—imperfect love in the face of loss. Any sane person with the facts would turn their back on a mission like that. And yet we loved; of course we did. We kept at it; we added our thread to the design. The courage that took—there was nothing ordinary about that.

—

“Hit the gas a little,” I said from the passenger side. “There’s no need to be afraid.”

“Yeah, just because you’re an old lady doesn’t mean you have to drive like one,” Shaye said from the back. She seemed lighter since her visit to the lawyer. A decision could be deadweight lifted. I hadn’t heard the details, only Shaye’s complaint about writing a fat check.

“All right, all right,” Nash said, adjusting her rear end in the seat. She was lighter, too. A revealed secret could also be a deadweight lifted. When I told her about the gather earlier, the well-orchestrated beauty of it, she’d only pressed her eyes closed for a moment before saying,
Get the keys
. Now we’d been on the dirt road leading to the Tamarosa arch for a good hour. After all the lessons regarding brakes and mirrors, we’d progressed only about a hundred feet.

“At this rate it’ll take you six weeks to get to Los Angeles,” I said.

“Step on it,” Shaye said.

This is exactly what Amy said from the backseat when I was teaching Melissa to drive. My most beautiful daughters, my babies. They’d grown up so fast. Every parent heard this warning. People said it frequently enough that it ended up having no meaning whatsoever until one day it did. No matter what happened or hadn’t happened my whole life long, them being in it had made it all worth it.

And then Nash did exactly what Melissa had also done. She gave it too much gas, and we lurched ahead, and the car went hurtling down that road. Shaye squealed in the back and even ducked a little.

“Take it down a notch, Nash.” I tried to keep the alarm out of my voice.

“Whoo-ee!” Nash said.

We flew, hitting the ruts in the road hard enough to make my teeth clatter. “Ease up just a bit,” I said.

“Nash, slow it down,” Shaye cried. Up ahead, Rob, who’d been grazing peacefully by the roadside, made a lumbering run for it. “Apply the brakes, damn it!”

Nash came to a stop. She spun out a little. I swear, I smelled the heat of screaming brake pads and tires. “My, that felt good.”

Shaye was laughing hard back there. “Oh, God, I’m going to wet my pants. You scared the shit out of both me and that buffalo.”

“Who knew he could move that fast,” I said. “How do you know if you’ve had a heart attack?” We were cracking ourselves up.

“Look at that. I haven’t forgotten a thing,” Nash said.

“Turn down the air conditioner,” Shaye said. “It’s like the arctic back here.”

This cracked us up more—who even knows why. Nerves and the relief of being alive. Nash turned off the engine and we sat for a moment.

“Where is Jack, anyway?” I asked. “Did he leave the ranch after what happened?”

“Nah. He stayed for a long while. Then he got a job managing some rich rancher’s property in Montana. Married the daughter, though she’s gone now. He’s still up there.”

“Hey! Second-chance time?” Shaye said.

Nash scoffed. “Jack was always better as an idea.”

“Why didn’t you ever marry Harris? He’s clearly devoted to you,” I asked.

“It goes both ways. You know why? He can love a strong woman, and that’s a rarity. But I like to live alone. I’ve always liked it,” she said.

“You know what else you never told us?” Shaye said. “That director. How’d he end up in the river?”

“Reckless fury,” Nash said. She looked downright smug after just burning rubber.

“I want to know why Grandma Alice had to go rescue our mother,” I said.

“That’s probably when she had that pregnancy scare,” Shaye said.

“What are you talking about? What pregnancy scare?”

“She never told you? Some boy she met at a gas station.”

“She never tells me anything.”

“She tells me entirely too much,” Shaye said.

“Well.”

“She probably just forgot. Like the way she told you twice about her party at Anthony’s Home Port and didn’t tell me at all.”

“I guess everyone has their secrets,” I said.

“I guess everyone has their secrets,” Nash’s niece says, and she is right. Everyone lives just a little more and a little harder than they let on. That was no pregnancy scare Gloria had, but Nash is keeping her mouth shut. Sure, there is squabbling and envy and jabbing between sisters, but sisters don’t tell. Besides, her nieces don’t need to know everything about Gloria and that boy and how ugly abortion was in the old days, and they don’t need to know everything about Stuart Marcel, either. Nor does Harris, even if they share everything else, including the folds and sags of their old, loving bodies.

As far as secrets go, Stuart Marcel and what really happened to him that day—it’s Nash’s last one. Jack’s, too, if what he said in that letter is true.
I never told another living soul
, he wrote.
That day, and a certain night, too, belonged to only us.
Now, though, she’s decided to finally reveal what happened, to one other person: Mr. Michael McKinley, otherwise known as Baby Edward Austen, now of McKinley and James Architects, Los Angeles.

Every person must come full circle to his or her rightful life, Nash knows. Sometimes, you have to make that same trip more than once.

She plays the memory again, of his first few hours: the way she and Ellen take the baby and wash him in the kitchen sink just after the wagon comes from the hospital to pick up Lilly’s body. Doc Bolger holds the infant in his hands as if weighing a pot roast, takes his temperature, and measures his head with a tape. He pronounces him healthy and well. He is small but full-term, farther along than Lilly or her doctor thought, which happens with
placenta previa
, he tells them
.
Nash does not know what the term means, only that it sounds wrongly lyrical, like the Latin name for a flower. The baby is slippery in that warm water, and they wrap him tight in a blanket.

A shocked Cook returns; delayed in Reno while trying to find pastry snails and good veal for croquettes, she’s now shaken and pale, trying to put a meal together that no one wants. Jack and Danny clean up blood in stunned silence, and Veronica stares out the window and smokes a cigarette. Alice will be back by morning, and they will figure out what to do then. The baby will stay with them for now, it’s decided.

“The husband,” Doc Bolger says. “He must be notified. The family.”

“She has no family,” Nash says.

“The husband, then. He has a son. He’s lucky. They could have both died.”

“He’s not the father,” Nash says.

“No?” Doc Bolger says.

Ellen stays silent. Doc Bolger shakes his head, and whether this is meant to convey disapproval of Lilly or of them, it is impossible to tell. “He needs to be notified,” he says again.

The cook, Irma, waits until Doc Bolger leaves. She’s seen plenty of life on the ranch, too. Her eyes are red, from cutting onions, from crying. She grips a kitchen towel in one hand.

“That man, the father,” she says. “He called all morning. She didn’t want to speak to him, so I made excuses. She went outside. Didn’t want to hear the phone anymore.”

“What’d he say?”

“Just that he was calling long distance from Los Angeles, and to get her on the phone, quick.”

“He’s in Los Angeles, at least,” Nash says.

“Not for long, if you ask me.”

—

Hadley returns with an entire shelf’s worth of Vitaflo nursers and Carnation milk and antiseptic baby oil and diapers and pins and jars of food and cans of Heinz strained chicken for babies.

“He won’t need these for quite a while,” Ellen says, as Hadley unpacks more jars of strained peas and peaches and bananas and corn and beans.

“No?” Hadley looks lost.

“Just this.” Ellen brings the milk to the kitchen, where Cook warms it for Edward Austen. This is what Nash names him, anyway. Edward, for the name Lilly chose when she left home, and Austen, for the author of her favorite book. Ellen rubs the bottom of the baby’s pink, ridged feet with her thumb to get him to wake long enough to sip from the bottle. He is more interested in sleeping. It is late, but tiny Edward Austen is the only one who
can
sleep. Nash hears Jack vomit from trauma. Danny gathers the bloody towels and gets rid of them. Even Boo’s eyes are wide open in Nash’s room, where he’s been locked away once more. He’s taking advantage and lies on Nash’s bed, where he’s not supposed to be.

Hadley sits in stunned silence on the couch, and Veronica puts her arm around her. “I’ll never see anything the same way again.” Hadley speaks in a hush. “I swear to God, I won’t.”

Nash joins them. Ellen sets the baby in Nash’s arms and kneels down in front of her. Nash adjusts the blanket around his beautiful, scrunched face. His hair is black like Lilly’s and soft as satin. He is wearing the tiny gown and socks from Lilly’s suitcase, which look huge on him. He smells like deep water. A feeling arises and overtakes her. Nash has never experienced anything like it before. It is love, but larger than love. It is devotion, but larger than devotion. Her whole heart belongs to this small being, with his tiny fingernails that are as translucent as shells. Every piece of her has just been handed over. As far as love goes, well, it’s over for Nash now. This is love.

“I am sorry I ever carried on about Eddie. None of that even matters,” Ellen says.

“I know,” Veronica whispers.

This is all that matters; now and before now and after now, this is the reason—this rosebud mouth, and this smallest, new hand gripping her finger.

That is when the phone rings in the kitchen. It is past midnight. It can be only one person.

“It’s him,” Ellen says.

He knows the truth about the baby, Nash is sure of it. Somehow, he’s found out. It’s the way the phone sounds. A ring can sound like a question, a polite question, even, but this one sounds like a declaration of intent.

“Oh, Lilly,” Hadley says.

—

She waits until Veronica has gone to bed, and Danny has gone home, and Hadley is asleep on the sofa, and Jack appears to be dozing in Alice’s favorite chair. She hands the baby to Ellen, who is the only one awake with her. Nash kisses that small, delicate head and goes upstairs to change again. The still-bloodied clothes she put on that morning to go to the courthouse are in a heap on the floor. Now she drops her jeans and shirt with them, selects a practical, somber dress. She gathers a few things. She finds You-Know-Who’s wedding ring, the abandoned gold band of Mrs. Fletcher, the ring that belongs to her now, which she still has tucked in her underwear drawer. She slips it on, just in case. She may need to stay somewhere for a while.

It’s time. Downstairs, Ellen hands her the bag of bottles and nipples and milk. “It’s important to sterilize these,” she whispers. “At least, use very hot water from the tap. And keep him warm. Keep his head warm. Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?”