The Secrets She Keeps (7 page)

“Veronica!” Ellen says. “That’s hardly our business.” Ellen is thrilled by the question, though. She laughs a little but leans forward so she doesn’t miss a word. They all want to ask, but only Veronica is bold enough to actually do it.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Lilly says. She is working out a tune on the piano. Her long fingers plunk wrong keys and then try again. “I don’t even know if I remember.” But she means the song.

“I saw him at a restaurant once,” Hadley says. She leans one hip against the piano, watching. “He was…”

“Attractive, oddly. Very attractive,” Lilly Marcel says.

“
Magnetic
is what I was going to say.”

Nash has seen pictures. She can’t imagine what’s attractive about that huge head and those fat fingers.

“
The Bird Kings
was brilliant, I must admit.
The Forever When
, too.” Veronica adds an
mmm
of remembered pleasure.

“My friend Eve was in
The Bird Kings
,” Lilly says. “Eve Ellings? She played the daughter.”

“Oh, right,” Veronica says, but she’s just being polite. Their focus is on Lilly.

“You were the girl in the hotel. In
The
Changelings?
” Ellen asks. “At the front desk.”

“ ‘Don’t interrupt me, Mr. Black.’ ” Lilly recites her one line. The line isn’t what you remember, anyway.

“Did you ever ask him?” They all know what Veronica means. Ellen opens her eyes wide.

“Well, once,” Lilly says.

The air is stifling hot. A fan spins on an end table. It might rain. No one speaks, and even the crickets have fallen silent. Anticipation hovers. It’s like a gavel in midair, the finger on the trigger, the lips parted for a kiss, but it appears that Lilly is not planning on saying more.

Hadley can’t stand it. “And?”

Lilly raises her hands and then slams her fingertips—
bum, dum, dum
—over the deep, ominous notes of the left side of the keyboard.

“You asked only once, I take it,” Veronica says.

“He made me feel like I could do anything, until he made me feel like I could do nothing.”

“Oh, don’t I know about that!” Ellen says. She holds a drink, which she swirls in anger, if you could call it that. Ellen’s anger is sighs and tears, and Hadley’s is crossed arms and door slams, and Veronica’s is a string of curses that could make Jack blush. Nash doesn’t even know what her own anger truly looks like yet. It’s like the Styleline Deluxe, which can supposedly go as fast as sixty-five miles per hour but no one, not even Jack, has dared try.

“After all the flowers and candy and fancy dinners, the big wedding? I thought he loved me. I thought I’d reached the happy ending. But I don’t think Eddie ever really even wanted to be married. Scotty is two. My Bobby is only six months old. I don’t know what will become of us.” Ellen says this to Lilly, because the rest of them have heard these facts a hundred times by now. “I begged and pleaded with him, but it’s like I’m not even there. Like
we’re
not there. Eddie walks right out of the room whenever Bobby cries. He says he’s fed up.”

“That’s awful,” Lilly says.

“Most of the neighbors think that I’m on vacation and Eddie’s on a business trip. I’m too ashamed to say anything. They must think we do a lot of traveling.”

“What are you going to tell them when you get home?” Hadley asks.

“I’m going to say he works overseas.”

“Gus is a sweetheart. I’m the one who’s wicked.” Veronica grinds the nub of her cigarette into the ashtray.

Hadley widens her eyes in pretend shock. “No! Wicked, you?”

Veronica lobs a cashew in Hadley’s direction. How many objects have been flung in the Fontaine household, Nash can only imagine.

“Sit here,” Lilly says to Nash, who is standing over by the window. Lilly scoots over, pats the bench next to her. “Do you play?”

It’s stupid, but she blushes. “A little.”

“A very little,” Hadley teases. She was there that night Nash made such a mess of Kirchner.

“Do you think it’s possible that some women are not meant to be married?” Veronica asks.

“In what way?” Ellen knits her brow.

“I feel murderous when his leg brushes up against mine in bed. I want to scream sometimes when he’s just being
alive,
breathing through his mouth. And when he pouts after being rejected in the bedroom—”

“Primitive man pouted when he was rejected in the cave,” Hadley says, and they all laugh.

“What kind of a person screams inside when her husband breathes too loud?” Veronica lights another cigarette. Her cupped hand and her bent head are serious.

“The same kind who feels nothing inside when he sobs his heart out,” Hadley says quietly. It’s the kind of confession that requires hushed tones.

“Why did I even do it, when I knew it was wrong?”

“Well, the day says one thing, and the night another, doesn’t it?” Hadley says. “Who wants to listen to what two
A.M
. says? We think two
A.M
. can’t be trusted, when it’s the honest hour.”

Boo is disturbed by something he hears outside. He darts around, barks at the window. Maybe it’s the heat, or an animal, or an imminent storm. Moths flutter around the yellow light outside, flying figure eights. Beyond that light, it is so dark you’d never even see a coyote prowling right outside the house.

“I wonder what it is.” Lilly watches the little dog.

“Just an animal, probably,” Nash says.

“Well, maybe I’m fed up, too,” Ellen says. “I’m tired of being ignored. And tired of being treated like a child! He takes the kitchen knives from my hand, like I’m not to be trusted with sharp objects.” Her eyes shine. She still hasn’t learned not to drink those Moscow mules so fast, and each
S
she speaks slides and crashes a little.

“Darling, I saw you with that pair of scissors,” Veronica says.

“I don’t even know how to drive!”

Veronica dunks her olive into her drink and then slides it off the toothpick into her mouth. “We’ll fix that.”

“You can teach her, Nash,” Hadley says.

Nash looks at Hadley like she’s just told a bad joke, but Hadley’s actually serious.

“Every woman should know how to drive,” Hadley says. “You don’t want to be his little girl. Or his mother, either.” Hadley’s husband is the playwright Joseph Bernal, who wrote that play
The Blue Shoe
, the one with the scandalous scene in the Garden of Eden with supposedly Freudian undertones. It was Hadley’s
Golden Butterflies
, though, the labor-union play, that won some award. Hadley has not said much about him or them or why she’s here. There have only been small dropped details—something about Jewish guilt, and the effect of bad weather on moods, and how the pages accumulate now, without constant interruption.

“I tell you, ladies, I’m the louse here,” Veronica says.

“We don’t need any further convincing.” Hadley sidesteps the airborne candied-covered almond.

“This,” Lilly Marcel decides. She places the sheet music on the stand.

Boo trots back and forth in front of the window. His eyes are focused and intent. There is the squeak-spring sound of the tiny doors of the cuckoo clock as they open and then the call of the little wooden bird.

“A coyote or something, maybe,” Lilly Marcel says to Nash. “Ready?”

She
is
ready. When she sees their hands together on the piano keys, Nash is astonished at how alike they look. It makes her get that great feeling, that rare, euphoric one, where all of life and its possibilities rush forward and your arms are wide out, ready to take in every one of them. Of course, there is no room in that feeling for the mixed and messy truth of it. When your arms are out wide, you’ll capture love and joy and golden moments but other things, too. Mistrust will sneak in on a wave of that joy, and complications will ride the backs of the golden moments, and there will be both love and the risks of love. That’s the way it is. That’s the design. The net is wide, if you’re brave enough to hold the net at all. Buoyant with hope and goodwill, Nash doesn’t even hear the squeak of leather shoes as they rise from a crouch outside the window or the crunch of soles walking down the gravel drive. She shuts her eyes just before she begins to play her heartfelt and imperfect song.

The mustangs were gone. Tex stopped barking. There was the squeak-spring sound of the tiny doors of the cuckoo clock as they opened and then the call of the little wooden bird, and then it was quiet. If it wasn’t for the mess left behind, I might have thought it never happened, which is something my dear sister said about a few of her failed loves, but never mind.

What had happened out that window, the unruly passion of it—it had altered the landscape. First a cloud of dust lingered, thick and red-brown, like the volcanic ash in the Seattle air after Mount St. Helens blew when I was a girl. And then the ground was rutted with fresh grooves, with hunks of dry grass hurled to far-off places. A distant fence post had also been somehow lifted and flung to the road. Even the buffalo had fled in self-protection.

“The forest-service man,” I said. I understood now.

“Forest-service man?”

“Mom said a guy’s been calling—”

Nash scoffed. “Forest service!
Bureau
. Bureau of Land Management.”

“Ah,” I said.

“That Kit Covey. He comes over as if he’s going to get me to
convert
.”

Bureau of Land Management: I imagined a dull, square-shouldered man in a green Smokey the Bear outfit. Oh, how wrong I was.

“Nash, my God. Why are you ignoring them? This isn’t some little problem with a…with…” I didn’t know the sort of problems the Bureau of Land Management dealt with.

She shook her head as if I was missing the point. “They are planning to
gather
them.”

“Good! Gather away! You need some help with this! Look what just happened. Those horses—there were so
many
of them! They were right
here
. They’re going to destroy this place!”

“It doesn’t matter.”

There was a knock at the door then. Nash folded her arms. “If that’s him, I’ve said all I have to say.”

“Let me handle it,” I said. Those horses were nothing,
nothing,
I could handle.

“Hello? Anyone home?” Someone was calling through the screen door, all right, and it wasn’t a forest-service man.

“Shaye?”

“Callie?”

She looked good. She’d lost weight. I guess weight was something sisters always noticed about each other right off, an unwelcome but permanent reflex of sibling rivalry.

“Holy shit! Those horses! I was in my car. I thought I might die in there.” Shaye dropped her suitcase to her feet, held her hand to her chest. “Did that really just happen? I gotta sit for a minute.” She grabbed my arm, pulled me down beside her to the hanging porch swing.

“Girls!” Nash said. “Don’t—”

Too late. There was a crash and a terrible clatter, and we were up and then we were down. Nash had her hands over her ears. Tex ran inside the house. Something hurt—my leg, my butt. Shaye had splinters in her hair from where the hooks had dislodged from the porch roof. I spit out a piece of sawdust from the 1930s.

“What are you doing here?” we said at the same time.

“Jinx,” Shaye said. “I think I broke my tailbone.”

“Me, too. Jesus.”

“Don’t tell me. Mom called you.”

I looked at Shaye and she looked at me. I knew those eyes. I’d been looking in those eyes since the day she was born. We both had our mom clothes on. Shaye wore a PTA-parent no-sleeve shirt, shorts, and those white tennis shoes you get at Rite Aid every spring, and I wore one of Amy’s hand-me-down tank tops and jeans, and we were a far cry from the girls in summer dresses we were years ago.

“That chain hit me in the shoulder,” Shaye said, rubbing her bare arm. I looked over my head. The wood above us was clearly rotted, and two new ragged holes gaped like frightened eyes where the hooks once were.

“Quit whining and help me up,” I said.

I don’t know what it was, but this made Shaye laugh, which made me laugh. It began as ordinary laughing and then turned to the bent-over stomach-holding variety. The two of us, Laura and Almanzo, back at the prairie in our mom clothes—it was beyond hilarity. What a mess both our lives were, too—I could barely catch my breath with the calamity of it all. “Jesus,” Shaye said. “God.” And then her little white Rite Aid mom shoe made a farting sound as she tried to get up, and this sent us over the edge again.

“Girls!” Nash barked, as if we were seventeen and had just come home drunk from a party. Poor thing: We’d come uninvited, and now this. It was shocking the amount of trouble well-meaning people could cause.

Tex had trotted out again now that there were no more falling objects. He hopped up on Shaye’s lap and went for her face with his fast pink tongue. “Down dog,” she said. “Ow, ow, ow. Toenails.”

I managed to stand. I reached out my hand and Shaye took it, and I pulled her up. “I heard about Eric’s sports car,” I said.

“I heard about Thomas’s girlfriend,” she said.