The Secrets She Keeps (8 page)

—

“How old is this stuff?” Shaye twisted open the cap of some bottle of liquor that looked like it had been in that cupboard for a million years. She took a sniff and reeled. “This could kill you, Nash. You know how they have those places that recycle motor oil? You should bring this.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Nash said, as she rooted around in her freezer. I couldn’t believe that thing still worked. It was big enough to put a body in, but it was nearly empty save for a few packages wrapped in white paper. “I could make us pork chops,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting company.”

“Oh, Nash. I’m sorry. We descended,” Shaye said. “I’m going to get us some Chinese and a bottle. Did you see that new Chinese place
and
a grocery store?” she asked me. Out here, it was practically like getting a mall with a Cineplex.

“It’s been there forever,” Nash said. “Ten years.”

“Maybe in another decade you’ll get Thai food,” I said. The light was turning yellow-orange, and the hills changed to shades of pink as evening fell. I was starving. I threw a twenty at Shaye.

“If you’re going to go, don’t dawdle,” Nash said. “You shouldn’t be out there when it’s dark.”

I elbowed Shaye. “Yeah, bring your pistol, cowgirl.”

“Never met a varmint I couldn’t handle,” Shaye drawled.

“Girls, don’t be smart,” Nash said. “You don’t know. I’ve seen plenty.”

I watched Shaye drive off in her giant SUV, and then I put sheets on the bed in Castaway for her. I hauled her suitcase to her room and folded down the bedspread like a hotel’s. I wished I had a little mint for her pillow, because she’d like that.

“How long does it take to get Chinese?” Nash said after a while. She had the gnarled hands of a woman who once could put an animal twice her size in its place, and her silver hair and gray eyes meant business. But she was eighty, and didn’t you get nervous at that age? I didn’t know. I just knew that with her skittishness and those horses somewhere out there and that big white moon and the sense that we were all lost together, I was glad when I saw the two beams of Shaye’s headlights come down the road.

While Shaye was away, my mind had been weighed down. Images and feelings tossed—my daughter eating gallo pinto in an outdoor restaurant; my husband opening a beer as he took off his shoes and unrolled his socks in an empty house; a hit of grief that Hugo was gone, gone, gone to wherever the dead go. My heart was heavy with fear and despair about Thomas and me and our own wrecked ground, and I could hear coyotes, and there was the kind of dark out there where you could disappear and never be found. But as soon as Shaye showed up with plastic bags filled with white cartons, and a fat grocery sack with the neck of a Jack Daniel’s bottle sticking from it, all that disappeared. It just
went
in a comforting, familiar flash, because, damn her, I knew it! I knew she’d eat all the fortune cookies on the way.

—

I called Thomas after dinner. Well, I had to. We’d only had a fight this cataclysmic once before, a few years ago, when we’d fought again about his mother. She’d come for a visit, and he accused me of not trying. I hadn’t tried, but all that history had left me cold by then. I suppose every marriage has its issue,
the
issue that’s been shot at and strangled and drowned and stabbed, and yet its mean little heart still goes on beating. This was ours. June Bennett. Of course, the fights about his mother weren’t about his mother. The issue is never the issue. It’s about what you need most colliding with what he needs most.

He wanted me to be more generous. I wanted him to
do something
. It was like he’d brought a wild animal into our house and then let it piss on the carpets and rip things up with its teeth while he stood there and smiled indulgently. Or, worse, didn’t notice when it drew blood. I tried to handle her various rejections and jabs and green-eyed moves with kindness, with bribery and gifts, with every self-help-ish term from
boundaries
to
detachment
. None of it solved anything, naturally. Thomas was the key here, and he was unwilling or unable to move from our fixed triangle. My hands felt tied—in such situations, if you fight your own battle, you lose, and if you don’t fight your own battle, you lose. I wanted him to make me a priority, and he wanted me to make her a priority, until finally, after that argument, I left. It was a short-lived gesture that lacked true courage, though I ate a burger that arrived under a dome of silver and remembered that I was a human being with a life apart from Thomas.

This time, though, June Bennett was dead, and I had run away to the ranch, and there were six months of small lies, but you went on after a fight, after a day or two or a week, didn’t you? It got lonely otherwise. Ignoring each other is hard work, and downright awkward in a shared bathroom. He sees you undress. The toilet flush reveals. Your toothbrushes still touch in the cup.

His crimes were small, and so were mine, and this was repairable. And the thing was, I wanted to tell Thomas, more than I wanted to tell anyone, about Nash. About the horses, and Shaye, and how you could really see the face in the moon in the desert. The sheets smelled like someone else’s closet and someone else’s laundry soap. Thomas was the one I told things to. Isn’t it part of why we marry, to have a person to tell your life to? You choose each other and become the principal witness. You begin to require his response to the funny sight, the victory, the trouble, because it completes the experience. Telling your witness sets a small volume or a large one to its place on the shelf.
There
, is what a part of you says.

And while I sometimes could have relayed my day to a large appliance and let it hum back in the right parts—not because Thomas wasn’t listening, but because I forgot to really
see
him across from me—for the most part I did see him, and he saw me, and it wasn’t about having someone, it was about having Thomas, the way he understood exactly what I meant when I said,
Remember Vegas?
or waved my arms in our private joke, which referred to the time his sister got hysterical at that party but which had come to mean any time a person overreacted.

He wasn’t just the one I told things to. He was the one.

I picked up the phone. I’d set the little patches around the injury, as you must; opened myself to the prospect of forgiveness. Likely I’d be heading home soon, maybe in a day or two, after Shaye and I
assessed
.

Thomas was out of breath when he finally picked up. “I was taking out the garbage. I didn’t hear the phone.”

I didn’t know what to say, now that he’d answered. As soon as I heard his actual voice, the warm balloon of my goodwill seemed to lift off and disappear.

“Callie?”

“I’m here.” I picked the tiny balls of fuzz from the quilt and made a small hill.

“You’re at the ranch, huh? That old place, Jesus. Melissa told me.”

“Yeah, well.”

Silence.

“If you’re mad about how much the therapy costs, insurance covers it, so don’t worry.”

“I don’t care about the
money
. When have I ever been the one to care about money?” Thomas—he was the one who thought it was an extravagance to throw away a yogurt carton past its due date. I saw his words for what they were, one of those alluring, argument side trails, the sort that you both careen down even when they’re so far off the main road, you’ll end up walking in circles for hours. He would remind me of the one time he ever bought anything for himself, and I would remind him that when he bought that car, we only had four hundred dollars in the bank. He’d say I was controlling, and I’d say he loved to play the victim. But the main road—this time I was scared where it was headed. The trails have a purpose, which is probably why they’re so widely used.

His voice was tight and strained, a thin wire. “I just…I needed to talk to someone.”

I wondered what it was like. A couch, the requisite box of Kleenex, two people in one intimate, silent space.

“I’m here, you know, as far as someone to talk to. Your wife?”

“There’s no need to be threatened.”

“I wouldn’t be
threatened
if you hadn’t kept it a secret. You lied to me, Thomas. And why? How often did I suggest it myself? Remember that Saturday when you barely got out of bed? I said,
Thomas, you’ve got to call someone. You’re clearly depressed.
And what did you say?
I don’t believe in paying someone to listen to my troubles.”

I tried to keep my voice down, so Shaye and Nash wouldn’t hear. Things could get so confusing so fast between two people. You wouldn’t think it was possible, and every time it happened, it astonished me. In a second, we—lovers, friends, partners—could be two animals thrashing over one carcass. “You lied for
six months
, Thomas. I doubt Mary Evans would think that was burgeoning good health.”

“She doesn’t know I haven’t told you.”

“Oh, great. Super. We should be going together, Thomas, if you feel like this. Marriage counseling—”

“Why is this suddenly about you? This is
mine
. I kept this to myself, yes. So sue me! I wanted to figure out my own head first.”

Here was the question that had to be asked. It was the boulder that must be dropped from the cliff, and when I shoved it over, I heard the gruesome thud and felt the landing in the pit of my stomach. “And what
is
in your own head?”

There was no sound, just the buzz of phone static. And then I realized something awful. He was crying. Thomas, who never cried. I could hear the
eck eck
of his sobs, the struggle for words.

“I’m wondering. If this…is
all.
”

“This? Us?” Oh, God. It was awful.

“No!” He blew his nose. From my side of the phone, it sounded like a typhoon gust whipping through a room. “This, all of it.” His next word was tiny, which was funny for a word so big. The biggest: “Life.”

Damn it, my heart flooded with feeling. Compassion. I wanted to cry, too. For him, and me, and for all of us poor, sorry human beings doing our best in this world. “Jesus, Mack. Maybe you should just buy a sports car.”

I meant this to be light and caring, a gentle joke, but it was the wrong thing to say. The minute the words were out of my mouth, I knew it was the most wrong thing, but you’d think by then we could have seen each other’s good intentions.

“And you wonder why I didn’t tell you? Of course you’d make it trivial! A bothersome setback you could sweep under the rug with all that you
know
—”

He hated my emotional practicality. I hated it sometimes, too. “Thomas, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that! But isn’t this what
happens
?”

“To men of my age, you mean.”

“To people who’ve…Your mother just died. The girls…”

“A midlife crisis. A
cliché
.”

“An understandable situation! A thing can be clichéd and still be just as devastating.”

“Nice, Cal. Terrific.”

“There’s nothing wrong with it! There’s nothing to be ashamed—”

“How can you understand what a man feels? Really? You never even had a
father
.”

I crooked the phone between my chin and shoulder. I opened my suitcase, then put the small stack of T-shirts in the musty dresser drawer. Here was another truth, I thought, as I stood in Taj, holding a bathing suit that had seen better days. Thomas didn’t fight fair, and I was tired of it. It was something no one would see from the outside or ever suspect. He’d go from zero to sixty on the anger scale, and then all the days of laundry-doing and lawn-mowing and hardworking goodness would be gone. No one would recognize that monster from the way he swept the garage and made chicken with dumplings. He’d fling my most raw failures at me, too, like the excellent weapons they were.

I never liked big emotion. My mother’s was big enough during our childhood that high intensity resulted in the urge to flee to the safety of my room. At times like those, when Thomas stomped and fumed, I wanted to either leave home or slip a lethal powder into his chalice, but I’d handle him with distance instead. I’d shove a fat lot of it between us, so his raised voice and the lingering hurt from his words would have to climb a few barriers to reach me. The problem was, distance is a thing that can stack up. Over the years, bits of it gather like sedimentary layers in rock. The little ways you injure each other—they rise and harden.

He barely paused for breath. “Is it any wonder I don’t feel heard? This isn’t about us, or you, or our family. It’s about
me
. Figuring out what I want. When do I ever think about what
I
want?”

Oh, how fast that old jet plane was, the one that went from love to hate. This was just my familiar Thomas after all. The Poor Me Thomas, the I’m Last Thomas, the eater of cereal dust and burnt toast, who only needed to
speak
if he truly wanted to be heard. Frankly, I was sick of all his pointless self-denial. He may have thought it deserved some kind of medal, but I no longer saw anything admirable in it. There were so many ways you could go wrong in a marriage. Being selfish, not being selfish enough. Not being selfish enough and rubbing it in everyone’s face.

“Maybe it’s good you left for a while,” he said. “You know what? I’m glad. I need some time.”

I didn’t say a word. I bit the inside of my cheek so I’d stay silent. Dear husbands and wives. Sweet, loving people entwined in bed on a Sunday morning, turned to vicious bastards and bitches. The hardest part of being married—why don’t they tell you this?—is all the days you hate each other. We’d been together for twenty-two years. We had two daughters. Yet in an instant I could imagine my own small beach house, with white rugs and blue curtains and popcorn for dinner. I was sure right then that freedom was every woman’s secret wish.

Thomas was the husband every friend of mine envied. He was sweet and smart and he cooked and worked hard and he was still so damn handsome, with those broad shoulders, and that hair, and those brown eyes that brought to mind softness and suede. He was funny, too. But he could turn into a spiteful child and claim that’s what people did when they got mad.