The Secrets She Keeps (9 page)

And I, too, was the wife who was admired by his friends, and the wife no one knew, with my own arsenal. My preferred weapons were large and light, nothing sharp or speared or bloody for me. They were powerful, though; make no mistake about it. Silence and distance can drive a person crazy.

I hung up on him.

I could feel the tendrils of change crawling upward, wrapping themselves around everything usual and daily. I could feel them squeeze; at least, I could barely breathe. No one had made the call to fix that rot that made our house slope. He hadn’t, but I hadn’t, either. It was mystifying (frightening, alluring) the way you could let it all just
go.

The worst kind of cocktail, fury and fear, roiled in my stomach. I put that old bathing suit in the drawer and slammed it shut.

“Take all the time you need,” I said to my empty room.

—

“I didn’t want to say anything before, but guess who I saw when I went to get dinner? The forest-service guy. He was coming down the road to see us. He stopped and stuck his head out the window. I waved him off, pointed at my wrist like I was in a hurry,” Shaye said.

It was late, and Shaye looked exhausted. She lay on the couch, feet up, arms crossed on her chest like a corpse. Her eyes had ashy half-moons beneath them. Thomas and I weren’t the only ones fighting long-distance. Just after she arrived, I’d heard her outside, crying and yelling on the phone with Eric. I hated that sound. Other people fighting—it sent me right back to being seven when Mom left Gene. She’d been married to him for a long time, and he felt like a father. Shaye and I had hid in her room, clutching hands.

“Why didn’t you talk to him? I mean, clearly we can’t just let those horses run around and wreck everything.”

“I didn’t want to talk to him! I looked awful. I needed to brush my teeth! You should have seen him, Cal. Very Redford-
Out-of-Africa
-y. I mean, wow.”

“We’ll have to deal with him one way or another,” I said, which was true, truer than I knew then. “You can’t just go around ignoring government agencies.”

“You can when your deodorant gave up an hour ago. Anyway, we should at least get Nash’s side of the story first.”

“I tried! All she’d say was that she wanted the horses left alone. I’m worried Harris is right. This
is
some kind of emergency. I told you, that stuff in Nash’s room? It looked
crazy
. She said it was
ranch business. Closing out the paperwork.
No way all that stuff is ranch business. She doesn’t even have a ranch anymore, for starters.”

“Maybe she’s writing her memoirs.”

“She’s not writing her memoirs.”

“She could be!”

“This might sounds nuts…I sound like Mom.” Our mother loved a conspiracy. She once became convinced that a garbage bag of couch cushions was the dead wife of our neighbor, the murderous Mr. Fluke, who worked at a garden store. “But I saw a date. I think I did. It all happened so fast.”

“What kind of date?”

“A year. On file boxes, on a folder, lots of places. Kind of jumped out at me: 1951.”

“You do sound like Mom,” Shaye said.

I threw a pillow at her and missed. I was in my pajamas, too, and I lounged in the leather chair. Its seat had a permanent crater from all the time it had spent accommodating demanding asses, something Shaye was pretty familiar with, too, if you asked me. “Well, we’ll never know now. She locked her door. I tried to go in there to snoop when she was looking around for an extra bottle of shampoo.”

“A bottle of Breck circa 1977. It’ll make us go bald.”

“It’ll make you go bald. I brought my own.”

“She’d have a few things to say in a memoir. Didn’t some movie star come once? Ava Gardner, a fancy car, and something-something in a bar?”

“Yeah. I feel like we’ve heard the same three stories over and over.”

“Ava Gardner,” Shaye counted on her fingers. “Grandma and the drought…”

“The time the lady set her room on fire when Mom and Nash were babies.”

“So? It’ll be a short book.” Shaye bit the skin by her fingernail. “Can you believe she never got married? I can’t imagine it.”

“Sure,
you
can’t imagine it.” I was joking, but maybe it was a bad time for it, especially after that fight I’d heard. I’d given Shaye a set of glass bowls for her first wedding to the brooding, controlling Mathew, a pair of vases when she briefly moved in with that sweet but chaotic artist from Montana, a knife set for her brief, disastrous union with Quentin, the fuming egomaniac, and nonstick pans when she married Eric.

“Shut up!” she said, but it didn’t have much gusto. “Well, she had a few men in her life. There was that one guy for a while.”

“She did? What guy?” Tex snored from the corner of the couch, where he probably didn’t belong. I could hear the sound of insect applause, the
tick-tick-tick
of moth wings against the glass of the window.

“Hangy ears, backwoodsy name. Hooper? Hopper? Cooper! That was it. You don’t remember?”

“I didn’t know! No one tells me anything.”

“A few years before her mastectomy.”

“I didn’t know about any Cooper.”

“They weren’t together that long. It was before Harris.”

“Harris? They’re together, for sure?”

“Honestly? You can’t tell just by the way he looks at her? The man adores her. Oh, Cal, you’ve never been much of a romantic, have you.”

“No, I guess not. You’re right.” She was. My first childhood crush had been on the Professor from
Gilligan’s Island
. He was the practical one, sure, but he was also the only one who might actually save the lost, with his phone made out of a coconut.

“And I’m right about Harris. Trust me.”

The ice had long ago diluted the alcohol in my glass, but I sipped it anyway. The radio was on softly. That stupid Dr. Yabba Yabba Love was back, with her easy psycho-relationship BS:
What you think you see, you see
. “God, turn that off,” I said. Shaye sat up, reached over, and pushed the power button. The unit was from the days when bigger was better and laser shows were in. Either the stereo was now off or the captain had just landed the spaceship.

I flipped through another magazine I found under the coffee table, feeling slightly irritated. If Shaye knew so much about Nash, what was I doing here? “It’s like the historical museum of magazines down here.” I held up a
Woman’s Day
from 1960, with a woman and a man beaming over a glossy turkey.

“That one had Reno in it.” Shaye pointed, and I reached for a
Look
from 1958, with Jerry Lewis and family on the cover. “No, that one.”

“
Confidential
?” The face of some dead movie star beamed up at me, his teeth a row of perfect white Chiclets. “How do you know these things?”

“I saw it when we were kids. It’s the same one.”

“Your memory is amazing. Ask me what I had for dinner yesterday. No idea.”

“Quiz me. I’m answer woman.”

“Eric, for starters. Tell me what’s going on there.”

She rolled her eyes. “I can’t. I don’t even want to talk about it.”

“He doesn’t mind running things while you’re gone?” Shaye and Eric both did freelance marketing and were making a go of it under one umbrella.

“Mind? He couldn’t wait to get rid of me.”

“Okay, where are the kids? I’ll ask that.”

“Eric’s girls are home. But, you know, Josh and Emma always spend a month with Mathew in the summer.”

“How is it that I sort of forgot about Mathew?”

“Lucky you.”

I turned the fragile pages of
Confidential,
trying to find old Reno, then gave up. I tossed it back on the pile. “Tell me why you ate all the fortune cookies, how about that one?”

“Your magnetic personality will bring you a new hobby,”
she said. “Duane’s mother started hoarding, too, when she got Alzheimer’s.”

Duane, that’s right. That was his name, the boyfriend from Montana, whose new girlfriend was probably enjoying those vases. I rose, stretched my legs. Wandered over to that big window that looked out over that bigger night. Tex woke up. He stared at me, alert and watchful.

“Nash isn’t hoarding. Look how tidy the rest of the house is. She seems perfectly fine, that’s what’s strange. Maybe it’s a mission of some kind. Wouldn’t you need something like that out here? Still, why not just
tell
us? We’ve got to get into that room.”

“Well, she’s not fine.”

“Those papers, I know. It’s not right. It isn’t. The room is stuffed.”

“Not the papers.”

“What do you mean?” It was so dark out that window. Who knew what the snakes and wolves were up to in that darkness? Except for the white beam of the moon, shining down on the pool as if the pool were a silvery baptismal font promising renewal, it was only black and more black out there.

“You didn’t know?”

“What?” Why didn’t anyone ever tell me anything?

“She’s dying.”

The moon shines down on the swimming pool. It makes the water look silvery-black and shimmery, as if a dip in it might save your soul. A leaf floats across, a small, glowing boat, a cupped hand. It hits the edge and spins.

They don’t speak, but they are walking close together because of the dark path, and their shoulders nearly touch. Hadley has turned in early; her porch light is already off.

“I’ll make a stop here,” Lilly Marcel says. The white dots of her dress are illuminated, too, tiny stars, as she heads off to the toilet.

Nash waits. She can see the constellations in the sky. She rubs her arms against the cold. She doesn’t feel capable of protecting anyone. She wonders about soldiers and guards, and—wait—men in general, all of the people who are assigned to be strong. They must be just as scared as anyone else.

The door of the shack bangs and Lilly is back. “Now the baby wakes up,” she says. “A night owl.”

Nash likes this thought—a little swimming life, already equipped with habits and preferences. She follows Lilly to the cottage and up the stairs. Lilly has her hand on the knob of the door when they hear a long, high-pitched scream.

Lilly grabs Nash and shrieks. The noise is the strangled cry of a woman getting her throat slashed, but it is not a woman. It’s a sound Nash has never gotten used to.

“A rabbit,” Nash says. “It’s only a rabbit, caught by a hawk or maybe a coyote.”

“Oh, my God. That is the most chilling thing I’ve ever heard.”

It is. You know that fangs are sinking into the soft flesh of a neck. It’s horrible.

“Get in here, fast.” Lilly grabs Nash’s arm and pulls her inside. She turns the lock.

“Are you all right?” Nash asks.

“I don’t know.” Lilly sets her palm to her chest. “Rabbits have it rough, don’t they. Jesus, where’s the light switch?”

Their hands hit against each other on the wall, and Nash’s shin hits the bookshelf with an audible clunk. It’s the darkness and that scream, and now Nash’s poor shin, and they both start to laugh. They are holding each other’s arms and giggling madly from tension and the shared knowledge of their own false courage. A scream like that will set anyone on edge.

Lilly wipes her eyes. “Oh, God, oh, God. Where is that light?” she sputters.

Nash hits the switch. They squint at each other in the sudden brightness, and this is hysterical, too.

Lilly takes a big breath, exhales. “Whew. There. All is well.” Her eyes are bright blue.

The black windows gape at them. Anyone could be out there. “Let’s close those curtains,” Nash says.

Lilly’s suitcase is open on the bed. She follows Nash’s eyes to it. A corner of it is stacked with baby clothes. Nash can see a tiny sweater and a tiny pair of socks. “Just in case,” Lilly says. She holds up a sock in each hand.

“Oh,” Nash says. Her heart feels struck.

“I know,” Lilly says. She tucks the socks back into her bag. “Am I going to have to walk
you
back now?” She gives Nash’s braid two short tugs.

“Then I’d have to walk you again,” Nash says.

“It could go on all night.”

“I’m fine. This is practically my backyard. I grew up here.”

“If you say so. My God.”

“It’s okay,” Nash says.

“We heard its life ending.”

When Nash leaves the cabin, she thinks again about Lilly’s choice to stay out here alone. The curtained windows glow with yellow light, but the whole cabin seems like another rabbit out in the open. Nash doesn’t understand what leads some people to the edge. The bull riders, for example, with their arced backs and tight, gripping fists, full of bravado but with breakable bones and heads that could smash like overripe gourds. Or those men who walk on the wings of an airplane. Last summer, she and Jack saw one at the air show at Lansing Field, and they stood together and gasped when that tiny figure emerged from the door of the roaring plane. Or the women, even, who come back from Reno with stories of dancing with strangers, who marry men like Stuart Marcel, who drive too fast in cars with the wind blowing their hair.

Lilly shouldn’t be there alone, Nash thinks for the hundredth time, but she supposes everyone has their reasons for their rash acts.