Keeping Secrets

by Andrew Rosenheim

  ‘Can we go see her?’ he asked, curious as much as concerned, and indeed he was partly relieved that his grandmother shook her head at once. ‘Not for a while,’ she said, and he’d thought, What’s ‘a while’ mean?

  The bus came to a large town – there were houses stretching as far as he could see to his left, though on the right in the distance he saw hills. When the bus stopped at the terminal he looked anxiously at the driver. ‘Petaluma,’ the driver barked, and stood up. He looked at the boy and seemed to sense his anxiety. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you know.’ When he came back a few minutes later he chucked a Snickers bar at him, which the boy caught.

  Now the country grew less populated, and the hills seemed higher on the right side as they travelled north. There were orchards instead of cattle here, and a few fields with long lines of wire stretched between stakes, and leafy plants which swarmed all over them. In one field people with baskets were moving through rows of wires, but he couldn’t see what they were picking through the filtered glass of the bus.

  He realised as they came off the highway and into a town that the rain had stopped, but it was still a surprise, when the bus halted in a little square and the driver said, ‘Here you go, son,’ to come down into startling, white sunshine. He stood blinking as the driver retrieved his suitcase out of the luggage compartment, then said, ‘So long,’ and hopped back onto the bus. As it moved away the boy looked around the sidewalk for his uncle. A fat woman with short black hair cut like one of the early Beatles his mother liked so much was hugging a teenage girl who’d got off the bus behind him. Behind them stood a young man, his back to the wall of the drug store, who wore khaki-coloured pants and a blue T-shirt, with sunglasses pushed back over his head. He seemed to be smiling faintly as if he found something funny. He looked friendly, which made the boy hope that the same would be true of the large, dark-bearded figure he was looking for.

  He turned to face the square and looked out hopefully. Two men sat side by side talking on a bench in the small park, but both were too old to be his uncle, and there was nobody else in the square. He remembered the mix of bewilderment and fear he felt as he’d walked home from his fruitless search for his mother at the restaurant, and recognised the combination starting to take hold again. Anxiously, he began to inspect the cars that were parked around the square, peering at each one for occupants. Was that a man sitting in the fancy black car? No, only the headrest of the front seat.

  There was a restaurant on the far side of the square, next to what looked like a newsstand. Maybe he should walk over there and ask. But ask what? He was starting to feel more frightened than nervous, and tried to consider what to do calmly. In his pocket he had a piece of paper with a phone number on it, but his uncle was supposed to be here, waiting for him, and he didn’t begin to know where to make a phone call. Maybe in the restaurant over there, but what if his uncle arrived while he was inside trying to phone him? What if no one answered the phone, or the number he had wasn’t right? What if his grandmother had written it down wrong?

  ‘Would you happen to be Jack?’ said a voice behind him, and turning he found himself looking up at the smiling man in khaki-coloured trousers. In Haight Ashbury the boy would talk to anyone – Louis the Juggler, the affable drunks drinking beer out of paper sacks, Emilio who some days tended an ice-cream van, other days a hot dog stand. But here on strange turf he felt on his guard. He didn’t know what to say to this stranger who somehow knew his name, other than not to say anything, though he did give a small reluctant nod.

  ‘Thought so,’ said the man, looking amused. ‘Even if you don’t look much like your mom.’ He held out his hand. ‘I’m your Uncle Will.’

  And suddenly filled with relief, Jack exhaled and shook his uncle’s hand.

  ‘You hungry?’ asked the man, taking a Marlboro from a pack he had tucked into the rolled-up short sleeve of his T-shirt. Jack shook his head. ‘Sure?’ asked the man, as he inhaled and shook out the match. ‘We got us a bit of a drive.’

  ‘I’m okay,’ said Jack a little squeakily, for he hadn’t spoken once since leaving San Francisco and he realised he hadn’t even thanked the bus driver for the candy bar, which he regretted since the man had been nice.

  ‘Let’s go then. I’m parked over here,’ his uncle said, pointing to a pickup truck they now walked to. He carried Jack’s suitcase, then lifted it with one light swing of his arm into the back of the truck, where a wheelbarrow sat, pristine and gleaming in the sun. ‘There was a sale at the hardware store,’ his uncle said as they got into the cab.

  They pulled away and drove halfway around the square, then shot out in the opposite direction from which the bus had entered. The town seemed neat and tidy to the boy, with wooden houses, many smaller than those in San Francisco, but with nice lawns and large back yards. It was not a big town, and soon they reached the outskirts, then went under the highway. The land here was rolling, though in the distance there were higher hills and his uncle pointed towards them. ‘We’re going thataway. You must have brought the good weather with you. We’ve had nothing but rain for a week. See that,’ he said and pointed at the ditch by the side of the road, where Jack could see a long line of moving water on its bottom. ‘This road’s called Dry Creek Road – and it’s wet.’ He laughed at this, and Jack smiled with him, relaxing slightly. ‘So do you like the country?’

  Startled, Jack stared out the windscreen at the broken white dividing line of the road, watching as each section his eyes focused on neared, then disappeared underneath the truck. He didn’t know what to say. The man added gently, ‘Maybe you never spent much time in it.’ When the boy didn’t react he went on. ‘I didn’t when I was a kid. When your mom and I were growing up we always lived right in San Francisco. But you must know that.’ And Jack nodded, relaxing just a little more at the mention of his mother. ‘Anyway, we’re in the country now. Hope you like it. Something tells me that you probably will.’

  Slowly they began climbing, but the twisting road was sided by abundant bushes and high grass which obscured the view. When they levelled off, Jack could see the hilly landscape for the first time; there were small valleys in the distance, lushly green, like the landscape of Vietnam he had seen in a movie on television. Thinking of Vietnam, he cast a shy glance at his uncle, who seemed impossibly young and normal to have been a soldier.

  ‘That’s Swiss Cheese Road,’ said his uncle, pointing to a turn. ‘We’ll give it a miss. It’s not its real name, actually; I don’t want you getting confused from the beginning.’

  Jack decided to volunteer a question. ‘Why’s it called that then?’

  ‘Because it’s full of holes.’ He laughed. ‘Every year or so the county fills the potholes and twelve months later they’ve got to fill them again. After last winter they must have forgot, and with this rain it would be a pretty bumpy ride.’

  Soon they turned off the paved road onto a smaller one of hard-packed sand, so smooth they only slowed down marginally, though they were also climbing again. Again, there was no view, both sides of the road were lined with dense vegetation and trees with thick branches which towered above them. It felt as if the road was there against the odds, and that with any inattention it would slip back into natural habitat, overwhelmed by greenery.

  After a few minutes of ascent, Will turned sharply left onto another smaller track, with a grassy hummock in its middle. About fifty yards in there was a log cabin off to the right, neatly constructed but old: the logs were dark with age and the window frames badly needed painting. ‘That’s old man Truebridge’s place. He’s been there about as long as forever. He acts grumpy, and if I’m here another fifty years he’ll still think of me as a newcomer.’ He looked over at the boy and grinned. ‘But he’ll help if you need it. We don’t usually get snow up here, but the first winter there was a storm that just dumped it down, and then it froze over for almost a week. I didn’t have this truck then, and I couldn’t get my car out. Truebridge gave me a ride to town to
get supplies.’

  The track was becoming increasingly bumpy, but Will failed to slow down, so Jack found himself almost thrown into the air as the truck bucked up and down. Just as he started to feel sick, and was gathering courage to ask Will to stop for a minute, the woods suddenly gave way and they came into a flat clearing, where the track ended in a turnaround.

  Behind sat a house, presumably his uncle’s. It was two storeys and made of wood, with long horizontal boards stained a smoky grey. It was a wide house, though the second storey was not as wide as the ground floor, and had slanted overhangs so rainwater would run down and not gather on the flat roofs of the ground floor at each end.

  An acacia tree stood in front of the house on the left side, taller than the house. Nearer the front door, which was just slightly to the right side of the house, was a magnolia, shaped like a fat wineglass, which the boy recognised from one in a neighbour’s yard in Haight Ashbury. A dog came out of the shade, a big collie mongrel, and Jack stiffened. The only dogs he knew were other people’s – city dogs, often unpredictable, sometimes growling. But Will went towards this dog without hesitation. Kneeling, he cuffed it lightly round the ears and scratched its chin. ‘This is Ellie,’ he said. ‘The world’s worst watchdog. Wouldn’t hurt a flea.’

  They went into the house by the front door, and Jack stood still for a minute to allow his eyes to adjust to the comparative darkness of the room before him and then to the sudden drama of its space. It was a vast open room, the height of both storeys, and it stretched across the entire width of the house. Up above, a gallery ran the width of the room as well, with a thin balustrade of polished pine

  In this downstairs space there was a sitting area at the far end, with a long low sofa, full of red and green cushions, and two big armchairs, grouped in front of a stone fireplace. On the wall hung a gun cabinet, and next to it two mounted heads of deer. Nearer Jack a long pine table was covered at one end in stacks of papers, with several wooden chairs stationed around it.

  On this ground floor a pine wall, halfway back, separated the rear of the house from this immense open room. It was punctuated by several doors, and Jack followed his uncle diagonally across the room to one of them, which was open. Peering in, Jack saw a kitchen, and standing by the table in the middle of it was a young woman, roughly the age of his uncle.

  ‘This is Maris,’ his uncle said, nodding towards the woman, who wore jeans and Indian moccasins, and a soft flannel work shirt of faded blue. She was about his mother’s height, which was slightly above average, but where his mother had run to fat (Irish bones, she had liked to say, in what was half complaint, half explanation) this woman looked firmer, trim. Her hair was long, light brown and ran down her back in a long pigtail studded halfway down by a mahogany-dark leather slide.

  She looked at Jack with an expression that was serious, almost stern, but her face seemed warm, with soft eyes of silvery blue and a hint of colour in her high, round cheeks. Her face was not exactly pretty, for she had an awkward-looking overbite, as if her two front teeth were too big for her mouth, but it looked the kind of face which its owner has long ago accepted. She nodded at him and shook his hand, gravely at first, but then with a slight, toothy smile which made him feel more welcome.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked and his eyes widened, for other than the driver’s candy bar he hadn’t eaten anything since his grandmother’s poached eggs at breakfast. But he still felt too shy to say yes, and feeling nervous in the close confines of the kitchen started to say no when his uncle cut in. ‘Well I am. Why don’t I show you where you’ll be sleeping and then we can eat.’

  Jack followed Will out into the big room again, then trailed him as he opened another door, revealing a corridor running towards the rear of the house, with a room on either side. ‘The laundry room,’ Will said, pointing to a washer and drier, ‘and there’s a shower in there you might want to use. It would be all yours.’ Then he turned and crossed the passage. In this other room was a desk with an accountant’s calculating machine on it and a stack of ledger books. ‘This is the office. My office,’ he said a little wistfully, ‘though it’s Maris in here most of the time.’

  They went out and climbed the staircase, his uncle carrying the tin suitcase. At the top Jack stopped for a moment, and looked down over the railing at the vast sitting room below them. Behind him another short hallway led back to a large bedroom and a bathroom next to it. ‘That’s my bedroom,’ his uncle said, then led him down the gallery until they came to a room at the end – well, it would have been a room except that it lacked a dividing wall and a door to separate it from the gallery. But it did hold a single bed, which was neatly made with a patchwork quilt, and there was a big pine chest of drawers in one corner, and a stuffed armchair the colour of burned vanilla in the other. The outer side wall consisted of a glass sliding door, and through it Jack could see a deck, with two director’s chairs pulled up close to the outer railing on the perimeter of the house.

  ‘It’s not exactly private,’ his uncle said apologetically, ‘but at least there’s lots of room.’ He looked at Jack. ‘Will this be okay?’

  Jack was so surprised to be asked that it took a moment for him to nod, even though he thought it was more than okay. For it was about three times the size of his San Francisco bedroom, and the bed itself was twice the size of the small camp bed he was used to. And there was a skylight in the roof. Maybe I will see the stars, he thought.

  Will put his suitcase on the floor next to the bed. ‘You might want to rest for a minute. You can use the bathroom up here if you like. I’ll come get you in a bit.’

  He heard his uncle walk along the gallery and go down the stairs. The boy sat down heavily on his bed. Suddenly, and for the first time that day, he felt absolutely alone. He knew this man Will meant well – he could tell already – and maybe the lady downstairs would turn out to be nice. But he didn’t know them, and sitting in this strange and unusual kind of bedroom (It doesn’t even have a door, he thought, not resentfully but as a small expression of how odd he found everything just then), he thought of how far he was from home.

  Home? What was home now? His mother was lying in a hospital somewhere, and even if she weren’t in the hospital he would feel funny seeing her right now – what with his eye which was still sore, and the memory of her socking him, and a feeling that his grandmother’s intervention (however necessary) would be seen by his mother as somehow his fault.

  So there was nowhere to go back to right now: if Gram had wanted him there why had she put him on the bus? He had better make the best of it right where he was, with these strange people and in this strange place. And that very strangeness scared him, so much so that he didn’t even feel teary or like crying, but just hoped something would happen soon to take his mind off this emptiness, and aloneness, and fear. Actually, some company would do the trick – that was what he wanted just then, more than anything, even the company of these strangers. But he didn’t feel he could go downstairs yet, however much he wanted to. He should unpack, he knew, but in his anxiety his thoughts raced and his arms twitched – once, twice, then a repeated small throb right in his forearm and he had again this new and really not nice sensation of feeling shaky.

  And whether his uncle realised this the boy never knew, but blessedly he decided not to leave the boy alone after all, for Jack heard steps on the stairs again, then the click-clack of boots on the gallery’s wooden floor and he looked up and his uncle was in the doorway, and the smile was shy and understanding as much as warm, and his uncle said, very matter of factly and casually, ‘Maybe we should eat right now. What do you think?’

  And the boy nodded, and eagerly moved to the door and as he passed his uncle he felt the man’s hand ruffle quickly through his hair and Jack recognised it at once for the affectionate gesture it was, and looking down from the gallery he saw Maris putting plates on the table, and when she looked up and met his gaze she smiled.

  They sat down together at the big pin
e table in the large open room, where food was laid out on plates, and Maris served stew from a large casserole into earth-coloured bowls, and passed a plate with slices of rye bread, and there was a large salad bowl with lettuce which she seemed to be holding back for later. The stew came as a shock, for the meat in it was gamy and hard to chew, and the sauce – a rich mocha-maroon – was too peppery for him. He did his best but wondered how he was going to get through it all. He coughed and Maris quickly poured him a glass of water from the clear pitcher she’d brought out. He drank, swallowed, then coughed some more.

  ‘Venison,’ his uncle said apologetically, and Maris went out to the kitchen. When she came back it was with a plate of ham slices. ‘Try this,’ she said, putting a large slice between two pieces of bread. ‘Deer meat’s an acquired taste.’

  Deer meat? He looked over at the mounted head nearest them in wonderment, and Maris seeing him do this laughed. ‘It’s not that deer,’ she said.

  ‘Oh,’ said the boy. He looked at his uncle. ‘Did you shoot it?’

  ‘Nope,’ Will said, chewing a large piece of stew meat. He took a drink from his glass of water, swallowed and said, ‘Maris did.’

  The boy looked at her with astonishment, and she nodded matter-of-factly. ‘Just down in the Valley Orchard,’ she said. ‘Not half a mile from here.’

  ‘He ate good too,’ said Will.

  Maris pretended to grimace. ‘Well,’ she announced. ‘He ate well.’

  ‘Did you shoot the other one?’ he asked his uncle hopefully, nodding towards the other head.