The Secret He Keeps

by Julieann Dove

  “Yeah, I used to come here in a previous life.” She stopped staring at Dane and looked at John.

  “Well, I can see why.”

  Rachel’s nerves unwound with each sip she took.

  “I’m not much into dancing.” John must’ve seen her look wistfully toward the swaying crowd. They were playing a song she liked. Her eyes fell back on Dane. He looked the same there, sitting at that table. As if they were meeting here after a long week, themselves. He was the one who probably didn’t have time to go home and change. He wore a white button-down shirt; the top two buttons were undone, where a tie had most likely choked him all day. His hair looked mussed. She still was shocked by the sight of his facial hair. It looked good, though. Gave him a scruffy look. He seemed older with it, more weathered from life than when she remembered him younger.

  “So, what do you do for a living, Rachel?” John took another drink of his whiskey.

  The bar area was loud. It put her at ease. “I’m a doctor. Well, I’m a non-practicing doctor.”

  “Wow! Given up the sport, have you? What type of medicine did you practice?”

  “I’ve taken a leave of absence, I guess you’d say. I have a general practice with a few partners.”

  She gulped down her vodka and closed her eyes. It wasn’t taking long to feel the warmth of the drink rushing through her veins. She didn’t eat lunch, and she barely ate dinner. Her nerves were still unsettled from the whole eating with a complete stranger thing. A dating stranger, as it was.

  A hand rested on her arm. She turned to see who it was. “Hey, Dane! I thought that was you at that obnoxious table!”

  She stood up from her stool and hugged him. He felt maybe a pound or two lighter and smelled like a nice light fragrance she used to remember. Woodsy and clean. Her arms fit easily around him. It was easier to see him in the bar versus the hospital emergency room the other day. Bad memories had a hold of her that day. Or was it just the elixir floating through her bloodstream that made it easy to hug him now?

  His hair looked as if he’d just gotten it cut. Dirty-blond, with more hues of brown, these days. But still those eyes. The nicest, gentlest eyes she’d seen. The kind that put you immediately at ease for whatever troubled you. The eyes that seemed to know her best these days. Now that Scott was gone.

  “Rachel, this is the last place I would think to see you. What are you doing here? Are you fully recovered from the other day? You haven’t returned any of my calls.” He spoke loud to be heard over the group that sat two tables over from them. They were yelling about something on the television screen.

  She sat back down, her body facing his direction, opposite of John. “I’d have to agree—it’s the last place I would expect me, too.” She touched his arm. She was feeling a little light-headed from her drink. The bartender set another one on her napkin, next to her empty glass. “What are you doing here?”

  He pointed to the table in the corner with a tilt of his head. “It’s Bobby Craig’s birthday. We’re taking him out to celebrate.”

  “Bobby Craig.” She said it as if it was a name she hadn’t heard in ages. “Don’t tell me you all are going to get him drunk and throw him in the river again?”

  He stared at her, a puzzled look on his face. “You remember that?”

  Was she not supposed to? “Yeah?”

  He seemed satisfied with her answer. As if it was a good thing she did. “Nah, we’re going to take him and drop him off in the middle of Nelson’s farm off Rt. 618. Let him sleep off his hangover with the cows.” He smiled like a bad child.

  “My gosh, Dane, he might get trampled.”

  Dane looked over Rachel’s shoulder to John. “Hi.” He held out his hand for a handshake.

  “Hi, I’m John.” John shook it.

  “My Lord.” Rachel looked down at the bar and held her forehead. “I don’t know where my manners are. I’m so sorry,” she told John. “This is Dane. He’s my business partner. And this is John.” She hesitated. “He fixed my electricity.”

  “Nice to meet you.” John stretched his lips into a straight-lined smile.

  “You, too,” Dane politely added. “Say Rach, would you like to dance?”

  She looked at John, hoping he’d say something. Instead, he just sat there without any sort of expression that she could misinterpret. “I don’t think so.”

  “John doesn’t care. It’s just a dance among friends.” He pulled her arm.

  “John, do you mind?” she asked, feeling as though she were pleading with her father to go out with her friends on a school night.

  “Not at all.” He pulled out his phone from his jacket pocket.

  “Okay, if you’re sure.”

  Dane escorted Rachel out on the dance floor and before she knew it, his body brushed up against her. She wished she didn’t down the second drink before going out there. One thing about liquor was that not only did it loosen her, but it brought out the skeletons that haunted her day and night. In the form of memories of Scott. She could close her eyes and pretend it was him who was dancing with her. Just like the old days.

  “I’ve missed this,” Dane said in her ear.

  The noise of his voice so close startled her and she opened her eyes. Dane’s eyes seemed to be staring into the depths of her soul. It was at the point that he rested his hands on her hips that she froze. Maybe it was the song, maybe it was the vodka, but whatever it was, it made her want to run home and join Gus on the sofa and not ever return to society. And familiar faces.

  “I’ve got to go, Dane.”

  “Rachel, don’t be silly.” He grabbed her arm, but she shook it free and ran toward the bar.

  When she got there, John was staring ahead at the bottles on the shelves. She touched his arm. “John, do you mind taking me home?”

  “No, not at all. Is everything all right?”

  “I just want to go home. That’s all.”

  He paid the bartender for their drinks and walked her to the door. It was quiet on the way home. Rachel felt as if her world was one continuous roller coaster. There was no telling when the surge of loneliness for her husband would hit her like a sucker punch to the gut.

  The awkwardness of the front door after a date. John had walked her to it and stood, waiting for her to retrieve her key from her bag. She noticed his knees were rubbing together. The temperatures had dropped with the late hour.

  “John, thank you for tonight.” Rachel turned to him after putting the key in the lockset.

  “It was my pleasure.”

  She took a big breath. “I’m afraid I’m not the best sort of date.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In all fairness, my mind wasn’t there tonight. And if I had to be brutally honest, I spent most of my evening dealing with the guilt that I was able to even go out.”

  “Yeah, I wasn’t completely there, either, I guess. Want to talk about it?” His blue eyes softened in the reflection of the porch light.

  “You’re too sweet.” She opened the door and stepped inside. “Come in for a minute.”

  He crossed the threshold, his hands buried deep in his pockets. Rachel slowly unbuttoned the front of her heavy wool coat.

  “I’m sure Peggy told you about the accident, but what she didn’t tell you was how I feel guilty for the whole thing.”

  Wrinkles formed on his brow as his head tilted. “Guilty?”

  “Yeah, you see, I don’t remember what happened that night. Before the accident. And by all accounts, I shouldn’t have even survived it. Our car struck a tree at sixty mph.” She began to struggle, stammering with the more words that fell from her lips. “I remember one of the doctors saying that surviving the crash was a complete miracle.”

  “That’s amazing.”

  Her eyes rose from the ground and stared into his eyes. “Yeah, a miracle. But surviving is not exactly what I’ve been doing. I’ve been doing anything but. I can’t even return to work. I lie to my mom, and my poor dog doesn’t get regular exerci
se.”

  Poor Gus was panting, looking at both of them from the floor.

  “I guess what I’m segueing to is that I’m not ready to date. I thought I sincerely was.” She touched the sleeve of his coat. “I’m sorry.”

  “Rachel, I think you’re a fantastic person. Not only that, but you’re kind, generous, and unbelievably attractive. And I know you’re going to get past this. Whatever it is. And I keep reminding myself that I, too, will get past what was done to me. I apologize for not being the best date I could’ve been.”

  “Nonsense, you were wonderful.”

  He blushed. “Well, I guess that means good-night.”

  She leaned in and gave him a kiss on the cheek. It sparked something in her as her lips met his warm face. But deep inside, she didn’t want to wreck an innocent life with a chance that tomorrow or next week she wouldn’t want anything to do with him. She was too unstable at the moment, and this was a stand-up guy. And anyway, he needed to get over whatever demons lurked in his own closet. She knew he was probably going to get back with his fiancée. Not that she deserved this guy. But whatever would be, would be.

  He flashed her another peek at his dimples before he walked off her porch into the darkness.

  She ran to the sofa after turning off the outside light and flopped down. Why was life so complicated?

  She closed her eyes and thought about Scott. Going out tonight and even seeing Dane stirred up some old memories. She ran her hand along the piping of the couch. Suddenly a memory splintered her recall. It was Dane, carrying Scott and dropping him on the sofa. She saw it in her mind, as if it had just happened.

  “What in the world happened?” she asked Dane, as he was lowering Scott to the cushions. Scott slurred a mumbling of words, his eyes half open.

  “Arty called and said to come get him. He was getting belligerent toward the bartender when he cut him off.”

  Arty was the owner of Jake’s. It didn’t make much sense. Arty said he didn’t want people to think he was uppity by naming the bar after himself. Jake was his black Labrador retriever. Anyway, Arty was Frank’s cousin—Frank, who was married to Peggy and was Scott’s uncle. When Arty called to tell her about her nephew, she gave Dane a call to pick him up and take him home.

  “Scott, why are you so drunk? What happened?” Rachel poked at her husband, while she sat on the edge of the sofa.

  It was too late; he was passed out. “Thanks, Dane. I don’t know what he’d do without you. I’ll have him call and thank you when he wakes up.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Rachel. Just give him lots of coffee and about a bottle of aspirin for the hangover he’s going to have.”

  And like it had come to her, in a snippet, it was gone. Rachel couldn’t explain the memory she had just experienced.

  She pulled a blanket over her, text a good-night to her mom, and closed her eyes while the television played a movie on Showtime. It starred Robin Williams. Rachel had seen it a thousand times but couldn’t remember the name. It was where he was a teacher. She listened to it play until she was fast asleep.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Chasing Old Ghosts

  It was around lunchtime when Rachel finally got off the sofa. She picked up her skirt on the floor next to where she slept and headed for a shower first. There was only one clean towel left in her linen closet. Her mother would be shocked in horror at the amount of dirty laundry in her home. It wasn’t as though there were secret people living in the other two rooms of the house, soiling half the stack that now cascaded down the side of the laundry basket. And it wasn’t as if her clothing became all that dirty with just walking around the house and standing at the back door waiting for Gus to use the bathroom.

  Standing in her robe, she rummaged in her closet for something to wear. She remembered a pair of pants she’d purchased last winter and shoved in the back. Like other purchases, she wasn’t going to wear them, and she’d end up making plans to take them back for the money. She was famous for doing that. But time had gotten away from her and she figured the receipt would all but be impossible to find by now.

  She was pulling out some wadded clothes, when Scott’s old uniform shirt fell to the ground. She knelt and picked it up, holding it close to her, trying to inhale any sort of scent that lay trapped in the threads. A lovely memory floated in her mind of how they met, and how this was the shirt he was wearing when it took place.

  Rachel was not the dating type. Always trapped within the pages of a textbook, she barely had minutes available for a social life. She only had three boyfriends her entire high school years, two during college (she was there to get an education, not fraternize), and none during medical school. There was no time; the curriculum kicked her butt. She had an occasional drink with her male friends, but nothing serious until Scott. He came during the last year of medical school.

  Her mom was in Connecticut for a visit when Rachel met him. They had gone shopping in the downtown district and Rachel suggested eating lunch at Jake’s. She had gone with some college friends, and it was across the street from where they last went in to pick up Aunt Gayle a spoon rest with a lighthouse painted on it. And Jake’s served the best crab rolls she’d ever had. Her mother was a sucker for New England seafood. She professed everything crustacean in Georgia was shipped from here.

  Rachel had spotted a table in the busy place and elbowed through the crowd to claim it. She remembered how busy it was that day. A lot of people and a large crowd on the second level, all wearing the same sports uniform. At first her mother said it was too busy to eat there, but a diligent waiter came and took their order only seconds after they sat down. That was right before Dane showed up with a friend to introduce her.

  “Say Rach, I never see you here,” Dane said, leaning on the back of her mother’s chair.

  “I usually eat in my apartment.” Rachel smirked at Dane. She knew him to be quite the flamboyant guy around campus. She had no clue as to why he was coming over to her table, but she didn’t mind. Because standing next to him was a hunk of a guy. She could see the sweat glisten from his neck and forearms. His uniform shirt had the number eight, and a few dirt stains streaked across it.

  “Right, well, it’s good to see you.” He nodded and began to walk off.

  Rachel saw his friend elbow his side. He rubbed it with his hand and backed up to the table again. “By the way, this is my friend, Scott.”

  Rachel drew in a gulp of air. When Scott smiled, she seemed to have sensed a short supply of oxygen in the room. He took off his hat and she was able to see his dark hair. It was short, but much thicker than Dane’s. Almost as if he grew it out, it wouldn’t be so kind as to lay flat. The blackness of it matched his eyes and dark complexion. He stood an inch shorter than Dane and carried a smile that made her want to get to know more about him. It was gentleman-like, yet there was trouble behind it.

  “Hi.” She was only able to get out one syllable.

  He wiped his hand on his shirt—the one that wasn’t holding a longneck beer. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  She shook his hand and that was all it took. Eleven months later, she was walking down the aisle at his cousin’s backyard, saying I do. Her mother kept telling her she was rushing into something, when she needed to focus on finishing her residency. Rachel wasn’t sure why she was doing it so fast. Maybe she was ready to settle down and begin her life plan. It wasn’t difficult to see that Scott made her happy. No one else Rachel dated had ever made her feel the way he did. He had what it took to ease her restless mind and comfort her into believing everything would be all right.

  ***

  Rachel fell on her bed, still wrapped in her blue robe. She hadn’t slept a full night in her bed in more than ten months, and the mattress felt good on her back. After the accident, it took her three months to change the bedding. She kept them preserved, with the same wrinkles Scott left on them before he died. When he still shared the bed with her. Now they remained in a wad at the bottom of her hamper. Getting them
off the bed was phase one; washing them was phase two.

  The day she finally did change them, she sat on the pile, crying. They would never have his smell on them anymore. She looked at the new ones, spread across her mattress, taut and white, with purple flowers stamped on every inch of the surface. She felt contempt for them and hadn’t slept in the bed since. Even ripping them off during one of her binge drinking nights and cursing them to the drum of the washing machine.

  The mattress felt new. It allowed her to stretch out, unlike the sofa. She hated the sofa, now. It was where she sat in the day, ate her dinner in the evening, and slept at night. Maybe some new furniture would be a good idea. Help her come around to enjoying her house more.

  “I know you’re disappointed in me, Gus, but I can’t do it. I’m not made to go out on dates. I was supposed to be married for the rest of my life. Grow old, have children, spoil grandchildren even more, and then die. This was not supposed to happen.” She looked over the edge of the bed at her loyal companion. He looked up and rested his head once again on the floor.

  Rachel knew last night was a bust. She had no practice at it. It wasn’t as though John wasn’t nice. He was more than nice. He didn’t try once to get fresh with her. Collette had told Rachel enough stories about the nightmares she’d gone through for Rachel to know John was good stock.

  Rachel would have to make up her mind to either stay home for the rest of her life or get out there. Staying home sounded pretty good at this point. She was a shy person by nature, although willing to stand up and ask questions at medical conferences in front of hundreds of people. (She patted herself on the back for that courage.) A girl who didn’t lose her virginity until she was in college and thought Ben was the one she was going to marry. What a joke that was. He turned out to be one of those guys who went home for Christmas break and came back wanting to break up because he did some soul searching and knew it wouldn’t work out. What he failed to mention was he got what he wanted and was ready to conquer another mountain. One with larger boobs and sat two rows over from her in Biology 101.