Secret of Lies

by Barbara Forte Abate

  “Thank you, honey. I admit I’ve put on a little weight, but, Lord, these have been tough times.”

  My mother nodded sympathetically.

  I felt at a complete loss for words despite the rush of questions racing through my mind. But they were questions I knew that I couldn’t possibly ask. Not yet. Not now.

  I averted my eyes, an overwhelming press of unease crowding my insides like an inflating balloon. I twisted my fingers in the full cotton skirt of my dress, knowing I should’ve approached her then and extended the perfunctory hug and kiss, yet finding myself unable to step forward.

  “Stevie, would you get your Aunt Smyrna another glass of iced tea?” my mother said. Then turning to my aunt, “How about some of those lemon cookies you like so much?”

  “No, no thank you, Libby. I’ve eaten a dozen already, haven’t I,” she chuckled, then hesitating just briefly, “But I would love a little drop of bourbon in that tea if you have it, dear. I’m still so keyed-up from the drive.” Her eyes darted to avoid contact as if embarrassed by her own request. “Just a little spritz to take the edge off, is all.”

  My mother was noticeably surprised. “Well no, Smyrna, I don’t think we have bourbon. Clinton has some kind of whiskey though. Will that be all right?”

  “Fine–that’ll be just fine.”

  I returned to the kitchen, stopping to retrieve the dusty brown bottle from the hall closet. The bottle had never been opened, offering little clue as to how long it’d actually resided there wedged into the corner. I only knew that for years it had remained a familiar object I’d become so accustomed to seeing whenever I searched for my snow boots or an evasive umbrella, that my gaze ordinarily passed over the bottle like something invisible–knowing it was always there without actually needing to see it.

  Shoving aside a single rubber rain boot and ancient wicker picnic basket, I stretched my hand deep, feeling along a dust ball garden until my fingers touched upon the smooth glass neck. Tipping the bottle out from its hiding place, I wondered why my father even bothered to keep it. No one in our house ever drank alcohol other than an occasional glass of wine with a special meal once or twice a year. While Aunt Smyrna, I easily surmised, allowed herself no such restrictions.

  I had little opportunity for private conversation with Aunt Smyrna in the week that followed. Every afternoon after Mr. Selby dropped me off from work, I went in the house to pour myself a cold drink before moving outside to join my mother and aunt. I’d quietly arrange myself on the wooden porch swing, slowly swaying back and forth as they talked, knowing it wouldn’t be long before they’d forgotten my presence and moved back into the depths of whatever conversation I’d momentarily disrupted with my arrival.

  “Stevie, there’s a basket of peas on the kitchen table. Would you bring them out here so we can shell them for supper?” Mom asked one afternoon when I came out onto the porch to join them.

  “Um hum,” I answered, pushing myself up from the swing where I’d only just settled to watch a trio of blue jays screeching madly as they dive-bombed the smaller birds attempting to eat at the backyard feeder.

  In the kitchen, I helped myself to a couple of the lemon tea cookies my mother had baked that morning before returning to the porch toting the requested basket.

  “ ... and I told him we have to sell that house whether he likes it or not.”

  I stopped short of the screen door, hoping to catch something of Aunt Smyrna’s words. For three years she’d kept up the ruse, was so adept in covering the truth I sometimes had difficulty deciphering fact from invention whenever I walked in on her telling my mother something Cal had recently said or done.

  “Well you know I feel the same way, Smyrna, I just don’t understand why he insists on holding onto it.”

  “He’s always had a problem with letting things go. It’s all about control.”

  She paused and I heard the chink of ice in her glass as she lifted it to her lips. I shifted the basket of peas in my arms, feeling guilty for eavesdropping but anxious to hear more–knowing my reappearance would bring an immediate halt to their discussion.

  “You shouldn’t drink anymore of that, Smyrna. It makes you–”

  “What? It makes me what? It makes me fat? It makes me ugly? Depressing? Am I depressing you, Libby?”

  “That’s not what I–”

  “He tells me he loves the ocean. He tells me as if I should give a damn. As if it makes a difference.”

  “Smyrna ...”

  “He’s always been selfish like that, Libby. He just always has been,” Aunt Smyrna said, and I could almost feel her voice scratching its way over my own tongue.

  “I have to know what’s going on,” I said, at last grasping an opportunity to corner Aunt Smyrna away from my mother, the two of us having volunteered to wash-up the supper dishes while my mother went out to the barn to help Dad finish up his customary round of evening chores.

  “I’m doing the best I can.”

  “I know, but it’s been three years already and all that stuff you’ve been telling Mom about you and him is ... it’s just weird. I can’t help but think maybe you’re looking for someone you might never find,” I said, purposely keeping my eyes from meeting hers as I soaped a dinner plate in the sink. “Maybe what we need to do is call the police. Maybe that’s what we should’ve done when he left.”

  “You think you can just do that after all this time? Simply call the police and say you just now remembered what really happened that night?” she said, holding a pretend telephone receiver in her hand, her voice tight, eyes staring hard at the side of my face.

  “What do you think it would do to your mother and father? Are you expecting them to welcome the news that your uncle was involved with Eleanor and now he’s long gone–that he hasn’t simply been working everyday for the last three years? There’s nothing easy about any of this. It’s like a nightmare that won’t end even after you open your eyes. But don’t forget, Stevie, you agreed to this. I told you what I thought was best and you agreed.”

  “I was fifteen-years-old.”

  “You have to give it time,” she said, for just a moment her voice taking on the tones of commiseration–a timbre I hadn’t heard from the beginning of her visit until now. “Do you honestly believe you’re prepared to tell your mother and father such a thing right now?”

  It was the very question she’d asked me three years earlier and the answer remained the same now as it had been then. Because there were no correct words. No proper time or method for telling the truth about Eleanor and Cal.

  I lifted my head and she faced me squarely, her expression deepening. “We need to be patient.”

  “But what if he really didn’t do it? What if it was just an accident and he had nothing to do with her dying? Maybe he only ran because he was afraid. Maybe he was just scared.”

  “Don’t ever let yourself believe that, Stevie. Don’t ever allow yourself to think he’s innocent of what happened,” she said, her eyes holding me like invisible hands, making it impossible to look away. We’d never discussed the specific occurrences of that night and I wondered just how many details she actually knew. “I promised you I’d find him and I will. He won’t be gone forever. He doesn’t have what it takes to be a fugitive.”

  And when I came home from work the following afternoon, it was to find she’d gone.

  Chapter Nineteen

  My second year away at college I returned to Callicoon for two weeks at Christmas and was immediately struck by my father’s unmistakable decline in health. Though he’d always been tall and slim, he now looked unnaturally thin and angular–fragile even.

  One afternoon, accompanying him as he moved deliberately though his chores, I was certain I’d detected something suggestive of pain spike in a lightning path behind his eyes. And while the episode had been fleeting–come and gone so quickly it almost seemed not to have happened–I found it impossible to ignore away.

  “Is something wrong with Daddy? Has he been
sick?” I asked my mother late one night after he’d gone to bed, my concerns having gained considerable weight over the past several days so that I could no long carry them without straining.

  She didn’t look up, instead continued to tear coupons from the newspaper opened before her on the kitchen table as if she hadn’t heard.

  “Mom?”

  “Um … well, he had a bad dose of flu last month and it’s taken him a little time to get his strength back. He just has to take it easy for a while, that’s all.” She folded the paper then pushed her chair back from the table. “So, have you grown too worldly and sophisticated for a game of gin rummy?” She smiled, easily changing the direction of our conversation.

  Clearly there was nothing for me to be worried about when Mom was so unconcerned herself. “No, but I only play for real money now.”

  “So do I,” Mom laughed, hugging me briefly. “It’s so good to have you home, honey.”

  “It’s good to be home, Mom.” My voice offered the lie easily, while my heart held tightly to the truth that I couldn’t wait to leave again. The desire to run as far and as fast as I possibly could from the deepening shadows of my old life, growing larger and more pressing with each passing year.

  Daddy died in early spring. I’d only just returned to the dorm after a hectic morning of final exams when the call came through.

  “Come home, honey, Daddy’s gone,” my mother’s voice, barely more than a whisper, cracked through the receiver as she struggled to hold back her anguish.

  And whether I answered her then–cried out, collapsed into impossible convulsions of tears and grief–I couldn’t remember.

  Less than two hours later I was on the train heading back to Callicoon, staring beyond the dust streaked windows to the world moving past and thinking how even the day itself was the cruelest of contradictions to my grief; the sort of afternoon my father had always loved best, a brilliant blue sky rolled out like shimmering gift wrap, sweet tasting air subtly stirring the rich aroma of rebirth rising up from the earth–every ray and molecule exuberantly crying out for life.

  “Do you smell that? That’s the smell of the earth giving birth,” was the thing Daddy used to say.

  And I could–in the sun’s white radiance sunk deep into the soil; in the trees and shrubs dotted with fragile green buds; in the pale spikes pushing up through the dirt. These promised signs of life making it all feel especially harsh and painfully unjust now when I was going home to see my father laid to rest in it.

  I’d surprised myself by operating on a level of calm efficiency I hadn’t previously known myself to possess. Aside from the immediate decisions imperative to consummating Daddy’s funeral arrangements, there were a multitude of financial issues; necessary chores and responsibilities involved in the daily sun-up, sun-down running of a farm. An un-milked cow couldn’t wait for grief to move aside before being relieved of its daily burden, nor chickens left to nest on mounds of un-gathered eggs. Just as bare fields perpetually unplanted promised certain famine.

  Unlike when Eleanor died, my mother made little effort to conceal her heartbreak. I sensed how much she needed me with her, yet even then, there were times as we sat together eating supper or watching the Ed Sullivan Show in an effort to divert our attentions from continual mourning, when I could almost feel her thoughts spinning off–taking her to some private place where I couldn’t go.

  Could it be she’d loved Daddy so much more? But no, I didn’t really believe that to be true. It seemed far more likely the depths of this newest grief had more to do with the fact that when she’d lost Eleanor I’d been a girl. Young enough that she’d seen it as necessary to shield me from her anguish. But I was nearly twenty now. An adult. Old enough to share her pain.

  I’d hoped, but hadn’t really expected, Aunt Smyrna to resurface from her self-imposed exile. The extent of her correspondence since leaving our house nearly two summers earlier had been to send Mom one letter and a handful of postcards from various places distantly linked across the country–the most recent from Nevada. But in time even those minimal communications had stopped coming, her persisting absence necessitating we face our loss and handle our decisions alone.

  As much as I privately worried over the uncertain question of returning to school, our immediate concerns remained with the farm. It had already grown late in the season for planting the corn, but because no crop meant no cash, it was an assignment requiring our prompt attentions nevertheless.

  “I don’t know the first thing about planting corn,” I protested when Mom broached the subject. “Daddy never even let me drive the tractor–not after that time when Eleanor flattened the chicken coop.”

  “We’ll just do the best we can. It can’t be any worse than having no crop at all–especially if we end up having to eat every last ear ourselves to keep from starving.”

  I might have at least made an attempt at enthusiasm for my mother’s sake, if not for the fact all prospects for optimism had already died and been subsequently buried under a mountain of uncertainties. When it came to milking our cow Gertrude and feeding the chickens, I was more than capable. But planting acres of corn? No matter what angle I viewed it from, the potential for success remained the same–no less probable than growing cantaloupes on the moon.

  The sun was just winking over the trees as we crossed the yard and headed out to the waiting fields. The chilly vapor of early morning still hung in the air and the grass lay wet and shimmering beneath a transparent cover of dew.

  Ours was a small farm. “Just enough for one man to handle,” Daddy always said; his thirst for the land and sky and growing things nourishing his strength and framing his character as if he himself was rooted in the soil.

  In years previous, his sentimental descriptions of our isolated and uninspired surroundings (... orderly columns of gold tasseled soldiers striping the fields, pastures rolling like lushly carpeted rooms without walls, distant hills royally crowned by a majestic congregation of tufted green heads ...) had been largely lost to my own prudent sensibilities, though later, as I grew older and somewhat wiser, his observations had appealed to me as the quaintly detailed musings of a poetic soul. Yet now, standing beside my mother, staring out across the endless range of upturned earth, I saw nothing which might classify as poetic or even remotely visionary in the labors awaiting us.

  The sun, fully awake and beaming, rose steadily in a cloudless blue sky as we commenced to planting our field, my mother and I talking and laughing as we moved along dropping last year’s kernels into the ready trenches combed over the hillside. We pressed forward–rhythmically dropping kernels and covering them with dirt, dropping and covering–our conversation eventually dying away as the morning dragged on like a broken limb.

  By mid-day the heat was pressing down like an incandescent socket plugged directly overhead; the sun burning my scalp and staining my face and bare arms pink–then red. It wasn’t long before I found myself wishing I’d listened to my mother’s earlier insistence I bring a hat, rather than waving aside her advisement with the remark that wearing hats was mortifyingly old-fashioned.

  My mother’s voice, sweet and clear, drifted toward me as she started to sing. And though now separated by enough distance to hinder conversation, I easily recognized the timeworn hymn I’d heard as often as a bird’s familiar warble as she went about her daily routine. A boulder swelled thick and heavy in my throat. She was courageous, my mother, so unlike my own sorrowful self, trudging through the yet to be planted rows of dirt, selfishly dwelling on my own discomfort, hating the land and the sun and the sweat trickling down my neck and soaking my blouse in damp patches. Somehow, despite the telltale signs of weariness settled over her body–the droop of her shoulders, the slight bending forward of her head assuring that her back felt just as stiff and unyielding as my own–she’d nevertheless succeeded in holding open a place inside herself capable of singing meaningfully of faith, and strength, and hope.

  Judging from the position of the
sinking sun it was late in the afternoon, closer possibly to evening, when we surrendered to exhaustion and quit our labors for the day.

  “It wouldn’t be so bad if we could just get the tractor running,” I said, taking a stretch toward optimism as we trudged back toward the house.

  “We’ll try it again tomorrow,” Mom replied wearily. “Maybe we just need to fool with it a bit.”

  Nearly tumbling into the backyard like climbers at long last reaching the summit, we dropped the burlap bags containing our meager remains of lunch and the last of the planting corn we’d taken to the field, leaving them in a heap outside the kitchen door.

  “You go ahead and jump in the bath first,” Mom offered generously. “I’ll start supper.”

  I nodded appreciatively. I couldn’t remember when I’d last felt so thoroughly grimy–or if indeed I ever had been. But even worse was that beneath the surface filth, the exposed skin on my face and arms radiated with the certain promise of painful sunburn.

  I turned to answer her, at once startled to catch sight of a strange man approaching from the direction of the barn. “Who’s that?”

  “I don’t know,” Mom said, apparently having spotted him at nearly the same instant as I had.

  “Hello,” he called out as he neared.

  Mom hesitated a beat before answering. “Hello?” she said. More a question than a greeting.

  “Mrs Burke?”

  I stared at the man as he spoke, immediate pinpricks of uncertain recognition pinching the delicate place at my temples and sporadically along my hairline.

  She nodded. “Who are you? What were you doing in my barn?”

  “No one answered when I knocked at the house so I figured I might find you there.” He extended his hand. “My name’s Ash Waterman. Your neighbor Malcolm is a friend of mine. He told me you were looking to hire someone to help out on your farm.”