Our Little Secret

by Roz Nay

  “Haym?” Saskia’s head tilted. “Settle down. It’s nice to have mates over. Let’s not spoil good tucker.”

  HP got up then, and took a long time in the kitchen finding a beer.

  After we’d made it through dinner, I drove Ezra and his date home. We took off down the north shore of Cove Lake, Ezra next to me in the passenger seat, his window wound down as he howled like a wolf in the night air. We were almost in town by the time he turned to face me. “I still fucking hate Saskia.”

  I exhaled and switched gears.

  “She took him right out from under us, LJ. When I first met her, I thought she was going to be a good thing.” He squinted into the rearview mirror. In the backseat his date was fast asleep. “You remember my old dog in high school? Renfield, you called him, needy as shit, crazy, followed me from room to room?”

  I nodded and turned left.

  “You know what I figured out lately? Saskia is Renfield. She’s everywhere, always whining, pawing, desperate to help.” He grimaced. “I hated that dog. Wanted it gone.” He paused. “Here, this is me.”

  I pulled up outside a ragged apartment building with a paneled door smeared with a thousand fingerprints.

  “You wanna come up? Have a coffee? Make out?” He fumbled his way out of the car and opened the rear door, pulling at the arm of his girlfriend. “Or whatever, turn me down. It wouldn’t be the first time.” He crouched in the gap of the passenger door while his date toppled out.

  “Ez, whatever happened to your dog?”

  “Got hit by a car,” he said. “Still had to pay to get it put down.”

  * * *

  I drove back to HP’s house and opened the door quietly. Saskia was on the couch in the living room, HP beside her.

  “He’s just lost,” HP was saying. “He doesn’t mean anything by it.”

  “He hates me. They all do. I can’t get anything right. Even Angela—”

  I walked straight into the living room.

  “Hey,” said HP, sitting up. “You get them back safely?”

  “Yeah. Ezra was in a chatty mood.”

  Saskia looked at her feet. Olive cried out upstairs and Saskia jumped up as if an Olympic pistol had just fired, leaving HP and me alone.

  I sat next to him on the couch. I don’t know why, maybe I was thinking of those post-graduation days, but I jabbed him in the ribs, play-fighting.

  “What are you…?” He batted me away, or maybe he was going to start a tickle fight, but just then Saskia appeared in the doorway holding Olive.

  “Babe?” Her face was flushed. “I need you; her bed needs changing.”

  HP pushed me away and stood. He strode out of the living room without even looking back.

  I couldn’t fall asleep that night, so I wandered downstairs in the darkness. I’ve always liked the quiet in a house when everyone else is sleeping. Houses take on a life of their own in the early hours of the morning: the hum of the fridge increasing to fill the absence of voices; the fabric of furniture lush to the fingertips; floorboards primed to release sound. I moved around like a chess piece, stepping this way and that, my feet finding the parts of the floor I knew were noiseless. Through the living room window, the moon shone high over the smooth lake. The water rolled like mercury, thick and viscous.

  One of Olive’s stuffed toys lay slumped on the windowsill, so after a while I went up to her room to return it. Dusky light striped the stairway through the window. How soft the steps were under my feet, the broad strokes of HP’s shoulders and hands having smoothed the wood. A children’s book lay on Olive’s bedroom floor, ready to be read tomorrow. Are You My Mother? the title read. I stepped around it to the side of the bed.

  “Olive,” I whispered. A crescent of brown skin peeped out from where her pajama top had ridden up. Her belly button rose and fell. “Olive, move over.”

  I lay my body along the warmth of her. She turned and threw a short arm around my neck. We lay like that for a minute. Then she opened her eyes, blinking and rubbing at her nose with a knuckled fist.

  “Where’s Mommy?” she asked.

  “Next door, sleeping. Can I lie in here with you for a bit?”

  “You can have Chops.” She found a rag-doll lamb and placed him alongside my neck. “Mom says I’m a big girl and I need to sleep in my own bed.”

  “She’s right. You are a big girl.”

  “You are, too. But I won’t tell.”

  We slept like that until dawn, when I slipped back to my own room.

  * * *

  A few days after the disastrous dinner party with Ezra, I walked in from work to find Saskia and Olive coloring princess castles at the dining room table. They both looked up when I entered, brushing blond hair from their brows in perfect synchronicity.

  “Where’s HP?” I asked. I was hungry and opened the fridge.

  “Baseball practice. Their team’s killing it. It’s so exciting.”

  He played in a beer league, slow-pitch, on the same team as Ezra. They had a game every Saturday, a thinly veiled excuse to go to the bar every Saturday night from May to September.

  When I took a can of soda pop from the fridge, Olive’s eyebrows shot up. “You want one?” I asked her.

  “No, thank you!” Saskia chimed on Olive’s behalf. She didn’t look up from the coloring, moving her golden pen within the lines. I wandered over to their table and sat down. She clicked the lid of the pen back onto the marker and stood up, brushing her hands on the front of her frayed jean shorts.

  “Let’s go for a walk! Come on, all of us. It’s beautiful outside. You can’t beat spring in Vermont.”

  “What, now?” I’d just walked in the door.

  “It’ll be fun. Olive, get your bike. You can ride the lakeside path, and Godmother Angie and I will walk.”

  It was only a block to the beach, and the path around the lake was paved smooth enough that Olive could easily pedal on it, although she needed help getting going. Her bicycle helmet had pink bunny rabbits along its edges, and glittery plastic tassels hung from the handlebars, clacking in the wind as she rode.

  I took my soda with me and drank it as we walked. As soon as Olive was up ahead of us, Saskia launched her question.

  “How long do you think you’ll stay with us?” Her tone was light. “I know your mom is eager for you to go home.…”

  I scrunched my can and threw it in the recycle bin. “How do you know that?”

  She threaded her arm through mine, throwing me off stride. “Ange, can I ask you something?”

  I unlinked my arm before I spoke. “Go ahead. I won’t bite.”

  “Do you think you and I could be friends?” From there it was a flood, a torrent. “I mean, I know we get on and everything, but I’ve been thinking about it heaps lately, and I want to be close with you like Haym is—you know, the kind of friendship you can count on. I see how you feel about him.”

  I looked at her carefully. Her eyes were wide, her palms open as she spoke. I said nothing.

  “I mean you guys have a history—you’ve known each other much longer than I’ve—”

  “Eleven years.”

  “Gosh. I’m only at seven.” Saskia took a breath. “Okay, well, what I’m saying is I’d like that for us, too. For you and me.” She stopped walking and blinked at me with summer-sky eyes. She looked like a child at a magic show, watching the handkerchief, waiting for the pure white dove.

  Up ahead, Olive wobbled to a stop. She pointed at a tree and yelled something that the wind whipped across the lake. Saskia waved and gave her a thumbs-up. When she turned to me, she seemed more confident.

  “Sometimes I think we met on the same night because of fate. I mean, if you’d told me in that beer tent in Oxford that one day we’d all be living in the same house on a beautiful lake, walking on a cool evening with my daughter playing in front of us—well … It’s just proves things work out as they should.”

  “Seems too good to be true.”

  “It’s just a dream of m
ine to have a woman I can talk to, trust. I’ve always known the universe would look after me. I know we can be closer.”

  Just then Olive got too tired to try pedaling and Saskia had to push the bike all the way home with her back half bent. There was no more conversation, no more girl talk. We walked home in the dusk and it was then that I knew how this story would turn out. On the lake, a dark wave gathered, stretching and flexing. Soon it would flood, slipping under the doorways of her house and seeping into every window, turning every wall from blue to black.

  The universe was coming for her and nobody saw it but me.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “Is Saskia’s disappearance the ending you’re referring to, Angela?” Novak asks.

  “Maybe it’s the real world teaching her a lesson.”

  “That’s cold.”

  “Perhaps.” I refuse to give more.

  He sits back, disgusted. “We found your big glass jar, you know.”

  It takes me a minute to figure out what he might be talking about, and immediately my mouth floods with bile. “What big glass jar?” There’s no way he can know about that. I’ve never said a thing.

  “The one in your closet, Angela, dusty and hidden up high behind yearbooks and grad memorabilia. Your ‘Manifestations Jar.’” He makes air quotes around the phrase. “Did you think we wouldn’t find it?”

  “That’s not mine. It can’t be. I threw it out years ago.” My goddamn mother. Why would she have pulled that from the trash? “Mom must have salvaged it,” I say.

  “Interesting. So your mom rescued your manifest destiny.”

  The catchphrase shocks me. Did my mother give him that? I shift in my seat, smooth a wrinkle out of my pant fabric. “The jar was her idea. It was a dumb teenage thing. Whatever’s in there isn’t mine anymore, Novak.”

  “Whatever’s in there is handwritten, committed to paper. I told you, it makes things so much easier for us,” he says.

  “You can’t use the thoughts I had as a nineteen-year-old kid against me! That’s ridiculous.” My brain races, trying to remember what I might have written down.

  “They’re bringing the jar in. We’ll take a look then, shall we? At the very least, it’ll be a nice walk down memory lane.”

  “I want a lawyer.”

  “I was wondering when you’d ask.”

  * * *

  We’d come so far together, I didn’t want Novak to leave just yet. It’s strange, the attachments we form in spite of ourselves. And besides, I hadn’t told him enough of the story. I hadn’t even told him about the big fight; I knew he’d want to hear about it. I picked up from a few days before the first weekend in June, when HP told me that Saskia’s book club and his baseball game were both the coming Saturday.

  “I don’t mind watching her,” I offered. “I’ll just be here reading anyway.”

  “No Freddy this weekend? That’s a drag.” HP rinsed a dinner plate and handed it to me to dry and put away.

  “I’m meeting him next weekend in Boston. He’s paying for everything. This Saturday he’s at a conference in Virginia.”

  “Of course he is. Up there, left-hand side.” He nodded at a cupboard and then pointed with his elbow, his hands still in the water.

  “It’s on smuggling opiates undetected across borders.”

  “That’d be cool if it was anyone else. That guy couldn’t do anything undetected.”

  I glanced sideways at HP. “I think Freddy’s just expected to know about it; I’m sure he hasn’t done it himself.”

  “Yeah, well.” HP swirled the sponge over another plate. “I get the feeling he probably has some firsthand experience with illegal activity that he hasn’t disclosed. You can’t work with chemical warfare and remain completely innocent.”

  I weighed what he said but didn’t speak. Upstairs Saskia’s footsteps creaked on the floorboards outside Olive’s bedroom, and HP looked up at the ceiling.

  “Nobody’s innocent anymore.” I slowly clipped the old cupboard door closed. “It doesn’t matter what job you do: It’s a rite of passage.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We’ve all gotten older. It’s impossible to do that without taking damage, or causing it.”

  He turned to face me then, his arms hanging by his sides. Suds dripped from his fingertips onto the tiled floor.

  “I can’t ever tell what you’re getting at lately.”

  “I’m not getting at anything.”

  “You’re just…” He threw out one hand so that small drops of water splattered against the wall. “You’re so negative about everything. Sometimes you’re a real downer.”

  “HP, in my experience—”

  “Oh, change the tune. Seriously. All you know are death marches.”

  I moved away from him, stopping with my hand on the kitchen door. “I can’t believe you think that about me.”

  “You’ve been churning out misery for a decade. Can’t you see that we feel sorry for you? All of us?”

  All of us? What was that supposed to even mean? With his back to the door, he couldn’t see my eyes burning into the back of his skull. I kept my voice level. “If I’m so difficult to be around, do you even want me to babysit?”

  “Yes. Olive likes you. We decided long ago to include you in our family, to take the high road, to try to help you. But it would be a lot easier if you didn’t act like Eeyore in Olive’s Winnie-the-Pooh book.” Despite the wisecrack, he didn’t turn around. I slinked out and, on the way up the stairs, passed Saskia.

  “Going to bed already?” Shadows from the landing window wisped across her composed face; even at night she glowed. “Are you okay?”

  I laughed. “HP and I had a fight. He’s being an asshole. It’s nothing.”

  She sighed. It sounded maternal and made me gag. “Well, sometimes that happens. It’s best to just sleep it off and it’ll all be all right in the morning.”

  “You talk like you know him better than me,” I said.

  Her face screwed up into a question mark. “I’m his wife. Of course I know him.”

  “Do you know about Thomson?”

  Her eyes shot up as if jolted.

  There it was. Real, faltering doubt. HP hadn’t told his wife about his poor dead brother. She looked about to cry.

  “Listen,” I said. “Forget about that. All I’m saying is that wives, husbands—for a lot of people it’s nothing but a job description and there’s always the hope of promotion.”

  Saskia placed her arm carefully on the railing and moved down one step past me. “Is this what you and Hamish were fighting about—you bringing up the institution of marriage again?”

  “No. HP and I were disputing more important things.” She still wouldn’t walk all the way down the stairs. “Look, everything’s fine. Apparently, it doesn’t matter what I think or what I say.”

  “Maybe stop talking all the time, then,” she snapped.

  “Excuse me?”

  She lifted her chin. “Just shut up a little bit. Nobody would mind.” It took everything she had to say it. It was like a choir girl swearing in church.

  I reached down and patted her on the shoulder. “That’s more like it, Saskia! Good for you. At last you show up to the fight.”

  * * *

  I return my mind to the present. I’ve been entirely honest with Novak, so my conscience is clean. I don’t know if he’ll believe it, but HP never once apologized. Not for anything. You’d think if a guy made a series of wrong turns, he’d eventually stop driving the car and get out. Not HP. The next morning was Friday and when I woke for work, I could hear him grinding coffee beans in the kitchen. It was June so his timetable was more relaxed, but he always got up and made breakfast before going for a run. Olive didn’t usually wake until close to eight and since Saskia’s whole existence was dictated by motherhood duty, her clock was linked entirely to her daughter’s. She rarely made an appearance until after I’d left. If I timed it right, I could usually catch HP alone for a soli
d twenty minutes before I had to get to the office.

  He turned when I walked into the kitchen and then carried on grinding his coffee. He was barefoot, in shorts and a tank top as usual. Early summer had darkened his shoulder blades. I slid into a chair at the breakfast counter and readjusted the bust of my shirt.

  He came over and stood opposite me, bringing a cup filled to the brim with steaming coffee.

  “You want some, you can help yourself,” he said.

  “I’m good. They have coffee at work.”

  He watched me for a few seconds before speaking—long enough that I felt the color rise in the skin around my throat. “So you and my wife had quite the little chat last night.”

  I licked my lips. “Did we?”

  “You’ve no right to use my family’s tragedy as part of your little game.”

  “I didn’t. I just said your brother’s name is all.”

  “Why can’t you just grow up, Angela? Everything’s a test to see who I like more. Is there anything you want to ask me? Anything you don’t understand?”

  I shook my head.

  “Good. Because I’d hate to think you’re harboring some old resentment. Life’s too short.” His expression relaxed a little, and he took another sip of coffee. “There are things about me that only you know. You have that—it’s yours. You don’t need to keep proving it to everyone.”

  He looked at me, a look I didn’t understand. “You can’t live here forever. You can’t keep relying on us to dig you out of a hole. Go have some fun for once in your life.”

  The kitchen door opened and Saskia walked in wearing HP’s robe and carrying Olive.

  “Honey, I was just saying to Angela that it’s time for her to go. No problem or anything, no fight; just time to move on.”

  Saskia gripped her daughter close. “Of course, you’re always welcome to visit. Drop by at sundowners. Olive would love to see you.” All three sentences were of identical flatness and weight, doled out like dinner plates.

  “Angela’s leaving? No!” shouted Olive. Everyone pretended they hadn’t heard her.

  “I’ll be gone by Sunday. Is that fast enough?” I stood up from my chair, smoothing out my clothes.