The Art of Keeping Secrets

by Patti Callahan Henry

  Jake stood and went to her. “What made you so upset in the first place?”

  She shook her head. Jake walked toward the window, stared outside. “Why can’t you tell me?”

  “I just . . .”

  He turned and she saw his gaze move toward the canvas; then he took two steps toward the easel. Sofie stepped in front of him. “That was my mother’s,” she said.

  “Did she paint it?” Jake attempted to move around her.

  “Yes,” Sofie said. “But she never finished it.” She leaned down, picked up the fallen muslin and placed it back over the translucent starfish.

  “You won’t let me see it.” Jake’s voice took on a hard edge where soft concern had been moments ago.

  “It’s not mine to show you.” Her voice shook.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Are you here to find out about my mother?” A flood tide of anger rose in the empty places of Sofie’s broken heart. “I thought maybe you were here . . . for me.”

  “I am.” He reached for her hand.

  She backed away from him. “I’m so tired. Thanks for telling me what John said—I need you to go now.”

  Jake stared at her, and his face shifted like the surface of the water when a strong breeze blows over it. He walked to the kitchen counter, wrote his phone number and e-mail address on a scrap of paper. “If you need anything, let me know. I’m sorry about what you’ve been through.” He went to the door and placed his hand on the doorknob before he faced her again. “I know you don’t trust me. But if you knew me, really knew me, you would. I have no idea what you’re so scared of, but it shouldn’t be me.”

  She backed into the wall, lifted her hands to her face so she wouldn’t have to watch him leave. The door clicked shut, and she slid down the wall, sat on the hardwood floor and wept for all the things that were true: Delphin had called her name; Jake cared for her; her mother was dead; Knox Murphy was dead; and she held the key to Jake and Annabelle’s questions, yet she couldn’t let the answers go, couldn’t release them into their hands.

  When she rose from the floor and moved to the kitchen, the need for knowledge overwhelmed her. Somewhere out in the open sea, her heart had changed beats, and the need to know finally overcame her need to hide. The power her secrets had held over her had never caused her heart to hurt like this new ache that spread through her body. Before, it had been enough that she had Bedford, her dolphins, her town and the water. But now a new world called to her and the only barrier was the never-ending, escalating fear of her father; her old life had to be disassembled so she could create a new one.

  Sofie ran to the back bedroom, to the filing cabinet she hadn’t touched since her mother’s death, and pulled the top drawer wide. After Sofie had sold the art studio, she’d shoved the signed papers in here, ignoring the stacks she glimpsed in her mother’s handwriting. They’d lived a simple life, relied on cash for their basic needs. There had been no reason to go through records looking for insurance claims or bonds, for stock options or mutual funds because there were none. Now it was time to find him. There was nothing else to be scared of but him. If her mother and her grandmother and Knox were gone, what else remained?

  Only one fear: that she would never know her name, that even the dolphins couldn’t tell her who she was.

  Papers piled across the floor as Sofie went through file folders filled with old report cards, thick papers confirming ownership of the art studio, their condo, their car. Sofie worked her way to the back of the cabinet, finally pulled out the last folder and opened it. Inside was her birth certificate: Sofie Eloise Parker. Mother: Liddy Marie Parker. Father: Unnamed.

  Sofie threw the birth certificate across the room.

  She dug deeper. The last item was a brittle yellow envelope taped to the inside of the folder. The glue had long since given out. Sofie shook the envelope; a driver’s license fell out. The picture on the Ohio license was blurry and cracked, but it was her mother as a young and breathtaking beauty. Sofie leaned closer: her mother’s eyes were wide and almost haunted, staring past the camera as though she were looking at someone behind the photographer.

  Sofie glanced at the name: Diane Margaret Collins. A shudder ran through Sofie.

  She tried it on her tongue: Sofie Eloise Collins.

  Collins might be her given name, but it was not her real name. Sofie Eloise Parker, then Milstead were the names given as gifts from her mother. A lifesaving name meant to protect and nurture.

  Just as she’d told Jake, there was only one of almost everything in this town, and she called the only private investigator: Joseph Martin. She’d gone to high school with him, and he’d once told her that he’d imagined for himself a glamorous life of tracking down criminals and racketeers, maybe even pirates, but mostly he exposed wayward spouses and uncovered insurance fraud.

  He answered the phone on the first ring. “Hey, Joseph, this is Sofie Milstead.”

  “Hey, Sofie. What can I do for you?”

  “I know this is a strange request—but I’m looking for a woman named Diane Margaret Collins who once lived in Ohio in the early eighties, and was married. I want to know what happened to her . . . and to her husband.”

  Silence filled the line.

  “Are you there?” Sofie asked.

  “Yes,” he said, “just writing it down.”

  “Joseph, of course I’ll pay you. I’m not asking for a personal favor.”

  “Do you know this woman?”

  “Yes,” Sofie said. “Do you need to know more than that?”

  “No . . .”

  “Thanks, old friend. Just call me if you find out anything.”

  She hung up and stared at the canvas across the room. Half-finished, partially known things were cluttering her life: knowledge of her father; her relationship with Bedford; telling the Murphy family the truth; her mother’s art; her own research.

  She needed and wanted something to be finished, whole and complete. She walked toward her mother’s canvas, ripped off the muslin. She stood and stared at the starfish as a fiery wind filled her middle, as her fingers picked up the paintbrushes waiting for her touch.

  She opened the paint tubes one at a time, squirted colors onto the palette. When she first touched the brush to the paint, time and space collapsed. Her hands and arms moved of their own accord; the instructions her mother had imparted to her returned in a brilliant remembrance. Sofie recalled what her mother had once taught her about background and foreground, about the play of light and dark, the translucent nature of paint.

  Sofie painted methodically, not moving to another part of the painting until one section was complete. Thoughts and memories ran through her head like a rapid-fire slide show. Although her focus was on the minutiae of the painting, her mind wandered to elusive memories in hidden corners of her mind, briefly glimpsed.

  Her mother had stood behind her, holding the brush, reaching forward. The sun had come from behind them, falling through the windowpanes onto the canvas, onto their faces. Warmth had spread through Sofie while her mother held her hand and arm. “No, Sofie, stop forcing it. The paint is like truth or love—you cannot make it something it is not. Let it come naturally—let the picture rise from the brush while you surrender to the work.”

  Then came a memory of Knox, dimly lit. He and her mother were in the kitchen. Sofie was in the bedroom, but could see them through a crack in the door. They thought she was asleep. The next morning, when Knox was gone, her mother would be withdrawn, painting furiously and silently, shutting out Sofie and everyone around them. The days before Knox came were buoyant with happiness, and the days after he left overflowed with misery.

  When he prepared to leave, it was worse—her mother stood in the kitchen with her head in her hands, her face contorted with silent sobs. Knox held his hand over her head, touched her while she crumpled into him like a broken figurine. The only words Sofie remembered were her mother’s: “Please, please stay. This time please stay.” She always begged for th
at.

  When grief from this memory prodded at Sofie’s heart, she did what her mother had taught her—she painted with more focus, more determination. Knox and her mother were both gone.

  Gone.

  Then Jake’s face came to her, and dizziness overwhelmed her. She sat down on the round stool in front of the painting, felt the weakness in her arms settle into her shoulders. Knox’s son. She’d almost forgotten that before anything else, he was Knox’s son.

  There had once been bright and brilliant days when she pretended she was Knox’s child. He’d come for a visit and take them sailing or cook them dinner while Liddy talked faster and with more animation than usual. And under her breath, Sofie would whisper, “Dad,” although she knew he wasn’t her father.

  Her own father must never know she existed. He did not deserve the title “dad,” or so her mother had told her numerous times. To Sofie, he was a man without a face, without a name.

  Sofie had hated Jake, despised Keeley, for they had Knox. He was their dad, their steadfast rock, the ones he went home to. How had she forgotten that she hated Jake, hated the Murphy family? Oh, the agony of loving someone you can’t have, who cannot stay.

  While she painted, she brought forth the hate, let it rise around and above her like an overflowing tide. She allowed her loathing for the Murphy family to become part of her again. Then she kept painting, and the emotion subsided as she recalled Jake’s sweet touch, his belief in her ideas about the dolphins.

  Sofie allowed all these thoughts and emotions to sweep over her like clouds in time-lapse photography. She noticed them, but didn’t try to follow them.

  When exhaustion spread over her body, she lay down. When hunger prodded her, she ate. When thirst brought a headache, she drank.

  One afternoon a long time ago, it might have even been in Marsh Cove, she’d asked her mother how she knew when a painting was done. Her beautiful mother had stared off into space for such a long time that Sofie thought she hadn’t heard her question. When she finally turned to Sofie, she shrugged. “I wish I had a good answer for my little girl, but like love, you just know and you can’t fake it.”

  Now Sofie knew what her mother meant. The painting was done and she knew it. She didn’t love Bedford, and she knew it. This was why her mother painted—it showed her the truth, it revealed the heart—and Sofie felt a thrill and fright at this knowledge, at this powerful connection to her mother’s psyche.

  Two days had passed, and now the painting was complete.

  Sofie walked into the kitchen, made a cup of tea and waited for Bedford. He was due back any minute now—she’d heard the message machine in the distance of her art-induced fog.

  Bedford opened the door with his key; Sofie took a sip of tea and backed against the counter. He smiled. She stood still and quiet, cocked her head at him. “Hello, Bedford.”

  “I’ve missed my sweet girl.” He came to her. “I’ve been so worried about you. Why haven’t you answered your phone for two days?”

  “I didn’t want to talk to you.” Sofie found the truth easy and weightless, so freeing that she smiled when she said it.

  He placed his hands on her shoulders. “I can understand you’ve been exhausted and haven’t wanted to talk on the phone. But I sure missed your voice.”

  She moved his hands off her. “No. You’re not listening. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk on the phone—I didn’t want to talk to you.”

  He stepped back. “What do you mean?”

  “Bedford, it’s over between us. It probably never should have started.”

  He glanced around the room as if he were searching for someone else, a reason she would utter these words, as though someone must be holding a gun to her head. He moved toward the canvas, and then gazed over his shoulder, up and down her jeans and the old T-shirt spattered with paint. “You’ve been painting.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s okay, Sofie. You’re having a mild breakdown. It’s going to be okay. You’ve never really processed your mother’s death, and you’ve been alone for three days, embedded in her artistic passion. You don’t feel like yourself.”

  She laughed and the sound rising from her throat felt foreign and sweet. “I am not a chart, a diagram or a psych patient. I am not having a breakdown. I am not embedding myself in my mother’s art. I finished a painting.” She lifted her hands in the air. “Formulate a hypothesis, observe, analyze, interpret. I can say it in my sleep. You see life through the prism of the scientific method. What about mystery and wonder? What about love and God?”

  “You want to believe in fairy tales and talking animals, Sofie. That is your problem—you can’t face reality.”

  Bedford walked around the easel, brushed his hair back from his face. Sofie found the familiar motion irritating. “You play with your hair like a girl,” she said.

  His head snapped up. “What did you just say?”

  “Bedford, please go home.”

  His clenched his fists at his sides. Control was his North Star, his guiding force, and she had just removed it. She reacted as she did when a shark came near the dolphin pod: remained calm, kept her movements slow. “Bedford, please don’t say anything you’ll regret.”

  He laughed. “Regret? I only regret the time I’ve spent with you. You’re a spoiled child whose mother completely warped your sense of self and your notion of real life.” His hands gestured wildly. “You live in a fantasy world, Sofie. You will never accomplish anything because you think Prince Charming is going to come in on a white horse and save you. That a dolphin will talk to you. And now you’re throwing away the only true and solid thing you have: me.”

  Sofie stared at him, stunned that his brutal words brought her no pain, that they flew over her without damage. It was like standing in the middle of a swarm of hornets that buzzed around her, but never stung.

  “Thank you for the lecture, Bedford. Leave now, please.”

  “No need to ask. I’m gone. You will so regret this decision.”

  “Hmmm . . .” Sofie lifted her finger to her cheek in mock thought. “Probably not.”

  He slammed the door; a small picture of a dolphin painted on a discarded windowpane shattered when it fell from the wall to the floor. Sofie went to the glass splinters, picked them up one by one and remembered when her mother had found the old panes behind a house next door that was being renovated. The wood frame around the window was a pale blue, and Sofie’s mother had immediately known what should be painted on it.

  This was what Mother had been good at: knowing what art would work in what medium. A sliver of glass sliced Sofie’s palm and she dropped the glass, watched the blood leak in a thin line across her flesh: a crimson path across the palm that Jake had held only days ago.

  She went to the kitchen, rinsed the cut, swept the glass from the floor and threw it all in the trash. What had her mother left her besides this condo, this one piece of unfinished art, some money in a bank account? Sofie had planned to get her master’s degree and then make enough money to live on—nothing more, nothing less.

  The ring of the phone caused her to jump. She recognized the caller ID—Joseph Martin. For a minute she couldn’t think why this old friend would be phoning her. Then, like a dream that returned in the middle of the afternoon, she remembered her fogged day of going through papers, of calling a private investigator.

  “Hey, Joseph,” she said in a whisper, as though they were meeting in a secret place.

  “Sofie . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you know this woman Diane?” he asked.

  She didn’t know how to answer, so she didn’t answer at all.

  Joseph took a deep breath. “Listen, Sofie. This information was so easy to find, there is no way I can charge you. All you had to do was go back to old Ohio newspapers and search for her name.”

  “Okay,” Sofie said, sat on the hardwood floor and leaned against the footboard of her bed while an old high school friend released her from the ties t
hat had bound her.

  When she hung up, she curled into a ball and wept. When the dull throb of shed tears brought a headache, she moved to stare at the finished painting. Now, finally, some things were complete. For the first time her tears were not of grief, but of relief. Joseph had told her who her father was, and what had happened to him. She’d been let loose from his threat. Knowing had set her free.

  TWENTY-ONE

  ANNABELLE MURPHY

  The weeks that followed passed for Annabelle in a succession of days blurred at the corners, sweet as spring headed toward summer. Her body moved with fluid motions as though something had been released inside her.

  The jar of remember shells overflowed onto the hall table until Keeley came home from school late one day with an antique apothecary jar she’d bought downtown, stating that they needed a bigger jar for the memories. Annabelle held Keeley’s face in her hands, kissed her and waited until her daughter left to let her tears fall in private.

  Some shells had cracked under the weight of the others and yet the container remained full and beautiful—brimming over with reminders every time Annabelle felt the tug of doubt and darkness. Sometimes she’d remove a shell and hold it; other times she would walk to the beach and find another shell, another memory.

  Jake arrived home with his Tahoe packed to the windows, his trunk half-open and tied with a bungee cord to hold his favorite threadbare lounge chair, which Annabelle absolutely refused to let back into the living room. Jake hauled all his college belongings upstairs to his old room, and once again the house overflowed with activity, conversation and warmth. He told her that Sofie had healed quickly after her diving injury, and when he dropped the subject, so did Annabelle. She basked in this full house as others did a bubble bath or a swim in the warm sea.

  She’d gone into the office the day after her return from Newboro, asked Mrs. Thurgood to please allow her to continue in her job. Writing for the newspaper calmed her in a way it never had before. Annabelle read between the lines of the letters asking her advice, searched for more than a surface understanding of what the reader wanted. Mrs. Thurgood was pleased with Annabelle’s work, satisfied that she’d returned unbowed and unbent, ready and able to do her job.