The Secrets We Keep

by Stephanie Butland

  She knows, she tells Beatle, who keeps on wagging his tail in spite of the weight of all the secrets he is carrying, that there will be a bit of temporary unpleasantness. There will be a conversation in which the words disappointed and education and future will feature, heavily. Her mother will look tragic and her father will sulk and tut and sigh. They will all three of them—all four of them, if you count the baby, all five of them, if you count Beatle—be upset for a couple of days. But then, they will all find a way to get on with it. She’s sure they will. It will be all right, she promises the pup, and promises herself.

  Kate has known since that morning when the word pregnant materialized like magic in front of her that the longer she can keep her secret from beaming, blurting itself out, the better. The further on the baby is, the more of a fait accompli she will be able to offer the world. So she’s done her best to sleep unobtrusively, vomit discreetly, crave privately. She hears her parents talk about her, about shock and trauma, and she slides her hand to her belly, rounding now. The plan is to wait, until six months if she can, and then tell them. She thinks it’s a good plan.

  But then, one morning, there’s blood.

  • • •

  Richenda looks up from her laptop as Kate flies down the stairs, Beatle at her heels. There’s an urgency in their approach that alerts her. Since “that night at Butler’s Pond,” as the family has come to refer to it, Richenda has grown used to Kate being lethargic at best. She is anything but now. Her eyes are wide and her hands are reaching for her mother. “I’m bleeding,” she says. “Mum, I’m bleeding.”

  “Where?” Richenda is thrown. There’s been no crash, no clatter. There’s no sign of injury, no blood on her hands.

  “No,” Kate says, and she takes her mother’s hands, and a deep breath, and forces herself to look straight into her mother’s face, although this is not how she planned this, not at all. “Mum. I’m five months pregnant. And I’m bleeding.”

  • • •

  In the car on the way to the hospital, there’s one of the most uncomfortable question-and-answer sessions that either has ever taken part in. It reminds Kate of the conversation she’d had with her English teacher after failing her mock exams because she’d misunderstood the instructions on the paper. Richenda recalls talking to Rufus about one of his “work weekends away.”

  “Do you have any pain?”

  “No, no pain.”

  “What color is the blood?”

  “Mum—”

  “It’s important. Bright red, brownish red?”

  “Bright red.”

  “How much?”

  “Mum—”

  “If you’re pregnant, Kate, you need to be able to answer questions like this like a woman, not a girl. How much?”

  “Not much. Spots.”

  “OK.”

  Kate hugs her baby to her, as though her arms could hold it in its right place, as though the force of her love will make this all right. She hopes her mother has stopped with the questions. She hasn’t.

  “How long have you known?”

  “About six weeks.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us? Me?” Richenda’s voice is breaking. Concentrate, she tells herself, drive carefully. Don’t cry. Don’t look at her, look at the road. This family doesn’t need another near miss.

  “I thought you’d try to make me get rid of it.”

  The baldness of this makes Richenda pause. She stops thinking about a place at Oxford thrown away and a life narrowed and limited in ways that Kate cannot imagine. Instead, she remembers how she might have been a mother of three instead of having one perfect, beautiful baby girl and two wretched, painful miscarriages, how easy it is to be objective about someone else’s pregnancy, how your own is your own cosmos.

  She decides that she will leave the education/potential/future-abandoned-for-the-sake-of-one-mistake stuff to Rufus.

  “Who’s the father?”

  “No.”

  Richenda, negotiating a series of mini roundabouts, thinks she’s misheard. “You don’t know? Oh, Kate—”

  “That’s not what I said, Mum,” Kate says. “I said no. I’m not telling you who the father is. There’s just me and the baby. If the baby is all right.” Her voice starts to fray with tears. They pull into the hospital parking lot. Richenda stares ahead for a moment, then takes her daughter’s hand.

  “The baby’s survived a pretty rough time already,” she says. “Let’s hope for the best, shall we.”

  • • •

  They are through Accident and Emergency and into the Early Pregnancy Unit before there’s been time to say much more. Kate has been pale and still, but she’s answered questions in a clear, unapologetic voice, and while she hasn’t invited her mother to come into the consulting room with her, she hasn’t stopped her either. Richenda, calm on the outside but a scramble of worry and disbelief inside, is within arm’s reach, should Kate choose to reach. So far, she hasn’t, but her mother is sure that the time will come.

  Until then, Richenda does the math, and wonders about Christmas parties, and that boy whose mother manages the restaurant where Kate sometimes works, and the possibility of violence. And she wonders, yet again, how she could know so little about her daughter.

  She thinks of how Kate had been tested for pregnancy when she was admitted to the hospital after the accident. She remembers because Rufus had had to be placated when he found out.

  “It’s completely routine in admissions of women of childbearing age,” the consultant had said. “We have to know, just in case.”

  “You’ll find it’s negative,” Rufus had said. “She doesn’t even have a boyfriend.”

  Richenda wonders, not for the first time, whether Kate had been at Butler’s Pond to meet someone. But surely, if she had, he would have come forward by now, come to see her, come to make sure she was all right?

  • • •

  When they go for the scan, Kate does hold Richenda’s hand. Richenda looks at the small, taut mound of baby when Kate pulls up her top, and cannot believe she didn’t notice. She shakes her head. “Please, Mum,” Kate says, misunderstanding, and Richenda smiles and touches her daughter’s hair, which is the same cream-blond it was when she was born, although everyone said it would darken.

  “It will be all right,” she says.

  “Let’s see if we can find a heartbeat first,” the radiographer says, and Kate’s whole world shudders to a halt, holding its breath. And then there is noise, filling the room, strong and fast, like feet running along a wet pavement. She looks at her mother, sees a mirror of her own delight and relief, and starts to cry.

  “You see, it will be all right,” Richenda says, looking at the mixture of child and adult in front of her. She thinks of how, whatever the circumstances, you can’t really regret a baby. She remembers her own mother, saying, “A baby brings its own love.” And she thinks about how this almost-young woman is her daughter still, and if ever there was a time for a mother to stand with her daughter, it’s now.

  And then there’s a picture on the screen, and for a moment the radiographer, who has been all business so far, softens and says, “You never get tired of this bit.”

  She starts to measure and check, while Kate and Richenda watch the heart blipping away and the arms and legs moving and point to the outline of a nose and chin.

  Kate has to be asked twice whether she wants to know the sex of the baby, not because she hesitates over the yes, but because she is so absorbed in the graphite image, greedy for the sight of her child, that she doesn’t hear the question. Her last few months of worry and fear and living in a strange, secret universe vanish as she watches her baby’s tiny feet flex. The grief, the loss, remain, but they move back to make room for this new, greater reality.

  • • •

  “You can say what you like to her,” Richenda says t
o her poleaxed husband later, “but I’m telling you, Rufus, there’s no point.”

  “She has options,” Rufus spits, “other than her preferred option of throwing her life away.”

  “You can see that, and I can see that,” Richenda says, “but I saw her face when she looked at the scan and they told her it was a girl. I’ve never seen her so—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Richenda, of course she was going to look like that. It’s hormones. It’s instinct. The biological imperative to reproduce, nothing more. We’re outside the hormone cloud. We can see clearly. We’re her parents. She can’t keep it. We can’t let her.”

  “We can’t make her do anything else. She’s nineteen. She’s an adult.”

  Rufus pauses, absorbing this. His wife watches as his brain flicks through the possibilities: threaten to throw her out, throw her out, buy a little house to throw her into. He looks at Richenda. His eyes say, All right, all right, you’re right. There can be no throwing. He sighs.

  “She’s supposed to be going to Oxford, for crying out loud. Four As at exams. For this?”

  “We know that she’s a bright girl. Which means she won’t throw her life away. She’ll have the baby then she’ll find her path.”

  “That’s a matter of opinion. She wasn’t very bright when she got herself—” Unable to say the word, Rufus gets up, sits down, gets up, walks to the window, glares into the garden.

  Watching him, Richenda is thankful for the bargain she struck with Kate on the way home from the hospital: she would break the news to Rufus, if Kate would consent to a sensible conversation with him when he’d calmed down.

  Kate had agreed, with the caveat that the baby’s father was not, and would never be, up for discussion. “He’s not going to be part of our lives,” she’d said.

  “Well,” Richenda had replied, “that’s fine, except that your father and I will both want to know that you haven’t been…” She had rejected “forced,” deciding instead on “hurt.”

  “Hurt?” Kate had looked puzzled for a moment, then understood. “No, Mum. Not the way you think, anyway.”

  Rufus turns his back on the garden, annoyed by its rampant fecundity.

  “You don’t think she’ll have an abortion?”

  “No. I’m certain she won’t. And anyway, at five months, it’s—it’s not an easy thing. Not pleasant.”

  Rufus makes a half-shrug gesture, dismissing these mechanics as irrelevant to the much more pressing subject of his daughter’s future, having no idea that he’s just added another reason for his wife, already primed, to loathe him a little bit more. “Adoption, then?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m completely sure, Rufus. Don’t think I didn’t think about everything that you’re thinking about. But she’s not going to be talked out of this. She’s having a baby. She’s made a choice, and the only choice we are left with is whether we support her or not.”

  “And where will the father be in all this? Do we know who he is?”

  “No.”

  “Does Kate know?”

  “I think so. She’s not telling, though. Not yet, anyway. I think the less we ask, the better, at this stage.”

  “Well, that’s obvious. Christ, Christ, Christ.” Rufus is still glaring. “What do we actually know? Do we know anything at all?”

  Richenda chooses to answer the letter of his question, and ignore the spirit. “We know that she’s twenty weeks pregnant. We know that the baby is a girl. We know that both of them are well, and the bleeding was nothing significant. We know that we only know about the pregnancy because of the bleeding, and Kate would have kept this a secret for longer if she could have, because she has no intention of giving this baby up. We know that we don’t know who the father is and Kate is unwilling and unlikely to tell us, until and unless something changes. We know that, if things go as they should”—she ignores her husband’s furious snort—“Kate will have a baby sometime around the middle of September.”

  She judges that the storm has passed, and she sits down next to Rufus, speaks quietly. “We know that we’ve always supported our daughter.”

  • • •

  When Patricia arrives, bearing one of her pies, she looks as though she’s going to burst. Elizabeth braces herself for another tale that she won’t be able to follow. It starts unpromisingly, about how someone who had come into the library today had been talking to someone else who had had a hospital appointment the day before, for a lung complaint that won’t be cured, which is a terrible shame.

  She was just launching into an explanation of who, exactly, the person with the breathing problem was, when Mel looked up from her laptop and said, “Christ, Patricia, I can do Spanish into English, but not with Throckton rattling away in the background, so do you think you could please get to the point? I’m on a deadline here.”

  Patricia pauses, waits until both Elizabeth and Mel are looking at her, and says, “Well, the Micklethwaite girl—”

  “Kate,” Elizabeth corrects, automatically, one of the many small ways she’s found to show her mother-in-law that, despite everything, she’s not prepared to vilify the girl. She knows that making a target out of Kate won’t bring Michael back.

  “Well, Kate Micklethwaite was seen at the hospital, leaving the Early Pregnancy Unit, with her mother, and they both looked a bit teary, and the girl—Kate—was holding what looked like a scan.” She looks at Elizabeth and Mel, who don’t seem to be getting it. “A scan. Of a baby. A baby picture that you get when you’re pregnant, these days.”

  “OK,” Elizabeth says. “Well, I suppose she might be. We don’t know a lot about her, really.” She looks to her sister for rescue; babies plus Kate Micklethwaite in any combination aren’t going to make her evening bearable.

  Mel adds, “There’s no law against it. Girls will be girls.”

  “It seems that she’s no better than she should be, that’s for sure, for all of her picture-in-the-paper-with-her-place-at-Oxford.” Patricia sniffs. “And where was the boyfriend when she needed pulling out of a lake. That’s what I want to know.”

  This is just the sort of malicious triumph that Elizabeth can’t stomach. She gets up, walks to the kitchen, switches the oven on, breathes. Deep, deep breaths. She remembers the girl in the garden, beautiful and frail, just as broken as she is, in a different way. Slow, slow breaths.

  In the other room, Mel is pointing out that they know nothing, really, and even if she is pregnant, that’s her business.

  Patricia is arguing for a baby as further proof that Mike Died For Nothing. When Elizabeth hears Mel asking if Kate had fallen into the water because she was reaching for her library card, whether that would be an acceptable reason for Mike to go in after her, she interrupts to see if Patricia wants tea. She doesn’t: she’s on her way to a meeting of the church council.

  “You know,” Elizabeth says to her gently, on the doorstep, “she might be ill. Maybe the Early Pregnancy Unit is in the same direction as the MRI scanner, or the place they take your blood for testing. Maybe it’s Richenda that’s ill. Maybe Kate is pregnant, because since Mike died she’s been reckless and upset. Maybe she is pregnant, but there’s something wrong. We just don’t know, Patricia.”

  Patricia, who has listened quietly to all of this half turned away, turns back, touches Elizabeth on the shoulder, looks straight into her face. “Michael always said you always see the good,” she says, but the way she says it makes Elizabeth feel that her mother-in-law is telling her off, and her husband is joining in from beyond the grave.

  • • •

  Every now and again Mel thinks about going home, about her sociable Sydney life and the way her friends are changing, new jobs, new relationships appearing on Facebook and making her homesick. But there’s something in her that won’t let her leave her sister. Not just yet. Even though Elizabeth se
ems to be ready to go back to work and is sleeping better and spending less time looking like a woman trapped at the bottom of a well, it feels too soon.

  But they are establishing a new sort of normality.

  Elizabeth is back to full-time dog walking again, although she strides out looking at her feet and the six feet of pavement in front of her. Sometimes she arranges to meet Blake, but any discussion of shift patterns makes her sad, and she quite likes the chance to concentrate on her body and think about the things it can do that aren’t crying and aching—stride, climb, breathe deeply, hurl a stick. She has ordered a new pair of her favorite running shoes. She wants her lungs to burn with something other than tears. The thing she likes least about going out is the coming back: the whole weight of Michael not being at home when she gets there, never being at home when she gets there, crashes down on her again. Not quite again, because every time it happens it happens in a slightly different way, so it’s always surprisingly, shockingly painful.

  Blake is filling the absence created by the death of his friend with more overtime, more sports coaching, more time at the gym. He’s not good at dropping by to see how Elizabeth is, but he often finds a purpose for a visit. He mows the lawn; he’s battled back the leylandii that Michael and Elizabeth somehow never got around to dealing with.

  Lucy had put her foot down when Andy suggested that they might not take an Easter trip in case Elizabeth needed him.

  “What Elizabeth needs,” she’d said, “is to start to learn to live without him. And so do you.”

  “He would want me to look after her,” he’d replied.

  “Yes, but he wouldn’t want you to move in with her, and there are times when I think that you might as well.” It was almost six years since Elizabeth, looking closed off and uncomfortable, had come to see them after the boys were born and refused to hold either of them. “I’m not going to make you take one away with you,” Lucy had joked, and Elizabeth had shot her a look full of fury. Lucy would like to think that she didn’t hold this against Elizabeth, after all this time, all this tragedy, but she suspected that she did.