The Secrets We Keep

by Stephanie Butland

  “Richenda?” Blake’s voice is gentle.

  She shakes her head. “Miles away,” she says. “I’m sorry. I assume this isn’t a social call?”

  “Afraid not,” and he explains, probably in more detail than he needs to, certainly with more feeling than he realizes, what’s happened.

  “So, Elizabeth would like to see one of Kate’s photographs of her with Michael?”

  “Yes”—Blake’s eyes say, I’m floundering here—“I think it might help her to accept things.”

  Richenda thinks of all the photographs of Caroline on Rufus’s phone, his password so easy to guess that it’s almost as though he wants her to look. “It will probably hurt her very much.”

  “Everything is hurting her at the moment.” And Blake looks so bleak that as Richenda passes him to call Kate downstairs, she rests her hand on his shoulder. He sits very still, as though some rare and precious bird has come so close.

  Kate comes slowly down the stairs. “I was in the rocking chair,” she says. “I think if I rock Kayla in it when she’s on the inside, then it will soothe her to be there once she’s on the outside. It works on me. I was nearly asleep myself.”

  Blake stands. “Hello, Kate.”

  Kate half smiles, wary. “I still don’t remember anything, you know. About the accident. When Mike died.”

  “It’s not that, Kate,” Richenda says and looks at Blake to see whether he will make the request or she should.

  “Elizabeth is having a hard time accepting that your baby is Michael’s,” Blake begins.

  “I’m not lying about it,” Kate says. “Why would I lie?”

  Blake thinks of Elizabeth’s list of reasons. “I don’t think you’re lying,” he says. “I’m just telling you what’s happening for Elizabeth.”

  “Elizabeth,” Kate says, although she doesn’t like to speak the name aloud, as it makes her remember how Michael used to say it, each syllable as soft and equal as the next, with the comfort and quality of a word said often. “I don’t want to talk about Elizabeth. I’m just thinking about me and Kayla now.”

  Richenda looks at him. Forgive her, her eyes say. She’s young and she has no idea what she’s saying.

  “Of course,” Blake says. “I do understand that. I understand that Elizabeth trying to come to terms with this is not the most important thing for you now. But maybe for Michael? She was important to him for a long time, Kate, whatever happened in the end.”

  Blake can see by Richenda’s face what a gamble he’s just taken.

  He waits.

  The ball scuttles: red, black, red, black, red. Kate remembers that Blake is the only person who congratulated her on her pregnancy. She remembers how Mike said he was someone he would trust with his life. Cautiously, Kate says, “What do you want?”

  “I’d like you to text me one of your photos of you and Michael. Then I can show it to Elizabeth. Then I’ll delete it. That’s all.”

  Blake is searching his pockets for his card with his cell phone number on it, so her “no” catches him off guard.

  When he looks at her, she’s sitting up very straight, hands on her stomach, eyes on his. “I don’t have to prove anything to her. She doesn’t have any right to see anything of mine. I don’t belong to her; my photos don’t belong to her just because her husband’s in them.”

  “OK,” Blake says, “but, Kate, she’s really struggling. This might help her.”

  “Why do I have to help her?”

  Richenda says, “Kate—” just as Blake says, “You don’t.” Richenda leans back in her seat, knowing that all the things she’s on the brink of saying, about marriage and death and grace and life being about more than just you and what you want, aren’t the right things to be said.

  “You don’t have to help her. But if we only helped when we had to, where would we be? You have your baby. Elizabeth has nothing left of Mike except the fact that he’s not the man she thought he was.” To Kate, he sounds a bit like Mike. It’s not that his voice is the same, but it’s the sort of thing that Mike would say. She remembers standing in Elizabeth’s garden; the pleading, the conviction that Elizabeth was the only person entitled to grieve for Mike as she was grieving.

  “All right,” Kate says. “She can see the photos. But she has to see me too. I’ll show them to her. She’s not pretending that I don’t exist anymore. You can tell her that and see what she says.”

  • • •

  Elizabeth says yes. Well, she says, “Bloody little cow. All right. Get her around here. She can sit in Mike’s house and my house and see how she likes that,” which Blake translates into “Yes” and passes on to Richenda in a conversation where both express their misgivings.

  Richenda says, “I think it best that we keep things as calm as possible,” with a question mark at the end, and Blake, whose translation skills are coming into their own at the moment, realizes that she doesn’t plan to tell Rufus until this is over and says, “Yes, I agree.”

  And so, on a sunny day in the middle of August, Richenda and Kate walk up to Elizabeth and Michael’s front door, and Kate rings the bell. Her face could be made of wax. Mel opens the door.

  “You’re a bit early,” she says, not unpleasantly, “but ten minutes isn’t going to make this any easier for anyone, I suppose.” And she steps back, and Kate walks into the house that she’s walked past and wondered about so many times.

  Three steps and she’s in a living room that feels like a home. Above the fireplace there’s a framed wedding photo. Mike has a white shirt on, and he’s laughing. He looks younger. So does she: younger, prettier, longer hair. Kate looks at the shelf of travel books, the lamp with the twisted wooden base she thinks must be from Australia, the alcove where the Christmas tree goes.

  She wishes she hadn’t come.

  Blake is already here. He’s standing, to the side of the fireplace. Mel indicates the sofa, and Richenda sits at one end, Kate in the middle.

  Blake smiles bravery toward Richenda, smiles it again to Mel, who says, “I’m dispensing with the traditional offer of tea. I hope that’s OK.”

  Richenda nods.

  And then Elizabeth comes down the stairs and into the room. Her hair is damp and she wears jeans and a white shirt with a hole in the elbow. Her feet are bare. So is her face. She nods to Richenda, who nods back.

  Mel opens her mouth to say something, but Elizabeth says, “It’s fine, Mel.”

  The room holds its breath.

  And then Elizabeth looks at Kate.

  And Kate looks at Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth sees blossom. She sees bloom. Everything about Kate is rounding, orbing outward as though the baby she carries is filling every space in her with its presence and intention. I’m coming, and when I come, I’ll change your life. Her hair is glossy and her eyes are bright, and even the sharpness she is holding in them can’t contain the cornered, afraid child she is.

  Kate sees tiredness. She sees sadness. She sees the contents of her own heart—love, grief, loss—carved onto someone else’s body. Elizabeth’s toenails are unpainted and her hands don’t rest. There’s a cut on her fingertip. She works her wedding ring around and around on her finger, with her thumb. Her engagement ring, a diamond solitaire clasped in yellow gold, sags from her finger a little. Kate finds herself wondering whether Mike chose it or whether they had bought it together. She sees the ring on Elizabeth’s thumb, too big too. Recognizes it. Remembers the time she tried to take it off, half playful, and he’d pulled his hand from hers and said, no. Just that one word.

  The room needs to breathe.

  Elizabeth says, “Thank you for coming, Kate. I hope you’re well.” She sits down, next to Kate but careful to be far enough away to make sure that their bodies can’t accidentally touch. At eight months pregnant, Kate is taking up a lot of room. Elizabeth holds on to the arm of the sofa with her le
ft hand, to keep her anchored at a safe distance.

  Kate, scrabbling for purchase as she realizes that Mike is smiling out from every picture frame in the room, says, “Do you?”

  Richenda says, “Kate.”

  Elizabeth says, “It’s much easier to think unkind thoughts about someone when they’re not sitting next to you. And there’s no way your baby is Mike’s child. So yes, I hope you’re well. My husband died because you’re walking around, so it would be a shame if you weren’t well.”

  Kate can’t work out if Elizabeth is being bitchy or not, decides that she isn’t, that she doesn’t have the right sort of eyes. And her mother, who is now holding her hand so very tightly, has promised to step in if need be.

  But then Richenda says, “Kate, you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

  Mel opens her mouth, but Elizabeth, who seems to be watching herself from out of her own wedding photograph on the wall, says, “I’m sure you appreciate that this is difficult for me.”

  “Yes,” Richenda says in the voice Kate recognizes as the one reserved for people in shops who are rude and Dad when he comes home too late and too flushed. “It’s actually rather difficult for everyone, so let’s get on with it, shall we?”

  And Kate takes her phone from her pocket.

  Mel is next to Elizabeth, perched on the arm of the sofa, her hand on her sister’s shoulder.

  Kate passes the phone to Elizabeth.

  She isn’t as shocked as she thought she was going to be. She is hurt, more hurt than she has been since she sat in the funeral home and thought about how Mike had left her when he promised he never would. But not shocked. The sound of Mel crying is more shocking than the photograph, which just makes Elizabeth think, Well, there’s Mike. What’s he doing with his arm around that girl?

  Elizabeth starts to scroll forward through the photographs. He looks uncomfortable. They both look cold. Really cold. In most of the photos they’re both looking straight at the camera, but in one Mike’s head is turned toward Kate, his mouth caught in the blur of a word.

  Elizabeth, hungry for detail, asks Kate, “What’s he saying?”

  Kate leans over, half smiles, and says, “He was saying that Pepper doesn’t like the flash.”

  And that’s when it happens. The others watch and see the darkness dawning. Inside, Elizabeth is bellowing, wailing, clawing. Screaming. Screaming, “You know my dog. You fucked my husband, and you call my dog—our dog—by his name, as though you have the right to. As though you’re part of the family. Which you’re not, and you never will be.”

  But her body has turned to marble and her heart to the kind of sharp, hot dust that whirls in every passing gust and scratches its way across your eyes.

  She says, “Blake, will you let Pepper out, please? I think he wants to go into the garden.” And Blake obeys, even though Pepper is passed out in his basket. And then Elizabeth musters her best shot, which isn’t much of one, and says to Kate, “Those pictures were all taken in one go. You could have been leaving a party. He could have been humoring you. They prove nothing.”

  Elizabeth is twisting the ring around her finger again. Kate has taken her phone back, has her eyes down, face hidden by her hair.

  Richenda and Mel are both looking at Blake, who says gently, “Elizabeth, I know this is hard, but we agreed that Kate would come here and show you the pictures, and that’s what she’s doing.” He catches Mel looking glistening daggers at him. “Mel, we can’t go on like this.”

  “I agree,” Mel says, “but that’s not to say we should be trying to make things worse.”

  Richenda makes to stand, but Kate resists. She hands her phone back to Elizabeth, who finds herself looking at a text message from Mike’s number, from the previous July. “Dog walking tonight.” She scrolls past what seems like hundreds of messages that say “Dog walking” or “Running” or occasionally “No dog walking,” which is somehow worse. Elizabeth’s face goes from pale to paler to peaked, and she starts to shake.

  Mel takes the phone, glances at it, hands it back to Kate, and says, “Thank you for coming. I think you can go now.”

  Richenda helps Kate up, a hand under her daughter’s arm, and they are almost at the door, Elizabeth crying in a sad defeated keening, when Mel says, “Actually, one more question.”

  Richenda, who has tears clawing at her own throat, would have kept Kate moving, but Mel’s voice is quiet, pleading, and so it seems safe to turn around.

  “Is that everything? I think we need to know whether that’s the lot. We don’t have the resources for any more revelations.”

  Kate says, “That’s everything. That’s all I have of him,” and it’s an easy lie, because what she is still keeping to herself is so buried, so ugly and ignored, that she couldn’t immediately put words to it if she wanted to. But as she watches Mel and Blake go to Elizabeth, it kicks a few words out. “So I don’t know why everyone feels so sorry for her.”

  Elizabeth is on her feet before she knows it. Mel sees a flash of the sister she used to know, who couldn’t bear life on a farm in the middle of rural Australia anymore, who raged to be free. This time there are words, ready and biting at one another in their eagerness to get out. “Because I was his wife and he and I could not have a child of our own. Because, whatever you think, he loved me and he loved our life together. Because within two years you’ll be off-loading your baby onto your poor mother every evening and screwing your way around Throckton in the hope of finding someone to love you.”

  Richenda takes a step forward, Elizabeth one back, but she doesn’t stop talking, couldn’t if she wanted to, but she doesn’t want to because for as long as she’s talking she can’t listen to the terrible things that her soul is screaming, “And by the time you’re twenty-five you’ll be scraggy and stupid and you won’t have a thing to look forward to.”

  Richenda is turning, trying to turn Kate, but Kate isn’t going anywhere until she’s said, “I’ll have nothing to look forward to, except my baby growing up.”

  “If it grows up,” Elizabeth says.

  The room inhales, a sharp, shocked breath.

  Kate, tears jumping from her eyes, is movable again.

  Richenda has a novel feeling of wishing her husband was here. This would be the perfect place for all the unpleasant, unkind rants about Michael Gray that she’s had to endure lately. She says, “That really is enough, Elizabeth. I’m sorry for your loss, and for your pain, but that’s enough. Kate, come on.”

  Elizabeth nods.

  Kate leaves, followed by her mother.

  Mel says halfheartedly, “Well said, Sister. I couldn’t have put it better myself.” And then to Blake, “Text messages. From Mike. Before you ask, no, nobody wants tea. I want a cigarette and when I come back in I’m bringing whiskey.” She gives him the look that says, You look after her for a minute—it’s a look that she’s passed, caught, passed, caught more often than she wants to think about in the last few months, dropped only once or twice when Elizabeth has intercepted with a “For heaven’s sake, you lot, I’m not about to throw myself under a bus”—and she goes.

  Elizabeth looks as though someone has not only switched out her light but removed the bulb and the fuse. Blake guides her back to the sofa, sits her down, sits next to her. Waits. He doesn’t have to wait for long.

  “He did it, Blake,” she says, turning stamped-on eyes to him. “Mike did it. He did it with a girl just over half his age. He did it over and over again. He did it in the dark and the cold at Butler’s Pond. He did it in the place we walked the dog together. He did it with the dog there. He did it with her and then he came home and did it with me.” Her voice is growing softer and softer. “He did it, presumably, without a condom. He did it and he made a baby.”

  Blake thinks of the man he knew. “But he loved you,” he says. “You can’t doubt that he loved you.”

&n
bsp; “I can doubt what I damn well like,” Elizabeth says, and she gets up and heads for the stairs.

  Mike,

  I don’t know why I’m writing to you because you’re dead, you bastard, DEAD. And anyway there are no words for this. No words. Just colors. Spikes of colors when I close my eyes, echoes of them when I open them. Blood red and filthy orange and shades of mud and earth and the winter water that you drowned in.

  I think what I’m angriest about is the fact that you’re not here so I can’t scream and shout at you. I can’t take the fists that my hands make whenever I’m not doing anything else with them and beat them against your stupid cheating chest. I can’t hold your face and make you look at me so you can see exactly what it is that you’ve done to me. I can’t have you sitting there while I cry my heart out, again, over some stupid fuckwitted thing that you’ve done, again, the fire then the dying and now the—this. I don’t get to push you out of the door and slam it behind you and listen to you pleading to be let back in.

  I can’t ask you questions. Well, I can ask, but you’ll never be able to tell me the answers. And I wouldn’t, couldn’t, ask her, and she wouldn’t tell me, and even if she did, I wouldn’t believe her.

  How did it happen? Where did you meet her? Who kissed who first? Did you plan it or did it sneak up on you? Was it sex or did you love her? Did you ever bring her here? Did you drive her anywhere in our car?

  What, in the name of all that’s holy, did you think you were doing screwing a kid? I mean, I know she’s technically an adult, but she’s just left school, for Christ’s sake. All she’s ever done is go to school. What did you talk about? Pythagoras?

  What was wrong with me? Did you think I was too old? Was I starting to get fat? Too sterile, too familiar, too demanding? Why wasn’t I enough for you?

  If you were here I’d be telling you that I never wanted to see you again. I haven’t even got the satisfaction of doing that.

  You bastard. You cheating, lying, unfeeling, bastard. You dead bastard.