A phone call, Robin would insist; that's all and she'd be over. If someone was sick, a missed ride, whatever Nora needed, Robin was there. At first she'd felt swamped by Robin's attention. That's just the way she is, Ken would assure her. And it was true. Kindness, love came naturally to her. Nora used to marvel at the acuity of Robin's sense for a person's pain. How many dinner parties and events had they driven home from with Robin's voice in the backseat filled with concern for “that poor Henderson woman. Her younger sister's schizophrenic, and the family wants to keep her institutionalized, but Jeannie thinks she should be given a chance—”
“Jeannie?” Nora and Ken cried in equal astonishment. Jean Henderson, or “the viper” as she was more commonly known, so cutting and cruel that before they were eighteen, every one of her children had left home, never to return.
“How'd she happen to share that bit of information with you?” Nora asked.
“I don't know. We just got talking, and next thing I knew …”
And so it went. Always and everywhere. In spite of her mounting troubles. Or perhaps because of them; over time, her own pain, sculpting, giving depth to her beauty. Because she had no secrets, kept no part of herself private, or so she would have you believe, Bob's drinking and increasing volatility, his erratic employment, their strained finances, their run-down house, it was all there in the tapestry's intricate weave. Her suffering, a brilliant artistry, so submerging herself in another's life that the normal delineation blurs; from her own vulnerability creating an instant emotional communion. Too wounded to be envied, she is the perfect friend. Women admire her; men want to protect her.
The pretty mailbox hangs on its crooked post, clipped more than a few times by Bob's alcohol-fueled swerves into the driveway. Robin painted the climbing blue morning glories herself, hidden among the leaves her signature robin bird. Crafts. Quilting. Dinner parties, she can do it all, sublimely unhindered by her husband's failings, unshamed by his disruptions, unembarrassed by peeling paint, the missing glass in the storm door, the doorbell protruding from a frayed white wire. Less evidence of a failed life than bravely borne wounds, her domestic stigmata. Nora bangs the brass door knocker, pineapple, pitted symbol of welcome. Its dull strike brings fear. Her heart races, her thoughts colliding in bursts so that when the door finally opens, she hears herself hiss, “A malignancy. That's what you are. All you've ever been. Destructive and selfish …”
“I'm so sorry,” Robin gasps. “I'm so sorry. Please. Please,” she cries, holding out her arms as if this might be healing enough. Without makeup and with her long hair pulled back, she looks tired, but younger. “Please come in, Nora.” She opens the door all the way. “I beg you. Please. What happened, it was so—”
“No! Not what happened! What you did, that's what's so disgusting!”
“I know that. Of course I know that,” Robin weeps.
“And don't you ever again speak to my son. Do you hear me?”
“I—”
“Saying you love him like a son, how twisted are you?”
“But I do,” she sobs. “And I love you, Nora. That's the hardest part. Losing all of you.”
“No. The hardest part's not getting what you want. What you've wanted all along.”
“That's not true! Oh, God. Oh, please. Please, Nora. You have no idea,” she calls after her down the path. “I'm so miserable. I'm so unhappy I just want to die. Do you hear me? That's all I want!” she screams. “That's all I want anymore. To die. To be dead! Done with it all!”
“Mommy!” a child shrieks. Robin is slumped, sitting in the doorway, sobbing, berating herself for all the world to see. Lyra stands there, arms around her mother's head.
Nora yanks down on the seat belt, tethered now, anchored and safe. She stares back at the weeping little girl as she starts the car, her safe, sensible Volvo, then drives slowly away, and bursts into tears. Another child's pain—the last thing on earth she wants.
he meeting ends late. Two board members were upset to find their names omitted from the Sojourn House stationery. Father Grewley spent most of the time trying to placate them. Such a minor point, but the young priest kept saying they needed “to make it right.” Every time Nora attempted to move the agenda along, he'd drift back to it again. Easy enough to order new stationery, he supposed. Yes, at an additional cost of eight hundred dollars, the equivalent of a week's worth of groceries, she pointed out, to no avail. Father Grewley can't bear offending anyone, so he is insisting on paying for the printing himself “Ridiculous,” Nora murmurs as the slighted members pass her on their way outside.
“No, no,” Father Grewley says. “It's my fault. I should have checked the copy. It's only right. They do so much.”
“But that's really all they care about, about their … their credentials. Like belonging to the right club. It's not about helping people.”
“But people do get helped, in spite of the motivation.” He smiles. “Flattery, vanity, guilt, whatever works.”
She opens her checkbook, scribbles the amount. Eight hundred dollars. “You're right.” She holds out the check. “Whatever works.” Hammond money. It never really mattered, now even less. If anything, it seems like a genetic flaw thinning each generation's moral fiber. She'd gladly give it away, every penny of it, just to be happy again. And to see her children strong.
“No, I didn't mean you, Nora.”
“I know. But I want to. Please.”
She hurries to her car. For all his wide-eyed naïveté, the young priest knows exactly what he is doing. She admires that. It is his mission to craft human weakness to a higher purpose. If only he could do the same with her. Confronting Robin last week brought a brief surge of confidence, a fleeting sense of control, but then her anger turned to guilt, which makes no sense at all. Seeing Robin's pain gave little satisfaction. Hurting her has only made Nora feel worse. Maybe there is no answer beyond forgiveness. It's all Ken seems to want, but she feels empty, with nothing left to give. Going through the motions takes all her energy.
Seven o'clock. Too late to start cooking dinner now. There is a pan of leftover lasagna, enough for Chloe and Drew, anyway. As she drives, she calls home.
“Mom!” Chloe answers. “Where've you been? I've been calling you!”
“A meeting. My phone was off, but Chloe, listen. In the fridge, on the bottom shelf, there's—”
“Mom.” Chloe's muffled voice. “There's someone here. He said he's an old friend of yours.”
“Who?” She turns onto the highway. “What's his name?”
“Ed Hawkins. But the weird thing is, he's the same one, that guy. The one that was looking for that street before.”
She sees him through the door glass. He is sitting at her table watching Chloe take plates from the cupboard. He stands up when Nora comes into the kitchen. For a moment she's surprised that he's older. He's thinner, not as tall as she remembers. There is a silvery blondness to his thinning hair and his eyes, the same pale blue but with a bright transparency she finds hard to look at.
“Nora! It's you! After all this time.” His arms spring wide, expecting what, she wonders for a queasy moment: an embrace, a kiss? She shrinks back. He offers his hand.
She can barely touch it. “I'll finish the table,” she tells Chloe.
His gaze holds, in full measure of her distress. He smiles. “I was just telling your beautiful daughter how much she reminds me of you. Same age as then, right?”
“Yeah, seventeen. Same as my mother!” Chloe answers, clearly enjoying being part of her mother's reunion with an old friend. She is unrolling place mats onto the table. “So'd you guys go to the same college?”
“More of a summer thing,” he says, and Chloe smirks, eyebrows raised. “We worked together,” he adds.
A lie. He'd hung around the hotel a lot, particularly the golf course, but he never held a job there.
“So what're you doing here?” she asks, for Chloe's sake, straining to sound unconcerned.
“I didn't
know what happened. I always wondered.” He'd been in D.C. recently, on business, and what does he pick up but Newsweek. There's an article he's interested in, faith-based charities. Doesn't know why, but he kept looking at this one picture. “Took me a minute. Same face, same first name. Nora!”
Hands trembling, she slides the lasagna pan onto the oven rack. She tells Chloe she'd better get started on her homework. But she only has a little left, Chloe protests. “Then go finish it,” Nora says. Like her father, Chloe loves company. “Now, please.”
“Okay!” Chloe is annoyed.
Smiling, Eddie watches her flounce through the swinging door. “Looks like you.”
“No.”
“Reminds me of you.”
“Why did you come here?”
“Now, that's not very welcoming.”
“You have a reason, what is it?”
“No! No reason.” He laughs. “I was in the area. Thought I'd stop in, say hello.” He is unfolding a newspaper. “Pretty impressive. Family paper.” He turns the page, reads the masthead: OLIVER P. HAMMOND, PUBLISHER. KENNETH L. HAMMOND, ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER.
“What do you want?” She already knows. Money.
“You've turned into a very skeptical person, Nora.”
“I'd like you to leave, please.”
“Please! So, it's a request, it's up to me.”
“It's not a request. I'm telling you, I want you to leave! Now!”
“Nora,” he chides, holding up his hands. “I thought you'd be happy to see me. I'm all right. See! Aren't you relieved? It was all so crazy that night, so confusing.” He grins and his dimples deepen with an intimate sweetness that turns her stomach. “I was so worried about you. All this time I been wondering, did some psycho pick her up? Does she even know what happened? Does she care?”
“So you refuse to leave, is that what's going on here?” She comes around the counter nearer the phone.
“No, I just … actually, I'm a little hurt. I just wanted to set your mind at ease, that's all.” He picks up a stack of photographs from the counter and riffles through them. They were taken on Chloe's junior class trip to New York City. “Good-looking kids. Think the world's their oyster, that nothing bad's ever going to happen to them.” He chuckles. “Good thing they don't know,” he sighs, grinning at the picture of Chloe pulling herself up the ladder from the hotel pool. She is wearing a skimpy bikini that Nora said not to bring. Suggestive enough on a beach, but definitely inappropriate on a class trip, especially in such close quarters as an indoor pool. “Now you've even got bikini rules?” Chloe laughed. “That's right!” Nora snapped back, troubled by the echo of her own mother's stridency.
“Like us,” he continues. “We didn't know, did we?”
There was no us, no we, she almost says, but that's what he wants. She snatches the picture from him. “I'm really very busy.”
“Go ahead, don't let me hold you up.” He pulls out a stool. “I'll just sit here while you do whatever it is you do.”
“My husband'll be home any minute.”
“Great! Unless … he doesn't know about us.” He laughs softly.
She takes the head of lettuce Chloe laid out and begins to tear the leaves into the salad spinner in the bar sink.
“So what happened? Where'd you go? I always wondered.”
She turns the water on high. Fill in the blanks and maybe he'll leave. “I got a ride.” She speaks so quietly he has to lean forward.
“What about me? Did you ever think, ‘Oh, poor Eddie. I should've stayed and helped him out a little’?” He wrings his hands, that same way, slender fingers writhing through one another.
“I was upset.” She stares at him.
“Yeah!” Like himself, he means.
“I was very young.”
“That's your excuse?” he asks in disbelief.
“Excuse?” Floating romaine leaves brim over the spinner into the sink.
“For letting me take the fall. Twenty years I been in.”
Her knees sag. “I don't know what you mean.”
“Never gave you up, though. Gentleman to the end, I'm proud of that. ‘So who is she? What's her name?’ they kept asking. ‘I don't know,’ I said. ‘I don't know’” He shrugs. “Just kept playing dumb. ‘Some chick,’ I said. ‘Some chick by the side of the road, thumbing a ride, next thing I know some guy's passed out in his car.’ ‘No,’ they go. ‘Try dead.’”
Water, the only sound, it keeps running.
“He didn't die.” She can barely breathe.
“Really?” Again, his amusement. “That what you wanna hear?” He jams the faucet down, shutting off the water. The sudden silence stunning, like the jolt of an electrical shock. “That what you been telling yourself all these years?” He slips a business card from his breast pocket, scribbles on the back. “My cell.” He slides off the stool.
She doesn't pick it up until he is gone.
HARMONY LTD.
P.O BOX 0367
NEW YORK CITY
NEW YORK
A week has passed. Eddie hasn't been back, so he's probably gone for good. He couldn't rattle her the way he wanted. Random, that's all, a blip on the screen. She doesn't believe the man died or that Eddie went to jail. There's no denying the violence of that night, the pipe, blood pouring from the man's face. Ugly, but not murder. Couldn't have been. No. Impossible. He would have told the police she'd been there, too. He never would have protected her all these years, serving a prison sentence in noble silence. Not the type. No. Just a down-on-his-luck loser working a newfound connection.
The shock of seeing him, though, has been an antidote. Injecting one poison into her system to fight another, rousing her from malaise. As in a fever, at its hallucinatory pitch the phantom has slipped from one nightmare into another. The past is dead. Only family matters, her marriage. Now, with perspective, she will be well again. She calls up the back stairs to Chloe. What's taking so long? School starts in twenty minutes. Nora sits at the table with her toast. Stirring his coffee, Ken says he heard the shower go off an hour ago.
“Probably still trying to get the stripes out,” he says, and she can almost smile. Chloe sprayed green stripes into her hair for last Friday's varsity basketball game.
“I know. Poor kid,” Nora says. Days later, and the stripes still show, even after countless shampooings.
“I'll ask Oliver, maybe Nana's wig's still up in the attic.” His grandmother Geraldine Hammond's singed blonde wig is part of family lore. A candle set it on fire one night at a dinner party. After snipping away the burned strands she continued wearing it. Hammondian frugality, Oliver calls it in justification of his own dated wardrobe.
“Don't. Don't even mention a wig. That'll be the next thing, driving around to wig shops.” Laughing with him again feels good. A relief. The way things used to be here.
“Outfit us all. The whole family, bewigged, bothered, and bewildered,” Ken croons, making her laugh even more. His hand slides over hers. “You look good,” he says, and she tries to hold her eyes level with his, but can't. “Are you okay?”
“All right. I guess.” Again, ice in her voice; can't help it. Stay on safe ground. So much easier talking about the children.
“Here, Mom.” Chloe runs into the kitchen, listing under the weight of her bulging backpack slung over one shoulder. “Can you sign this? I am so wicked late.” She holds out a pen and folded paper. “My ride's waiting. That line,” she adds in a faltering voice as Nora reads. “The bottom one.”
“It's your progress report.”
“I know and it sucks and I'm sorry, and I'm really gonna try, but right now you have to sign it so I can bring it back. Please? Please, Mom? Please?” she begs, rocking back and forth on wedged heels.
“One D and three C minuses.” Nora pushes it across the table to Ken.
“What's this all about?” he says. “What're you thinking? What do you want, to end up in some two-bit junior college somewhere?”
“If she's luc
ky,” Nora says.
“I know,” Chloe groans, pleading for release.
Nora asks how long she's had the progress report. A week, Chloe admits, but she forgot about it. She did. And that's the truth. Nora refuses to sign it until Chloe discusses the poor grades with them and explains how she plans to raise them.
“I can't now, Mom! So just sign it, please! I'm gonna be late and I've already got three tardies.”
“Apparently you're going to have to get another one,” Nora says, scraping butter onto her cold toast.
“But then I'll get detention!” Chloe cries.
“That's not my problem now, is it?”
“Dad! Please! Will you sign it? Please? It's just the progress report, and I'm trying so much harder now. I swear. I am! I've got the whole rest of the term.”
Ken looks at Nora. “What's the harm? Gotta sign it, sooner or later.” He clicks open his pen with a stern look at Chloe. “But just so you'll know, your mother's right. This has got to be discussed. Whatever's going on here has got to change.”
“I know. I know. Please, Dad.” Chloe glances at her watch. “Now Max is gonna be late too.”
Scribbling his name, Ken winces. “Max?” he and Nora say in unison. “What the hell?” Ken says.
“He's just giving me a ride, that's all.” Chloe snatches up the paper. “Jeez!” she cries with the closing door.
“Was that a slam?” Nora asks, seething.
“One one thousandth of a decibel shy.” Ken finishes his coffee. “But I'll tell you something, in my house that progress report would've called for a celebration.”
“Ken!”
“I know. Just trying to keep things in perspective, that's all.” He stands up to leave. “Goddamn Max Lafferty that's what really pisses me off.”
The Last Secret Page 9