Secret Lives

by Diane Chamberlain

  Ah, so that was it.

  He touched her elbow. “Let me say hello to Lou.”

  She had known, perhaps intuitively, not to talk to Kyle about the skeleton. It was not so much the skeleton that was off limits. It was the cave itself. Kyle had sealed that cave in a fury. He took his anger over Kate's death out on it, and although Eden didn't have her own memories of this, the story grew like a legend that Kyle had single-handedly pushed the largest boulder into the opening while the men from the neighborhood looked on in stupefied silence. No one was to mention the cavern to him again. Somehow everyone knew, then and in the years that followed, to keep their thoughts about the cave to themselves when Kyle was around. Before reading the journal Eden had only partially understood Kyle's sadness over losing his sister. She had not known the bond that existed between them, their dependence on one another. In Kyle's mind the cave had become a living being, responsible for the hold it had over Kate and for making her its victim.

  “We have a foursome tonight,” Kyle said to Ben during dinner. “You know what that means, don't you?”

  Ben caught on immediately. “Tramposo!” he said.

  “It's been so long,” Lou said. “I'm not sure I can remember the rules.”

  The men laughed at what was apparently a joke. Ben must have seen Eden's look of confusion. “It's a card game we used to play in Colombia,” he explained. “You'll see.”

  After dinner they sat at the walnut dining room table and played tramposo. Ben was her partner. With his eyes and with his foot beneath the table he cheated shamelessly, letting her know what was in his hand, when she should make a move, when she shouldn't. At first she was uncomfortable. She sent him incredulous stares across the table and did the opposite of what he requested in an effort to put an end to his brazenness. But gradually she realized Kyle and Lou were cheating as well. It was part of the game, a game with no rules. The cheating mounted until the cards themselves were almost immaterial and it boiled down to which team was more skilled at nonverbal communication. It was no contest. Kyle and Lou, with their years of practice at cheating together, slaughtered the competition.

  Kyle poured them each a glass of the grape brandy Ben had brought and told her about the first time they'd played tramposo with a few rough sorts in a small Colombian village. They played with three teams: Kyle and Lou, Ben and another archaeologist, and the two Colombians, who upped the stakes by threatening to kill the losers.

  “Of course they wouldn't have,” Ben said, “but we really weren't sure at the time. They were just trying to get us into the spirit of the game. We cheated like our lives depended on it.”

  “Desperate people take desperate measures,” said Lou.

  Eden thought of the few evenings she and Wayne had spent with Kyle and Lou. She had dreaded those visits, and the memory alone was enough to bring on the burn behind her breastbone, the damp palms. It had been nothing more than a duty to visit with these two relatives who had taken her in and from whom she'd fled. The atmosphere on those occasions was always stiff and formal. They would never have played cards. They would never have played a game of any sort. Each of them would have chatted politely about their work: Kyle's latest project, Lou's painting, Eden's movies, Wayne's cases. Conversation that was lifeless, hollow, dry as bone.

  Tonight had a completely different quality. She realized now that she and Wayne had set the tone for those evenings, that Kyle and Lou had probably felt the discomfort as keenly as she had. She was jealous of the easy camaraderie between them and Ben. He treated them like peers. Intimates. His love and admiration for them was candid and genuine. She wished she could express her feelings for them so easily.

  “Let's move into the living room and have some of that pie Sara Jane sent you home with,” Kyle said.

  Lou wheeled herself into the living room. “I don't know if I want you to eat any of Sara Jane's cooking, Kyle,” she said. “Eden thinks she still has a crush on you.”

  “‘Crush’ is the definitive word in that sentence.” Kyle laughed as he walked into the kitchen for the pie.

  Eden was taking the dessert plates from the china cabinet as Lou started to shift herself from the chair to the sofa. Suddenly the chair slipped out from under Lou's hands, sending her sprawling onto the hardwood floor.

  “Lou!” Eden ran to her aunt's side. Lou was struggling to sit up, her skirt up to her thighs and the stump of her right leg flailing the air. Ben was quickly behind her, supporting her back with his arms. Eden pulled Lou's skirt over her knees and helped Ben lift her to the sofa.

  “What's going on?” Kyle peered into the room.

  Eden opened her mouth to say that Lou had taken a terrible fall, but Ben spoke first. “Lou just took a little tumble,” he said. He sat next to Lou on the sofa, his arm across her shoulders.

  “Are you all right, Lou?” Kyle asked.

  She waved him back to the kitchen with her hand, but she was clearly shaken. Her face was drained of color, and her hand shook violently as she tried to brush the long strands of her salt-and-pepper hair back into her bun. Eden knelt in front of her.

  “Are you sure you're okay?”

  “I'm fine.” But even Lou's voice seemed weakened by the fall.

  Ben tightened his arm around her and pressed his lips to her pale temple. “You gave us a scare, Lou,” he said. Sitting next to Ben, Lou looked frail enough to break under the weight of his arm.

  “Would you like some iced tea? Lemonade?” Eden asked.

  “Iced tea,” Lou all but whispered as Kyle set the pie on the coffee table.

  Once in the kitchen, Eden began to cry. She leaned against the refrigerator and pressed her hands to her face. Her head filled with the image of Lou lying on the floor, her legs thrashing the air in a desperate attempt to right herself. God, she'd kidded herself into thinking Lou didn't suffer.

  “Eden?”

  She turned to see Kyle in the doorway of the kitchen. He walked toward her. “Lou's okay,” he said. “Her pride's hurt more than anything.”

  “You didn't see it, Kyle. She fell hard. Ben made light of it to spare her embarrassment.”

  Kyle set his brandy glass on the counter. “I've seen her fall before,” he said.

  “You mean it happens often?”

  “More often than she'd admit to you.”

  “Maybe she needs a different kind of chair. The Children's Fund makes this chair you can stand up in and—”

  Kyle shook his head. “Her chair's fine. I long ago stopped trying to protect her from everything that could possibly happen to her. She doesn't want that, Eden.”

  Eden's eyes filled again. “I don't want to see her suffer.”

  Kyle put his arms around her and she didn't resist. For a few minutes she cried softly against his shoulder while he stroked her back. Not since that day in the orphanage a lifetime ago had she let him hold her, and she wondered if he would be holding her now if he knew her part in Lou's tragic loss.

  She returned to the living room with the iced tea, but Lou was back in her wheelchair. “I'll take it to bed with me, dear,” she said. “I'm tired all of a sudden. I'll just read for a bit.”

  Kyle wheeled Lou into the bedroom, and Ben looked up at Eden. “You've been crying.” He reached up to take her hand. She drew his hand against her leg, and the electricity she'd felt between them the night before shot through her again.

  “A little.” She looked down at the pieces of pie on the coffee table and shut her eyes. “I'm not hungry.”

  Ben stood up. “Neither am I. I'm going to go. Walk me out to the truck?”

  Cicadas had taken over the night outside, their song rising and falling in gentle waves. The air was still damp from the rain and sweet with honeysuckle. It made Eden feel dizzy. Or drunk. She wasn't sure which and didn't care. When they reached the truck Ben turned her toward him, sandwiching her between the truck and his body.

  “I've been waiting all night to do this,” he said as he lowered his head to kiss her. She ope
ned her lips, tasted brandy on his tongue. When he finally leaned away from her she was winded, her lungs fighting to pull in the thick, wet air.

  “Catch your breath and we'll do it again.” He smiled.

  She let her head fall back against the cool metal of the truck as he slid his hands from her back to her sides. He raised them slowly until his thumbs rested just shy of her breasts. She wanted more. She felt his hard but uninsistent erection and pressed her hips against him. He drew in a quick, sharp breath, dropping his hands to the seat of her jeans with an intimacy that startled, then pleased her as he pulled her even closer. Her legs turned liquid. She closed her eyes, let her head fill with the sound of cicadas.

  “I'm a little tipsy, I think,” she said. “Not responsible for what I'm doing.”

  He laughed. “You know exactly what you're doing. You speak very fluent body language.” But then he drew his head away, his hands, his hips, and took a step back from her. “We need to have a talk,” he said. “A serious one.”

  “I don't see why.”

  “You want to know what ended my marriage and you have a right to know before we…before things go any further between us."

  She shook her head. “I've thought about it, Ben. I don't see why I need to know anything at all about your past, except what you'd like to tell me. I'm the one who should be talking seriously to you. You have to realize that I live in a different world, and I'll be returning to it at the end of the summer.” She had a sudden image of Michael and Nina in her living room in Santa Monica, talking loudly, pushing her, pulling her, and felt a distinct wave of nausea. “Whatever happens between us this summer will have to end.”

  She couldn't read his face. Then he gave a little nod, a small smile. “Okay. But if you change your mind, about wanting to know, or”—a broader smile now—”about wanting it to end when the summer's over, let me know.”

  He leaned forward for one small, quick kiss. Then he got into the truck and pulled her hand in through the window. “Tell Lou she better not drink any more of that brandy. And tell her I love her.” He cupped all ten of his fingers around her hand. “It's supposed to rain again tomorrow. Would you like to do something? Take a drive? Go to some used-book stores?”

  She was suddenly aware of danger, hanging like a scent in the air, mixing with the honeysuckle. Her cavalier speech about leaving at the end of summer might have convinced him but not herself. She shook her head quickly. “No thanks," she said. "I've got to work on the screenplay.”

  Lou was alone in the bedroom when Eden poked her head in the door. “I just wanted to make sure you're all right.”

  “Come in, dear.” Lou patted the edge of the bed. Her color was back. She was propped up by two pillows and she held a hardcover book in her lap. Her hair was loose and hung thick and straight over the shoulders of her pale yellow nightgown. Out of its bun, her hair gave her the appearance of a wise old sage.

  Eden sat down on the bed. “You look much better.”

  Lou took her hand. “I feel like such an old fool when I do things like that. Forgetting to lock the wheelchair. You'd think after all these years it'd be second nature. It's my brain that's the problem, Eden, not my leg.”

  Eden held Lou's hand as Ben had just held hers, her fingers cupping Lou's protectively. “I know you're trying to ease my guilt about your leg. But you can't. My guilt is here to stay. I'll take it to the grave with me.”

  Lou stared at her. She can't believe I'm talking about it, Eden thought. “Ben said to tell you he loves you,” she added. “And I do too.”

  Kyle suddenly stepped into the room and Eden looked up to see his surprise at finding her there, holding Lou's hand. “I'm interrupting something,” he said.

  “We were just having a little chat,” Lou said. Her blue eyes had misted over and she blinked to clear them. She smiled at Eden and squeezed her hand.

  Kyle stood near the bed, his hands on his hips. “I haven't heard Ben laugh that much in years,” he said.

  Lou nodded. “And I don't think I've ever seen that look on your face before, Eden.”

  “What look?” she asked.

  “That hungry look.” Kyle answered for his wife, and he and Lou both laughed.

  Eden felt the color in her cheeks. “Was it that obvious?”

  “Yes, but it's also obvious Ben shares your feelings,” Lou said.

  Kyle let out a great sigh. “I don't want anything to do with wrecking whatever's making the two of you happy. You're both adults. I'm not going to say another word about Ben to you."

  She was surprised that his words brought her no relief. She felt a little deserted.

  Kyle looked down at his wife. “How’re you doing?”

  “I'm fine.” Lou sounded very sure of herself.

  Kyle leaned over and set his hands on Lou's shoulders. He bent low to kiss her lips, and Eden got to her feet. She'd seen affection between her aunt and uncle before, but it had never jarred her in quite this way. This last week had forced her to see Kyle as something other than the solid, simple-hearted man she had always assumed him to be. He was something else, your uncle. He had at one time been an impassioned lover. Perhaps he still was.

  She knew by the way Lou looked at him when he pulled away from her that they were still lovers—that tonight Lou would find solace from the evening's trials in his embrace.

  –19–

  The next morning was rainy, as promised. Ben looked at his watch. Seven-thirty. Seven-thirty on a Saturday morning. He remembered Saturday mornings long ago, getting up to find Bliss parked in front of the television, a bowl of cereal in her lap, watching cartoons. Why hadn't he thought of that before? She might be the only person up this early.

  He reached for the phone and set it next to him on the bed. He took a minute to think this through because he suddenly felt his chances of having her answer were very good. She would answer and...what if he spoke to her? He could just say he loved her, he hadn't forgotten her. She had to be confused about his disappearance. How had they explained it to her? He could say…But that would be the end, wouldn't it, if he spoke to her? What would they do to him? Jail again? Maybe just a warning? It would be worth a warning. He dialed the number. His pulse throbbed somewhere in his gut.

  Someone answered and he sat up in the bed. He heard a metallic click, the static of a tape beginning to play.

  The number you have reached has been changed to an unlisted number.

  He called again to be certain he'd heard correctly. He had.

  He lay down. He was completely cut off from her now. The final blow. It hadn't been much—calling a number, imagining she was in the next room when Sharon answered—but it was all he had. And now he didn't even have that.

  If anyone had asked him during the last five years what was most important to him, he would not have had to stop and search for an answer. Nothing—not his career, not his reputation, not his friends, and although he would have balked at having to admit it, not even his marriage—could compare to his attachment to Bliss. He himself had wondered if he was too attached. If anything happened to her he was not certain how he would cope with the loss.

  The pleasure he took in Bliss had come as a surprise. He and Sharon had both been absorbed by their careers when they first married, and he'd been comfortable with that arrangement. When Sharon suggested a baby he'd felt indifferent to the idea.

  “I have to travel too much,” he told her.

  “I understand that,” Sharon had said. “And I won't expect you to do half the work. You can be one of those daddies who come home on weekends to do all the fun stuff while I wipe runny noses and teach manners.”

  So they went into childbearing with that agreement, but something changed. He was first aware of the shift in his feelings during Sharon's pregnancy. Every time he returned from a trip, her body had changed again. Her emotions peaked and plummeted, and he felt guilty that he was not with her during the low times and left out when she described feeling the baby move in her belly late a
t night. He knew she was careful about telling him these things. She had made a bargain with him that she wanted to honor. Still, she was overjoyed when he decided to leave the field for a while and teach so he could be closer to home. He took the job at the university just before Bliss was born.

  If anything, the bargain they had struck with one another was the antithesis of what actually happened. With his schedule at the university Ben had more time at home with Bliss than Sharon did. (Yes, they brought this out during the trial, pointing out to the jury just how much time alone he had with his daughter, how he had deliberately arranged his work so as to have that time with her.) Sharon took on more work for herself at the private high school where she taught, as her comfort grew with Ben's ability to care for Bliss. (She blamed herself later. “Did I push you into it, Ben? I mean, maybe you had those leanings, but if I had been there more often you never would have acted on them.”) It was usually Ben who took off work when Bliss was sick. It was Ben who cooked for her, fed her, bathed her. (“Indeed,” the prosecuting attorney had said, “your wife was absent from the home much of the time and your little girl was all the company you had. She, in essence, took your wife's place, did she not?”)

  He was a lousy disciplinarian. Everything Bliss did struck him as endearing. When he did reprimand her he could barely keep the smile off his lips. And she knew. It infuriated Sharon. “She'll be running wild by the time she's a teenager if you let her get away with everything now,” she'd said. But he saw no point in getting on Bliss's case over every little thing she did wrong. Save the lectures for the big stuff. The fact was, she never required much discipline around him. She'd often throw tantrums for Sharon, who would turn her over her knee for a spanking, a practice he found barbaric. This was all drawn out of him and Sharon during the trial. Picked apart. How he treated Bliss more like an adult than a child. That was ludicrous, he said. He took care of her, protected her. He just refused to talk down to her. Sometimes the lawyers tried to turn this whole thing into a war between him and Sharon. It was not that. He was not angry with Sharon, only hurt that she wouldn't believe him. He defended her when his own attorney tried to paint the picture of her as an absent, ineffectual mother. And Sharon never, not once, said an incriminating thing about him. But in the courtroom both her words and his were twisted and distorted to the extent that they began to see each other as enemies. Even if he had been cleared he didn't think their marriage could have survived the beating it took in that courtroom.