Secret Lives (15 page)

“It's rustic,” she said, her tone
complimentary. She looked at Ben. Despite his rugged demeanor he
did not belong in this bare little mountain cabin.

“It's a little cooler outside,” he said. “Why
don't we move the table out there to eat?”

They set the table and two of the wooden
chairs in the small clearing in front of the cabin.

“You're really isolated up here,” she said.
“It must be scary at night.”

“Not scary. Just lonely.” He had brought a
bottle of wine from the cabin and he poured it into plastic
glasses. “Sorry about the plastic cups.”

“If you apologize for one more thing I'm
leaving.” She took the wine he offered, hoping it would loosen his
tongue a little. She thought of Kyle drunkenly asking Kate for her
help in his plight with Sara Jane and began to laugh.

“What's so funny?”

“I'm learning more about Kyle than I ever
wanted to know. Do you know the bakery on Main Street?”

“The Millers'?”

“Yes. Do you know Sara Jane Miller?”

“Is she the heavyset woman?”

That he would be so kind in his description
of Sara Jane said a lot about Ben, she thought. “Yes. Well, she was
Kyle's first.”

“First…?” He looked confused for a moment.
Then his face broke into a warming smile. “Oh, you mean his
first.”

She nodded.

Ben set down his glass and laughed. “You
really shouldn't tell me things like that. Does Lou know?”

Eden told him how Lou had manipulated her
meeting with Sara Jane.

“I should have guessed,” Ben said. “Lou and
Kyle don't have many secrets between them.”

Just one, Eden thought.

“Lou's one of a kind,” Ben continued. “She
inspires me. When I'm wallowing in self-pity, I think of what she's
accomplished with her positive attitude. She's never let her
handicap hold her back.”

“No, she hasn't.” Eden thought of changing
the subject, but she wondered how much Ben knew. “Did she tell you
how it happened?”

“Car accident. You were with her, right?”

She amazed herself by considering the truth,
but settled for the lie. “Yes.”

“She said she was going too fast and a
station wagon plowed into her.”

“She makes it sound like it was her
fault.”

“She drives like a maniac,” Ben said. “You
were lucky you weren't hurt.”

Eden sipped her wine. “She likes you very
much,” she said.

“Lou and Kyle have been wonderful to me.
They've gone way beyond the call of duty.”

She picked the fried crust off her chicken.
“What stuns me is that Kyle hasn't censored the journal in any way.
If I were him I would have wanted to pull out a few pages here and
there.”

“Maybe he did want to, but he's an
archaeologist. He'd never tamper with an artifact. Besides, he said
your mother wanted you to have it, right? She knew what was in
it.”

“Yeah, but the truth is my mom was a little
kooky. She wouldn't care what I learned about her.” She leaned
forward and rested her elbows on the table. “Tell me about you,
Ben. I'm not sure what to ask you because I get the feeling some
questions aren't safe to ask.”

“Some aren't.” He smiled. His eyes were gray,
a true gray, pale as mist. “I was born in Maryland. Bethesda.
Thirty-eight years ago. I have a brother, Sam, who's a psychiatrist
and rich and successful. My father was a doctor, my mother a nurse.
They died a few years ago within a couple of months of each
other.”

“Oh, I'm sorry.”

Ben took a bite of chicken before he
answered. “Well, it was lousy for Sam and me,” he said, “but really
best for them in a way. I couldn't imagine one of them living
without the other.”

“Did you always want to be an
archaeologist?”

“Since I was a teenager. I like examining the
past. It's safer than the future. Not too many surprises.”

“Do you miss teaching?” She plowed ahead. He
was still talking, still comfortable.

“Yes, I guess I do.” He tossed a shred of his
biscuit to a squirrel at the edge of the clearing. “I liked
standing up in front of people, trying to make what I had to say
entertaining enough so they'd get something out of it. I liked
working with really bright students who showed a lot of promise.”
He shrugged. “But, you know, it's nice to be in the field,
too.”

“Do you miss…what was your wife's name?” More
dangerous ground, but he didn't seem put off by the question.

“Sharon? I miss the life we used to have. We
had so many plans, and we'd done a lot together that's hard to just
forget, you know?”

She nodded, thinking of her own marriage. She
and Wayne had done amazingly little together over the fifteen years
they'd been married. Cassie had been their only common thread.

He put down his chicken and leaned forward.
“I designed the house we lived in. That had always been a goal of
mine, and we did a lot of the building ourselves. Would you like to
see a picture of it?”

“Oh, yes.”

He wiped his fingers on his napkin and went
into the cabin. When he returned he showed her a snapshot of a
beautiful cedar contemporary that she had no trouble at all
picturing him in.

“It's wonderful,” she said.

“It was on a wooded lot that backed to the
water. Not huge—we couldn't afford huge—but it was really nice.
Lots of glass. We were in it eight years and I never stopped
marveling at what we'd done.”

He looked up at her. She saw the glimmer of
pride in his eyes and felt his loss.

“Is Sharon still in it?” she asked.

He nodded. “With her new husband. She
remarried a couple of months ago, probably about the same time
Wayne and his schoolteacher tied the knot.” His voice was quiet,
his pain almost tangible as it hung above the wobbly table.

“Something is terribly wrong,” she said.

He looked up, alarmed.

“No, not here. I mean, you've been gypped
somehow.”

His laugh was bitter. “No kidding.”

“You had a special house, a good job. I don't
care how vicious a divorce is, people don't lose everything unless
they've done something outrageous or…”

He shook his head, touched her hand. “You
said there was something in the journal you wanted me to see.”

She shoved her plate aside and leaned toward
him, arms on the table. “Ben, do you understand that I know exactly
how it feels to lose a marriage? To have the person you love marry
someone else?”

“Shhh. I just need a change of topic, okay?”
He pushed his chair back from the table. “Where's the journal?”

It was getting too dark to read outside, so
they carried the table and chairs into the cabin. She sat on the
plaid sofa; he sat in the matching chair.

“My mother found a human skeleton in the
cave,” she said.

Ben's eyebrows shot up. “What did she do with
it?”

“Nothing, as far as I've read. She was only
sixteen when she found it. She wasn't interested in archaeology
yet.”

“Did you ask Kyle about it? Is it still
there?”

“I didn't mention it to him.” When she'd told
Kyle she was having dinner with Ben tonight he'd shaken his head at
her. “You need to be very careful, honey,” he said, and she was so
bothered by his words that she didn't ask him anything else.

She opened the notebook to the entry from
November 16 and read it to him. Ben laughed when she had finished.
“Your mother was a pip,” he said. “Who's this Matt guy?”

“My father.” She smiled. “This is my
introduction to him.”

“Your mother seems very fond of him.” Ben
snickered.

“It's only 1943 and I wasn't born until 1955.
I think it's going to be fun to see how her feelings for him
change. I want her to have one great passionate love affair. Can't
you picture it in the movie? The way their relationship will grow
as they mature into adults? Great sensual tension. Michael Carey's
going to play Matt. How young a character do you think he could get
away with?”

“In terms of looks, maybe twenty-one or -two
with a little makeup. In terms of behavior, fifteen or so.”

She laughed. “You don't like him much,
huh?”

“I'm jealous.”

“You don't need to be.”

He sighed and set the notebook on the coffee
table. “I'll ask Kyle tomorrow about the skeleton, but probably
it's nothing or he would have told me. If it were any older than a
couple hundred years it would increase Lynch Hollow's value as an
archaeological site, so surely he would have done something about
it if that were the case. Skeletons don't last more than a few
hundred years anyhow. Unless it was really dry in that part of the
cave. Your mother did say the tunnel was on an incline, huh? It's
possible.”

Eden was no longer listening. She had spotted
a photograph of a little girl on the mirror above his dresser. She
walked over to the dresser and plucked it from between the glass
and the frame.

“Is this your daughter?”

“Yes.”

She carried the picture back to the sofa and
sat down again. The girl had long, straight platinum-blond hair
with deep bangs above wide gray eyes. “She's adorable. She has your
eyes.

“Yes.”

“What's her name?”

“Bliss.”

“Bliss?” Eden smiled.

“Yeah. We had two girls' names picked out and
hadn't decided between them by the time she was born. When I saw
her in the nursery at the hospital the name Bliss just popped into
my mind. I was thinking that someone with that name could never be
unhappy.” He rubbed his palms on his thighs. “A little naive of me,
I guess.”

“You miss her.”

“God, yes.”

Eden leaned forward. “Is money the reason you
aren't having her visit this summer? You shouldn't let that stop
you. You don't need money to love a child. You and she could have
such a special relationship out here, something she'd always
remember. You can teach her about nature and the site and give her
plenty of things nine-to-five fathers with loads of money can't
begin to touch.”

“Eden.” He stood up and took the photograph
from her fingers. “I just can't talk about this.” He walked over to
the dresser and slipped the picture back into the mirror, and she
felt a wall go up between them, as it had at Sugar Hill.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I don't seem to know
when to shut up."

“It's not you, it's me.” He stood in front of
the small stereo, hands in his pockets. “What kind of music do you
like to dance to?”

“Anything.”

He put on a tape of oldies. The first song
was slow, and he held out his hand to her. She took it reluctantly.
“Are you going to push me away again like you did the other
night?”

“No.” He drew her against him.

She shut her eyes and an agreeable dizziness
filled her head. She drank in the subtle scent of his after-shave,
the laundered smell of his shirt. He tightened his arms around her.
The pressure of his thigh between hers seemed something more than
accidental. Be very careful, honey. She re-turned the pressure, and
he groaned. He lifted her chin with his fingertips and kissed her
softly, but she backed away from him, although her arms still
circled his neck.

“I'm afraid to get any closer to you,” she
said. “You won't let me know you. If I get close I'm afraid you'll
disappear.”

He laughed. “You summed up my insecurities
perfectly. I'm afraid if I let you know me, you'll disappear.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Other people have.”

“What could you tell me that would be so
awful?”

“Shhh.” He pulled her against him again.
“Let's just dance. It's safer than kissing, and definitely safer
than talking.”

The music quickened and they danced to every
song on the tape, sometimes touching, sometimes not. She felt the
wine and the heat. She liked watching him move. And she liked to
imagine how this cabin would look from outside, from deep in the
woods, where the music could just be heard and two shadows moved
dizzily in the amber light.

Maybe Sharon had kidnapped Bliss. Parents did
that sometimes, ran off with the kids for one reason or another.
But Sharon was still in their house, so that didn't fit. What did
it matter? She didn't need to know his secret. Let him have it. She
would focus on the here and now. Forget the past.

When the next slow song came on she didn't
wait for him to reach for her before settling into his arms. She
held him tightly, listening to their breathing work out a pattern.
The song ended and she looked at her watch behind his head. It was
nearly midnight.

“I'd better go,” she said without moving,
although another song, this one fast, had started.

He lifted her hair and it caught on the damp
skin of her neck as he buried his lips just below her ear. She felt
his heart beating against her breast and pulled her head back to
find his lips. They were warm, and salty from her own
perspiration.

“Nice,” he said, his mouth on hers.

She thought of the bed, half twin, half full,
the beautiful quilt. She wanted him to lay her down on it. She
couldn't remember the last time she'd actually wanted a man. Her
breasts ached for Ben to touch them. She was her mother's daughter.
But there were things to be concerned about these days before you
had sex with a stranger. With a jolt she thought of his
secretiveness, of Kyle's warning.

“Could you have AIDS?” she whispered.

Ben laughed and took a step back from her.
“You really know how to bring a guy back to reality. No, I could
not, and where is your mind, woman? I was only kissing you.”

She pressed her forehead against his chest so
he couldn't see the color in her face. “I don't know how to date,”
she said.

“Well, that makes two of us. Anyhow, I'm the
one who should be worried about getting AIDS. Michael Carey's
something of a Casanova.”

“That's true, but he and I aren't
lovers.”

“Right, Eden. What about that scene in Heart
of Winter?”