Secret Lives (58 page)

They watched in silence for a few minutes.
Then Kyle said, “When it flooded in 1959, everyone said it was a
once-in-a-hundred-years flood. Hard to believe it's happening
again.”

Eden stared at the cave, mesmerized. It was
as though the entire field of water was being sucked into the earth
through that black hole in the hillside.

“What was it like inside yesterday?” Kyle
asked. “Was it familiar to you?”

“The great room was. But it was much darker
than I remember.”

“Kate always had those lanterns burning.”

“I nearly fell over the typewriter.”

“Was any of the furniture left?”

She told him about the settee, the desk, the
chair. “Everything was against that back wall by the reflecting
pool.”

Kyle nodded. “That's where they found Kate.
You don't remember it at all, do you? The flood?”

“No.” She turned her head toward him and
asked him almost shyly, “Can you tell me?”

Kyle looked toward the cavern. “My father and
I were sandbagging the fire station in Coolbrook and suddenly it
occurred to me—I don't know why so late—that if the flood could get
as high as the fire station, it could get as high as the ground
here by the cave. I left to come back here, thinking at first that
I was overreacting. So I forced myself to walk slowly, but as I got
closer I could see how high and wild the creek was and I started
running. I pictured you and your mother in the cavern with cotton
in your ears, not able to hear the water coming. By the time I got
here, sure enough the water was pouring through the entrance. Not
as quickly as it is now, but quick enough. It was only up to my
ankles at the entrance but it was much deeper inside. Deep enough
to put out most of Kate's lanterns. Just two were still
burning.

“I couldn't see her at first. I called to her
from the entrance to the great room and she called back to me, and
after a minute I could see her as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.
She was holding you in her arms and trying to fight her way to the
entrance, but the water was coming in so fast she couldn't make any
headway. She said, 'Take Eden,' and she was holding you out to me.
You were screaming your little head off.” He smiled. “Trying to
hang on to your mama, not making it easy for her to hand you over.
I went in as far as I dared and she nearly had to toss you to me.
You latched onto me like a monkey, and I managed to get you back
out here. I set you up there on the road.” He pointed to where the
truck was parked. “It was just a dirt road then. I told you to stay
there. I remember thinking that without being weighed down by you,
Kate could probably get out on her own, but by the time I got in
again, she was pushed back even further. The water was to her waist
and she was holding on to a stalagmite, trying to keep from being
pulled deeper into the cave.”

Eden hugged her knees, queasy from the images
forming in her head.

“I got closer,” Kyle said. “I was scared we'd
both drown. I kept looking back toward the entrance and could see
the space between the water and the ceiling getting smaller and
smaller. And I kept thinking about you out there alone on the road.
I was afraid maybe you'd try to get back into the cave, or maybe
get swept into the creek.

“I was holding on to the stalagmites, trying
to work my way toward Kate, when suddenly it went dark. The last
lantern went out. It was black as pitch in there. Kate screamed out
my name. 'Kyle!' she screamed. Her voice bounced off the walls loud
enough to hurt my ears. I called to her. I called and called but…”
He shook his head. His eyes had filled and Eden slipped her arm
through his and set her head on his shoulder.

“Sometimes I still think about it,” Kyle
said. “That maybe if I'd had a rope ... Maybe if I'd run from
Coolbrook instead of walked…”

“Maybe if you didn't have to get me out
first,” Eden said.

“No.” He touched her hand where it rested on
his arm. “No, that's one thought I've never had.”

“All I remember from that whole episode is
that your hands and arms were scraped up.”

He smiled slightly. “You remember that?” He
turned his hands palm side up in his lap, but the scars were gone.
“I guess from the tites and mites. Your mother's arms were covered
with scrapes too when they found her.”

“Who found her?”

“Daddy and a neighbor. They went in the next
day after the waters went down. I couldn't go in. Not until after
she was out. Then I went in for the journals, and when the water
was completely gone I sealed the goddamned hole in the ground—for
eternity, I thought.”

He let out a long sigh. “Poor Eden,” he said.
“You kept asking for your mama, and we'd explain the best we could
that she was dead, and I thought you finally understood. But then
the next year when I came to visit, you asked if Kate was with me.
You said you wished she'd come back.”

They were quiet for many minutes, watching
the savage waters churn below them.

“I loved her so much, Eden,” Kyle said. “When
I look back, it's amazing that we didn't make love much sooner than
we did. We had so many opportunities, we were so close, and I
certainly wanted to, but I knew it could only hurt her, someone who
already lived on the edge of reality. I only gave in to it that
once and I regretted it. I can't tell you how ashamed and filled
with remorse I was. I regretted it until the day you were born.
Once I looked at you, once I held you, I stopped regretting.”

“I love you, Kyle,” she said.

He put his arm around her, kissed her temple.
“I love you too, sweetheart.”

For a moment neither of them spoke. A sense
of contentment, half formed and fragmentary, fell over her and she
knew what she needed to do to make it complete.

“There's something I have to tell you.” She
lifted her head from his shoulder. “About Lou's accident.”

He dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “I
know all about Lou's accident.”

“No,” she said. “You don't know what really
happened that night.”

“Yes, I do.”

“How could you? Lou said she never told
you.”

“She didn't. She wouldn't betray you. But
that boy you were running off with—Tex?—wrote me a letter shortly
after the accident. He was in a drug program and his counselor made
him write to me. He pretty much spelled out what happened.”

Eden pulled away from him. “You've known all
these years?”

“Yes.”

“Weren't you furious with me?”

Kyle sighed again. “I was furious with
myself, Eden. I failed you somehow that you wanted to run away,
that you couldn't tell me the truth. I always felt as though I
failed you, right from the start. I couldn't be a real father to
you. I should have fought to take you after Kate died, and I should
have told you I was your father long, long before I did.”

She left Kyle sitting on the bridge and drove
to the Lynch Hollow house. She should get the truck back to Ben,
but there was one thing she needed to do that couldn't wait.

She sat down in front of her word processor
and opened the screenplay. She scrolled through the pages until she
found the love scene she'd written between Kate and Matthew. She
read a few lines. It was a beautiful scene. Wrenchingly lovely. The
dialogue rich, the sensual tension compelling. She pressed the
button that would delete the scene in its entirety and smiled at
the blank screen left in its wake. Later today she would fill that
screen with something even richer, something real. But not right
now.

She pulled up the title page and changed the
title from A Solitary Life to A Secret Life, then scrolled to the
very end of the document, where she wrote:

THIS FILM IS DEDICATED TO MY FATHER, KYLE
SWIFT

She put paper in her printer, centered the
lines on the screen, and hit the print button. Then she sat back to
watch the letters take shape on the clean, white paper.

The End

About the Author

Diane
Chamberlain is the author of 18 novels. A former medical social
worker and psychotherapist, she lives in North Carolina with
photographer John Pagliuca and her Shetland Sheepdogs, Keeper and
Jet. Visit her on her home page
http://www.dianechamberlain.com
or on her Facebook page
at:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=57525775363&ref=ts

Other Novels by Diane Chamberlain

The Lies We Told

The Shadow Wife (originally Cypress
Point)

Secrets She Left Behind

Before the Storm

The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes

The Bay at Midnight

Breaking the Silence

Her Mother's Shadow

Kiss River

Keeper of the Light

The Courage Tree

Reflection

The Escape Artist

Brass Ring

Fire and Rain

Lovers and Strangers

Private Relations