The Art of Keeping Secrets (10 page)

He closed his eyes. “Yes.” Then he opened them and stared at her. “And sometimes we get to keep them and sometimes we don’t.”

“Exactly,” she said. “Please tell everyone to stop asking after me, checking on me. Okay?”

“Okay.” He stepped back, and together they walked back into the dining room.

The wineglasses were all empty—a sign that someone would eventually say something they regretted. But even if they did, all would be well; this group forgave, moved on and laughed about it at the next party. Like the time Mae told Cooper he really shouldn’t have cut his hair because it made his head look like a bowling pin, or when Christine told Mae she was off her rocker to own a horse farm without horses. Well, maybe not everyone forgave her that one, but it hadn’t been mentioned since.

Annabelle helped clear the table and dully heard the conversations through a blur of red wine and one martini—straight up—that Shawn had made her before dinner. He did this, she knew, to soften the tumultuous emotions, but actually alcohol only intensified everything she felt, gave it the sharp edges of broken glass. As she watched the married couples lean in for private jokes or the other two women laugh about their husbands, her lonesomeness increased, her sense of isolation keen.

She headed toward the kitchen with a handful of empty plates, heard Cooper’s and Shawn’s voices in a familiar melody. She stopped before the kitchen door, leaned up against the wall to listen, their hushed words filtering through the doorway.

She heard Cooper say, “It’s her, old buddy, isn’t it?”

Silence was the answer and Annabelle wished she could poke her head into the kitchen, see the expression on Shawn’s face. She should never have alluded to Maria. Now Shawn’s past heartaches had come to visit also.

Annabelle clung to the plates for fear she would drop them, shatter Cooper and Christine’s family china and give away her presence.

Shawn answered, “It’s always been her . . . then and now.”

“I’m sorry, buddy.

A long, drawn-out silence followed, and Annabelle stayed frozen behind the swinging door—if she entered, they’d know she’d heard. She tiptoed back to the dining room, set the dirty dishes on the table. Christine, Mae and Frank looked up at her. She walked to her purse and picked it up. “I gotta go, okay? Christine, thanks for having me. It was a great night. I’ll get my serving dish tomorrow.”

“You’re walking home?”

Annabelle nodded at the ever-responsible Frank. “Yes, it’s only two blocks. I’ll be fine.”

Outside, the moist air hit her with an awakening jolt. Just as it would always be Maria for Shawn, it would always be Knox for her. They’d been married for eighteen years, dated for six before that. If she did the math, he’d been gone for less than ten percent of her entire time with him, and she’d never been with anyone else. There was only one time when her and Shawn’s friendship had crossed the line into the realm of other possibilities.

She’d had a final exam the next morning, and the house she rented with three other girls was in the full throes of a party. She’d gone to Shawn’s house to study—it was the semester Knox was away doing an internship with a state senator.

She and Shawn had driven the hour back to Marsh Cove. His parents had been out of town. They studied in the large library until her eyes started to close; he quizzed her on some remote French treaty in a time and place she didn’t much care about. And she’d told him so.

He came to sit with her on the couch, wrapped his arm around her—which wasn’t unusual. He continued to study while she dozed on his shoulder, as if his knowledge would filter over to her. She’d awakened to him staring at her, pushing her bangs off her forehead and then holding his hand to her face.

It had seemed the most natural thing to kiss him. Even later, when she wanted to regret that one kiss, she never felt the guilt she supposed she should—after all, Shawn was Knox’s best friend too. The remorse never came and another kiss never happened.

But in that brief moment, something blossomed inside her that she hadn’t thought possible—an attraction to someone besides Knox Murphy, with his ragged curls, his brown eyes, his deep laughter. This feeling was not something she wanted or needed and so she shoved it away.

They awoke the next morning on the couch, crooked and cramped, drove to school with only seconds to spare before the history final, and both aced the exam to make the dean’s list.

Nothing was ever said about the kiss again. Was it just another secret she hadn’t realized she’d been keeping?

Once, in a quiet moment long after her and Knox’s rushed wedding, she’d caught Shawn’s eye and he’d smiled. And in that small space, right below her breastbone, she’d remembered that long-ago kiss. Then she’d reminded herself of the pain and misery she’d felt without Knox, when she’d been unable to find him during Hurricane Hugo.

And for almost two decades, she hadn’t thought about that kiss once.

With all the broken pieces of her life scattered or misplaced, she felt incapable of desiring anyone but Knox. The deepening knowledge that she would forever wonder who was with her husband on the night of his death destroyed anything of want or longing inside her.

How, she thought as she climbed the stairs to her front porch, was she to ever love again? Trust again? Believe in herself and what was true in her life?

The weight of her questions collapsed on her as she sat down in the wicker rocking chair, stared at the pewter-colored blending of water and sky: there was no horizon to disappear into tonight—only darkness.

Footsteps echoed on the sidewalk. A figure walked with swinging arms, stopped at her stairs and hesitated to come to the porch: Shawn. He didn’t see her in the rocking chair. She watched him under the streetlight and felt like a voyeur, yet couldn’t bring herself to call his name.

He stood there for long minutes, turned to leave, then moved back until he finally continued down the street and rounded the corner back to Cooper and Christine’s. Relief and loneliness spread through her as she rose and entered her empty house.

She wanted to scream out at Knox,
What were you doing
?

She had to do something, find something. Just walking around vowing to keep it together, faking a smile and feigning bravado were causing her to falter. She entered the kitchen and slammed her palm down on the counter. Helplessness unraveled her heart, and she felt consumed by a need for control. On a piece of white notepaper with the cutesy quote “My heart will always be in a cottage by the sea,” written in script on the bottom of the pad, she began to list the facts she knew.

 
Fact One : Knox flew out on a Tuesday afternoon to go hunting in CoLorado at a ranch in Durango where he’d been ten times before colorado at a ranch in Durango where he’d been ten times before (or at Least he said he’d been there ten times).

 
Annabelle’s heart paused and the name
Newboro
entered the space before the next beat.

A tingling began at her temples and moved downward to her stomach, then feet. Fragmented ideas fluttered across her mind. Her heart beat as though it couldn’t decide whether to stop or quicken, changing its rhythm with each thought.

She ran to her bedroom, pulled the suitcase out from under the bed and began packing, the tingling sensation still running through her body. She would go to Newboro. This was insane, yet her body was acting independent of her thoughts and feelings, as though she were running for an answer she wasn’t sure her mind and heart wanted to know, yet she had to go.

SEVEN

SOFIE MILSTEAD

Being separated from Bedford was usually hard for Sofie, but this time she welcomed the reprieve. She’d been in bed sick for two days, heat and ice spreading alternately through her body. Bedford was off in Raleigh for a lecture series that would last only three days. She hadn’t told him how she was feeling; she didn’t want him to worry. She longed to be alone with this illness, which caused her to dream in multicolored images of dolphins talking, of land and sea melding together.

Sofie pulled her hair behind her head and thought she needed to take a shower, get something to eat. She wasn’t sure how she’d gotten sick—either the rainstorm, or the news about the historian, or both had left her vulnerable to a virus. She and Bedford didn’t talk much when he wasn’t with her in Newboro. She only stayed in his place when he was in town.

She rose from bed and walked to the far corner of her condo. Sofie and her mother had lived here together for more than eight years, and her mother’s last canvas lay on an easel in the back of the room, covered with beige muslin. The oil paints in their tubes were dry and cracked.

In an urge she hadn’t felt in months, Sophie lifted the muslin off the canvas and stared at the unfinished piece. It had a breathtaking allure. She found herself touching the corners as she exhaled. She sat on the metal stool in front of the easel and picked up a dried brush, attempted to break apart the paint that held the bristles together in a two-year-old memory of when it was last used. Her mother must have taken off in a hurry to leave behind an uncleaned brush.

Her mother’s art lessons had infused Sofie with an ability to paint, but not the desire. If, and only if, she added to this painting, picked up a new brush and began to complete the starfish . . . “No,” she spoke out loud, put the muslin back over the canvas. If she ruined the art, if she destroyed what her mother had started, she’d never be able to fix it or go back and do it again. You only had one chance to do things right—her mother’s advice ingrained in her as permanently as her eye color.

This unfinished painting represented so much that was lost, and deep down Sofie knew that nothing really mattered—people died, they left, they loved and weren’t loved back. All of it was spit in the wind, all of it meaningless, and it was ridiculous to try to make sense of senseless chaos. Even her work with the dolphins didn’t amount to anything. No matter how she tried to quantify, list, chart, graph or prove her theories, the truth was that none of it meant much in the larger scheme of things. Her life and her work were just specks in a swirling world, and this was just an unfinished painting. Just one.

There was a single cure for her when her thoughts became trapped in these hopeless thoughts: her dolphins. She grabbed a Windbreaker off the hook by the door.

She headed to the research center, where she always went to calm her inner turmoil. If she stood on the rocky outcropping at the very edge of the harbor, she could see nothing but water, nothing before her to the right or to the left. It was all she could think to do when she reached this hollow, hopeless place.

The water was calm, in harsh contrast to her churning mind. Fever raged in her veins, in her muscles and behind her eyes where a headache throbbed. She sat on the rock, leaned forward and despite her dizziness, she basked in this vista of sea and sky.

She willed the dolphins to appear. Finally, the still water rippled, and they rose above the surface, blew air from their blowholes; two jumped and flipped as though for her enjoyment. The other two swam sideways, glancing at her. It was Delphin’s family with his pregnant mate. Sofie smiled and longed to jump in and swim with them.

She shivered inside her Windbreaker, suddenly chilled underneath her pajamas. She leaned farther out, watched them with the acute eye of the researcher. She sensed they knew she was sick—they were sympathetic. She had no way to verify her belief so it would be accepted by the scientific community, but still she felt it to be true. Could love be quantified and put on a chart? Could desire be graphed? Could grief be summarized with bullet points?

She rose and stared down at her dolphins, held her hand over the water to acknowledge their presence. She knew without a doubt that these animals had a name for her.

Sofie’s mother had told her many times the story of her real name and why it had had to change. She longed for her mother now to come and tell her the story again. She wanted to curl up on the couch and hear about her mother’s love, and how they’d been rescued.

When she returned home, she unplugged the phone and placed the teakettle on the stove. Today, she would remember the story as though she were telling it to herself, as though her mother sat on this couch with the muslin off the canvas, with the sweet smell of paint remover settling in the corners, Bocelli on the stereo, the windows open so she could hear the splash of water against the dock and of boats against the waves: this was how her mother had loved to live.

Sofie clicked PLAY on the CD player, opened a far window and curled beneath her quilt with a cup of hot tea. Her mother was always one to tell stories, use them as another would use salve or medication to heal a sick child. She told fairy tales, myths of gods and goddesses, stories of running and being saved. Sofie couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment when she realized that one in particular—about the man who had saved them—was a true story.

Sometime during her childhood, among the telling and retelling, Sofie began to recognize a change in her mother’s voice when she told the story of their rescue. But with her tea in hand, Sofie fell asleep without recalling the entire tale—remembering only the feeling of safety and love.

While she slept, the fever ebbed like an outgoing tide, and Sofie woke to a knock on her front door. Something important had drifted through her in sleep, and yet she couldn’t find it when she awoke.

She jumped for the door—maybe Bedford, worried about her, had come home.

But a stranger stood on the threshold dressed in a suit and tie, and holding a briefcase. His eyes squinted at her, giving him an intense and tired appearance, like a weary traveler.

Sofie pulled the blanket tighter around herself, aware now that she was in her pajamas. “May I help you?” she asked, closed the door another inch.