The Art of Keeping Secrets (16 page)

Jake sat in the sole chair in the room, dropped his arms over the sides of the starfish-design upholstery. “Mom, what are you doing here?”

“Jake, I need some food in my stomach before I try to answer that. Okay?”

“Does it have anything to do with Dad?”

“Yes, but I’m not sure how yet.” Annabelle walked toward her son, who was now taller than Knox had been. His dark curls fell below his ears, and dark stubble covered his chin. The remnants of adolescent acne were long gone.

She was selfish for believing that this dilemma was affecting only her, not everyone else in the family. She walked into the bathroom, hoping to wash the fatigue and stress off her face. When that was unsuccessful, she dabbed on some blush and lipstick, ran a brush through her hair, then leaned close to the mirror. “That’s as good as it’s gonna get tonight.”

In the past two years she’d often found herself wondering if Knox could see her, could watch the family from heaven. At times she’d wished this were true, but right now she hoped it wasn’t. The last thing she wanted him to see was her, bedraggled, panicked, running around like an insane woman trying to find out about “the woman.” She looked up at the water-stained ceiling. “Oh, Knox, I do love you, but what were you doing here?”

She came out of the bathroom. “Let’s go. I’m starving,” she said to Jake.

He followed her outside without a word. Communication between her and Jake was often like this. Annabelle understood he was angry, yet trying to control it enough to discover what this trip had to do with him, with his dad.

She led him down a side street to a restaurant she’d noticed after leaving the church. She wound her arm through his as they entered a packed room that smelled of fried food and warm salt air. They were told there would be at least a half-hour wait. Annabelle leaned against the wall and let out a long breath.

Jake pulled on her arm. “Come on, Mom. I’ll buy you a drink.”

She lifted her eyebrows at him. “You aren’t legal to buy me a drink.” She poked at his side.

“Two more months and I will be.”

“How did that happen?” Annabelle spread her hands apart. “How did I come to have an almost-twenty-one-year-old son?”

He shrugged, blushed, then walked toward the bar. Annabelle listened to him order her a Chardonnay and a Coke for himself, his gestures and tone of voice so like his father’s. Her heart hurt as though it were breaking all over again as she watched him take money from his wallet, smile at the waitress.

She accepted the glass of wine he handed her, took a long swallow and then sat on a bar stool. “Thanks, Jake.”

“No problem. Tell me what is going on. Please.”

Annabelle leaned her elbow on the counter, pushed a stray hair off her son’s forehead. “I remembered that your dad stopped to refuel here. I thought I’d come and ask some questions. But it didn’t take very long. . . . You’re not going to believe who I saw in the first couple hours I was here.”

Jake shrugged.

“Sofie Parker. Remember her?”

He stared off at the wall, paused and smiled, turned back to her. “The little girl who used to live above the art gallery with her mother. The lady whose painting is in our foyer . . . right?”

Annabelle took a sharp breath—the painting in the foyer. She had forgotten Liddy Parker had painted it. Annabelle felt her eyes squint, her brow furrow.

“Did I say something wrong?”

She shook her head. “No, I just haven’t eaten.”

Jake rose and walked toward the maître d’, then returned. “Come on. We have a table now.”

Annabelle laughed. “What’d you do, bribe him?”

Once they sat down, the room around them faded like the blurry background in an old photo. Annabelle spoke in quiet tones. “Anyway, she knew your dad’s plane was found—she heard it on the news—but when I asked if she knew who was on the plane with him, she was very skittish, scared almost. She told me your dad was helping some woman—a mission trip. She wouldn’t tell me the woman’s name, but in a small town like this, that shouldn’t be hard to find out . . . I guess.” Annabelle leaned back in her chair and marveled how some sleep and reassurring news could completely change her outlook on life.

“I remember Sofie from elementary school, and her cool mom who ran the art studio. Sometimes when Dad picked me up from school, we’d drop Sofie off there, and Dad would look at the art, talk to her mom about it.”

“Well, that little girl must be twenty now. You two were the same age.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“Neither do I, but it must’ve had something to do with his pro bono work.”

“Yeah . . . I guess.” Jake leaned back in the chair. A waiter came and took their order, placed a basket of hush puppies on the table. Annabelle ate two. “These are wonderful.” She pushed the basket toward Jake.

He popped a hush puppy into his mouth, chewed while he stared at the restaurant crowd. “Weird.”

“Yes.”

“Well, maybe I can talk to Sofie, find out something more.”

“You can try—she wouldn’t tell me anything else. I have no idea where she lives or works or anything.”

Jake scooted back to allow the waiter to place water glasses on the table. “What else did she say?”

“Listen, Jake, I don’t have anything else to tell you. That’s all I know right now. Let’s talk about you. How is school going?”

“I dropped out of the semester.”

Annabelle’s drink slipped in her hand; Jake grabbed it before the wine spilled.

“Sorry, Mom. That’s why I’ve been avoiding your phone calls. It’s why I bought you that drink.” He smiled at her and made a face. “Don’t lose your cool, okay?”

Oh, God, how she wanted Knox here. She wanted to look to him for the proper words to say, for how to respond to her precious son in a way that wouldn’t ruin this fragile moment.

“Jake, why?”

“Mom, I didn’t like the prelaw classes at all. I think I want to teach. Or write. History probably. I’m not really sure. But I know I don’t want to be a lawyer.”

It was as if the news about the woman in the plane had upset a precarious equilibrium, tipping out a mess of confused goals, beliefs and misunderstood motivations.

“Honey, you’ve wanted—”

“I know. But I don’t now.”

“Okay, then let’s talk about what you do want.”

“That’s the biggest problem. I’m not sure. I just know what I
don’t
want. I know this is crazy for you to hear, Mom. I know this isn’t the way your brain works. And I’ve practiced this speech five hundred times, but it still isn’t coming out right. I know you can’t support me while I figure it out, so I promise I’ll get a job. If we’re supposed to do something with our lives that inspires us and others, then I want to teach history.” He held up his hand. “I know that doesn’t make much money. But I love it. I love everything about it.”

Annabelle looked across the table at her son in this strange town, in this foreign land where she had come to find out what her husband had been doing right before he died. “Jake, if you love history, then teach it, write about it. You do not need to choose a career to satisfy me or your father.”

She spoke about Knox in the present tense, as if he were still there looking over them, judging Jake’s decisions. A new freedom came over her, freedom mixed with a sense of betrayal; she didn’t need to think about what Knox would say or how he’d react—he wasn’t there. “Jake, you’ve loved history since you could read. While everyone else was reading the Hardy Boys, you read about the Crusades. While others did their school projects on the popular sports figures, you did yours on some Roman battle I don’t even remember. While others dressed up at Halloween as John Elway, you dressed up as a gladiator. Don’t try and please
me
with your choice of career or school.” She grinned at him. “I never want you to blame me for whatever misery you bring on yourself. You already have enough to blame me for.”

Jake looked toward the other side of the restaurant, but a mother knew the look on her son’s face when he was fighting back tears. She couldn’t tell what they were for—her mention of Knox or her release of his life—but she reached across the table and laid her hand on his forearm. “Hey, you okay?”

He looked back at her. “Mom, I have never blamed you for anything. Ever.”

She smiled. “That was meant to be a joke, but you know what? Keeley does blame me. She hates me now. Do all sixteen-year-olds hate their mothers?”

Jake nodded. “That’s what I’ve heard. Mom, I just think she is still really, really mad at Dad for leaving us.”

Annabelle sat back in her seat. “I guess I’ve seen it, but ignored it, hoping it would pass.”

The waiter returned, placed their plates on the table. Jake took a bite of the pecan-encrusted grouper he’d ordered, chewed and spoke simultaneously. “Mom, are you sure you don’t know where Sofie lives now?”

Annabelle shook her head, laughed. “Don’t talk with your mouth full.” Then she looked away from him. “No, I don’t know where she lives. I drove most of the night to get here, and then found her by accident at the church. Guess I’ll have to do some sleuthing.”

Jake stood abruptly and went to the bar, came back with a phone book. Annabelle laughed. “I would’ve thought of that . . . eventually.”

Jake leafed through the pages until he came to the Ps for Parker. He looked up. “Nothing here with the names Liddy or Sofie, or even the initials.”

“She said her name is Milford or Milstead now, something like that.”

“Did she marry?” Jake sifted through the pages.

“I doubt it. In the church she was with an older man she called her boyfriend. She’s awfully young to marry.”

“Hmmm . . . don’t I know someone who married the love of her life when she was twenty?”

“That was different,” Annabelle said. “Very different.”

“I’m sure it was.” Jake laughed. He flipped through more pages. “Here’s an L. Milstead with an address and a phone number.”

“Liddy.”

“You have a pen?”

Annabelle pulled a black Sharpie from her purse. “Here,” she said.

Jake scribbled the name, address and phone number on a napkin. “She must still live with her mother.”

“She told me her mother left. That’s all she said about her.”

“Mom, this is all way weird.”

Annabelle took a sip of wine, attempted to ignore her son’s comment as she looked out the porthole window to Bay Street. Sofie Milstead knew more than she had told, and the information was like a stranger Annabelle was unsure she wanted to meet.

ELEVEN

SOFIE MILSTEAD

Bedford stroked Sofie’s back, muttered the words she loved to hear. She never understood all that he said, yet she got the meaning—she was loved and adored. And above all else—she was safe.

He told her of her beauty and how her life had been made for his. If she examined this idea, if she probed for reciprocal feelings within herself, she couldn’t find them. There was not a space inside her that Bedford filled—only the dolphins did that for her. She understood there was something wrong with her, this failure to return his deeper love, but she basked in his adoration and assumed that eventually her immaturity would diminish and she would be able to truthfully love him back, tell him that he completed her.

Bedford dozed off with his hand flat on her stomach, and Sofie thought how the hours that had passed that Sunday somehow added up to more than one day.

The humidity outside had settled inside her veins, her very blood bringing on a languor. When they’d set off for church that morning, she’d felt slightly guilty for not having told Bedford that Michael Harley, the art historian, had come calling. Bedford had looked down at her and kissed her on the forehead.

They had walked into the church as they had every Sunday since the first time she met him. He was a man of habit and of conscience, and these two qualities conspired to make him a churchgoer, if not a man of faith. This had baffled her at first—how could this man demand such strict church attendance when he found it hard to believe anything that couldn’t be empirically proven? Then she realized that the familiar liturgy, the same words repeated in the same order week after week, appealed to his need for order even as they called to her heart.

They had walked toward their seats, the air dusty and stifling. Sofie had leaned against Bedford’s shoulder and allowed the calm of this place to comfort her. People had filed into the church, sat in their regular seats and nodded hello to Sofie and Bedford, whispered, “Humid out there, eh?” as if no one else knew. Sofie had stared at the doorway, where the refracted light fell in a single path along the blue carpet; she thought how it looked like the path a dolphin might make in the water. A sadness rose in her, in a lump below her throat. She had started to look away, but a woman who walked into the shaft of light had caused Sofie to stop and stare.

She had dusty blond curls that fell wind whipped to her shoulders, and the awed, disoriented look of someone who had never entered this church before. She’d rubbed her hands together, then looked left and right and sat in the back pew to one side, her legs poised as if she might run at any minute.

Then the woman looked straight at Sofie, stared at her, through her. Electricity ran through Sofie and caused her body to quiver beneath Bedford’s hand on her knee as she recognized Annabelle Murphy—Knox’s wife.

Bedford patted her leg. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” Sofie whispered. “I’ll be right back. I have to go to the ladies’ room.” She stood and walked down the aisle, avoided this woman’s stare and entered the courtyard through a side door. This was it—this was when the consequences of her lies and secrets caught up with her.

The bench at the end of the church courtyard faced a playground surrounded by gravestones. Sofie sat and stared at the date on one of the stones: 1875. She counted inside her head: how long would it take Annabelle Murphy to come outside, find her?