The Art of Keeping Secrets (27 page)

She knew what he meant because she felt it, too: the despair that threatened to overtake her if she thought for more than two minutes that Knox had not loved her as she had loved him, the emptiness that loomed when she thought again,
What if none of what I believed is true?

She took Shawn’s hand, understanding the dark place. “I’m sorry, Shawn. I didn’t mean to say it so cruelly. Did you love Liddy?”

“No. I thought I did for a little while, but she was only an escape. I am ashamed to say I was glad when she moved. When I realized that I had used her to leave a bad relationship, I felt terrible.”

“And you never told Knox?”

He shook his head. “Never. I didn’t tell anyone. Until now.”

“Oh, God, how many more secrets are there?” Annabelle dropped her head into her hands. “If you . . . if you did this thing and kept it from me all these years, why couldn’t Knox have done the same? If she had that kind of power . . .” All Annabelle’s beliefs, which she’d been gathering all day, crumbled. She could talk and talk, and remember and remember, and gather more shells, but what was the truth?

He spoke in a whisper. “That is the only reason I told you. You think I wanted you to know about this? Never. But I could not have you think it was Knox who had the affair. . . . He wouldn’t. He didn’t.”

Annabelle looked up now. “If you could, he could.”

Shawn looked away, and she knew it was because her words were true and he had no answer for them.

“Why else,” she said, “would he have been with her?”

“I came to relieve your fear, not add to it. That woman told you Liddy had one affair in Marsh Cove; you’re looking at him.”

Then a possibility crossed her mind like an arrow of such piercing pain that she doubled over. “Shawn, are you making this up to force me to believe Knox was not that man?”

He stood, touched the top of her head. “God, no. I wouldn’t do that.”

She looked up at him. “I thought you wouldn’t cheat on Maria either, that she left you because she was selfish and cruel. Here’s the thing, Shawn: we know part of the story, only part of it, and we form our belief around that part. Now you’re telling me another piece of the story, and it challenges everything, doesn’t it?”

“No, it doesn’t challenge everything.”

She rose next to him, looked toward the horizon. “It breaks life into pieces I can’t put back together, not in a way that makes any sense to me.”

“You don’t think I’m trying to piece this all together, too? You aren’t the only one who feels hurt and betrayed by Knox.”

She looked away from the water and sky, refocused on Shawn. For the first time, she saw anger flare in him, where only grief and sympathy had been before. “What do you mean by that?”

“Knox didn’t tell me about Liddy, either. He didn’t say a word to me about taking her somewhere on a plane. Hell, I didn’t even know he had kept in touch with her. You aren’t alone in this.”

“I wonder if he knew he’d hurt everyone—you, me, our friends.”

“I don’t think he would ever intentionally hurt us, or anyone for that matter. Listen, what I had with Liddy for that brief time was wrong. It didn’t seem that way then, but we both admitted that we had tried to find something in each other that we couldn’t get from the one person we truly loved. We even tried to make that okay. Isn’t that the worst part? We tried to make it okay that we tried to take our love for other people and give it to each other.”

Annabelle stepped closer to Shawn to ask, “Who did she love?”

“She never told me.”

“But Maria loved you, didn’t she? She was my friend . . . a good friend, and I turned my back on her because I thought—”

“It wasn’t Maria that couldn’t love me back.”

They faced each other, and Annabelle felt a shifting beneath her feet, a crack opening that might expose another secret she wasn’t sure she could bear. She asked anyway. “Who did you love like that, Shawn? Who did you love so desperately that you tried to fill the loss with an affair?”

“You.”

“Shawn . . .” His name escaped her mouth in a whisper.

He took a step backward. “I am going to walk away now, because I cannot stand to see your eyes.”

He turned to leave. She wanted to find words to soothe him, make him come back, but instead she sank back onto the bench. Had she always known this?
Another secret
.

She returned to her car, allowing the obligatory chores of the day to drive her forward without thought. When Shawn’s face or words entered her head, she forced herself to think of Keeley and Jake, of her newspaper column, her grocery list . . . anything but his confession.

When she drove back to pick up Keeley from school, she thought how children did this for parents—made them move, forced them to get up and go when they felt incapable of doing one more thing.
This is what love does
.

Keeley crawled into the passenger side of the car. “This is so embarrassing—getting picked up by my mother.”

Annabelle nodded at her. “You can start taking the car next week if I don’t get one more call from the school.”

“No more calls.” Keeley leaned against the car door, stared at her. “What did you do all day?”

“Not much.”

“I doubt it. You’re always going a hundred miles an hour.”

Annabelle stopped at a red light and looked at Keeley, and her heart filled all the way to the edges with love. “Well, maybe you just don’t know me as well as you think you do.”

“Yeah, right,” Keeley said.

Silence filled the car and Keeley reached over, turned on the radio, and Annabelle tolerated the music of Ludacris until they pulled into the driveway. “You have a lot of homework?”

“Yeah,” Keeley said. “I’ll be in my room.”

Annabelle nodded.

“Mom?” Keeley opened the car door, put only one foot on the ground.

“Yeah?”

“You okay?”

“Yes,” Annabelle said, ran a hand over her face.

“Okay.” Keeley got out of the car.

Annabelle met her daughter on the other side of the car, now convinced that honesty was the cure for all that ailed them. “Listen, Keeley, I’m not okay. I’m sad. It’s really hard being without your dad and fighting the good fight, you know?”

“I know.” Keeley looked away. “I left math class the other day because Nicky Mulroney showed me the front page of the newspaper with Dad’s story. I didn’t mean to skip, Mom. I really didn’t. I just meant to go the bathroom and try not to throw up. But the next thing I knew I was in the car. Then the next day I didn’t want to face them again—so I didn’t go again. I’m sorry.”

Annabelle took her daughter’s hand. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You didn’t give me a chance . . . and I hated you and life and Dad and Nicky Mulroney and school and everything.”

Annabelle nodded. “We’ll get to the other side of this, okay? Let’s just not hate each other. It’s hard enough without that.”

“Deal.” Keeley ran up the stairs to the porch. The screen door fell shut behind her.

Annabelle sat on the bottom step. She would stay strong for Keeley. There was more at stake than her own belief and trust in Knox; her daughter was also in danger of losing faith.

TWENTY

SOFIE MILSTEAD

Sofie curled her knees to her chest as she sat up in bed, stared across the room toward the easel holding her mother’s uncovered artwork. The hospital had only held her for one day, and then released her the night before. After Bedford had tucked her in, bought groceries and made sure she had everything she needed, he’d left her to return to finish his lecture series.

The quilt fell to the floor and Sofie reached for it, wrapped it around her legs. Nothing made any sense. She still could not remember why she’d gone to the boat, why she’d become so confused as to break all the rules of diving.

Her fitful sleep revealed scraps of ragged remembrance: morning light streaked across the bow of the boat; peeling red paint on the hull; the mask too tight across her forehead. Yet in wakefulness, she found that these images did not fit together into one whole.

She curled tighter into herself and willed sleep to come and reveal the truth. She suspected Bedford was telling her only the parts of the day he wanted her to know: how he was there when the coast guard had brought her in, how John had been beside himself with fear, how her scuba tank had been empty and how the shrimp boat’s men had seen her floating in the water and dragged her into their boat. Her breathing had been rapid and shallow when they pulled her on board. They had believed she was unconscious from the hit on the head. Her savior had been the buoyancy vest, which left her floating faceup.

There was more to the story; she knew there was. Just like the one time she had asked her mother for the whole story about her father. She’d wanted to know all of it, not just the ending when Knox Murphy saved them. All her life she’d been waiting for the whole story.

Sofie felt the same way now: there was more, so much more to this tale.

And as she had then, she waited.

She didn’t know what or whom she waited for until the phone rang. Even before she answered it, she understood that Jake Murphy knew something about that day that would help her. What stopped her from answering the phone was one glistening reality: if he offered her the truth, then she must tell him the truth about his father.

She huddled under the quilt, stared at her mother’s canvas and fought the urge to weep when the answering machine picked up the call. “Hi, Sofie,” Jake said. “Um . . . I think you’re home. I hope I didn’t wake you. I have to head back to Marsh Cove, and I just wanted to say . . . goodbye. . . .”

Sofie grabbed the phone from the cradle, whispered, “I’m here.” She heard her voice on the answering machine as she spoke. She reached over, shut the machine off.

“I’m downstairs,” Jake said. “Can I come up?”

Silence filled the room, filled her mind as Sofie closed her eyes. If she let this man into her condo, she would know what had happened to her that day, but life would shift, maybe so imperceptibly that she or anyone else wouldn’t notice at first, but eventually, like a giant ship that made the slightest adjustment in navigation, the direction would change dramatically, the destination altered completely.

“Are you there?” Jake’s voice came from a long distance away.

Maybe a change in destination wouldn’t be all that horrid, all that fearful. What worse thing could happen now?
He will find you—that’s what,
she heard her mother’s voice say, as real as the canvas across the room.
That
is the worst that can happen.

“No,” she said out loud, for the first time overriding her mother’s objection, “
that
is not the worst thing that can happen.” And although she was still not sure what the worst thing would be, it was no longer the fact that her father could find her.

“Sofie?”

“I’m here,” she said. “Come on up.” She replaced the receiver and rose from the bed. Her jeans hung low on her hips, and she pulled a white linen tunic over her white tank top. She scooped her hair into a ponytail, swiped Carmex on her chapped lips and opened the door to Jake Murphy—and to whatever new direction he would take her.

When Jake entered the room, Sofie fought the urge to throw her arms around him, let him hold her until she felt well enough to take a deep breath, without the searing pain of her hurt lungs, without the headache from the large bruised lump on her skull where she’d hit the boat. Instead she tried to smile. “Hello.” She stepped back.

He reached toward the bruise on her cheek, then withdrew his hand before he touched her. “Are you okay?”

“Tired,” she said. “Would you like a cup of tea?” She lifted a hand to her hair. “I know I look a mess, but you surprised me.”

“You couldn’t look a mess if you tried,” he said, walked farther into the room, into her life.

“Good line,” she said, moved toward the stove.

“I don’t have lines.” He laughed, followed her as she placed the kettle on the burner. “So this is where you live.”

“Yes, Mother and I lived here together.” Sofie turned on the gas, looked over her shoulder at Jake. He glanced around the room, then back at her.

“You both slept in one room all these years?”

“No.” She waved toward a door. “There’s a small room in the back, which was actually my room until . . .”

“The plane wreck.”

Until that moment Sofie had almost forgotten the one thing they truly had in common: they’d each lost a parent in the plane crash. They both carried the irreversible emptiness of a parent gone, love vacated.

She moved toward him with slow steps, almost like a swimmer against the current. He held out his right hand; she took it. He lifted their hands to his lips, kissed her palm. She closed her eyes to fight the dizziness overcoming her; then she felt him draw her toward him and she fell against his chest.

His heart beat steadily in her ear. His hand ran through her ponytail until tingles trilled along her scalp; his fingers seemed to be healing her bruises. She heard a slight exhale of relief and realized she had made the sound.

She leaned away from him; he touched her cheek. “I don’t remember anything from the day I did the dive. Can you tell me what you know?” she asked.

The teakettle whistled and they jumped back, laughed. Sofie filled two mugs, threw in organic green tea bags—her mother’s favorite—and handed him a cup. They sat at the round zinc kitchen table for two. “I got there when the ambulance did—I didn’t see anything before that.”

She sat across from him, placed her hand over his on the table. He wound his fingers through hers. “Tell me what you do know,” she said, squeezed his hand.

“Okay,” he said, took a sip of tea. “I went to tell you I was leaving town. My mother called and said she was driving home that morning. She needed to get back for my sister, Keeley. I wanted to talk to you before I left.”