Keeping Secrets (36 page)

“I think you are, too. But we need to make sure of that.”

“I wish they didn’t, didn’t talk to me about the baby,” he said. “But-but-but…” Then he looked at her very strangely. He wasn’t just stuttering. He was struggling with something he didn’t understand.

“There is no baby, Daddy,” she said. “I’m here. The baby’s grown.”

“I know.” He smiled then, as if that was the answer to everything. “You’re all grown up. B-b-but…” and then she could see him going away again, to somewhere terrible in his head, “I promised Helen, it didn’t matter, it never mattered, I would never give the baby up.”

“You didn’t, Daddy. You didn’t give the baby away. You kept her.”

“I was scared. The baby was so little, and she was hungry, and Helen was lying there…” His voice choked. “I was all alone. I was so afraid, being all alone.”

“It’s okay. You did the right thing,” she said and went to sit beside him on the chaise. She took his hand, which had become as soft and white as her own, no longer the strong hand wielding a meat cleaver when she was a child. The sound of a night baseball game wafted across the backyard from a neighbor’s television.

“Do you remember all those games we used to listen to on the radio when I was a little girl?”

“The Dodgers. The Brooklyn Dodgers. They were something.” Then he laughed the way he always did when he paid a compliment, as if in the giving of it he was receiving praise too and was a little embarrassed.

“Yes. They really were.”

“I don’t listen to them anymore.”

“They moved to LA, Daddy.”

“I
know
that. They moved a long time ago. I’m not crazy, Emma.”

She looked at him in the half-light of dusk and smiled gently. “No, of course you’re not.”

Then he faded out again, like the voice of the announcer saying, “A high pop fly to…” Someone changed the channel, and she couldn’t hear the game anymore. “I promised I wouldn’t tell you, but sometimes I think I ought to.”

“You already told me about Rosalie and my real momma,” she said. “A long time ago.”

Jake shook a warning finger at her. “No, no. You don’t know…” he trailed off. Then he leaned over and whispered, “The baby shouldn’t be out there in the dark alone.”

* * *

Later Emma listened to both Jake and Rosalie snoring in the next room, across the hall.

Her room, the guest room, though she’d never lived in this house to which they’d moved shortly after she left for Atlanta, was a re-creation of the one she had when they lived behind the grocery store.

She lay in a curlicued metal bed piled with the long dolls in satin dresses that Jake had won for her, pitching baseballs at targets at the parish fair. On the night table lay books she’d never gotten around to reading:
The Red and the Black, Swann’s Way, The Joys of Yiddish.
That last one she kept meaning to take home with her, wherever home had been over the many trips and many years, but it never found its way into her suitcase.

She wondered whether she left it here to remind Jake that he was a Jew—just as she was. After she found out about Helen, which made her, by anyone’s rules, Jewish, she’d gone for a while in Atlanta for religious instruction. When she told the rabbi about her upbringing, he’d seemed much more interested in talking about that than in teaching.

“It’s like a mystery story,” he’d said. “Where was your mother from? What was she doing in New York? Why don’t you track down her family?”

“I wanted to know about her, but I wanted my father to tell me,” is how she put it later to her Jewish roommate in New York, “just like I wanted him to tell me about what it means to be a Jew.”

Her roommate undertook the latter task, picking up where Herman had left off, took her home for the High Holy Days, for Passover, gave her a basic New York Yiddish vocabulary, so she knew a shmuck from a shmatte and wouldn’t embarrass herself. “You can’t go around with a name like Fine and not know the difference between a fool and a tacky dress. Though with your accent nobody’s going to believe you’re Jewish, anyway, even if your name was Esther Goldblatt.”

And after a while Emma realized that her cultural heritage was what she was interested in anyway. But she was going to be no more religious as a Jew than she’d been as a Baptist.

Jesse had never quite understood it. “Why do you want to identify with a group that’s been so persecuted, if you don’t have to?”

“Would you pretend that you weren’t black if people couldn’t see your skin? Jake and Rosalie pretended for so long that I was something else, the label is important.”

Jesse shook his head.

When she tried to talk with Jake on visits home, he’d smile, as if it really pleased him that she thought of herself as Jewish, but he always said, “Not too loud. It’ll upset Rosalie.”

So Emma left behind
The Joys of Yiddish
and wondered whether Jake had ever read it. But he probably never came into this room. (He did, though. When he was lonesome for Emma, he sat on the edge of her bed and patted the pretty dolls he’d won for her.)

Rosalie was in and out of the room all the time. She filled the closet with the overflow of her scores of polyester pantsuits. When she found the fabric on sale, she couldn’t resist. The quilt on Emma’s bed was made of little scraps of all those garments, patched together with her sewing machine’s zigzag stitch.

Around the walls marched Rosalie’s drawings of Emma. Some of them were hung side by side with the original photo. Was that so that the viewer could see how close she’d come to capturing the image? Emma wondered. Or was it some kind of voodoo—casting a spell that would bring her back home again?

Did Rosalie think about things like that?

They had never talked about their feelings for each other since that awful Christmas when Emma had snapped out her suspicions about Rosalie being her stepmother. That had been nearly ten years earlier. Since then, on her annual duty calls they politely walked around each other. They smiled and exchanged pleasantries, that was all.

Yet she was my mother, Emma thought. She raised me since I was ten months old. But I live in California, and she might as well live on Mars.

It was so strange: for all the trouble Rosalie had gone to to have a daughter, Emma couldn’t remember Rosalie’s ever having said the words
I love you.
Neither to Jake nor to her. She said them to her little dog Bootsie, but never to people.

Instead she talked about being hurt, cheated, slighted, about things being overpriced. Was love too expensive for her, too? Was the chance of being short-changed just too great—so that she’d decided simply not to deal in that commodity, even though the husband and child she’d cut a bargain for in a moment of emotional profligacy were already in place?

Had the deal been sealed before she realized, too late, that she just couldn’t play? For if she truly considered the world too terrible and hurtful a place to bring her own child into, why did she think things would be any different for a stepchild?

Suddenly the air in the room felt even more close. Emma sat up again and pulled her T-shirt off. It was too hot to sleep in anything. Except for the little oscillating fan, nothing moved. The room smelled musty.

“Rosalie, you really ought to get someone in to clean once in a while and to help you with the yard,” she’d said early this afternoon.

“I can keep my house myself. It’s perfectly clean.” Rosalie had the same disdain for housekeeping that she had for cooking. She slapped a dust mop around every once in a while. “And no one else knows what I want done in the yard.”

“They could at least mow the lawn. How much could it cost?”

“Too much.” And that was the end of that.

It was Rosalie’s life, Emma reminded herself. If she wanted to be out there in the broiling sun pushing a lawn mower, it was her choice.

Emma stretched out, trying to find a cool place in the sheets. They felt like polyester, too. Perhaps Rosalie had been running up bedclothes from sheet-sized remnants.

She would be scandalized if she could see Emma lying naked in her bed. But, God, it was
so
hot.

Emma wiped a trickle of sweat from between her breasts. And for the first time since she’d left him standing in the airport that morning, she thought of Jesse.

They’d done the right thing, choosing to never involve him in any of this. What would be the point? He didn’t want to be part of West Cypress and her family any more than they would have wanted him to be.

She closed her eyes and saw his handsome face. She rubbed the fingers of her right hand across her naked wedding-ring finger. It still felt a little numb.

What was going to happen to them? she wondered. Was their story going to have a happy ending? Were they going to grow close again? (They were nice, weren’t they, those moments they’d spent together in bed before the phone call from Rosalie. She couldn’t remember when she’d last felt so close to him. She’d whispered, “I love you.” He’d whispered the words back.) Was it going to get better when she went home—life with Jesse, her secret husband?

Or worse? Would she one day tell Rosalie and Jake, “I have a good-news/bad-news joke. The good news first—I’m divorced.”

God, she was never going to get to sleep with those kinds of thoughts. She should read a little while. She reached for the lamp, fumbled, and then there was a crash as all the carnival dolls fell onto the floor. One of them suffered a shattered skull beneath its blond wig, and its blue eyes rolled under the bed. What could they see under there? Were there monsters? Was the Green Skeleton waiting?

“Emma? What was that?” Rosalie, alarmed, was standing in the doorway.

“Go back to bed. Everything’s all right. Go back to sleep, Rosalie.”

And for the thousandth time in her life, Emma thought, who’s the momma here? In all the secrecy and hush-hush, did we swap places?

* * *

A week of tests passed. Then a week and a half.

“You’ve had a little stroke,” Marshall said to Jake. “Probably several tiny ones.”

Jake’s eyes looked frightened behind his glasses. He turned to Rosalie, who was twisting the strap of her plastic purse.

“What does that mean, Marshall?” Emma asked.

“You’re going to be okay, Mr. Fine. It’s going to take a little while to see the effects of the medication we’re putting you on. You’ll have to take it every day.”

Jake nodded obediently like a child.

“The voices?” Rosalie asked.

“They’ll disappear.”

Jake looked from Rosalie to Emma, then down at the plushy brown carpeted floor of the doctor’s office, as if the hallucinations were something of which he was ashamed.

What did I say, Jake wondered, when I was out of my mind? Did I tell them everything? I must not have. Everyone is being so nice.

“They’re not your fault, Mr. Fine. I know the images are very real to you, but they’re triggered by the lack of oxygen to the brain. It’s funny how the brain responds when it doesn’t get enough air to breathe. We’re going to give you some tranquilizers to make you rest easier until they subside. So you’ll be sleeping a lot at first. But we’re going to keep close tabs on you.”

“He doesn’t need to go to the hospital?” Rosalie asked.

“Oh, no. I’m sure he’ll be safe in your hands. You’ll see that he takes his medication. Home is where he needs to be.”

* * *

“I need to go home, too,” Emma said later that afternoon. They were sitting on the back porch drinking iced tea. Now that the crisis was over, she couldn’t sit still. When they walked back into the house after stopping by the pharmacy for Jake’s medication, the old claustrophobia had grabbed her by the throat. She could stand it as long as she had to. Now she didn’t have to anymore.

Rosalie looked up from the peas she was shelling. Each one pinged into an enamel pan. She’d picked them at dawn that morning before the blistering heat rose. Her garden was in full harvest, popping out vegetables almost faster than she could gather them. “You’re not going to go so soon.”

“I have to. I really need to get home.”

“But you don’t have to be back at school till after Labor Day.”

Emma looked down at her hands. The vacant spot on her left hand no longer looked naked. She had ceased to miss the heavy gold band’s weight. But Jesse was waiting for her, and her house, her work, and Skytop. There was so much straightening out to do.

Suddenly she’d missed Jesse with a palpable ache. It was good to have gone away—now she had a fresh perspective. She needed to get back. They could make a new start and make things work. She knew they could.

She looked over at her father, who had just taken his pills. He had a pleased expression on his face, like a little boy who had been very bad but now was being good.

She needed to be good, too, she thought. She needed to try harder with Jesse. She could be more loving if she tried, more patient. She didn’t want to strike out on her own again. They’d have a long talk when she got back.

“I’m going to call Susan and tell her when to pick me up at the airport,” she said, using the name of her imaginary roommate.

“Okay,” Rosalie answered, deciding to be brave. It didn’t make any difference what she said, for Emma had always done exactly what she wanted to. “That’s awfully nice of her.”