The Secrets She Keeps (10 page)

Nash hurries back toward the house, past the stables where all the horses are tucked in, past the riding rink and the pastures and the pool with its beam of holy light. Her heart is beating fast because of that rabbit and Lilly Marcel and because it feels darker than usual with her mother gone.

There is the chew and spit of tires against gravel. It makes her think her mother is home, but of course her mother isn’t home. Nash recognizes the sound of the truck: It’s just Jack, coming in from a night out.

She waits for him. He hops out, tosses Nash the keys. She misses, and they land at her feet.

“Aw, Peanut, it was a bad throw.”

She smells the alcohol. He is one handsome man, oh, dear, he is, and that smell of alcohol and his eyes in the night—Nash may understand heedlessness after all. All lovers are bull riders and wing walkers. Every person who risks giving their heart over stands with their feet at the edge of a high, open doorway.

“What are you doing out here?” he asks.

“Waiting for you.”

He grins. “Oh, really now.”

“Really now.”

He takes a pinch of her shirt and playfully pulls her closer. It’s an infuriating gesture, closer to him but not
to
him, his hand grazing her skin. She wishes he’d kiss her. “It’s getting late. Better head in.”

“If you say so.”

Nash watches him head away; he’ll go down that path that leads right past Lilly Marcel’s cabin. She shouldn’t think what she’s thinking.

He turns around to look at her once more, walking backward as he speaks. “Bob Watson said he saw mustangs on his property.”

They came only a few times in a person’s lifetime, and Jack knew how she felt about those wild horses. She hoped and hoped she might one day see them. She’d confessed it that afternoon when they sat together next to the lake, after he’d taught her how to smoke a cigarette.
Seeing them changes you
, he’d told her, that’s what any cowboy knew, and she was sure it was true, same as seeing any rare event, those comets that came once every hundred years, a blue Mount Charleston butterfly that crossed your path. You would have gotten a singular, extraordinary message from nature then, a message that would leave you transformed.

“You may just get your wish, Peanut,” he says.

—

Veronica is on the telephone. She is wearing her silk robe and sits at the wood table in the kitchen with the phone in front of her. She pokes her finger in each hole of the dial. Her head is bent down, and when Nash comes in, Veronica only glances up at her. It’s late, and Veronica’s makeup is off, and her eyes look weary and distant. Her real name is Dorothy, she admitted one cocktail hour. Tonight she is Dorothy again. She is saying,
Please, please,
into the phone. That phone has heard plenty—pleadings and apologies and declarations of love and hate. Nash thinks about how much anguish phones have suffered through, especially at late hours. Night has a way of stripping you down and leaving only your true, scared self. At a late-enough hour, we are all rabbits, hiding safely in our warrens, or making mad, dangerous dashes, or trembling in the open.

I’m sorry
, Veronica says. She sounds crushed.
I’m so sorry. I never meant to hurt you.

Nash hears it again and again, the way people hurt each other without meaning to, making decisions based on runaway hearts and dimming passions, past mistakes, and promises of change. In a lifetime, the recipe always needs amending—more of this, a little less of that, what to do now that the cake has fallen. Not many people mean to be cruel, as far as Nash can tell. But there are always those few who do.

It’s a different car. When you live out in the middle of nowhere, you know cars. You know the sound of a strange one same as you know a rattle in the grass.

Nash watches from the darkness of the main room. The car is long and low and it comes down the road with its lights off. This is strange. Very, very strange, and she doesn’t know what to do but watch. Boo begins to bark in the quiet house. He races down the stairs, and with the late hour and the uncommon speed, he loses traction and skids across the floor.

Nash scoops him up and holds his tense little body. “Shush,” she says.

A man gets out of the car. He walks along the road but turns away from the house, down the path to the pool and the cottages. He is a large, walking shadow. He is holding something. His hand grips it against his chest.

Nash feels all-out panic; her heart stomps. There is not time to get Veronica off the phone so that she might call Jack or Cliff or Danny. This man is more dangerous than a wolf or a mountain lion, this seems obvious, and for a moment Nash thinks about getting the shotgun from under her mother’s bed. Instead, she is out the door before logic kicks in. She was raised here, and, more than anything else, more than her friends from school or her books or some hazy vision of the future, the ranch and the women who come here are hers. Even though she is barely eighteen years old:
hers
.

She runs down the porch steps. She waves her arms, as if scaring a rabid dog away from chickens. “Get out!” she yells. “Get away from here!”

The man takes off running. His long dark coat flaps behind him, and the camera—she sees it’s a camera now—bangs against his chest. He gets in his car. The back wheels of his car spin and swerve in the gravel.

Veronica is out in the yard in her bare feet. “What is going on?”

“A man,” she says.

“Who?”

“Someone trying to take pictures, I don’t know,” Nash says. But she does know; they both do. At least, they know who sent him. He’s not a reporter from
Confidential
or
Photoplay.
Only one other person would likely see the pictures the man is after. The photos would be proof of wrongdoing, as if a man like that needed proof. She begins to shake. Veronica puts her hands on Nash’s shoulders.

“Some people can’t stand the outrage of being left.”

“
She
left
him
?” Nash is surprised. She thought it was the usual. It happened so often, a powerful man finding a replacement when he got bored.

“She told Ellen. Of course she told Ellen! Ellen’s got that kind of face. A killer would confess to Ellen.”

If her mother knew this, she never would have gone running to help Gloria. Gloria’s most recent romantic calamity or whatever it was would have had to wait. Alice knew the dangers. Angry men who were left—well, there had been Vic Jones that one year, and then Harv Cullins. Vic waved a gun out on the front lawn, and Harv smashed a car window with his fist.

“Come on. Come inside.”

Nash must have set Boo down without realizing it. He stands on the dark porch, looking worried.

“You should have seen yourself,” Veronica chuckles. “I never knew you had it in you. Watch out! You’re one tough cookie, after all! I’m never going to cross you, Nash McBride, that’s for sure.”

Veronica has her arm around Nash. She is in that robe and her bare feet. Her toenails are painted red. Her eyes look smaller without all that makeup, but softer, too. “Let’s put this goddamn day to rest.”

She squeezes Nash’s shoulder. It’s almost motherly. Veronica does not have children, but Nash wonders right then if every woman is a mother in one way or another.

Shaye was painting her toenails red. She looked like she hadn’t slept all night. She had Einstein hair and parentheses of frown lines between her brows. “You know it’s not just the car,” she said.

“Of course it’s not just the car. The whole stepfamily thing…It sounds like a nightmare. Wait,” I said. It hadn’t hit me before, not really. You could have arguments and new sports cars and mad leavings to Nevada; you could even use the word
divorce
and not mean it. “Are you actually
leaving
him?”

Shaye stopped the little brush in midair. Her toes were half done; the poor blank ones looked like sad orphans next to their flamboyant friends. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do anymore. I mean, we’ve also got a business together now. I feel like such a failure.”

“You’re not a failure.”

I’d dragged an old vacuum cleaner down the hall, and now it sat beside me, a too-short dance partner, same as David Selby in the seventh grade. I hunted around for a plug. Words like
commitment
and
vow
knocked wrongly around my head and threatened to spill. Failure wasn’t an option if you stood behind words like those. But who was I to talk? We were both there at the ranch, and, if I was being honest, there were many times that it was cowardice and cowardice alone that kept me in my marriage, not some superior moral footing. Not some exalted word like
vow
. Honestly? I might have been Shaye, if I’d had more guts.

Because there were these tender and treasured things: his body next to my body, rubbing sore necks, bringing medicine; soft words on bad days, and the fact that he seemed like my only true friend in the world sometimes, my still-laughing sidekick through bills and diagnoses and the triumphs of our children. But there were also these: a wish to be better known after all those years, hearts kept private, a list of past crimes; years that made us companionable roommates, and sometimes not even that. Often, marriage was solitude, with company.

How did one add it up? What conclusion could a person come to? Could anything hold the weight of two lives lived side by side? Or, perhaps even weightier, the lives not lived?

Then again, could you go through a colonoscopy with someone and not be wedded for life?

“How can you clean at a time like this?” Shaye yelled over the roar of the vacuum cleaner.

“A time like what?”

“How can you just…I mean, you, here…Thomas…Something is wrong, Cal. Telling you to stay out here—it’s not like him. He hid going to therapy for half a
year
.”

“Move that chair,” I shouted.

“You can’t keep busy forever,” Shaye said.

“Lots of people do,” I yelled. “They go from dinner plans with so and so to the kids’ birthday party to the roof cleaner.”

“You haven’t even cried.”

“You know I hate to cry.”

“You can run, but you can’t hide.”

“He’s just grieving! It’s loss. His mother just died! Besides, I wouldn’t even know how to imagine…” My stupid voice cracked.

“What?”

“Some new life. I don’t even know what that could look like.”

This shut Shaye up. It shut us both up. There was only the roar of the vacuum and the sound of it knocking against the wall as I maneuvered around furniture.

“How can you clean at a time like this?” Nash yelled from the doorway. I flipped the switch, and the roar silenced.

“I never saw you as the housecoat type, Nash,” I said. “Those roses are so sweet.”

“I can’t believe we’re wasting time discussing my attire,” Nash said. She crossed the room, flung open the curtains. “Look.”

“Brown grass and more brown grass,” I said.

“A brand-new day?” Shaye guessed.

“
There
.”

“I thought the eyes were supposed to go when you got old,” I said. I couldn’t see a damn thing except all that wreckage that needed tending to.

“Those two.” She tapped the glass with her finger. “They’re fighting over a mare.”

Ah, a splotch of darkness in the distance. “I see them.”

“Wow, they’re tall,” Shaye said.

“That’s a pair of acacias, you idiot,” I said, and Shaye socked my arm. “The black spot to your right.”

“I hated those horses for years,” Nash said. “Dirty, dangerous creatures. A menace. And then a few months ago I saw them again. For the first time in a long while. I was washing dishes. Soapsuds up to my elbows, and there they were. Right out there! And it was the most incredible thing. It changed me. Changed me again. I could see how beautiful they were, in spite of the trouble and the danger. I’d forgotten that.”

We huddled around the window like a trio of hostages. Nash’s old road-map hands rested on the sill. Her nose was scrunched and her eyes narrow as she squinted to see. I tried to do the same, but the horses still only resembled a moving thumbprint.

“Nash, I get it—why you’re ignoring the bureau guy. I do,” I said. But I didn’t. Not at all. “The grandeur of them…”

She turned to me, raised her brows like I’d taken leave of my senses. “
Grandeur?
”

“Whatever you want to call it. But they’re destroying your land.”

“
My
land?”

“This is an animal-rights issue to you?”

“It’s not an issue to me at all. It’s a personal matter. I want them left alone anywhere near the property.”

The vehemence, it was another thing I thought I suddenly understood. How had we missed it, when it was so obvious? “This is what the papers are about. In your room. You’re trying to stop the gather.”

“Nonsense. I don’t like it, but I can’t stop it.”

“You’re not building some case…”

She scoffed. Looked at us like we were a pair of children who’d not yet learned the ways of the world.

“I don’t get it
,”
Shaye said. “Sure, they’re beautiful, but anyone in your position would want those horses gone. Out of here, and
fast
.”