The Secrets She Keeps (27 page)

Grandma Shiny was Gene’s mother. She was our grandmother for the six years Gene and our mother were married, and then we never heard from her again. There were so many people who made a crucial appearance in your life and then disappeared. How did we let that happen? I suppose we couldn’t keep everyone who showed up or our lives would become as stuffed as my closets back home, but Grandma Shiny put up Christmas stockings with our names on them. She’d embroidered those names. We called her Grandma Shiny because she wore lots of sparkly jewelry. She even let us play in her jewelry box, where there were rings too large for our fingers and a charm bracelet with a tiny carriage with wheels that turned. Tucked in the bottom of that box was a small envelope with a creepy but awe-inspiring lock of Gene’s baby hair, much blonder and silkier than the bristly brown hair we knew.

“Yeah. We’d hunt through them for pictures of naked tribesmen.”

“Who cared about Aztecs and maps of how the Pompeii water system worked.”

“Really. Just give us some droopy boobs and bare butts in loincloths. My God, it felt so dirty and wrong and thrilling.”

“Kids today wouldn’t even care. Big deal. You see more than that in a PG movie.”

“We sound like old people again.”

“Rock ’n’ roll will destroy our youth,” Shaye said, shaking one fist in the air.

“It makes me sad, thinking about Grandma Shiny.”

“Me, too.”

“She’s probably dead.”

“Jeez, Cal.”

“What? It’s true.”

“Well, you don’t have to say it like that.”

“She has probably passed on to her eternal rest.”

Shaye made a face at me. “I hate hospitals. Why does time pass so slowly in hospitals? Every sick minute is sixty real-life minutes.”

“You’d think being so close to the end would speed time up.”

“Really.” She was looking around in the drawers of the nightstand, the way you do in boring motels.

“You’re not going to find anything in there, believe me. I spent enough time in hospitals when Thomas’s mother was sick, and when Thomas’s mother wasn’t sick.”

“Aha!” Shaye said. She held up a small packet, happy to prove me wrong.

“Gauze? Okay, good for you, Shaye, you won the gauze lottery.”

The hospital was not bringing out the best in us. We both heard the wheels coming down the hall and straightened up, ready to be on good behavior, but there was only the squeak of shoes on linoleum as the mound of a body under blankets passed.

“I’m scared of what I’ll see every time,” Shaye said.

“Me, too. You know, we’re going to be spending a lot of time here in the not-too-distant future,” I said.

“Thanks for that. Thanks so much for another cheery news flash of something I already knew.”

“I wonder if our real father is dead yet. Probably.”

“I’m sure he is. Men don’t live as long. Do you think about it often? It was too bad we never knew him.”

“I think it would have been a worse too bad if we did.”

“Yeah. No doubt he was better in my imagination.”

The next time, the sound of wheels and the squeak of shoes really did bring Nash. The nurse banged the poor woman and her gurney into the door and then into the wall, all the while talking in a voice used on toddlers. “Okay, Mrs. McBride! That wasn’t so bad! Let’s get ourselves settled back in! We’ll see what the doctor says about getting you home!”

Then again, we weren’t any better. What was it about certain places that brought out your inner A-student? Hospitals and government buildings, churches—well, a person started speaking in sunny, functional exclamation points. You suddenly wanted to look like the kind of woman who baked pies. “Look what came while you were gone!” I said. I held up the flower arrangement. Daisies and carnations, a limp rose or two, all splayed against a fern-frond background.

“Someone has a new admirer!” Shaye said.

Nash narrowed her eyes at us. “Stop being so damn cheery. Who are they from?”

I slipped the tiny card from the tiny envelope to show her. Nash didn’t quite look like herself in that blue gown with the white paisley teardrops, but she looked better. She’d had a shower and her hair was pulled back in her usual strong, steely braid, and she had color in her cheeks again. She wanted to get out of there. “Deke Donaldson,” I said. “J. J.’s Autos.”

“Word gets around,” Shaye said.

“That Harris has a big mouth. Deke Donaldson only wants to sell me the long-term auto-protection plan, and there’s no long-term anything in this picture.”

“Oh, Nash,” I said.

“We’ve got to get out of this place. I don’t have a lot of time left, and I need driving lessons.”

I scooted the heavy green vinyl chair next to her. “Say we teach you to drive. What about a license? You’ll have to take the test.”

“Yeah. And that eye exam…” Shaye said from over by the window.

“I have a license. Everyone needs a license. Just because I don’t use it, doesn’t mean I don’t have one. I go in and get my eyes checked and get my picture taken every few years. I’ve got eyes like a hawk. I’m surprised you didn’t see it in my dresser drawer, with all the snooping you must be doing since I’m not there.”

“Why bother snooping now that your room is sparse as a nun’s? And how have we had time for snooping? We’ve been right here with you almost this whole time.”

I studied my fingernails, but Shaye told the lie right to Nash’s face without even blinking. She’d found that envelope from Jack Waters in Nash’s room the night before, taped to the bottom of the floor lamp, and she’d opened it. And when she did, she found a blank piece of paper inside, with one word on it in Nash’s distinctive handwriting:
Gotcha
. Shaye had bolted from the room, waving that paper in my face, but she didn’t go back in. She told me that getting caught made her feel like Nash was watching, even as she lay in a bed in room 222 at Saint Mary’s Regional Medical Center, being pumped full of fluids because that’s about all they could do for her. That, and a few hits of pain medicine. Her bones were beginning to ache now, too.

“You going to drive somewhere with those pain pills in you?” I said. “We’ll take you where you want to go. We’ve told you a million times.”

“It’s a trip I need to make alone. Of course I’m not going to drive under the influence. But, fine. All right. I’ll tell you what the big secret is. Might as well have it out.” She crooked her finger to Shaye and me. It was a dramatic, deathbed-ish gesture. We should have known better. We got in close, just as she wished, fools and eternal optimists that we were.

“I’m writing a book,” she said.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said.

“You’re a barrel of laughs,” Shaye said.

Maybe it was the drugs singing through her, but Nash was having a whole lot more fun right then than we were.

—

“That’s good news, Cal,” Thomas said. “I’m glad she’s back home again where she belongs. I think maybe you need to come back home where you belong, too, right? I mean, it’s getting to be a long time. We need to talk.”

When we took Nash in to Saint Mary’s, we’d phoned Gloria, and Gloria phoned Thomas, and Thomas phoned me, and there you had it. As Nash said, word gets around, and in a family, I supposed that’s how it should be.

“You don’t need time alone anymore? What happened? I don’t want to come back to the way things were.”

“I know you’re pissed, and I’m sorry. I was wrong not to tell you about the therapist. I was,” Thomas said. “But I miss you. I do. I want you home.”

My silence wasn’t some sort of revenge for his. I had nothing to say. A wind was blowing through me. Inside, I echoed.

“Cal, I don’t like how close we’re getting. To some…edge.” Thomas was talking fast, and I could feel his panic. I heard its rattle, even louder against the steel girders of my emptiness. “It’s scaring me. It’s a dangerous game we’re playing. Our whole marriage, all these years, it could fall in if we’re not careful.”

I had an image of a wagon train on a very long trail, high atop a canyon. A wagon train that had been traveling for months, its members emaciated from starvation and drought, the only remaining objects a gun without bullets and a hollow tin cup.

“Twenty-two years,” he said. “You don’t just toss that. We’ve got to try to understand what’s going on. Get past it.”

I could tell you exactly when things under our roof changed, the very moment that Thomas took his true first step away from me, a permanent and meant step, not the small, annoyed retreats of a marriage, the two steps back, the one step forward that can eventually lead to a deficit of steps. It happened a few months before June died. We’d brought her home from the hospital, same as Shaye and I had just done with Nash. June was finally back at her own house, the house with the past-tense florals and breakable, too-cherished belongings and the perfect draperies, draperies the children used to brush up against, making her wince. You had to be careful in there, that’s for sure. The house had grown too large for her, with its three empty bedrooms. Table surfaces and the tops of picture frames gathered dust. Something smelled musty. Thomas’s sister, Bailey, who wisely lived far enough away to be absolved of regular involvement, had flown in to be with her. As we were leaving, Bailey was making grilled cheese sandwiches in a frying pan with peeling Teflon. June chatted cheerfully from the couch. This was the illness attention she had always longed for, and in spite of how sick she was, her cheeks glowed with pleasure.

In the car, though, I could see Thomas’s tight-jawed profile. Amy was in the backseat, talking about wanting to run a marathon. It was an involved plan, the sort of complicated idea that Melissa and Amy were fond of in their teen years; there would be training sessions, and new shoes, and a certain number of days before the big event, and friends who wanted to join in. Damn if she didn’t actually run that thing and finish, too. But right then her voice bubbled over my shoulder; she was saying something about strength and building endurance, and Thomas’s eyes, his usually warm and friendly eyes, got that coldness I was familiar with from when we argued.

Two people can have a silent conversation when you’ve been together a long time. Maybe you’re wrong about who says what, but I doubt it. When we got home, he didn’t speak to me, and he yanked his arm from mine when I reached out.

“Thomas?” I asked, as he changed into his old jeans and went outside and started the lawn mower. The lawn mower shouted. It told me what a disappointment I was. It told me that his mother would die soon, without him ever giving her what she wanted, what Bailey was right then giving her, some easy, doting care, free of undercurrents. It blamed me for the way our children were stiff and overpolite with June and for the way Amy right then cared more about her marathon than about his mother, and it even blamed me for the fact that June would be gone for good, as if I’d been a factor in her demise. The person next to you is the large mirror you look into, a mirror that reflects your own failings. Sometimes, that person is also a soft, easy target, an unknowing and ever-deficient receptacle for your expectations.

The distant eyes stayed distant. Thomas left and a mood took his place. The mood had a place at the dinner table. At first I tried to tame it with kindness, and then I stepped around it when I encountered it in the hall. I let it have the first shower so it didn’t run out of hot water and tiptoed so as not to wake it. When June died, I stood beside Thomas and held his arm in that black suit, but he was truly off somewhere, standing alone. I hadn’t shared his love, and so I couldn’t share his loss, and he made sure not to meet my eyes to remind me of this.

Yes. That’s when it had begun.

And when had I stepped away from Thomas? Was it when I was so sick of the mood I could have held a pillow over its puffy, dark face? Was it when he merely patted my hand after Hugo’s own eyes had gone blank, just after he sighed his last breath? Or was it an accumulation of farther backs, times I felt despair and was met with his chirpy optimism? When he hadn’t
seen
me? When that chirpy optimism in the face of despair told me I wasn’t known? That’s all we want much of the time, to be seen and known.

Or was he my own soft target, the one who hadn’t met my expectations? Maybe it went all the way back to that first meeting with his mother, and the times since, when he’d let her say and do to me whatever she wanted. Or to the times when I was the one to call the police because the teen boys next door were having a party so loud it woke the baby. Or when I was the one to confront a vicious coach, or the insurance company, or that nasty female accountant, because he couldn’t stand to be the bad guy. He couldn’t stand to be the bad guy, but when I called the police, or confronted the coach, or dealt with the accountant, or pushed away the spiteful mother, I was a person he disliked, and I knew it. I was a person he disapproved of, then. Maybe this went all the way back to that raccoon. To the thing I most longed for since Shaye and I were children, protection against a raging storm, something much too heavy to set upon Thomas’s very real shoulders.

You hold a story about your husband or wife in your head—who they are and who they aren’t. What they have and haven’t done. The catalog of their wrongdoings. You want them to be this somebody who fills this something and they aren’t and can’t. It was all ancient fault lines, some with names, some without. Cracks and crevices you could barely see the bottom of, going on for miles. You could get so tired of that story. The wagon train could go over the cliff finally, and maybe it would be a relief, that last tin cup bouncing against the rocks before hitting bottom.

“This is the life we have,” Thomas said. “This is the life we made.”

“This is the life we’ve had so far,” I said.

“I’m coming out there,” Thomas said.

“I need some time alone. I need some
self-care.”

It sounded angrier than I felt.

—

“Tex, please!”

I recognized the sound of that truck, too. I was glad Nash was napping in her room but dismayed at my own disheveled state. I’d only had a quick shower that morning, and my hair was up; I wore an old pair of shorts I often gardened in and a tank top with frayed seams. I think it might have once been Amy’s. I managed to locate my purse in a hurry before he rapped on the door, and I popped a white square of mint gum into my mouth.