The Secrets She Keeps (4 page)

When he sees them, Jack gives Nash the thumbs-up. He knows her license is only two weeks old, and they both know how Alice feels about that wagon. Nash’s mother, a practical woman who still follows the guidelines on the back of the old ration books (
IF YOU DON’T NEED IT, DON’T BUY IT
.), ponied up two thousand dollars for the Styleline Deluxe, with its natural-wood trim and room for eight passengers. When Alice brought it home two years ago, she was beaming and Gloria was beside herself with joy, but Nash could only see the new car’s sad, thoughtful headlight eyes and downturned grille mouth.

Jack opens the car door and holds out his hand. “She kill any jackrabbits on the way, Mrs. Marcel?”

They’ve had beautiful women at the ranch, tons of them, actresses even—Lola Phillips, from that movie
Two by Sea
with Cary Kramer. They’ve had expectant mothers before, too—Nash remembers Mrs. Betty Woods, who placed Nash’s hand on her hard, round belly so that she could feel the lumps and turns of the baby underneath, which was embarrassing but fascinating. Even after her six weeks and her turn at the courthouse, she still called herself Mrs. Betty Woods. She didn’t throw her ring off the bridge or toss it into the full glass vase of them on Alice’s piano, either. She kept wearing it, which was probably smart in her condition.

But Lilly Marcel—she’s not just beautiful or an actress or an expectant mother; there is something else. Something different. Nash can’t put her finger on it. Maybe it’s how strong her voice is, even when her wrists are so delicate. “Only a single rabbit,” she answers Jack. “But he had it coming. We put him in the back so the cook could roast him for dinner.”

Jack catches Nash’s eye, drops an impressed jaw. “I thought you were bringing a dude, Miss Nash, not a new ranch hand.”

He plays this up for full effect, the them–us, the
ma’am
’s, the threat of snakes in the grass, his thumbs hooked in the waistband of his jeans. He always wears his hat, too, especially when he’s the one to drive in and pick up the ladies from the train station or the airport. On that first trip back to the ranch, Alice be damned, he’ll drive fifty miles an hour through the desert, spitting rocks under the wheels and flattening plenty of unlucky rabbits, the ones who choose that doomed moment to dart across the road, as the women from New York and Los Angeles and St. Louis squeal with terror. He isn’t mocking them, though, or taking advantage of their naïveté. It’s not like that. He just says that for a hundred and forty-eight dollars a week, they ought to get more than steak dinners and a divorce, and this is why Nash’s mother, Alice, both made him her head dude wrangler and forbade him to drive Stuart Marcel’s wife in her absence. Nash’s mother is, above all, a good businesswoman. No one should end up dead because Mr. Marcel, the great and powerful Hollywood director, tired of his latest wife.

During the drive, Nash gathered this information about Lilly Marcel: the smell of citrus; a soft profile tilted toward passing scenery; a question about desert temperatures spoken in flute notes. Now Nash really looks at her. She is perhaps seven months along but holds herself upright, with only a trace of a waddle, as she walks beside Jack Waters, who carries her suitcase. Her black, shiny hair is crimped and held to one side with a single barrette. Those stockings look hot and uncomfortable. She’s probably only a few years older than Nash, though this seems impossible given the places she must have been and the life she must lead.

Jack holds that large suitcase as if it’s made of dust and feathers, and he tells Lilly Marcel about the trips into Carson City and where to find extra towels. As they pass the pool, Veronica May Fontaine, who is stretched out on a chaise longue, lifts her sunglasses to watch them, nudging Ellen Parker’s calf with her toe. Ellen raises herself on her elbows and watches, too.

“You ever ride? You know, before—” Jack pats his stomach. The riding ring is long behind them, but the barn and stables are up ahead. The horses are turned out into the pasture, and though she can’t see Cliff, Nash does see the wet sand and pine chips flying from the end of his fork as they land in the wheelbarrow just outside the door of Zorro’s stall.

“No, but I’ve been taken for one.”

Jack laughs too hard, which is irritating, and so is the way he looks pleased with himself just for being in Lilly Marcel’s company. “That’s why you’re here,” he says.

“That’s why I’m here.”

“You’re sure you don’t want a room in the main house?” Jack says. “We don’t like this. It’s not right. You shouldn’t be in a cabin alone, you know, given that you’re…in the family way.”

“I’m fine,” Lilly Marcel says. “I prefer my breathing room.”

“Well, I understand that,” Nash says. More than just about anything, she loves to be alone in her room, reading. A book gives the best company, the kind that expects nothing in return. Still, Nash feels shy after saying it. There is no way they’re the same, and she shouldn’t imply it. Lilly Marcel must need so much more from her privacy and retreat. Stuart Marcel has his own airplanes. They say he has a different woman every week just to light his cigarettes. It’s strange, come to think of it—Lilly only has a single suitcase. Sometimes, when a guest arrives, the entryway of the main house fills with monogrammed trunks.

“There’s not much out this way except breathing room.” Jack tilts his chin out, indicating the big sky and the wave of blue-gray Sierras that you can see in the distance, just past the Carson foothills. His love for the place is corny, but it’s clear he doesn’t care. “Well, Nash here is always around, and I’m down the path a bit if you need me. Look for the place with the large woodpile, just before the lake.”

He unlocks the cabin. This one is called Avalon
.
The sign, with letters burned into wood, hangs over the door. Next to Avalon is Shangri-La. The windows of that bungalow are open, and Nash can hear the
click-tick-tick
of Hadley Bernal’s typewriter.

There are two twin beds with quilt bedspreads, and a wooden nightstand with a reading lamp and an ashtray that someone stole from the Nugget. The mothers with children stay here, and there is a bookshelf with games for them: Easy Money and Raggedy Ann and a Giant Cootie, who doesn’t have many legs left. Gloria put some of her old books in here before she left home—
Little Toot
on up to
The Dana Girls
—but Nash would never give away her old books.

“Nothing fancy,” Jack says.

“I don’t even like fancy,” Lilly Marcel says.

Jack tries again. “The main house is much more comfortable.”

“Summer camp,” Lilly Marcel says.

“With cocktails,” Jack says, and they both laugh.

“I’ve never been to summer camp.”

They leave her there to rest up. Sometimes, when they finally close the door, you can hear them burst into tears. Or else there is just the sigh of bedsprings.

“There you go,” Jack Waters says to Nash. “You see?”

She hasn’t even told him how worried she’s been about her mother leaving her in charge, but he knows. Her heart crashes at his knowing. There’s the feeling that they’ve accomplished something together, and this pleases her so much that a warm buzz starts in her chest. After all these years growing up at the ranch, with all the broken hearts and wrongly hopeful ones, she hasn’t learned a damn thing.

—

It gets so cold here in the evenings. People from the city don’t know this about the desert. They expect what they see in the movies: heat and dust and cowboys. Some even think they’ll see Indians. Horses! Rifles! Tumbleweeds! It is heat and dust, but not only heat and dust. It is also frigid nights. It is cowboys, yes, but they are the men Nash knows. Danny, who left home when he was fifteen, who rides the fence and can fix a tractor engine just by looking at it. He once screamed when a spider fell in his lap, and they haven’t let him hear the end of it since. There’s Cliff, too, who’s been at the ranch since he was a young man; he delivered both Bluebell and Zorro and buried Little Britches and once drove all the way to San Francisco to pick up a tearful guest too scared to make the trip alone. It is tumbleweeds but also the purple-flowering carpets of verbena, and the scorpion weed, with its horrible smell of body odor and the prickly hair that can cause a rash if you’re not careful to keep your distance. It is horses, yes, but each horse: Maggie, who gets depressed in bad weather, and Zorro, who sees your soul when you look in his eyes, and Bluebell, who is high-strung and prefers Jack. The rifle is a real one, the Savage Model 720, an automatic, which Alice keeps under her bed in case of wolves or coyotes. Before he died, Nash’s father tried to teach her to use it, but her aim was bad. Instead of hitting the target on a nearby tree, she shot out the porch light of Shangri-La. Her father laughed so hard he could barely stand up straight, but he never let her touch that thing again.

Lilly Marcel might need extra blankets, the way the cold drops down at night, so Nash carries a stack of quilts to her cabin. The evening light is turning pink, and there are these smells: sage, and cooling dry grass, and horse manure, smells Nash loves. Just down the path, though, Nash runs into Lilly as she’s coming out of the bungalow where the toilet is.

“Well!” Lilly says, as if she’s on the other side of a recent adventure.

“The main house…” Nash says.

“I prefer to stay where I am.”

But this is when Nash begins to worry. Lilly might speak boldly, but except for her large stomach, she is small, and there are dark crescents under her eyes. She shouldn’t be alone in one of the cabins, they shouldn’t let her, Nash’s mother would insist; and it’s possible that this is the beginning of the disaster Nash feared when her mother left the ranch in her care. Lilly Marcel’s own insistence seems a symptom of something larger, of a heedlessness that has led her here. Nash had gotten it wrong before—
this
is what distinguishes Lilly Marcel from the rest, because, of course, there is much more that people say about Stuart Marcel. It’s not just the airplanes and the women and the film studio and those beautiful clothes and the way people are drawn to him in spite of his almost hideous looks. There is
the
thing: the first wife who leaped (or was pushed? Did he push her? They say he pushed her.) to her death from some high, deserted Topanga Canyon road.

Gloria would say Nash is being stupid, the way her nerves are rubbing and twitching like the legs of a mosquito. But Gloria would never have caught the way Lilly Marcel flinches right now when the door of the main house slams.

“You!” Veronica calls, pointing at Lilly with her elegant finger. She strides toward them, wearing her new shirt with the pearl snaps, a bandanna tied around her neck. Ellen runs to catch up. “You may have swallowed a bowling ball, but you are still coming for cocktail hour.”

Lilly has an uncertain smile when she meets Nash’s eyes. It’s the same look Nash’s friend, Louise, gave her when that boy took her hand at the Fireman’s Association dance, and she gives the same response in return—a smile and a shrug.

“You must need a drink, your first night here,” Ellen says to Lilly. Ellen is as cheery as a daffodil in that yellow dress, and her heels require her to walk cautiously down the dirt path, arms out slightly like new, tentative leaves. Her blond hair is in a perfect curve. She’s smiling now, but she cried for her first three days, until Alice insisted she take a trip to Carson City with the girls one night.
She danced with a cowboy!
Veronica said with a wink afterward. There was a great deal of laughing and elbowing one another.
If Bill had seen me, he would’ve
died, Ellen said.
He would’ve had me put
away
!

“I was just going to read in my room,” Lilly says.

“Nonsense,” Veronica says.

Ellen takes in Veronica and those pearl snaps for the first time. She adjusts Veronica’s bandanna just so. “Very chic.”

“You like? I couldn’t decide if it was hideous or the best thing ever, which is exactly how I felt about Gus on our honeymoon.”

“I look like a frump,” Ellen says.

“Never.” Veronica links her arm with Lilly’s. “We don’t allow hiding in one’s room. We are also coming to get Hadley, who tries to avoid us.”

“I guess I’m doomed,” Lilly Marcel says.

“We don’t bother with You-Know-Who in
the Ritz
.” Veronica tosses her head toward the cabin.

“She came with a spare,” Ellen says. “So…”

“A spare?” Lilly asks.

“The new man. The next one in line,” Veronica says

“Busy trading one prison for another, then?” Lilly says.

Hadley comes out of her cabin door, her dress slim and shimmery. “We make our own prison, my dears.”

“Oh, please,” Veronica groans. “I can’t stomach profound observations before a drink.”

Nash still holds those blankets as the women change direction and head back toward the house. The quilts made the trip out of the cupboard for nothing. The unease she feels—it stops its ugly whispering as she follows the women inside. There is a yellow dress and shimmery fabric and Jack will be coming with some friends.

“I’m through with you cynics,” Ellen says. She waves her hand, and the White Shoulders she dabbed at her wrists spins and flaunts.

“Us cynics are all you have,” Hadley says.

“Love is an act of courage,” Ellen says. This is not something she would have said when she first arrived, but Nash knows that even a single, uncharacteristic dance can set change in motion.

Boo the dachshund sits straight by the piano, being his best self, and Ellen picks him up, looks in his pointy face. “Oh, you are just waiting for your mind to get read, aren’t you?”

Hadley holds out a stack of sheet music. “Nash? Please? If your mother were here, she’d play something.”

“You know I tend bar,” Nash says. She is secretly proud that she can make a mean martini.

Veronica sets one beautiful finger on Lilly’s round stomach and taps. “Come here, and tell us who did this to you,” she says, as if they all don’t already know.

Jack—he’s wrong about
breathing room
. In spite of the ranch’s two hundred acres, with its spilling pastures and wide views of Washoe Lake, in spite of the miles and miles of desert beyond that, in spite of the vast sky, where you’ll frequently see a single red-tailed hawk or a peregrine falcon soaring in all that space, once you drive underneath the archway with the Tamarosa sign, once the fenced pasture comes into view with the white farmhouse beyond, breathing room, at least the kind that Lilly Marcel means, is just wishful thinking.