The Secrets She Keeps (6 page)

I retrieved my bag from the car. Tex followed like an incompetent but well-meaning valet. Upstairs and down the hall, I found
TAJ MAHAL
right next to
CASTAWAY
—
the doors still had the signs on them, with log-shaped letters burned into wood. It was hot in there, and the dust in the curtains made me sneeze when I reached past them to open the windows, but who could blame Nash for not tending to each room? Once the kids hit high school, I barely wanted to cook anymore. Taj was tidy enough, with its large pine bed and quilt spread. I could see why it was a favorite—the view was immense, one that would please any choosy tourist.

I put on a tank top, washed my face in the bathroom across the hall, and then I turned my phone on again to check for messages. Thomas or no Thomas, my daughter was traveling in a foreign country, and I might have to hop on a plane to rescue her from some terrible jail or tropical disease or heartbreak or whatever else might befall her away from the safety of home. I was still trying to hold on to the idea that my children needed me.

There was only one message, though. It wasn’t from Thomas or Amy. Surprisingly, it was Melissa who’d called. She was using her bossy-eldest voice, which could make me mad when directed at me, and she was saying something about Thomas and me and Mary Evans. Thomas had used her to relay his side of the story, and the wrongness of this barely registered before I heard what she said next.

“Mary Evans,
PhD
, Mother. He said you thought he was having an affair! For God’s sake!
Dad?
She’s a
therapist
. He’s been seeing her for about six months….”

I sat down on that quilt-covered bed. It wasn’t what I had expected, not at all. I felt the slight lift of relief before the anger rolled in. Six months? How many lies and lies and lies does it take to cover weekly appointments for
six months
?

I held my phone in my hand and stared out over all that ranchland, which looked less wrecked than exhausted. I watched a woodpecker
bam-bam-bam
his beak into a beam of rotting wood. All those small lies, the late nights at work, the lengthy errands, maybe even those long runs in the hideous silky shorts…The fact that he couldn’t tell me this basic truth, it felt oddly worse than my original, mistaken conclusion. It felt like the final verdict on the state of our marriage, the kind of vast desert distance that was impassable. Passion, legs entwined with legs, hot mouths and bare desire, found love—it was tangible, even understandable. I could grab hold of that and either choke it to death or let it go on its foolish, temporary way. But unhappiness—an unhappiness deep enough to hide—it seemed like such a larger, untamable enemy.

The Mary Evans of my imaginings was gone. The shimmer of her, the desert mirage, went up in a poof. Why I also felt a small, odd sense of loss over that, why some strange emptiness took her place, I didn’t yet ask myself.

Well, I didn’t have time, for one. Right then, I heard a tremendous clatter down the hall, a sliding crash. Nash had fallen, I was sure of it. She wasn’t as sturdy as she looked. I leaped to my feet. Dear God, she’d probably broken a hip or something. After all that time living alone without incident, the very second I arrived, she had a catastrophe. It was proof how another person’s capable presence could turn you incompetent. I hurried to Nash’s room, only to find her just fine and upright, looking guilty.

“Shit,” she said.

Shit was right, because clearly this was the reason (one of the reasons) for Harris’s worried call. Yes, the reason was scattered and splayed out in front of me. What had fallen, what I bent to help Nash with, though she waved me away, were a chair and a stack of books that had been on it. This might have been innocent, except that it was only one small part of the disturbed chaos and bizarre accumulation of paper in that room. There were stacks of it. Stacks and more towering stacks, along with piles of large, fat envelopes and stuffed file folders. I’d been wrong about Nash and senility: She must have lost her mind; this was proof. Her bed was in there somewhere, and in there somewhere, too, was a ringing phone. A cellphone! I heard a jazz riff, but Nash made no move to answer it. Nothing was what it seemed. I felt a sick dread.

“Nash, my God,” I said. “What is going on here?”

“What are you talking about?” she said.

“What is all this stuff?”

My eyes caught a label on the end of a box, and then I saw the number everywhere. A folder, a letter, a newspaper:
1951, 1951, 1951
.

She folded her arms, and her eyes blazed. That’s when I also noticed a nearly empty glass of beer and an open box of crackers. Nash followed my glance and tried to shove the box into a trash can overflowing with paper. “Last night’s snack,” she snapped. But then her head tilted, as if there was a sudden noise. “Do you hear that?”

Voices, probably. I was so far over my head that I was sinking fast.

“Yes,” she said, and her face lit. She grabbed my arm, hurried me downstairs to those large windows in the dining room. Waves of heat came off the desert like ripples of water, and it was quiet except for an
awwwk!
of a falcon overhead.

But then I also heard it. A sound like thunder; that deep bass roll off in the distance. And then—same as thunder, too—the
boom
was suddenly right there in Nash’s very own pasture, a roar of hooves and huffing and wildness; there were manes flying and thick haunches with muscles clenched in forward motion, a blur of brown and satin black. I could not hear or see or feel anything else, not the ringing phone, not the car coming down the drive, not the horrible heaviness in my stomach, not even a sense of inevitability about these horses and my future. There was only this: motion and power and thrill and fear.

“My God,” I said.

Nash’s fingers gripped my arm.

“They’re back,” she said.

Waves of heat come off the desert like ripples of water, and it is quiet except for an
awwwk!
of a falcon overhead. It is You-Know-Who’s day in court, Mrs. Daisy Davidson Fletcher, who is some relation to the long-dead James Buchanan Duke of the American Tobacco Company, or so she says. It is also her wedding day to Mr. Jeremy Gunther, who sits with her in the back of the Styleline Deluxe. Mr. Gunther is a poet, Veronica discovered a few weeks ago. She shared this fact after dinner.
He explores the themes of parting rich women from their money,
she cackled, and Nash’s mother began to play “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” on the piano, making everyone laugh.

Maybe the quiet is the silent shouting of second thoughts. Little Jimmy Fletcher sits beside Nash, his hands folded in his lap, staring sullenly out the window. He looks like a miniature businessman in that suit.

When they go into the courthouse to meet Bill Thisby, the attorney, Jimmy waits in the car. It’s Nash’s first time standing in for Alice. She’s accompanied her before, though, so she knows what to do. She rises. The judge asks if Mrs. Fletcher has been a Nevada resident for the required six weeks, and Nash answers,
Yes, Your Honor
, as Mr. Fletcher glares from the other side of the room. He cites three of the nine grounds for divorce, when only one is necessary, though Mrs. Fletcher seems unfazed as her crimes are stated aloud. Adultery, insanity, extreme mental cruelty, and that’s only a third of the ways love can go legally wrong. It’s over in half an hour.

The poet is dashingly handsome but no physical match for Mr. Fletcher, so Nash is relieved when they are down the courthouse steps, fetching Jimmy from the car. Jimmy spots what Nash guesses is his father’s black Mercury parked by the curb, unless he always cranes his neck to look at certain automobiles with obvious longing. Still, they are in a hurry; the second official of the day waits. The newly ex–Mrs. Fletcher yanks the boy’s hand, and she laughs as they cross to the other side of the street to enter the Park Chapel.

In ten minutes, it’s done. It takes longer to break promises than to make them. From all she’s seen, Nash thinks it should be the other way around. The poet’s friends arrive to drive them off, and a strange impulse overtakes Nash. She bends and kisses the boy’s cheek.

Then Nash spots him. Mr. Fletcher, still sitting in his black Mercury. His head is in his hands. He is weeping. So often it seems that one person’s gain in love is another’s loss. In the courtroom, she’d been afraid of him, but now her fear turns to pity. Her heart wrenches. He once looked into Mrs. Fletcher’s eyes and saw forever. Every single couple who walks up those steps, every woman carrying a purse and smoothing her skirt and fanning herself from the heat, every man who checks for his wallet and admires the shine of his own shoes and removes his hat once indoors—they all once looked into each other’s eyes and felt enough passion to overcome their own unspoken uncertainties or the objection of parents or the weight of the future and they
vowed
. What it took to actually fulfill that vow, well, that’s where no one seems to have any answers. The distance from the vow to forever seems as long and bumpy as the one from the Park Chapel to the arch of Tamarosa. There’s heat, drought, snakes, and your own confusion once you get turned around out there in the dark.

Nash should go back, but in her palm is You-Know-Who’s doomed wedding ring, the gold band that the weeping Mr. Fletcher once placed on her finger. Nash walks to the Virginia Street Bridge, the Bridge of Sighs, they call it, over the Truckee River. She intends to complete the ritual that You-Know-Who has left undone. Some women leave their rings in the vase on the piano, but the others fling them off this bridge into the tumbling waters below.

When she gets there, though, Nash sees a familiar figure. Her first instinct is panic; people jump from this bridge, too, and Lilly Marcel is on her watch. But coming closer, she sees that Lilly is only leaning forward to peer down at the bridge’s cement double arches and at the river, which flows with some speed, as if heading off to more-important business.

“I thought you might leap.” Nash makes it sound like a joke.

“Not with Beanie.” Lilly Marcel sets one hand on the round bump under her polka-dotted dress. There’s the smell of citrus again. It’s the smell of sun and California and good fortune. Lilly Marcel is beautiful, especially set against the turquoise of that river and sky.

“Beanie,” Nash says. She smiles.

“No creep is worth losing your life over, anyway,” Lilly says. “No mistake is, either.”

“Definitely not,” Nash says. “How did you get here?”

Lilly hooks her thumb over her shoulder. “Some cowboy,” she jokes.

Nash sees Jack, his familiar broad shoulders and thoughtful profile, leaning against a cement pillar on the other side of the bridge, smoking a cigarette. He’s wearing her favorite hat, the one that’s a small bit too large, which he’ll flick from his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. Her heart twists in jealousy, for no good reason. Lilly Marcel—well, look at her, with that ivory skin and those bright blue eyes; she could have anyone she wants, even if she wants some cowboy who’s never even cared about going to the movies.

“When is the baby due?” Nash asks.

“Ten weeks.”

“Are you scared?”

“Very,” Lilly Marcel says. They lock eyes. It’s strange—Nash first saw that face ever-so-briefly on a large screen at the Riverside Theater, but right now they are two young women on a bridge, and something passes between them.

Jack catches sight of Nash and waves, heads over. There are things she knows about him: His mother died (and he adores Alice); his father drank (he does, too; too much); he was smart enough to go to college (but hated being stuck inside a classroom). She knows his strengths—his charm, his kindness, his loyalty—and his weaknesses. The small lies he tells to get out of things, the flash of hotheaded temper when he’s criticized. But there is so much she doesn’t know—what as a man he is hungry for. All of that seems like such a mystery. One thing Nash has realized about love, if this is love, is how powerful and powerless it makes you feel at the same time.

“You’re ginned up,” he says to her.

“Mrs. Fletcher’s day in court.”

“Six weeks,” Lilly Marcel says, and sighs.

“We’ll make sure the time flies. You’ll want to stay. You won’t even miss the green tiled pool or the red plush seats.”

The pool, the seats—they are obviously a part of a private discussion Nash had no part of. Jack spins his circle of keys on his finger, as if eager to get the show on the road. There is her and him and her, and it’s confusing. Desire and envy skitter past before disappearing underground, same as a zebra-tailed lizard.

Nash doesn’t know what is happening, or what is about to. She is naïve to the way wild hooves and forces of nature can destroy orderly pastures and upright fences. Still, she decides not to throw in the wedding ring after all. She tucks it into her handbag. She zips that abandoned circle of gold into a small pocket. She does this with care and even love—the way a mother puts a baby to bed.

—

“So what’s he like? Stuart Marcel,” Veronica asks. She’s wearing a green satin evening dress with a bow at the hip, and her blond hair is smoothed up into a twist. Her legs are crossed; she swings one ankle in a circle and blows a stream of cigarette smoke up into the air, like a freight train pulling out of the station. When Veronica first arrived, she carried her fur over one arm, until Peg Marx Dunnell (successfully divorced and returned to Chicago) accused her of needing a security blanket. An ashtray was thrown by one and impressively caught by the other.