The Secret of Everything

by O'Neal, Barbara

  “Hey, sweetie,” she called. He started to move toward her, but a door slamming nearby sent him skittering back into the trees.

  It was the doggiest town she’d been to in a long time. There were more dogs than people. Maybe, she thought, she should see about taking the pup to the animal shelter. If she saw him again, she would do that.

  Back at the hotel, she took a shower and called down to room service for a glass of wine. Then she filled a bowl with ice and water and rested her foot in the ice for ten minutes at a time.

  While she sipped wine and cooled the foot, she looked up Green Gate Farms on the Internet and sketched out her plans for visiting. She wanted to speak to whoever was in charge of the farm itself and also meet with the manager of the cooking school to see if there was any chance of setting up short-term small-group offerings. A vegetarian cooking school was still avant garde enough to be pleasing, especially in the Bourdain-influenced world of meat-heavy French cooking that was all the rage. She liked the angle of gourmet vegetarian and the Alice Waters-ish emphasis on whole and organic. She made a couple of phone calls, set up a tour and interviews for the following Thursday, and then sat back and enjoyed her wine.

  Long gold light spilled into the plaza, illuminating dust in the air. The scent of sizzling meat and garlic swirled in fragrant clouds, and somewhere a guitar played melancholy Spanish music for diners dressed in casual chic as they sipped their twelve-dollar margaritas. A trio of pigeon-breasted Anglos in pastel fishing hats crossed the cobblestones, obviously tourists on their way to supper. A man politely tipped a black hat at them, and something cracked in Tessa’s memory.

  She stood at the window of a bedroom, petting a cat. A big cat, black and white, with yellow eyes and little spats on his paws. Behind her, someone sang in a breathy voice:

  “El Señor Don Gato was a cat

  On a high red roof Don Gato sat

  He went there to read a letter, meow meow meow

  Where the reading light was better, meow meow meow.”

  Tessa sang the chorus, her hand moving and moving on the cat’s head.

  And then, just as quickly as it had opened, the shutter slid closed. Click. Although she stayed very still, peering into the dusty gold light, nothing more surfaced.

  The song, however, lodged itself in her head. She hummed it under her breath.

  Over the years, she’d often tried to remember—or rather, reorder—her memories, sweeping them all into a pile that she then tried to smooth into something that made a picture, but there were too many things that didn’t fit. Angled shards with chunks missing, like a broken mirror.

  As she sat here now, she wondered if her approach had been wrong. Maybe she’d been looking too much for the missing parts, feeling around for something that slipped out of sight, rather than focusing on what she did remember.

  Pulling the white tablet over to her, she picked up a pen and started scribbling a list.

  Songs. Whole folk songs. Lots of them.

  A blond woman who seems mean (probably my mother?).

  A black-and-white dog sleeping with me (Brenna).

  A sidewalk covered with colored chalk.

  Playing jacks with another girl (boy?).

  A forest fire.

  Playing hide-and-seek in really high grass or something. A big field.

  Getting scared and lost.

  Something clattered below her balcony, and Tessa was jolted abruptly from the trance of memory. She startled so hard that she dropped her pen, and she suddenly felt a clammy sense of terror that was utterly out of proportion to the prosaic list of memories.

  Maybe things were buried for a reason. Maybe she didn’t really want to know what lay back there in the darkness. Sometimes a broken memory hid a trauma.

  Well, but she knew what her trauma was: She had nearly drowned. She’d always known it but never remembered anything about it until the ordeal in Montana, when she’d nearly drowned again. Climbing out of the Snake River with an arm broken in two places, she had remembered being hauled from the river when she was four. It had unnerved her so badly that she’d had panic attacks for weeks afterward.

  Which was when she decided it was time for her to stop ignoring the dimly lit memories and try to put them to rest. But at this moment, rubbing her hands on her thighs, feeling a shaky sense of dread, she couldn’t really remember why she had decided it would be such a great idea to come out here and try to sort it out. How would that help the current problem, which had nothing to do with her past and everything to do with making peace with the fact that her bad judgment had led directly to the death of a young woman who had trusted Tessa implicitly?

  It wouldn’t. And it was making her father nervous, and she really had no idea what she might discover. There were oddities, like the fact that she didn’t remember her mother. Sam told Tessa that her mother had been at the commune, a hippie, but Tessa didn’t remember anything about her.

  Weird.

  Her pulse grew suddenly thready, unsteady, and panic began to stir in her limbs. In the plaza below, a man laughed, and it sounded so much like Sam that she picked up her cell and punched in the number. “Hey, baby girl,” he said, answering on the second ring. “How’s it going out there in Thieves Land?”

  “Good,” she said, pleased that her voice sounded calm. “I walked up to the lake this afternoon and talked to the priest at the church. It’s all so beautiful I can’t believe it.”

  “I remember,” he said in his deep voice. “No place on earth like Los Ladrones River Valley.”

  “I think we’re going to get some great tour possibilities out of it. It’s really too bad you’re not here with me.”

  “Yeah, well, some of us have to work, you know.”

  Tessa smiled. The sound of his voice calmed her racing heart. “You poor thing.” She sipped the last of her wine, crisp and white and dry. “I’ve met some great dogs here, too. An Akita mix who nearly got himself killed the first afternoon, and the sweetest little border collie stray who keeps showing up.”

  “A border collie? Could it be—”

  “Don’t say it!”

  “Brenna!” he said, and laughed. The familiar charm of it made Tessa miss him acutely. “Sounds like you’re having a good time.”

  “So far so good. I’m headed over to Green Gate Farms later this week, do some interviews.”

  “Is that right?” His voice was suddenly bloodless. “Who are you talking to? Maybe I know some of them.”

  Tessa slid her thumb over the mouse square on her keyboard. The screen came up and she read a couple of names. “Sound familiar?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, it was a long time ago.”

  “It was.”

  “You sound kind of funny, Dad. You all right?”

  “Me? I’m great. Getting ready for the rush.”

  “I guess I’ll let you go, then.”

  “Keep in touch,” he said.

  “You can call me, too, you know.”

  “I don’t like to bug you, you know that.”

  She shook her head. “Bug me, Dad. Please? It’s better than you sitting out there worrying about me.”

  “All right, kiddo, I will.”

  “Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  As she hung up the phone, Tessa pursed her lips, staring at the dusty sunlight burning a ribbon along a craggy blue mountain range. He was really not happy about this, and considering how laid-back he was about everything on the planet, maybe Tessa should pay attention. Maybe sleeping dogs should stay asleep. Instead of poking around in her past, maybe she ought to finish up her research and get back to her regular life.

  Or not.

  The truth was she needed to make peace with the distant past in order to know who she was and maybe make peace with the recent past. A healthy person faced things. As long as that black hole of regret lived inside her, waiting for her to lower her guard, she wouldn’t be whole and healthy. She’d written a letter of apology
to Lisa’s parents. She’d made a confession to her father. She’d written out a long journal. None of it really touched her guilt.

  Since the direct route wasn’t working, the next best thing was to work on the other black hole—that jigsaw puzzle of a mixed-up memory. That, too, was a step toward wholeness.

  With a sigh, she shoved the subject away. Right now she could live in this moment. Live here, on a late Sunday afternoon in August, in Los Ladrones, New Mexico. She fetched the camera from the bed and, sitting with one foot in ice, the other propped on the railing, she shot the ribbons of molten gold over the mountains, and the vast tree in the plaza, and even her toes, plain and unpainted, sticking up into the sky.

  Sometimes, the moment was enough. A moment was a place you could live.

  Vince got the girls—sunburned, cranky with sunshine and exhaustion and food—into bed by eight-thirty. Not even Natalie complained. He wandered back into the living room, kicked the dogs off the couch, and picked up the remote but didn’t push any buttons. He just didn’t want the noise.

  Old, he told himself. You’re old now.

  Once upon a time, he’d been a metal fanatic. Iron Maiden, Pantera, Slayer, and later, System of a Down, had blasted in his ears twenty hours a day—on the radio, in his car, on his Walkman, on the stereo. He’d burned out on noise before getting an iPod, or he would have listened to it on that, too.

  Now the silence, mountain silence, broken only by the faintest of crickets somewhere out in the fields, fell on him like a quilt. It had texture and depth, a velvety weight to ease his jangled nerves, his weary brain.

  Natalie and Jade had gone at it again on the way home from the lake, kicking and screaming and biting, pulling each other’s hair, calling each other awful names. He roared over the seat back for them to stop, but they ignored him, locked in what seemed to him to be mortal combat. Hannah, terrified, started to cry. The dogs, safe behind a grid in the very back, had started barking and howling, until it seemed the vehicle would split from the noise. Vince had slammed on the brakes, pulled the car over, yanked open the back door, and bodily separated his two fighting hellions, then spanked them both. Firmly.

  It shocked them both enough that they burst into tears, flung themselves against him, and wept out their apologies. Natalie had long scratches down her forearms, beading blood. Jade had teeth marks on her upper arm.

  He had no idea what to do with them or why this war had suddenly broken out. As far as he could tell, it had exploded about a month ago, when he’d taken them to Albuquerque to go shopping for school clothes. Natalie was surly and hateful all the way, and Jade needled her about her size, and it got out of control. He’d come back home without buying anything; in fact, his mother was taking them to her sister’s in Pueblo to shop next week. Before they left, he needed to have a talk with them, each one of them, and see what he could find out about what was going on. Maybe he needed to spend more time with them, one on one. Maybe Natalie was still having problems with her mother’s death.

  Maybe it was all just normal.

  Times like this his anger at Carrie could consume him. How could she have checked out like that, leaving him to manage so much on his own? Rationally, he knew she had been troubled, that suicide wasn’t exactly a choice. Rationally, he knew she’d been depressed for a long time—and that, too, had been a burden, much as it shamed him to admit it.

  On another level, an emotional level, he was flat-out furious with her. How could she have deserted her children? Who did that?

  All he knew was that he was exhausted. Lonely. Tired of doing everything himself.

  No, not by himself. His mother was a huge help, bringing casseroles to supplement his wretched cooking—not that her cooking was that much better. She took the girls overnight on a regular basis, intervening with parenting advice and insights when he asked.

  But it wasn’t the same as having a partner. Sprawled on the couch, too tired to even turn on the television, he surveyed the disaster of the living room. Clothes, toys, dishes, blankets, dog toys, pens, newspapers, kids’ books, shoes, and dust and dog hair littered everything. He tried to give it a cleaning once a week or so, but sometimes it didn’t even get done that much. Between work, kids, the modicum of cooking he could do, the general hygiene of the girls, and care for their clothes, he barely had time for a shower, much less vacuuming the living room.

  Pedro shoved his head beneath Vince’s hand, and even in his current state, Vince had to chuckle. “If it’s just sitting there, it might as well be doing you some good, huh, dog?” he rasped aloud, rubbing the dog’s ears.

  It made him think of Tessa, lean and tan, on the sand this afternoon. A very intriguing woman. She wore an air of aloof mystery like a cloud of perfume, with exotic notes of foreign travel and that strange childhood. He could listen to her smoky voice for ten thousand years and never get tired of it.

  He closed his eyes and thought of her lying there on the beach this afternoon, her belly flat and brown, her hair swept away from her neck. Her breasts were constrained in a sports bra, which covered more than a bikini top but not in the same way. He’d seen the outline of her breasts very clearly, the slight pear shape, the outline of her nipples. He’d been careful not to stare.

  She had the loose, comfortable body language of a woman who liked herself, and it wasn’t hard to forget about all the shit in his life and imagine her lying flat on that sand, minus the sports bra. He decided she was asleep, her breasts white and tipped with dark-brown nipples. No, maybe not dark. She was blond. Pink nipples, then. Soft in the hot, hot sun.

  In his imagination, he arrived at the lake without any children in tow. Just him, discovering her there on the beach, topless, a treat for him only. He stopped beside her and he bent to put his palm flat on that belly, the skin so hot it practically blistered his palm, but she didn’t wake up, not until he flicked his tongue over the pink nipples and made them hard, sucking them into his mouth. She woke up, pleased, and reached a hand out to stroke him.

  Yeah.

  In the darkness of his living room, all alone, Vince gave himself some comfort, thinking of Tessa’s tits, then hauled his ass up and went to bed, too damned tired to care when the dogs leapt into bed with him.

  Vita’s day began at three a.m. It made people wince for her, but she loved it. Loved rising in the dark while the world slept and putting on her clothes and going downstairs to the café to make a pot of coffee. The kitchen was starkly clean, its tile floor swabbed with bleach water by the dishwasher the night before, all the stainless counters polished and empty, utensils neatly in their drawers and on hooks—whisks and spatulas in a dozen sizes, ladles and spoons and knives. The pots, battered and sturdy, in every imaginable variety—stockpots to sheet pans to skillets to tiny saucepans—were stacked below the counters and on the shelves around the room. The grill had been scrubbed clean with a brick after the last meal was served and now waited for the new day, when it would give its heat to nourish the humans who would pass through on her watch today.

  Wednesday’s special was an egg casserole that never failed to sell out completely, usually before eight-thirty Which was fine. Letting it run out rather than making more gave it a special cachet.

  She poured a cup of coffee, stirred in heavy cream and two teaspoons of sugar, and took her first sip of the day. Coffee was her constant companion, coffee made just like this—from freshly ground, excellent-quality beans, brewed strong enough to put hair on your chest, so that it needed heavy cream and some sugar to thin it out. No lattes for Vita. No extra whip mocha bravo whatevers. She loved good, plain coffee as much as anything in the world, and she drank a lot of it. It was a great smug pleasure to hear science upholding her claim that it was a health drink—nothing that smelled that fantastic could possibly be bad for you.

  On a shelf above the main work counter was a small stereo. She used to go through radios at a pace of about one every six months; now she used an iPod deck with an iPod encased in a vinyl sleeve. The fir
st had lasted almost a year. This one was well past the year and going strong. She didn’t allow individual players for the staff, even when they were working alone—it was too dangerous to be unable to hear what was going on around you, especially in an environment riddled with fire and sharp knives—but she did allow people to bring in their own mixes and play them. Sometimes. She had a preference for Bob Dylan and the Stones, Canned Heat and It’s a Beautiful Day, the soundtrack of her youth, when she’d drifted west from Ohio on a cloud of patchouli and pot, riding in a van with a cluster of college friends. They landed in Boulder, sharing a ramshackle Victorian house that was freezing all winter and had plumbing problems year-round. Still, there were plenty of bedrooms, a wide porch that looped around the downstairs, and a kitchen that could seat twenty along a wall of windows overlooking the mountains.

  It was in that kitchen that Vita first learned to love cooking, love the pleasure of nourishing and feeding other people but also the pleasure of handling food, preparing it, enjoying its beauty. A good number of her recipes came directly from those gilded days, when she was young and listening to rock that wasn’t yet classic but was fresh and passionate and capturing everything about the world that they wanted to say and couldn’t. Some of the happiest days of her life, those years in Boulder in the late sixties.

  This morning, as she hummed along with the raw, hungry voice of Janis singing “Turtle Blues,” Vita broke eggs and sliced organic naturally smoked ham into thin, elegant slivers and let the spirit of those lost days waft over her. All that youth and happiness. The memory of them could give her a sense of wist-fulness that could still rip her heart out.

  Funny how you didn’t know when you were happy.

  She was happy now, too, of course, but not with that same sense of gilded … what? Expectation. The sense of possibility and wonder. Anything could happen. Life could carry you anywhere. When you were young, you didn’t realize that the “anywhere” could be a place you didn’t want to go.