The Secret of Everything

by O'Neal, Barbara

  Vince turned and gathered her into the solid circle of his body. “You all right?” he rumbled.

  “Bad dream,” she said, and tried to go back to sleep. But every time she closed her eyes, she saw the dramatic plunge into the water, and all the cold terror came with it.

  After a while, Vince said, “Are you asleep?”

  She said, “No, are you?”

  “Do you want to go get something to eat?”

  Tessa laughed. “It’s the middle of the night!”

  “So? I’m a big guy. I haven’t had anything to eat since lunch at 100 Breakfasts, and it’s been pretty busy since then.” As if to underscore the plea, his stomach growled. Loudly. “See?”

  “Okay. I could eat,” she said.

  He smoothed a hand upward, cupping her breast. “You have no idea what a relief this has been. Just being with somebody, letting everything go.”

  “Ditto,” she said. Light from the doors edged his mussed hair, the curve of his shoulder. “Kind of a surprise for me, too.”

  “A surprise?” He lifted up on one elbow. “How so?”

  “I don’t know.” She felt shy, revealed now in the pale light. “It’s really easy to be around you. Like I already know you.”

  “Maybe it’s not just dogs who come back to life. Maybe we knew each other in Mesopotamia.”

  “Could we make it somewhere a little more interesting? Medieval Venice or something?”

  “I can go with Venice. Were you a courtesan?” He traced a circle around her breast.

  “Oh, no. I was the haughtiest noblewoman in the whole of the town. And you”—she narrowed her eyes, letting the story unfold—“were a bishop in the church, sworn to uphold vows of chastity until death.”

  The tips of his fingers skimmed her throat, and he bent close enough to brush his lips over her lower lip. “Was I successful?”

  “What do you think?”

  Vince rolled her over onto her back, his hands on either side of her shoulders, and nestled in between her legs. She felt him nudging her, playfully, heatedly. He bent, slowly, slowly, slowly, and touched his mouth to hers, swirled his tongue over hers, and she met him in kind, running her hands over his chest, then his arms and buttocks, poised for a plunge. “I think you drove me mad,” he growled, “and I took you when your husband was in the other room.”

  Tessa laughed throatily “Show me.”

  He dove in, and then they were tangled again, making love with a fierceness Tessa couldn’t remember feeling for a long time. A long time. His hands moved on her chest and caressed her heart. His breath moved on her lips and animated some dead fragment of her soul. His voice, ragged and rumbling and rich, set thrumming some answering sound in her own throat. Everything shivered when he touched her. Everything blazed.

  Dangerous, she thought as they moved.

  He braced himself over her and put his hands beside her face. “Look at me, Tessa.”

  Her breath was shallow as she opened her eyes.

  “Promise you’ll tell me before you leave town.”

  “I promise,” she whispered. “I promise.” Then they were both sliding away into their own shared world, constructed when they met, demolished when they parted. Unique in all of time.

  Vince drove them out to a truck stop off the interstate, nearly thirty miles away, where no one would see them or even care. Felix came with them, riding in the back. He curled up happily on a blanket but didn’t want to be left behind.

  The humans settled under the green fluorescent glare in a booth next to a window, where they could see his truck. An individual jukebox and heavy white mugs ready for coffee furnished the table. A skinny, heavily eyelinered waitress in a pale-pink uniform and white shoes shuffled over to slap menus down. “Coffee?” she asked, pot poised over cups.

  “I’ll have tea, please,” Tessa said. “Very hot water, if you can.” The woman nodded. She poured coffee for Vince, gathered a handful of mini-creamers out of her pocket, and set them down gently. Tessa shot Vince a cheerful wink. Her cheeks were rosy.

  He excused himself to wash his hands, and when he came back out, she was studying the menu with great intensity. She had the look of a woman who’d been having sex for hours—the slightly swollen mouth, little nick of passion on her throat, eyes sleepy. Her hair always looked slightly untidy, and in truth it was no different now, but it added to the general postcoital look. He wondered if the other men noticed and glanced around, glaring at them, as savagely protective as a bear.

  Chill, he told himself, rejoining her, but then she looked up with those light-green anime eyes and he realized he was in trouble. He’d been doing fine the past year or so, getting laid now and then, taking care of the girls. He was tired. He was lonely. But he’d been doing okay.

  Tessa suddenly made that world seem like a sepia photograph—a still life absent color or passion. He bent his head to study the menu. “What are you having?” he growled.

  “I don’t know, Mr. Bear,” she said, and lowered her own voice to a growl. “What do you recommend?”

  He glanced up to catch the shine in her eyes. “Not oatmeal.”

  She smiled. “I’m way too hungry for oatmeal.” She slapped the laminated menu closed. “I’m having the works—eggs, bacon, hash browns, biscuits, and gravy.”

  He grinned. “Hungry, doll?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “All we ever do is eat and have sex, you notice?”

  “We had a picnic.”

  “Only by accident,” she said. “And that’s eating.”

  “True.” The girl returned, and Vince ordered blueberry pancakes, eggs, sausage, and milk. Tessa ordered her massive meal, too, then turned her attention to the jukebox.

  “Hmm. Do you think they’d get mad if we played things?”

  He glanced around. There were three men hunched at intervals over the counter, likely all truckers stopping in for a cup of coffee so they could keep going another couple hundred miles. “Probably.”

  “Too bad. They have all kinds of good stuff.”

  “What would you play?”

  “Aerosmith, and Guns N’ Roses, maybe a little Led Zeppelin.”

  “Really?”

  She grinned. “No. I thought you’d like them, though.”

  “Good call.” He leaned in to see the selections. “Yeah. ‘Dream On.’ ‘Welcome to the Jungle.’ ‘Black Dog.’ All good.”

  “So predictable,” she said with a tsk.

  “What would you choose, Ms. Supercilious?”

  She flashed him a coquettish glance. “Beach Boys. ABBA. Motown. All happy, all the time, much to my father’s despair.”

  “Not what I would have expected.” He stirred three sugars into his coffee. “Don’t tell me—you have a secret passion for The Sound of Music.”

  “Not secret. I love it. And The Music Man, and every Disney song every recorded, and all the bubble-gum-pink pop you can think of.”

  Vince shook his head in disbelief. “And I was worried about being cool in front of you, world traveler and Renaissance festival woman.”

  “You should see my iPod lists. My dad literally groaned aloud when he saw it. Not”—she rolled her eyes—“that I can get him to own an iPod.”

  “My mom probably knows your dad, you know.”

  “I suppose they probably would know each other. Or did.” She shook her head. “Weird to think of them all in that world, right? All young and full of passion and vision.” She inclined her head. “And look what came of it, too—the farm, which is cool.”

  Vince let her ramble, sleepy and overamped from too little sleep and lots of sex. Her oddly deep, musical voice washed over him in welcome waves. He watched her red mouth moving, and the float of a hand drawing a point in the air, and her thin, long eyelashes, and the tiny elliptical fold at the corner of her eye that gave her that Asian anime look. He looked at the hollow of her throat and the curve of a breast, and everything about her was exactly perfect.

  It occurred to him that he had
fallen, hard.

  And he suddenly had a suspicion that he knew who she was. He’d have to check out some pictures at his mother’s house. If he was right, her story was a lot more complicated than she thought.

  For now he wouldn’t say a word. He would just drift on waves of Tessa, lazily and at peace for the first time in longer than he could remember.

  SEVENTEEN

  It was the first very sharp morning of the year, and Vita started making biscuits and sausage for the morning special. Nothing like a solid plate of biscuits and gravy to get a person moving. She was vain about her biscuits, which she’d learned to make from a Southern girl who’d lived at the Boulder house, decades before. They always turned out light and fluffy and tender, no matter how she grew the recipe.

  It wasn’t yet dawn when Annie came in. Vita had taken the cell-phone picture over to the police station, but they said it was too murky to see well. She scowled and told them to keep an eye on the area anyway. She really didn’t want to disturb Annie’s peace.

  “Hey, kid,” Vita said now. “Hungry? I’m about to put the biscuits in the oven.”

  Annie huddled by the door, her hands behind her. “I actually came in early to get your advice about something.”

  “Okay.” She wiped her hands on a towel. “What’s up?”

  “Can you come outside for a minute?”

  Vita followed the girl out. Woman. It was hard to think of the skinny little thing as a full-grown woman, even if she was in her mid-thirties. The back door opened into a fenced area, then into an alleyway where the dumpster was.

  Annie knelt and picked up a white cat that was nearly as skinny as Annie herself. “This is Athena. She showed up at my door and I’ve been feeding her. I know I shouldn’t have, but …” Annie bent and kissed the cat’s face, and Athena purred, tucking her head against Annie’s jaw. “She’s just so sweet.”

  And you’ve been so lonely, Vita thought. She rubbed a hand over the cat’s skinny back. “She’s a beauty. Does she have seven toes?”

  “Yes! How did you know?”

  “There’s a whole community of seven-toed cats around here. A lot of them are Siamese mixes, but a lot of others are all black or all white. They’ve lived here since the Spanish came.”

  “Wow. You hear that, sweetie?”

  Vita waited for Annie to get to her request. It was sure to be a request. Women in her circumstances had few resources and fewer places to turn. “I want to keep her, but I have to find a new place to live. And I might need some help with that. I mean, I don’t have a lot of money, and I don’t want to get in trouble with my parole officer or anything like that.” She raised her pale eyes to Vita’s face. “My ex-husband killed my last cat. And I just want to keep Athena, and this way she gets a good place to live, too.”

  The women and girls who came through Vita’s kitchen all stole her heart in one way or another, even when they couldn’t make it work on the outside and ended up back in jail, but something about Annie made her ache all through her middle. Vita smiled. “That is the most I’ve ever heard you say.”

  “I know, right? I’m not allowed to have cats where I am, and I want to make her a safe home.”

  “I’m sorry about your cat. That happened to me, too, unfortunately.

  It was a bird, not a cat, but it was the reason I finally left him.”

  Annie looked at her. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too,” Vita said. She spread out her arms. “But, you see, here I am and I’m happy and productive and I have a life I love.”

  “Yeah, I see.” Annie shifted the cat in her arms. “Can you help me find a different place to live?”

  “You bet. For now let’s take Athena here upstairs and let her sleep on my bed. Okay?”

  “Very okay. I’ll do extra work, whatever you want.”

  “You don’t have to do anything, Annie. Sometimes a friend does another friend a favor.”

  Dawn came gray and cool. Vince dropped Tessa back at the hotel, and they stood outside his truck, kissing and kissing and kissing beneath the overcast skies. When he left to go fetch his girls, Tessa was both relieved and bereft. She had a shower and went out for a walk, ambling around the church and then around the perimeter of the town on a trail where she met swollen-eyed townspeople walking their dogs. They nodded at her and smiled at Felix, who was as polite as a little old man out for a weekend stroll. In a way it broke her heart—he seemed afraid to do anything that was even faintly puppylike. “I won’t leave you, you know,” she said.

  He licked her hand. They walked for a long time, and Tessa was pleased at how quickly her foot was healing now. Maybe in the next day or two, she could try some of the longer trails. She’d hiked most of the shorter ones.

  Later today she would have to find a new place to stay. Los Padres, while lovely, was too expensive for the long haul. She could stay one more day but would have to find something else by tomorrow. She paused at the desk to make sure she could keep the room for another day, then went back upstairs and slept for a few hours. When she woke up, it was sprinkling a little. She headed out into the drizzle, hungry.

  There were dozens of other restaurants, but Tessa really only wanted to go to 100 Breakfasts. Felix was happy to be tied up outside where he could see her. She sat by the window and he sat on the other side, calmly observing the world, safe and dry beneath the eaves.

  Tessa scanned the menu, looking for something that tickled her fancy—she could work it off by checking out some of the trails around here later if it stopped raining.

  The local specialties were in the 90s. Breakfast number 92 was huevos rancheros with green chile and corn tortillas and refried—not black—beans. Number 95 was migas: chiles and eggs and tortillas and chorizo scrambled together. There was a breakfast taco and a bowl of green chile stew. She chose the migas.

  Vita caught sight of her and waved through the pass-out bar. She waved back. Annie was there, too, with a lime-green bandana over her head. She looked as if she’d gained a little weight this week, and it made her much prettier. Something about the angle of her face reminded Tessa of someone, but in her fuzzy state it took a while to bring it into focus: She looked like Cherry at Green Gate Farms.

  Maybe Xander, the leader, had spread his seed far and wide. Annie said she’d grown up in Albuquerque. Not so far away.

  Which made Tessa think of the conversation she’d had with Vince about her mother and her singular lack of interest in the woman. When Tessa was young, Sam would say only that her mom had been pretty and kind but not really strong enough for this world.

  As Tessa got older, he said only that her mother was troubled. And Tessa supposed she had accepted that Sam had her best interests at heart. If he glossed over her mother, then Tessa probably didn’t really want to know. She knew her name—Winnie, which seemed the too-soft name of a weak-willed woman—and that she’d come to the commune from California. That was about all she knew.

  Thinking now of Natalie, who was five when her mother died and at eight still fiercely kept the memory alive, Tessa suddenly found it rather odd that she remembered nothing at all. Even with the trauma-induced amnesia. She had never wanted to know any more until she fell into the river with Lisa.

  The story her father had told her all these years—the fairy tale making light of her terrible story, the vagueness of backstory—now seemed patently rehearsed, as if she’d been brainwashed or something. The thought made her sit back in her seat, pulse racing. What if all of it was a lie?

  Stop.

  She was entirely too stirred up. By the town, by the rescue of Felix, by the waves of memory washing to shore. And by Vince. Staring out at the plaza, she thought of his mouth, his big hands, his low, thrumming voice, and knew that he was dangerous.

  After breakfast, she stepped outside and called her father. “Hey, princess,” he said. “Did you get my letter?”

  “You wrote me an email?”

  “No, I sent it through the mail.”

  “You
wrote a letter by hand and sent it snail mail?”

  “That must mean you haven’t gotten it yet.”

  “No, but where would you have sent it? I don’t have an address here.”

  “And you say that I’m the dumb one. Your hotel, honey. I mailed it to you in care of the hotel.”

  “Oh. What’s in it?”

  “Um … Just wait and see. What are you up to today? Finished with that lousy little town yet?”

  “It’s not lousy at all—I keep telling you that you should check it out again. It’s not the place you remember.”

  “Still has evil spirits.”

  Tessa rolled her eyes. “Whatever. Listen, I’m calling because I remembered some things, and I’m kind of bothered by them.”

  A depth of silence on the other end of the line suggested her father was not pleased. “What did you remember?”

  “I remembered going in the river, off a cliff. And a fire, and a woman with long blond hair who always seems angry with me, and—this is the weird part—somebody who seems like my sister.” She paused, a pain in her ribs. “Do I have a sister?”

  Again the quiet. “It’s complicated,” he said finally. “The letter will help.”

  “Why can’t you just tell me?”

  “When you get the letter, princess, take your dog and a big cup of tea and go somewhere outside. Like that church—don’t you like that church?”

  “You’re scaring me.”

  “I told you I didn’t want you to go there.” His voice was ragged. Old. “But once you throw the lid off Pandora’s box, there’s no going back.”

  “Dad!”

  “You’ll be fine, Tessa. Call me after you read the letter, all right?”

  She realized she was threading Felix’s ear through her fingers, over and over, as if it were the satin on a blanket. “Okay.”

  “Promise?”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  “I love you, kiddo. You know that, right?”

  It made her smile. Doubt thou the stars are fire, she thought, but never doubt that Sam loved her completely.