The Secret of Everything

by O'Neal, Barbara

  Father Timothy had pinned a pilgrim’s badge to each of them, blessing them with a prayer before they began. They walked alone, without dogs, and the rule was to walk in absolute silence. Because it was a hard, long climb, they’d worked out a signal that Natalie could use if she needed to stop or if it was becoming too difficult.

  “I’m ready if you are,” Tessa said.

  “I’m ready.”

  Tessa gestured for Natalie to go ahead of her, and they began to walk. At first it was not terribly unpleasant to be barefoot. The path was smooth dirt, and cold, but not unduly so. Tessa turned her mind to Lisa, to remembering and honoring her. She carried a photo of the young woman in her pocket. Natalie carried a photo of her mother and something else she wanted to leave as an offering at the shrine at the top. She didn’t tell Tessa what it was.

  In silence, they walked up and up. The sun came over the mountain and touched their heads, and still they walked. The silence and the steady movement put Tessa into a meditative state where things became clear. Or at least clearer. It was what she loved most about walking.

  Because of her injury, she had not had many chances over the past few months. It had knocked her off balance, especially when she had so many things to think about, so many things that had shifted in her life. Things lost, things found, things given away and rearranged.

  As they climbed, the trail grew rockier and more uncomfortable. They had to slow down and pick their way over sharp stones sticking out of the ground and beware of roots. Tessa stubbed her toe and it started to bleed, but it wasn’t bad enough that she felt she had to stop, and they kept going. A little while later, Natalie cut her heel on something, and they looked at it silently, but it was not bad, either. Their eyes met and they kept walking.

  Walking higher and higher, Tessa gave thought to what she wanted. If she was honest with herself, she had been drifting since Tasmania, shaken by the loss of a dream she really had wanted and believed in. She had believed she would settle with Glenn, leave the wandering life behind, and have a baby or two, maybe move her father into a cottage nearby.

  For the past two years, she’d been leading tours only because she had no idea what else to do, how to arrange her life, what she wanted it all to look like.

  As she walked a pilgrim’s trail, she allowed the possibility that she had been blocking her happiness by never naming anything she wanted.

  So what did she want? If she made no judgments and resisted all fear, what did she want, big and small?

  A different job. This one had become too exhausting for her nearly forty-year-old self.

  A place to belong.

  Her sister close by, and her father.

  She swallowed, watching brave Natalie climb the mountain on strong, sturdy legs, her hair crazy around her head.

  Natalie. Tessa wanted Natalie. To be around her and watch her come into herself. She wanted to foster that fierce passion for food, find ways to encourage her and help her grow. For a moment, she imagined Natalie at twenty, wearing the green coat of the Green Gate Cooking School, looking saucy and cheerful like Julia Child, and the vision brought tears to her eyes.

  Did that mean she wanted Vince, too?

  Vince was a separate issue. Vince, who was so tender and powerful, with his giant heart and giant hands and delectable lips and good mind.

  Yes. She wanted Vince, too.

  Under her breath, she started to hum the tune:

  “Well, the rivers ran uphill

  And the fish began to fly

  And the day before

  I died, I became a blushing bride.”

  Natalie hummed with her, giving Tessa a wicked and complicit glance over her shoulder. They hummed the old song until they ran out of breath, until the trail became genuinely difficult, very steep and littered with sharp, nasty rocks and scree that made them walk very carefully. Both of them had bleeding small cuts and bruises, but Tessa gave Natalie the respect of not fussing. It was meant to be hard.

  Toward the top of the mountain, the path looped along a steep, dramatic cliff that showed views of the entire valley and both the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo mountains. It was slightly dizzying, but the path was a good solid fifteen feet away from the edge, and Tessa felt safe.

  For some reason, however, it brought Lisa to her mind vividly—the young woman’s joy in discovering that she had what it took to hike to a beautiful high mountain and conquer her fears, to be an active woman. Tessa halted for a moment, tears crowding into her throat, and suddenly she realized that a part of what she’d been feeling was grief.

  She let the tears flow unchecked, finally. Natalie came back and put her hand into Tessa’s but didn’t say a word, and she was simply, honorably just there. Tessa squeezed her hand in thanks, and they continued the climb.

  When they reached the top, there was a statue of the Blessed Mother, a long-haired, dark-skinned version of Mary. She had curves and plump hands and Tessa loved her immediately, imagining that the sculptor had used his wife, a wife he loved, as a model.

  Before they began their climb, Natalie and Tessa had agreed to give each other privacy at the top. Natalie wanted Tessa to go first, so Natalie pointed to a grove of trees, where there was a bench overlooking the river far below. Tessa nodded, and Natalie trundled over there.

  Tessa watched her go. For years, she’d been herding young women up mountains, mothering them, encouraging them, especially loving the ones who were not particularly fit or had never discovered they had power in their bodies. She mothered them because she had no children of her own.

  She turned back to the statue and looked up. It would be hypocritical for her to pray, since she didn’t particularly believe in sainthood or Catholic ritual.

  But she did believe in something. Something that had brought her back to her sister, something that lent healing. Something that had made dogs.

  And she believed in forgiveness, for herself and for others, so she bent her head and spoke to Lisa. “I’m sorry that my hubris let you down,” she said. “Let you die. I hope wherever you are that it’s beautiful. I hope you’re looking after your mother, helping her come to terms with the loss of you. I hope you know I loved you and respected you.”

  At the base of the statue was a covered altar, with offerings of all sorts. Tessa took out a hat that had belonged to Lisa and placed it at Mary’s feet. “Look after her,” she said.

  Then she stepped away and gestured toward Natalie, who stood up and came over with a very sober face.

  Natalie’s feet were hurting. A lot. She didn’t go barefoot all that much, and now she could feel bruises and cuts and things all over them. She limped a little as she approached the statue of the Blessed Mother.

  “Hi,” she said aloud, and knelt on the ground, realizing that her knees were going to get awfully sore, even through her jeans, but that was okay. She pulled out her mother’s rosary, made of dark-blue beads, and held it in her hand. “I’m sorry for stealing, and I will not do it anymore.” It had finally come to her that it was her choice to steal. That she had to decide not to do it.

  She bowed her head and began to say the rosary, not all of it, but a decade and a couple of Our Fathers and Glory Be’s. The wind whipped across her body as she chanted, and it felt like it was blowing away everything in the past, scrubbing her clean. Something heavy and thick in her chest seemed to get lighter and lighter and lighter, until it felt like her heart was just normal again, like it used to be before her mother died.

  Her father had taken her to the salt store, where she offered to do whatever work the lady needed for two hours every week until the lady was happy again. The police and everybody said it was okay to do it that way, and the woman had a look like the Wicked Witch of the West, all pinched, but she agreed. Natalie had gone in yesterday, and the woman just had her break down boxes and make them flat for recycling. It was super easy.

  And the lady—Ms. Tonkin—started talking to her, telling her all about the history of the pink salt Natalie h
ad stolen like a crazy person. When her dad came back to get her, Natalie asked if she could buy some of the pink salt to bring with her today, and he said she could take it out of her allowance.

  So now she had an offering. She took the salt out of the bag and put it in her hand. She thought of her mother’s eyes, which were always sad, always. It wasn’t Natalie’s fault, like she sometimes thought. It was some broken thing inside her mother, her daddy said, and sometimes that just couldn’t be fixed.

  When she was ready, Natalie opened her eyes and opened her hands and let the wind sweep the salt away.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Vince was working on the fence for the dogs when he saw Tessa driving up with Natalie. The dogs sprang off the porch in glee to investigate, and Vince put his hammer down to go help Nat if she needed it.

  She limped toward him, but she was smiling broadly, the pilgrim badge on her blouse, her shoes in her hands. “We did it!” she cried, and hobbled over to him. “Look at my feet!” She sat down and held up her feet so he could see the filthy, bruised, bloody bottoms.

  “Jeez, Nat, that looks like it hurts! Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, Dad,” she said, and there was something so clear and solid about her that he nodded.

  “Good. Why don’t you go take a bath, soak those feet?”

  “‘Kay!” She stood up. “Bye, Tessa. Thanks again!”

  Tessa waved. She had something in her hands and carried it over. She, too, was hobbling a little, though not as dramatically as Natalie. “Hi,” she said.

  Her voice ran like a silver river down his neck, circled his chest. “Hi,” he said gruffly, and picked up his hammer. “I brought something,” she said. “Oh?”

  She grinned. “You didn’t happen to notice that I was carrying a stack of frames in my hands?”

  He shrugged. If he didn’t let her have a crack, he wouldn’t crack, and it would all be okay.

  “I thought you might like something to hang on your walls,” she said, and held out her gift.

  They were photos, five of them—all her own work, he guessed. There was Natalie’s hand with the avocado, and one of Vince with Hannah, and the coy photo of Jade with chocolate on her mouth, and one the day she’d been here to talk to Natalie, when the light had been so extraordinary. It was Vince, surrounded by the dancing arrows, looking forbidding and godlike.

  “Zeus,” she said.

  There was something in her voice that made him look up. “I’m not leaving Los Ladrones,” she said. “I’m probably stuck in that crappy rental for a while, because it’s too expensive to buy, but I’m staying. My boss nixed the tour, because he thought it was too mellow for our demographic, but I’m going to work with Vita and Green Gate to develop my own tours of the area. Cooking, mellow walking. Less adventure, more joy.”

  He looked back at the photo. He’d never seen himself like this. “You made me look like a giant,” he said.

  “You don’t have to say anything back, Vince, but I really need to tell you that I’m in love with you. And your girls. And your dogs and your town. I know it’s fast and I know it doesn’t make any sense, but sometimes you have to go with your instincts. I can take as much time as you need to prove it to you.”

  He wanted to believe her. If he had been on his own, he wouldn’t have hesitated for a minute to take a chance, but the girls deserved better than a maybe.

  As if she sensed his hesitation, she tucked her hands in her pockets. “Look at the last picture.”

  He put the Zeus picture aside, and there were the two of them, looking up at the camera from her bed that rainy afternoon he’d come back to kiss her. They looked calmly, steadily at the camera, heads just touching, her blond hair splayed on the pillowcase and over his bare shoulder. Eyes full of love. Both of them. He remembered that he’d turned and kissed her shoulder.

  “I love this.” He turned and carefully put the photos down. His hands were shaking as he turned back. “My mother brought me a photo, too,” he said. He pulled the snapshot out of his wallet and handed it over. “That’s me, at nine.”

  She looked at the photo. Vince came close and looked over her shoulder. It showed a boy in jeans and a T-shirt with a little girl on a tricycle decorated with tissue-paper roses. The girl had a sash over her bathing suit, and her long blond hair swept her rear end. “I remember this.”

  “Nobody ever told me that they thought you drowned. You were just gone, like everybody else. And I missed you. You were funny and smart and silly, and you loved to read whatever I brought you from my mom’s store.”

  “See?” she said, smiling. “I knew it.” She raised her eyes. “I think you should trust me. I’m not going to clean your house or suddenly make great meals, because I’m not good at that, at least not now. I’ll want to be on the trails, and I want to teach the girls how to be strong and listen to their inner voices. I want to sleep with you and eat breakfast with you every day.”

  What Vince thought, suddenly, was that she always told the truth. He knew in his bones that she would never leave, that if she gave her word she would keep it.

  “Promise?” he asked.

  She raised a hand, like a Girl Scout, three fingers up. “Promise.”

  The rigid blocks he’d been keeping up collapsed all at once, and Vince scooped her into his arms. “God, Tessa, all I’ve wanted to do for a week is charge over there and order you to stay here, live here, be here.” He buried his face in her neck. “I am so in love with you that it scared me half to death. I used Nat as an excuse, but it’s been me who was afraid.”

  Her arms locked hard around him. “I have so many things to tell you.”

  “Do you love me?” he asked, raising his head so he could see her eyes.

  “Yes,” she said clearly. “I just said I did.”

  “Say it again.”

  “I love you.”

  He kissed her. “I love you.”

  Holding her, it felt like everything that had been out of alignment for so many years suddenly moved into place.

  Behind him was a giggle. “Daddy and Tessa, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” Jade chanted.

  “Scamp,” he said, but he kissed Tessa again anyway, hearing the laughter of his daughters fill him like a song.

  Tessa, curled against him, began to hum under her breath.

  “What’s that song?”

  She stopped to listen, and laughed—Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young—then sang aloud, “Our house is a very, very, very fine house …”

  Déjà Vu, he said, and Tessa laughed.

  “Déjà Vu,” she agreed.

  NATALIE’S RECIPE FOR A

  HAPPY SUNDAY BREAKFAST

  One giant kitchen with a big, big table

  One grandpa with a thick mustache, who knows how to do magic tricks

  One daddy, cooking bacon on an electric skillet so that it stays flat

  One grandma, who loves biscuits

  One auntie with tattoos around her wrists

  Two sisters (I guess)

  One Tessa-Mom, singing

  Vita, taking the day off from her restaurant

  Six dogs on the porch, watching us cook

  Smell of coffee

  Daddy kissing Tessa-Mom

  Me, all surrounded with happiness and good smells, standing on a chair to make hollandaise with Vita.

  Stir. Serve every Sunday.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BARBARA O’NEAL fell in love with restaurants and the secret language of spoons when she was sixteen. She spent more than a decade in various restaurants, dives to cafés to high cuisine, before selling her first novel. O’Neal teaches workshops nationally and internationally, and lives with her partner, a British endurance athlete, in Colorado Springs.

  The Secret of Everything is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

&nbs
p; A Bantam Books Trade Paperback Original

  Copyright © 2009 by Barbara Samuel

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicaton Data

  O’Neal, Barbara

  The secret to everything : a novel / Barbara O’Neal.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-553-90739-1

  1. Tour guides (Persons)—Fiction. 2. Family secrets—Fiction.

  3. Families—Fiction. 4. Homecoming—Fiction.

  5. New Mexico—Fiction. I. Title

  PS3573.1485S43 2010

  813′.54—dc22

  2009036613

  www.bantamdell.com

  v3.0