Keeping Secrets

by Andrew Rosenheim

  Soon he found himself settled into a routine which was only occasionally varied. Some days Maris gave him a ride home and when she stayed over took him with her in the morning, stopping by her neat small house on the Russian River side of town, where he waited in the car while she changed for school, put her hair up in a more feminine bun and collected her mail. Mostly, though, he took the school bus, which dropped an older girl on Hill Road a mile down from his uncle’s place, so Sam the driver seemed happy to collect and deposit him at the end of the track by Truebridge’s cabin. Early on, he had the choice of staying on after school for Little League, but he was eager to get back to the farm, where there was always something to do with his uncle, or sometimes with Maris when she came in – always later – from her own day at school.

  When the harvest was over, there was still work to be done in the orchards, at first collecting the final windfalls, then helping Will with the old cider press he’d installed in the barn, feeding it for hours at a time – virtually all of one weekend too – then carefully filling with its cloudy pulpy juice all the plastic containers Will had collected since the previous autumn. The weather only gradually cooled, and while the late-afternoon light remained Will started to teach him to swim.

  He wore the lifebelt, which took away his fear of the water, even in the deep parts, but swimming was harder than he’d thought, and though Will said he was making good progress he found it frustrating that he could only manage a stroke or two of crawl before everything seemed to collapse and he went literally nowhere, buoyant only because of the belt.

  Usually Maris was out of the way when he and Will were outside together; she was either in the house doing homework or cooking supper, or, while the light remained, tending her garden plot she’d carved out on the west side of the house, the end where Jack slept. But occasionally she came round to the pond and watched the progress of his lessons, and it was she who questioned the use of the lifebelt, telling Will right in front of Jack in her blunt straight-up way that it might tempt Jack to go into the pond alone and unsupervised. He was surprised when Will brought him into the argument right there and then, as they stood on the bank dripping water, to ask him to promise not to do any such thing. He was flattered by this inclusion in the grown-up discussion of worries about him, and happy to promise this anyway, since he didn’t want to let Uncle Will down and wanted Maris to understand that he was grown up, and not just a little kid.

  He was learning fast that with Maris he had to be careful, since unlike Will she could be moody. Will himself just had two gears, it seemed – easygoing and enthusiastic. His eruptions of high spirits at first unnerved the boy, who was accustomed to the emotional volatility of his mother and distrusted it accordingly. But as far as he could tell, Will’s deviations were only on the good side of the emotional spectrum, and seemed entirely authentic, if boyish and younger than his years at times. The boy had to remind himself sometimes that Will was actually his uncle.

  Maris was never so enthusiastic, and though friendly enough kept a slight distance from Jack; he recognised this and out of self-protection tried to match her coolness. But aloofness did not come naturally to him, since he liked affection and was by nature affectionate himself, and as the weeks passed he found that although most of his time in this new home was spent with Will, it was Maris’s companionship he especially savoured.

  She seemed to know everything about the countryside around them, and had abilities Jack had never before thought possible in a girl. She could shoot, using the same rifle from the cabinet she had shot the deer with; one day she waited patiently for half an hour until two jack rabbits appeared in her vegetable garden, then calmly plonked them both. She skinned them herself, then cooked them in a Mexican chocolate sauce that night, which both Jack and Will thought was wonderful but she declared disgusting. She could drive the tractor, a lot better than Will in fact, and she was surprisingly strong – Jack found her one Saturday cutting high grass by the barn with a long old-fashioned Dutch scythe. And she was handy. When Will built a birdhouse whose two sides didn’t meet right at the top, she took a power sander and smoothed them down until they matched almost seamlessly where they met. But though Jack was a little confused at first by the presence in her of so many masculine attributes, there were occasional indicators that, however brusque her manner, she could be completely feminine too – like the time he overheard her singing unabashedly to a Joni Mitchell record in a clear soprano voice.

  Like any student of an inspiring teacher, he found he wanted her approval, though he would not have been able to put this desire into words. The sneaking sense that he might not get it made him unwilling to put it to the test, and on the rare occasions when he elicited her praise he glowed the more for its being unprompted. There was the day in early November when the cold was starting to set in earnest and swimming should have ended, but somehow he managed to get Will to go with him into the pond. As if sensing that he was running out of time, something intervened to reward him for the work he’d done; suddenly, when he usually would run out of steam or coordination, a confidence pushed him through that barrier and he was swimming, swimming for real, awkwardly maybe, and with a kind of fragility to the motion of his arms, but swimming chug chug chug until, unbelievably, he was at the far bank, having swum across the pond. And there was a shout from Will of triumph and he raised his own hand with the modest acknowledgement of a magnanimous conqueror, and then there was clapping – applause he thought, wondering where on earth it came from, and he looked past his uncle and there was Maris with her hands smacking together. Though as soon as he began to wave to her she turned and went back into the house, as if embarrassed by her own display.

  It was, he sensed himself, a happy time, though he wondered occasionally as he sank into the curious household of the farm – not depressingly, but like a tired child sinks into its bed with insensitive contentment – just how long it could possibly last. He thought sometimes about his mother, despite trying not to, and though he didn’t ask Will about her at all he listened carefully each time the phone rang, and he inspected the mail surreptitiously each day as it lay half opened and half digested on the big pine table in the downstairs open room. But as far as he could tell there was no communication from her, and nothing even from Gram.

  There was so much to explore, moreover, in this new world that whenever he felt sadness or anxiety start to move inside him like worms, he would go and stand on the deck outside his bedroom. From there he could look out over most of the variety of the farm, and he would pretend to be a great landowner, maybe of a vast plantation like the ones he’d read about at school, thinking, I Am The Master of All I Survey, which was a phrase from something or other, saying this to himself while he turned one hundred and eighty degrees in almost synchronised slowness as he regarded his empire: from the barn next to the turnaround with the tractor sticking halfway out; then over the bushes and Maris’s vegetable garden plot by the side of the house; the entrance to the path through the woods to the Valley Orchard; through the rhododendrons until he could just make out the diving board, partly obscured by the bushes; finally, the hill which the greenhouse backed against, with the far tip of the Back Orchard visible in the distance behind it. When he was on the ground outside, seeing these places at their own level, he would remember how they figured on the mental map he collated while standing up on the deck, and so, even in the lush abundance of the land and woods around the house, he never felt lost.

  There were not rules per se in the household. He helped Maris when she let him, and he always assisted with the dishes, and he would take the garbage out when asked, and feed Ellie on the deck when Will forgot to or was too busy, and he made his bed each morning and tried to keep his dirty clothes in the wicker hamper Maris had placed in the corner of his room. But he didn’t really have to be told to do any of these things, and other than bedtime – which Will would let him bend a bit when Maris wasn’t there and he was watching television – there weren’t reall
y any guideposts.

  Except outside, where in addition to Maris’s concern about the pond, Will had early on been unusually specific and strict. ‘I don’t mind you going anywhere you want on the property except for two places. One is the greenhouse. I’ve got it temperature controlled for both the grafts and the strawberry plants, and I just can’t have the door opening and closing all the time. If you want to go in there, wait until I do – or ask me special. Understood? The other place is the sandy bank behind there and the woods on top. I can’t believe you’re fond of rattlesnakes, and there are tons of them there – there must have been a nest back there sometime. So you stay out of there, okay?’

  Jack was happy to nod assent to both, though he was a little surprised by the proscription of the greenhouse, since Will himself seemed to be in and out of it twenty times a day. But nothing much else seemed forbidden, or even strange, though there was one night when he couldn’t sleep and had slid out ever so slowly, to stand in the gallery a few feet back from the rail, where Will and Maris, sitting downstairs by the fireplace, couldn’t see him – not unless they actually stood up and looked up and back. And he heard their quiet talking and then Will laughed and Maris coughed, hesitantly at first, then in a full fit, and out of curiosity and concern, Jack edged forward and looked down to see her doubled up. He couldn’t understand why Will was laughing, and then he saw Maris hand him the cigarette that had made her cough so much.

  And the next afternoon as he walked with Will to the Back Orchard to check for stray crates in case they’d left one or two under a tree, he said, ‘I didn’t know Maris smoked.’

  Will gave him a look and said curtly, ‘She doesn’t.’ Then he seemed to catch himself, and hesitated, then said, ‘Well, maybe once in a while. Why, did you see her smoking?’ Jack nodded and his uncle looked at him curiously. ‘Don’t let on that you saw her, okay? She wouldn’t want you to know.’

  By mid-November he’d been there two months, and one night Will knocked and came into his bedroom while he was reading before bed. ‘I was thinking maybe we’d go some place for Thanksgiving.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, wondering where. The ocean? Will was always saying they should take a trip up north along the coast. He felt a little disappointed – in San Francisco they always had dinner at Gram’s. Occasionally cousins joined them, some nice people on his father’s side who lived in Daly City, but otherwise it was just Gram and his mother. So he had been looking forward to a Sonoma version, to helping Maris cook, then watching football on TV with Will. ‘Where do you want to go?’ he asked his uncle.

  ‘We thought maybe San Francisco,’ said Will. He looked awkward standing at the edge of the gallery. He paused. ‘At your gram’s house.’

  It was Jack’s turn to be surprised. Will had never been there for Thanksgiving that he could remember. He thought for a moment, and asked, ‘Is Maris coming?’

  ‘I hope so. Gram’s never met her. Do you mind if she does?’

  ‘Of course not.’ How could his uncle think such a thing? ‘Who else will be there?’

  Will sighed and came into the room, then sat down on the kitchen chair Maris had installed next to the glass sliding doors to the deck. Will rubbed his hands together and spoke as if he were being especially careful. ‘Your mom’s supposed to be there.’

  Jack looked at Will with a smile that began tentatively, then despite itself widened into a face-splitting grin. ‘She’s better then?’ he asked, ducking his head a little, for it momentarily seemed too good to be true.

  Will nodded. ‘That’s what Gram says. She’s out of the place where she was and back in the apartment. She’s working too, in a steakhouse downtown.’

  ‘Why can’t we go there then? You know, to my—’ he hesitated, was it home any more? He compromised. ‘At the apartment?’

  ‘Slow down, Jacko. Let’s take it one step at a time. Okay?’

  Take what one step at a time? ‘Does she know we’re coming?’

  ‘Sure she does.’ Will stood up to go, then added as if an afterthought. ‘She can’t wait to see you.’

  They left mid-morning on Thanksgiving Day, taking Maris’s Chevy instead of the pickup truck since it was more comfortable and also, as Jack said, more of a town car. Will drove with Maris up front next to him, and they seemed more subdued than usual, though in his excitement it took Jack some while to notice this. Now that he was going to see her again he realised how much he had missed his mother but had not allowed himself to feel.

  Still he felt oddly disoriented as they paid the toll and barely noticed when he watched Will reach over and hold Maris’s hand as they started over the Golden Gate Bridge. Jack tried to look out over the Bay towards the Pacific and found only a vast bowl of fog, yellowed at the corners by the sun. He knew he was going to his home town, but he already felt so settled at the farm that the prospect of a city unsettled him. When he remembered the bus ride he had taken going in the opposite direction it didn’t seem ten weeks ago but ten years.

  Outside Gram’s he felt the stinging west wind off the ocean, five blocks away, and its salt smell mingled with the light rain that had started. He ran towards the door and pressed the bell. Gram answered in an apron, and he hugged her but was already looking behind her. ‘Is she here? Is Mom here?’

  Gram only gradually let go of him, calling out as he rushed towards the living room. ‘She’s not here yet Jack, you’re early.’

  So they all sat down in the living room, the grown-ups with grown-up drinks and a Coke for Jack, which surprised him since his grandmother had never let him have Coke, and they made polite conversation while Jack waited impatiently for the doorbell to ring.

  ‘So how are things up there?’ Gram asked.

  ‘Good,’ said Will, nodding his head. ‘We had a good year.’

  Maris explained. ‘He’s got apple orchards. It was a good harvest.’

  His grandmother just looked at Will, with the set expression Jack was familiar with. It betrayed nothing; it wasn’t sceptical, it wasn’t disbelieving – it wasn’t really anything. Except if you were lying it seemed uncannily to catch you out.

  ‘What’s the matter, Mom?’ asked Will. ‘Mom’ sounded funny to Jack coming out of his uncle’s mouth. ‘You think I can’t farm?’

  ‘I am sure you can do anything you set your mind to, William,’ she said dryly. She turned to Maris. ‘Are you farming too?’

  ‘No ma’am,’ Maris said politely. ‘I’m a schoolteacher.’ This seemed to meet with Gram’s approval, and Jack drained his glass of Coke while the two women went at it, all about teaching reading versus teaching maths, and how parents these days didn’t rule the roost at home, and an awful lot of other chitchat about education systems that seemed to go on forever while Jack sat there wondering when his mother would come. He could smell the turkey in the oven, and from time to time Gram would go out into the kitchen to check on the bird and whatever else she was cooking, and Maris got up the second time as well, and Will winked at Jack and said in a whisper, ‘They’re getting along just fine.’

  And Jack said, ‘Who?’ with genuine curiosity, and Will pointed towards the kitchen, and Jack realised that Will must have been nervous about Maris meeting Gram for the first time. Then he wondered again where his mother was. ‘What time is it now, Will?’ he asked.

  Will shook his head. ‘I better be getting you a watch, you keep asking me the time. It’s three thirty now.’

  And at exactly four thirty, by which time Gram had given him permission to watch football on the TV in the corner of the living room, as long as he kept the volume down while she and Maris yapped some more and Will had another whisky and ginger ale (‘No thank you,’ Maris had said, with an inauthentic primness when Will had offered to refill her drink), Gram announced that they should eat or the food would be ruined. And at the announcement Jack looked with mild outrage at Will, who just shrugged. ‘I’m sure she’s coming, Jacko, but we can’t hold dinner for ever.’

  And they sat down in the small
dining room, and Jack had Gram on one side and his mother’s empty place on the other. And he felt so upset that they were actually sitting down to eat, because somehow it seemed to confirm his mother’s absence, but he struggled not to show it as Will carved and heaped his plate with dark meat, which he preferred. Gram served him as if he were a little kid, spooning out mashed potato, and candied yams, and green beans and carrot rounds, and pecan stuffing from out of the bird, and a dinner roll, and the only thing he got to do himself was pour the gravy from her only-on-special-occasions silver tureen. And he looked down at the plate brimming with food and thought he would gladly go hungry for even just five minutes of his mother’s company. And he tried to eat, but the food stuck in his throat – honest, he thought, it tastes like sand – and Gram said, ‘Eat your food, Jack,’ in a low quiet voice to him twice, not meanly but as if calling his attention to the meal. And then she started to say something else, only the phone rang in the kitchen as she did. ‘I’ll get it,’ said Will in a hurry, and he was up and out of the room before Gram could even acknowledge or protest his answering the phone in her own house.

  They all sat in silence, straining to hear, but it was impossible, and when Will came back he stared at Gram and gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head, and Jack knew he was trying to hide the news but what was the point? ‘She’s not coming, is she, Will?’ he asked as his uncle sat down. And Gram had reached over and put her hand on Jack’s arm, he didn’t know whether to hush him or comfort him, but he didn’t care which it was because he was intent on Will’s reply, and Will fiddled with sitting down and then unfolded his napkin and took a sip out of his water glass and picked up his fork as if to start eating again but then finally, maybe sensing the intensity of Jack’s stare, he looked up and shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Jacko,’ he said.