by Maisey Yates
20
There are secrets one must keep. Secrets for one’s country. I do wonder, though, if secrets of the heart ever do anything but hurt.
—FROM A LETTER WRITTEN BY STAFF SERGEANT RICHARD JOHNSON, OCTOBER 11, 1944
WENDY
All the way back home, Wendy turned certain revelations over in her mind.
The way that she had judged Anna.
Because she had cast that other woman, that woman who would break marriage vows, as the worst kind of harlot in the years since she had moved to Sunset Bay.
Herself.
She realized that she had done that to herself.
If you told a story enough times for a long enough time, it became easy to believe. But she’d realized how flimsy it was. How...pointless when that woman had gone after her girls on a public street.
Over the years, she had reframed everything in her mind, because it had been the easiest thing to do. But if she unburied everything, the depth of her hatred for her own self was staggering.
And when she had to speak the words, it had all come flooding together.
She had fractured the truth, swept it underneath the rug.
But now that rug had been pulled back, and she was painstakingly putting those pieces back together, trying to put the picture back into place so that she could explain.
Not just to them. But to herself.
And those pieces were sharp. Jagged. And she knew she wouldn’t be able to sift through them all without cutting herself.
Without bleeding.
Three cars pulled onto the private drive, and then up to the Lightkeeper’s House.
Wendy got out first, inhaling the ocean air, trying to allow the familiar sounds of the waves hitting the rocks, rumbling through her, to soothe her. But she was beyond the point of soothing. She wrapped her lilac shawl more firmly around her body, as if it might hold her together. She walked up the steps of the front porch slowly, and then unlocked the door and pushed it open.
She flicked on the lights, but somehow, the familiar house didn’t feel familiar right now.
The whole world felt alien.
Because when she had written that letter, asking to be the innkeeper of this beautiful place, when she had scrubbed and polished, restored and renewed the building, she had scrubbed away pieces of herself.
As she had given a new facade to this place, she had done the same for herself. For her own life.
But just like the house itself, no matter how new the fixings were, no matter how the wood shone with care from all that polish, no matter the new wallpaper, the new paint, the new appliances in the kitchen, the history remained the same.
Underneath all that beauty, it was still an old house.
It wasn’t made new.
And neither was she.
She had covered and covered for as long as she could. But the wear beneath had come out now. And she should have known that was inevitable. It was just like this house. Something always broke. Because no matter what new things they put over the top of the old, the fundamental structure was from 1894. And so there would always be burst pipes and strange noises.
You couldn’t change who you were.
You couldn’t erase your past.
You could only cover it.
“Mom,” Rachel said. “Let’s go sit down.”
Rachel was taking charge, taking care. Of course. Anna looked tight-lipped and angry, and Wendy was afraid that would only get worse.
Emma looked worried.
The four of them went to the dining table and took their usual places in the chairs.
There were two empty chairs, and that felt like it sat large and heavy in the space.
Jacob’s seat was empty because he was gone. Thomas’s seat was empty. The shape of them had changed.
And it was about to change again.
She was afraid. Afraid this would mean more empty chairs around her table. Her fictional reputation was hurting Anna. It was hurting Rachel. And Wendy couldn’t justify it. Not anymore.
“I’m so sorry,” Wendy said. “I blame myself for all of this. I tried to tell you how to live good lives. I tried to guide you into happy marriages. But I don’t know anything about them. I told you that mine was ended by another woman, but that wasn’t true. The truth is, I was never married. I was the other woman.”
Silence settled hard in the house, the only sounds the ticking of the clock and the groaning of the floorboards, as if the house itself was protesting all of this.
“Explain.” It was Anna who said that, her face pale and drawn, her voice thin.
“I was never going to tell you this,” Wendy said. “It never seemed like there was any point. I made up this story to protect you. You have to believe that. And then over the years I sort of forgot that it wasn’t true. Because I told it so many times. Because you would ask me about your father and I would tell you who he was, and I had changed the way it all went. And I repeated it more times than I ever lived the reality of what happened, and it began to seem more real. And I was grateful for that. Because then I could be angry. Because then I could feel justified. Because then I could enjoy the life that I built here with you, because it’s easier to be a victim than it is to be the one who—”
“Just tell us what happened,” Anna said.
“Anna,” Rachel cautioned. “Give mom a moment, she’s upset.”
“I’m upset,” Anna said.
“Should I leave?” Emma asked.
“No,” Wendy said. “You should hear this, too.”
And that was the hardest thing. To let her granddaughter stay. To let her granddaughter be part of this thing that was going to fracture their family, their lives, even more than they already were.
“I was never married to your father,” Wendy said. “I started working for him when I was eighteen years old. I never had a great relationship with my mother, and I was eager to leave home and make a life for myself. So I did. I got an office job, and I felt independent and confident. And I liked my boss. A lot. And he liked me. He was...about twelve years older than I was. And it took some time, but we began a relationship.”
“Meaning you started sleeping with him,” Anna said, pointed and hard. Bitter.
She’d had a hand in creating that hardness. That bitterness. Her own fear had kept her from reaching out to her daughter when she should have.
She had caused all the harm she’d hoped to prevent. Like dammed-up water finding its way around the barrier. Causing damage to places unseen and unguarded.
Eroding that foundation that was made only of sand.
“Yes,” Wendy responded, feeling shame lance her chest. “He was married. And I knew that. But he kept telling me that he loved me, and that she didn’t love him. He told me all about how his marriage was failing, and I found a way to twist and justify it in my head. Because he loved me better, but he was trapped. And he had to figure out a way to not be in that trap. He had to protect his legacy, his work. His money.”
She took in a shuddering breath. “I got pregnant. And he promised that he would leave her. Then he told me it wasn’t possible for a variety of reasons. After I had Rachel, he made me leave my job. But he kept paying for my life. He paid for us to have a little apartment and he would come and visit us.”
Rachel looked pale, stunned. “I remember that,” she said. “I remember him. But not much. He never lived there, did he?”
“No. He never did. And then, he quit seeing us for a while. He said there were reasons... And he couldn’t leave his wife just yet, and he had to go away for a while. But I think what happened was she was getting suspicious. And he couldn’t chance that. He kept paying for the apartment. But I went out and got another job, part-time, so I could keep taking care of you and only have you in day care for some of the time. And then he came back. He came back, and I
was weak. And I loved him. And I forgave everything. His absence, that he hadn’t left his wife yet. Everything. That was when I got pregnant with Anna. I found a picture of his family in his wallet after that. His whole family. He had children.”
“We have half siblings?” Anna asked. “We have half siblings, and you didn’t tell us.”
“You had to have assumed that was a possibility all this time. And you never asked.” She shouldn’t have said that. She shouldn’t have been defensive. But that much at least was true.
And it did seem to quiet Anna for the moment. She wasn’t sure she had the right to quiet Anna, or to try and mitigate her youngest daughter’s judgment.
Because it was Anna she had hurt the most. And she knew it. Not just with the judgment that her lie had contributed to as far as the town was concerned. But the way she had been unable to reach out to her. Because it had touched too close to all these things, and she had still been running from them inside of herself.
She had been running for more than thirty years.
“I would love to tell you that I was the one who cut things off. And maybe in some ways I was. But I had to disappear to do it. When he found out I was pregnant with Anna, he left. I have no doubt he would’ve been back when he wanted...what he wanted from me. But I left. I heard about this place. About the contest. And I ran. I found a place here. And an opportunity to start over. I knew that nobody... Nobody would want to be friends with a woman who’d slept with another woman’s husband. No one would want to know the other woman. And they wouldn’t want to be friends with her children. And I—I wanted better for you. Better for me. Better for this place, and our future. I thought that I’d done it. But the day that Jacob died, all that we built here started unraveling. Suddenly I could see... No matter how hard I tried to spare you from pain, I couldn’t. And I didn’t. I caused you a different kind of pain by lying. And I’m sorry.”
Wendy looked at her daughters, and her granddaughter. Rachel was clearly torn between comforting Anna and comforting Wendy. Emma looked subdued. But Anna... The anger in Anna’s eyes burned.
21
I have had far too much time to think up here. It’s become unbearable. If you sit alone with your thoughts for too long, you question everything. The whole way the world is put together.
—FROM A LETTER WRITTEN BY STAFF SERGEANT RICHARD JOHNSON, NOVEMBER 1944
ANNA
Everything that Anna had believed about life had been instilled in her by her mother.
And so much of the shame that she had felt over the crumbling tower that was her marriage over the past several years had come from the way that her mother had instilled such value in the institution.
Right. Because you married a pastor and became a pastor’s wife and none of the pressure from town, and church, and yourself, played a role in your inability to walk away like a normal person.
Well, that might be. But her mother was part of that.
And her mother had been...just as weak as she was. Granted, they hadn’t been her marriage vows, but someone else’s. But it had gone on for years.
She was the other woman that she had purported to hate so much.
Anna couldn’t wrap her mind around it.
“I don’t understand,” she said, the words falling from her mouth before she even had a chance to think to speak. “I have to understand how you could talk about a wife and marriage vows as something sainted. Sacred. How you could paint the kind of woman who would come in and sleep with another woman’s husband as being evil. When it was you. It was you. You were with someone else’s husband at night. You were... You were the villain. You were the woman you asked us to hate, that you asked me to hate. And I’ve been hating myself and...living miserably because of it.”
“I believed everything that I said to you. I believed that a woman who would do what I did was weak.” Her mother’s voice broke, but Anna didn’t feel any pity. Anna didn’t feel anything. “I believed that a woman who would do what I did was morally compromised. I believe that about myself, Anna. And over the years it became easier and easier to push it to the back of my mind. To pretend. Because the woman that I was and all the things that I believe about her... She couldn’t have raised you girls. She was too flawed. She... I...”
Her throat worked and she closed her eyes. Then she seemed to gather herself and spoke again. “It’s me. I can’t let myself off the hook. Not anymore. I can’t distance myself from what I did. I want to. I fell in love and it made me do things that I never believed I was capable of. When I went back home... I was pregnant with you. My mother already thought that I was a sinner beyond redemption, Anna. And when she found out that I’d let him back into bed with me... When she found out I was pregnant again... The things she called me. Well, they were things I had already called myself, believe me. She said it would be better if you didn’t know. Or if I gave you—both of you—up for adoption. Because that kind of shame would follow you. She said my mother loved me enough to give me up. She said I should be brave enough to do that for you and for Rachel because I was unfit.”
“Mom,” Rachel said. “She didn’t say that to you. She couldn’t have.”
“Of course she could have. Why do you think you’ve never seen her?”
“I knew she wasn’t supportive,” Rachel said.
“Well, she wasn’t wrong. About the way people would see me. What would have happened if we would have come here and people had known that I’d had an affair with a married man that spanned years? That I had two children with him? Do you think they would have been kind to me? They would’ve locked their doors and never let me anywhere near them. They would’ve been afraid that I would steal their husbands. They would never have let you play with their kids. It would have followed you. It would have followed Emma. We would have been outcasts up here on the hill instead of being part of the community.”
“So it was up to me to make us outcasts, then?”
“No,” her mom said. “Of course I don’t mean that.”
“But it’s the outcome. I’m the one that ruined things. And you’re all just good. Good people, who have to deal with me.”
“Was telling Hannah not enough? Do you want me to get a billboard and put it up in the middle of town, Anna? Because I will. I’ll expose myself—my reputation doesn’t mean anything to me in light of what this has done to you.”
“Why? Why bother?” Anna said. “You can just go ahead and keep defending me on the street when people come up to shout at me because they’re so angry about what I did to my husband. And you all are, too,” Anna said, looking around the room.
“I’m not,” Emma said. “I never was.”
Some of the anger drained from Anna. “No, Emma. I’m sorry. I don’t mean you.”
“I didn’t understand at first,” Rachel said. “I understand now. I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to be supportive of you at first. I am.”
Suddenly Anna felt gross and mean. And she remembered Rachel saying something similar to her only a few weeks ago.
Don’t you ever just feel mean?
She felt mean now. Mean and unforgiving, and she just didn’t want to see her mom’s point of view. She was hurt. Wounded. Destroyed by this lie and how it had shaped her life.
“We lived to make you happy,” Anna said. “Because of what you did for us. Because you made us feel like... Like your life was harder because you had us.” That wasn’t exactly true, but it was something that Anna had always been somewhat aware of. That her mother had it harder because she was single. And that she was single because of the two of them. “Everything that I thought about being married, it’s because of you. Because of the sanctity that you bestowed on it. And you didn’t even believe in it. You used to tell me that the secret to a happy marriage was love, but how would you know? You’ve never even been married. And I stayed married so much longer than I would have because of you. You
didn’t keep me from becoming that other woman, Mom. You turned me into her, because I didn’t know how else to escape. And I’m not sure that I can ever forgive you for that.”
Anna turned and fled the room, went out the front door and down the steps, into the darkness.
She looked up at the lighthouse, cutting great swaths of brightness through the endless night.
She felt lost. Alone.
She thought of the soldiers that had been stationed up here, not knowing if there was an enemy out there in the darkness.
She knew where the enemy was.
The enemy was inside her.
She started to cry then. Real, deep sobs, that came from the depths of her soul. And she didn’t know what was actually devastating her. That she felt her mother was at fault for her marriage? Because she knew that wasn’t the whole story.
That her mother wasn’t a saint?
Or that she wasn’t. And that she had no one to blame but herself.
Not Michael, not Thomas.
Things had gone the way they did because of choices she made.
She let out another wrenching sob as a fat raindrop plunged from the sky and splattered onto her face. All around her, the clouds let down, the rain like ice over her skin, rolling down her back, under her clothes.
So cold at first, but then she stood there, and closed her eyes as the storm raged around her, as the waves began to froth and groan, crashing against the rocks like they were trying to destroy the very foundations of the outcropping the lighthouse sat on.
The very foundations of her life.
And she waited.
Waited for things to crumble around her.
Waited for the rain to make her feel clean.
But she didn’t. No amount of rain, no amount of self-righteous anger at her mother... Nothing seemed to work.
And she wondered if this was just life now. Caught somewhere between happiness and guilt. A remorseless sort of guilt that she didn’t know if she could ever explain, let alone sort through inside of her own heart.
