Sweet Hush

by Deborah Smith

  Abbie sagged against me. I held her up. “Abbie, they’ve put two and two together and come up with five. Idiots. It doesn’t mean—”

  “Oh, Hush, all that matters is that they’re sniffing out the truth, slowly but surely.” She raised her head and looked at me with haunted eyes. “They’ll find out the rest. Hush, Nolan knows the truth but my children—” she looked around furtively, though we were alone—“Hush, I don’t want to see any of my children suffer because of this.”

  “No.” I heard my own voice like an empty echo. “No, I won’t let . . .” I put a cold, sweating hand over hers, where she held my arm.

  “What can we do?” she moaned.

  “I have to think it through. I don’t know, yet.”

  “The terrible thing is, this is all my fault. Nolan and I can survive. But your relationship with Davis and—”

  “It’s not your fault. It’s mine, maybe, for believing a golden rule I made up when I was too young to know better.”

  “Your rule?”

  “Give people a good story and they won’t care about the truth.”

  “Oh, Hush. That’s true, most of the time.”

  “All right, we’ll talk more when I come up with some ideas.”

  “Please, don’t leave me alone with this dilemma.”

  “I’ll be at the inn. Close by.” The fake mountain atmosphere and the truth and the past and the future suddenly stole my air. I pulled at the soft collar of the leather coat I wore. “I have to get outside. Have to go. I’ll call you later. Let me know if you hear anything else today. I’ll come running.”

  She hugged me. “Hush, I’m so sorry.”

  I should have hated and envied her for what her dalliance with Davy had done to my life, but she’d only made foolish mistakes, just like me when I was young. In a way, because of me. Davy had picked her out of a crowd when she was barely twenty-one and ripe for trouble. He’d chased her because she reminded him of me when I was baby-soft and easy to charm. She was the only one of Davy’s women I didn’t want to kill on sight.

  I made the right noises, said the right words, but began to mourn, inside. Sorry wouldn’t get the job done.

  I’M A TRACKER. I followed Hush to Chattanooga, watched her go into the aquarium, waited outside in the cold December morning, watched her walk out. She was dressed in a long coat, soft tan trousers, a white blouse too thin for the temperature. She must be freezing, but didn’t seem to notice, or care. The wind of a bright blue mountain day whipped her coat away from her as she crossed the plaza outside the aquarium, her head down, her fists shoved into the coat pockets. Thinking. Walking blindly. I hunched my shoulders inside my heavy down jacket.

  You’re cold. I’ll give you my jacket. Look up. Look for me. You know I’m here. You knew I’d follow you. I always do.

  I trailed her down a quiet street in a historic district of nice shops. She turned toward the river and I turned, too. The city had transformed an old, narrow car bridge into a pretty walkway over the river. Goosebumps rose on my skin as she strode out on that long span of girders and concrete in the icy wind. The bridge was empty that morning. Even the hardcore walkers and joggers stayed away.

  She walked without seeing until she was nearly halfway across, then stumbled to a side rail and held on with both hands, breathing hard as she stared down at the smooth, gray sheet of the Tennessee river passing deep and slow and deadly, yards below.

  I closed the distance between us in only a few seconds, barely enough time for her to hear me running. She turned around, swaying, not startled so much as ready. I took her by the shoulders. “If you go, I go over with you.”

  “Jakob.” Looking up at me with affection and anguish, she cupped my face between her ice-cold hands. “What are you doing here?”

  “I don’t give up. And I won’t let go of you.”

  “I wasn’t going to jump. I was thinking of who I’d like to push.”

  “Then tell me, and I’ll throw the bastard over for you. You want to trust me. You wanted me to follow you from the farm. I’m here. Talk to me.”

  With the slow melt of defeat in her, the giving up of hard defenses and bone-tired pride, Hush shut her eyes. “Abbie was my husband’s last girlfriend.” She paused, her throat working. “And the mother of his other child.”

  “Puppy,” I said automatically.

  She nodded, and for the first time since I’d known her, she looked hopeless.

  All I could do was pull her close and hold her.

  THERE WAS A PRETTY inn near the historic district, perched high on the bluffs above the river. Each time I visited Abbie, bringing her new pictures of Puppy and little stories to tell about Puppy’s everyday life, I stayed at the inn. I paid cash for my room, registering under a fake name. I took every measure to keep that life separate from my life in the Hollow. I had to protect Davis. Protect Puppy. Protect Abbie and her husband and their baby sons. Protect Sweet Hush Farm and all it stood for. And yes, I had to protect me, too.

  Hush McGillen Thackery couldn’t keep her husband in her own bed, and finally he left her with another woman’s child to raise, in secret. She didn’t even tell her son he had a half-sister. Some legend. A lot of people would be happy to spread that news.

  So in Chattanooga I called myself Ms. Ogden. Patricia Ogden. The inn’s owners prided themselves on remembering my name, adding me to their guest book, inquiring about my relatives. I’d made up an entire family history for myself.

  “I always come home from my visits to Abbie and scrub like a leper,” I told Jakobek. “Trying to get back down to the skin of Hush McGillen Thackery, the honest woman I claim to be.”

  “You look honest enough to me,” he said. “A mother taking care of her son. And her son’s half-sister. That’s what I see.”

  “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, Jakob.”

  “Been there,” he said.

  I sat outside on the inn’s veranda alone while he went inside to register. I was too shell-shocked to do more than stare at the winter hedges and Christmas garlands wrapping old, wind-twisted oaks in the inn’s yard. A broad vista of river and hills, homes and shops and traffic and everyday life, moved slowly in the distance. High places. A view. I had picked the inn for that.

  When Jakob came back outside he rested a hand on my shoulder and shook me just a little. I was dazed. “You sure you want to stay here?” he asked.

  “I can’t go home until I decide what to do. I have to have a plan. Get myself together so I can say the right thing. Only I don’t know what the right thing is. Do I tell more lies to Davis? Hide the truth from Puppy for the rest of her life? Or do I do nothing and hope the shit diggers like Haywood Kenny won’t find out about Puppy and tell the story just for the sake of gossiping about Al Jacobs’ in-laws?”

  “The world’s changed since we were kids. People aren’t shocked by anything.”

  “Not my people. And not my son.”

  He squeezed my shoulder. “I have a stake in this, too. Whatever hurts Davis, hurts Eddie.”

  “I worry about that all the time. I . . . like her, Jakob. No. I love her. She’s my daughter-in-law and I love her.”

  “And she loves you.”

  We sat there, letting a cold wind curl around the simple core of my family, something I desperately wanted to preserve. I made a keening sound, and Jakobek pulled me to my feet. “Let’s take this inside. We’ll talk. We have a room with a fireplace. We’re Mr. and Mrs. Johnson. Bill and Patricia. I told them you married me, Ms. Ogden. They think I teach at a military college they never heard of.”

  I focused on the soft give of my kneecaps and the tremor in my hands. My throat ached. I’d corrupted even Jakobek, lured him into my cover-up. “Bill, you married a woman who seems to be falling apart.”

  “Mrs. Johnson doesn’t fall ap
art.”

  I took the challenge. We went inside.

  I SAT ON THE rounded edge of a deep burgundy couch before the room’s fireplace, hugging myself and staring into the flames. The room was decorated for Christmas, with a Victorian-themed tree and the scent of pine from garland on the mantel. The furnishings were elegant and feminine and plush—a lot of brocade, lace on the white pillow shams, amber lampshades with beaded fringe that reflected flecks of rainbow color on the high, patterned ceiling. A fantasy. I liked my fantasies. I was losing them.

  My life with Davy flowed out of me in words as ruined as a melting honeycomb. I’d never told another soul the ugly facts I told Jakobek on that long day into evening. He listened as quietly as a ghost in a tall armchair by the hearth, leaning forward, his eyes never leaving me, his elbows on his knees, his big, crude, gentle hands hanging in thin air, ready to help me if there were any way, which there wasn’t. Shadows grew around us and the night came. Jakobek poured tea from a wicker hostess cart the owner brought up. It was all I could do to swallow from the cup he handed me.

  “I found out about Abbie five years ago, just after Davis left for his first year at Harvard,” I told him. “Heard a rumor, went to find her. I always kept track of my husband’s girlfriends, just to make sure they wouldn’t cause trouble for me and Davis. I didn’t play nice with them, Jakob. Every time I found one, I did my best to scare the hell out of her. I tracked Abbie down and just flat told her: ‘You touch my husband again and you’re dead. Do you want to die?’ That had always worked with his other girls. But this skinny, prep-school, Southern belle, this rich girl—and she was just a girl, fresh out of Vanderbilt, then—she looked at me with big, sad eyes and answered, ‘Except for the baby, I’d tell you to go ahead and kill me.’

  “Except for the baby. A baby. Davy’s baby. He’d gotten this college girl pregnant. I could have killed him. Except for the baby.

  “Abbie didn’t want to have an abortion, but she didn’t want anybody in her family to know she was pregnant, either. She wanted the baby, but then again she didn’t want it. Said she was going out to California to stay with friends and give the baby up for adoption when it was born.

  “I went home and cornered Davy. He said I refused to have more children with him, and how he had always wanted more, so that was my fault, too. I told him No, he’d done me out of having another child, because I’d be damned if I’d fight him for the soul of a second child the way I’d fought him for Davis.” I stared into the fire. “To make a long story short, that night we fought about everything our marriage had been and would never be. It was the worst fight of our lives—a knock-down, drag-out battle.”

  Jakobek said quietly. “That was when you tore your shoulder.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to answer outright—to admit I’d lived with a man capable of throwing me down my own back stairs. Jakobek shifted slightly. I didn’t have to admit it. He knew. When I looked at him his eyes were nearly black.

  “I’m not a doormat, Jakob. I fought back. Don’t feel sorry for me.”

  “I never do,” he said quietly. Lying. A gallant man. “Keep talking.”

  “I hit him. Hit him right in the face with my fist. How dare he twist what my pride and hard work had built for him and our son as well as me. I tried my best to hurt him.”

  I paused. “And he hurt me back. I ended up in the hospital emergency room, and I told everyone I’d fallen during a hunting trip.” I stopped again, flexing my hands in front of the fire, pulling back into the shadows, feeling Jakobek watching me even more intently. “Davy was inconsolable. He felt bad about what he’d done to me, bad about Abbie, bad about her baby, but worst of all—he didn’t want Davis to find out and hate him. My husband had his own kind of honor.

  “He didn’t say a word when I told him I wasn’t going to let his girlfriend give my son’s half-brother or half-sister to strangers and never know how or where or if that child was raised kindly. A few hours later he drove up on Chocinaw. His accident was deliberate, Jakob. No doubt in my mind. He killed himself up there.”

  Jakobek stood. “Some debts of honor can only be paid back one way.”

  “I didn’t want him to die. Does that make sense?”

  “Things are never simple. Yeah.”

  “Abbie showed up at his funeral. I spotted her in the background, crying, looking like hell, this . . . rich pregnant girl, all alone . . . hiding her stomach in an oversized cashmere coat and grieving for my husband. I wanted to hate her, but I couldn’t. So I helped her. Came up with a plan. Logan was on his way home from the army, in Germany. His wife had died—he really did have a sweet German wife, Marla, when he was in the army—and I told him about the baby. And Logan, god bless him, Logan said, ‘If you’ll help me, I’ll take the baby. Marla and I wanted kids so bad we didn’t know what to do. She’d want me to raise this baby. Please.’”

  “So that’s how it came to be. This perfect little baby girl came home with my brother, and people accepted our story about her being Logan’s daughter. Our state rep., J. Chester Baggett, helped me get the right paperwork—a foreign birth certificate, all that—and I announced that Logan’s little girl was Hush McGillen the Sixth. Hush Puppy. Puppy. End of story.”

  I put my head in my hands and sat in silence, rocking a little. Jakobek dropped to his heels in front of me. “Look at me,” he ordered gruffly.

  When I did, he smoothed his fingers over my hair and my damp cheeks. Straightening me. Righting me. “You’re going to go home tomorrow and sit down with your son and tell him the truth—tell him, before anyone else gets the chance.”

  “The truth? Tell him I didn’t have the guts to be honest with him about his father and me from the day he was born? A son has a right to expect better from his mother. Wouldn’t you?”

  Jakobek grew quieter, his face hard, pensive, sad. “Let me tell you,” he said quietly, “the truth I live with. The truth about my mother.”

  WHAT I HAD KNOWN about Jakobek—what was said, what I’d heard, and what the paid liars like Kenney told the world about the President’s darkly constituted nephew, went up in the smoke of the inn’s Victorian chimney, that night. Jakobek described his childhood in ways that turned my stomach over and drew my sorrows through the fine sieve of his loneliness. The flat timbre of his voice said he wanted no one to call it a sob story. He gave me the facts. But they were brutal.

  “Don’t do that,” he said softly, as I sat there listening with tears on my face. “You don’t want anybody’s pity. Neither do I.”

  “I don’t feel sorry for you. I feel sorry with you.”

  And that was the truth. I felt sorry with him. Sorry for what life does to us, starting when we’re young and completely defenseless, the shame of that. A shame on the families that let it happen, and on the societies that let it happen, a shame on the ordinary pettiness of ordinary life. Children suffer and then grow up hard-hearted as a result, ready to hurt the children who come behind them. It’s a miracle when a soul shines through the loss and defeat. It’s a time for celebrating. An unexpected harvest is the sweetest.

  I knelt in front of Jakobek, just as he’d knelt in front of me. “You have nothing to feel bad about. I was right to believe in you, like the bees—although I tried to resist. I’ve been fooled, before. But not this time.” He lifted his head and looked at me.

  The mantel clock slowly struck ten in the darkness above our fire. I stood, touched his face, then went to the bath, did not turn on any light, and waited in the shadows with a Chattanooga midnight gleaming through a stained glass transom, lighting us with ancient starshine over the old Southern river that bound the city. I twisted the knobby faucets of the shower, adjusted the heat, and let the water flow over my hands as if the river itself, warm with comfort, had come inside. I heard Jakobek’s footsteps. I felt the depth of his body before he put the careful grip of his hands on my should
ers. Both of us needed to come clean.

  “Yes, I knew you’d follow me,” I said quietly. “And yes, I wanted you to.”

  “I’ve been following you all my life,” he whispered.

  We undressed each other in the fertile warmth of that winter night.

  HUSH AND I DIDN’T trash the room, tear the sheets off the bed, or tie each other to the headboard. We didn’t have to. All that chaos, all that energy, all the mind-clearing joy and cathartic lust and tender, intense sex can tear two people apart and wrap them back together without any outward evidence. It’s as simple as a kiss, a fast rhythm, a word or two at the right second, her holding me around the shoulders, me bearing down on her and her lifting me up. When we finally had to rest, had to pull the covers up and be still, we tangled ourselves together and breathed against each other like dozing wolves, still ready to attack.

  Tell her. Tell her you love her and see what she says. And when she says, ‘Thank you, you’re good in bed and I enjoy your company,’ say, ‘Yeah, that’s all I meant, too,’ and let it go at that.

  I love you. Hard words to say and get them right, plus we had enough trouble to deal with already. And besides that, no, I didn’t want to know her answer. One of the few times in my life I’d rather stay in the dark.