The Secret Between Us

by Barbara Delinsky

  “Remember how she died?”

  “She was driving when her car left the road and crashed down an embankment.”

  “Mmm. Her daughter had a rough time afterward—you know, the one who was in the car with her. I always wondered about whether she was the one actually driving and they covered it up.”

  “But Princess Grace had a stroke,” Deborah protested.

  “Well. No matter,” said the man. “Your Grace is lucky. She has you.” He scratched the back of his head. “Say, listen, I really am sorry about the Hubers. I probably should have just come right out and said who’d made the call. I hate thinking I made you lose two patients. If there’s anything I can do…”

  “There is,” Deborah said. She was thinking of everything Tom had shared about his brother. She probably should tell John, but she felt—absurdly, perhaps—that she couldn’t betray Tom’s confidence. “Just speed up the accident report, John. You owe me this.”

  Chapter 13

  Michael’s car wasn’t in the driveway when Deborah got to the house, which relieved her on two counts. First, she truly did want to think that he was out for breakfast. And second, she was pleased not to have to see him so soon.

  Parking nearby, she carried her med bag, her coffee, and her untouched sticky bun down the driveway. Three cars were in the small lot there—those of the receptionist, the nurse, and an early patient who had caught a cold from her kids. After diagnosing bronchitis, Deborah sent her off with the proper prescription, and went down the hall. Her father hadn’t arrived.

  His office was neat but crowded. Books filled every shelf, relics of the day when journals weren’t digital, and while he was totally addicted to the computer that sat on the side of the desk, he refused to get rid of them. Same with the presents that his youngest patients had given him over the years—Valentines added each year to a decorated board, numerous shells, rocks, and twigs, a primitive clay mug. Each held a memory. For all his dictatorial bearing, Michael was a softie at heart.

  “Gone looking for a bottle in the drawer yet?” asked her father, coming up behind her. He dropped a handful of magazines on the desk and flipped on a light.

  “No,” she said. “I would never do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s your desk.”

  His face was sober. “But you were thinking of it.”

  “I was actually thinking about you and Mom,” Deborah said. And yes, it had crossed her mind to check the desk, though she hadn’t drummed up the courage to actually do it. “I would have liked to have had a marriage like yours.”

  “You thought you did. I thought you were rushing. He was a hippie, for God’s sake, but you said that was what made him special.”

  “It was.”

  “Arguable, given what he’s done since, but back then you said you’d found the right guy and that if you waited until after med school, he’d be gone.”

  “He was,” Deborah remarked.

  “He wasn’t gone until two years ago.”

  She gave a sad smile. “He was gone long before that.”

  “The marriage was bad all along?” Michael asked in surprise.

  “Not bad. Just not the same as yours. I chalked it up to our being a two-career couple.”

  “You said he was fine with your being a doctor.”

  “I thought he was, women’s rights and all. He seemed so modern, the ideal mix of free spirit and realist. At work, he was amazing. He brought unconventional ideas to a conventional field. I thought he was brilliant.” She paused. “I thought he adored me the way you adored Mom.”

  “Maybe back then he did.”

  “Maybe I misjudged him.”

  “Maybe you were too young to judge him at all.”

  “Oh, Dad, I was not,” she scolded. “I was no younger when I got married than you were.”

  “Things were different in my day. My buddies were being sent to Vietnam, and some of them weren’t coming home. We didn’t have the luxury of time.”

  But she shook her head. “Lots of kids still get married young.”

  “It’s a socioeconomic thing now.”

  “But they do it, and their marriages don’t always fail. So what’s the problem with us?”

  “Hey, don’t include me in that.”

  “I know. Your marriage was perfect.”

  He reddened, his temper heating. “If you’re going to start telling me all I didn’t know about my wife—”

  “No, that’s not it. I’m serious. Your marriage was perfect,” Deborah insisted. “I cannot remember once when you ever argued with Mom. I thought that was how all marriages were. Maybe I expected too much. Maybe I saw things in Greg that just weren’t there.”

  Michael sat behind his desk and turned on the computer. “If you fantasized, it was your own doing. I never told you what to expect.”

  “No. But kids see their parents, and their relationship becomes the standard.”

  He reached for his glasses. “Doesn’t look like your sister saw that.”

  “Oh, she did. She knew what you and Mom had. Why do you think she never found the right guy?”

  Eyes on the screen, he muttered, “Because she’s prickly.”

  “Not prickly. Picky. She wanted someone as strong as you.”

  He shot her a look. “Don’t flatter me.”

  Deborah was suddenly impatient. “I’m not. This is about perception—perception and expectation. I saw a certain model and took certain things for granted. Clearly, I shouldn’t have. But we were talking about Jill. The problem is, expectations can be hard on a child.”

  “Jill is not a child.”

  “She is. She’s your child. She always will be.”

  He looked at her over his glasses. “Don’t we have patients to see?” “She can’t do everything the way you did. That doesn’t mean what she does is bad. The bakery is a fabulous place, and she’s doing it well.”

  “Good.”

  “Doesn’t that make you happy? What more do we want for our kids than to know they’re happy?”

  “Lots. We want security. We want growth. We want them to do better than we did.”

  Deborah thought of what John had said. “That may not be possible. What then? Are they failures?”

  Her father straightened. “You tell me. You want your boy to play baseball, but he can’t see. Does he actually get satisfaction from those games?”

  Deborah thought about her son and fear twisted her heart. “It’s about being part of a team.”

  “Sure, that’s what we say. Only, is it? Is he better off being the worst kid on the team—”

  “He isn’t the worst kid.”

  “He can’t see, Deborah. He can’t see to hit the ball, and he can’t see to field it. He is, on the other hand, a good little musician.”

  “He’ll never be a concert pianist,” Deborah said, thinking of what her father had done to Jill. “I refuse to pressure him that way.”

  “And you don’t think forcing him to play ball isn’t as bad? Come on, Deborah. You can’t see what’s right in front of your nose.”

  “I guess that makes two of us,” Deborah said, just as the intercom rang.

  Michael jabbed at the speakerphone. “Yes.”

  “Jamie McDonough is in Room One, Dr. Barr. Would you tell Dr. Monroe that the Holt children are in Room Two?”

  “Fine.” He punched the off button and got up. “They expect us to be there. They expect us to have answers. They expect us to cure their ills.” Taking a lab coat from the back of the door, he pushed his arms through the sleeves. “Who cures us?” He glared at Deborah. “We are all we have.”

  Technically, Deborah agreed. Wasn’t that the philosophy she had lived by since the divorce? We do what we have to do, because no one else is going to do it. It may not be right, but it’s the best we can do.

  Coming from her father, though, it was depressing. Drinking cured nothing. If aloneness was the problem, drinking only made it worse. The question was
whether what she was doing was any better.

  She might have obsessed about it if her morning hadn’t been filled first with office visits, then house calls. Her afternoon wasn’t much better. By the time she reached the gym, she was desperate for distraction, and pushing herself helped.

  Later, pulling into a diagonal spot in front of the bakery, she phoned Greg. “Hi. It’s me. Is this an okay time?”

  There was a pause. “An okay time for what?” he asked.

  “To talk.”

  “About…?”

  “Us. The kids.” Can’t see what’s right in front of your nose. “Maybe what went wrong.”

  There was dead silence. Then a curious, “What went wrong when?”

  “With our marriage.”

  “You want to talk now?”

  He wasn’t making it easy. “If this isn’t a good time, I can call back.”

  “That’s not the point. For months after we split, I wanted to talk. You never let me.”

  “I couldn’t. I was hurt. You had turned into someone I didn’t know.”

  “Not true. I went back to being the man I was when we first met.”

  “Maybe,” she conceded. “But it had been a long time, and I found the change threatening.”

  “Because I wanted to talk?”

  “Because you wanted to tell me why you didn’t want to be married to me.”

  “It wasn’t you, Deborah. It was the whole of my life—”

  She cut in. “I heard me. Right or wrong, Greg, I took it personally. I couldn’t satisfy you as a wife, so you left. I couldn’t satisfy you as a woman, so you married Rebecca. Had you been in touch with her all along?”

  “No. Only at the end of our marriage.”

  “Did you leave me specifically to marry her?”

  “No. Once I was gone, it just…fit.”

  “And I didn’t. Do you understand why I couldn’t talk? I didn’t want to hear all the things I’d done wrong.”

  “So I was the bad guy.”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s different now?”

  She looked out the windshield. The afternoon sun shone on the bakery window, blocking her vision, but she knew that Grace and Dylan were inside. “The anger isn’t working. I’m not sure it’s the best thing for the kids. I’m not sure it’s the best thing for me either.”

  “You’re older and wiser now?”

  Hearing a note of sarcasm, she said, “There were times in our marriage when I felt so much younger and dumber than you.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “I didn’t like discussing our age difference.”

  “You threw it at me plenty when I left.”

  “No, Greg. All I said was that you were having a midlife crisis. Maybe you heard more than I said.”

  There was another silence, then a surprisingly conciliatory, “Maybe.”

  “I expected my marriage to last forever,” Deborah said. “I wasn’t prepared for what happened. I was humiliated.”

  “I’m sorry for that. I probably could have handled it better.”

  “How?” she asked. “By giving me a week’s warning?”

  “I’d been unhappy for a while.”

  “So unhappy that you couldn’t discuss it?”

  “I wasn’t supposed to be unhappy at all. That wasn’t in the plan—and I’m not being sarcastic. You weren’t the only one with expectations. It occurs to me that I needed those plans to convince myself that what I was doing with my life was right. Our life together was a show. We did what was expected of the perfect couple.” His voice softened. “I’m not blaming you.”

  Absurd as it was, her eyes filled with tears. “I couldn’t move up there with you. I couldn’t, Greg.”

  “I knew that.”

  “I made calls. There were too many doctors there already.”

  “Deborah, you don’t need to explain.”

  “I do,” she insisted. “I’ve always felt guilty. I felt like I chose my house and my career over my husband.”

  “It wasn’t a black-and-white choice.”

  But she went on, desperate that he understand how she had felt toward the end of their marriage. “We hadn’t talked about anything substantial for years.”

  “Deborah.”

  “If I let you down, I’m sorry. I thought I was doing everything right. But how do we know? How can we see down the road and know what’ll work and what won’t? It’s like driving at night in a torrential rain. You think you know the way, but you just can’t be sure.”

  “Are you all right, Deborah?”

  She was about to say she was not, when John Colby pulled into the space beside her. Something about his expression said that he had news.

  “What’s happening?” Greg asked.

  “Lots, I’m afraid. But I’ve just run out of time.”

  “Is it something to do with the kids?”

  “Nothing that won’t wait another day or two.”

  “This is a good time for me to listen,” he said meaningfully.

  She heard him. “I appreciate that. Thank you. But I’ll have to call you back.”

  She closed her phone before he could say another word, and rolled down her window as John rounded the front of his car and leaned in.

  “I talked with the folks at the state lab,” he said. “They don’t like to say anything until they’re done, but so far as they can see, you’re in the clear.”

  Deborah was afraid to breathe. “In the clear?”

  “There’s no evidence of wrongdoing—no speeding, no reckless driving, no vehicle malfunction. It’s pretty much what we said. There’s no grounds for charges. They’re focusing on the victim now. The preliminary report says he ran straight out of the woods.”

  Deborah was a minute following. “Out of the woods?”

  “He wasn’t jogging along the road. He was in the woods and ran directly out onto the road.”

  “There’s no path through the woods.”

  “I know. But his footprints were there.”

  “Bizarre,” Deborah murmured, not for the first time associating that word with Calvin McKenna.

  John went on. “They took pictures of the footprints, but they haven’t finished analyzing them. Could be he went into the woods to take shelter from the rain. Could be he went in to relieve himself. People at school never knew he was a runner. Looks like he kept a lot to himself.”

  John didn’t know the half of it, Deborah thought, but to say it would lead to more questions, and to answer them would be a betrayal of Tom.

  “I tried to call Hal,” John added, “but he’s off playing racquetball.” He squinted at the bakery. “Grace inside? Oh, there she is.” He grunted. “No. She’s off again. Guess she didn’t want to talk to me.”

  Deborah was relieved enough by the report to say, “Don’t take it personally. She hasn’t wanted to talk to me, either.”

  “The accident’s thrown her.”

  “I’d say that.” Deborah reached for her bag.

  John opened the door and stood back. “Well, you tell her what I told you. Maybe it’ll cheer her up some.”

  Deborah found Grace in the back office, slouched in the chair behind Jill’s desk. Her feet were up, flip-flops braced against the edge of the desk.

  “You shouldn’t have run,” she said softly. “John had good news. The state team found nothing.”

  Grace didn’t blink. “Mr. McKenna’s still dead.”

  “Yes,” Deborah said. “He is. I’ll always feel badly. I’ll always feel badly about Jimmy Morrisey, too. Did I ever tell you about him?” When Grace shook her head, she said, “He was a fixture in Leyland—didn’t live here, but was a handyman who worked at practically every house in town. Early one morning—I was seventeen—he was up on our roof replacing shingles when he fell. We were having breakfast and heard his cry. Poppy did what he could, but Jimmy was dead before the ambulance arrived. Poppy and Nana Ruth took it personally. They criticized themselves for rushing him o
nto the roof in March, when there was still morning frost. They criticized themselves for letting him work alone. But this was what Jimmy did. He’d been on a roof down the street the day before. He saw the frost when he climbed the ladder. He could have waited an hour for it to melt.”

  “You’re saying it was his fault.”

  “I’m saying it wasn’t entirely our fault.”

  “Sorry, Mom. The analogy doesn’t fit. Mr. McKenna would not be dead if I hadn’t been driving that car.”

  “Oh my,” Jill said, stopping mid-stride two feet from the door. Hand on the still-smooth belly of a buff-colored apron, she looked from Deborah to Grace. “The plot thickens?”

  Grace’s face crumbled. “This isn’t funny,” she cried, hugging herself. “I keep seeing the road in the rain…I can’t see more than two feet in front of the car. It was my fault. If I hadn’t been driving home from Megan’s, Mr. McKenna would still be alive.”

  Knowing Jill had heard the truth—and from Grace’s own mouth—Deborah felt a weight slip from her shoulders. “The point of my story,” she told Grace, “is that Mr. McKenna may not have been any wiser than Jimmy Morrisey. We didn’t see him on the road, because he wasn’t on the road. He came out of the woods just as we went by.”

  “And ran right into us?” Grace asked with a horrified look.

  “What kind of idiot would do that?” Jill asked, seeming horrified on more than one count as she eyed Deborah. “You lied to the police?”

  “No.” Deborah still thought she looked pale. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “Please don’t change the subject.”

  Deborah relented. “They assumed I was driving. I didn’t correct them.”

  “You filled out that report, Deborah. I was right here when Hal read it.”

  Deborah might have made the argument about being the driver of record that night, but she was already having so many doubts about her own behavior, that she simply asked Grace, “Did you know Mr. McKenna was a runner?”

  “No. But he had every right to be running that night. We don’t own the road.”

  “Deborah,” Jill persisted, “you signed your name to that form.”

  Deborah didn’t have the strength to argue. Besides, she was making a point for Grace. “If we were doing everything right—if you were doing everything right and a man ran out of the woods and into the path of the car—”