Secret of Lies

by Barbara Forte Abate

  Morning laid bare the heavy damages left behind by the savage passage of wind and rain. The stretch of sea and shoreline strangely unfamiliar as the winds diminished and water flooded the streets, the weakening tides tossing thick colonies of flotsam up against the rocks and over bulkheads along the shore.

  And still there was little more to do other than continue to wait for Eleanor’s return.

  In the succeeding days, as the impossible chain of events unfolded, I was grateful to find myself cast as a casual observer–occasionally asked a question or two, but little else beyond that.

  The police came, officially declaring Eleanor a missing person and reiterating what had already been concluded–the fact that the storm had washed away any trail she might otherwise have left. There were more questions, an obligatory combing of the area, and assurances Eleanor would very likely turn up at any moment, tail between her legs, contritely ashamed for causing such worry.

  My mother and father arrived early the next morning. Mom tearfully anxious–Daddy attempting to counterbalance her fears with a vigorous effort at stoicism. And for the next several days, we remained there inside the house, sequestered within the dispirited gloom of expectation.

  One day Jake came. I’d been standing at my bedroom window–staring out at the sea now returned to calmly rolling innocence–when I’d seen him, easily recognizing his familiar stride even at a distance. Once he reached our house and climbed the steps to the porch, I’d held my breath inside my lungs like someone struggling not to drown. And I hadn’t gone down to meet him. Instead remaining where I was, knowing that Uncle Cal would inevitably send him away–aware he would want any witness of that fateful night banished as quickly as possible, whether they were capable of speech or not.

  Indeed, it was only a moment later when I saw Jake descending the steps–pausing once to cast a fleeting glance back toward the house. I’d quickly moved away from the open window, concealing myself behind the filmy lace curtains fluttering on the light ocean breeze. And when I’d chanced to look again he was gone.

  As desperately as I wanted, even needed to see him, I somehow couldn’t. The guilt and shame which rightfully belonged to Eleanor and Cal had effectively settled over all of us, soiling Jake and me in such a way that everything once shimmering and clean now felt ugly and ruined.

  I threw myself across the bed–a hopeless carcass tossed onto the tracks–at last surrendering the flood of bitter tears risen up behind the dam over the past several days; somehow having lost all perspective of how I was supposed to feel, what I should say or even think.

  What would happen when she finally did return? Could I ever bear to look at her again without seeing the two of them and those hideous moments in their entirety? If only I hadn’t gone there, hadn’t found them–hadn’t been confronted with a scene impossible to ever prepare for. If only I’d run away.

  Days later, though my thoughts had not yet cleared, I forced myself to take a backward glance at the events of that night–shielded glances from different angles–at length concluding that, no, I would not betray them. I would not tell what I’d seen. What I knew. My rational self making an appearance to remind me that it was more Cal’s fault than it was Eleanor’s. He was after all our uncle–a responsible adult. He was the one liable for upholding the moral import of such taboos and understanding the weight of such sins. Eleanor, on the other hand, was just a girl struggling to become a woman–who’d been caught up in things she didn’t have the experience to fully understand or the wisdom to walk away from.

  That day could have been a day from some earlier more innocent time. Brilliant rays of white sunlight shimmered over the smoothly rolling sea; the occasional wail of a gull gliding past on the gentle current stirred along the shoreline; the pungent aroma of my uncle’s pipe wafting up from the porch and in through the open screens of my bedroom window–the unaffected familiarity of it tightly twisting the now ever present knot in the depths of my stomach. I simply couldn’t comprehend how he was capable of proceeding with even the most ordinary endeavors when everything around us had stopped–a world held motionless in a hardening mortar bound by uncertainty.

  From somewhere downstairs I could hear voices rise and fall–first with accusations, then with reassurances. It’d been like that for days, no one appearing to notice I spent most of my time alone, purposely separated from them.

  Although the day was seasonably warm, I laid back down on my unmade bed, knees bent and curled to nearly touch my chest, feeling cold and thoroughly deserted. It was just past eleven o’clock in the morning and yet my only desire was for sleep, and the chance to put another day behind me.

  Somewhere in the house a door slammed, the sharp noise opening my eyes with a start to the amber colored light of late afternoon filtering in through the parted curtains. My eyelids felt leaden and thick from too much sleep, my mouth coated with a sour film. I pulled myself upright, dangling my legs over the edge of the bed, all at once struck by the awareness that I was hungry–ravenously so.

  In the kitchen a box of powdered sugar donuts sat unopened on the table and I tore the box carelessly, eating two rapidly then reaching for a third.

  I found my mother sitting on the porch with Aunt Smyrna and for a long moment I stood quietly listening, though not quite hearing as they talked in hushed tones–a sharp stab deeply needling the wall of my chest as I scrutinized my mother’s face, seeing someone I almost didn’t recognize. Had she ever been so pale? Her features so devoid of expression beneath the smoky shadows sunk beneath her eyes in a smudged reflection of her heartache?

  “Mom?” I said, once she’d sensed my presence and turned her head. “I’m going for a walk. It’s still so warm out.”

  “Oh … but, Stevie, the sun will be going down soon.”

  “I won’t go far. I’m just tired of being inside.”

  The hesitation I read on her face was nevertheless cut short on her lips. “All right. But not too long.”

  I nodded, understanding she likely viewed the beach rolling out below as something sinister–an evil thing that had mysteriously consumed her child.

  From the shore I made certain to glance up and wave at my mother and aunt watching from the porch, purposefully lingering within view, reassuring my mother of my intended obedience.

  With slow deliberateness I drifted further along the shoreline until gradually losing sight of the house–anxious to be away from the closeted misery settled within the monstrous place like piling ash.

  I strode further and further away, kicking the sand hard enough to make my ankles hurt. For days now my mind had laid immobile, gears and sprockets ceasing in mid-revolution, cogs welded stiff by an intertwining mass of recriminations that had steadily swelled to fill every space and parcel inside my head.

  The dunes appeared curiously shifted, crests remarkably unfamiliar–peaks strangely flattened as if by the weight of a giant’s hand–the piked slopes I’d climbed four nights earlier a newly foreign land.

  “Eleanor … EL,” I called out impulsively, knowing she wasn’t here to answer, but nevertheless hoping.

  She was gone. I was certain of that. Run as far away as possible to escape the wreckage now piled-up around us.

  Waves broke, rhythmically crashing and hissing over the rock-strewn shore then sliding smoothly back into the sea. So much had changed over what felt like a passage of decades since the afternoon two months earlier when I’d nearly drowned, and standing here now felt more akin to distant memory than any current reality.

  The sun had slid like melting butter on the horizon–a reminder it was time to start back. I expected that by now my mother would be kneading her fingers, pacing the porch, leaning over the railing in order to better scrutinize the empty beach, blaming Smyrna for allowing her to let me go. And yet the thought of returning to the big house–and the dread and anxiety breathing over every thought and word–kept me from leaving, if only for a few moments longer.

  I scaled the rocks carefully;
crawling over surfaces dark and slick with sea spray to reach the grassy slope above. From my princely summit I skimmed my gaze along the glimmering surface of the sea, then dropping my eyes to the rock strewn cove framed within a half-moon curve along the shoreline directly below–at once finding myself smiling as I thought of my slumbering hero–how he’d assuredly leapt with the agile grace of a gazelle over these very rocks to pull me sputtering and coughing from the water. The smile just as quickly evaporating with the immediate recollection of how repulsive I must’ve looked in those moments–an erupting volcano of chocolate chips and lemonade seawater.

  How many years would it take for the land to repair and renew itself from the damage wielded by the storm’s powerful winds and punishing rain, I wondered as my stare traveled across the surroundings in stunned disbelief. All around me lay destruction: slender young trees torn from the earth by their roots–older, mature trunks snapped in half like so many toothpicks. Only the dense thickets of briars and beach roses, though twisted and mangled, still managed to look much as they had before.

  Scattered amongst the rocks below was a surprising amount of debris–likely amassed elsewhere and then discarded here by the churning waters of the hurricane. Stringy clumps of seaweed and vegetation clung resiliently to the sharp projections of rock and driftwood along the rough shoreline, sweeping back and forth in slimy green ropes as the tide moved in and out.

  I paused to consider an especially curious mass of refuse as my gaze swept the area below. Unlike the other scatterings of quivering flotsam, it appeared to be securely wedged within a cluster of large rocks. Submerged there in the shallows, it bobbed slightly as the water lapped back and forth.

  I continued to study it with interest as I descended the slope. The sun winked against the treetops, the shadows stretching longer, and I knew if she hadn’t exactly been worried before, there was little question my mother would have worked herself into a precarious state teetering somewhere between anxiety and hysteria by now as she awaited my return. Yet even then my curiosity refused to quiet, piqued to the point it felt altogether necessary that I have a closer look at the strange accumulation.

  It was all but impossible to keep from getting my sneakers wet as I manipulated my steps over rocks almost completely submerged in seawater. Yet as I drew nearer, keeping my feet dry lost all importance. Because in those final moments before I’d reached the object of my unshakable interest, I knew what it was. I knew from the immediate hammering inside my chest–so deafening I could no longer hear or feel anything beyond the slamming crescendo. Not the cold water swirling around my ankles, or the violent crashing of the sea. Not even the sound of my own scream–a horrified, suffocating sound I felt rocketing up through my throat. I knew long before I’d reached her that I’d found Eleanor.

  Chapter Sixteen

  For days I’d wrestled with the cold fear that maybe my uncle had done this unthinkable thing to protect himself. Yet watching him now–pale and shaken–his dull movements and vacant expressions, I felt the foundations of my convictions beginning to waver.

  “I never would’ve hurt her, Stevie. You know I never would’ve done that,” he said, catching me alone for a brief moment when Aunt Smyrna was occupied in the kitchen brewing another pot of tea for my crumbling, falling-apart mother. And I’d turned my head and stared full into his eyes–dull flat holes sunk into the ashen planes of his face–and somehow, I’d believed he was telling the truth. Selfish, morally deficient, shameless philanderer … absolute coward, but not a killer.

  The guilt when it came was staggering–unbearable thoughts reviving minute details of the horrible assertions I’d shouted at Eleanor–the words swearing how much I hated her still chokingly bitter in my throat as if they’d only just been said. My mind plummeted to the darkest depths, walls closing in with the blackness of an eternal night, unrelentingly reminding me of the impossibility of living with the brutal oaths I’d hurled at her, each a lethal blow; every minute, every hour pushing me closer to the conviction that more than any other entity, it had been the hateful poison of my anger which had in truth destroyed her.

  Yet, even then–despite the debilitating core of grief throbbing inside my head with a constant ache, that wrung the breath from my lungs whenever I thought of what I’d done–some undetermined spring of fortitude nevertheless continued to smolder beneath the embers feeding my pain, pulling me back before I’d irretrievably settled into the very deepest depths of despair.

  And the only prescription I could see for surviving my heartache lay in unburdening myself of the truth–lifting my shattered self out from under the crushing weight of everything I’d seen that night–and shifting the blame onto Calvin where it rightfully belonged. But in the days leading to Eleanor’s funeral it was Aunt Smyrna who convinced me of the essential wisdom of waiting.

  “I saw them together that night … Eleanor and Uncle Cal,” I said, starting to cry, knowing she’d have questions and that I would need to elaborate no matter how impossible or distasteful.

  “Shh, I know … but we can’t say anything yet, Stevie.” So Cal had actually broken down and told her the truth. “It would kill your mother and father right now–it would just kill them. We have to let them get through the worst of it.”

  That she knew something of that night stunned me as much as it brought a certain sense of relief–dividing the weight I’d been carrying by half. Of course, she was right. She knew best what to do–was most qualified to judge when my mother would be ready to receive the truth.

  But then all at once Cal was gone–simply gone. “He had to get back to the city … an emergency situation at the office,” Aunt Smyrna told my mother, only she and I aware that he’d done more then leave; had in fact vanished as effectively as someone who’d never even been there at all.

  We grieved and somehow carried on with our lives through seasons woven of absence, emptiness, and long gray silences. My mother and father did their best to shield me from their grief. Yet in their refusal to visibly mourn, they left me floundering like an orphan–grievously displaced and horribly alone. They never cried, as I did, over some small reminder unexpectedly surfaced: a song playing on the radio, a fleeting whiff of rose scented toilet water (Eleanor’s favorite fragrance though the other girls her age had pledged allegiance to Evening in Paris or some slightly less worldly perfume borrowed from a mother’s Avon collection once they’d landed in high school), a half empty tube of tart red lipstick tucked in a dresser drawer in the hope our mother wouldn’t find it. Every suggestion of my sister’s once spirited presence as sharp a slap as any I’d ever received. So how was it then that they had so effectively managed to ignore away these same precious relics in their misdirected efforts to divert our broken family from looking into the impossible truth that she was gone? Forever, eternally, gone.

  While no one was ever cruel enough to confront me directly with questions over the details or circumstances of my sister’s death, the natural curiosity afforded such tragedies was faithfully passed around in whispered conversations day after day in school–presumptions and speculations quietly exchanged or silently circulated in hastily folded notes. And yet, despite the incessant hunger for sharper details and deeper explanations, that Eleanor had drowned during a hurricane was the only portion of the story I intended anyone to ever know.

  Because even once Aunt Smyrna found Cal as she’d promised, and the absent pieces where finally set into the puzzle, I knew there was no detail, insignificant or otherwise, which I would willingly sacrifice at the altar of gossip.

  It was on an afternoon late in October; over a year after losing Eleanor, when I came home to find my mother packing my sister’s clothing and other personal articles into cardboard boxes. She gave no indication of discerning my presence as I stood silently in the doorway, watching as she gently lifted a collection of sweaters from the dresser drawer.

  Her fingers gripped the neatly folded pile in her hands as if she were lifting a formidable weight rat
her than a few simple items of various colored wool. And it wasn’t until she pressed her face against them that I understood she was weeping–her grief nearly silent, other than the escape of an occasional muffled sob.

  For the first time since Eleanor’s funeral I felt my insides lurch and twist in response to the intensity of my mother’s anguish–saw her sorrow in the heaving of her narrow shoulders. And I understood then, not only the profundity of her pain, but how eternally it was etched. At once shamed by how ignorant I’d been with my silent accusations; the criticisms of my parents for their lack of visible tears. My mother had avoided packing away Eleanor’s belongings for over a year not because it had taken her that long to find the time to accomplish an unpleasant task, but because it had taken her that long to gather the courage to face it.

  Over the supper table several nights later, my mother mentioned that Aunt Smyrna and Uncle Calvin were planning to sell the house on Long Island by early the following summer. I found myself unexpectedly startled by the news, though knowing I shouldn’t be. As well as I understood to anticipate these occasional falsehoods in context of Aunt Smyrna’s purposeful plot to keep Cal’s disappearance a secret, I was nevertheless disconcerted when they actually came. How long was I expected to carry the burden of lies? What if he never resurfaced? What was I supposed to do with the truth then?

  “I have to be honest and say I’m just surprised it took them this long to get rid of it. I don’t know how they ever went back there last summer.”

  I forced myself to continue eating as she talked–biting, chewing–tasteless lumps sinking down the back of my throat like stagnant mud.