When Secrets Die

by Lynn S. Hightower

  “I won’t leave you.”

  “Yes, I know, that’s exactly what I’m afraid of. You have to live your life, Emma. And I have to live mine. Now mine is over. And it’s been a good one. But this that I have left, this isn’t a life for me, much as I love you. I’m in so much pain, honey. And it’s only going to get worse. And I’ve got two arms now and shoulders and a head, but I’ll lose ground. That’s my future, and it’s one I don’t want. I don’t care what’s socially acceptable. Can I make you understand that dying isn’t the worst thing that can happen? Can I make you understand that for me, dying is another form of life that is much better than this? Can you respect me and love me enough to let me make up my own mind?”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure. I’d do the same for you. Martin Bender will take Empress and turn her out with his horses when you head off to Denver.”

  “You’ve got it all worked out.”

  “Can you see this as a choice, and a simple end of the day for me?”

  “Sure, Mom.”

  She’d done it, and she’d never regretted it. She’d gotten the pills and handed her mother the bottle of Maker’s Mark. She’d wanted to stay, but her mother had forbidden it. Her mother had kissed her good-bye and told her to feed the horse, leave the door open so the dogs could come in, and head out for her evening class as planned.

  “We don’t want to let them know you helped me, Emma. That stays between you and me.”

  “They’ll know somebody had to help you.”

  “I’ve got that covered too.”

  “How?”

  “Kiss me good-bye, Emma. And know that what you are doing is the kindest, kindest, most respectful thing any mother ever had to ask of a daughter. I hope someday you have a daughter just like you. And know this”—and her mother had tugged on Emma’s sleeve, pulling the cotton material out of shape—“I will always watch over you, and I will always be with you. I am going to be with my mother and my father, and I am going to be happy and okay like I can’t be in this body I’m in right now. If I had any choice other than to have you help me … but there is no one but you, honey. I need you more now than I’ve ever needed anybody. Don’t let me down.”

  And Emma hadn’t. She hadn’t let her mother down.

  But she hadn’t finished school, and she hadn’t gone to Denver, and somehow her father had known. Instead, she’d worked low-end jobs, and gotten pregnant with Blaine, and married his father, a son of a bitch she’d stayed married to for seven long stupid years, till she dreamed that she had lunch with her mother, and told her she was getting a divorce and not to try to change her mind or talk her out of it, and her mother had patted her hand and said, Honey, what took you so long?

  Round the corner, a backhoe and crew worked the ground to open a grave site for someone new to death, and at the genuinely new section across from her mother’s grounds, a green awning and chair were set up for another service. For a small cemetery, there was always plenty of activity. Off in the distance, Emma could hear traffic, but here behind the fence and among the trees and tombstones, it was quiet. She left the toy by the lamb on Ned’s grave, and moved over to face her mother’s tombstone.

  “So there you are,” Emma said. She sat down cross-legged in the grass, and the ground felt cold against her thighs. But the sun was bright, and it was October in Kentucky, and with any luck the temperature might hit seventy, or more likely, sixty-eight degrees. Or maybe not. The air had that crisp edge to it that meant the first frost might surge, when the temperature dropped on the outgoing tides of darkness and night.

  You and I have business, Mama my dear. Because you owe me. You owe me, and you failed me once, but I’m giving you another chance and calling in your debt.

  I know I haven’t been here in ages. Eighteen months, and no little visits, no flowers on your birthday, no tears or fond memories on Mother’s Day. No pats on the tombstones or nostalgic memories. I’ve made it a point not to even think about you, because when I do, it makes me mad.

  You know, when you died, I was here every day. Then maybe a few times a week. Nobody knew how often I came here, nobody but you. And it got funny because every time I sat down to have a good cry, there’d be some damn backhoe and a huge noise of digging or some such mundane and noisy thing to interrupt my peace. I suppose you thought that was funny. I didn’t blame you then.

  But that was because I was nineteen, Mama, and didn’t know any better.

  And like all good grieving, mine followed the usual pattern. I came less and less. At first, it was the only place I could find peace, because it was the only physical way to be with you, a place where I could sit with your remains and your commemorative tombstone, which by the way, you might never have gotten if I hadn’t guilted Dad into it by telling him I’d like it in place before he actually remarried. Otherwise, you might still be waiting. I sure as hell couldn’t have afforded to buy you one. Not then, anyway.

  I know it isn’t fair to blame you because Ned died. I know you would have interceded if you could. I know that my hours here—praying to God, and begging you to look after him … not foolish, I think, and certainly worth a try. It shakes my faith in you, just a little, but I suppose if dead relatives could keep all bad things from happening, no bad things would happen. I’m sure you did what you could. I’m sure the two of you are together now, and that you look out for him. Believe it or not, it gives me peace of heart to know you are together, because I believed you, in that dream, when you came to me and said you’d watch out for me, always. Watching out for me means watching out for my babies.

  For the longest time, Mama, I couldn’t figure out why Ned dying meant I was so angry at you. It’s not that I blamed you for his death. It’s just that his death, my grief … it stripped away all the bullshit, and the excuses I made for you, and left me with the hard cold THING. You killed yourself. And you made me help you.

  And now that I am older and wiser and have children of my own, now I see what a terrible thing that was that you did to me.

  I’m not much for suicide, Mama. Those of us who survive those of you who do it never are. We turn a deaf ear to the excuses, because we know how the reality of the act rips the people who loved you right in two. Only, in your case, I can see it. Paralyzed, the prognosis that you would lose more mobility as time went on, constantly in pain, and married to a shit like Dad … I have to say that yes, I can see it. I could make the same choice—yep, I admit it, in that circumstance only because for me and obviously for you, that isn’t life. So it’s not like ending life, but it’s more like ending a death-life.

  One thing for sure, between you and Ned, I am definitely not afraid to die. I see it for the blessing and the relief that it is. And once in a while I catch myself thinking, not just “beautiful day” but that if … I mean when I die, it wouldn’t be so bad if it was a day like today. Sometimes I envy you here, because all the cares and the worries and the bad things … they don’t mean anything to a woman in your position, as in six feet under. Nothing can hurt you now.

  But you should have never involved me. You should have found a way not to put me in the middle of it. You should at the very least have protected me from the rage of good old Dad, who did not give me the money you so generously left me in your will, the money that would have seen me through school and a whole other life. When you died, that other life went with you, and you left your mark, your suicide mark, on me.

  So Mommy darling, I won’t say as yet I forgive you, and I won’t say I’ll be here to visit you like I used to do, because forgiveness, as they say in bridge, isn’t my long suit.

  I do ask you one thing. And that is that you look after Blaine, and don’t let them take her away from me. Keep her safe and keep her with me, and let me take care of her the best way I can, because really, Mom, when it comes right down to it, as good as you were, I’m an even better mother than you were, because not only did you teach me what to do, you also taught me what not to do. So you just keep
your eye on her—you watch over her like you said in the dream, and I’ll do the rest, because I’m not like you, Mama. I never give in, and I never give up.

  Emma did not bother with her seat belt. The cemetery speed limit was about ten miles per hour. She had thought she’d cry this morning, and had brought a box of Kleenex, but the box sat unopened in the seat beside her, and she was as dry-eyed as a stone.

  She felt bad about the way she had talked to her mother. In her mind’s eye she could see her mother walking that mare who killed her, the horse well-meaning but afraid, while her mother spoke to her in low comforting tones, letting the mare settle and lose her fear. Her mother had always told her that animals suffer when they are afraid. Emma had pushed those memories away since her mother died, all the times with that mare, all the mornings she’d seen her mother grooming the horse, combing through the tangled mane, rubbing the yellow bots off the mare’s legs with the pumice stone, right around this time of year. All the times she herself had led the mare in, gentled now, so that her mother felt safe letting Emma bring Empress in from the field, out of the dusk and settling darkness, into the warm and well-lit barn.

  The flush of shame made Emma’s cheeks go pink. Her mother had needed her help at the end. That was all. Her mother had not given up, she had simply accepted what had happened, and for her it was not a life. She had a right to that decision. She had the right not to stay just to humor her family.

  When had Emma let the world’s stock of judgmental hypocrites tell her that her mother had been wrong?

  Emma, glancing to her left, noticed the person putting a wreath on a grave at the far end of her mother’s section, but she followed the code rules of cemetery politeness, so she did not stare, or nod hello. And in truth, she was deep in thought as she drove by, and did not look into her rearview mirror, where she would have been intrigued to see the person put the wreath back in the trunk, cross the lawn to Ned’s grave, and pick up the small wrapped gift she’d left in the paws of the small stone lamb.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Emma hadn’t gone into the studio at all yesterday, and was finding less and less urge to dance. She had closed down her own studio while Ned was sick, thinking she could open back up again later. The opportunity to get out of a three-year lease had come up when the optometrist next door had wanted to expand, and he’d dropped by with an air of apology, mentioning that he wasn’t trying to take advantage of her problems with a sick child, but if she was feeling trapped by the lease and wanted to let it go, he’d be glad to take it over. The building owners had agreed—all she had to do was sign, and she was off the hook.

  Emma supposed he’d noticed that the clientele had dwindled along with the economy. In truth, she had not seriously considered shutting the place down until he’d stopped by, a nice man, slender, with thinning blond hair, wire-rim glasses, and a sweet smile. He’d fixed her sunglasses once for free, like they’d been Ray-Bans instead of Wal-Mart specials.

  So she’d let the lease go, and had joined a new studio over in Homburg Place, an easy drive from her little cottage. Instead of carrying the mixed burdens and blessings of self-ownership, her own studio, and doing everything her way, she worked at a studio co-op owned by the dance teachers themselves. You paid a reasonable monthly fee, and whatever you made from your students was yours to keep. Plus, you had the practice area whenever you needed it, a private locker, and the company, good and bad, of other professionals—real professionals who were in the business for the long haul, not people you’d coaxed in off the streets.

  Her teaching load was moderate right now, but the students she had were committed regulars, and without the overhead of the studio weighing down the finances, and without having to pay rent or mortgage, or car payments, she was doing okay. She’d done very well in the competitions before Ned had died, managing to put some prize money in savings, in fact felt she’d hit a creative turning point. When her son became ill, she’d been unable to compete, and had sadly, grinding her teeth, but trying to be fair, wished her dance partner well when he’d moved on to work with someone else. The only competitions she’d done since were the pro-ams, where she danced with her students. She enjoyed those enough that not competing did not seem the blow she’d thought it would be. She was oddly content, which bothered her. She’d danced all her life, achieved her lifelong dream of her own studio, and had been doing well in professional competitions (her specialty the mambo). Letting all of that slide away seemed like a betrayal of everything she’d worked toward all of her life. But she didn’t get the pleasure out of it that she used to; she was happy to teach, dance with her advanced students, and enjoy the dance nights and the occasional workshops she took herself. She had always assumed that she was on a straight uphill climb where she would rise further and further in her field, and now she was leveling out, even dipping backward. But she was tired of worrying about bills, and the studio, and how to lure in enough clientele to keep all of her teachers happy, and making enough money to stay that way, and should she expand, and how could she let people know she was not high pressure like the competition without being high pressure like the competition, and should she sell dance shoes, and if so, should she also sell costumes, and how much price break should she give on the package deals … and the million and one other things she had worried about for years now. For absolute years. She was tired of it all, and what had once been a joy had been grinding her down to fine dust. It seemed she had lost her ambition. Maybe she should do what she’d planned to do all those many years ago and go to vet school.

  Right now, she was happy to do as little as possible. Enough teaching to live on, that’s all she wanted. It made her feel lazy, but in truth, she felt that maybe she deserved a rest. She had worked so hard for so many years, two jobs, or hours and hours at just one, practicing and keeping her body in shape to dance, and God, since Ned had gotten sick she’d gained a good thirty pounds, and what was she doing right now but drinking a Coca-Cola and sucking on a Tootsie Roll Pop like every other fat American.

  She marveled at the woman she used to be, the woman who took care of Blaine, worked the PTA chili suppers, was once actually the cookie chairman of Brownie Troop 113; the woman who kept the house in fairly good shape, cooked dinner most week-nights, taught at other people’s dance studios until she opened her own, and sometimes took on a temporary job when the dancing money did not come in fast enough to keep her and Blaine in good funds. Living with Clayton had spoiled her; two incomes instead of one.

  The slam of a car door brought her head up, and she went into the living room just as her daughter’s voice drifted in through the open windows. Blaine was in a good mood. She could always tell by the way her daughter walked up the front steps, across the porch, and through the front door how good or bad her day had been. More often than not it was bad, and Emma worried late at night and couldn’t sleep. There is no such thing as a happy teenager, but Emma wondered how much of Blaine’s unhappiness was due to losing her little brother, losing her pseudo stepfather, moving one more time to a new school and having to make a whole new set of friends, a difficult math teacher … any of the one hundred and one things that can go wrong for any teenager, and Blaine’s load was heavier than most.

  Nobody has a perfect life, she told her daughter, and she had to remind herself of the same thing. It’s a funny thing, when you have a child, how reason gets sucked away. You look at that baby and feel yourself changed, and you know that there is nothing you won’t do to keep your child’s life safe and happy. And you vow that nothing bad will ever happen to one of your children; you will be that much more diligent, that much more careful; watchful, wise, caring … in short, perfect. The kind of stupid things all new parents think, in the same category with Nobody touches the baby until they’ve washed their hands with antiseptic, My child will never eat candy, My child will watch no television and only play with educational toys, and will only be fed homegrown organic foods with no additives and preservatives. And then somehow
there you are, turning on cartoons the minute they walk in the door, tossing a frozen pizza into the oven, and burrowing through the basket of clean but never folded clothes to find them something clean to wear to school.

  “Hey, sweetie!”

  “Hey.” Semi-surly, and just a flicker of eye contact.

  “How was school?”

  “Ummm.” Blaine went to her bedroom and shut the door.

  The thump of Blaine’s stereo muffled the noise of a tractor that had been thrumming through the air as Emmet Michaels, who owned the farm behind them, worked his fields for the last cutting of hay. Emma preferred the tractor. She looked at the phone extension in the living room and saw that the red light flickered. Her daughter was already plugged in.

  She went into the kitchen. Staying near the refrigerator would be the most likely place for the next sighting of her daughter, and by then maybe Blaine would have a few words to say. Emma did not expect conversation until Blaine had been home for at least an hour—what she called after-school detox. She remembered what hell high school could be, especially a new high school. It was the idiots who told teenagers that they were going through the best years of their lives who caused all the trouble.

  Emma was making biscuits. She wore her favorite “Mom Cat” apron, and, as usual when she cooked, was unintentionally spreading flour all over the kitchen. It had not gone unnoticed, how Marcus had appreciated Aunt Jodina’s homemade biscuits, and Emma was baking them for him. She was feeling a contented domesticity that would have panicked her in her twenties. It was different, cooking for Marcus and Blaine, cooking for the three of them. Different than it had been cooking for Blaine’s father, a chore, and for Clayton, less of a chore but definitely not a pleasure. Of course, in those days, she’d been slacking if she wasn’t doing at least two or three things at once. Now, she had the pleasure of doing one thing at a time, guiltlessly. It wasn’t the world that had changed, it was Emma.