The Art of Keeping Secrets

by Patti Callahan Henry

  Everyone at the research center told her not to get involved with him—he was too old for her, a wanderer; he never stayed in Newboro for more than six months at a time. He was a marine biologist who specialized in environmental chemistry. He taught as a guest lecturer at numerous universities, yet was in Newboro often to consult with the research center on environmental problems in both the natural habitat and in the tanks housing the wounded marine life.

  He’d stayed with Sofie for the past two years. He hadn’t moved on except for the few weeks he traveled to various universities for his lecture series, which allowed him more freedom than full-time teaching would have. This month he would be in Raleigh.

  Bedford loved her; he told her so every morning and every night when she lay in his king-sized bed under the white down comforter. She felt guilty sometimes, knowing that she kept so many things from him—her family history and her love of mystery—intangibles that could not be measured on charts and proven with experiments.

  He was proud of Sofie’s research, of the work she was doing for dolphin conservation, which he thought would bring her both academic distinction and publication in scientific magazines. She basked in his admiration.

  The rest of the day flew by as she transferred numbers onto databases and graphs. Although Bedford would also proof her work, she felt the need to get everything as perfect as possible before his red pen hit the paper. She’d made a deal with herself—if she finished this section, she could work on her private research.

  She wanted to prove that dolphins communicated with one another, named each other. It would be a landmark paper. But more, Sofie felt instinctively that her theory was true. Providing empirical evidence would elevate the mammals to a higher place in the animal kingdom, and thus, she hoped, help protect them.

  Then she wanted to write a children’s chapter book in which a child learned how special every dolphin was, since each had a name. If there really were a way to combine “truth” and “story,” Sofie thought, life would make some sort of sense, shift into a definable paradigm. But she would tell no one of her work or why it mattered so much to her. She had made a bargain with God—I’ll only have one real dream and not ask for anything more. She wasn’t quite sure if God was in on the bargain or not, and she was being a bit dishonest since she also wanted to prove that dolphins not only named each other, but also had names for the humans they loved.

  When she looked up at the clock, the day was gone and she hadn’t been able to switch to her own work. She pushed her hair out of her eyes, stood and was stretching when Bedford walked into the room.

  She smiled at him. “Hey.”

  “You look tired, baby.” He walked toward her, touched her face and kissed her lips.

  “I am. Can we just go back to your place and grill some shrimp?”

  “I don’t have any food at home.”

  She grabbed her rain slicker off the chair. “We could stop by the market.”

  “I thought we could sit and really talk if we weren’t rushing around the kitchen cooking.”

  “Oh,” she said, as usual unable to find an argument against his irrefutable logic.

  He held out his hand. “Let’s go.”

  She took his hand, felt the warmth of him and leaned into him.

  Philip, the maître d’, welcomed Bedford and Sofie, led them to their favorite table at the far end of the restaurant and left them alone.

  “Okay, what is it, Bedford?”

  “I know you don’t like to talk about your mother, but I thought you should see this.”

  “What is it?”

  Bedford reached down, pulled a newspaper from his briefcase and held it out to her. “Read page one of the arts section.”

  Sofie took the Raleigh newspaper and read the article while her feet and hands went numb, while her heart slowed to an erratic pace as if she’d dived too far down following a dolphin.

  The article told of an art historian, Michael Harley, who was traveling along coastal Carolina communities looking for Ariadne—the painter whose art was characterized by broad brushstrokes and translucent paint; who employed innovative methods to integrate background and foreground images on metal, wood and other surfaces. Her work had been dispersed throughout the country by tourists who had bought pieces while on vacation in the Carolinas, yet no one knew who the artist really was, not her full name or where she lived. No new work had shown up in years.

  Harley had started to collect Ariadne’s work. He was researching her for an article, and he was intent on finding her—or him.

  The article explained that in Greek mythology Ariadne was the daughter of King Midas. She married Dionysus, god of the sea, after escaping from the island of Crete. The historian’s theory was that the artist was a strong woman who wished to hide her identity behind a goddess who represented an escape from patriarchal society.

  Sofie faked a smile, looked up. “None of this makes sense. Greek myth? Art technique? Fake names?”

  Bedford touched the top of her hand, stroked her wrist with a featherlight touch. “Sofie, that is the name of the artist whose canvases are sold in the Newboro Art Studio. The article says Newboro has the largest collection of Ariadne’s work. Your mother owned the art studio. I know you know about this. . . .”

  Sofie felt her bones soften, collapse into her flesh as though she might disappear. She dropped the newspaper onto the table, closed her eyes and felt the room spin; nausea rose and she stood, ran for the bathroom.

  The door safely shut, she leaned over the toilet and retched. Panic ran through her body in a familiar pattern, and then Bedford’s voice echoed through the bathroom. “Sofie, Sofie, are you okay?”

  She stood, walked to the sink to wash her face. “I’ll be right out,” she called to the closed door.

  She pinched her cheeks, smoothed her stick-straight blond hair back into its ponytail and walked out to face Bedford. “I think the oyster sandwich I had for lunch was bad.”

  “Tell me what’s going on.” He hugged her. “I know when you’re hurting. I hate bringing up the subject of your mother, but you have to talk about her death someday. This man”—Bedford held up the paper—“is coming to Newboro to ask questions. You can’t pretend your mother is coming home in two days.” He said this in the quiet voice of a father—or what Sofie imagined a father would say, since she’d never had one.

  They walked back to the table. She sat across from him, and he reached his hand out to her; she took it. “Just talk to me. . . . Did your mother know this artist?”

  Sofie released the long-rehearsed words she’d prepared for this moment. “Bedford, she’s gone. I can’t ask her if she knew Ariadne. I have no idea who Ariadne is. It was Mother’s studio—not mine.”

  He ran his fingers across her palm, over her forearm. She shivered with the familiar desire that rose up in her when he touched her. “I’m really not that hungry. Can we just go now?” she asked.

  “I’m starving,” he said, smiled.

  The waiter approached and took their order. When the wine bottle arrived, Sofie nodded yes to a glass. She spooned her clam chowder, but didn’t take a bite. Bedford cut into his steak, stared at her. “Why don’t you eat? You’re going to float away soon.”

  Sofie was thin—she always had been. She could eat a lot or a little, and her frail frame neither gained nor lost weight. Bedford circled his fingers around her wrist. “Eat.”

  She sipped her soup, looked up at him and realized he had no idea, whatsoever, of the fear that lived and moved inside her when she thought of the consequences of telling the truth. Each time she contemplated the possibility of speaking the facts of her mother’s life, anxiety folded over her in a suffocating blanket of silence.

  “Well.” Bedford sat back. “You know he’s going to come try and talk to you.”

  “Let him. What do I care? I’ll tell him the same thing I’m telling you. I don’t know anything about the artists whose work Mother hung in her studio, where she found them or w
here they went. I was a child. I didn’t pay any attention.”

  Bedford ran a hand through his hair, a familiar and irritating gesture that Sofie often thought feminine. He dropped his hand and lightened his furrowed expression. “So,” he said, “tell me about your trip out with John. How did it go?”

  For a minute or two she forgot about her mother, Michael Harley and Bedford’s questions as she talked about her work, content to be discussing the subject she loved best. She told Bedford about her day, or at least the part of her day that would make him smile. She wanted to love him as much as he did her, as much as she had once loved another man.

  Yes, there was a time when she’d loved someone else. Of course she’d never told Bedford about him: Christian Marcus, who’d worked with her at the Marine Research Center. When she thought of Christian, sorrow came in a wave of regret. He was the loss she bore because of her inability to tell the truth. He was the debt she paid for keeping secrets.

  She had believed Christian would love her despite the things she couldn’t tell him, regardless of the past life she refused to speak about. When he had informed her that he was taking a research job in Alaska, he claimed his heart was broken, but he could not love someone who did not love him in return. No matter how hard Sofie tried to convince him that she cared for him beyond words and without measure, he felt the wall around her heart, and so he left.

  Although she was young and her mother told her she could not truly love yet, Sofie had blamed her mother for this great bereavement and didn’t speak to her for a month after Christian moved away. Sofie then vowed never again to feel the hopeless and frantic need she’d often seen in her mother: the reckless desire to make a man love you back when his heart and commitment obviously resided elsewhere.

  Sofie reached out and took Bedford’s hand, stroked his palm. “I do love you,” she said, a magic incantation to prevent more loss.

  FOUR

  ANNABELLE MURPHY

  The phone rang in the far end of Annabelle’s house, four times, five times, before the answering machine clicked on. She walked to the kitchen to listen to the messages. Mrs. Thurgood wanted to know why the advice column wasn’t on her desk. It was only two hours before deadline and she refused to print a repeat.

  Annabelle put her hands over her ears. Every single phone call over the past four hours had been a reminder of something else she hadn’t done since Wade Gunther had walked up on her veranda: attend the fund-raiser committee meeting for the new women’s room at the church; drop off the bulbs at Ann-Marie’s before the neighborhood gardening club’s planting party; work tomorrow’s shift at the food pantry; and now write her column.

  In not one of these calls had anyone inquired about her well-being or provided the only news she wanted to hear: who was with Knox on that plane.

  Annabelle stood, stretched and walked to the computer in her small office at the front of the house. The question Mrs. Thurgood wanted Annabelle to answer in the “Southern Belle Says” column would be in her e-mail in-box.

  “I can do this.” Annabelle spoke out loud to the empty room. “I’ve been through worse—I will not let this take me down.” She rubbed a hand across her face.

  The old computer whirred and hummed, threatening to quit at any minute. Now might be a good time. Her in-box scrolled full. She scanned for the e-mail from the newspaper and clicked on NEW QUESTION.

  Dear Southern Belle,

  I have a secret I have kept from my best friend for over five years. I can’t hold it in anymore. But I don’t know how to tell her now; it is too late to change what happened or the consequences that have followed. My guilt is eating away at me. Is five years too long to wait to tell the truth? What is the proper etiquette? Is there a time limit like with wedding or baby presents?

  Guilt-ridden and Confused in Charleston

  “Moron,” Annabelle said to the screen. “A time limit like with wedding presents?” She slammed her hand on the keyboard; random letters and symbols appeared on the screen.

  “Mom?”

  Annabelle glanced over her shoulder at Keeley leaning against the doorframe. “Hey, darling.”

  “You talking to yourself?”

  “No, I’m talking to the person who asked this stupid question for my column.”

  “I thought you said there are no stupid questions.”

  “This one is.” Annabelle tapped the screen. “Hey, what are you doing home?” She glanced up at the wall clock. “It’s only two.”

  “I hate math.”

  “What?” Annabelle went to her daughter. “What do you mean? Are you telling me you left school in the middle of the day because you hate math?” Her voice rose.

  “Chill, Mom. Geez. It’s not the middle of the day. There was only one class left. And I don’t feel good. I’m going to lie down.”

  “Oh, Keeley, did you go to the nurse or check out at the office?”

  Keeley rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”

  “That is not an answer. If you’re really sick, go to bed.”

  Keeley held up her hands. “I am.”

  Annabelle watched her daughter walk down the hall, drop her backpack in the middle of the foyer and take the stairs two at a time to her bedroom upstairs. She should tell Keeley to come back and pick up her backpack, holler at her for leaving it in the middle of the hall, but Annabelle had only enough energy for the task at hand—the advice column.

  The computer blinked and Annabelle sat down to answer the question.

  Dear Guilt-ridden and Confused,

  This is the stupidest question I have been asked in the nine years I have been writing this column. A time limit as with a gift? What kind of upbringing did you have that you believe there is a time limit on the truth? Of course you should tell your best friend the truth. If you claim to have a best friend, if you are living as if she is your best friend, then you are living a lie. Deceit and betrayal cannot exist between two people who care about each other.

  Sincerely,

  The Southern Belle

  Annabelle clicked send to Mrs. Thurgood and leaned back in her chair. A slow laugh began below her chest and rose until she sat giggling at her computer. There was no way Mrs. Thurgood would let an abrasive and rude column through her “Southern Belle” filter.

  Annabelle began to type her real answer.

  Dear Guilt-ridden,

  This is a complicated question, just as relationships are complicated and multifaceted.

  Annabelle leaned back on her office chair, rubbed her fingers on her temples and thought about what to say next. She was staring at the ceiling when the ding of incoming mail made her look back down at another e-mail from Mrs. Thurgood:

  Thank you for the quick reply on the column. See next e-mail for article on Knox’s plane. Please let me know if you have any input.

  Annabelle took in a sharp breath. Mrs. Thurgood must not have read the advice column—she had sent it straight to print. Yet what really knocked the air out of her lungs was the new attachment that scrolled across her screen:

  KNOX MURPHY’S PLANE FOUND

  Annabelle slowly read the facts she already knew from the sheriff. But here they were, about to appear in the evening and then morning papers for all of Marsh Cove and South Carolina to see, for Internet readers and the Associated Press to find.

  Annabelle dropped her head into her hands. “Oh, Knox. Sweet, sweet Knox, what were you doing?”

  The room seemed to spin and Annabelle closed her eyes until footsteps entered the room. “Mom?”

  Annabelle lifted her head. “Yes?” Keeley stood before her with a coat in one hand, car keys in her other.

  “I’m headed out.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  Keeley laughed and Annabelle marveled at the unknown child before her. “Yes, I am,” Keeley said.

  Annabelle stood, took four steps toward her daughter and grabbed the car keys from her hand. “You cannot skip school and then take the car. What is wrong with you?”


  “Nothing is wrong with me. But there is definitely something wrong with this family—Dad was running off with some woman.”

  Annabelle dropped her hands, gripped them behind her back. “Is that what you think?”

  “Isn’t it what you think, Mom? Come on, really.”

  “No, that is not what I think.”

  “Please.” Keeley rolled her eyes. “Don’t be a fool. He didn’t want any of us, and he was running away with some woman.”

  Annabelle shook her head at hearing her worst fear coming out of her daughter’s mouth. “We’ve been through this together before, Keeley. Your dad did not willfully leave us. He did not choose to leave us. His plane crashed and he died.”

  Keeley backed a step away from her. “Yeah, I finally believed all that shit you and the counselor told me. Now I see he really was running away. He might not have meant to die, but he did mean to leave. Lucky Jake, away at college. I wish I was gone and didn’t have to see and hear all this.”

  “Do not curse. And no, he wasn’t leaving us. Just because we don’t know why he was on that plane with that woman doesn’t mean there isn’t a good reason.”

  “Mother, do you hear yourself? Quoting the same old stupid thing my whole life: ‘Just because we don’t know the reason doesn’t mean there isn’t one.’ I am so out of here.” Keeley tried to grab the car keys back from Annabelle, then dropped her face into her hands and attempted, unsuccessfully, to stem the flow of her tears.

  Keeley’s words threatened to open a drain at the bottom of Annabelle’s soul. She wrapped her arms around her daughter. “Oh, Keeley.”

  The mystery overwhelmed Annabelle—how giving herself away in love filled her up with more to give. To love her child was to offer part of her heart while hers grew larger. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she swore she could feel Keeley breathing, or hear her heartbeat.