The Art of Keeping Secrets

by Patti Callahan Henry

  She added up the days: they hadn’t seen each other for seven weeks, longer than anytime she’d ever been apart from him before they met.

  The cool grass felt good against her cheek, and she faded into it, let the tears take her longing for Knox Murphy into the earth, away from her. Oh, if only it could work that way, if only she could release this need for him into the dirt, but the ground was still saturated with rainwater and seemed unable to absorb more than it already had.

  She rolled over onto her back, spread her arms and legs, felt a dull pain where glass had cut into the arch of her foot. The branches above her were like a net across the sky, also catching whatever she wanted to release and sending it right back down to settle into her soul. The Spanish moss danced in a swaying motion that made her dizzy again. She closed her eyes.

  The earth shook with subtle steps, careful steps. She didn’t want to see her mother, her father, the Murphys; she didn’t want to explain why she’d run away.

  But when the footsteps stopped at her side, she knew before she opened her eyes that it was Knox who stood beside her. He knelt down, touched her foot. “You’re bleeding, Belle.”

  She opened her eyes. “I know,” she said.

  He lay down next to her, took her hand and held it in silence. Long moments passed, the only sounds the wind, whispering moss and, far off, frogs singing to the approaching twilight. Then he spoke into her ear. “I’m sorry.”

  His sweet voice, his lips against her hair and his hand on hers released the withheld emotions, and she turned toward him. “For what?”

  “I know these have been rough weeks for you and your family, and I wasn’t here.”

  “The weeks were rough before the hurricane, Knox.” She touched his face, his familiar face.

  “I know, Belle. I know. But we agreed, didn’t we?”

  “Yes, we did.”

  He ran his hand through her hair, down her spine and then around to her middle. He held his hand to her stomach while they faced each other on the grass.

  His eyes asked a question and she answered it for him. “Yes,” she said, knowing that someone who had held her for years would notice those weeks of growth on her small frame.

  He seemed to hold his breath as he asked quietly, “Yes, what?”

  She closed her eyes, not wanting to say the words, not wanting to make him do or say something he didn’t want to do or say.

  “Knox?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Did you come out here to get back together or just to say goodbye?”

  His hand cupped her abdomen, stayed there. “What do you mean?”

  “Today, right now, when you came after me, said you’re sorry—was that to say goodbye?”

  He pulled her to him so she couldn’t see his face. “Oh, Annabelle Marie Clark. I’ve loved you since you were practically a child.”

  “And now?” she whispered over his shoulder.

  “And now . . . you carry my child, don’t you?”

  She pushed him away. “Knox, you have to answer me. You have to tell me—did you come to say goodbye or to return? Tell me. . . .” Her voice cracked, broke on the last word, into a million pieces.

  “I’m here. I’m here.”

  “I know you’re here, but why?”

  “This is where I live. This is my family.” He pulled her close. “My family.”

  And she didn’t have the will to ask again—to discover if he had truly meant to return to her, or if he had only now decided, with the news she still hadn’t spoken out loud. He stood, pulled her to her feet. “I love you, Belle. I always have. I always will. There are a few things I have to do. Trust me.”

  She nodded. He dropped his forehead to hers, kissed her, then ran back toward the house. She watched him and marveled how they had just had an entire discussion about their future with so few words. It had always been this way with them—understanding without words, without argument.

  But had he come to say goodbye or to return to her? She would never ask again because the answer would never be truer than it would have been before he touched her stomach, before his eyes opened wide with knowledge.

  His body disappeared behind the hill, on the other side of the farm, and she walked back toward the Murphy home, repeating his words with each step. “Trust me, trust me, trust me. . . .”

  Twenty-four hours—one day that felt like a year, a lifetime. He’d said Trust me and disappeared behind a rise in the land and had not yet returned. Annabelle sat on the edge of the bed, bent over her knees, wanting more than anything to be in her own bedroom, getting dressed for a party or date, for church or a luncheon. She wanted to be doing anything other than sitting on the bed waiting for the nausea to subside and wondering once more where Knox had gone.

  She stood and went down to the kitchen, where they were calling her name for dinner. No one had asked what happened between her and Knox; no one had pushed the subject or inferred that she had made him leave again. There were other pressing concerns.

  Her father pushed open the screen door. He was covered in mud and moss. “Hi, Daddy,” she said. “What in the world have you been doing?”

  “Just met with the contractor,” he said, sat on a wooden chair at the Murphys’ kitchen table.

  “And?” Annabelle came and sat next to him, took her dad’s hand in her own. Her mother sat opposite them.

  He looked at both of them, then at Mrs. Murphy. “I cannot thank you enough for your hospitality and the way you’ve taken care of me and my family. We cannot intrude on you any longer.” He turned to his wife and daughter. “We’ll have to find somewhere else to live for a while—the house will have to be torn down. The foundation is completely rotten. The contractor said that the house probably wasn’t in very good shape to begin with because of its age, and that the water and mold ate through what was once worth saving. Insurance will cover rebuilding, but it will take a long time, at least a year, and we can’t stay here that long. It’s too much of an imposition.” He turned to Mrs. Murphy. “Our son, Charlie, is coming home to help us for a few months. He took a leave of absence from work. . . .”

  Mrs. Murphy came to sit at the table then, placed her hand on Grace’s. “I know you’ll want some privacy, but it has been more than a pleasure having you here. I didn’t realize how lonely I’d been until you came.”

  “Daddy, I’m so sorry about the house. Can we build the exact same one?” Annabelle asked.

  “Once the foundation is ruined, you can never build the exact same one, but we can try and make it look similar. Make it feel the same.”

  Annabelle’s mother lifted her hands. “As long as we’re all in it, it is exactly the same. Home is not about the stuff. I might have thought that at one time, but it is never, ever about the stuff. It is about the people.”

  Mrs. Murphy rose, placed dinner on the table. Annabelle had become accustomed to this routine the way a child becomes dependent on a lullaby and a back rub before sleep: the call to dinner, the sitting down at the handmade pine trestle table with the mismatched ladder-back chairs, the linoleum floor with the single crack below Annabelle’s chair, where she ran her toe.

  A place was set at the far end for Knox. Annabelle didn’t know if this was because his mother knew he was coming, or hoped he would show up.

  Trust me.

  Mr. and Mrs. Murphy grinned at Annabelle simultaneously. “Is something wrong?” She touched her face, her hair.

  “No, dear. Let’s eat.”

  “I love your cooking, Mrs. Murphy, but I’m just not very hungry tonight.” Annabelle stood. Her chair scraped across the floor. “I think I’ll go lie down.”

  “Please sit, my dear,” Mr. Murphy said.

  And because Mr. Murphy had never ordered her to do anything, she sat. “Okay,” she said, glanced at her own dad, who shrugged his shoulders.

  Mrs. Murphy passed the ham and potatoes, then the green beans and sweet tea. Silence blanketed the table with a humid quilt of unsaid words. R
ain began to fall onto the metal roof, pings of intermittent drops that quickly became a full cacophony.

  Then the screen door scraped open and Knox walked into the room, grinning and shaking rain off his coat and umbrella. “Hey, sorry I’m a bit late. . . . Weather hit around Awendaw.”

  All five faces looked up at him in question, but none more than Annabelle’s wide eyes.

  He walked toward her, then knelt. “Annabelle Marie Clark,” he said, “all the loss and death have made me realize that nothing is more important than those we love.”

  Annabelle stared down at him. “I love you, too. Get up off the floor, silly.”

  “Because you and the people in this room are more valuable than any I’ve ever known, I wanted to ask this in front of the entire family. Belle, will you marry me? Be my wife? Stay with me forever and build a life with me?”

  All the words she’d ever dreamed of hearing were being said, and the moment didn’t seem real. She wanted this proposal to be more authentic, more alive than anything she’d ever experienced, but a surreal feeling came over her.

  She dropped to her knees next to him. “Are you sure? Are you really sure? I don’t want you to . . .”

  He placed his finger over her lips, pulled a diamond ring from his pocket and offered it to her in an open palm. “Don’t say anything except yes.” The ring was his grandmother’s—he’d been to the safety-deposit box to retrieve it with his parents’ permission.

  “Yes,” she whispered, fell onto his chest.

  They married almost immediately beneath the oak tree where he’d found and held her that night he discovered the life growing inside her body. They blamed the hurricane for the rushed wedding, for their sudden desire to live together. There were so many things one could blame on the cursed hurricane.

  Annabelle became Knox Murphy’s wife and never dwelled on the events that immediately preceded his proposal; she merely relied on the love they held for each other in the years that came before, and all those that followed.

  TEN

  ANNABELLE MURPHY

  On the road to Newboro, Annabelle’s anger returned. She thought she had conquered this particular emotion a year ago—rage at Knox for leaving them, for dying while flying a plane she’d begged him not to fly. Now her memory of the weeks when he was lost to her cut through her mind like a jagged knife. Had those days been long enough for him to have an affair, to have fallen in love with someone else?

  Annabelle banged the steering wheel, stepped on the gas until her SUV crept toward ninety miles an hour in the middle of the night somewhere on a bleak road in the Carolinas. Blue lights lit up behind her and her anger spiked. Damn!

  She pulled the car over, and a policeman appeared at her window, shining a flashlight into her face. She held up a hand to cover her eyes.

  “Driver’s license, insurance, registration,” he said.

  Annabelle rolled down the window, reached for her purse on the passenger seat, yanked the license and insurance card from her wallet, then dug the registration out of the glove compartment. She handed them to the bald man in uniform.

  He looked at the documents, then at her. “Do you have any idea how fast you were going?”

  She shook her head and felt the sting of tears and fatigue behind her eyes; she hadn’t been pulled over in twenty years.

  He leaned down to the window. “Ma’am, are you okay?”

  She nodded. “Yes, I guess I just . . .”

  “You were going eighty-eight miles an hour.”

  “Oh.” Annabelle reached a hand to her mouth. “I’ve never gone that fast. I’m so sorry.”

  “Where are you headed in such a hurry?”

  “I am trying to get to Newboro, North Carolina.” Annabelle stared out into the dark night. Her lips quivered as righteous anger and indignation ran out of her as though she’d opened a drain, leaving her limp, exhausted while this policeman stood at her window and held her papers. She was suddenly unsure if she could drive one more mile. She glanced at the clock: three a.m.

  “You still have a few hours to go until you get there, ma’am. You need to slow down before you hurt yourself or someone else.”

  Annabelle leaned back on the seat. “Do you know where the nearest hotel is?” she asked.

  He handed back her documents. “Follow me to the next exit. There’s a Hampton Inn.”

  Annabelle looked at him. “No ticket?”

  He laughed. “When was the last time you got a ticket?”

  “Probably twenty years ago.” She smiled.

  “Ah, hell, I don’t want to break that kind of record. Follow me.” He walked back to his car.

  Annabelle pulled the car into the traffic lane, followed the county police car to the next exit, where HAMPTON INN blinked in neon lights beside the highway. When she pulled into a parking space, she wasn’t sure she had enough strength to get out of the car, check in at the front desk and then drag her bag to a room. Examining her and Knox’s life over the past six hours had been more exhausting than running a marathon.

  The police car pulled up next to her as she climbed out. “Be safe, Mrs. Murphy.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you.”

  She had an odd thought as he drove off—what would it feel like to be with a man who didn’t know her now and hadn’t known her since kindergarten, a man who hadn’t heard all about her and her children, and wouldn’t look at her with pity because her husband had gone down in a plane, leaving her all alone?

  She checked into room 623, crawled into bed fully dressed and fell asleep before one more thought could carry her down the spiral pathway of doubt.

  Daylight filtered through the blinds, hit Annabelle’s face. Confused, she squinted into the light and lay still, trying to remember where she was and how she’d arrived there: somewhere in North Carolina on the way to Newboro. She rose from the bed, an ache stretching along her back from the drive and the unfamiliar mattress. She walked to the window, threw open the curtains to look at her view of the parking lot.

  She picked up the folder on the desk and saw that she was in Holly Ridge, North Carolina. The clock blinked seven a.m.

  She drank the instant coffee provided in the room while out loud she talked herself through what she would do next. She’d call Keeley and Jake and soothe their worries about where she was. Then she’d call Shawn. And then what?

  She’d decide when she got there.

  The bridge to Newboro spanned a river with the deep basin of a marina, the quaint town below. She’d only been here once before—to pick up Jake from sailing camp—and then she’d been in such a rush to get home, she hadn’t stopped to appreciate the outrageous beauty of this place and its harbor, homes and boats. Now the possibility that she’d lived her entire life too fast, without noticing important things, filled her with regret.

  When she’d spoken to Jake he’d been concerned, but quiet. Keeley hadn’t cared about her mother’s absence as long as Gamma didn’t try to boss her around.

  Annabelle turned off the bridge and into a town surrounded by water. Public parking was available along the waterside streets; she pulled into a spot, shoved coins in the meter without any idea what to do next except get out and walk around.

  Live oaks lined the roadways through the middle of town, as though the trees had been planted a hundred years ago with just this day in mind. They framed the town square while midday sun filtered through the Spanish moss. Bed-and-breakfasts in hundred-year-old homes were scattered up and down the block. There was an art studio, a bookstore located next to a coffee shop and a corner drugstore that claimed to be the first to sell Pepsi. Annabelle entered the coffee shop and paid for a large black coffee and toasted bagel with cream cheese to go.

  She walked out onto the sidewalk, then across the street to where a wrought-iron fence surrounded a massive stone church. She stood eating outside the gate and stared at the stone building. The words on an iron plaque described the history of a town founded before the signing of the Declaration of
Independence, proclaiming with pride that this town was older than the country itself.

  People were walking into the church, and Annabelle realized it was Sunday. She marveled at all these people believing and having faith when her world was falling away.

  A man and woman passed, smiled and nodded at her. Annabelle swallowed the last of her hasty breakfast and followed them into the sanctuary. Maybe her faith would be fortified in this stone structure, in a place older than the country, than her marriage, than her doubts. She went in and sat in the back row, where she could see most of the congregation without being seen herself.

  A slight, tall young woman entered the sanctuary. Her presence caused a tingling in Annabelle’s neck. She was a fragile blonde with pale skin and a haunted expression. She clung to the arm of a man who looked to be her father; he led her into the far left pew. Annabelle couldn’t take her eyes off this woman.

  In the way people know someone is staring at them, the woman turned to Annabelle. Their gazes held longer than a stranger’s would and a deep chill, not caused by the air-conditioning but originating deeper inside, ran through Annabelle. She had once known this woman. She closed her eyes, mentally scrolled through time until she reached ten years ago. Her eyes flew open—this young woman looked like Liddy Parker, but younger. Liddy Parker had once owned the art studio in Marsh Cove, and then abruptly moved away.

  Disorientation overcame Annabelle. Liddy Parker and her daughter, Sofie, had moved here? Had she known that? Had Knox ever mentioned them again? Or was fatigue making her delusional?

  Liddy had had a young, beautiful daughter who had been . . . ten when they’d moved. Recognition came in a single knowing: this woman was Sofie Parker all grown-up.

  The blonde looked away, as if Annabelle had said her name out loud; then she whispered to the man next to her, rose and walked out a side door. Annabelle scooted from the pew, ran out the front door and around the church to the outdoor courtyard, where she had stood only moments ago.