The Art of Keeping Secrets

by Patti Callahan Henry

  Sofie understood that like animals in the wild who recognize their own species, Bedford would talk to this professor in his matching clothes and wire-rim glasses.

  “Hello.” Bedford held out his hand, shook the other man’s hand. “What do you teach?”

  Their voices blended in Sofie’s head until she couldn’t separate the words one from the other. They talked about curriculum and whom they might know in each other’s universities.

  Sofie stared at them: all her stories would soon be futile, insignificant. Her heartbeat was erratic and words she’d stored in an airtight place in her soul now scattered through her mind in random order: hurricane; Ariadne; beating; father; Knox; never tell; Parker; shattered bones.

  What had she unleashed when she’d told Jake about her mother? Her hands flew to cover her face and she whispered behind her palms, “Mother”: a single plea in a desperate moment.

  Telling even one person could have made her vulnerable to being found. She’d made the worst mistake of her life.

  She ran upstairs, changed into jeans, yanked a T-shirt over her head and grabbed car keys off the dresser. She ran down the back stairs and was in her car before she registered the words Bedford hollered after her. “Stop, stop now, Sofie.” She had reached the harbor before the words had meaning and before her body had any inclination to do as he said.

  The parking lot of the research center was empty except for the few cars of the board members who were there for the meeting. She glanced around for John’s pickup truck. Yes.

  She parked the car, ran to the docks and hit the splintered wood before she realized that she wasn’t wearing shoes. Her bare feet pounded against the planks as she ran to the end of the dock, jumped onto John’s boat. “John,” she hollered.

  His face rose from belowdecks. “Well, top of the morning to you, Sofie Milstead.”

  “Hi.” She smiled at him, crouched down. “I was hoping I could talk you into taking me out this morning. I just discovered I have a few free hours, and it is so beautiful. I’d love to take a quick dive.”

  He tilted his head. “When was the last time you dove?”

  “Four days ago.”

  He wiped his hand on a greasy cloth and climbed on top with her. “You don’t look like you’re ready to go diving.”

  “I can be in less than five minutes. Please.”

  “You know they”—he motioned toward the research center—“like you to book the dive so they know who is out when.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t want to interrupt their board meeting, do you?”

  He scowled at her. “Yeah, like I want to head into that room.”

  “Okay.” She jumped up from her crouched position. “I’ll be back in five. . . .” As she ran toward the research center, she calculated that it would take Bedford five minutes to react to her rapid departure, five to get Michael Harley out of the house and ten to drive to the research center, where he would assume she’d gone. She had less than ten minutes left.

  The self-closing door swung back on its hinges as Sofie ran down the hall to the locker room, where she kept her bathing suit and diving gear. She unzipped her pants as she ran, entered the locker room while she yanked her shirt over her head. In a conscious attempt at sanity, she emptied her mind of all thoughts except one: Hurry.

  In moments, she jumped onto the deck of the boat. John stared at her with a furrowed brow. “You sure you got everything? Seems like that was mighty quick. You couldn’t have checked your equipment that fast. . . .”

  “John,” she spoke in a slow whisper, “please go. I promise I won’t dive until I check the equipment. Just get us out on the water, and I’ll do everything I’m supposed to do.”

  He nodded, moved toward the controls. Sofie held her breath until she felt dizzy; then she gulped in fresh sea air as the engine sputtered to life. “Grab the ropes, please,” John called.

  “Sure thing.” Sofie unwrapped the back nylon ties from the cleats as John did the front ones. Then he pushed the throttle forward, and the boat moved across the water into the harbor.

  Sofie sat down and dropped her head into her hands. Although she tried to stem the sudden flow of tears, she couldn’t. Subdued sobs rose with a will and force of their own.

  A hand came to rest on her shoulder; she looked up at John. “I’m fine. I promise. Just give me one minute.”

  “Did he hit you?”

  “What?” Sofie took a deep breath, then glanced at the shoreline, where John motioned with his hand. Bedford stood on the seawall; he waved in frantic motions and his mouth formed a mute round “O.”

  “Oh, no. No,” she said, wiped at her cheeks. “Nothing like that.”

  John stared down at her, his brown eyes concerned. “Okay.” “Okay.”

  Sofie faced away from Bedford so she wouldn’t be tempted to go back, to make him calm down until his face became warm with love and approval.

  “Do I need to turn the boat around?” John asked, moved toward the steering wheel.

  “No, whatever he needs can wait until I’ve done my dive.”

  “Are you sure you’re feeling okay?”

  “I don’t think a few tears make a dive impossible.” Sofie attempted to force lightness into her voice.

  She checked the oxygen level, the tank and the regulator. She called out each checkpoint to reassure John that she was in control and thinking clearly. This was what she needed right now: to delve beneath the surface and listen to the song of the dolphins. She needed this more than she needed air, water, love, food, even Bedford: her consuming urgency grew.

  The flippers snapped onto her feet; she fit the mask to her face and took a couple of breaths from the regulator. She gave a thumbs-up to John and bent over the bow.

  “How much farther do you want to go?” he asked.

  She wanted to tell him miles and a millennium away from here, but she looked over her shoulder and said calmly, “Let’s just go about a half mile into the sound. Then I’ll begin to look for the dolphins.”

  “They’ll find you. They always do. It’s weird, if you ask me.” He revved the engine.

  Waves splashed against the bow in a rhythmic dance. Entranced, Sofie leaned over, then banged on the side of the boat to attract any dolphins that might be nearby.

  John pulled the boat into a tidal creek that Sofie knew cut through to the sea, not the way he usually went. She glanced up at him. “Where’re you going?”

  “When I was fishing here yesterday, there was a pod running up on the bank, almost beaching themselves, eating fish like they were never gonna get enough. Frantic almost. I’ve seen that twice before. It’s beautiful. Thought they might still be back here for you. . . .”

  Sofie nodded. “Strand feeding,” she said. “They chase the fish onto the banks, where they can catch them easier. Lazy bums.” She laughed. “You know, the only place they’ve ever been seen doing that is here and around Hilton Head. And only at low tide.”

  Slowly, surely, Sofie’s panic lightened, the memory of the morning’s events fading like day into twilight.

  The boat purred as John navigated the tidal river. Sun teased along the marsh edges in a silver-flash amusement of light and green growth. Tiny fish jumped near the spartina, causing pockmarks on the water, as if rain were falling from a clear sky. Warmth traveled up Sofie’s spine, along the back of her head, where the strap of the mask gripped her scalp.

  Droplets of water hit her face, and an alligator raised its knobby head and stared at her. She shivered at the sight of his cold eyes and stealthlike movements. Once, she’d been in a boat with her mother—the small Boston Whaler they kept on the far shore—when a pair of alligators swam past them toward the marsh. They’d stopped and blinked their bright eyes at Sofie and Liddy. The large one, lumpy and green, its tail slithering like a snake through the water, stared at them as it opened its mouth, moved forward in a movement so quick that the deed was over before Sofie understood that the alligator had just eaten a turtle sunning itsel
f on the mud.

  When the mouth snapped shut, when the teeth came down and the crunching sound echoed across the water, Liddy grabbed Sofie’s hand and squeezed it so tight that Sofie felt her finger bones rub against one another. When Sofie had pulled her hand away, telling her mother she was hurting her, Liddy had begun to cry silent tears of apology.

  Sofie had asked why the alligators scared her mother so badly when they couldn’t get in the boat. Liddy answered, “The one in the front—the bigger one—looks just like a bad man before he strikes. The alligators and that man usually attack at night, but you have to be careful all the time, be ever vigilant.”

  Sofie had whispered the only question that mattered to her. “Mother, does the alligator ever attack and eat the dolphins?”

  Her mother had wrapped her arms around Sofie. “Of course they don’t eat dolphins,” Liddy said. But for the first time in her life, Sofie had not believed her mother. Terror had crawled into Sofie’s soul at that moment and had lived there ever since.

  Until that day on the water with her mother, it had seemed that her mother’s stories were make-believe, equivalent to the boogeyman under the bed. But the alligators made the danger authentic and palpable. Sofie never forgot.

  Now the alligator disappeared below the surface and slithered into the marsh grass. Sofie shivered, motioned for John to take the boat out to open water at the mouth of the river. He gunned forward, and they rode the tide out toward the sea.

  John stopped the boat, came to the bow, where Sofie stared into the gray-blue depths, picked a barnacle off the side of a buoy.

  “Ready? I’ll anchor here,” he said.

  “Okay.” She stood, took in enough of the sea’s vista to wash the image of the alligators from her mind. “Let’s just float for a bit until we see a pod. Don’t anchor yet, okay?”

  “Okay.” He took a step back, and then laughed.

  “What?” Sofie screwed up her face, yanked at her mask strap.

  John pointed to the water; Sofie looked over her shoulder. The gray-silver burnished back of a dolphin rose from the surface. Joy billowed upward in Sofie’s chest. She swung her legs around, gave John a thumbs-up and fell backward into the water.

  The sea surrounded her, took her in as she knew it would. She sank with each breath until she swam evenly and without effort just ten feet below the waves, where she heard the dolphins the best. She didn’t recognize this pod—but it didn’t matter since she didn’t have her recording equipment with her.

  Some pods never left the rivers, yet this one headed toward open water as she followed it. She felt a kinship with the pods that stayed inside the winding rivers and tidal creeks of the marsh and barrier islands, where everything one needed was within the safety and comfort of the known world; danger lay out in the mysterious, unfamiliar expanse of the ocean.

  The mammals called to one another in high-pitched squeals; Sofie craved to know what they were saying. Were they talking to her? This need to understand them was a constant ache that moved through her body like the flu. She followed them to deeper water, listening, touching, diving below and above them, lost in their sounds and silken bodies.

  An adolescent dolphin poked at Sofie’s side with its blunt nose as if it needed or wanted something. Sofie touched its face, ran her hand down its side until she came to the fluke and flattened her palm against its flesh.

  She knew she was crying by the way her mask fogged, by the sounds of her breath in the regulator as the pod pushed forward and she followed. A boat revved in the distance, the engine muffled. A chorus of clicks and whistles filled the air, and the pod dove straight down. Sofie smiled beneath her mask, the rubber digging into her cheeks.

  She had no proof, but somehow she knew they had all warned one another of the danger posed by the boat ahead, by the nets that would be trailing it. Still far enough away to be safe, she took long breaths of oxygen, lunged deeper with them.

  From where she swam, the crests and dips of the sea-floor looked like the mountains of Colorado from the sky. This was what people on land never understood—they thought of the aquatic world as something separate from themselves, apart from the dry, oxygen-laden surface, but the land swept the oceanic floor just as the crests and valleys of dry earth.

  She’d first seen the earth from the sky when Knox Murphy had taken her and her mother to Colorado on his private plane. She couldn’t have been more than twelve years old, it had been twilight and she remembered staring out at the glorious mountains below her. The image had embedded itself deeply in her mind so that she could still picture it.

  The single-engine Cessna hummed, and in that moment Sofie had experienced a peace that she rarely found any other time in her young life. Knox Murphy sat in front of Sofie with his earphones on, his hands twisting instruments. Her mother, seated next to Knox, had leaned her head back on the seat and stared out the window with a calm smile, then patted his leg and mouthed, Thank you.

  Sofie, caught up in the moment, had never wanted it to end. The mountains below them, the sky above them, all in a quiet place where no one could find them, ask them questions. Knox wouldn’t have to leave. Her mother wouldn’t be silent for days or even weeks afterward, painting as though she were mad, half crazed with the need to capture a shell or sea oat in perfect detail.

  Maybe in the beginning of her dive training, the recollection of how she felt that day in the plane had drawn her to the below-water life: it was the same world that she saw below the gilt-edged clouds. The familiarity and peace she found were only part of why she belonged below the water more than above it—the dolphins were the other part.

  Sofie and the dolphins were deeper now. The water teemed with tiny fish, shrimp going out with the tide. Sofie followed the pod as it began to feed on a school of menhaden. She looked down at her depth watch, and calculated how long she’d been there. A monstrous realization struck her: she’d made a cardinal mistake—she’d lost track of time.

  Somehow in her sorrow, fear and remembering, she’d forgotten to watch the clock and oxygen level. She glanced at the floating gauge and saw the needle almost buried on the large red E. She’d once had a dream like this, awakened herself as she grappled with the quilt, clawed at her empty bed.

  This was not a dream. How had she gotten in this situation when she knew better? When it had never happened before? At some point she’d been crying, gulping air in bigger and deeper breaths than usual. The adult male dolphin swam back toward her, nudged her bottom with his nose. I know. I’m going.

  Sofie kicked upward, too fast, she knew. She attempted to take slow, even breaths to save the oxygen she had left. Even if she ran out, she could make it to the top while holding her breath, she told herself as she rose. She mustn’t go up too fast or she’d get the bends. She’d moved too far away from her own boat, from John, who was probably frantic by now at her failure to return.

  The surface came into view, shimmering and light-filled. She took another slow breath, filled her entire body as if with helium, full and expansive. A peculiar calm overtook her mind and body; a tranquillity that told her nothing really mattered. She slowed her kicks and floated; she’d rise eventually.

  Images moved through her mind. She saw her mother smiling, Knox Murphy standing at their front door holding a box of her favorite crab cakes, the three of them together on the beach at twilight while Sofie collected shells in a tin bucket. Sofie smiled at these beautiful images and wanted to stay with them, find more of them. There was a storehouse of fluorescent memories in her mind, and she wanted to access every single one of them more than she wanted to rise to that surface. Her regulator must be wrong—there was no way she could be out of compressed air so quickly.

  She looked up toward the surface and thought it curious that the bottom of a boat dented the smooth top of her world. Breath released into the regulator, and she heard the hissing of empty sound just as she remembered another moment. She’d been about nine years old, and they’d still lived in Marsh Cove; she
was in the back of the art studio making a sketch of a house. Her mother was in the front of the store talking to a customer, laughing and explaining the technique of another artist whose work was displayed in the window. Sofie shifted her gaze from her drawing. She’d just made a perfect front door and wanted to show her mother.

  Sofie had run out into the main room and hollered for her mother, the paper held in her hand like a flag. Liddy turned around and her face looked like a stranger’s. Instinctively, Sofie dropped the paper and ran to her mother, crying out to know what was wrong.

  Her mother had put her hand on top of Sofie’s head, leaned down and whispered to return to the back room and do her homework. Everything was just fine out here. But it wasn’t fine; the man who stood at the front desk was asking too many questions.

  The sea’s surface was too far away.

  Knox couldn’t stay with them.

  Her head hurt and the hissing sound grew louder.

  A small boy came into the studio with Knox—Jake—and they hid together in the back room while their parents whispered and Sofie heard her mother cry.

  The dolphins poked at her with force now—nudging her more than she wanted. Sofie reached down and touched the top of one dolphin’s head, ran her hand along the silken flesh, or she thought she did, but she couldn’t move her hand; her body wouldn’t obey her.

  She tilted her head at the animal—it was Delphin; he’d come.

  She closed her eyes because she had to, because her body forced them shut. Then she heard it—the soft double click followed by a squeal that she had come to know as Delphin’s greeting.

  Double click. Squeal.

  Double click. Squeal.

  Her mother stood in the front of the studio. Twilight surrounded her as she faced the easel, her face smiling, a paintbrush in her hand.

  Sunlight fell through the water in thin strips.

  Double click. Squeal.

  My name, Sofie thought, a double click and a squeal. She sank into this knowledge: they did know her. Wasn’t that all that mattered?