The article about Liddy’s identity and presence on the plane was, of course, front-page news in most of the local papers in North and South Carolina: Mystery Woman Identified as Ex-Artist from Newboro. The fact that Knox was taking the artist to visit her sick mother was also printed. If there was talk of Knox and Liddy having an affair, Annabelle never heard it. She was immersed in her job, her memories, her conviction in Knox’s faithfulness.
The book she’d started five years ago began to speak to her in soft tones of seduction. Annabelle wrote a few paragraphs a day—like sneaking a tryst with a lover. She barely allowed herself to think, I am writing a book, but when the thought crossed her mind, a thrill ran through her. Soon a few pages gathered inside her Word file and on the side of her desk. She hadn’t read through them, only kept adding to them. Sometimes she would fold the laundry or walk through the grocery store and realize that she was done with her tasks, yet the entire time she’d been thinking about the archaeologist or the man she loved in the page she’d last written.
Annabelle began to covet her personal writing time, and her time alone with Jake and Keeley. She didn’t question Jake about his future, just enjoyed his presence at home. She ignored her friends in such a sweet and quiet way that they barely noticed she was avoiding them until one night they sent Cooper over to find her. The house was still and warm while Annabelle proofread her advice column about a woman who wanted to know if she should allow her son-in-law to borrow money to buy her daughter a birthday present. The columns had taken on a more honest tone, and Mrs. Thurgood was sending more difficult questions, those involving not simple etiquette but tough choices with far-reaching consequences, questions of honesty and trust, deceit and betrayal, the breaking and mending of family bonds.
A knock disrupted Annabelle’s thoughts, and she looked up from her laptop. Cooper walked into the room without waiting for her to open the door. “Annabelle Murphy, get up. We are nothing without you.” He grinned, but held his hands behind his back in that nervous way he’d had since childhood.
“Hey, Cooper,” she said, closed her laptop and went to kiss his cheek. “How are you?”
“Seriously, Belle, we miss you. The dinner party at our house is going on right now, and they’ve sent me to get you.”
She shook her head. “You’re sweet, but really, I don’t want to go.”
He sat on the couch next to the dented space she’d left. She settled in beside him. He shifted his weight and tilted his head. “Have you cut us out? Have you decided that you can’t be around your dearest friends?”
“That’s not it. I just want some time alone with Keeley and Jake.”
He glanced around the house. “They’re not even home, Belle.”
“And myself,” she said. “I need some time alone with me. I don’t want to hear what everyone has to say, and I don’t have anything to say to anyone.”
“Don’t you think that’s a bit selfish?”
“Oh, Cooper, I don’t mean for it to be. I’m so sorry. I would never, ever want to hurt y’all. I’ve just been trying to . . . sort through how I feel, get my family’s feet back under us. I love all of you.” She reached out and took his hand.
“What if we need you and not just the other way around?”
Annabelle rubbed her face with her free hand, remembering that she hadn’t put on any makeup that day, that her hair fell free and wild over her shoulders and white shirt. “You all do not need me.” She smiled. “I’d like to think that you do, and it’s sweet of you to say so, but you don’t. You have Christine. Shawn has all of you. Mae has Frank.”
“That is ridiculous. We all need all kinds of people, not just one or two.”
His words held a truth she couldn’t fully see yet, and as though he’d written them on his forehead, she squinted at him. “ ‘We all need all kinds of people,’ ” she repeated his words, then stood up. “Cooper, I promise I’ll be back, but not tonight. Not now.”
“Christine thinks you’re . . . unavailable because you think we’re hiding something from you.”
“No, I don’t think that. I might have once, but I don’t now.”
“We’re not. Listen, we’re all just as hurt and confused as you are. Everyone is struggling with this . . . not just you.”
“I know.”
“Shawn quit his job—did you know that? Your friends’ lives are still going on.”
Annabelle shrank into her seat. “No, I didn’t know that. How could he . . . not tell me?”
Cooper raised an eyebrow. “How? Telegraph?”
She attempted a smile. “Okay, I get it. I’ll do my very best to get out of this shell because I love every single one of you. And how are you?” she asked.
“I’m hurt, Annabelle. Hurt that one of my best friends never told me what he was doing. That he lied about going on a hunting trip alone. I’m sick of the whole thing and want us all to just be the way we were.”
“That’s the problem. We’ve all kept secrets. And they’ve changed us.”
Cooper stared at her for a long time. “What secrets are you talking about?”
“We all have them,” Annabelle said, and felt a moment when she wanted to release one of them. “Did you know that I was pregnant when Knox and I married?”
“No, but does it matter?”
“It matters because of the motivation. Maybe, just maybe he wouldn’t have married me if I hadn’t been carrying his child. Or maybe he would have. Either way—he did marry me, and we never told anyone.”
“What do you want me to say, Belle? We’re all best friends. We need each other. We need you.”
“Thanks, Cooper.” She hugged him goodbye, walked him to the door.
He left, but looked over his shoulder as he went down the porch steps. “What are you waiting for?”
She shrugged. “I’m not sure. Thanks for being such a good friend. I promise I’ll be part of y’all’s life again.”
“We love you, Belle,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “I love all of you, too.”
He drove off in his car, and Annabelle said the word again: “Love.” It was a word that had once seemed simple in her known world, yet now the definition expanded in its implications, in its possibilities.
TWENTY-TWO
SOFIE MILSTEAD
Sofie focused on her work, spending long hours at the research center as the weeks passed. Every spare moment she swam with Delphin—asking him to speak to her, to tell her what to do now. She felt suspended between two worlds, the past and the future, and she was unable to cross the divide between time and space.
All this time, Jake’s e-mails, funny and full of the life she longed for, came across her screen. This was safe, this e-mailing. She wanted to tell him the truth, but she wrestled with how to reveal it, when to tell him, then again whether to tell him at all.
Some things were best left alone. Hadn’t her mother always told her that? When she asked about finding her father, or the past, or the future, “Some things are just best left alone,” Liddy would say with a kiss and a smile.
Telling Jake the full story was like that—wasn’t it? But somehow Jake seemed the person least likely to be “best left alone.” Everything in her wanted to do everything with him except leave him alone. Oh, she tried. Sometimes she went three or four days without e-mailing him. Then she’d run in from work and find a message, and her heart would fill to the edges at the sight of his name on the screen.
They played a game: Jake would e-mail her a myth recast in present-day names and circumstances and make her guess what myth it was, what gods and goddesses the stories were about. Sometimes it would take a day or two, but she always figured it out. When she tried this game back at him a couple of times, he always had the answer in less than five minutes.
They communicated about everything and nothing—his search for a new school, her research on the dolphins, the weather, the equinox coming next month. They did not mention Bedford, Liddy or Annabelle or even h
is sister, Keeley. How long could they go on pretending these people weren’t part of the story?
After the FAA had contacted her about her mother’s remains, Sofie had taken her mother’s ashes to the seawall and said goodbye one last time by scattering them on the waves. This farewell had been more real, more complete than the memorial service two years ago. Somehow her mother felt truly gone now. Her echoing instructions and fabricated life floated away.
News sources were asking questions about her mother, and Sofie told them she’d known her mother was on the plane, yet she’d told them nothing else. The secrets were gradually being exposed.
Once, Bedford came to the house to beg for their reunion, in his own way, which meant telling her how wrong she was and how much she needed him. He could have been a stranger, a talking head on TV, for all the emotion he aroused in her. She smiled at him, and told him that it was funny how he always thought he knew what was best for her, but he’d never really known—not once.
She’d apologized to John, sought him out at the dock and asked his forgiveness for frightening him the day of her botched dive. She promised never to do it again. He’d stared at her for a long time and told her that the demons that had chased her to the bottom of the ocean would never leave her unless she released them. She’d mumbled something about appreciating him and his understanding.
The morning she was summoned to the research center, she drove to work with a knot in her stomach, the kind that made her think she might be getting sick. She took a seat in Andrew Martin’s office. He appeared unusually disheveled, his gray hair mussed, his baby blue button-down shirt wrinkled, his Conservation Matters lapel pin crooked.
“Okay, give it to me. What’s happened?” Sofie asked.
“I might as well shoot it to you straight, Sofie. Our funding has been cut.”
“What?”
“You’ll have to stop the work you’ve been doing. The center has all they need from your project, and the funding is being channeled elsewhere.”
“But . . . we can’t stop. We can’t make our case unless we understand the dolphin’s behavior.” Sofie’s voice shook.
“Yes,” Andrew said. “But we have to let it go. We have to stop the research . . . for now.”
“We can’t,” Sofie said in stuttering words, lifting her chin. “You can just tell the foundation that we aren’t done yet. We’re almost there . . . but not yet.”
“Sofie, we don’t have any choice. Funding has been cut everywhere. It’s not just our center and it’s not just your project. The time and money are better used elsewhere. We can give the National Science Foundation what we’ve got, still publish the results of the data you already have.”
“But I’m not done.” Sofie shook her head. “When does this happen?”
“Now,” Andrew answered.
“Will you find me another project to work on?” She held out her hands, began to count off the projects. “There’s the winter stock structure, the right whale habitat, the sea turtles and fisheries . . . any of them.”
“Sofie, I promise we’ll try and find more work for you as soon as possible. You can take the summer off, though. When school starts back up, we’ll find a place for you if you have time. But we have nowhere to put you right now.”
“I’ll do anything, Mr. Martin. I’ll stay off the boats. I’ll log data, clean the tanks. . . .”
He took a deep breath. “You’ve been working here nonstop since you were fifteen years old, Sofie. Go have fun for the rest of the summer. Please. I don’t have a choice. You’ve recently been in a terrible accident. Take some time off.”
“They saved me. Those dolphins saved my life and I have to help save theirs.” They’re all I have left, she thought. All I have. I can’t let them go. . . .
Andrew rose from the table. “You have helped them, Sofie. You’ve done research that will make a difference in their lives, in understanding their behavior around nets and boats. But this particular study at this center is over.”
Sofie stood then and walked out of the room, her legs carrying her to the seawall before she had a plan, before she knew where she would go in this strange world in which she was free to do whatever she wanted. Her job was gone, her boyfriend dismissed, her mother dead.
Sofie listed the events that had brought her to this point, to this unbound life: one discovery of a woman on a plane, plus one art historian, plus one secret revealed to Jake Murphy. Adding those three events together could not, and did not, equal the number three, but a sum of greater magnitude than could be calculated with simple addition.
Sofie stood on the seawall and willed her dolphins to come. The water blinked in the glory of morning. Along the shoreline, pluff mud lay exposed and dark in the low tide, clumps of spartina sprouting from the rich almost-black mounds. Then the waves rippled, three dorsal fins broke the surface, scattering drops of water like silver confetti.
It took Sofie a moment to understand what the dolphins were doing as they circled a single dolphin in the middle. The pod was surrounding Delphin’s mate, Sandy. In protective unity, the dolphins pulled closer. They cried out to one another, danced around the female. Sofie swung her legs over the seawall and peered down; her breath caught with a cry of joy—a just-born dolphin calf swam below Sandy.
Sofie had been taught that dolphins were born tail first as the mother bent in the middle, that newborns were four feet long and weighed about forty pounds, that the calves were usually born between May and July, and that the fetal folds on the skin appeared to be stripes. Yet these facts did not explain the marvel of a newborn dolphin calf swimming next to its mother. Facts could never capture the full wonder of experience.
The mere facts of her life could not fully encompass who she was and whom she was going to become.
Sofie’s joy threatened to overflow in tears. Just as she had come to say goodbye, the pod was greeting new life. Delphin rose above the surface, nudged his nose toward Sofie.
Go, she told him in her mind. Go, take care of your new baby. Thank you for saving me . . . for knowing my name.
He splashed with his snout and then nudged his new baby toward its mother, where the calf would nurse and then get a free ride in the mother’s slipstream. Sofie exhaled with this truth—she had done the same thing: been carried along in her mother’s slipstream, living life beneath her mother’s fiction and fears. She would not travel that way anymore.
Sofie returned home to tell a story, one that would open the door to letting go. To the truth.
She typed an e-mail with slow, deliberate strokes.
Hey, Jake, so you think you’ve always got the best story? I’ve got a great one for you. Ready?
Here’s a little intro: The ancients thought names were powerful. The name of an individual was often not the real name at all, as the real name would bring danger or knowledge, yet changing the name changed the destiny. Here is a naming story:
One day there was a goddess named Diane. She was married to a god of money, fame and power who didn’t love her, but loved to own her. She ran from him and gave birth to wisdom.The bargain she made with the gods was this—in exchange for this escape she would never find true love or reveal her real name. For the rest of her life, true love evaded her no matter how hard she tried to find it.
Think I finally beat you this time—bet you can’t name this one. . . .
With love, Sofie
Then she rose and stared out the window toward the water, toward all she was letting go at this moment. Then the ring of incoming e-mail made her return and sit again.
Hey, Sofie, okay, I’m officially stumped. You have to tell me which one it is. Celtic? Greek? How are the dolphins? Love, JM
Sofie placed her hand on the screen as if she could touch Jake’s face. When she saw his initials like that, with the word “Love” in front of them, her heart ached for something she couldn’t label—like a distant land she’d once glimpsed but never reached.
Then she typed what she’d rehearse
d over and over in front of the window.
JM, I’m coming to Marsh Cove. I’ll leave today and be there day after tomorrow to give you the answer. . . . Love, Sofie
She didn’t want to see his reply and learn that maybe he didn’t want her to come. She turned the computer off and yanked her suitcase out from under the bed. It was time to tell the story—not a myth, not a tale, but her story and her name.
TWENTY-THREE
ANNABELLE MURPHY
Jake sat on the front porch, tilting his laptop for the best reception on the wireless Internet. Afternoon shadows fell across the scuffed white floorboards. Annabelle came up behind him, hugged his neck. “Let’s make some decent use of your time—the porch floor needs painting.”
He turned to her as her gaze wandered down to his computer screen. He held his hand up in an ineffective effort to cover the words.
Annabelle straightened. “You’re e-mailing Sofie?”
Jake rolled his eyes. “Oh, Mom. Yes.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“Nothing is ‘going on.’ We just talk. . . . She tells me about her work. I talk to her about all the stupid, boring things I’m doing while I decide where to go next. . . .”
Annabelle had to ask the question. “Has she told you anything else about her mother?”
Jake shut the laptop, stood up. “We don’t talk about it, Mom. Really, we don’t. It hasn’t come up since I left. I tried. Then I stopped.”
“Is she recovered from her hospital stay?”
“Fully,” Jake said.
Annabelle had been a scholar of her children’s faces since babyhood and understood even now that he was telling the truth. He wasn’t hiding anything from her. She stared at him, and then asked, “Is there . . . something between you two?”
The Art of Keeping Secrets Page 23
