The Art of Keeping Secrets

by Patti Callahan Henry

  “What happened then?” Keeley had scooted to the edge of her seat. “Is this really true?”

  “Yes,” Sofie said. “And this is where your father comes in. He came into the barn just then.”

  Annabelle spoke. “It was Knox’s family barn.”

  “I guess so,” Sofie said, closed her eyes and heard her mother’s words, remembered how her mother’s face would fill with joy when she told the part of the story Sofie would not say aloud now—how her mother would stare into a far-off place as she described the moment she saw Knox Murphy, how she believed she had been made for him and he for her. He threw open the barn doors, sunlight creating a halo around him. He looked to her like heaven.

  His face was rugged and covered in stubble, his dark hair tousled by the wind. His eyebrows were dark, like his hair, his eyes a warm brown. His jaw was rounded, but then squared off as it met his ears, and his hair was long, curled at the ends and toward the back. His voice was gravelly and deep when he called out, “Bootsie, are you in here?” He was looking for his cat.

  He squinted into the barn and Liddy could see that he was young, her age, but he looked older when he did this, as if certain wisdom were already evident in his features. She held her breath for fear that if he saw her, his features would change, and like a myth, this beautiful creature would turn into something ugly or deformed.

  The hay beneath her rustled, and he looked up at her, saw her and stepped back. She wanted to tell him not to be afraid, not to go away. But she couldn’t find the words. And, as he did from that day forward, he seemed to know what she wanted to say without her having to speak. He stepped forward, climbed the ladder to the loft and came to her.

  Liddy told Knox Murphy her entire story, about how she was pregnant, how she had run and faked her own death to escape an abusive husband. She told Sofie that she never remembered the exact words they had said to each other and part of her believed they’d had this conversation without ever talking. Knox left to get food and water and first aid for the jagged cut on her forearm; he returned to take care of her.

  Sometimes he slept there with her, yet never touched her beyond offering the comfort of holding her when fear overcame her. Together, they devised a future for her. They found a solution, and although they never once talked of what existed between them in that hayloft, she thought she and Knox had time, a lifetime, for words unsaid, touches not yet given.

  But Sofie did not tell all of this to the Murphy family. She only said, “He came in looking for his cat and found my mother in the hayloft. He helped her through the bad days after the storm and then found a small studio and loft in town, and offered the down payment. She opened the Marsh Cove Art Studio beneath the loft. . . .”

  Sofie stopped now, slumped back on the chair. “That’s the story you never knew. Knox Murphy saved my mother and helped her start a new life. He helped her get a new name, find a new home. That is what he did.”

  “How?” Keeley whispered, as if the story had stolen her anger.

  “He took an old birth certificate from a flooded and ravaged courthouse closer to Charleston. When the town of Marsh Cove met her, her name was Liddy Parker and she was an artist come there to open the town’s first art studio.”

  Sofie closed her eyes for a moment, remembered what her mother had told her about the flat above the art studio. Knox had the flat painted all in white—white walls, white furniture, white bed with a white quilt. It was as though he had washed her clean of the past. He told her she could add the color, she could choose her new life. But in the end, she could not choose him.

  “Were they . . . a couple?” Keeley’s breath caught inside her question.

  Sofie looked across the room at Knox’s daughter. “No. He told her he was engaged to his high school girlfriend. He only helped her.”

  “Why did you leave Marsh Cove all those years later?” Annabelle asked.

  “The way Mom told it, a man from Ohio came and bought a piece of her art. This man took the piece home, and my father saw it in a display at a party, then called the art studio looking for the artist, since he thought it looked just like something his dead wife might have done. Mother was terrified he would find us. So we had to move. Knox helped us choose a new place, and helped Mom change our name from Parker to Milstead.”

  This also Sofie did not tell the Murphy family—that when she was in high school and her boyfriend broke off their relationship, Sofie was so brokenhearted that her mother confided in her as she never had before. She told Sofie that their secret life would have its casualties. That her own heart was still broken for Knox. She’d thought that being gone from him would cure her of wanting him, but it hadn’t. This desperate desire for Knox Murphy never left Sofie’s mother.

  “We didn’t see Knox much through the years. He came when Mother was in a bad situation.” Sofie avoided eye contact. “When she ran out of money, or needed to see her own mother. He came about once every two years. He was so good to us. I don’t think I can make clear to you how he saved us, how he . . . made sure we were okay.”

  “That last time he was taking her to see her mother?” Jake’s voice filled the silence.

  “Mother wouldn’t fly commercial airlines since she constantly feared she would be caught with her fake ID. Yes, Knox was taking her to see my dying grandmother, but they never arrived. That day, that terrible day, I lost my mother and . . . a dear friend. Then two weeks later, I lost my grandmother.”

  Sofie glanced around the room cast in soft light from the setting sun. Annabelle was silent; Keeley had placed her hands over her face; Jake sat back on his chair. Finally Annabelle spoke. “Why did you keep this a secret? Why couldn’t you have told us?”

  “I didn’t want my father to find me. Michael Harley and all of you were suddenly asking about a woman who was dead and never wanted to be found. She taught me to make sure I never, ever told anyone who we were—or he would come after us. After me. She knew he would kill us both. Mother told me this fact all my life. I have never spoken a word about him, or what happened. Fear has held me tight. Mother didn’t tell me the most terrible parts until I was older. When I was a child, she only told me he was bad, that he mustn’t find us, like a real live boogeyman. It wasn’t until I was in high school that she told me how he beat her, how he . . .” Sofie hesitated. “I have hidden my identity for fear of this man. I’m sorry for any pain it has caused you.”

  Jake stood, came to her. “He can’t touch you, Sofie. He doesn’t know you exist.”

  “He would have if Mother’s name and story came out sooner. But you know what? Here is the craziest part—it doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Why not?” Keeley asked. “Why would it matter all this time and not now?”

  “A few weeks ago, I dug through our old papers, and found my mother’s Ohio driver’s license and original name. I called an . . . investigator and asked him to find out everything he could about my mother. He called back within a day to say that the information was so easy to find he wouldn’t even charge me.”

  “What information?”

  Embarrassment overwhelmed Sofie, and she turned away to speak these words. “I’ve been hiding from a man who has been in jail for five years.”

  “What?” Keeley spoke first.

  Annabelle stood, came to Sofie’s side. “You’re telling us that my husband helped you and your mother hide from a criminal who has been locked up for years?”

  Sofie turned. “I don’t think she knew it. She never sought him out. She was so scared of him that she had become accustomed to hiding. The investigator found the newspaper articles about my mother’s supposed death in Charleston, then about how my father—a man named Brayden Collins—was convicted of killing a man in a bar fight five years ago.”

  “Damn,” Jake said.

  “This is ridiculous. My dad died protecting your mother . . . and she didn’t even need it?” Keeley asked.

  Annabelle placed her hand on Sofie’s shoulder. “We can only act o
n what we know. All we can live with is the part we do understand.”

  Sofie spoke over her shoulder. “I should have . . . tried to find out sooner. I should have. . . . I don’t know why my mother didn’t try and find out . . . or tell me.”

  “Maybe she liked her life exactly the way it was,” Annabelle said in a quiet voice. “We all get used to things the way they are, and we can’t imagine them any other way.”

  Sofie looked at Annabelle. “All his power over my life . . .”

  “What power?” Jake asked.

  “The power of making us afraid. My mother perfected the art of keeping secrets: from me, from Knox, from your family. But it’s over now.”

  Jake touched her elbow. “Thank you,” he said.

  “That’s why I came. The one thing I feared—my father discovering my name—is also the one thing I’ve craved, that this secret would no longer hold any power over my life.” She looked at each of them in turn and thought of the turmoil that could have been avoided, the hurt and pain that should never have existed.

  “Are you okay?” Annabelle asked.

  Sofie nodded as a terrible thought crossed her mind: Maybe Mother needed Knox more than she needed the truth.

  There would be many more thoughts and emotions to examine and try to understand. Revealing the story to the Murphy family ended one chapter and began another. “I’ll show myself out,” Sofie said, turned and walked from the room. She followed the long hall to the front door and out into the evening. She didn’t hear Jake come up behind her until he clasped her elbow. “Oh,” she said, stumbled.

  “You are a brave woman,” he said, and placed his hands on both her shoulders, pulled her close and kissed her.

  For the first time in her life, she understood what her mother had meant when she said that just being with the right person can fill the empty places.

  Jake ran his hand up her back, into her hair, and then released her.

  “Jake,” she whispered, “these past few weeks, I’ve had to let go of so many things, and I’m glad I did. But there is one thing I don’t want to let go of.”

  “What is that?”

  “You,” she whispered into the twilight.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  ANNABELLE MURPHY

  Annabelle and Keeley stared at each other across the sunroom. Mosquitoes buzzed outside the screen door; the condensation from the iced tea glasses formed puddles on the side tables.

  “Okay then,” Keeley said.

  “Are you really okay?” Annabelle moved to sit next to her daughter on the couch, pulled her onto her shoulder and ran her fingers through her hair.

  “I’m not sure, Mom. I mean, if all that stuff is true—then we didn’t know everything about Dad.”

  “I’m not sure you can ever know everything about anyone, even someone you love.”

  “Her mother loved Dad. She didn’t say it, but I can tell.”

  “Liddy Parker might have loved your father, but you can’t make someone love you back if their heart belongs somewhere else.”

  Keeley sat up. “You really believe that?”

  “Yes, I do,” Annabelle said. “Just like I can’t make myself stop loving him just because he’s gone.”

  Keeley nodded. “I know.”

  “Love isn’t something you can make happen at will, or because it’s convenient.”

  “Why didn’t he tell us?”

  “He made a promise to help her, protect her . . . or at least that’s my best guess. If he told anyone, he risked jeopardizing her safety. He didn’t anticipate that the secret would one day bring all this pain to us. He thought he was doing something . . . good.”

  “He was.” Keeley rubbed her face. “He was doing something good, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.” Annabelle nodded. “But it sure didn’t look like it for a while, did it?”

  “Guess we can’t always judge things by how they look.”

  “Guess not.” Annabelle laughed, smoothed her daughter’s hair.

  “But on his last trip to help her, she didn’t even need it.”

  “He didn’t know that.”

  Keeley stood. “I hate this.”

  Annabelle stood to face her daughter. “I do, too.”

  “I’m going to Laura’s house. She’s having a few people over tonight. Can I have the car?”

  “You have two more days until you get the car keys back.”

  Keeley exhaled through pursed lips. “I’ll walk.”

  Annabelle went into the kitchen, grabbed the car keys off the hook on the wall and threw them to her daughter. “Be careful.”

  Keeley brightened. “Always,” she said.

  Annabelle stood alone in the kitchen and tried to remember where she had been on the exact date of the hurricane—sometime between September twenty-first and twenty-second. She’d been at Aunt Barbara’s with the knowledge of a child growing inside her. Knox had been helping a stranded, abused and pregnant woman in his family’s barn. It didn’t seem possible that these two events could have happened simultaneously, that those two moments had existed within the same universe and then branched off into separate lives in which Knox Murphy played a central role in both.

  Annabelle went to her desk, flicked the computer on, and typed in bold letters at the top of the page: TO BELIEVE. Then she began to write of the need to believe when doubt seemed larger and more powerful.

  When she was done, she leaned back in her chair and stared at her first article for Mrs. Thurgood’s living section. Then she e-mailed it for her boss to see first thing in the morning. She walked down the hall and passed the jar of shells; she plucked one out, took it to place on her bedside table.

  Liddy Parker might have had a talent for creating beautiful canvases and for keeping elaborate secrets, but those were not the most important forms of art. Believing when all the facts seemed to point to disbelief, keeping the faith when the circumstances fostered doubt—those were the true art forms.

  Annabelle woke the next morning and knew that it was more than a new day; it was the start of a new life. Keeley and Jake were asleep in their beds; Sofie was in a hotel across town that Annabelle had arranged for her. And Annabelle didn’t need to know what would happen next. She just needed to kiss her children and take another step forward. After a jog on the beach, a shower and a strong cup of coffee, she responded to Mrs. Thurgood’s earlier “Come now” barked into her phone machine, headed to the Marsh Cove Gazette offices.

  The room full of reporters buzzed as though mosquitoes had been released inside the building. There was a developing story about a car accident downtown involving the mayor and an open bottle of bourbon. Annabelle laughed as she wove her way among the desks. Her and Knox’s story was old news. No one cared now how it had ended, how Knox Murphy had protected and cared for a woman he had found in a hurricane.

  Annabelle knocked on Mrs. Thurgood’s door, then entered in response to a raspy “Come in.”

  Mrs. Thurgood motioned to the chair in front of her desk. “Sit,” she said.

  Annabelle remained standing. “No, thank you. You called, asked to see me.”

  Mrs. Thurgood laughed. “I just wanted to talk to you about the piece you sent.”

  Annabelle nodded. “Go ahead.”

  “It is the best piece of work you’ve ever done for the paper. You know I don’t particularly like to give compliments—it breeds laziness. But this is good, quite good. I want you to start that new column we discussed and address your observations about life from the perspective of the Southern Belle.”

  Annabelle sat down. “I can’t write what I was writing for the Southern Belle column. I can’t give you that good-girl Belle anymore. I wish I could, but I see things a little differently now. I’m not sure that perfect advice is always the best advice. For me, things aren’t as black-and-white, or as neat, as they used to be.”

  Mrs. Thurgood stood up. “That is exactly what I want to hear. We will now have a brand-new column from the new and improved So
uthern Belle. It will be fresh, it will be original and it will be witty and sharp and funny.”

  “Whoa.” Annabelle held up her hand. “I don’t know if I can be all those things.”

  “You, my dear, already are.” Mrs. Thurgood winked. “Now get out and do your job. I have an up-to-the-minute scandal to report today.”

  Annabelle laughed, stood up. “Yes, ma’am,” she said, and walked out of the offices with her next article already brewing in the back of her mind: Belle Wakes Up.

  Annabelle pulled her car in front of the art studio, shoved a quarter in the meter and entered the room as the bell over the door announced her arrival. Kristi hollered from the back room, “I’ll be right with you.”

  “Okay,” Annabelle replied. To avoid Ariadne’s painting on the far-right wall, Annabelle walked to the shelves of pottery and picked up a mug with a palm tree etched into the side. Mumbled voices came from the back room. Her head snapped up; she heard her son’s voice.

  “Jake?” Annabelle called out as she headed toward the back.

  He poked his head around the corner. “Hey, Mom. Come in here.”

  It took several seconds for Annabelle to register the scene before her: Sofie holding up a painting of a starfish, Jake’s hand on her back, Kristi with a magnifying glass raised to the left corner.

  “What are you doing?” Annabelle asked.

  Jake took his hand off Sofie’s back. “Sofie is selling this painting to Kristi. Her mother started it, but Sofie finished it. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Annabelle forced herself to look at the painting. “Yes, it is.” She turned to Sofie. “Why are you selling it?”

  “This”—Sofie pointed to the art—“was my mother’s life. This painting and all the secrets that were part of it were hers, not mine. I don’t want them.”

  “Kristi,” Annabelle said, “you should call Michael Harley. He’ll want this piece. I know he will. Or he’ll at least want to see it.”

  Jake squinted at his mother. “Who’s Michael Harley?”