The Secrets We Keep

by Stephanie Butland

  Later, when her solitary funeral tribute is over, Mel watches as the clouds below ignore her, and she thinks about how all of this global village stuff is crap when your sister’s husband dies, and your sister is on the other side of the planet. She’s talked to Elizabeth every day, and she’s listened to all that she has managed to stutter out, about how she has to learn to live without Mike and she might as well start now, and how all she’s doing is thinking and sleeping and trying to eat what Patricia tries to feed her, and how Mel has her own life to live. Melissa had pretended to listen—or rather, she’d listened to what was happening between and behind Elizabeth’s words, the scrabbling for some sort of purchase in reality, in sanity, in the place outside the nasty black bubble she was trapped in—and then she’d overruled.

  “I’ve bought my ticket, I’m arriving on the eighteenth of January, I’m staying for as long as I need to, and you, Sister, are just going to have to suck it up.”

  “OK,” Elizabeth had said, and it had pleased Melissa to hear relief in her voice, although she half knows that it was her imagination that put it there. She can’t bear the thought of her sister in that funny little place she lives in, with a crone of a mother-in-law as the closest thing she has to a family. Mel doesn’t try to sleep, or read, or do anything except watch the hours pass, and the miles decrease, on the screen in front of her.

  When Andy picks her up he notices the wide-eyed, pale-faced shock of her, part long-haul flight, part landing in the real version of the abstract thing she’s been thinking about ever since she got the call.

  “How bad is it?” she asks as they walk to the car.

  “Bad,” he says.

  “Is that a medical opinion?”

  “It’s everyone’s opinion,” he says. “You’ll see.”

  • • •

  Andy stops at the gate and unloads the suitcase from the boot. “I’ll see you later,” he says. “I’ve hardly seen Luca and Toby. And Lucy. Since. And you’ll want to—”

  “Yes,” Mel says, thinking, I want nothing less than what’s behind that door. I want nothing less than to see my sister in the way I’m going to see her. She almost asks him to come in, then she sees the way he pulls at his tie, the places he’s caught his chin when he shaved, the pinkness of eyes unused to crying.

  “Sure,” she says. “Tell them hello.”

  “I will,” Andy says, and he nods, gets into the car, starts the engine, and drives away. Mel takes a breath and opens the gate. She’s never been so sorry, and so glad, to arrive anywhere.

  • • •

  It’s Patricia who opens the door, more gaunt than Mel remembers her.

  “I’m so sorry,” Mel says, and Patricia says, “Yes,” and there’s a moment—just a moment—when the two of them could be friends. Mel almost forgives all of the barbed remarks about dyed hair and funny accents she’s batted away with sarcasm over the years, and Patricia could forget how small and silly Mel makes Throckton seem—and, by extension, her whole life and all that’s dear to her. But it’s too much effort, especially now.

  “Those boots will mark the floor, you know, they got rid of the carpets and Michael stripped the floorboards last summer,” Patricia says, and Mel, momentarily cowed by this intimate domestic detail of the dead, bends to take her boots off on the threshold.

  Magnanimous in victory, Patricia offers, “She’s sleeping,” then adds, “The pot’s just warming.”

  “Oh, good,” Melissa mutters at her back. “Tea.”

  There’s time, before Elizabeth comes down, for Mel to hear about the funeral in the forensic detail of someone who must remember, as though the power of remembering is a measure of love. Patricia talks as though she cannot stop: who came, where they sat, what they said, when they cried. Elizabeth, scratching at the side of her neck until it bled; Blake, who was sitting on the other side of her, taking her hand and holding it, firmly, in his own, although the fingers kept fluttering and flinching. Andy’s eulogy, touching and true, although it didn’t mention Michael’s father, which was a shame. Elizabeth slipping off her shoes and rubbing one foot against the other incessantly, and having to be reminded to put the shoes on again before they followed the coffin out. The Micklethwaite man, shame-faced, at the back. Patricia wouldn’t have said he could be there when Blake came with the request, but Elizabeth had said of course he must come, how kind. (Patricia doesn’t admit to Mel that, when Blake had left, she had objected to Rufus coming to the funeral, and Elizabeth had turned bemused blue eyes on her and said, as though it was the only possible option, “But, Patricia, you know what Mike would have said. He’d have said that this is no one’s fault. He’d have said he was glad she was alive. We should let them come. If it was me, I would want to go,” and she had felt ashamed of her own fury at that stupid, stupid Micklethwaite girl, who had not only killed her son, but also seemed to have done so in nothing more than a moment of fecklessness.)

  Mel listens, and watches, and waits for a sound of Elizabeth. It’s dark, and she’s had two pots of tea and a sandwich selected from the funeral leftovers, and struggled to stay awake and listen to Patricia’s memories of Michael—already well on the way to sainthood in his mother’s heart—before they hear footsteps on the stairs. “I’ll put the kettle on,” says Patricia, and Mel’s heart sinks for a moment before she recognizes that the tea is tact, and smiles her thanks.

  Despite the warnings from Andy, the memory of her sister’s sobs on the phone, and the litany of uneaten meals, unwashed hair and unopened curtains from Patricia, Mel is still unprepared for the way her sister looks. Elizabeth’s skin has taken on a tint of gray, her eyes have dulled like glass tossed in a violent sea, and her body has defeat in every line and muscle. She looks half dead herself. The tears start in Mel before they erupt from Elizabeth. They hold on to each other, sobbing sadly and wearily, each remembering how they did this when their mother died, two frightened little monkeys clinging on to each other for dear life. In the kitchen, Patricia permits herself a tear before loading cups into the dishwasher, and is too tired to push away the thought that Elizabeth might—will, in all probability—find herself another husband, while she will never have another son, and yet they must all feel sorry for Elizabeth. Later, watching Mel spoon-feed soup to her sister, who opens and closes her mouth like a sad bird, she wishes she could take the thought back. But, she thinks as she lets herself into her own dark house, if I could take things back, I’d start by taking back whatever happened that night, and then none of us would be where we are, and Michael wouldn’t be gone.

  • • •

  The next evening, Andy comes for dinner—well, he brings dinner—and he, Elizabeth, and Mel sit around the table and have something that, given a casual glance from the outside, would look like a normal evening. Except that a normal evening takes no effort, and it’s clear from the start that there is effort everywhere, from all of them.

  Elizabeth has told herself over and over that she’s allowed to do this, to sit at a table with her sister and her oldest Throckton friend and eat and drink and remember her husband. But when she walks into the kitchen where Mel and Andy are joking as they get out the takeaway cartons, something happens and she can’t remember where the plates are, and Mel has to steer her to the table and sit her there, in pajama bottoms and the sweater that Mike used to wear in the evenings as he watched Pepper have a last-thing sniff around the garden. She’s like a child coming to the table for the first time after a sickness.

  Mel and Andy are genuinely glad to see each other. They work out that it’s ten years since they met, on the eve of Michael and Elizabeth’s wedding, and speculate about what Mel’s then-boyfriend is doing now. (Andy reckons prison; Mel thinks she heard a rumor that he joined a cult. Elizabeth rouses herself long enough to point out that Mel seemed quite keen on him at the time. Andy and Mel look at each other as though they’ve won a prize.) There’s no reason to wonder where An
dy’s then-girlfriend is: she’s at home, with the boys, and so Mel looks through the photos on his phone and says, “You know I’m not a fan of the smaller members of the human race, but they are cute. They were just little tiny balls of wrinkles the last time I was here. Your eyes.” “Yes, and Lucy’s smile,” Andy says.

  But both of them are horribly aware of the ghost at the table, and the almost-ghost he has left behind, pushing rice around her plate and trying to smile, which is more pitiful than when she cries. The only other time Elizabeth has anything to offer—Mel and Andy have understood that as yet the conversation can do no more than nod toward Michael—is when Mel talks about the discomfort of the single bed in the spare room. Andy, who spent the first night after Michael’s death in it, agrees.

  “I didn’t think it was too bad,” Elizabeth says. For a second, Andy and Mel catch each other’s eyes, then Mel asks, gently, when her sister has slept in that bed. “Oh, when I can’t bear to go into our bedroom,” she says matter-of-factly, and then something happens to her face—it’s like watching a time-lapse film of one of those daisies that only come out in the sun—and she gets up from the table and goes upstairs.

  Mike,

  Everything’s still black.

  I keep telling myself that it doesn’t matter what happened to you, but it does. I keep telling myself that you’re—you know, gone—and that’s the only thing that matters. But I can’t bear that I don’t really know. I feel like a failure. Mel won’t let me listen to your voice in the night—she says it’s unhealthy—so, instead, I lie in bed, or sit on the sofa on the nights when I can’t be in our bed without you, and I imagine.

  I imagine Pepper running off and you following him and finding Kate. Maybe she was waiting for a boyfriend. Even your mother can’t dig up much dirt on her. The worst thing she’s done seems to have been to have her nose pierced for a dare, though she took it out when her Oxford interviews came around—she’s very clever, very hardworking, quite intense by the sounds of it. (I don’t think you get 4 As at exams by being laid-back.) She was supposed to be doing some fantastic gap-year thing this year, but apparently she got cold feet and canceled at the last minute. God, how I wish she’d gone. Then she’d be shagging some floppy-haired traveler right now, and we’d all be happy.

  Maybe the sound of you surprised her, and she got up and moved away and slipped and fell into the water.

  I’m sure you didn’t hesitate. I’m sure you were in there before you’d thought it through properly. We promised we’d never mention the Burning Building Incident again, and I’m as good as my word, but you can’t be surprised that I’m thinking of it. You stupid, stupid, brave, stupid, stupid man. It must have been so cold, so cold, and I bet she panicked and clung to you and made it really difficult for you. I think you got her as close to dry land as you could, and she pulled herself the rest of the way.

  But then I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why you didn’t follow her onto the bank and get yourself safe. I can’t believe you wouldn’t have fought to get back to me. It just doesn’t make any sense.

  Sometimes when I’m thinking about this, in the night, I can’t breathe and I feel as though I’m with you there, in the water, and I feel so cold and so frightened and my whole body is so impossibly heavy. Last night Mel came in and shook me—she thought I was having a nightmare, she heard me thrashing about and crying. I didn’t tell her that I was awake all the time.

  Come back to me, Mike. There must be a deal you can do. When I asked you, in the chapel, to send me a sign, I felt so sure you would. I haven’t forgotten. I’m waiting.

  E xxx

  Kate’s recovery is slow. Her body can’t seem to remember what it was like before, when it was carefree, when it could trust itself to be strong and supple and had no idea that one day something might go wrong, and it might be overpowered. Her heart labors and burns under the weight of Michael Gray’s death, and when interviewed she remembers nothing more of what happened that night at Butler’s Pond, despite gentle questioning, vigorous questioning, and questioning under hypnosis, during which she kept her hands curled in on themselves so tightly that her fingernails bit her palms and kept her mind well under her own control.

  • • •

  “She’s barely coming downstairs, let alone going out, Rufus,” Richenda says wearily as her husband picks up his car keys. He is dejected because Kate has declined another of his carefully casual offers of a run out in the car, maybe some lunch; he’s sure that if they could only get her to behave as if she were recovered, she would recover.

  “If only she’d gone to Thailand,” he says for what must be the hundredth time in the last three days.

  “Yes,” says Richenda, “or if only she’d stayed in that night. Or not drunk so much. Or not slipped. Or left earlier and come straight home. If only there had been something on TV she wanted to watch”—self-control fails, and suddenly she is on-screen, scrabbling, incapable of controlling her rising voice, her speech getting quicker—“or she lived in a home where her parents weren’t fighting all the time”—the tears start—“and her mother wasn’t bitter and sour and her father wasn’t planning his next”—Rufus rolling his eyes makes her pause, find a better word, something to make what she is saying find a place to grip and dig instead of sliding away—“dalliance…” She runs out of steam, turning away with a what-do-you-care set to her shoulders.

  “I was working that night,” he says. “I was upstairs and I was working. Planning regulations are—”

  “Of course you were, Rufus. You’re always working. All those nights you spend in hotels when you could drive home in an hour and a half. Just sitting there, on your own, in a hotel room, reading planning regulations. All night.”

  “I thought we were talking about Kate.”

  “We are talking about Kate.”

  “We need to bring her out of herself. Out of her room. We need something to…to coax her.”

  “She’s not a sick puppy, Rufus. She’s had a massive physical and emotional shock. A lunch in a country pub is not going to put her right.”

  “No, but it would be a start. What’s your strategy, Richenda?” And he strides out, plans for a summerhouse rolled in a tube under his arm, car keys rattling. He leaves the door slightly ajar, a move he knows is worse than a slam, by virtue of being unexpected, and obliging Richenda to get up and push the door shut. He sighs as he starts the car, allowing himself to pull this door closed with just a shade of unnecessary violence. He really does try not to be petty, he thinks as he drives away, but every man has his limits. And anyway, there’s absolutely nothing going on with Caroline.

  • • •

  Richenda hates it when he has a point. She has assumed that love and time will heal her daughter. Rufus has made her wonder whether letting Kate sleep and cry, cry and sleep, is the best thing to do. The friends who have been Kate’s world are mostly gone, digging wells to bring clean water to places that don’t have it, handing out food in war zones, sleeping in hostels around Europe, working all hours in city bars to pay for the next chunk of their lives, some even at university already. While her peers are all agog at their new horizons, Kate’s world is shrinking, shrinking. But Richenda has to admit that, actually, Kate wasn’t quite right before this happened.

  The gap-year adventure had been talked about more than anything else: more than exams, more than university, more than how dull Throckton was and how she couldn’t wait to get away. Six weeks of working on a conservation project, with a break in the middle for some traveling and the option to change her ticket home so she could stay longer or travel more, was what Kate had her heart set on. When her friends had come around so that they could all revise together, more often than not Richenda would overhear them talking about how their adventures would intersect: meeting up and traveling around Australia, how once you are in Australia you may as well travel back via the States, it seems crazy not t
o. And Richenda, who likes her own bed and a world that she can reach out and touch the sides of, a steady, constant sky above, had been both terrified for Kate and in awe of the fearlessness that she saw in her.

  And then Kate had decided, out of nowhere, to cancel her gap-year plans, and since then she’d done very little. A few weekend shifts at Benito’s restaurant, some talk of going to join her friends in Turkey for a week, which came to nothing, sleeping in the afternoons. Rufus had taken the whole thing at face value and pointed out that their daughter seemed happy enough, which was certainly true, but Richenda had still wondered whether there had been more to it. She’d asked Kate and gotten nowhere. “I’m not doing anything wrong,” Kate had said. “I’m just not doing anything, and when I’m ready to do something, I will.” And so the Micklethwaites had soon settled into the line-of-least-resistance position of family life as they knew it.

  As Richenda knocks on her daughter’s bedroom door, she wishes she had listened to the instinct that told her there was more to Kate’s change of heart than met the eye. She longs for the days when mothering was simple, when a Barbie bandage on a scraped elbow or an afternoon with a film about princesses was enough to cure all ills. She might have been tired and harried when Kate was a child, but she never had this sense of dread and sorrow as she looked to see how her daughter was doing.

  “I brought you some tea,” she says.