The Secrets We Keep

by Stephanie Butland

  Richenda unravels her life and looks for the knot that, had she seen it and undone it in time, would have changed the way things had turned out, and meant that Kate would have been safe at home that night. Or that she would have been confident enough to go to Thailand instead of being beset by last-minute nerves. Or that she had been anywhere, anywhere but here. She can’t find it, or rather, she can find lots of knots, tied tight, not easy to undo, not clear what they are holding together.

  Most of the knots attach to Rufus. But of course, without Rufus, there would be no Kate at all. Richenda knows that she’s unkind to her husband, and sometimes unfair; she knows that there were times, earlier, when she was all too ready to let him sleep on the sofa bed under his precious poster while she sulked on their vast and expensively sprung mattress. She wishes she had made more effort and got the marriage really working, or made less effort and left him. She remembers their early days, and how the nervous young man, recently emerged from the double prison of obesity and merciless bullying, had been devoted to her, following her around the way Beatle follows Kate, dejected in her absence, ecstatic when she appears. He hadn’t known then how handsome he was, those eyes as bright as cornflowers and those cheekbones and the way his hair wouldn’t quite lie flat at the back of his neck. His shyness, his desire to please, was as true then as it is an act now. His interest in her studies was unfeigned, his enthusiasm for her body endless.

  And she curses the fact that she didn’t have the sense to realize that the way he reacted to a little bit of attention from her would be the way he would react to a little bit of attention from any woman.

  Yes, that’s the top and bottom of it, really, she thinks as she listens to Kate’s sobs subside. I can make it a lot more complicated, but it isn’t. That’s how he’s always been, and that’s how I’ve let it be. And now here we are. The mistake I made was to think that the state of our marriage wouldn’t affect Kate.

  When Kate was born—and earlier, when Kate was unborn, swimming and growing inside her mother—Rufus and Richenda took their role as parents very seriously. Rufus set up a savings account on his way to work on the day that Richenda took the test. (“We don’t want to have any worries about university fees,” he’d said.) They’d read books about child development and attended prenatal classes with the fervor of newly signed up members of a cult. Richenda had felt thoroughly loved, from without and within, and put the unsteady early years of their marriage down to—well, it didn’t matter, really, they were here now, and they were talking about what they’d be doing with their child in five, ten, twenty years, and they wouldn’t be doing that if they weren’t happy. Of course they wouldn’t.

  The birth had been uncomplicated. “I wish all of mine were like you,” the midwife had said. “Seven hours and three tiny stitches, and baby as calm as can be.” And Rufus had burst into tears. Richenda had hardly noticed, looking at the wonder of her baby’s earlobes and the way her little feet flexed. Yes, Kate had been easy from the start: easy to feed, easy to get to sleep, easy to love.

  Not so easy to give a baby brother or sister to. The miscarriages and the grieving and the sex fraught with purpose were like taking Rufus and Richenda’s marriage and hurling it down a hill. When it came to rest, the part around Kate was still strong, but much else was broken. Simple intimacy had been one of the first things to smash; without it, honesty soon broke away.

  As Kate grew and Rufus and Richenda grew apart, they did their best to parent together. However much they might whisper disappointments late at night, ignore the other whenever they could, they sat together at parents’ evenings and school plays and made a point of being polite whenever they thought Kate was in earshot. Their heads touched as they put their diaries together and worked out who would take Kate to her riding lessons; they talked about her future without edge or rancor. Richenda allowed herself to cry only once Kate had gone to bed, and shouting was restricted to the times when she was out of the house.

  They thought they did a good job. Of course, such a way of life was unsustainable. At fourteen—still quiet, still clever, sometimes sulky—Kate had said, quite matter-of-factly, that she really didn’t think a family trip was a good idea this year because she could see how much strain it put on her parents to play happy families for a fortnight. They’d protested, but she’d said, “Don’t insult me,” and that had been that.

  Of course, Rufus and Richenda had agreed that, even if they weren’t all going away together, they could still be civil. Perhaps the lack of pretense would make things easier. Perhaps, conversely, admitting that they didn’t get on might help them to get on.

  It didn’t.

  Kate is quiet. Richenda, making her way softly down the stairs, is no closer to knowing whether she and Rufus should have done less, or more, to avert this disaster for their daughter. She remembers what Blake said, about not worrying about what you can’t control. She starts to look for the knot again.

  • • •

  Kate’s bones gnaw with tiredness. She wants to be left alone, to sleep and cry and think, but that doesn’t seem possible.

  She sleeps all afternoon, sits downstairs with her parents for a couple of hours, goes to bed at eight, wakes early, and finds the only bit of the day that she likes: taking a walk with Beatle, before Throckton has rubbed the sleep from its eyes and so can’t stare. She avoids Butler’s Pond. Dog walkers, when she meets them, seem to be kind, but she already knew that.

  When she gets home, she lets her mother make her breakfast and then she has a look to see what her friends are doing, in the posted pictures full of tans and new friends and sun reflecting from teeth.

  She answers emails and texts and tells people that she’s getting better, which she knows isn’t true. Where before she wanted to talk, now she wants to be quiet. She toys with saying more to Bella, who is the one who knows the most and has understood things best over the last year. But Bella is in India, and when Kate looks at the latest pictures of her friend, she can’t imagine how to talk to someone in such a bright and blazing world.

  The relentless approach of the inquest dogs her dreams, along with Michael’s face and the sound of him calling her name. Grief, shock, trauma seem like words too small to describe the way she feels, although her mother throws them around with a desperate fervor, as though they will heal her. Kate knows she will never be healed.

  Mike,

  I do know it can’t be you, leaving flowers by the gate. (Winter pansies, silver ribbon, so pretty. And when I picked them up, I thought, it was you who taught me all the names of English flowers, and it was your mother who taught you, when you were so young that knowing about flowers was no different from playing with trains or poking ants with a stick. So you didn’t think it was unusual for a man to go plunging through the undergrowth because he thought he’d seen the first of the bluebells. I love that in you. I’ll tell your mother when she comes around.)

  But I still think it is you.

  I haven’t told anyone about this. I know they’ll think I’ve lost it. Patricia will shake her head and Mel will make a joke because she’s uncomfortable and Andy will talk to me about grief and depression and how drugs aren’t an admission of defeat. And then it will be spoiled.

  Standing in the garden with the posy in my hand this morning, I wondered about all of the myths and stories there are in the world, about ghosts and visitations and that sort of thing. I thought about how many people have told me that when someone they love has gone, they’ve smelled their perfume, or heard them singing, or that their favorite book keeps falling out of a bookcase when there’s no one there. And not the people you’d expect to say those sorts of things, not the fluffy people. Your mother’s friend from the library, the one whose shortbread she complains about, who’s as sensible as the day is long. The man in the paper shop. Susan-next-door’s daughter. They’ve all got a story like that, that they’ve told me, when they’ve come here to tell me ho
w sorry they are, and I’ve had to stop myself from asking them to tell me again, like a child with a favorite bedtime book.

  So I think maybe this is just an extension of those stories. Maybe there is a way you can bring these things to me. Maybe you’re telling me that everything is going to be all right.

  I love you.

  E xxx

  Every night, Patricia tells herself that she won’t get the photo albums out again. Every night, she does. She runs her fingers over the faces of her two men, and she smiles, and she cries, and she tells herself not to be so silly. She looks at the pictures of Michael on his birthdays—the plain sponge with jam and cream in the middle, his name iced in blue on the top; nothing like the cakes they have now, but Michael always liked them. She tries to remember what he got for birthdays. Every now and then there’s a photo of him standing proudly next to a bike, slightly too big for him. She remembers Star Wars, but not when that started or stopped. There’s no one to ask now.

  She’d asked Elizabeth and Melissa what they did for birthdays when they were small. They had looked at each other, pulled faces, and said “joint parties,” explaining that there was a year and two days between the two of them, so they could have either a joint party or no party at all. Patricia had said, “But you have each other, and you always will,” and she’d meant it as a good thing, but it had come out sharply.

  She knows that if John were here, he would tell her kindly that she just needs to get on with it, that the fact that it’s terrible now doesn’t take away from the good there was before. She knows that if Michael were here, he would tell her that he had loved his life and that she should be glad of that.

  But they’re not here. Unsure of whether she is angry with them for their sudden, terrible absences and their misplaced ideas of her strength, or with herself for this nightly indulgence, Patricia resolves to put the albums away.

  Opening the bottom drawer of the dresser in the back bedroom, she finds the hand-knitted sweaters Michael wore as a toddler and a boy, lovingly made and kept, once Michael had outgrown them, in readiness for a grandson. Not that there will be one now. Patricia thinks of Elizabeth, childless, wearing Michael’s sweater, refusing to let it be washed, claiming it holds a trace of him although it smells only of her own sweat and sleeplessness. She closes the drawer, gets to her feet, and shuts the bedroom door behind her. I’m the last twig on the family tree, she thinks.

  And then, resolutely: After the inquest, we will start to find a way. We must. Although Patricia had had a hard time accepting the love of her son’s life, she wasn’t going to let her fade away.

  Patricia had been unsure of what to think when Michael had come home from his great adventure full of talk and photographs of a pretty brunette who worked in a hotel and had, as far as she could see, taken advantage of her boy. “Who paid for all of this?” she asked halfway through the pictures of the pair of them at Luna Park, and Michael had said, “Oh, Mum,” which Patricia took as confirmation of her suspicions. First, she waited for the whole thing to fizzle out. Then, she awaited Elizabeth’s visit—Michael could talk of nothing else—sure that the girl was still taking him for a ride, and they would hear no more from her once she’d had her chance to visit England. Worried for her son, she’d cautiously aired this view to Michael, who’d laughed and said, “Mum, she’s paid her own airfare and anyway, much as we love Throckton, I wouldn’t have thought it was that much of a target for international gold diggers.”

  She’d said nothing else. There was no talking to him when he was in this mood—joyous, flippant, excited. Patricia hoped out loud that it wouldn’t all end in tears, and hoped, to herself, that it would, and sooner rather than later, because it couldn’t possibly work in the long term. Although Elizabeth had sounded nice enough. She looked pretty in the photographs, and the stories Michael told about her suggested that she was nicely brought up and good-mannered. If she worked as a hotel receptionist she must be polite, and well organized, qualities that Patricia valued very highly. What she really couldn’t see was how such a girl could be so much more special than any of the ones Michael had grown up with. Girls whose history she knew, girls whose mothers she’d chatted with at school concerts and church services for almost thirty years.

  But she had seen how he had been after that first trip to Australia and known that here was something new, something greater than her son having had his eyes opened to a different way of life. And she had understood that here was something she had no power over.

  One night, she took a deep breath and asked the question that she didn’t want to know the answer to. She asked Michael whether he thought he would move to Australia.

  “Well,” he said, “if it comes to it I was thinking I would ask Elizabeth to come here. To marry me. To settle.”

  “Oh,” Patricia had said, then “Oh” again. And she’d thought, Well, that will be something. Better than something else. Better than him being all the way over there. She’d thought of one of her library regulars, always reading the same books as her daughter who lived in California as a way of keeping in touch with her. Frances is constantly counting down to Christmas or Easter or summer—with brittle excitement if her daughter is coming home, or stoic good humor if the flights are too expensive. “You get used to it,” Frances had said when Patricia had asked her how she managed with her child so far away. Patricia hadn’t believed her.

  • • •

  Since the conversation with Andy, Elizabeth can think of nothing but drowning. Of the feel of water filling your body, the moment when you know, if you do, that you can’t get out of the water. About how water muffles vision and stems sound and so there might be something dreamlike about the whole thing. About the remembered panic of being a child slightly out of your depth in a bright, clean swimming pool, and how darkness and dirt would multiply that feeling. About how it must feel to be truly unable to breathe, rather than trying to make it happen, the way she does sometimes in bed or in the bath as she tries to see how serious she is about wishing she was dead too.

  But the medical details aren’t enough. It’s a taste of what Elizabeth needs to know. She thought talking to Andy would stop her from wondering, but it’s made her want more details, more understanding. Now that she knows she can talk about it without falling apart, she looks for opportunities. So, when Blake comes around to talk about the inquest, she asks him to tell her what he knows about drowning.

  She can see by his face that he’s shocked.

  “Are you sure you want to know?” he asks, and she nods. After looking into her face to make sure, he begins.

  “I’ve been to six drownings in about twenty-five years,” he says, “and every one of them has looked calm, although of course it depends if you get to them in reasonable time”—Elizabeth winces, and he reminds himself that he’s not talking to a new recruit here, warns himself not to say body or corpse or it—“and people’s faces are usually unmarked, so they just look like themselves, sleeping or dreaming.”

  “I didn’t think Mike looked as though he was sleeping,” Elizabeth says, “but he did look calm. Yes.” Blake isn’t sure whether she is talking to herself, or to him, or if she even knows that she is speaking out loud.

  “The first death I ever attended was a drowning,” he says, then stops, thinking through what he might say to make sure it’s safe. He decides that it is.

  “It was a little boy, a nine-year-old, who’d gone too far out to sea. It should have been terrible—it was terrible—but everyone who came to look at him—the police officers, the forensics people, the parents—just paused for a minute and drew in their breath because there was something about him. A serenity. It was—it was—” He can’t find the words, but finds another way to explain it. “A month or so later, I went to my second fatality, which was a road accident, and I remember driving home thinking that if I had to go suddenly, violently, I’d take the water over the road, any day.”


  “Really?” Elizabeth hasn’t considered the desirability of drowning before. She’s thought about the unnaturalness, the choking and the dread, the coldness and the fear. She is drowning in another way, in love that has nowhere to go and memories that won’t wait until she is ready for them. She considers the idea of drowning as the best option, shakes her head.

  “Really. I still think that,” Blake says. “I think it would be”—the first word he used is still the best—“calm.”

  Calm. Elizabeth rolls the word around her mouth like a marble. Calm. “I would like to think he felt calm,” she says, and then she is anything but, howling again. Mel comes downstairs and settles herself next to her sister, resigned, routine, sad.

  Mike,

  I never should have given your mother a key. Every time she scratches it in the lock, there’s a moment when I forget that it won’t be you, and my heart bounces, and then it splatters back down again, like a watermelon on a hot pavement. Although I’ve forgotten what heat is, really. Mel says that being in England is like being trapped in a big, clammy, leaky cave, and that’s why so many Brits are miserable and weird. I told her she’s oversimplifying. I thought about how, if you were here, the two of you would have gotten into one of your endless England v. Australia arguments and I would have left you to it and gone to have a bath.

  So. The inquest. Your mother offered to take me to the hairdresser, which I refused, but I did let her choose my clothes (dark green dress, black belt to gather it in as it hangs on me a bit these days but there’s no way in the world I’m going shopping) and talk to her about whether the navy blouse went with her maroon suit, or whether she should stick with the ivory blouse she usually wore with it. We decided on the navy. I’m trying to be a good daughter-in-law. If that’s what I am now.

  I’ve agreed to the dress, and a lift from Blake, and Andy coming here for lunch afterward. I’ve had a grim conversation about “misadventure,” which means that you knew that what you were doing was dangerous but you didn’t mean for what happened to happen. Which is you, in a nutshell: so ready to help, to solve, to save that you wouldn’t have seen another option.