The Secrets We Keep

by Stephanie Butland

  But when the bleeding started, and the scan confirmed the gaping black emptiness of her womb, tight and cramped inside her like a clenched fist, something in her broke a little bit more.

  Still, that first time, it was almost easy to talk about bad luck. They had known it might take more than one go. Elizabeth could find a brave face, although she started to go to bed earlier and earlier and sometimes didn’t wake when Michael got in beside her after a long shift or a late dog walk.

  Salty died two days before they went back for the embryos to be implanted the second time—he’d gone from being a little bit off his food to being put down in the space of two weeks—so it always seemed unlikely that a baby would come from those sad days. When the bleeding had started, Elizabeth had felt sad but not surprised.

  It was during the third try that Elizabeth and Michael started to struggle. With their new pup Pepper a force of scuttering, chewing enthusiasm for life, and bluebells everywhere on their walks, and a feeling of warmth returning to the world, they couldn’t quite believe it when a baby still didn’t materialize. To not be pregnant seemed perverse. To sit, weeping, over blood once more, while everywhere Elizabeth looked there seemed to be growth and newness, was wrong. But it was what happened.

  Sitting in front of the consultant like two bright high school students who hadn’t done as well as they should have done in their exams, Michael and Elizabeth had talked about options again. Their NHS-funded treatment was at an end. Michael remembered being a boy at a fairground, looking at his empty hands where three hard rubber balls had been a minute ago, the coconut still obstinate on its stand. His father, clapping him on the shoulder, saying some things are harder than they look, son.

  The consultant had advised a break and suggested that they could come back in six months and fund their own treatment, if they wanted to. Elizabeth had cried. The consultant had offered tissues, with the gesture of a man who mopped tears with great regularity. And Michael had said thank you, and taken his wife by the hand, and walked her to the parking lot, and put her in the car, and tucked the belt around her. And in many ways he had felt not a lot different from the way he felt when he spent a day at work dealing with the aftermath of a car accident, a house fire, a sudden death. He was sorry; he was helpless; he was hurt; he was strong with the strength that comes of having a role to play. These things were all the same, whether he was taking his distraught wife home or doing his job on a difficult day. But there was a difference that made all the difference. At work, he was not responsible for whatever had gone wrong to begin with. At work, he could hand over to someone else, and go home, to a life that had once been so perfect he could barely believe it would last. Well.

  “Maybe we should have a weekend away,” Elizabeth had said, in an attempt at making an effort, a couple of days later. Michael had agreed, although he used to like it when such weekends were fun, rather than attempts to recover from the last failure of trying to make a baby or prepare for the next. But neither of them had the heart to organize anything, and if they were going to pay for IVF they’d have to watch their money. So Michael bought a set of all the James Bond films on DVD—he couldn’t remember so much as a single baby in a Bond film—and they watched them, one a night, and when they had worked their way through them all, they went back to the fertility unit and started IVF again.

  Mike,

  I’ve started driving to work. I don’t talk to anyone any more than I have to. I drive home and I come upstairs, to our room, and I wait for all this to pass.

  Because it will. It will. All I have to do is wait. I can wait.

  But when I close my eyes, and I want to see you, instead I see her.

  Standing in our garden with that look on her face.

  Leaving the flowers.

  Help me.

  E xxx

  Between

  It was one of Michael and Elizabeth’s trips that brought everything to a head. Michael and Kate had just bumped into each other, in a way that could have looked casual, Kate coming out of the café at the entrance to Butler’s Pond just in time to see Michael arriving with Pepper, Michael setting off slowly on his walk so that anyone walking quickly would have been able to catch him up just out of sight of the parking lot.

  Kate had had a lot to say about waiting for exam results, and how far away university seemed, and how boring her parents’ arguments were, how repetitive, and how every time they whined or shouted each other’s names she was glad that they had, at least, given her a sensible, easy name. “Although my middle name is Eris,” she’d said, “so I didn’t get off completely when it came to weird names.”

  “I’m Michael John,” Michael had offered. “You can’t get much more functional than that.”

  “Like bread and butter,” Kate had said, and she’d smiled.

  Up until then, that smile, Michael had been pleased with how things were going. It had all been as he’d been determined it would be, what he had in mind when these walks started. These conversations made what he was doing a sort of public service. He was striving to mentor a teenager who was under pressure, to show her that there was life beyond exams and parents arguing. He knew what it was to be an only child; he knew what it was to feel the borders of Throckton as restraints and frustrations.

  But then there was that smile. It gave him a glimpse of what she was feeling. That smile, that in another man—a man less devoted to his wife, his beautiful, generous, sweet-natured, unreproaching wife—might feel an answering glint for.

  By mutual consent, they had seated themselves on a fallen tree a little way away from the main path. On warm days like today, Michael would pour some water into Kate’s cupped hands, and she would stretch down her arms so that Pepper could drink before he settled at their feet. No one would be passing close enough to see who they were.

  Michael had unlaced his boot to take out a stone, and as he’d done so, he’d said, “I won’t have this problem next week. Next week it will be flip-flops all the way.”

  Kate had looked at him, an animal alert for danger, and he’d said, as casually as he could, “Oh, Elizabeth and I are going to the Canary Islands for a fortnight. Just to get her some sun before the hotel gets really busy in July. Even after all this time, she can’t completely get used to the climate.”

  Kate hadn’t been able, in that moment, to fathom what was worse: the thought of two weeks without seeing him, or the way he had talked about his wife, so casually, the way you’d talk about your arm, so much a part of you that you barely think of it. She had watched Michael’s foot being swallowed up by his boot again, and watched his hands, lacing, pulling, back and forward, back and forward, snap, snap, snap.

  She’d thought about how, if he’d cared for her even the smallest bit, he would have explained it better, added some preamble, tried to let her down gently. He wouldn’t have told her that he was going away in a blurt like that. He wouldn’t have flung it in her face.

  Kate had wanted to get up and go but she felt weak all over, and the tears came without announcing themselves in advance so she had no chance to dig her nails into her palms and stop them.

  Michael had fastened his boot again, stood up, and turned to Kate to suggest that they head back, before he noticed that she was crying. He sat down again, cursing his stupidity, knowing that he knew better than this, and he said her name. It was meant to be a coax, a teacher to a student, but it came out as a plea, a man to a woman.

  But Kate wouldn’t look. She kept crying, every now and then the heel of her hand swiping up her face to knock the tears aside. When Michael put an arm around her, she sat solid, not showing that she noticed.

  So he put out his free hand, and he turned her face toward him.

  It was the way his thumb fitted so exactly along her cheekbone that did it.

  And once he had kissed her, he was done for, and he knew it.

  When they had walked back to the par
king lot, he said, “This can’t happen, Kate. You know that, don’t you?”

  And she had said, “I know, Mike.” It was the first time she’d ever dared to shorten his name.

  • • •

  When Michael had walked away from Kate that afternoon, he was sure he’d never put himself in that position again. He’d planned to rearrange his shifts, persuade Elizabeth to do more dog walking with him, get organized to go out with Blake and Hope more often. He’d stick to busy places. He’d explain to Kate that it was inappropriate for the two of them to spend so much time together and apologize if he had hurt her feelings or misled her in any way. By the time his hand was on the gate at home, half an hour later, that kiss had felt like a thing of the past, or an ill-judged moment in someone else’s life.

  But it hadn’t stayed that way.

  The Canary Islands had been fine. Good, even. Elizabeth had read books and slept and been charmed by local bits of tourist nonsense, and she had worshipped the sun. Michael had read a bit, and gone to the gym once or twice, and stroked Elizabeth’s hair while she lazed and dozed. They went to couples-only resorts these days, so everything had felt quiet, and calm, and civilized. They had swum in the mornings and chatted over cocktails and meals and promised each other that they would cook fish more often when they got home. It had been every bit what they had planned, the kind of trip they always had these days.

  It was two weeks designed not to remind them of the fact that they didn’t have a child, or two children, or three. Designed to remind them of how lucky they were, to have each other, to have love, to have a happy home, to have the money to do this sort of thing.

  Except…maybe it wasn’t the thumb/cheekbone. Maybe it was the eyes, or the soft, waiting unsureness of two mouths new to each other. All Michael knew was that, all the time they were away, Kate Micklethwaite filled his mind. He didn’t think that she was anywhere near his heart, but he didn’t trust himself. Because he had already done something he had been certain he would never do.

  He was a loyal man, a true man, a faithful man. He loved his wife, and since the moment he’d set eyes on her, standing behind the hotel reception desk with her uncomplicated eye contact and her unforgettable smile, he’d thought of no one else. No one. It had felt like madness. It had felt like walking toward those flames, the heat building, the cries behind him, powerless to stop.

  • • •

  When he and Elizabeth had gotten home, Michael hadn’t been able to wait to take Pepper out and see whether Kate would appear. He knew how much could happen in a fortnight, and he half hoped that she had found herself a boyfriend—there was someone she mentioned sometimes, a lad who worked at the restaurant where she waited on tables on the weekend—and the other half he ignored.

  But Kate was nowhere to be found, although he walked Pepper in all the familiar places, and dawdled past the end of her road. It’s for the best, he told himself, imagining her hand in hand with someone nearer her own age, single, full of things to give her. It’s for the best, he said to himself, as he came home from work late and curled in bed, wrapping himself around his beautiful wife in the way they knew worked best for their bodies, Elizabeth waking only to mumble something with the words “love” and “night” in it.

  And after five days without so much as a whisper of Kate anywhere, he had given in, and he had texted her. He had remembered as he’d done so how he’d protested, politely, as she’d put her number into his phone. He hadn’t wanted to say, “But why would I ever need to call you?” So he’d just said, “Well, we often bump into each other, so I shouldn’t think I’d need it.” And Kate had smiled and said, “You never know,” and then rung her own number from his phone so she had his number too.

  And Michael had paused before sending the three little words that he knew would change his world. But he had sent them.

  • • •

  Kate had been waiting. After two weeks without seeing him, and another week since he’d gotten home—she’d checked the flights and worked out exactly when he would be back in Throckton—she was starting to wonder whether her strategy had failed. Her decision to let him find his way back to her if he wanted her had been much easier when he’d been out of the country. Since he’d been back in Throckton, tanned and smiling, she’d found it much harder not to put herself in his path. Much harder to press Delete rather than Send after writing another text message.

  And then Kate’s phone beeped, and she was looking at three magic words: “Dog walking tonight?” She didn’t reply. But she went. And they sat on the tree trunk, and they kissed, and Kate smelled limes and fresh sweat, and Michael tasted lip gloss and breath mints, and they were both of them lost.

  Mike,

  I remember, once, we were talking about a trip, and I said, “How about a boat?” “Like a cruise,” you said, and I knew you were thinking about your mum’s unending list of people she knew who were either planning a cruise, going on a cruise, away on a cruise, or coming back from a cruise. And I said, “No, not a cruise—a gulet. A little Turkish boat, maybe five or six other couples, just kind of doodling around the coast. Swimming, reading, sleeping, sex, watching the sun go down.”

  And you shuddered, and you said, “No,” as though I’d suggested going clubbing in Ibiza or trekking through a rain forest or any of the other things we’d agreed that we never needed to do.

  You said it was the idea of being surrounded by water that you didn’t like, a tiny little boat and nothing but sea.

  I asked you whether you’d looked at a map, if you knew where you lived, on a tiny little island full of people obsessed with going to the edges of it and looking at the water while they were lashed by the wind?

  “I know,” you said, “but—I can’t stand the thought of it.”

  And you shuddered again, and I stopped laughing at you, because I could tell that you weren’t fooling around, that you felt the way I felt when I walked past a pet shop and saw anything in a cage.

  And I thought, How funny, I never knew that about you. We must have been married for eight years by then. I think it must have been about two years ago.

  Still. I never told you about the day I thought I was pregnant. You never knew that. You never, ever knew.

  So. My not-baby. Your surrounded by water thing. I think that makes us even. One secret each. No more. I know that.

  I refuse to talk about the rumors or have anyone talk about them in our house. I’ve hardly seen your mother; she obviously can’t trust herself to keep off the subject. But in our bedroom, it doesn’t matter. In our bedroom, there’s just me, and the memories of us.

  I wish, wish, wish you were here.

  E xxx

  Now

  Blake feels as though he has a foot in both camps, and is fully welcome in neither. Elizabeth’s eyes are hostile when he asks how she is feeling, and she snaps back that she’s feeling every bit the way he might imagine, and does he ask the Micklethwaites the same question?

  She’d gotten up and left the room, and he and Mel had caught each other’s eyes, and Elizabeth had called, from the bottom of the stairs, that there was no need to look at each other like that—she wasn’t mad, she just knew her husband.

  With Richenda, Blake can’t manage to have a constructive conversation either. When he tells her tentatively that there are rumors about Kate that she probably ought to know about, she holds up a hand and says, “Blake, I’m not at home to rumors. I don’t need them.”

  “But,” he says, and she says, “No buts, Blake, thank you.” And he stands in her kitchen while she grinds beans for coffee and then tamps them with what seems like unnecessary force, and he sees what it would be like to have this woman as a teacher, a mother, a lover, the sort you could only push so far and if you overstepped the mark you’d know about it.

  “Rufus just wants to argue, because if he’s making a big noise he doesn’t have to think,” she says.
“And Kate is so busy thinking about what color to paint the spare room that there’s no getting any sense out of her, but I can see it’s going to hit, sooner or later, and when it does, well, heaven only knows, and here I am, trying to keep us all together, which is a joke because we weren’t even together to begin with—”

  “These things—” Blake begins.

  “Please don’t tell me that these things can bring a family together, because I’m sure it’s true, but I don’t need to hear it now, while my husband is behaving like a spoiled little boy who can’t believe that everything isn’t going according to his plan, and my daughter is having to be way older than she should be, but I still hear her crying in her bedroom at night.”

  “I won’t,” Blake says. Richenda takes coffee mugs from the shelf, puts them on the countertop, then looks at them as though she has never seen them before, and has no idea what they are doing there.

  “Coffee,” he says gently and is rewarded with a smile, quickly erased by a shake of the head.

  “You can see,” she says, “why I don’t need to hear any more bad news.”

  • • •

  Mel’s desperation for a change of scene has brought her, Andy, and Blake to the pub. “I’m having an early night,” Elizabeth had said, and as if to prove her point had gone upstairs and started running a bath.