The Secrets We Keep

by Stephanie Butland

  It’s the fact that Kate seems still half girl that breaks his heart. Her hair is in a ponytail, her fingernails are painted pink, her cheek is as smooth as it was when she was born, and Rufus had held her while Richenda slept and promised her that he would look after her, and protect her, and be the best dad that there had ever been.

  He remembers all of the parent-teacher evenings where he and Richenda were told how bright their daughter’s future was, and how she could do anything she wanted to do. And he could not believe that this was what she wanted: this domestic shackling, this deliberate shrinking of her world.

  Unless she had gotten scared. Unless all of that promise, all of those possibilities, had been too much, too soon.

  After a quick check on the summerhouse project, Rufus has been to Marsham to have lunch with Caroline, a woman he has lunch with whenever he can contrive it, and will do more than have lunch with if things continue as they are. Caroline has interesting theories about human behavior, something that attracts Rufus almost as much as her walk, the shape of her forearms, the high warm glug of her laughter. The fact that she laughs a lot.

  Caroline thinks that everything people do they do as a way of getting something that they want, so, according to her, if Kate isn’t ready to go away, if Kate feels insecure, then getting pregnant is a clever way of making sure she doesn’t have to do the things that she’s afraid of. The baby makes her safe from too much change, safe from being alone in the world.

  But she’s not alone, Rufus had said, and Caroline had said, no, but she probably feels that she will be, would be, if she went away. She has no idea that after two days on a beach or three evenings in a university bar, she’ll have made friends who she feels as though she has known forever. Those of us who live in these small places, these fixed places, can forget how much the world can flex.

  Then she’d reached across the table, rested her hand on his, and said, apologetically, “Of course, Rufus. I don’t know Kate at all; you must ignore me, or stop me, or tell me that I’m wrong. I’m just going from what you’ve told me; you are her father and you know much better than I do,” and he’d said, “Honestly, Caroline, I feel as though I know nothing about my daughter. Nothing. Not anymore.”

  And so, as Kate sleeps, he walks over and touches her, lightly, on her head, and then he takes a breath and touches her stomach, and leaves his hand there, waiting to feel, if not love, then some sort of affinity. The baby moves and Rufus remembers how miraculous, really, it all is and he thinks, Well, new baby girl, none of this is your fault, and you and I are going to get along just fine. It’s the best he can do for now.

  Richenda has woken, and she puts her hand on his arm. He looks at her, smiles, stops smiling when he sees the look on her face. “What now?” he asks, and that tiny peace inside him wilts away, vanishes, takes with it the memory of it ever being there at all.

  Richenda sighs, moves herself gently out from under Kate, who is sleeping in the way that only the emotionally exhausted can, and says, “Let’s talk in the garden. You’re not going to like it.”

  Hey, Mike.

  There are other alternative universes that are much worse.

  There’s the one where Pepper dies so you don’t need to walk him, and you’re safe at home that night. We’re doing the crossword, or watching a film. We might even be talking about getting a new puppy. Mustard, I imagine we’d have called him. Or Ketchup. When I look at Pepper now, I feel bad about this universe. I give him too many treats to make up for it, and he’s getting fat.

  The next alternative is worse. I only think of it when things are very dark. In this universe Kate dies and you live, because you don’t see her go into the water, or you realize in time that you can’t get both of you out and you get out yourself, or you call for help. I’m really ashamed of that one, in spite of the lies that girl is telling about you.

  And then there are those alternative universes where you would have died anyway, because in some book somewhere in the beyond, your name and that date are written, unchanging. So there’s the heart attack universe, the car crash universe, the meningitis universe, the undetected cancer universe, the eating a sandwich with a bee in it universe.

  But if you were always going to die, I have a bunch of other universes that are much better than those, because I die too. In the same car, killed on impact universe. The plane crash universe. The house fire universe, where the smoke suffocates us in our sleep.

  But none of those are this universe. This is the slowly dying of a broken heart universe, and I wish it would hurry up and be over.

  There is no universe in which that is your baby.

  E xxxx

  Between

  That summer—his last summer—Michael was like a man possessed. With Elizabeth at the hotel, and Kate with nothing to do until she went off on her gap-year trip in September, it was as though it was meant to be, as though he had been given this small gift, these few months of uncomplicated sex and simple adoration. A little bit of time off from good behavior. A little bit of time off from wondering whether he and Elizabeth should have tried a little bit harder for their baby for a little bit longer, whether the sad way she looked sometimes, when she thought he wasn’t watching her, was her thinking about the family they didn’t have.

  Everything was all right between them, of course: good, even. They had enough money, a happy home, a way of living and working that suited them both. When they argued, it was angry and fast, and soon forgotten. The three-trips-a-year agreement they’d made when they stopped trying to have a baby still stood and their evenings of planning and wondering, researching and deciding, were some of the happiest he ever knew. His wife laughed at him and accused him of liking the anticipation more than the time away. He denied it, but she might have been right. When she was absorbed in brochures, bookings, dates, flicking between web pages and asking herself where she’d seen something that she’d meant to show him, she was all his own Elizabeth, the one he remembered from the first, serious and sweet and excited, not disappointed yet.

  She still avoided babies, and that made Michael wonder. He had noticed that she would make any excuse not to see Lucas and Toby, left the room as soon as his mother started talking about one of her friends’ new grandchildren. It didn’t worry him, exactly, because he knew that they loved each other, even if the loving was quieter. But sometimes Elizabeth looked wistful, and he was afraid of what she might be thinking. Did she ever wonder whether, if she had picked a better man, she would have a life that didn’t include a pair of pristine white baby shoes still tucked in the corner of her underwear drawer? Michael couldn’t find a way to ask.

  One day, as Michael had been coming home from work, he’d looked in through the living room window to see her sitting on the floor with her head in her hands. He’d rushed to the back door, immediately and thoroughly worried, his years of being a good husband leading him to think only that someone else has hurt his wife, not that he could be part of whatever the matter was.

  What happened when he got to the back door shocked him. He went in to find Elizabeth as she always was, happy and smiling, delighted to see him, with a shortlist of next year’s marathons and a new travel book.

  Every time she tucks her hair behind her ears, the diamond earrings he gave her for their tenth anniversary last year wink at him and remind him that he walked into the jeweler’s with an eternity ring in mind.

  • • •

  Kate had asked to talk to her parents on the Saturday after her exam results came in. She had thought it would be the best time: they were so proud of her, of her success and, by extension, their own success as parents, that the three of them had managed to spend a genuinely enjoyable evening together, with no snipes or sulks. When the mood had still been cheerful two days later, Kate had decided that there wouldn’t be a better time.

  “I just want you to hear me out, please,” she’d said, and her parents had l
ooked at her and waited, her mother with half a smile, her father with half a frown.

  “I’ve decided that I don’t want to go to Thailand. I’ll have time to do those sorts of things during summer break from uni, and I really want to spend the time I have between now and next September here. I want to save some money and I want to just do nothing for a bit. So, I want to cancel my trip.”

  She’d held her breath, waited, seen her parents glance at each other and swap expressions, her mother taking the half frown in exchange for her half smile passed to Rufus.

  “Are you sure, Kate?” Richenda had asked. “Has something happened to change your mind?” And Kate had thought of what has happened to her, not so much a change of mind as a transformation of body and heart. There’s the tang of limes and the salt of sex that she feels herself emitting in great waves with every move and breath, the ache in her thighs and the feeling of fingernails moving across her lower back, not hard enough to mark her but hard enough to leave the sensation of themselves behind. There are only two places that Kate wants to be these days: the nest that they make for themselves at Butler’s Pond in the good weather, or Michael’s car, warmer but so much less comfortable, parked in the dark when it’s cold and wet or when he’s on his way to or from work, with no Pepper for an excuse.

  And there’s her heart, which seems to be stretched to vastness, taut and tense with love, vibrating at every thought of the man who is making the leaving of Throckton impossible. She wonders if Michael will ever understand the enormity of what she is doing; until they found each other, she was counting down the days until she could get away from her parents’ constant bickering, the home made sad and cold by years of hopeless effort. Not yet.

  “Not really.” She had shrugged, remembering what Mike had told her once, that the best way to avoid an argument is to not engage with it at all: that if you give nothing, there’s nothing to react to. Just the thought of him had sent out a twang that she couldn’t understand her parents not hearing, or seeing, somehow.

  Although the look in her mother’s eyes had made her wonder whether she did know something.

  But Richenda had said, “Well, it’s your choice,” and Rufus had nodded and added, “I thought for an awful minute that you were going to say you didn’t want to go to university.”

  “No, Dad,” she’d said, and she’d thought, We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, if we have to.

  University Kate seemed like another person, in another world. Although, once, all she had to do to turn into that person was to keep putting one foot in front of the other, now, that other Kate seems hypothetical.

  • • •

  The place they had found was in a hollow made by tree roots, well off the beaten track, well away from all of the other places couples with nowhere else to go went to. Mike had made Kate sit there, when they first found the spot, while he had curved a radius around her, checking to see whether they were visible.

  “Probably best if we lie down,” he’d said when he came back, pulling her down to him, and Kate had blushed, still not used to this frankness and frank enjoyment.

  Her sexual experience had been limited, so far, to a classmate who had known as little as she had, and a university student intern of her father’s who had been nice enough but couldn’t wait to get away from her afterward—in retrospect, her bedroom at home while her parents were at work probably wasn’t the best venue—and so Kate had been left with a mixture of guilt and “Is that it?” which had made her determined to wait for something better. She hadn’t anticipated that “something better” would take the form that it had, but she knew that life’s best love stories were unlikely. The usual form of things, as demonstrated by her parents, certainly wasn’t anything to hold out for.

  They had been lying on a blanket in their spot, later on the day when Kate had told her parents that she wasn’t going to Thailand after all.

  “What would we do,” she had asked, sitting up, cross-legged, and reaching up inside the back of her T-shirt to refasten her bra, “if someone found out?”

  “You’d be all right,” Mike had said, smiling at her as she tugged down her T-shirt, raked her fingers through her hair, bound it into a ponytail again. “I’d be run out of town. But no one’s going to find out.”

  “Eventually…” she’d said carefully.

  His eyes, lazy in the dusk, had found hers then. “Kate,” he’d said, “there’s no eventually in this. In us. You’ll go off to your turtles and some lucky boy will watch you in your bikini and—eventually—he’ll pluck up the courage to ask you to come for a walk with him in the moonlight, and I’ll be someone that you barely remember.”

  “I thought—” she’d begun.

  “Sweetheart, don’t think.” He was tired. He said it kindly. “Sweetheart” was his reassuring work word for sullen children, before he had learned their names. Kate didn’t know this. She took those two syllables, wrapped them up tight, put them just behind her solar plexus for safe keeping. Used them to fend off that last sentence that, later, she would pick over again and again. Boy and barely remember would distress her the most.

  “I’m not going,” she’d said.

  “Why not? What’s happened?” He had sounded concerned, a bit scared. This conversation was not going the way that Kate had planned it. She had hoped for—expected—relief at this news, an admission of how much they had both dreaded parting, and finally, the thing she is waiting for more even than the next touch, a stuttering declaration of love. She had thought that this would be The Night. She had been wrong.

  She had looked at him—he was sitting up too now, his eyes on hers, his mouth a line, his forehead a question, and for all that Kate’s heart was twisting and shouting, her mouth managed to do the right thing.

  “There weren’t enough people,” she said. “They canceled it.”

  “That’s a shame,” he said. Then carefully, cautiously, “You’ll be looking for something else?” Inside, his heart is flapping, a tethered bird. Their jokes about turtles are so much a part of their conversation that he hadn’t noticed, until now, how often he had thought about the end date of this—thing. (It’s not an affair. He’d never do that to Elizabeth.)

  • • •

  Later, walking back to the place where, by mutual consent, they parted, he had said, “Kate, you know there’s no future in this, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” she’d said.

  “Good,” he’d replied, “because I couldn’t stand the thought of you throwing away your future because you thought there was more to me than there is. I never got much farther than Throckton, but I was happy to do that. I am happy.” He thinks of adding “without you,” decides against. “You—you could do anything. And you should. Don’t think of me.” He had remembered how he had wanted to help her, how, when they had first talked, he had encouraged her to talk about Thailand, about Oxford, asked questions about what she would learn, see, do. He knew when it had all changed: the lip gloss–mint kiss that never should have happened.

  “Of course not. Don’t worry about me,” she’d said, and some tautness between what she was feeling and what she wanted him to see had meant that she’d smiled him a smile that was a perfect balance. Strength pulled it north, fear south; love sent it east, longing west. And so it flew a true path, and banged Michael right in his solar plexus, so he stood, half winded, for a moment or two before he composed himself and headed for home.

  • • •

  After that Michael had tried harder. He had renewed his efforts to stay away from Kate. He had taken Elizabeth to a spa for a weekend, which had turned out to be a lousy idea. She’d spent most of both days having treatments that required either isolation or silence, so apart from half an hour in the Jacuzzi or a stroll around the grounds in the slot between Elizabeth’s manicure and her massage, he was left to himself. He swam fifty lengths of the pool, he took a squash less
on, he ran a five-mile loop around the grounds in one direction, then the other. And all the time, he thought about Kate. About that smile. If the kiss had made his body sing, the smile could, very possibly, have done for his heart.

  And yet. At dinner, Elizabeth had glowed with relaxation, good health, and gratitude. At night, she had slept the sleep of someone who has spent all day having the tension wrung out of them. Michael, sleepless, had watched the shadows of the night hours move across her face, and he had loved her. He had known that he loved her without end, that the years they had spent together had only made them more than they were to begin with, that nothing, nothing, not even Kate’s magic, would take him from Elizabeth. A part of him still remembered the difference between love and infatuation; a part of him recognized his impulse as being different from his true wish.

  And he lay there, not switching on his phone, not looking to see whether Kate had sent him something, a picture of her painted toenails accompanied by a question mark, a little “thinking of u,” which was the most affection that she ever dared, and he wondered what it was that Elizabeth had been feeling, that day she sat on the floor with her head in her hands, that she had been unable to show him.

  Mike,

  I don’t know why today was the day to sort out your clothes, but it was. It was the thing I’d dreaded most, and your mother and Mel had given up suggesting it. But now that there’s something I dread more, I thought I would give it a try. Even though I like the smell of your things when I open the wardrobe door, and I like the way your clothes and mine are all squished up together.