The Secrets We Keep

by Stephanie Butland

  First I looked at the colors, the grays and blues that, if you mixed them all together, would make the kind of sad sky that England does so well.

  I started with the thing I thought would be the hardest: I pulled out your old leather coat that makes me think of winter walks. Especially my first January here, because I never put enough clothes on when we went out and you would wrap me in your coat when you said my ears had turned blue. Sex by the fire when we got home. My second winter, we bought me what your mother called “a proper coat” but I missed walking with the old leather one around my shoulders, your arm keeping it in place.

  I sat on the bed and I held your coat and I realized what people mean when they talk about “sorting out” the clothes of a dead person. They mean decide which memories are really precious to you and which memories you can risk losing. The shirt we bought when we were meeting Andy’s girlfriend, and then neither of us liked her. The sweater that lived downstairs for most of the winter so that there was always something for one of us to put on when we took Pepper out. Your white dress shirt that you used to like me to wear in bed when we’d been somewhere dressed up, over my black bra and panties. The jeans with the tear in the knee from when you fell on our way down from Beau’s Heights, and I thought it was funny until I saw how deep the cut was. I’m sitting here writing to you with all of these memories sprawled around me. I’m supposed to decide which ones I can throw away, manage without. Well, I can’t manage without any of them. When I die, someone can throw away all of our clothes together.

  If you were thinking of one day putting in a ghostly appearance, this would be a really good time. I don’t think I’ve ever been so lonely.

  E xxx

  Then

  It had been a month after the seventh round of IVF failure, the fourth that they’d paid for, from their savings and from the money Elizabeth had inherited from her aunt and uncle and left, untouched, to pay for her children’s university education, one day. When she thought of that former version of herself, so sure she would have the future that she planned, Elizabeth wanted to laugh, but couldn’t, quite. Summer was coming.

  Michael had hardly needed to look at Elizabeth’s face to know that something was serious. She was sitting in the half-light of the kitchen, waiting for him, not doing anything, not putting food on the table for them, not looking at the crossword, not reading a book. No wine, no coffee at her elbow; no radio, no TV. Just Elizabeth, beautiful and calm and eerie in the evening. Michael had gone to switch the light on, but she’d said, “No.” He’d looked at her then, looked for tears or pain in her face, now more afraid than concerned. “I think it might be easier to talk in the dark,” she’d said.

  “OK,” he’d said, “then how about the garden? It’s warm.”

  And she’d nodded, and then he had regretted his suggestion, because it meant talking about having a glass of wine, and finding the bottle opener, and Elizabeth going to get something to put on her feet, all of which had given Michael time to wonder what on earth this could be about.

  He had been able to imagine a new test result, given with an apology about mixed-up lab samples, that meant that one of them was, in fact, properly infertile. Or something else the tests had shown: some medical condition that made being sterile the least of their worries. He had taken glasses from the dishwasher and thought about cystic fibrosis; about the heart problem that took his father; about Elizabeth’s aunt with the aneurysm; her father, medical history unknown; her mother, who died before she had the chance to show where the weaknesses in her body were going to be. His stomach had been heavy. The skin around his eyes had pinched and ached.

  Elizabeth had obviously been finding it difficult to look at him as they settled into their usual chairs by the garden gate, so Michael had poured wine and thought, Even if it isn’t medical, even if there’s no bad news in that sense, she’s gearing up to tell me something I’m not going to like. He had listed the possibilities: She wants to go back to Australia; she’s going to leave me so she can find a man with a history of children, before it’s too late for her; she doesn’t love me anymore. All of the above.

  Elizabeth had been planning this conversation all day, and mulling it, in the quiet wakeful night hours, for weeks. It had been that morning when the thought struck her that she could no longer talk to Mike about what was in her heart, that all of this baby-making stuff had made them cautious, stepping through tall fields of fragile flowers when they spoke to each other, afraid that one day the stepping through might go wrong and then they would be facing each other, knee-deep in dead petals that their clumsiness had shimmered to the ground. And then—well, and then not having a baby would be the least of their worries. Once, they had had a joke about how, if they split up, Elizabeth would at least get to leave all of the terrible wedding presents behind on the grounds of air freight charges. They don’t joke about that kind of thing anymore. Not because it feels as though their marriage will end; these months and years are binding them tighter, tighter, every day. But sometimes Elizabeth dreams of suffocation, sometimes of disintegration. She knows she needs to find some freedom, somewhere.

  So she had taken a deep breath and flipped her hair back over her shoulders so that her whole face had faced her husband’s, and she had said, “How would it be if we never had a baby?” The look on Mike’s face had confirmed all that she had feared. She had watched as he thought, considered, opened his mouth, closed it, trying for words that wouldn’t cause so much as a petal flutter.

  “I would be sad,” he had said, “because you—we—want to have a baby so much.”

  “Are you saying that because you know that that’s the right answer?” Her tone had been sharper, more combative than she had meant it to be. Speaking the language of their love, she had touched his thigh, an apology.

  He had put his hand, briefly, on hers, an acknowledgment.

  “I mean,” she’d said, “that I’m afraid we’ve stopped being honest about this, Mike. We’re so busy trying to have a baby that we’re forgetting things. Other things.”

  Michael had thought about the way it felt to come home these days. “I think we’re paying a high price,” he’d said. And then, remembering the sharp, good taste of undiluted honesty, “There are times when I dread coming home.”

  Elizabeth had bowed her head. “There are times when I dread waking up,” she had said, and then she’d started to cry, and although Michael had thought that there couldn’t be anything worse than dreading waking up, as she kept talking he had begun to understand that that was just the beginning of bad days. “I dread going to the hospital and I dread coming home. I dread my period but”—and her eyes, finding his, had looked wild where the moonlight was catching at the tears—“I dread being pregnant. What if I was, and then I miscarried? Or there was something wrong with the baby? What if I was a terrible mother? What if I died when the baby was small, smaller than I was when my mother died, and then it had to grow up without me?”

  Michael had been on his knees in front of her, his first thought to be close enough to comfort, but, as he had listened, feeling his own list of what-ifs begin, he couldn’t find a way to comfort her. Instead, he had sat with his back to Elizabeth, his shoulder blades at the outside of her knees, feeling her left hand on his left shoulder, knowing that her right hand was wiping away her tears as his right hand was wiping away his.

  Elizabeth had said, “What if this just isn’t meant to be, Mike?” and then, finally, she’d become quiet, still.

  Michael, torn between truth and calm, had chosen truth. “What if it had something wrong with it?” he’d begun. “What if it grew up, and we were happy, and then our child died before we did? What if being an only child was too much for it? What if we missed all the years of just the two of us?”

  And then, in the quiet of the night, he’d given voice to what had seemed, when it was nestled inside him in the dark, the worst thought of all: “What if a
ll this isn’t worth it?”

  • • •

  That night they’d slept without moving, without dreaming, and in the morning when they’d woken they’d looked at each other with nervous eyes, afraid to confirm whether they’d really said the things they had the night before.

  Michael had been the one to make the move. “I’m glad we talked,” he’d said simply. “I feel much better.”

  And Elizabeth had smiled and said, “Yes. Yes.”

  Mike,

  I’m making a patchwork quilt. I used to help Auntie Brenda do it, way back in the mists of time, when we didn’t have a lot of money and we didn’t have a lot to do. Auntie B used to save up worn-out clothes, curtains, sheets, and when she had enough she’d get out her hexagon templates and we’d start cutting out. You had to cut carefully around the hexagons so as not to waste anything.

  Mel used to get bored fast, so she’d get the job of putting them in piles, which wasn’t really a job at all, but she’d arrange all the hexagons into soft towers of different colors and that kept her happy.

  Then we’d sew the hexagons onto smaller hexagon templates that were cut from old Christmas and birthday cards. Then we’d sew the hexagons together. If our stitches weren’t neat enough Auntie B used to make us pull them out and start again. I think Mel pulled out more than she ever sewed, but I liked the precision of it, and I liked the fact that I was good at it, because most of the things we used to do—horse-riding and tree-climbing type things—Mel was always best at. She was cleverer at school too. But I was best at sewing.

  Mel liked the part when you took the tacking stitches out and pulled the cardboard hexagons free, but Auntie B and I couldn’t sew fast enough for her. You could make patterns of flowers or diamonds or stripes or diagonals, or you could make the patchwork completely random, but that was much harder than you thought it was going to be—there would always end up being a pattern, somehow. When the hexagons were all done and all sewn up, we made a sandwich with an old sheet on the bottom, some flannel in the middle, and the patchwork on top, and we sewed a knot where every point touched. We all liked that bit best, I think: the feeling of racing toward the end.

  Like you said, the last mile of a marathon ought to be the worst, but it’s brilliant, because you’re nearly there.

  I’ve decided to make a quilt out of your shirts.

  I reckon it will take me three months.

  By the time I’m done, everyone will have forgotten the stupid, malicious talk about that baby. And I won’t have to get rid of your clothes, ever.

  There will still be your shoes, with the shape and shadow of your feet in them.

  Love, love, love,

  E xxx

  Now

  As Richenda walks to the library, she lets her steps be slow and her breath weighty. Although she’s not looking forward to what it is she is going to do, and she hasn’t enjoyed what she’s leaving behind, she can see no reason why she shouldn’t make the most of this sweet space between.

  It’s Tuesday morning. For the first time in three days, no one is talking to her, glaring at her, sulking at her, or ignoring her. No one is weeping; no one is achingly inconsolable. No one is making demands about food and care that reveal what a horribly thin veneer of equality exists in their relationship.

  Of course, Richenda understands why things have been the way they have been. Once the initial shock of Patricia’s visit had worn off, Kate had spoken to her midwife, who (as far as Richenda could tell from Kate’s end of the conversation) had made valiant attempts to reassure her over the phone, and then arranged to come around the following morning. Richenda and an unwilling Rufus had racked their brains and spoken to cousins and aunts they hadn’t been in touch with for years, and been unable to find any evidence or anecdote of cystic fibrosis. “That doesn’t mean anything,” Kate had said, face ghoulish with the reflected light of the computer screen. “It’s a double recessive. We could all carry it.”

  Denyse, the midwife, had sat with Kate and Richenda and gone through everything they needed to know. If both Kate and the baby’s father were carriers of cystic fibrosis, there was a one in four chance that the baby would have it. Kate’s breath became a moan, but Denyse had said, “Kate, you need to stay calm and listen. If neither of you are carriers, the chances are nearer one in a quarter of a million. Now, there is a good chance that the father is a carrier if his aunt was, but we’re not going to panic, because even then, the odds are very much in your baby’s favor.” She had held eye contact with Kate as she’d counted off on her fingers. “There’s no reason to think that you carry the faulty gene, there’s been absolutely nothing in what we’ve seen of the baby on the scan to suggest that she has any problems at all, and we can do a simple test when baby is five days old, which will tell us for sure whether there’s a problem.”

  “There’s no test you can do now?” Richenda had asked, seeing Kate’s stricken look, knowing that she was working out that that meant three months of waiting.

  But no, Denyse had said, it was too late for the usual tests, which needed to happen much earlier in the pregnancy.

  Kate was like a little girl again, weeping and following her mother, exhausted and afraid. “Why didn’t you tell us about Michael?” Richenda had asked her, struggling to get her arms around her daughter, and Kate had said, simply, “I promised. I promised he could trust me.”

  Richenda had accepted this. Rufus had not.

  “Did he force you?”

  “No.”

  “Kate, you can tell us if he did.” And Kate had tapped at her phone, passed it to Rufus, who’d held it out for Richenda to see. Michael and Kate, Michael with his arm around Kate’s shoulders, Kate smiling, Michael looking, Richenda thinks, a little bit embarrassed. No forcing.

  Rufus’s voice is unsure whether it’s a shout or a sob. “So it happened more than once? It wasn’t a—a—”

  “A one-night stand? No, Dad, it wasn’t. But I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I don’t care what you want. I’m thinking about what I want. I’m sorry if you don’t like it, Kate, but if I’m expected to have a hand in the upbringing and, presumably, financing of this dead man’s bastard”—Kate had given a little mewl then, and although Richenda thought afterward that it must have been at the word dead, it seemed to come out just as Rufus said bastard—“and it is a bastard, Kate, you can dress it up however you like.” Rufus had stopped, taken a breath, looked away as he tried to find where he’d taken his finger off the place.

  Kate, undaunted, fierce at the insult to her baby, had offered, unrepentantly, “She’s just a baby, Dad. I don’t care what anyone thinks. I care that Mike isn’t here and I care that there might be something wrong with her. I didn’t want anyone to know, but now you do, so—”

  “So?” Rufus had asked, voice low, trying to get Richenda to share his incredulous look. “So? Do you have any idea—”

  “Yes, Dad,” she’d said. “I know you think I’ve thrown my life away. I know you think it’s the end of the world. I know you think Mike took advantage of me. You’re wrong, but there’s no way I can convince you of that. So you’re just going to have to wait and see.”

  And just as Richenda was being impressed by her daughter’s maturity, Kate walked away, up the stairs, and slammed her bedroom door behind her.

  Rufus had said “See!” with triumph and malice, and Richenda had truly wanted to hit him, one of only a few times in her whole life when violence had seemed like the best thing to do. Instead, she’d let him rage and snort and hypothesize at her, her mind on Kate and all that Kate would need. But Richenda had found the time too to take a vicious pleasure in not pointing out that all the things Rufus was raging over—Michael’s duplicitousness, his finding someone younger, picking on someone vulnerable to his charm, the exploiting of his position—were things that Rufus himself could be accused of.

 
And then there had been Blake’s visit, yesterday morning. He’d arrived when Richenda and Kate were upstairs, talking about the nursery—the only distraction for Kate seemed to be to think about preparing for her baby—and Richenda hadn’t heard the knock at the door, so by the time the raised voices reached them, it was too late for her to do anything except go downstairs and watch and kick herself for forgetting that she’d arranged for Blake to be here now when under normal circumstances Rufus would be at work. Normal circumstances. As she heard the words in her head, Richenda felt as though she was listening to an excerpt from a long-dead language, words describing a concept that there was no need for in her world.

  At the top of the stairs, she had heard Rufus telling Blake that they now knew that “your dead friend” was the father of Kate’s baby. By the time she reached the bottom, Rufus was saying, “For the last few months we’ve all been asked to worship that man, who turns out to be nothing more than a grubby little cheat. How are we to know that he didn’t push her in there himself?”

  “Well,” Richenda had said, knowing she was fanning flames but too tired to stop herself, “we don’t, but as he went in as well, and as he got her out, we can assume it’s unlikely. Kate might have pushed him in, for all we know. Hello, Blake.”

  At that, Blake had caught her eye, nodded a greeting. And in the warmth in his glance, the look that said, Of course I don’t understand what you are going through, but I do understand that it’s wrecking your family and now I’m here I’ll see if there’s anything I can do to limit the wreckage, Richenda had had the briefest of glimpses into an alternative universe, where it was a man like this who was steering into the eye of this storm, other storms too, with her.

  Next to him Rufus looked mean, unkind. But Rufus really was just the outward manifestation of the shrew that was burrowing inside Richenda, resenting too the time she’d spent on guilt for Elizabeth’s honorable husband, imagining how easy it would be to dazzle someone like Kate, so grown-up on the outside, so unsure and afraid that she’d canceled her gap year—oh. Richenda had felt life tilt a little further. The canceled gap year. Of course. She’s always felt there was something Kate wasn’t saying about that. She had shaken her head, wanting to clear it of questions that her daughter had no intention of answering.