The Secrets We Keep

by Stephanie Butland

  “Is everything all right?” Richenda asks.

  “No, not really,” Patricia says, agitation vibrating around her words. “Elizabeth took an overdose. She’s awake now, she’s all right, but, well, it’s given me a bit of a fright.”

  They all stand, absorbing.

  “I’m not sure where she is,” Patricia says, looking around the atrium at the signs and corridors.

  “This place is a bit of a maze,” Richenda says, seeing what she can do to help, and as Kayla’s two grandmothers consult the hospital map on the wall, Kate feels as though Mike is tapping her on the shoulder, he’s so clearly there. She can hear him, telling her what to do. As soon as he says it, Kate knows that it’s right, that it’s time to get it all sorted. That there’s Kayla to think about.

  When Richenda and Patricia turn back, she says, “Do you think she’ll see me?”

  • • •

  When Patricia walks into the hospital room, she’s overcome by pity and sadness for Elizabeth, who looks like the sorrowful, lost woman she’s felt herself to be so many times, although she’s never shown it. She feels tears beginning. Then Mel is at her elbow; Elizabeth reaches out a hand. For a moment, there’s a real understanding.

  When Patricia has gotten hold of her feelings—when she’s stroked Elizabeth’s head, her cheek, thought of how she could have lost this sweet girl too, closed her eyes and wished for something different for all of them—she realizes that it’s going to be more difficult than she thought to do what she’s just promised to do. But she does it. She holds Elizabeth’s hand, and she says, as gently as she knows how, that she’s just bumped into Kate, who is waiting outside and wondering if she could possibly come in and talk to Elizabeth. Mel swells to about twice her normal size.

  “No, she fucking well can’t, and she has no business asking, and neither have you.”

  Patricia does what Elizabeth and Michael would have rated as a seven on the shocked-face scale they had for his mother. They’d only managed a ten once, one Christmas, when Mike had suggested that he and Elizabeth were going to spend Christmas away, alone together, a plan that they hadn’t dared see through.

  “Well!” Patricia says. “I only asked.”

  Mel raises her voice so it can be heard outside, in the corridor. “Get that little cow away from here before I get hold of her.”

  But then Elizabeth says to Patricia, “Yes, she can come in,” and to Mel, “She and I are just going to have to find a way.”

  She’s rewarded with two faces that hit nine and a half on the shocked-face scale. “Can you both go outside please and ask Kate to come in?” She doesn’t know whether it’s the drugs or the sleep or the not-quite-dream about Mike, but she feels calm now, as though maybe she can get through.

  Kate does a shocked face too—Elizabeth seems so ashen, diminished under the too-bright hospital light. Elizabeth smiles, a sad smile but a real one, that makes Kate realize how many pretend smiles were coming her way at the moment, and says, “I know, I look terrible, even for me. Sit down, Kate. It was brave of you to come in here.”

  So Kate sits. She hasn’t been sure how she will start. Mike had seemed to vanish as suddenly as he had come, before he could say anything useful. So she just says, “I thought I should tell you what happened that night. I feel as though I should now. I didn’t, before. I’m sorry.”

  “It was wrong of me to try to make you,” Elizabeth says, “but I would like to know. I’d like to know it all, from the start, if you wouldn’t mind telling me.”

  And once Kate starts, it won’t stop coming. It isn’t easy exactly, but Elizabeth’s eyes are on her, and she feels as though what she is doing is making the most important speech she’ll ever make. Kayla is hushed inside her, as though she understands that what she’s experiencing is a piece of her own history being made.

  Sometimes Elizabeth winces, sometimes she cries, but she doesn’t stop looking and she doesn’t speak. Somewhere in the middle, she takes Kate’s hand. At the end, they are both crying.

  Hello, my darling Elizabeth.

  Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if there hadn’t been email when I came to Australia, and when I went home again. I know we would have called each other, but I wonder whether we would have written too. I remember, as a kid, being sent to the post office to buy those blue fold-up letters for my mum, when she used to write to her friends in Canada. I think we would have written letters, and I think because they were going to travel halfway around the world, we would have thought really carefully about what we wrote. Our instantaneous emails were lovely because they were so easy and inconsequential. But now I wish we’d written, because I think I could have done with the practice.

  Because if you are reading this, my sweet, lovely Elizabeth, I am a very long way away again. When I’ve finished it, I’m going to seal it and give it to Blake and ask him to keep it to give to you if you ever need it. It’s not a “sorry I died” letter, because if I was going to write one of those, I would have put it in the drawer with our other papers. (I hope you faced down my mother and stuck with my choice of “Spirit in the Sky,” by the way.) It’s a letter for you, for if ever you get to the point where you doubt me, or doubt my love for you, or feel as though things couldn’t be any worse, then Blake will give it to you.

  It’s nearly Christmas. Today we bought the tree, and we talked about me walking into that fire, and I was overwhelmed by the feeling of how much I love you. I know we haven’t had the life that we planned, that it’s gone off the tracks here and there, and been hard. But whatever has happened, whatever I’ve done, I don’t want you to think for a moment that I don’t love you, heart and body and soul.

  I’m writing this in the kitchen, and you’re asleep in the bedroom, so really only about six feet away. I know you’re sleeping because I can hear you snoring. I know that you’ll stop when I get into bed, because you’ll roll off your back and curl yourself into me, and suddenly you’ll be as serene as can be. We have always been like that: serene together. Even in our first weeks and months, when we were fizzing with excitement and newness, there was something very still and calm at the center of us, like the water that you see when you look down a well. The trouble with a well is it makes you want to throw a stone into it. I’m sorry for the times I threw stones, and for the ripples.

  If you’re reading this, my darling Elizabeth, I’m sorry that things have gotten so bad. I could never imagine living without you. There was no imagined future for me where we weren’t together. I promise. Nothing could be truer.

  If you’re reading this, I’m sorry I left you. I don’t know whether this letter will make things better or worse. When I sat down to write it, I was wondering how I would manage to say all that I wanted to, but now it seems quite simple. Elizabeth, I might have been able to do a better job of loving you, but I couldn’t have loved you more. Whatever this dark place is, it will end, and I promise you’ll be happy again, and you’ll be free of it.

  Mike xxxx

  “I like it when it all goes back to normal,” Elizabeth had said on the ninth of January, settling in with the crossword and a hot chocolate, nape damp from her bath still, while Mike had clipped on Pepper’s lead and chucked her chin in passing.

  “You love Christmas,” he’d said.

  “Yes,” Elizabeth had said, “I love Christmas, but I also love the bit when it all goes back to normal. That’s why I’m such a delight to be married to. I’m so easy to please. Christmas, not Christmas, I’m happy.”

  Mike had grinned, said, “See you later.” And then he was gone.

  • • •

  Michael has grown careless in his walking. It’s more than four weeks since he had seen Kate in the garden center when they were buying their Christmas tree, and there’d been a moment when he’d wondered what she might do. But her promise of silence had been fervent and there was something in her that he ha
d always trusted: trusted enough for nakedness, for text messages, for something that he didn’t understand but that made him vulnerable.

  All the same, he has avoided the usual spots, until tonight.

  The moon is nearing fullness and when he sees her, a haze of moonlight and cold-air mist around her, he stops and looks, the way he would if he had come across a deer. Those eyes. She hasn’t seen him, and so he keeps looking. He can see, so clearly, the woman that she almost is. He hopes that, in the future, if she thinks of him at all, she will think well of him. Any other possibility is unbearable, in this dangerous moonlight.

  And then Pepper bounces over to her, and her face lights, and she searches Mike out and feels every bit as elated as she had known she would when he came back to her. She hasn’t gone to the usual place every night but often enough, she has thought, for him to find her when he is ready to. And there’s something else, something like the moment before exam results: the feeling that her life is about to change.

  Unwillingness is watermarked into him as he sits down next to her. “Kate—” he says, but she’s faster.

  “I’m sorry about the Christmas tree thing. It wasn’t very mature. I was just—I was surprised.”

  “You have nothing to apologize for,” he says. “All of this is my fault.”

  “Well,” Kate says, so, so aware that this could be her last shot, that he could be about to tell her again that they can’t see each other anymore, so, so determined to do what she needs to. “I’m glad I’ve seen you, because I’ve got your Christmas present.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Please,” she says. Her voice is made magnetic with the memory of the day she bought it: a jeweler in Marsham, someone who didn’t know her, so when they had asked if it was for her boyfriend she’d said yes, as though she were half of the most acknowledged couple there had ever been. “Our hands are the same size,” she’d added, “although Mike’s knuckles are bigger,” loving the saying of his name.

  He unwraps it. It’s a ring. His heart sinks. “It’s lovely,” he says, “and very thoughtful, but you know I can’t take it. You know I can’t wear it.”

  Perhaps if Kate weeps, or screams, or threatens, or protests, it will work out differently. But she doesn’t. She recognizes the hopelessness of the situation. She sees the look in his eyes, the way he is measuring the distance between where he is with her, and the life, the wife, he wants, and she thinks, OK then. And the hope goes out of her, and she takes the box back out of his hands.

  And Mike feels hopelessness, and love, and acceptance pass through her—in this place that is the closest they have to a home, they are as alive to each other as a mouse and a cat—and he says, “Why don’t you wear it for me?”

  But his voice is too full of their scant past to make the words sound the way they should sound. They come out as softly as starlight. And so Kate, knowing that she’s playing but knowing how true this is too, takes the ring and puts it on the third finger of her left hand, and she kisses him, and he is lost once more, lost even though he had promised himself he would never take this winding road again.

  • • •

  They are walking along the path that will lead them back to the main road when Michael stops, and starts to throw stones into the water. He picks big ones, the size of a child’s fist, and he hurls them as though he is trying to break windows.

  Kate steps forward, puts her hand on his arm. “What is it? Mike?”

  And he stops throwing, and turns, and looks at her.

  Perhaps if he hadn’t—if he’d kept facing away, if his words had lost some of their force without his eyes to vouch for them—things would have worked out differently.

  “Kate,” he says, “I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry. I love my wife. You’re lovely, lovely, but—I’m going to stay away from you. You’re special, but you’re not my wife. I don’t love you. I love her. I’m sorry.”

  Kate’s bra is uncomfortable because she hasn’t done it up properly. Her thigh has a damp, cold trickle running down it. She says, “I don’t understand.”

  “You do,” Michael says. “You do.”

  And Kate, who cannot believe that her world can be changing so fast, tick and tock and tick again, moves to take off the ring, only silver because she couldn’t afford gold, unengraved because she had thought there was more chance of him wearing it that way, and sees Mike checking his watch.

  If he hadn’t, things might have worked out differently.

  Kate, who had been about to ask him to keep the ring, even if he never wore it, never thought about it, turns instead and throws it into the water.

  And she slips.

  Falls.

  Mike grabs for her but only reaches her bag.

  And so Kate is in the water, gulping for breath, shocked by the biting cold, feeling for the bottom of the lake that isn’t there, reaching for the bank, which she can’t get to.

  She’s cold. Colder than she would have thought she could be, so quickly. She hears Mike shouting at her to get hold of something—she sees he is holding something out to her—but her arm can’t find it. Her legs can’t work against the cold and the weight.

  And then Mike is next to her. As soon as he’d seen her eyes lose focus, as soon as she’d gone quiet, he’d realized he had no chance of getting her from the bank, and he’d gone in.

  With her clothes, she weighs a ton. She passes out as soon as he touches her. It’s as though she knows she is safe.

  He lifts her onto the bank, lays her down, and he sees her chest rise and fall, and he wills those moon eyes to open.

  He is dragging himself out of the water, although the water is doing its best to hold on to his freezing clothes, when Pepper, who has a dog’s instinct for a crisis and a dog’s capability for planning, hurls himself in to help.

  Mike curses, reaches for him, misses, reaches again, and then he loses his footing and he’s over and under before he knows it. He breaks the surface with a great shout, not so much as a word as a plea for things to start going right, right now, and he frightens Pepper into going farther away from the bank.

  And he goes after him, even though he knows he shouldn’t.

  Of course he does.

  Mike,

  It’s almost a month since I last wrote you a letter.

  After Kate came to see me at the hospital I felt a sort of relief. I cried and cried and Mel and all of the nurses and doctors were doing worried faces at one another, but I kept on telling them I was all right. And I did feel better than I had done since you died, in a funny way. Kate brought me the bits of you that were missing, and when I had them, the picture was whole. I didn’t like the whole picture, of course—I never will—but having it meant that I knew what I was dealing with. I had the answers I needed.

  Before I was allowed to come home I was assessed by a psychiatrist. She listened to the almost-full story—everything except for you coming to see me at the hospital, I’m not ready to let that go yet. And she said, “I think what’s happening to you is very simple, Elizabeth. Your husband let you down by dying and he let you down again by fathering a child with someone else. You’re grieving. There’s nothing more human than that. It would be more worrying if you weren’t sad and upset. I don’t think you made a serious suicide attempt, but I do think you need some help, to cope with it all.”

  And it all seemed so straightforward when she put it like that.

  So now I see a counselor twice a week and, after eight sessions, I feel a bit less angry and a lot more sad, but it’s part of a process. The biggest thing is understanding that I am in a process that will lead to me being all right again. For the last nine months I’ve been fighting to stay at the bottom of the pond.

  Kate and I have met, twice. Once she waddled her way around here—by prior arrangement, as our two households are like warring nations trying to figure out a t
ruce—to see if I was all right. I think the talk we had at the hospital made her realize that I was a real person who loved you, so we have a peculiar bond forming. I don’t think I was very nice to her. I wasn’t horrible, just too sad to make an effort. I refused to talk about the baby. We sat in the garden—you know that corner where the bench is, where, in autumn, the heat sometimes gathers? We sat there. I asked her why she brought the flowers here. She said, “I used to walk past your house and think about him being inside. I still did it when he had died. It felt like the closest I could get.” I said, “That makes sense. Well, about as much sense as me thinking Mike was leaving the flowers.” Mel brought some tea out and asked Kate how many stretch marks she had. I told her off, afterward.

  Then I went to see Kate. I’d been going through our papers, sorting things out, shredding, filing, and I found the papers and letters and reports from the fertility clinic. Everything that our blood and genes said, none of which helped us, in the end. I thought of what a waste of time it had all been, and then I thought about how Kate would know none of it. So I went around and I told her everything the reports said about you, including being a cystic fibrosis carrier. I didn’t know whether it was the right thing to do—I checked my heart, so carefully, for malice before I went, and if I’d found any I wouldn’t have gone—but I think she was relieved. And if there are problems with the baby, the more she knows, the better.