Every Single Secret

by Emily Carpenter

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes.” Then I reached up and laced my fingers through his thick black hair and drew his face to mine. He took off my glasses and kissed me, and I thought, for the thousandth time since meeting him, I’d never been kissed so well in my life.

  In the bedroom, I was impatient, peeling off my shirt and then Heath’s, but he gripped my wrists to make me slow down. I pulled him to the bed, but the more urgently I moved, the more he resisted. Every time I pressed against him, he would pause whatever incredibly delicious thing he was doing, fix his eyes on mine, and gently push me away. He grazed his fingers over every plane of my face.

  In the light from the hallway, I could see that his brown eyes had lightened to a pure, reflective amber—the way they did anytime he was tired. His lips parted, then pressed together. It seemed like there was something he wanted to say.

  “What is it?” I gave him a playful shake even as alarm shuddered through me. This was always tricky territory for me—opening up, talking about my feelings. And Heath and I didn’t usually go there, but this night felt different. He shook his head and kept staring at me with those amber eyes. There was something more than tiredness in them—something I’d never witnessed before. He was afraid, afraid to tell me something.

  Suddenly I was afraid too. I had a crazy urge to cover his mouth with my hands or to run out of the room. But I didn’t do either. Instead I calmly pulled aside the sheet, tugged down his underwear, and went to work on his body until all thought of conversation had been forgotten.

  Later, he pulled the sheet over my shoulders and murmured in my ear. A simple wedding, he said—maybe in our backyard, or even at the courthouse. A honeymoon in the Caribbean. I nodded to all of it. The details of a wedding were irrelevant to me. Neither of us had enough family to count and only a handful of friends. What mattered was we were back to normal. Whatever he might have wanted to say, he’d changed his mind. The delicate balance between us was restored. I was safe.

  Heath pressed a kiss against my hair, and I burrowed into the blankets, my eyes fixed on the diamond band on my left hand. It winked in the bar of light from the bathroom. Heath had gotten it sized to fit me perfectly.

  It was perfect.

  Everything was perfect.

  Sometime in the night, I felt the blankets jerk and I woke, disoriented. The streetlights had shut off and the room was ink black. Heath, on his hands and knees, was mumbling and pawing at the covers, like he was searching for something.

  “Break the mirror,” he said. “Break it. Smash it.”

  He leapt up and darted across the room, yanking up the blinds on the bay of windows in our bedroom. He laid his hands on the wavy old pane of the center window, gently at first, his fingers spreading outward. Between them, I could see the cloud of his breath on the glass.

  “Heath?” I said, but there was no answer. Only the sound of his breathing. It was heavy, like he’d just burst over some invisible finish line.

  “We can open the window, if you want.” I could hear a tremor in my voice. Maybe he was having a panic attack and needed fresh air. I told myself to stay calm.

  “Do you—” I started.

  With no warning, he balled his hands into fists and smashed them into the window. The glass cracked but didn’t shatter. I gasped, then he drew back again, ramming his fists clear through to the other side. The window splintered, breaking into a million triangles.

  A moth fluttered around his head, and the sheer voile curtains billowed behind him. He held his hands out, palms up, and a beaded line of blood trickled down his forearms. His eyes were wide open but hollow, and the look on his face stopped my breath. It was a triumph I’d never witnessed on anyone’s face before.

  “I did it, Mom,” he said.

  I shrank back against the wooden headboard and waited—for what, I didn’t know. After a few seconds, Heath moved to the bed and lay down again, curling his body away from me. I heard him sigh once, deeply, then begin to snore.

  I eased off the bed and crept around to the other side. It was hard to see in the dim light, but the worst cut seemed to run along the edge of his hand, all the way down past his wrist—a good three inches and a series of angry, oozing crosshatches across his knuckles. But the bleeding had already slowed, even though some of it had soaked into the blue sheet beneath him.

  In the kitchen, I made myself a cup of tea and drank it standing up, staring out the back door, willing my hammering heart to slow. I flung open the door of the pantry. Rows of cans and boxes and packages lining every shelf. Plenty of food for now. Plenty for always. I counted until my breath evened out.

  The next morning, when I got out of the shower, Heath was sweeping the floor. He shook his head when I asked him what the dream had been about.

  “I don’t remember.” He squatted and swept the glass into the dustpan.

  “You don’t remember anything?”

  “No.” He dumped the pan into a garbage bag.

  “Was it something about your mother?” I asked, my throat closing with dread.

  The question hung in the air between us. Here was his chance to tell me anything he’d held back. Here was my chance to do the same.

  “You said something about a—”

  “Daphne,” he interrupted. “It was just a bad dream. No point in talking about it. But I’m sorry about the window.”

  He slung the bag over his shoulder. Something in the clipped tone of his words, the closed look on his face that I’d never seen before, kept me from pushing any further. I had the distinct impression that we’d ventured into a tenuous place. That if I wasn’t careful, I could lose him. I nodded my assent, and he left the room.

  The nightmares continued, at least two or three times a week. Occasionally Heath got physical, delivering a particularly fierce kick or jab to my ribs. Once I caught an elbow on my jaw, leaving me tender and bruised. When Lenny saw me at the office the next day, her eyes got big, and she sent Kevin on a coffee run.

  Her silence made me nervous. “It was an accident,” I said. “He was asleep—dreaming—and got agitated. I just happened to be in the way, that’s all.”

  “Did he mention what he was dreaming about? Zombie Nazis? Killer T. rexes? The IRS?”

  I avoided her gimlet eye. “He said he didn’t remember.”

  “Maybe it was about his mysterious, murky past, that he doesn’t like discussing with you or anyone. Which you let him get away with because y’all seem to have this weird pact where you don’t talk either.”

  I sighed. “Everybody has a right to privacy. Some of us just need more than others.”

  “I know,” she said. “And I’m not trying to pry, I swear. I’m just . . . I love you, Daph. And I think it might be a relief to let it all go.”

  “Mm-hm,” I said.

  “Something to think about,” she said. “That’s all.”

  “We need to put the Mathison drawings into CAD,” I threw over my shoulder as I stalked off in the direction of our minikitchen.

  “I love you,” she yelled after me.

  “I love you too,” I yelled back, and that was the end of that.

  She might’ve been off base thinking Heath was an abuser, but she was right that the nightmares were a sign of something more going on with him. The truth was, I had known for a while now that below Heath’s perfect exterior, inside him, lay a wilderness—I had recognized it that first night because I had the same thing. Before, it had made me feel connected to him in a way I couldn’t put into words. But now I knew there was something seriously wrong—something my fiancé didn’t think he could tell me.

  And it occurred to me, for the first time, that both of us could end up lost—so easily and without any hope of rescue—in that vast, hostile wilderness.

  Chapter Five

  The monitor at the left end of the shelf showed a room furnished with Victorian pieces like they had downstairs, rather than the modern style of ours. A couple slept peacefully in the bed. The room on the middle monitor look
ed almost identical, except it was papered in an old-fashioned rose pattern.

  A movement caught my eye, and I inched closer to the screen. The couple—presumably the Siefferts, the ones who’d arrived before us—were awake. I hadn’t noticed this before, but they weren’t in bed. They were sitting on a matching pair of ottomans positioned close to the camera. And it appeared that they were fighting. Mr. Sieffert slumped back, arms folded across his chest, and his wife leaned forward, her chin jutted, lips moving fast. She was mad about something, that was for sure.

  It was hard to tell with the low lighting and the grainy picture, but she looked like she might be the same woman I’d seen earlier, watching us from the dining room. She was slim, and her hair was the same lightish tint, blonde or gray, pulled back in a clip.

  “How do you turn up the volume on this thing?” I murmured.

  I twisted a couple of knobs along the bottom of the monitor, but nothing happened. Maybe there was another volume control. Or maybe Cerny disabled the sound at night. I drew back, chewing at my thumbnail, momentarily ashamed for prying into their private moment. The feeling didn’t last long, because another blip from the left monitor caught my attention.

  Jerry McAdam—no more than a fuzzy gray blob on the screen—was climbing out of bed, easing out slowly from between the sheets. He disappeared into the bathroom, then a few seconds later returned and crept toward the sitting area. He eased himself down, threw a glance over his shoulder at the bed, and began thumbing at an old-school flip phone.

  “Jer, you sneaky bastard,” I breathed, moving closer to the monitor. “You smuggled a phone into Baskens? I call a flag on the play.”

  He set it on the arm of the chair. A few seconds later it flashed; he snatched it up and started typing again.

  “Texting somebody, are we? And not your wife, obviously, as she’s just a couple of feet away.”

  Suddenly, behind me, I heard a loud click and a whir. I leapt backward, bumping into the desk, bashing my hip bone. I yelped, then clapped a hand over my mouth. As I limped to the other side, the yellow pad caught my eye, and I smoothed the page. There were four names written on it, in all caps.

  SIEFFERT.

  MCADAM.

  AMOS/BECK.

  I looked back up at the monitors. The woman, Mrs. Sieffert, was alone now, her husband out of the frame. He must have gone to the bathroom. She had her head in her hands, and her shoulders were shaking. She was crying.

  The apparatus behind me beeped again, one long, tinny whistle, and the monitors went black, dousing the room in darkness. I froze, my heart pattering. Holy shit. This room was a minefield of cables and metal corners. How was I going to get out of here without impaling myself? Arms extended, I picked my way out of the room, managing somehow not to trip or bang any more body parts. After gently pulling the door closed behind me, I hurried down the stairs. At Dr. Cerny’s room, I paused for a quick beat, then continued down the stairs that I hoped would lead me to the kitchen.

  I was right, thank God, finding myself in Baskens’s thoroughly modern and spotlessly clean kitchen. Commercial appliances gleamed; above them, shelves stacked with pots and pans and every conceivable cooking implement. Just beyond the massive double refrigerator, I spotted a door and was immediately rewarded with a pleasurable little spike of dopamine.

  Ah, yes. The pantry.

  I opened the door. Inside, wooden shelves lined the wall, one stacked with cans of soup and pickles and sun-dried tomatoes, another with dry goods. The rest were bare. I looked around, not quite able to stop myself from counting as I took it all in. There was a hanging basket with a few potatoes, onions, and apples. A glass jar of candy bars. Two boxes of cereal. Not exactly the bounty I’d expected to see. But maybe the cook brought in fresh food every day.

  I snagged a couple of packages of peanut-butter crackers, an apple, and a bag of M&M’s, and, kicking the door shut behind me, carried my windfall back into the kitchen. As I did, one package of crackers slipped from my grasp and went spinning across the floor. I scuttled forward, anchoring everything with my chin, and reached for them, only to be met by the sight of a pair of expensive-looking black leather loafers.

  I straightened, my face already hot.

  The man, dressed in a dark sweater, tailored trousers, and the loafers, was in his late sixties. He had an impressive head of thick hair, mostly gray with streaks of honey, and a neatly trimmed beard. A smile played around his lips, deep dimples cleaving his cheeks, and I felt something twist hard and fast inside me, and the pain was so unexpected it took my breath away. He looked so familiar, like someone I’d known. Someone I’d loved . . .

  It was Mr. Al, I realized. From Piney Woods.

  He held out the package of crackers. “My apologies, I didn’t realize you were awake.”

  I accepted them. “I’m sorry. Heath and I—we slept through dinner.”

  “No apologies necessary. I’m Matthew Cerny. It is my great pleasure to meet you.”

  “Daphne Amos.”

  We managed an awkward handshake. His grip was firm, warm.

  “I was hoping you didn’t stand me up because you were unhappy with something. Your accommodations, possibly. Something Dr. Teague said.” He grinned again. And there was that twisting sensation once more, deep in my gut. I felt breathless.

  “Daphne?”

  “Excuse me. No, everything is lovely. We just . . . we were so tired from the trip.”

  “Feeling better now? More rested?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “Would you like your dinner?”

  “Oh, this will be fine.”

  “Don’t be silly,” he said. “Sit.” He gestured to a small table by the window. I sat and deposited my haul as he swung open the refrigerator and began pulling out an array of plastic containers. “We have a wonderful cook, Luca, but he goes home, back down to Dunfree, every night and doesn’t return until morning. So I’m afraid you’re left with me. No fear, however. I am well versed in the ways of the microwave.” He spooned leftovers onto a plate.

  “You really don’t have to,” I protested.

  “No, please, allow me. It’s a first, someone paying for one of my retreats but declining to meet with me. I have to admit, on one hand, it’s been making me feel like the last one chosen for the kickball team.”

  I gulped.

  “On the other . . .” He turned now and regarded me with a thoughtful expression. “It means we can be friends. I think I’ll rather enjoy running into someone this week who isn’t a client.” He put the plate in the microwave and punched a few buttons. He drew two wineglasses hanging from a rack above the counter toward him. “How about something to drink? How about a red?”

  “Water’s fine,” I said.

  “Problems with alcohol?”

  I hesitated. “No. I just don’t want you to go to any trouble.”

  “It’s no trouble. And I’d like a glass myself.” He inspected a bottle on the counter. “They left us half.” He filled both glasses, then held his aloft. “I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free. Do you know the quote?” He looked hopeful. And even more like Mr. Al than I’d thought at first. It was the cowlick, just above his left eye. On Mr. Al, it had been endearing—made him look like a wide-eyed boy. It lent a certain charm to the doctor as well.

  “No, sorry,” I said.

  “It’s from Wuthering Heights. A classic.”

  “It’s a good one. Evocative.” If a little bizarre for a toast. He clinked his glass on mine, and we drank the strong, mellow red. “When I looked at you, that’s immediately what came to mind. Heathcliff’s girl, making her way back to the old house, searching for her lost innocence. Her childhood love.”

  The microwave beeped, and he pulled out the steaming plate.

  “It’s just Heath, by the way. My fiancé’s name. Not Heathcliff.”

  “Noted.” He set the food in front of me, along with utensils and a cloth napkin, then settled in the other chair. “So,
shall we discuss the elephant in this shadowy kitchen?”

  I blushed.

  “Your distaste of psychotherapy.”

  I concentrated on the scallops. “Trust me. You’re not missing much by not meeting with me. I’m kind of boring.”

  “Oh, I doubt that.” He poured more wine. “In particular, I’m interested in why you don’t want to talk.”

  “Therapy’s not my thing.”

  “Ah.” He laced his fingers. “You’ve had a negative experience.”

  “Not necessarily. It’s . . .” My eye fell on a toaster on the counter. The doctor and I looked like a Picasso painting on its gleaming surface.

  And that was exactly what I wanted to say to the doctor. That the past was like the surface of a crazy mirror. When you spoke certain things aloud, when they left your mouth, they changed. The words became either oddly magnified—blown out of proportion—or squeezed down to nothing. Right could appear wrong, good could look like evil, depending on the spin. No one talked about their past without things getting distorted—and without consequences. There were always consequences.

  “It’s complicated,” I finally said.

  Cerny’s lips curled. “Ah, complicated. That magical word that has the power to end a conversation.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No apology necessary. It’s none of my business. But I couldn’t help but notice the . . .” He nodded at the hair band around my wrist. I realized it must stand out, especially to someone in his field. A tip-off to who I was.

  I cleared my throat. “I read about it somewhere, a few years ago. I use it to bring me back to reality when I get . . . off track.” Maybe a smidge of self-revelation would satisfy his curiosity, prevent him from prodding any deeper. “I was a foster kid. Raised on a girls’ ranch in south Georgia from age eleven to eighteen. Not a great place, but not as bad as it could’ve been. There was a man—one of the housefathers—that I was close to. Long story short, he was a good guy, but he ended up going to jail. Felony drug possession and child endangerment.”

  I felt short of breath, disoriented. Like some foreign entity had just taken over my body and unleashed a torrent of words in an unknown language.