The Last Secret

by Mary McGarry Morris

  Carol,” she says too quickly too urgently when her sister answers the phone. And as always Carol's response is distant, reserved, tentative in her fear that something might be expected of her. Seventeen-year-old Nora might have run away for a week, but it was cautious, serious Carol, the mature RN, who hadn't been able to get away from home fast enough, marrying right after nursing school and moving to California.

  A few years later, when Nora was in college, she asked Carol if she could come spend spring break with her and Les. Carol said their apartment was small, but Nora offered to sleep on the couch or on the floor even, she was dying to see the new babies. The twins were six months old and Nora and her mother had only seen pictures of them. When they were born, Mrs. Trimble had planned on flying out to San Diego so she could help Carol for the first ten days. They might both be nurses, but Carol was still a new mother, and twins were an entirely different matter. Then, at the last minute, late, the night before her flight, the phone rang. Les informed his mother-in-law it would be better if she didn't come. He and Carol had decided what they really needed was time alone to bond with the babies.

  “What's her problem?” Nora asked her disappointed mother after hearing the litany of Carol's reasons why spring break wasn't a good time for her to come.

  “Selfishness mainly.” Her mother's answer shocked Nora. It was the first negative word she'd ever heard uttered about her sister. But if Carol had cut her family ties, her mother only blamed herself Through the years she would regret having expected too much of her older daughter after her husband's sudden death. Carol should have been out having fun instead of being burdened with so much responsibility. With Mrs. Trimble's abrupt return to teaching, she needed Carol to be at the house when Nora got home from school. She needed Carol to drive Nora to Girl Scout meetings and tennis lessons, then home again, often skipping her own extracurricular activities. She needed Carol to start dinner so that by the time she got there they wouldn't have to eat too late. Carol was expected to work her way through UMass, waitressing nights and weekends. And then, as soon as Carol could, days after graduation, she was gone, clear across the country with bright but humorless Les, one of only three men in their nursing class.

  “They're doing well,” Carol says now when Nora asks about the twins, the niece and nephew she barely knows. Allison is at Caltech starting on her master's and Jacob is taking some time off to paint. “For his art,” Carol said the last time she and Nora talked. Jacob dropped out of college three years ago, but Carol continues to make it sound as if it has only just happened.

  “That's wonderful,” Nora says. “And Les, how's he doing?”

  There's a pause.

  “Actually, I've been meaning to call. I … Well, Les and I, we've come to a … an agreement.”

  “Oh?”

  “We don't live together anymore.”

  “Oh. Well, that's not good. I mean … well, what does that mean? Are you separated or divorced or—”

  “He's moved. Closer to the hospital. So now his commute's only half what it was. Twenty-six minutes to be exact.”

  “And you're okay with that?”

  “As okay as I can be,” Carol says with a fluttery lilt, helpless wings in a downward spiral.

  “What happened?”

  “The usual. Midlife crisis and all that.” Her voice cracks.

  “Carol. I'm so sorry.” You're not the only one, she wants to say but doesn't. Let there be one person in her life who doesn't know she's been betrayed, one person whose vision of her holds, one person not thinking “poor thing” whenever they talk.

  “It's so strange. I mean it's not as if he's with someone else. He's just … he just wants to be alone.”

  “Maybe he's just trying to work something out.” His sexuality, Nora thinks, immediately ashamed of the malice in her heart. While Les has never been unkind to her, he's never been kind either. Only disinterested. Remote. The few times she and her mother did visit, he'd get up from the table and watch television.

  “If it was another woman, that I could understand. Or make some sense of But this is just pure rejection. Of me. Me, he doesn't want to be with,” Carol sobs.

  “Oh, Care. I wish I was there so I could give you a great big hug right now.”

  “I'm all right.” Carol pauses to blow her nose. “I'm fine,” she insists. “It's just the way everything's changing. It's hard. You wake up one morning and everything's different.”

  Not so different, Nora thinks. Les hasn't changed, only Carol's illusions have. Like her own.

  “I don't even make the bed anymore,” Carol says. “I mean, what's the point? It's just me. I haven't run the dishwasher in days. And I look terrible. God forbid Les should walk in now. My color hasn't been done in months. You should see my roots. I canceled the papers, magazines, it's all so depressing. And now I even hate Republicans. I mean, imagine, after all these years, but it's like there's something in the air. A pall over everything, like a toxic cloud. You know what I mean? Dead-ness. Something.” Her voice breaks. “It's just so hard.”

  “Maybe you should see someone, Carol. A therapist, someone you could talk to,” she says with a twinge of hypocrisy.

  “Could you come, Nora? We wouldn't have to go anywhere, just sit by the pool and talk. I'd really like that.”

  “I can't, Carol. I wish I could, but I can't. Things're just so … so up in the air right now. So busy.” Busy trying to hold her own life together. Busy trying to stave off the looming storm that is Eddie Hawkins.

  “That's right. I'm sorry, I wasn't even thinking of your job.”

  “It's not just that.”

  “You were so smart to go back to work. I wish I had. I should have, but I didn't want it to be like Mom. I wanted to be there for the kids, and for Les. But all I did was make him carry the whole load, and now look what I'm left with. Nothing!”

  “That's not true.” Nora can't think of a way to steer the conversation back, twenty-six years.

  “I've been thinking of taking a trip.”

  “You should. Get your mind off things.”

  “Maybe I'll come see you.” Carol poses it as a question. A timid one.

  “That would be … nice.” Great idea, she should have said. Or wonderful. Or when, soon, I hope. Instead she is asking her sister if she remembers anything of that long-ago night when she called her frantic mother, needing help to get home.

  “Well, yeah, that Mom was beside herself. Out of her mind. For an entire week she just sat by the phone.”

  “I know. God, when I think of it, how upset she must have been. But did she ever say anything? You know, details like, where I ended up. What state I was in.”

  “You mean you don't even know?”

  “It's just that I'm having a hard time remembering.”

  “What were you, on drugs or something?”

  Nora bristles with her sister's scorn. Obviously Carol finds this conversation therapeutic, restorative to be back on old footing, good sister-bad sister.

  “So you don't know? Mom never said?”

  “She was a wreck. I mean, you and everything else that was screwy in her life.”

  “Poor Mom.”

  “There I was, three and a half months pregnant, but once again it was ‘Oh, Carol, please. I need your help.’ I flew home. Don't you remember?”

  Nora squirms. Yes, now she does. How could she have forgotten? The first of Carol's many miscarriages, and it happened the very day Nora arrived on the bus. Her poor, poor mother, Nora keeps thinking. She never should have called Carol. The psyche protects itself by forgetting. The last thing she wants to remember is the pain she caused her mother, alone and having to deal with one daughter a runaway, the other losing her first pregnancy.

  “I never should've gone. Les kept telling me,” Carol is saying. “But it was all such a mess. That whole thing with you and what's-his-name, that teacher, and him coming on to Mom. No wonder you ran away. I mean, God, what was she thinking? He was closer in age to y
ou than her, that's what happened!”

  “That was a real hard time for Mom.” Nora cringes with the memory. Mr. Blanchard, her handsome, young English teacher.

  Carol laughs. “I'll say, dating a pervert.”

  “He wasn't a pervert.”

  “Oh, really? Then what was that whole trashy mess all about? All the screaming and crying?”

  Wincing, she holds her head. “Do you mind, Carol? I really don't feel like talking about all that. I mean, why? What's the point?”

  “You're the one that brought it up, asking me what state you ended up in, for godsake!”

  “I'm sorry, but you're confusing things. You weren't there when it happened, the teacher, I mean.”

  “No, I'm just the one you kept calling night after night, remember? Crying, sobbing into the phone, telling me how you were going to kill yourself if Mom said anything to him. And then she'd call and tell me how it was her mandated duty, her professional responsibility. My God, do you have any idea what that was like for me, all that turmoil and long-distance wailing, sometimes in the middle of the night even? And there I am, taking my temp every two hours, trying to get pregnant, and having to put up with that. Finally Les just put down his foot. ‘That's it,’ he said, ‘no more. It's about time your mother and sister solved their own problems and stopped using you as their personal wrestling mat.’”

  “I'm sorry, Carol. I am, but that was an awfully long time ago. And besides, you're mixing up two totally different things.”

  “No, Nora. I'm just being honest. Not like you and Mom, all your little secrets, then expecting me to come pick up the pieces. And don't think I—”

  “I can't hear you,” she lies. “You're breaking up, Carol.” She holds the phone at arm's length while her sister rages on. She hangs up and the phone rings seconds later. She won't answer.

  In the days that follow, memory and regret lodge in her heart like a wide, thick blade that constantly aches. Eddie Hawkins has become the provenance of all sorrow and fear, the pain of her marriage. Her mother's loneliness. Her sister's bitterness. If only she'd never met him. If only he'd go away.

  liver is in the hospital. He and Annette had just been seated for dinner at the Renwood Club when the numbness hit. The waiter was handing them menus, but Oliver could only stare across the table at Annette, unable to lift his arm. When he tried to speak his garbled words made no sense. Nora is in the emergency room lobby. She has been on the phone for the last fifteen minutes, trying to track down Ken, but no one has seen him. His cell phone must still be off because the voice mail cue starts with the first ring. The lobby door flies open and Stephen rushes in. She tells him the little she knows. Annette has come out twice to brief her. Oliver's CAT scan showed there wasn't any bleeding, so the doctors are giving him tPA to break up any other clots.

  “I knew this would happen. These weird pains he's been getting. Like tingling in his arms and legs. And here.” Stephen touches his neck, the carotid artery. “I told him, do something. Don't just sit there. But he's a mess. The man's a mess. An absolute mess. He and his brother, they just stay mired.”

  Mired? Her marriage, is that what he means? But this isn't the time to lash back. With distress, Stephen's emotional volatility rages. He and Oliver are not only first cousins born weeks apart, but they were raised almost as brothers. Stephen's mother and Oliver's mother were identical twins who did everything together until Stephen's mother died of a burst appendix when he was twelve. With his own father long divorced and remarried, Stephen was brought up by his aunt Addie and uncle James, Oliver and Ken's parents. When he was seventeen he had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for months. After years of therapy and, more recently, antidepressants and a long relationship with unflappable Donald, he is far more stable and happy.

  “If anything happens to him,” Stephen declares, shaking his fist. “I don't know. I don't know what I'll do.”

  “Oh, Stephen, I know.” She holds his hand in hers. As exasperating as she has found his snarly pettiness through the years, it is impossible to stay mad for long. She has grown deeply fond of him in spite of his early coldness to her, all part of his unbreachable loyalty to family. His first allegiance was to Robin, “Kenny's little friend,” he used to call her. Being that much older, Stephen had known Robin since she was a child. But Nora and Stephen quickly found common ground, the death of a parent in their early adolescence. “But we mustn't think like that,” she says to soothe him now as he fears the loss of one of his two closest living relatives. “The EMTs got him here right away. And there's so much more they can do now.”

  “I blame myself,” Stephen says with a gasp, covering his mouth for a moment to compose himself. “Why didn't I do something? Why did I just let it happen?” His ragged whisper echoes past confidences. His beautiful mother's sudden death occurred when he was away at summer camp. He hadn't wanted to go, but his mother made him. Boys' activities, the rough-and-tumble of life in a tent, frogs, bugs, latrines, he needed more of that, she felt, all the things he detested. Make him stronger, toughen him up, especially with his uninterested father on the opposite coast. Stephen would always regret not standing his ground, refusing to go. If only he'd been there, he might have come to her aid, alerted someone, saved her in time. His obsessive caution is a joke in the family, though understandable.

  “You didn't let it happen. It's not your fault. You know Oliver. He's—”

  “Intractable!” Stephen cries, and two elderly women look up, startled. “But so what? When you see the ship going down, you don't just stand there, do you? No! You damn well do something! You save the people you love!”

  Yes, and a chill goes through her. You do. No matter what it takes, or how.

  Stephen's cell phone is ringing. It's Donald. Stephen moves nearer the door to tell him what has happened and where he is. Stephen's voice rises. “Let someone else cover! This is where you're needed!”

  Flipping open her own phone, Nora walks out to the alcove lined with vending machines. This time, Chloe answers. No, she doesn't know where her father is. She just got in from SAT tutoring and heard her mother's message on the machine. She asks how Uncle Oliver is, grows quiet when Nora says she's not really sure. It sounds like a stroke, though no one's actually said the word yet.

  “A stroke,” Chloe repeats, and Nora hears the fear in her voice. “But he's going to be all right, isn't he?” she asks, like her father, needing the positive spin, even if it means being lied to. A cheerful outlook is its own strength, Ken said once when Nora complained about his lack of concern, or at least the appearance of it, during the delivery drivers' strike at the paper when Ken had been quoted as saying the stoppage was more about union politics than wages and worker dissatisfaction.

  “That's bullshit,” Nora said.

  “Which makes the world go round and round and round,” he laughed, his silken humor and silken life unmarred by want or pain. Until me, she thinks. Is that it? Am I the slub, the chosen flaw? Robin may have married within their circle, but he would choose a woman totally different. An outsider.

  “I don't know. If it's a massive enough bleed, there could be paralysis. Or it could even be fatal,” she says, hating herself She's not even sure what she's talking about, but she's here, Ken's not, and Chloe should know that. “Could you call around, Chloe, try and find Dad? Tell him something's happened to his brother.” The unspoken message: His brother. In time of need your father's nowhere to be found. Cruel to do to her, but the child should see. In betraying their mother he betrays them all.

  “Where? Who? I don't know who to call.”

  “Everyone. Wherever you think he might be.”

  “But haven't you?”

  “Some places. Maybe you can … maybe you can call some others.”

  “Okay.” Chloe's voice is small, uneasy with the mission.

  “What's Drew doing?” In her rush out of the house she forgot to tell him exactly where she was going, only that Uncle Oliver was sick.

 
; “Watching television.”

  “He's supposed to be working on his term paper.”

  “I'll make him turn it off. But Mom … do I have to call the Gendrons?”

  Nora listens to her daughter's breathing. “Why? You think he's there?”

  In the silence, she can feel Chloe's cringe. “I don't know.”

  “No. That's fine. I'm sure we'll find him. Sooner or later.”

  Nora and Stephen huddle in the corner. This is as far away as they can get from the coughing. Holding his head, the haggard young man opposite them leans over his knees and moans, then is wracked by a barrage of violent sneezes. Stephen covers his nose and mouth.

  “This is ridiculous,” he says behind his hand. “Imagine subjecting healthy people to this.”

  “You can wait outside, if you want. I'll come get you,” she says.

  “Where the hell's Kenny?”

  “I told you. I've been calling. I know there was a meeting with Al Bailey, the new school superintendent, and then—”

  He looks at his watch. “Nine thirty at night, what kind of meeting's that?” he says so snidely that she has to take a deep breath.

  “I don't know, Stephen. Do you?”

  “I thought it was over. Isn't it? What the hell's he thinking?” he asks when she doesn't answer right away.

  “He's trying. We both are. It's … it's hard.”

  “Just so you know, I talked to him. I did. I told him he was an ass, an absolute fool, putting everything on the line like that. And for what? She's a disaster. Everything she touches turns to shit. And that's from someone who likes her, you know that. But you don't—”

  Along with everyone else in the waiting room, they both look up as Annette rushes through the swinging double doors. Even with the profusion of tears running down her smooth brown cheeks, she looks stunning, regal in her flowing red caftan.

  “Oh my God,” Stephen gasps, and Nora throws her arms around him. To protect him from the news they both fear.