Secret Lives

by Diane Chamberlain

  I made two more trips back to the house and now I have here my mattress, turned over so the stain don't show and some candles, which I set all round the cave on rocky ledges. I also brung a blanket and some rags from the rag bag for my female problem. Kyle didn't say how long this ministrating will last. I wisht I understood it better. What part of me is bleeding? And what has the blood to do with babies? I could believe as easy some spirit has taken ahold of me as I can believe what Kyle's telling me.

  I'm going to spend the night here in my garden, though I wish now I left a note for Kyle. He'll be worried since I didn't show up at the mill neither. I am a coward, afeard of going to my own home. The strap scares me worst than ever.

  I'm going to turn out the lantern now and lie here in the darkness. I'm not scared here. Nothing in my garden can hurt me.

  July 23, 1941

  I went back to the house real early this morning and snuck into my window. I woke Kyle with my finger to his lips and when he opened his eyes I saw they was red and I felt terrible for the worry I caused him.

  “Where you been?” he asked. He sounded angry but I knew it was really worry I heard.

  “I had to stay away,” I said.

  “No you don't,” he said. He looked excited. “Mama said yesterday you're a woman now, you're too growed for her to whip.”

  I knew Kyle wouldn't lie to me but it was hard to believe Mama would say that. Kyle swore she did, that she was real calm after her fit yesterday.

  “Please stay, Katie,” Kyle said. “I promise I won't let her whip you.”

  I was real nervous and I just set on the chair in our room waiting for breakfast time to come.

  I showed up for breakfast like nothing was different. I was so scared I couldn't touch my eggs or grits and no one said a word til after Daddy left for the mill. Then Ma stood up and begun clearing the table and finally she spoke.

  “I'm glad you had the decency to get rid of that wicked mattress, Katherine,” she said.

  I was afeard to turn around and look at her and I could hear her clattering the pans in the basin.

  “You're growed now,” she said. “Too old to whup.”

  Kyle smiled at me, but then I saw his eyes get big, his lips go flat. He leaned back in his chair and hollered, “Ma, no!” Before I could turn to look, Ma took ahold of my hair and snapped my head back and then I heard the sound of the scissors as she worked them right close to my scalp and in seconds my hair lay in a thick shiny yellow pile on the floor.

  Ma set the scissors on the table, calm as you please, and walked out of the room. For a minute I stared at the hair on the floor and felt tears trying to push out my eyes. Then all of a sudden, I didn't care. I looked at the hair and didn't feel a thing. I touched the spikey, hacked off ends of my hair close to my scalp and felt nothing at all. Kyle jumped from his chair and grabbed up the hair from the floor. He held it to my head as though he could attach it back on some how.

  “Leave it be,” I said. “I want to show you something. A place I found.”

  “But, Kate, your hair.” Kyle looked upset I wasn't crying or mad like he thought I ought to be.

  I stood up. “Come with me,” I said.

  Before we reached the cavern I made him swear he would never tell nobody what I was about to show him. I pulled aside the brush I set against the entrance and led him inside and when I lit the lantern he let out his breath in a long whistle. I could see he was amazed and I felt proud.

  “I can get away from her here,” I said.

  He walked around like I did the day before, touching the stalagmites, staring into the reflecting pool.

  “You can't stay out here,” he said.

  “Just sometimes,” I said, though I had been thinking how good it would be to sleep here on hot summer nights.

  “We have to get to the mill,” Kyle said.

  I touched the back of my hair and the ends of it felt like broom bristles against my palm. “I'm staying here,” I said.

  I spent the rest of the day turning the cavern into my hide-a-way. The Smith's house has been deserted since last year when they left for West Virginia, so I took a chair and a table from there and drug them back here. I found more candles there too and a lap desk filled with pencils and paper. There's a long rock above the reflecting pool—sort of a ledge that makes a perfect bookshelf for my dictionary and grammar book. Now they can stand upright like they is sposed to be. High above the place where I lay my mattress there is a deep hole in the wall and this is where I'll keep my journal.

  –4–

  Ben Alexander sat on the bed in his cabin high above Lynch Hollow, a small battered address book on his knee. He took another swallow of whiskey from the bottle on the floor and stared at the name on the page in front of him. Valerie Collins. She was the last one. Over the past few months, he'd called everyone he'd ever known. Valerie was his last hope.

  She used to send him cards at Christmas. She'd address them to both him and Sharon, but he knew they were directed to him alone. The cards were always a picture of Valerie with her salukis. As the years wore on she'd taken on the look of her dogs, sleek and long-limbed. Her nose grew thinner and more pointed, her hair longer, silkier, blacker. Sharon laughed as she followed Valerie's transformation from woman to canine, never catching the meaning behind the cryptic messages: Hope to see you soon, or Love you. He knew Valerie meant the singular you. She didn't know Sharon and didn't care to.

  He took another taste of the whiskey and moved the phone from the apple crate he used as a nightstand to his bed. Surely Valerie would want to hear from him.

  The phone was army green, cracked and held together with masking tape that threatened to break with each turn of the rotary dial.

  “Hello?” Her voice was soft. If a saluki could talk…

  “Valerie?” He sat up straight.

  “Who's this?”

  “It's Ben Alexander, Valerie.”

  There was that heavy silence he was growing accustomed to. The name would register, the newspaper images of his face, bearded then and lined with fatigue, would race through Valerie's head.

  “It's late, Ben. I'm on my way to bed.”

  He shot ahead in desperation. “I was wondering if we could get together? I'm living in the Shenandoah Valley now, but I could drive up to D.C.—it's been a long time—I'm divorced now. I don't know if you knew that.”

  Silence again. Then a sigh. A drawing in of breath and courage. “Ben, the honest truth is I don't ever want to see you. You must have really changed over the years to do what you did. Please don't call me again.”

  He jumped when she slammed her phone down, and it was a moment before he set his own receiver back in its cradle.

  He sat on the edge of the bed with his hands folded in his lap for many minutes. The light behind the open door of the bathroom pulled at him seductively, and he pictured the bottle of Valium on the edge of the sink. He'd gotten the prescription filled months ago, but he hadn't taken a single pill. Twenty still in there. They would do the trick. How long would it take Kyle to find him? When he didn't show up at the site in the morning, Kyle would assume he'd overslept or had some urgent errand. But by afternoon Kyle would start to wonder. And by evening maybe he'd take a drive up here and find him. Ben would leave him a note, thanking him for being the one person who believed him, for offering him the job at the digs when no one else would hire him, for being a friend. Ben shuddered. He couldn't do that to Kyle.

  He took another drink. Drinking too much these days. And alone. Little option there. The only people who would condescend to drink with him were not the kind of people he wanted as friends. People who looked at him knowingly, who winked as though they understood how a man could do what he'd been accused of doing.

  He'd hoped that here in the Valley he could escape the knowing eyes. But one or two people knew and they'd told others. Sometimes he felt as much a leper here as he'd been in Annapolis.

  The phone rang and he had a brief flutter in his chest
at the old fantasy: somehow Bliss had stumbled across his phone number, and when he picked up the receiver he would hear her five-year-old voice, perplexed, asking, “Daddy, aren't you ever coming home from this trip?”

  He lifted the phone to his ear. It was Kyle. “Sorry to call you so late,” he said, “but my niece arrived tonight.”

  Ben said nothing, still caught in the fantasy of his daughter.

  “Ben? Remember? She's working on a film about her mother?”

  “Yes. Right.” Eden Riley.

  “She'll need to get a feel for the site. It was so much a part of her mother's life, and you can use an extra pair of hands this summer, can't you?”

  Ben pictured the Valium and turned his back on the gaping bathroom door. “Does she know anything about the site?” he asked.

  “Nothing, but she'll learn fast. You have no objection, do you?”

  “No, of course not.” He wanted to ask, so he could steel himself for meeting her, “Does she know about me?” but he couldn't. He would know by the look in her eyes if Kyle had told her or not. “Sure, it's fine. Just send her over in the morning.”

  He hung up and carried the bottle over to the sofa. He turned on the TV, made a quick tour of the channels, and turned it off. He lay back on the sofa and stared at the brown water stain on the wood-plank ceiling.

  He hated being alone. He'd managed to avoid it most of his life. He and his older brother, Sam, had been inseparable as kids and close to their parents. He'd never gone through the usual adolescent rebellion. His parents flowed too easily with the punches. But they'd been dead five years now, and he was glad they hadn't lived to see this past year and a half. He liked to think they would have been certain of his innocence, but he wasn't sure. It was better not to know, to imagine they would have stuck by him as Sam and Jen had done. Sam and Jen had been his life support during the trial. They still saw Bliss, calling him after each visit to say how cute she looked, how unscarred she seemed to be. “She's fine,” Jen would tell him. “And she asks about you.” He wondered if she still did, or if Sam and Jen just told him that. It had been a long time, and kids' memories…well. Plus she had a new dad now. Jeff. Did she call him Daddy, with the dimple on the second syllable he always used to watch for?

  Sam and Jen had begged him to stay in Annapolis after his stint in prison. “You need to be near us,” Sam said. Perhaps they knew what he hadn't known then. The ostracism he would face. Shunned by expeditions, he applied for openings at half a dozen universities but was turned down by all of them. And then the call came from Kyle.

  “Why didn't you let me know?” Kyle admonished in the familiar soft voice Ben knew from the years as his student, the years as his friend. “I heard about it through the grapevine. But I wanted to hear it from you.”

  So Ben told him as calmly as he could about the accusations, the trial, the tide of evidence he felt helpless to stem as it mounted against him, the prison term. Then he told Kyle about losing his job, not being able to find work anywhere.

  “I know you like a son, Ben.” Kyle's voice was sure, full of conviction. “I wouldn't care what evidence they showed me, I could never believe you were guilty. I can offer you a job here—the arthritis doesn't give me much time in the pits anymore. I know it's a pathetic offer after what you're used to. Please don't be offended.”

  “No, that'll be great.” Just that day he'd been turned down to muck out stables.

  At first he stayed close to Kyle and Lou. He was so relieved to feel trusted and he knew their sympathy was genuine. The three of them went to see Heart of Winter shortly after his arrival, when he was still numb from the months in prison. That movie changed his image of Eden Riley. She was known for her portrayal of angels and earth mothers and, Bliss's personal favorite, the beautiful witch in Child of the North Star. But now he could picture Eden only in that hotel room scene with Michael Carey. One sexy scene in an otherwise unsexy movie. One sexy departure from a tenaciously unsexy career. He couldn't scrape from his mind the image of Carey undressing her from the inside out. Expertly. Slip, stockings, panties, bra, leaving her in a silky black dress open just enough to tease the camera with a glimpse of her breasts.

  Ben had been keenly aware of Kyle and Lou sitting next to him, watching the woman they'd raised through her teen years, the woman they adored and rarely saw, making love to the rakish Michael Carey. He heard Lou's muffled “Oh, my” and Kyle's chuckled response before he was swallowed up by the images on the screen. There was a hushed stillness in the theater, an electric tension that seemed rooted in his loins. After months of feeling nothing at all he was stunned by the aching in his body, by the yearning in his chest that went far beyond the sexual. And for a few brief moments he kidded himself into thinking that life might still hold something for him, that perhaps he had not lost everything in that Annapolis courtroom.

  Then he'd returned to his cabin, to the silent telephone, the numbing emptiness. Kyle and Lou had their own lives to live and he could not spend every evening with them. He tried his old friends one by one and their rejection of him stung. No one bothered to feign politeness. He was not even worthy of common courtesy in their eyes. He'd become a vehicle for their disdain about everything that was wrong in the world.

  He saw no way out of his loneliness. The whiskey had become an escape for him, but he took no pleasure in the taste or the burn or anything other than the temporary oblivion it offered. The pills could provide something more permanent.

  But he'd promised Kyle a favor. He'd help Eden with the digs, show her what to look for, how to catalog what she found. It was the least he could do for Kyle.

  –5–

  “I called Ben,” Kyle said as he poured milk over the granola in his bowl. Lou still made her own granola, just as she had when Eden was a teenager, long before granola was a household word. “He's expecting you this morning. I'll walk you over there after breakfast.”

  “I remember the way,” Eden said. The site was in the field between the cavern and Ferry Creek. She'd rather walk there by herself, rather not have to make conversation with Kyle.

  “The grant's up the end of this year,” Kyle said.

  “Then what?”

  “Then we fold.” Kyle shrugged as if it didn't matter to him, but Eden knew better.

  “Isn't there some way to get new funding?”

  He shook his head and swallowed a mouthful of granola before he answered her. “Too much competition. It's hard for a little site in the Shenandoah Valley to survive. I can work there on my own, but the site won't have much credibility without the money.”

  Eden sipped her coffee, watching Lou dart around the kitchen in the electric wheelchair. Refrigerator to toaster to coffeepot and back to the table again, where she set a plate of toast in front of Kyle.

  “I'm ready for the second notebook,” Eden said.

  Kyle raised his eyebrows above his coffee cup. “Always were a fast reader. What do you think so far?”

  She had fallen asleep last night thinking about how much of Kyle's life would be exposed to her in the pages of her mother's journal. Suddenly she could picture him as a young kid in this very kitchen, bent over the table, sparing Katherine a beating by accepting it himself. She understood his reluctance to share the journals with her. They would tell his story as well as Katherine's. She thought of thanking him but returned her attention to her cereal instead. Had she ever thanked him for anything?

  “You were a nice kid,” she said.

  His smile was quick and surprised. “And your mom?”

  “I'm not thinking of her as my mother right now. I'm trying to stay objective as I read.”

  “Hmm.” Lou tapped her coffee cup with her fingertips. “I wonder how long you'll be able to do that.”

  “Long enough to get the screenplay written, I hope.” Eden ignored the challenge in Lou's words, although if she was to be honest with herself she knew her objectivity was already slipping. “I never realized how difficult her childhood was."
<
br />   “No harder than yours,” Kyle said.

  “Well”—Eden poured cream into her coffee, dismayed to see the tremor in her hand—”I'm here to think about my mother, not myself.”

  “I'm not sure you'll be able to do one without the other, honey,” Kyle said.

  “The journal's amazing,” Eden said. “I can see her writing style emerging already.”

  Kyle let her change the subject. “She read constantly. Our father—your grandfather—was always sneaking her books. I never did figure out where he got them.”

  “I have to think about who should play her as a child. And we have to find someone to play you, too.” She had given no thought to whom she could cast as Kyle, as either child or adult. Until last night she had not realized how significant his role would be.

  “I wouldn't object to having Robert Redford portray me as an adult.”

  Lou laughed. “He's not randy enough to play you, Ky.”

  Eden raised her eyebrows. “Kyle? Randy?”

  “You don't know your uncle very well, dear,” Lou said.