Can You Keep a Secret? (12 page)

Colby was at a loss. He returned to the office. He’d told Summer about the pregnancy. He wasn’t supposed to – Caitlin hadn’t been far enough along – but saying the words out loud made it seem more real. Now he had to tell her that Caitlin had miscarried.

‘It happened to one of my friends,’ Summer said sympathetically, ‘and Caitlin’s right, it’s just a waste of time to go into emergency because what can they tell you? You’ve miscarried. Like you don’t know if you’re pregnant or not?’

‘Well,’ said Colby, crestfallen, ‘she’s not.’

Back when she was seven years old, Caitlin had received a diary as a birthday gift in the mail from her grandmother – Ruby’s mother – who she rarely saw. It was a small diary with a hard pink cover with some glittery stones stuck on it, and it came with a brass lock and two tiny keys.

‘To our lovely little island monkey,’ the card said. ‘Now you have a special place for all your secrets!’

Caitlin didn’t really have any secrets, not back then when she was still so small, but she opened it straight away and wrote ‘PRIVATE’ and ‘SECRET’ on the cover page. Then she couldn’t think what else to write so the diary remained somewhat empty until a year later, when Caitlin crossed that out and replaced it with ‘Property of Caitlin Hourigan aged EIGHT – Confidential’.

Caitlin kept the diary behind the Golden Books on the painted timber bookcase next to her bed. Her biggest fear, as a girl, was that somebody might discover the diary and
read it, but her early scribbles were pretty typical of little girls: she wrote about her friends and teachers at the Horseshoe Bay school; she made lists of presents she’d like to receive, and of her favourite colours. She drew Biro hearts, shot through with Cupid’s arrows.

As she got older, Caitlin gave up pink and pretty things, including the little diary; she took up scribbling in exercise books, instead. Like plenty of teenagers, she had her obsessions with pop stars – she collected posters from Ruby’s copies of
TV Week
– and instead of love hearts, she took up drawing bleeding hearts, or else she’d draw the word PAIN in giant letters, and she’d go over the letters so many times that the tip of her ballpoint pen would break through the lined pages.

Her mother, Ruby, would occasionally come across the exercise books, and she’d shake her head at what Caitlin had written. ‘Things I Hate’, for example, about living on Magnetic Island, but Ruby wasn’t particularly bothered. She figured that all teenagers did that.

She’d have been more amazed by what Caitlin
didn’t
write about, such as the time her father came into the pink house with the yellow painted floor and saw Caitlin standing by the stove and said, ‘Where’s your mother?’

‘She’s out,’ Caitlin had replied. She had been stirring Milo into warm milk on the stove, and didn’t turn around.

‘When’s she back?’

‘Don’t know.’

Caitlin wasn’t exactly ignoring her father, but she didn’t want the milk to burn. Besides, he popped in fairly regularly,
usually to borrow something Ruby didn’t want to lend him, like money, and if Ruby wasn’t home he’d normally come back. But not this time.

This time, he moved quietly towards Caitlin, so quietly that she didn’t even notice until he was standing right behind her.

‘Hey,’ he said. He was so close that Caitlin could feel his breath on her neck.

‘Hey what?!’ she said. ‘You scared me.’

She had one hand on the handle of the saucepan and the other hand was stirring a spoon like mad so a skin wouldn’t form on the milk. She wondered why her father was suddenly standing so close behind her. When he reached around her body and under her armpits to put his hands on her breasts, Caitlin jumped and let go of the wooden spoon. It clattered to the floor and the milk in the pan immediately began to rise.

‘What are you doing?!’ Caitlin’s face turned beetroot red, but so did Jack’s. He was leering.

‘Ah, come on!’ he said.

‘Jesus Christ!’ Caitlin said. She turned back to the stove to stop the milk from boiling over, and, by the time she turned back again, ready to whack her father with her fist or maybe even the milk-filled pan, he was gone.

‘I HATE Magnetic,’ Caitlin wrote, a day or so after that. ‘I want to leave this place and NEVER come back.’

It was six months before she saw her father again, in the street outside the milk bar. ‘Hello, daughter of mine,’
he said, but Caitlin found that she could not speak. She went home that night and drew dark pictures of children in wild weather, with lightning bolts coming down on their heads.

‘Well, aren’t you the little artist,’ Ruby said when she came by the kitchen table with a sweet-smelling joint in her hand. ‘Is that for school or more of your secrets for the diary?’

Caitlin covered her drawings with a folded arm, and said, ‘Go away, it’s private!’

‘It’s private, is it?’ asked Ruby. ‘I’ll have to make sure I get a good peek when you’re at school one day!’ She walked away humming and laughing.

Sometime later – it may have been a couple of days, or maybe a week – when Ruby was at the pub playing Bingo, Caitlin took all her diaries, including the original pink one, and put them in an old claw-foot bathtub that had somehow ended up in their backyard. She sprayed them with hairspray from a pink Cedel can and set the whole lot on fire.

‘Aren’t you an idiot?’ her mother commented when she saw what she’d done.

A little over four months later, Caitlin turned sixteen. She packed a bag, got on the island ferry to Townsville, and never lived on Magnetic again.

‘I would have gone earlier,’ she’d told Colby in one of their early twisted-sheet pillow talks, ‘but you’ve got to be sixteen to move out, or welfare comes looking for you.’

Caitlin worked in retail and in cafés in Brisbane for a few years, making pots of tea and serving up slices of carrot cake, before she was old enough for bar work, which was better paid. It was only because her mother called Caitlin in Brisbane one day to tell her about the MS that she returned to Townsville to take the job at the Merchant where the only job was in skimpy.

‘I didn’t want to move back so close to Magnetic,’ she’d told Colby, ‘and even though I hardly stepped foot on the place, I used to get this anxiety, like I might get dragged back there one day.’

‘I’m sorry I made you go,’ he said, but Caitlin shook her head, saying, ‘No, it’s okay. Seeing Jack there, it just made me realise how I’d done the right thing, practically running away.’

Now she was living in New York, but memories of Magnetic still plagued her and one fine day, Caitlin found herself in Dr Greenberg’s office, saying, ‘I never told my husband this, but I used to get this strange feeling. I’m talking about before 9/11, before I even met Colby. Like, I’m restless. Like, I can’t sleep. Like everything is just strange, and I’m feeling it again now.’

‘Because of the miscarriage?’ Dr Greenberg said.

‘I don’t even know if it’s that. It’s more like my head is spinning. Like I don’t belong in my own skin.’

Dr Greenberg was concerned. ‘Have you ever thought about keeping a diary of your feelings, Caitlin?’

‘I kept one when I was a little girl. I used to worry about
somebody finding it, and laughing at me. I haven’t kept one for years.’

‘Well,’ said Dr Greenberg, ‘how about we start one? I ask a lot of my clients to do it. Some people find it very helpful just to write down how they feel each day. Maybe we’ll find some patterns: what makes you happy, and what doesn’t.’

Caitlin nodded. ‘That’s going to be weird, having a diary that’s not private and showing it to people and thinking they might laugh at me.’

‘I’m not going to laugh at you,’ said Dr Greenberg, ‘but I am worried about you. You’ve lost a lot of weight.’

‘I’m not doing it deliberately. It’s just falling off, with stress, maybe.’ That wasn’t true: Caitlin often went from table to bathroom where she used her fingers – and dental floss – to help her bring her meal up into the toilet bowl.

‘But are you eating normally?’ Dr Greenberg asked, and Caitlin said she’d given up meat and dairy, and then eggs, and then anything with gluten, and then sugar. ‘Because everyone says, if you’re trying for a baby, diet has a lot to do with it. And people think I’m thin, but cutting out all the rubbish means I’m probably healthier now than I’ve ever been.’

That wasn’t true either: Caitlin was so thin that she had stopped menstruating, and she started most days pulling hair out of the shower drain.

‘You know it’s going to be more difficult getting pregnant if you stop ovulating?’ Dr Greenberg advised. ‘And what does Colby think of all the food rules?’

‘Oh, he doesn’t follow them,’ said Caitlin, shaking her head. ‘Like, yesterday, I wanted an orange, but it was covered in pith. You know those little white strings? They were all over the outside of it. So, I was cutting the orange to get rid of the pith. You basically have to make it square, or else you’re still going to have bits of string, and Colby was looking at me while I was doing it, and he said, “What are you doing?” and I said, “I’m trying to make sure I get all the pith off,” and he said, “But that’s crazy,” and I said, “Why is that crazy?” and he said, “It just sounds obsessional to me.” I said, “Don’t laugh until you’ve tried it. A clean orange is much better.” But he was shaking his head.’

Dr Greenberg tilted her head. ‘And what do you think? Is Colby right? Is it a bit obsessional to remove all the pith from an orange before you eat it?’

‘I think it’s crazy what people put in their mouths without even thinking about how it ends up in their bodies.’

‘Well, maybe we should get you keeping a food diary as well,’ Dr Greenberg said, making some short notes on her clipboard. ‘Let’s track how you feel, and what you eat, and see what patterns we can find.’

Caitlin agreed, and that afternoon, after she’d paid her therapist’s bill with Colby’s credit card, she took herself to Barnes & Noble where she asked to see the journals. There were two racks of Moleskines, and other high-end brands; journals with comedy covers and sequined covers; journals with lined pages, or with what looked like torn pages. She settled, finally, on a journal with a soft leather cover and
loose straps that could be tied around its middle, as if to keep the contents safe. She splashed out on a fancy pen, too.

‘I’m going to write down all my thoughts,’ she told Colby that night. He’d come in late, but Caitlin had long been used to the idea that she wouldn’t see the headlights of his fancy car pull into the drive until well after 9 pm, by which time the first of the logs she’d have placed on the fire would be well alight. ‘We’re going to try to work out how to get me feeling good again.’

Colby took the journal from her and turned it over in his hands.

‘Fair enough,’ he said, ‘although this is a bit old-fashioned.’

‘The diary? I liked that one.’

‘No, the idea of keeping it with pen and paper.’

Caitlin took the diary from him.

‘I just want to get better,’ she said, ‘and if Dr Greenberg thinks this might help, then that’s good.’

‘Well, you must have left the house today,’ Colby said. Both of them knew that was happening less and less.

‘Only to see Susan.’

‘And you bought that diary.’

‘That’s true. But I still get scared.’

‘There’s nothing to be scared about. You know that.’

Caitlin’s hands tightened around her new journal. ‘I noticed at Central Station today that everyone still has machine guns.’

‘Everyone?’ Colby raised his eyebrows.

‘Soldiers. Marines. The blokes in camouflage. You see them everywhere.’

‘It’s a mirage,’ said Colby, dismissively. ‘It’s to make you feel safe.’

‘Well, I don’t. And it’s not like I don’t have enough to do around here.’

Colby didn’t really understand what she meant. Caitlin had her online courses, but now that the bulk of the renovating was done he didn’t know what she did all day. She would never have told him that she had insisted on installing gym equipment in the basement so she could use it every day. She also spent a lot of time cleaning the same surfaces, over and over again, and washing and folding the clothes.

‘You know you can send them out,’ Colby had said, the first time Caitlin had presented a still-warm, newly pressed shirt to him, ‘and you don’t have to go anywhere. The dry-cleaning people will come here and pick them up.’

‘I don’t like it when strangers come,’ Caitlin responded. ‘Who knows who they are and what they want?’

‘They want to pick up the shirts!’ Colby smiled. ‘They have a little van with the name of their business on the side. And I mean, what about all the delivery men who come here, bringing the things you’ve ordered from catalogues? What about all the tradesmen who have been here over the years?’

‘That’s different. I have a record of who those people are.’

‘Of course you do,’ said Colby in a way that suggested that he thought that idea was absurd. Caitlin heard the tone in his voice and was offended.

‘People can pretend to be anything,’ said Caitlin.

‘Of course they can,’ said Colby, wearily.

He wouldn’t have said so, but such conversations with Caitlin drove him crazy. He’d tried to talk to her about what he described as the ‘lunacy’ behind some of her conspiracy theories – including the many new ones she had developed about 9/11 – but she always reacted like he was the strange one.

‘You won’t believe the things she believes,’ he told Summer, in a moment of candour.

‘She’s not the only one,’ said Summer. ‘Go online, you find all kinds of crazies.’

It was late on a warm evening in October 2005. As two of the most senior people at Carnegie, Summer and Colby often found themselves alone in their offices at night, with nothing but emergency light in the corridors, and the faint hum of computers on stand-by. Colby would often crack open a beer, and Summer would sit on his desk and have one, too.

‘I suppose she needs something to take her mind off things,’ said Colby. He’d loosened his tie, and had one well-shod foot up on his desk. ‘She’s done some online courses. She works out like a demon. And you know we’re trying for a baby, but it bugs her how it’s not happening – it’s a women’s problem thing. I haven’t gone into the details
with her – just they said it was a miracle it happened in the first place, and now she’s so thin, it’ll be a miracle if it happens again.’

‘Not that you mind trying,’ Summer had said with a smile. She was side-on to him, wearing a fine wool shift in a dark colour. It was shapely and stopped just above her knee.

‘Not that I mind trying,’ Colby agreed, raising his bottle in a mock toast.

‘Well, lucky you.’ Summer raised her own bottle. She’d had a few boyfriends since 9/11, including one she’d been quite serious about, but then he’d been accepted into an MBA program in Chicago and the distance had been the end of them. Now she lived alone but for a well-trained cat, in a pale-coloured apartment downtown.