Secret Lives (7 page)

“Good. I'd like to be incognito here for as
long as I can get away with it.”

Ben picked up a clump of earth and studied it
for a moment before crushing it between his fingers. He looked at
her. “What did Kyle tell you about me?”

She shrugged, surprised by the question.
“Just that you're his partner.”

“Partner? That's what he called me?”

“Yes. Isn't that what you are?”

Ben shook his head. “Jesus, he's amazing. I'm
his employee. I was a student of his and we did some work together
in South America. That's all.”

It suddenly fell into place for her. She
remembered letters, remembered hearing his name. And she remembered
a jealousy she'd had no right to feel. “You're the guy Lou and Kyle
used to write me about,” she said. “You traveled with them, didn't
you? You've known them a long time?”

“I met Kyle shortly after you…left them.”

Eden smiled. “I'm sure that's not the term he
used to describe my going to California.”

“He said you ran away. But you were nineteen,
right? Old enough to make your own decisions.”

“I thought so.” She brushed the dust from the
front of her shorts and looked up at him again. “Ben Alexander. I
remember now. They wrote about you all the time. I was jealous. I
guess I wanted them to mourn when I left, and instead they seemed
to adopt you. You replaced me.”

He shook his head. “That wouldn't have been
possible. They adored you. And they mourned you all right. If
that's what you were after, you got it.”

She felt her cheeks flame as she turned back
to the square of earth. “Well, I'd better get back to work on this
old dirt,” she said. No doubt about whose side this guy was on.

She knew it was another minute before he
turned around himself.

The soft bristles of her brush caught on
something. She slipped them over the earth again and again, and a
small, hard mound, about the size of a dime, began to form beneath
the bristles. “Ben? There's something here.”

He sat down on the ground next to her and
watched as she swept the earth away from the object. “Go easy,
now,” he said. “You don't want to lose anything that might be
around it.”

“Maybe you'd better do it.” She held the
brush out to him.

“Uh uh. It's yours. You're doing fine.”

He was so close she could smell the sun on
his skin. She edged away from him, closer to the cool earthen wall
of the pit. She was not accustomed to men like him. All the men she
knew were actors, predictable in the personas they'd adopted. They
were either gay, blood-and-guts macho, or strong and slickly
sensitive, a facade Michael had perfected and others copied. They
were like comic book characters. What could be safer than a
paper-thin man?

When she thought of the men in her life she
did not even include Wayne. He didn't count as a man. Sorry, Wayne,
but it was true. That was one reason she'd sought him out so long
ago. His asexuality. His harmlessness. She'd been just a kid then,
looking for someone safe to lean on. But the man next to her right
now seemed anything but asexual, anything but safe. He was
mercurial—self-conscious one minute, brazen the next. She watched
him run his fingers over the earth in front of her. She couldn't
categorize him. He was a different type of man than Wayne or
Michael. Entirely different.

The mound was now the size of a silver
dollar. “Is it pottery?” she asked.

“Yes. And it looks like it's going to be the
biggest piece I've seen in this pit.”

She looked at him in apology. “I'm
sorry.”

“Don't be silly.” He motioned her to
continue.

The mound grew until the bristles of her
brush finally caught on an edge. By that time the rounded piece of
clay was larger than her hand.

“Beginner's luck,” Ben said. He stood up to
take a clipboard off the rim of the pit and drew the location of
the pottery on a chart. Then he carefully slid his fingers beneath
it and lifted it out. He held it in front of her. “It's part of a
bowl. Would have been about ten inches in diameter.” He ran one
dusty finger across the curved surface of the clay. “They started
mixing the clay with vegetable fiber around that time. The deeper
we go, the less pottery we'll find. It'll be replaced with stone
bowls.” He wrapped the pottery in a piece of newspaper and set it
on the rim of the pit.

It was nearly noon. She wanted to get to the
archives in Winchester before they closed. “I'll come here in the
mornings, if that's all right with you,” she said. The work in the
pit would give her time to digest what she read in the journal.

“Stay for lunch,” Ben said. “I have two
sandwiches.”

“I don't want to take your lunch.”

He patted his flat stomach. “I really don't
need two sandwiches.”

They climbed into the bed of the pickup truck
and sat under the shade of the elm. Below them, Ferry Creek slapped
against its banks, and Eden could hear the groaning of the
suspension footbridge that spanned the width of the creek. She'd
played on that bridge as a child. Cassie would probably love
it.

Ben threw her a beer from his cooler and
handed her a cheese sandwich. She peered inside at two orange
slices of American cheese, iceberg lettuce, mayonnaise, and catsup
and bit her lip.

“It's the catsup, huh?” he asked.

She nodded. “A little odd.”

He handed her the plain piece of bread from
his own sandwich.

“Music?” He turned on the tape player still
attached to his belt. The music was fast, full of accordion. The
lyrics were in French. She looked at him questioningly.

“Zydeco.”

“Interesting.”

“It's happy music. I have no idea what
they're singing about, which is fine with me. You don't speak
French, do you?” He looked worried until she shook her head. “Good.
It'd wreck it if I knew what they were saying. This way I can
pretend they're singing about whatever I choose. Make it up to suit
my mood.”

She smiled at him. Had she really thought a
few hours ago that he was intimidated by her?

He leaned back against the side of the truck.
“I read most of your mother's books when I was a kid. They were
full of adventure.”

“I'm afraid my mother's only adventures were
in her mind.”

“I tried reading one of them to my daughter,
but she'd rather watch the movie. Typical kid, I guess. She's a big
fan of yours.”

So, he was married. She wasn't sure if she
felt relief or disappointment.

“I told her I sort of knew you,” he said.

“Now you can tell her you really do. I'd be
happy to meet her, if you like.”

“Well, I don't get to see her that often. She
lives with my wife.”

“Oh. Where does your wife live?”

“Annapolis.” He stretched his legs out in
front of him. “Your daughter's about the same age as mine. Cassie,
right?”

“Do you know about her from Lou and
Kyle?”

“Everybody knows about Cassie, don't they?
Including all the personal details of how long you tried to get
pregnant, how you spent the last three months of your pregnancy on
bed rest, et cetera?”

She made a face. Wayne had said he was sick
of people learning the most intimate details of their lives while
waiting in grocery store lines.

“How do you tolerate having so little
privacy?” Ben asked.

“Sometimes I don't tolerate it very well.”
After Heart of Winter, her face had been on so many magazine covers
that she'd lost count. That had been fine until Wayne left. Then
she'd wished she could have disappeared from the public eye
altogether.

“So how do you go about writing a
screenplay?”

“The research comes first. I thought I'd have
to pick Kyle's brain, since he's the only person still living who
knew Katherine well. But last night he told me she kept a journal.
It would make my work much easier, except that it's written in a
dozen notebooks and Kyle plans to feed them to me one at a
time.”

A smile broke slowly from Ben's lips. “He
wants to keep you here as long as he can. He was so excited you
were coming.”

“I don't know why. I didn't give him the most
pleasant years of his life. Anyhow, I don't want to work strictly
from the journal, because I have a specific idea of how I want to
present her…” She cocked her head to look at him. “How do you think
of her? I mean, as someone who only knows about her from the
media?”

He swallowed a bite of his sandwich. “As an
isolate,” he said. “A woman who valued solitude above anything
else. That's something hard for me to understand. I'd rather get
hit by a train than spend my life alone.”

“Exactly,” Eden said. “No one understands her
because of the way she's been presented in the past. I want to
normalize her. I want people to see this film and be able to relate
to her, not think, oh, here's that weird Katherine Swift
again.”

“How old was she when she started the
journal?”

“Thirteen.”

“What does a thirteen-year-old have to write
about?”

“Plenty. She was feisty and impulsive. And
lonely. The other kids didn't like her. She got into a lot of
trouble. She got her first period and her mother—my grandmother—was
so crazy she cut off all Katherine's hair. So she ran away. That
was when she found the cavern.”

Ben looked in the direction of the cave. “Do
you remember what it was like inside?” He almost whispered the
question, as though he understood that the cave was a subject to be
treated with reverence.

Eden stared across the field to the wooded
embankment. She could just make out the dark patch through the
trees where the boulders marked the entrance to the cave.

“I was four when they sealed it up,” she
said. “My memory's very cloudy.”

“Close your eyes.”

“What?”

Ben set down his sandwich. “My brother's a
shrink. Whenever I can't remember something he tells me to close my
eyes, and gradually the picture comes into my head.”

Eden obediently closed her eyes and leaned
back against the cool metal side of the pickup. At first she could
concentrate only on the sound of Ferry Creek rushing below them.
But then she heard it, the clack, clack, clack of the typewriter
keys, muffled by the cotton her mother had put in her ears. She
felt cool air on her arms. The cave was dimly lit by lanterns
hanging from the walls and by candles set here and there on the
floors and rocky ledges. The room was filled with shadows. Eden was
playing with her friends, the stalagmites. She'd forgotten about
them, the cold, grotesquely shaped formations that in her
four-year-old imagination took on human form.

Her mother sat on a wooden chair, an enormous
black monster of a typewriter on the table in front of her. Sheets
of paper were scattered on the cave floor around her chair. Her
face was blurry. Eden could see only her hands, the skin silky and
smooth, the fingers slender, the nails trimmed short. Her hands
never paused. Clack, clack, clack…

Eden opened her eyes. Ben was watching her,
gnawing his lip.

“I was afraid you got stuck back there,” he
said.

“I remembered the stalactites and
stalagmites. Tites and mites, my mother called them. They fill the
cavern. They were my playmates. I'd play with them while she typed,
and when she was finished for the day she'd cuddle me on her lap
and read to me.” Her voice had softened, thickened, betraying her.
She'd forgotten what it felt like to be held that way, with no
strings attached to the love.

Ben leaned forward to touch her knee. “This
film's not going to be easy for you to make,” he said.

She shouldn't have said so much, been so
open. With every word she'd made herself more vulnerable. “I don't
think it will be that difficult.” She stood up and jumped out of
the truck, relieved to have the heat of his fingers off her knee.
“I'd better get going. Thanks for the sandwich.”

“Could you show me how to do that?” he
asked.

“What?”

“Turn off your feelings that quickly.” His
eyes were narrowed.

“I don't know what you mean.”

“I think you do. One minute you're sad, next
minute everything's right with the world.”

She sighed, giving in. “To be honest, I'm
usually better at it.” She put her hands on her hips and looked
toward the cave. “My defenses are down out here. Usually I can
pretend everything's fine until I actually start to believe it
myself.”

“Whew. I'll teach you to dig if you'll teach
me how to do that. How about over dinner tonight? Just something
casual. just, you know, platonic.” He grinned. “I mean, I know
about you and Michael Carey.”

She groaned. “Michael and I are just friends.
And why do you want to have dinner with me if you already know
everything about me?”

He ignored her question. “I'll pick you up at
seven.”

She wanted to go. It would be easier than
having dinner with Kyle and Lou. “Maybe I could meet you
somewhere.” She'd be in control then. No chance of being stuck with
him longer than she could handle.

“Seven at Sugar Hill,” he said. “Kyle can
tell you how to get there. Don't forget to take your pottery with
you to impress him.”

She walked across the field to the pit,
picked up her pottery, and headed toward the embankment, feeling
his eyes on her the whole way. What was his game? She would meet
his daughter. He didn't have to take her out for that to happen. He
could write to the folks back home and say he went out with Eden
Riley. Hopefully he had no illusions that she would sleep with him.
Maybe he wanted to get on Kyle's good side to get a boost up the
career ladder. He had to be bored in this confining little site. Or
could he possibly just be lonely? It didn't matter what his motives
were. She knew as she walked through the woods toward the house
that it was her own neediness she had to fear, not his.