The Last Secret (31 page)

“Let him go!” Ken yelled as she started into the breezeway “I can't take it anymore. I'm sick of it. He wants to brood, he can go do it somewhere else.”

“No, Ken,” she said, her tone and look putting him on notice that the day it came to that, the choice would be easy.
He
would leave. Not her son.

“But Mom, he's always like that,” Chloe implored from the table. “You should see him in school. I mean, it's so embarrassing. He's always alone. He won't sit with anyone. He doesn't even talk to people. It's, like, weird.”

“Well, then maybe
you
should sit with him and talk with him. You're his sister. Maybe that's all he needs, a little attention from you. From someone!” she declared, her voice ragged and trembling.

“Mom!” Chloe cried, jumping up from the table. “That's not fair, and you know it!” She threw down her napkin and ran upstairs.

“She's right,” Nora said, more to herself than to Ken who stared into his untouched dinner. “It isn't fair. It really isn't.”

“Nora?” Father Grewley gestures through the opening door. Could she give him a hand with something? Her legs wobble. Drew. Something's happened. When she left he still wasn't home.

“It's Alice,” he says as they hurry along the corridor to his office. “Her neighbor just brought her in. She's in a bad way. He really did a job on her this time.”

Alice sits in shadows, her face in her hands. The neighbor, Roz, is a wrinkled, shrewd-eyed woman with long gray hair. She apologizes in a raspy voice for turning off the overhead light, but it was hurting Alice's eyes. Roz wanted to bring her to the hospital, but Alice refused. She's afraid they'll call the police on Luke and, besides, Roz adds, Alice
doesn't have any insurance. Father Grewley asks where the children are. Roz's husband is bringing them to Alice's mother. Is this what she wants? he leans close to ask Alice, who shrugs. Her head bobs, a battered weight on its thin stem.

“Poor thing. She don't know what she wants,” the neighbor whispers to Nora, who tries to hold her breath against the reek of cigarette smoke in the woman's clothes, jeans, and a hooded Patriots sweatshirt. “She thinks she's miscarrying. I don't know, maybe that's why. Like, this is the last thing she needs now.”

The only available space is on the third floor. A dark, chilly room, its angled attic ceilings are still stained from last winter's ice dams. A frayed braided rug lies molded into the rippled contours of the gray floorboards. But there is a pretty stenciled chest of drawers and an old mahogany double bed with a frilly yellow duvet. And this room has its own attached bathroom; only a few do. Nora waits outside on the landing. Maizie Dennehy is in with Alice. Maizie is one of four nurses they can call on day or night whenever an emergency comes in. Father Grewley leaves the room energized. He will return to the meeting with new resolve. Alice's plight confirms their mission. Before he starts downstairs, he whispers to Nora that if Letitia is so at odds with Sojourn House's purpose, then she must resign for the good of the board. And so must
she
, Nora realizes ashamedly So overwhelmed by her own troubles, she forgot to call Alice back. Her concern has become a charade. All she really cares about is her family.

Maizie comes out and closes the door. “She may be miscarrying, but at least nothing's broken,” she says. A stocky woman, she is a pretty, perky blonde. Even now she manages to smile. Given a choice, the guests always want Maizie. “Terrible bruising. Mostly he slapped her. Every time she'd try to get up he'd start on her again. It's almost like he knew. Nothing that would send her to the hospital. After a while, they get pretty savvy.”

For a moment Nora isn't sure who Maizie means, abused or abuser. Both, she decides, entering the room, and herself as well, here again, victim of her own mistakes. Eddie's bad penny, because on it goes. On and on. Pain and cruelty. Everywhere. To think she once considered
herself somehow apart from all this. A spectator. Helper. But in the end, what is the difference between her and any of them?

Alice is sitting up in bed. The ice pack for her face is in her lap. Her head turns from the gleam of entering light, from Nora.

“I'm sorry,” Nora says. “Is there anything I can do?”

“No.” Emptiness. A door closing on an abandoned house. Hope smothered. Love. Children, every youthful dream snuffed out with its utterance.
No.
Nothing.

“Things will get better. You're strong. I know you don't think you are right now, but you'll see. You'll find out. Your strength will come from your children, Alice. That's what he keeps trying to beat out of you. But he can't. Because you're not going to let him, are you? Ever again.”

“I wish I was dead.”

“No, you don't. You don't mean that.” She leans on the bed and Alice winces. “You have everything to live for. You do.”

“Not anymore,” Alice says with a slow, almost foolish smile. “I'm pregnant. That's why it happened. He's so mad. He said I did it on purpose. To trick him. Because I didn't know what else to do with my pathetic life.”

“That's ridiculous! Of—”

“No, it's true. He's right. I did. All I wanted was for us to be a family, to be happy,” she bawls, sobbing into the duvet. “Each one, that's all I ever wanted.”

Nora lets her cry. She wants to hold her but can't. Robin would, so easily and naturally, she knows. She remembers Robin's tears the day she told her she was pregnant with Lyra, sobbing because she didn't want to be and had even called an abortion clinic but then had decided that it was a sign, because maybe a baby, new life in her troubled house, might change all that had gone wrong in her marriage, Robin had said, bawling, as if at the shallowness of her hope, holding out her arms, shaming Nora with her plea to be held. Still now, Nora wonders, what reserve, what coldness, what emptiness kept her from comforting a woman she had loved. Yes. Loved, with a depth and joy she had never felt for another woman before Robin. And so, how cruel, how
heartless, of them for what they did, for using her. And in the end, how predictable. How complicit she was, time after time, in her quick dismissal of the obvious. How easy she made it for them. Because as long as they loved each other,
she
was loved.

“No matter what happens, you've got your children, Alice. You're still a family. All that matters is them. You'll be a better family without him. You will.”

Alice buries her bruised face in the bunched-up hem of the bed covering. Nora Trimble Hammond who can't even let food pass her lips under this patched roof sits on the side of the bed. She puts both arms around this broken woman. A child really, she tells herself, waiting for something, goodness, wisdom, some energy to flow between them. She will not pull back, but all she feels is dread.

“There. There, now,” she whispers, her hand at the back of this snarled and sweaty hair, days of an unwashed muskiness, she thinks, then realizes it must be the heavy bleed. The smell is blood, sickeningly strong. And familiar. “It's going to be all right. You'll see. I promise,” she makes herself say, makes herself sit there, trying not to gag.

A small plane
flies overhead. For a moment it drowns out the children's voices. He watches from the corner. The wind gusts and he turtles his chin deeper into his collar. He hates the cold. With the exception of the one child, the others wear hats and mittens. She runs around the carousel, screeching with laughter. Two small girls chase after her. Alone, under the gnarled locust tree, her mother sits at a silvery, weathered picnic table. Her face is hidden by the curled visor of a bright green baseball cap. Black seedpods crunch underfoot as he moves closer. Talking on her cell phone, so deep in conversation, she doesn't look up until he sits down.

“Gotta go.” She snaps her phone shut. “I didn't see you coming.”

Almost an accusation the way she says it. Still though, he smiles. “You were too busy talking.”

“My mother,” she says so quickly that he knows she's lying.

“How come you don't take my calls?”

She stands up and looks around, squinting as she watches Lyra swing, belly on the rubber sling, spread-eagled. Like a trapped bug, he thinks. The cricket legs he used to pull out and then the calm he always felt.

“All my messages, you musta got one, anyway.”

“It's been so busy. Doctor appointments. Then Clay's … he hurt himself This is Lyra's first day out of the house.”

“That's not why.”

“It's cold, I know, but she needs this.” Shivering in her short denim jacket, she hugs herself, revealing the soft flesh of her waist. “Lyra!” she calls and strides off suddenly, as if something is wrong when all the girl has done is jump off the swing and run to the slide. Instead of climbing the ladder, Lyra is walking up the slide itself At the top, a younger child sits, waiting her turn. Poised behind her on the ladder, a red-cheeked, curly-haired little girl with glasses grins and waits her turn. Lyra laughs. She enjoys being in the way, holding things up, he thinks as he follows Robin. She tells Lyra to get off the slide so the two other girls can come down.

“That's Jane!” Lyra points up at the petite, blue-eyed child, unlike Lyra, so stiffly bundled in her quilted snowsuit that her legs stick out in front of her. “And Mary, that's her sister.” The two waiting children smile down at Lyra. “C'mon, Janie-Jane!” Lyra laughs, daring, taunting, teasing like her mother. Just as Robin reaches to take her daughter off the high metal slide, the child, Jane, loses her grip and hurtles down on her slick nylon bottom, boots first, into Lyra, knocking her back onto the frozen ground. Quickly next, comes Mary, landing on both of them.

Eddie chuckles. Brat. She had that coming.

Lyra wails and Robin is helping up the crying girls. Their mother runs over from the sand box where she's been gathering up their toys.

“Janie!” the woman calls. The smaller girl's nose is bleeding. Her sister hugs her.

Should have been the other one, he thinks. Lyra, the troublemaker.

“I'm sorry,” Robin says. “Lyra knows better than to go up the wrong way.”

Her tension excites him. He wants the other mother to go at her, attack her, hurt her. She deserves it. A good slap, that's what she needs, right across that full red mouth. His fist clenches as he imagines it hard on her wrist, and her soft, wet face at his, begging forgiveness.

The women apologize, assuring one another it was just one of those things. That's how they'll learn, the hard way, they agree.

Ditto that. The hard way, he thinks, stunned to see her suddenly leaving. Carrying Lyra, she hurries down the street. He calls her name, but she only walks faster. Her car isn't parked in the playground lot, but across the street, behind CVS. Trying to hide it. From him, he knows, easily keeping pace. So close he hears her panting. He waits while she buckles Lyra into her booster seat. Closing the door, she stands with her back against it. Message clear: shielding her kid from him. Raising his hands, he steps back.

“Why? What'd I do?”

“Nothing.”

Her weak smile infuriates him.

“I just have to go, that's all.” She makes a show of pushing up her sleeve and checking her watch.

The honey brown fuzz on her forearm makes him ache with horniness. More hair than you'd expect on such a beautiful woman, proof of her earthiness, her warmth, all that makes her so desirably real. A creature of flesh and fear, born for a man's pleasure. Submission now in the slow sweep of her gaze. Her soft mouth trembles.

“Please.” She steps around him to open her door. She gets into the car.

“Tell me what's wrong,” he says, holding the door. She can't close it without hurting his hand.

“Don't do this. Please.” She looks up at him as she starts the car.

A woman has left the pharmacy and is getting into the next car. She glances over at them before backing out.

Again, Robin tugs at the door and says she has to go. Why, he demands over the racing engine. He doesn't get it. One minute they're friends, next minute not. Why?

“Everything you told me, all those random things, the space program,
your sick brother, and your businesses, but the one thing you never said was, you know Nora.”

“Yeah, I know Nora. So?”

“You know what I mean,” she says grimly.

“No. I don't. Why's it such a big deal?” He grins, wanting to laugh. Toying with her, he feels giddy, almost silly. And powerful.

“Mommy!” Lyra whines, and kicks the back of her mother's seat. “I have to go potty! Now!”

“I have to go.” She shifts into reverse, but he doesn't move. “Please.”

“I knew her from a long time ago. Then I ran into her again. That's all. I swear!” He yanks the door open and leans in. “Robin,” he says reassuringly. “She doesn't have anything to do with us. Really.” Such a look of fear comes over her that he cups his hand on the side of her face. “You're the best thing that's ever happened to me. Believe that.”

“Oh my God,” she gasps while behind her the little brat's tantrum of kicks and threats to do poop enrages him. Robin leans away from his touch, cringing almost. Her hands shake on the wheel. She inches the car back, until he is forced out of the way. She speeds off.

His skin feels prickly. His eyes hurt. That bitch. It came from her. Why do people do this, always setting obstacles in his way?

Everything enrages him, getting caught next to this wheezy fat man when the light changes to green, the biting wind and honking horns as he darts through traffic to the municipal lot. And now this, the orange ticket flapping under his wiper. He shreds it into tiny pieces, which he flings at the meter. It doesn't make sense, though. She didn't want anyone to know. And all that money, without him even asking. So why would she have said anything? Unless she's been checking, looking back, and now she thinks there's nothing to fear. That she's free of him. Suddenly, he's afraid. What if she wants her money back? Turns it around on him. Extortion. What if she calls the police who've just written a ticket off the other bitch's plate? And here he is in her car. Brand-new, but he should've gotten rid of it. Should've done a lot of things.