The Secrets We Keep (9 page)

Lucy had been around a couple of times, with food and sympathy and the boys, but it hadn't been a success. The fact that the two women just don't get on all that well, so easily concealed or ignored at birthday parties and barbecues, became obvious as soon as they tried to talk about anything more meaningful than how sorry Lucy is or how helpful Andy has been.

They don't dislike each other, exactly. They have just never found a way to connect. It had been awkward during Elizabeth's first months and years in Throckton. Then one evening at the pub quiz, after a little too much to drink, Lucy had nudged Elizabeth, nodded toward Andy and Michael who were standing at the bar, and said, “If we can get those two to realize that just because they're best friends we don't have to be, I think everything will be a bit easier.” And it had been. Until now, at least. Lucy fumbles for something to say. Elizabeth tries not to show how difficult she finds Lucas and Toby: not for themselves, but for the way that life and noise bursts out of them, barely controlled, when she cannot bear very much of either.

“Why don't we go for a walk?” Lucy had asked the last time she had dropped in.

Patricia was spending her afternoon off cleaning the kitchen.

“It's not dirty,” Mel had said when Elizabeth told her.

“That's not the point,” her sister had replied. “It's just what she does. I cry, she cleans. I get the cleaning more than I get the hairdresser and the social clubs.”

Patricia looked up from where she was kneeling by the radiator—she's cleaned down the back; Mel would say later, “I didn't even know that was a place you could clean”—and said, approvingly, “It would be good for you to get some fresh air, Elizabeth.”

And before she knew it she was thinking of Mike, lungs wrenching for good fresh air and finding only filthy, freezing water, and she was crying again, and Mel, who had been working in the spare room but was developing a sixth sense for when she was needed, was taking her by the arm and saying something about time, while Patricia shook her head.

Now, whenever someone mentions that she might want to go for a walk, Mel tells them that Elizabeth can make her own mind up about that, even though it's clear from the way that she has to be reminded to eat and drink and go to bed that that's probably not true.

So apart from the necessities—the funeral home, the funeral, the inquest—Elizabeth has yet to stray farther than her garden. Cold and dark and dead with the season, it's matched her, mood for mood. The sun, when it's come, has been watery and weak. She can stand on the patio and breathe the air with a hand still on the wall, for safety. Every now and then she puts on her wellies—unaccustomed to enclosure, her feet twitch when she walks in them—and works her way around the grass, cleaning up after Pepper, searching the earth for signs of spring and wondering if she will be able to bear them when they come, or whether the memory of Michael making her ring the bell of the first snowdrop will be too much.

And of course, the garden is the place where the posies appear.

Elizabeth likes it best in the morning, when Pepper is bouncing with energy, and watching him scurry gives her something other than the day ahead to think about. She stands in her pajamas and sometimes she is even able to make herself a small plan, the fulfillment of which will help to get her through the day:
I will change the sheets and duvet covers, I will reply to all of the emails that need a reply, I will defrost the freezer, I will sort out the photographs.
(Sorting out the photographs is one of the plans she often makes but has yet to begin. When it comes to it, she cannot bear to look at photos of them, smile upon smile upon smile.)

This morning, still wrung out after the inquest, she cannot face making even a small plan. She thinks she might try going back to bed. It's still early, not even morning really, light barely beginning.

She's just turned away from the garden, taken off her wellies and stepped into the kitchen, about to close the door behind her, when she hears the click of the garden gate, and turns back.

At first Elizabeth thinks she's seeing a ghost, or an angel. The figure is beautiful, and she stands just inside the gate, reflecting her own surprise, still as a deer in the dawn.

And then she recognizes Kate Micklethwaite from the inquest yesterday, from the photographs in the local paper, as the Girl Saved by the Brave Policeman Who Drowned. But up until now she has tried not to look at her too closely, instinctively afraid of what seeing her will do to her heart, in the way she'd once kept her eyes pointing away from her freshly broken arm, knowing that seeing the damage properly would make the pain worse.

But now she looks.

Kate has the lightly worn, unconscious loveliness of the young, with no idea yet that she will never be more beautiful than in these few years before age and sun and worry and sleepless nights and hangovers all find places to rest in her body. Elizabeth takes in a pale waterfall of hair, full-moon eyes of ice-blue gray. Kate is crying, grief and fright combining, and the tears magnify her eyes and make them shine, shine.

In her head she holds freesias tied with a piece of silver ribbon.

And everything makes horrible, awful sense to Elizabeth. Of course the flowers are a tribute. Of course the girl would bring them here. Of course she's grieving and confused and needs a way to express how she feels about Michael doing what he did.

Of course, of course, of course.

Time stops as they look at each other. Then Pepper barks. There's an answer from beyond the gate. Kate turns her head, says, “It's all right, Beatle.” The second hand sweeps, and Elizabeth makes her move. She's in front of Kate, holding her shoulders, before either of them has fully realized what she's done.

“The snowdrops?” she asks.

Kate nods.

“The crocuses?”

Kate nods.

“The winter pansies?”

Kate nods. Elizabeth, just a shade shorter than Kate and barefoot on the earth, is looking up into her face, but Kate is looking away, down, to the left, to the flowers still clutched in her hand. Elizabeth shakes her, not hard, to make her look toward her. Kate refuses, eyes determinedly elsewhere. A burst of the sweet scent of the freesias rises in a clear cloud.

“I thought my husband was leaving them for me.” Elizabeth's tears start. “Isn't that stupid? I thought he was”—her hands fall, and, freed, Kate's arms move to wrap her own body, cradling, protecting—“I thought he was coming back and leaving me flowers. I thought he was telling me, Elizabeth, it's all right.”

Elizabeth is fighting, fighting for control of her breath, her tears, her words, her hands, which want to take Kate's face and force her to look at her, as though looking into her eyes will make her understand. “How stupid. How stupid.”

Kate's tongue is a lump of dead meat. Her feet are buried in the earth. She can't move. She can't speak. The thought of her tributes so misunderstood makes her stomach shake. They were for him, in a place that was a little way into his life, not lost in a mass of flowers piled on his grave.

Elizabeth says, “He would be glad you are alive. Mike. He would be so glad that you are alive.” What leaves her lips is different from what had left her heart, though, because the “you” comes out hard, an accusation, and she sees Kate flinch.

“It wasn't your fault,” she says, aching with the effort to be the person Mike would want her to be. “That he died. It wasn't your fault.”

For Kate, the truth of this widow, her neglected hair and sallow face, wrenches her heart this way and that, while her body stands, mute. She sees that Elizabeth is wrapped in a man's dressing gown that's too big for her, and suddenly her hand is alive and grasps at the sleeve, stroking. Now they are both watching Kate's hand on Elizabeth's sleeve, as though it's something on television, something neither of them has power over, and then Elizabeth takes hold of Kate's wrist and she says, “Tell me. Tell me what happened. Please. Tell me. I beg you. I beg you.” She looks at Kate, cannot tell whether her mouth is sulking or planning to speak, and says, desperately, “Please. He was my husband. He was my husband and I was his wife and I need to know.”

And the tears come, really come, a tempest, and Kate is suddenly free to move and she says, “No, no,” the first words she has said to Elizabeth, and then she's out of the garden and gone.

• • •

Two hours pass before Mel gets up and heads out to the garden for her first cigarette of the day. She had worked late the night before, translating a Spanish novel with so many characters that it made her head spin; although she keeps on telling Elizabeth that she can work anywhere, which is true, she is finding that she can only really concentrate when she's certain her sister is sleeping.

When she sees Elizabeth sitting by the fence, still in her pajamas and Mike's dressing gown and—well, just still, so still—for a second she thinks her sister has died too. Elizabeth's hands are freezing; she's wet from sitting in the grass; she doesn't respond to her name. Mel thinks about a conversation she had with Andy yesterday, about how if this was the 1800s he'd be confidently diagnosing Elizabeth with a broken heart, and he's not sure that the diagnosis would be too far off today.

But as Mel gets closer she sees a pulse in Elizabeth's throat, and takes her hand and rubs it, rubs her fright and fear into it, and Elizabeth looks at her and says, “Oh, Mel, I should have known,” and she starts to cry, and she sobs the whole story out, her foolishness and hope, before she'll move a muscle.

Mel calls Andy at work, and until he arrives there's nothing she can do but sit in the grass too. It takes both of them to get Elizabeth—who seems to have only the slightest of connections to her body, and have no idea that she's cold, or wet—into the house, out of her wet clothes, and into bed, where she lies shivering, silent. Andy gives her some sleeping pills and a glass of water, and Mel says “no arguments,” and so Elizabeth does as she's told and sleeps for six hours without moving a muscle, her color and warmth seeping back like morning through a northern sky.

• • •

When Elizabeth comes downstairs, it's early evening, and Blake, Andy, and Mel are gathered around the kitchen table. Three pairs of cautious eyes turn toward her, assessing, appraising. “How are you doing?” Mel asks.

Elizabeth makes a gesture with shoulder, eyebrow, chin, which means, “I could say something in response to your question, but I have absolutely no idea how I am, so my answer would be meaningless.” She says, “I should have told her off and sent her home, or called someone, or brought her inside and talked to her properly, instead of—instead of being stupid.”

“Well,” Blake says, “you need to remember that if she's upset it's not because of you. It's because of what happened to her. And she wasn't to know—”

“That I was thinking her flowers were gifts to me from beyond the grave? No, she wasn't.”

“I've spoken to Richenda,” Blake says, “and Kate's quiet, but she's all right.”

“Good,” Elizabeth says, then, “I begged her. I begged her.” She shakes her head.

Blake picks up a look from Mel—before her sister came down, they'd been talking about Kate, and how she wasn't Elizabeth's responsibility—and offers, “Kate is having a hard time, but she'll come through it. She's young enough, and she has so much to go on to. This time next year she'll be at university. She'll be living a whole different life. And of course she'll always remember this, remember Michael; this won't be the end of her.”

Elizabeth nods, understanding that Blake thinks he is telling her not to worry about Kate, but feeling that he's describing the opposite of her life now, that all of the reasons Kate will be OK are the reasons why she won't be.

Andy says, “It's time, Elizabeth. It's just time that we need.”

She says, “Well, I have plenty of that,” thinking of how every single conversation she has now, every single wretched conversation, ends up with someone saying something about time. Time heals. Time will make it easier. In time it will be better. Give it time. Elizabeth stands barefoot and exhausted in her kitchen, looking at the fridge with the photos on it and the cupboard that she knows still contains the half-eaten box of cereal that only Mike liked and that she can't ever imagine ever having the heart to throw away. And she's almost certain that time won't make anything better. It just keeps making it different, awful in lots of new ways.

• • •

“The thing is,” Blake says to Mel later, as he herds Pepper and Hope along the path and she lights a cigarette, “if I had to write what happened in an incident report, it would sound like nothing. A young woman is found trespassing in a garden. She isn't stealing, but bringing a tribute to the man who saved her life. The property owner found her there, talked to her, and then the trespasser left.”