The Secrets She Keeps (37 page)

“I’m sure.”

They make a bed of blankets on the front passenger seat of the Styleline Deluxe. Ellen kisses the baby and then Nash’s cheek.

“Be safe,” she says.

Jack is awake after all. Of course he is. He watches out for a person. It’s the best thing about him. He comes outside and nods to Ellen on her way in, his hands shoved into his pockets. He passes Nash a slip of paper with his own writing on it. There’s a name and an address. “You can’t just run with nowhere to go,” he says.

The paper reads,
Miller Adoption Services, 45 Stone Road, Sacramento
. She looks at him with a question in her eyes.

“Something that happened when I was a kid. Back in high school.”

“Jesus, Jack,” she says, but it hardly matters now. None of it does.

“Nash, before you go. I want you to know, about the other night—”

He takes her hand. He doesn’t need to say anything more, and neither does she. They will always have great affection for each other. But passion, high drama, even love—they look entirely, irrevocably different to her now. She feels the fault line of before and after.

“I already do know,” she says. He kisses her cheek, too. And then he looks in the car, sees the rifle on the floor of the backseat, the Savage Model 720, which Nash took from underneath Alice’s bed. He nods his approval. “Take I-80 from Reno, Nash. Follow the Truckee River.” He isn’t calling her Peanut anymore. No, that young girl is long gone, and good riddance to her.

She starts the engine and heads down the road. She isn’t particularly scared. And she isn’t one bit sorry about Stuart Marcel or this reckless thing she is about to do. Not right now, anyway. Not when there are crickets and millions of stars and miles and miles of open road. There is a thin yellow curve of moon in that big, big desert sky. The night air smells like dry grass and horse manure and summer. She is flying down that dirt road with her true love beside her, and she is filled with…well, she is mostly and most simply
filled
.

She is soaring. There is a rise in her whole body now, as they pick up speed and the ranch falls away behind them.

—

Edward Austen, the little bundle of him, begins to make fussing sounds just past the turnoff where she and Jack went to see the aerial show that time, where the tiny, faraway man stepped out into the sky and walked on that wing.

Nash pulls the car over. She unwraps Edward Austen and croons to him. She sings a song she’s made up, and she puts Lilly’s name in it. She hopes Lilly can hear her. Edward Austen’s body is so tiny that the diaper looks as big as a turban on a man’s head. Her hands shake; she puts her fingers against his skin so that the pin won’t prick him. She wraps him back up, and she feeds him the bottle that Ellen has made, and she rubs his feet as Ellen did. She pats his back, with its tiny, bony spine, and she cups his head with her palm. She holds him against her chest, her jacket wrapped around them both.

She awakens. The sun is coming up. She has the sweet surprise of waking up in the Styleline Deluxe with a baby sleeping against her, just before that moment, that awful moment upon waking, where her story comes back to her. The horror of the day before descends. A sob comes up her throat as she remembers Lilly and that blood and her blank eyes and Lilly’s body being taken away in that wagon. She thinks of Lilly’s shiny hair, and her laugh, and her hand reaching out for Nash’s as she stood on those rocks.

But then Nash remembers her vow. She changes Edward Austen and feeds him and then turns the key of that engine. She needs to get to Sacramento.

—

It is morning, and the rabbits are hopping around as if it’s the first day of spring. She takes Old 395, just in case. It’s not the main road, so no one will see her. She’ll feel better once she’s out of Reno.

She is just past Davis Creek when she thinks she sees a black Cadillac a long distance behind her, and then it is gone. She tells herself that this is nerves, that she is seeing things. At this distance, it could be any black car. But then, as she nears Virginia Street, she sees it again. It is black and low, as if it’s creeping. It has a large chrome face, and on its hood it wears that silver flying goddess like a jewel in a crown.

“Dear God, dear God,” Nash prays. She places her hand on the bundle that is Edward Austen, to steady him, and then she steps on the gas.

It is there behind her, no doubt about it. Stuart Marcel’s Cadillac, with Stuart Marcel himself behind the wheel. She sees his large head with the dark hair swooped back, and she can feel his eyes on her.

Her heart races. Stuart Marcel is caught at the new two-color signal on Fourth Street. The city is just waking. The judges and attorneys are still eating their poached eggs on toast and drinking their first cup of coffee. Stuart Marcel is not someone who stops at a signal. He speeds through. Nash flies toward Virginia Street. Here’s what the Styleline Deluxe is capable of: sixty-five, seventy. More. She is a mustang fleeing a plane swooping low. Her body is fight and panic and bare determination.

He is right behind her, just on the other side of the bridge. And—wait. Is that Al Johns’s truck behind him? She has no idea what might have happened at the ranch in her absence, but what she does know right now is that even the Styleline Deluxe will be no match for the shiny new mechanical mastery of that Cadillac. She must do something else, something rash, that will save them both.

She thinks of the day of the driving lesson, how Veronica stood right up to Stuart Marcel, her nose nearly touching his. Yes. Nash is also capable of that kind of strength, by God.

She pulls over. She grabs that rifle and steps out of the car. Here, this is what her anger truly looks like; this is the full force of it, and of her love, too. Stuart Marcel is going a hundred miles an hour over that bridge. Nothing matters to her except Edward Austen. Edward Austen and the others of his kind, the small, wrinkled newborns—they are what all the folly and passion and trips up and down the courthouse stairs are really about, and Nash understands this now. The drama and madness are a snickering trick of nature, an outlandish but irresistible hoax with one ongoing goal: tiny beings such as this one, wrapped up and sleeping peacefully, unaware of all the fuss that got them here.

This, Nash thinks, is for Lilly. And for the first Mrs. Marcel, falling down, down, down from the ledge of that Topanga Canyon road, a flesh-and-blood woman who banged against those rocks, who, somewhere along that fast trip to the ground, became merely a body, a body likely as mangled and bloody as those horses Nash had seen. Nash lifts the Savage Model 720, and how she loves its name right now.
Savage
is what she feels—fierce, furious. Nash takes aim.

There is a loud crack, and Nash flinches. There is something else, too—the fact that Nash has always been a lousy shot. She aims for one of those white-walled tires, hoping to do enough damage to slow him down, but instead she gets the winged goddess, who shoots off and soars, midair. She is gone, an ornament no more, heading for the roof of the Washoe Courthouse, where she’ll land. Her sudden freedom causes Stuart Marcel to lose control of his speeding car. It is also airborne now; Nash can see its shiny underside as it takes flight and flips over the rail of the Truckee Bridge, like one of those hundreds upon hundreds of gold bands.

She hears it crash. There’s the boom of weight hitting water. When she opens her eyes again from squeezing them shut, she sees that she was right—it
was
Al Johns’s truck following behind that Cadillac. There’s the store’s H&J painted on the side, and Jack is rushing out of that truck, and he has his hand cupped around his mouth and he is running toward her and shouting, “Nash! Nash! Go! Go!”

Nash goes. There’s no time for either guilt or gladness. That bullet is down at the bottom of the Truckee, and, soon, Stuart Marcel will be, as well. That’s where he’ll remain, the bastard, until his big, brutal body and the battered carcass of that Cadillac are finally fished out of that river filled with wedding rings.

Shaye had her hand cupped around her mouth and she was shouting. “Callie! Cal!” She had her cute little sundress on, the one decorated with cheerful fruits, oranges and strawberries and watermelon slices. “What are you doing? I was looking everywhere for you.”

She dragged another old lounge chair out of the pool house and set it next to mine. What was I doing? Looking out over the abandoned hole, picturing it sparkling with water. Imagining women in formfitting maillots and high-waisted two-piece bathing suits, chatting and reading magazines. Seeing Shaye and me, diving for pennies as our mother sunned nearby, the fragrance of Sea & Ski in the air.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Talk to me.”

“I’m just surprised to find myself here.”

“Here, like the ranch here?”

“No, like
here
here. All of it. I don’t know—” My voice caught.

“Oh, Cal.” She came over to my chair and sat beside me.

“We’re going to break this thing,” I said. I wasn’t sure how to convey what I was feeling or even if I wanted to.

“We’re not going to break it.” She put her arm around my shoulders. “You’ve been so sad, Cal, haven’t you? Even before this, before coming here. The months before Amy’s graduation? I could hear it on the phone.”

“Sad?”

“Sad. Really sad.”

Sad
—I hadn’t even called it that myself, but the word took me down like an arrow. My God, the truth slammed into my chest, and I folded my arms across it. The defense seemed necessary. There was a terrible avalanche in there, threatening to spill.

“Why wouldn’t you be? I mean, think about it. The girls leaving home. Your job. Thomas’s mother dying—”

“No. You know how I felt about her.”

“Still, Cal. Still. Come on. That’s a huge piece of your life that’s over. And then Hugo.”

Damn it. Damn her! At the sound of Hugo’s name, I saw him, that big, innocent boy who was my friend, my sweet protector, so sick and then gone. The weight in my chest, it felt more than I could bear. My throat shut tight. “Silly,” I whispered.

“Silly? Are you kidding? It’s loss, Cal. It’s
grief
. You keep talking about Thomas losing his mother, but, Cal—”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to hear this.” I could barely speak.

“You’re grieving. You’re grieving a lot of things.”

Damn her, damn her, damn her, and damn the truth, and damn everything else that needed damning,
everything
. The heaviness in my chest was growing greater, pressing so hard that I started to cry, and I hate to cry. My sorry heart was breaking. It was breaking because shoulder pads were gone and so were bad perms, and the little pink potty chair the girls used, and so, too, was the car filled with soccer cleats and rainy, muddy clothes and snacks in foil packages. All of that was finished now, and so was the way Hugo turned in circles before lying down. I didn’t know where the time had gone, and Shaye was right, and I heaved with grief, crying like an idiot for elementary school Valentine’s Day parties and Hugo crunching his breakfast and swimming lessons, that moment—that delicious and perfect moment—of wrapping two small shivering bodies in their towels before heading home. Grief, yes, for the times Thomas and I would be in the front seat of the car with sleeping children in the back, for the quiet satisfaction of that life. The snug capsule of a family, speeding through darkness as rain fell, the windshield wipers going back and forth—how could one ever get over the loss of it.

“Oh, God. God.” I sobbed like a fool, then gathered some last remaining bits of control. I wiped my eyes with the palm of my hand. My nose was running. I was a big damn brokenhearted mess.

Shaye put her other arm around me now, too. I was held in the circle she’d made for me. “Don’t get mad.”

“I’m already mad,” I sniffed.

“Don’t get more mad.”

“What?”

“There’s something else.”

“If it starts with
don’t get mad,
I’m not going to want to hear this, right?”

“You know how you also keep talking about Thomas going through a midlife crisis? Cal, I think
you
are having one.”

“Oh, no.”

“It’s totally understandable, you know? That’s what happ—”

“Tell me it’s not true.”

“I think it’s true. I mean, the way you bolted down here in the first place…your camera, the forest-service guy—”

“You encouraged me!”

“I know I did, but Cal, I just think…”

I put my head in my hands. Shit. “You’re right,” I said, but my voice was muffled in my fingers.

“What did you say?”

“I said,
You’re right.
You’re right, okay?”

“I’m right? Can I record that on video or something?”

“I can’t believe it.” I was struck. I didn’t know what to say. I felt so stupid. How could I have missed this? It was all more complicated and much more simple than I ever thought. “It’s been
me
.”

“Well, I’m no Dr. Love, but I’d say it’s been both of you. Clearly, you’ve both been hit.”