Secret Lives (45 page)

“Hooray!” Cassie raised herself to her knees
to dig deeper into her cantaloupe.

“How do you feel about worms?” Kyle
asked.

“Oh, worms, yummy, I love them.” She giggled
ridiculously.

“That's good,” Kyle said. “If we don't catch
any fish we can eat the worms for supper.”

Cassie rolled her eyes. “Silly.

Kyle took Cassie out to the shed to find a
pole she could manage, and with her daughter's departure Eden felt
the tension drop from the ceiling to her shoulders.

“He used to take you fishing,” Lou said. “Do
you remember?”

Eden stood up and began clearing the table.
“No. Not really.”

Lou set her napkin on the table. “How long
are you going to stay angry with us?”

Eden turned from the sink to look at her
aunt. “You ask that question as though it's something I have
control over, as though I can choose my emotions.”

“It's eating away at Kyle,” Lou said
quietly.

“He seems fine to me.” Eden faced the sink
again and turned on the faucet full force. The hot water spiked
against the frying pan in the sink, blocking out any other sound in
the room, anything Lou might have left to say. From the corner of
her eye Eden watched Lou stack the plates on the edge of the table
and then slowly wheel her chair toward the door. And only when the
handles of the chair had disappeared into the living room did she
turn the water off. Suds filled the sink to the rim; the hot water
burned her hands and wrists. She pressed one soapy fist to her
mouth. Damn. She was not handling this well. She was acting like an
adolescent, like herself at seventeen.

Only she'd been tougher as a teenager. A puny
little scene like this would never have been enough to make her
cry.

There were catfish for dinner that night,
breaded and pan-fried and, at Cassie's insistence, served on the
flounder platter.

“Uncle Kyle caught the big ones and I caught
the little one,” Cassie said. Eden had never seen Cassie eat fish
and she watched as her daughter struggled gamely to get some of it
down. She managed two mouthfuls before requesting a peanut butter
and jelly sandwich.

Cassie had come home exhausted after her
morning with Kyle. Her shorts were wet, her arms and cheeks were
streaked with dirt, and a layer of black grime was embedded beneath
her fingernails. She smelled of fish and worms, earth and river.
Smells that filled the tiny upstairs bathroom as Eden ran water for
her bath, that hung in the air an hour later when she cleaned the
tub. Smells of Eden's own childhood that she couldn't shake, that
left her with a painful mixture of comfort and yearning. But the
smell she longed to remember most was missing. The cavern. She
couldn't remember, couldn't even begin to conjure up the texture
and scent of the air in the cave.

Now as she slipped a bone out of the catfish
on her plate she looked at Kyle. “How did the cave smell?” she
asked.

Kyle raised his eyes from his plate. “Like a
tomb,” he said bluntly, closing the subject with the tone of his
voice, and she knew all at once that he was angry with her too.

The following day she and Cassie returned
from a matinee at the Coolbrook theater to find Ben sitting at the
kitchen table. She wasn't surprised to see him there. They had
spoken the night before and decided that at some point today he
would come over. Yet after two days of not seeing him her immediate
reaction was visceral—a rush of adrenaline, a fire low in her
gut—as if he were an alluring stranger she'd caught a glimpse of on
the street. She smiled at her response, at the satisfying knowledge
that this stranger was hers.

He was drinking apple juice and reading the
newspaper, and he didn't stand when they walked in. Instead he
stayed in the chair, at Cassie's level, and Eden thought how smart
he was, how accustomed to a child.

“Cassie, this is a friend of mine, Ben,” Eden
said.

Cassie leaned hard against Eden's leg,
looking at Ben from beneath a furrowed brow. She'd acted this way
when she first met Michael, too, sizing him up, holding back. She'd
never really warmed to Michael.

“I heard there was a kitten over here and I
wanted to meet it,” Ben said.

Cassie eyed him suspiciously.

“Does it belong to you, Eden?” Ben asked, his
gray eyes innocent.

“It's mine,” Cassie said.

“Can I see it?”

Cassie ran off in the direction of the living
room and Ben smiled up at Eden. “She's great,” he said.

Eden leaned over to kiss him. “I miss
you.”

Cassie returned with the kitten cuddled in
her arms. She handed it to Ben, the guard in her eyes lifting a
little. “Is it a boy or a girl?” Ben asked.

“A boy. His name is Stuart.”

“Stuart?” Ben's eyes were amused. “He looks
very well cared for.”

“He is.” Cassie told him about Stuart's diet
and how she cleaned the poop out of his litter box every day.
Stuart stretched out his fat little body, his rear paws on Ben's
thigh, his front paws kneading the shirt above Ben's ribs. Eden was
jealous of the cat.

Cassie edged nearer to Ben until she was
close enough to scratch Stuart's head. She was on a roll now,
telling Ben about the vitamins cats require, how to prevent fur
balls, the merits of various forms of flea control products. Eden
had no idea Cassie knew about such things. Ben asked questions and
listened closely to her answers. He didn't tease, didn't talk down
to her, and Cassie swelled with pride at being taken seriously by
this man who had an insatiable curiosity about cat care.

Ben kept his visit short, but the next
afternoon he invited Eden and Cassie up to his cabin, and it was
then that he won Cassie over completely. Cassie was awestruck by
the dollhouse. “It's for me?” she said, her eyes wide. She had to
be wondering why this stranger would give her something so
resplendent. She walked in a circle around the yellow and blue
Victorian house where it rested on the table. “It's exquisite,” she
breathed. Ben, hearing her use this word for the first time,
laughed with pleasure.

They took her to the dollhouse store in
Belhurst to buy dolls for the house. She selected a tiny woman in a
housedress, a clean-cut man with a briefcase, and two little blond
girls. Eden gave her the money to pay the cashier, and she and Ben
waited at the door while Cassie made her purchase.

“Do you think she sees that mother doll as me
or Pam?” she asked.

“She probably just sees it as a mother
doll.”

As they walked back to the truck Ben took
Eden's hand. Cassie plowed between them, grabbing their hands and
pulling them apart. “Don't hold his hand, Mommy,” she said.

“Why not?” Eden asked. “I like holding his
hand.”

“‘Cause he's not Daddy. You're only allowed
to hold Daddy's hand.” She watched Eden carefully for another few
steps and when she was satisfied her mother was not going to take
Ben's hand again, she ran on ahead of them, rubber-soled heels
flashing behind her. Ben looked at Eden with raised eyebrows.

“I'd better have a talk with her,” Eden
said.

“Yeah,” he said. “You'd better if you ever
want to hold my hand again.”

“That's not all I want to hold.”

He groaned. “Don't talk dirty to me when you
can't follow through.” He put his arm around her but dropped it
quickly. “Are we ever going to make love again?”

“God, I hope so.”

That was the only drawback to having Cassie
with her: there was no place, no time to be alone with Ben.

Eden began checking into day care for Cassie
for the fall. Maggie DeMarco, Sara Jane Miller's younger daughter,
ran a small program out of her home. Eden and Cassie spent an
afternoon with Maggie and her little girls, and Cassie was thrilled
beyond measure at being around other children. She used to prefer
the company of adults, but Eden could see the difference the month
with April and Lindy had made. Eden herself felt comfortable with
Maggie, who treated her like any other mother. She seemed neither
impressed nor intimidated at having Eden Riley in her house. Maggie
had that lazy, almost bored smile that Eden remembered from their
meeting at Sara Jane's apartment. She looked like a woman whose
nerves never frayed.

“You know,” Maggie said over a glass of iced
tea, “that time at my mother's was not the first time we've met.
You and I were buddies when we were little, before your mother
died. I don't remember it, but that's what my mother says.”

Eden was stunned. “I didn't think I had any
playmates at all back then.”

Maggie shrugged. “I couldn't swear to it, but
Mama claims it's true.”

Eden signed Cassie up to start day care in
September. Maggie said she'd be happy to take her for the rest of
the summer, but Eden wasn't ready to give Cassie up just yet.

Besides, Cassie was being well entertained at
home. She helped Lou bake cookies and pies, and Kyle set up a
little music stand she could use as an easel right next to Lou's
easel. Cassie loved slapping the paint on her “canvas,” although
her short attention span hardly allowed for the production of great
art.

In the evenings she sat on Kyle's lap while
he read her The Lazy Lizard or Soup for Seven, and Eden watched
them, feeling once more that eerie nostalgia. Surely he'd once read
to her that way, with her nestled in his arms, his bearded cheek
resting against her temple. She could very nearly remember it.

She took Cassie to the site on a couple of
mornings, and Ben buried arrowheads for her to dig up. He'd treat
her discoveries with great sobriety, pretending to chart them and
telling her about the people who'd made them thousands of years
ago. What Cassie understood of his explanations Eden wasn't sure.
But she'd listen with complete attention and take great care with
her little artifacts.

By the end of that week Eden and Ben could
hold hands without protest from Cassie. Cassie liked Ben, but
liking Ben came with a little confusion and guilt. She would
occasionally parrot things Eden had said to her, suddenly, out of
context. Once she looked up from a book Kyle was reading her to
say, “It's perfectly okay that I like Ben,” and Kyle, masking his
surprise, said, “Sure it is, honey. You can like anyone you
want.”

One night Ben bought a giant bubble wand, and
he and Cassie spent most of the evening blowing huge iridescent
bubbles that floated and bounced on the hot air of the cabin. Eden
sat on the bed, watching Ben create bubbles the size of beach
balls, then bubbles inside bubbles. Cassie giggled and screamed and
begged for more. Suddenly she ran up to Ben where he sat on the
sofa. She set her hands on his knees and looked him squarely in the
eye.

“My daddy is always going to be my daddy,”
she said, letting him know that all this fun could never change
that fact.

“Oh, yes,” Ben said, his face very serious.
“He absolutely is."

When Cassie finally tired of chasing bubbles,
Eden laid her down on the bed, on top of the blue-and-white quilt,
and joined Ben on the sofa.

“She's an extremely precocious kid,” Ben
said.

“Is that an insult or a compliment?”

“In this case, a compliment. I wish Bliss had
more of Cassie's spunk. Cassie's very sure of herself. I can't
imagine anyone ever hurting her and her not telling. Have you
talked to her about it? Good touching and bad touching and all
that?”

“Yes. She has a book about it, though it's in
Santa Monica. I don't know how often you have to reinforce that
kind of message. I don't want to make her paranoid.”

“I think you can't reinforce it enough, but
then my whole perspective on the subject is skewed. Sharon and I
talked to Bliss any number of times, but apparently we screwed up
somewhere along the way. We told her if anyone hurt her to come to
us, never to keep it a secret no matter what that person told her.
And still she didn't tell. I think it was because she was so
convinced it was me. If I told her to keep it a secret, of course
she would. If you can't trust your own dad, who can you trust?”

He would have moments like these from time to
time, when Eden could feel him sinking, when his arm around her
shoulders felt like lead. But they were becoming less frequent,
less extreme, and she knew having Cassie around gave him more
pleasure than pain.

She and Ben spent little time these days with
Kyle and Lou. The pleasure the four of them had experienced
together only a few weeks earlier—the tramposo, the easy
conversations—had died a sudden death. Eden knew she was the only
person who could lift the pall that had settled over Lynch Hollow,
but she had no intention of doing so. She was content to let Cassie
take responsibility for lightening the mood.

She missed the sexual side of her
relationship with Ben more than she would have guessed. For over a
year she had not cared about sex and had had no difficulty turning
it down when it was offered to her, but that was before she met
Ben, before her body had grown accustomed to the solid feel of him
next to her in his narrow bed. She was all right when she wasn't
around him, but seeing him without being able to hold him felt like
a cruel sort of punishment. She didn't feel free to show him
physical affection in front of Cassie, and he agreed it would be
premature. One evening when he was leaving the house at Lynch
Hollow, he took Eden in his arms to kiss her but pulled away
abruptly when Cassie walked in the room.

“‘Bye,” he said instead of a kiss and, with a
doleful smile on his forbidden lips, walked out the door.

Lou, who had witnessed the scene and must
have read the frustration in Eden's face, said, “Now you have the
tiniest sense of how your mother felt.”

“What do you mean?” Eden asked.

“Being in love with someone you can't
touch.”

Eden scowled. “Stop it, Lou. There's no
comparison.”