The Secrets We Keep (4 page)

“And anyway,” Blake reminded them—in a rather patronizing fashion, in Rufus's view—“this is Throckton, and this is all anyone is talking about. And as soon as she's home and back on Facebook, there'll be nothing you can do.”

“Yes, yes,” Rufus had said. “We get the picture. She needs to know. We need to find the right time.”

And he and Richenda had agreed they would tell her carefully, together, when they thought that time had come. But looking at his daughter, he sees that it will never be the right time. He sits down next to her, settling one leg underneath him so he can face her, takes her hands.

“Michael Gray died,” he says, looking straight into her eyes. “He drowned. The police need to talk to you some more, when you're up to it, but they think he got you out of the water and then couldn't get out himself.”

“No,” she says. Rufus watches her, helpless as she turns the color of a lime-washed wall, anxious as the hands he holds go from warm to cold to chill.

“No.” The shaking seems to start at her heart and ripple out, more violent at her fingers and toes.

“It was a terrible accident,” Rufus offers, although he can see how inadequate his offering is. “A terrible accident, Kate. But accidents happen. And you have to think that you could have both been dead.”

“No.” And Kate pulls away from him and lies back, and she closes her eyes, and Rufus sits with her cold feet in his lap and wills the heat from his hands into them. He's still there when Richenda gets home. He's still thinking about the weight of what has happened: of how a death on your behalf might make you bow or buckle, or force you to be strong. Neither option is what he wants for his daughter. But they are the only options Kate has.

Mike,

I'm going to the F word in the morning. I've become one of those people I used to despise, who say “passed on” and “gone” instead of the real word for the thing that you've done, except now I understand why they did it, because when you hear the real word it's like being taken back to that first horrible moment, every single time.

Apart from the funeral home, the only times I've been outside until now are when I've stood on the paving stones by the back door while Pepper frolics around the garden. (I'm sure he's looking for you. He thinks you're hiding, or playing. I don't know how to explain it to a dog.) Even this pathetic winter light is too much for me. Your mother opens the curtains every morning when she comes. I leave the bedroom ones drawn all the time.

I miss the little things. I miss smiling with you about nothing much, like Pepper squeaking and growling in his sleep, or your mother plumping the cushions when she thinks I'm not looking. I miss you getting into bed in the middle of the night and wrapping yourself around me. I miss eating pizza out of the box and drinking champagne out of the flutes that were the first thing we bought together. I miss the smell of Deep Heat in the bathroom when you've had a shower after a run.

I miss you.

I wonder whether we couldn't have a baby because of this. Because it's written, somewhere, that this was going to happen, and when it did, I'd fall apart, and no child should have to lose their father and watch their mother…this. I don't have the heart for this life on my own. I need you.

E xxx

Melissa is in the air somewhere above the Indian Ocean when Michael's funeral service takes place. She's been working on UK time since she got on the plane, so when 11:00 a.m. comes around, she puts her book away, takes her headphones out, and puts on her eye mask. She sits with her hands in her lap for what seems like the right amount of time for a funeral to take, remembering the man who her sister first described to her, eleven years ago, as “quite a sweetheart, for an English bloke.” And so he had been. If Mel ignores the part where he persuaded her sister to move half a world away, she had no complaints about Michael, who made her sister happy, who came to Australia and sweated and swatted at insects and pretended that he loved the place for the sake of Elizabeth.

Later, when her solitary funeral tribute is over, Mel watches as the clouds below ignore her, and she thinks about how all of this global village stuff is crap when your sister's husband dies, and your sister is on the other side of the planet. She's talked to Elizabeth every day, and she's listened to all that she has managed to stutter out, about how she has to learn to live without Mike and she might as well start now, and how all she's doing is thinking and sleeping and trying to eat what Patricia tries to feed her, and how Mel has her own life to live. Melissa had pretended to listen—or rather, she'd listened to what was happening between and behind Elizabeth's words, the scrabbling for some sort of purchase in reality, in sanity, in the place outside the nasty black bubble she was trapped in—and then she'd overruled.

“I've bought my ticket, I'm arriving on the eighteenth of January, I'm staying for as long as I need to, and you, Sister, are just going to have to suck it up.”

“OK,” Elizabeth had said, and it had pleased Melissa to hear relief in her voice, although she half knows that it was her imagination that put it there. She can't bear the thought of her sister in that funny little place she lives in, with a crone of a mother-in-law as the closest thing she has to a family. Mel doesn't try to sleep, or read, or do anything except watch the hours pass, and the miles decrease, on the screen in front of her.

When Andy picks her up he notices the wide-eyed, pale-faced shock of her, part long-haul flight, part landing in the real version of the abstract thing she's been thinking about ever since she got the call.

“How bad is it?” she asks as they walk to the car.

“Bad,” he says.

“Is that a medical opinion?”

“It's everyone's opinion,” he says. “You'll see.”

• • •

Andy stops at the gate and unloads the suitcase from the boot. “I'll see you later,” he says. “I've hardly seen Luca and Toby. And Lucy. Since. And you'll want to—”

“Yes,” Mel says, thinking,
I
want
nothing
less
than
what's behind that door. I want nothing less than to see my sister in the way I'm going to see her.
She almost asks him to come in, then she sees the way he pulls at his tie, the places he's caught his chin when he shaved, the pinkness of eyes unused to crying.

“Sure,” she says. “Tell them hello.”

“I will,” Andy says, and he nods, gets into the car, starts the engine, and drives away. Mel takes a breath and opens the gate. She's never been so sorry, and so glad, to arrive anywhere.

• • •

It's Patricia who opens the door, more gaunt than Mel remembers her.

“I'm so sorry,” Mel says, and Patricia says, “Yes,” and there's a moment—just a moment—when the two of them could be friends. Mel almost forgives all of the barbed remarks about dyed hair and funny accents she's batted away with sarcasm over the years, and Patricia could forget how small and silly Mel makes Throckton seem—and, by extension, her whole life and all that's dear to her. But it's too much effort, especially now.

“Those boots will mark the floor, you know, they got rid of the carpets and Michael stripped the floorboards last summer,” Patricia says, and Mel, momentarily cowed by this intimate domestic detail of the dead, bends to take her boots off on the threshold.

Magnanimous in victory, Patricia offers, “She's sleeping,” then adds, “The pot's just warming.”

“Oh, good,” Melissa mutters at her back. “Tea.”

There's time, before Elizabeth comes down, for Mel to hear about the funeral in the forensic detail of someone who must remember, as though the power of remembering is a measure of love. Patricia talks as though she cannot stop: who came, where they sat, what they said, when they cried. Elizabeth, scratching at the side of her neck until it bled; Blake, who was sitting on the other side of her, taking her hand and holding it, firmly, in his own, although the fingers kept fluttering and flinching. Andy's eulogy, touching and true, although it didn't mention Michael's father, which was a shame. Elizabeth slipping off her shoes and rubbing one foot against the other incessantly, and having to be reminded to put the shoes on again before they followed the coffin out. The Micklethwaite man, shame-faced, at the back. Patricia wouldn't have said he could be there when Blake came with the request, but Elizabeth had said of course he must come, how kind. (Patricia doesn't admit to Mel that, when Blake had left, she had objected to Rufus coming to the funeral, and Elizabeth had turned bemused blue eyes on her and said, as though it was the only possible option, “But, Patricia, you know what Mike would have said. He'd have said that this is no one's fault. He'd have said he was glad she was alive. We should let them come. If it was me, I would want to go,” and she had felt ashamed of her own fury at that stupid, stupid Micklethwaite girl, who had not only killed her son, but also seemed to have done so in nothing more than a moment of fecklessness.)

Mel listens, and watches, and waits for a sound of Elizabeth. It's dark, and she's had two pots of tea and a sandwich selected from the funeral leftovers, and struggled to stay awake and listen to Patricia's memories of Michael—already well on the way to sainthood in his mother's heart—before they hear footsteps on the stairs. “I'll put the kettle on,” says Patricia, and Mel's heart sinks for a moment before she recognizes that the tea is tact, and smiles her thanks.

Despite the warnings from Andy, the memory of her sister's sobs on the phone, and the litany of uneaten meals, unwashed hair and unopened curtains from Patricia, Mel is still unprepared for the way her sister looks. Elizabeth's skin has taken on a tint of gray, her eyes have dulled like glass tossed in a violent sea, and her body has defeat in every line and muscle. She looks half dead herself. The tears start in Mel before they erupt from Elizabeth. They hold on to each other, sobbing sadly and wearily, each remembering how they did this when their mother died, two frightened little monkeys clinging on to each other for dear life. In the kitchen, Patricia permits herself a tear before loading cups into the dishwasher, and is too tired to push away the thought that Elizabeth might—will, in all probability—find herself another husband, while she will never have another son, and yet they must all feel sorry for Elizabeth. Later, watching Mel spoon-feed soup to her sister, who opens and closes her mouth like a sad bird, she wishes she could take the thought back.
But
, she thinks as she lets herself into her own dark house,
if I could take things back, I'd start by taking back whatever happened that night, and then none of us would be where we are, and Michael wouldn't be gone.

• • •

The next evening, Andy comes for dinner—well, he brings dinner—and he, Elizabeth, and Mel sit around the table and have something that, given a casual glance from the outside, would look like a normal evening. Except that a normal evening takes no effort, and it's clear from the start that there is effort everywhere, from all of them.

Elizabeth has told herself over and over that she's allowed to do this, to sit at a table with her sister and her oldest Throckton friend and eat and drink and remember her husband. But when she walks into the kitchen where Mel and Andy are joking as they get out the takeaway cartons, something happens and she can't remember where the plates are, and Mel has to steer her to the table and sit her there, in pajama bottoms and the sweater that Mike used to wear in the evenings as he watched Pepper have a last-thing sniff around the garden. She's like a child coming to the table for the first time after a sickness.

Mel and Andy are genuinely glad to see each other. They work out that it's ten years since they met, on the eve of Michael and Elizabeth's wedding, and speculate about what Mel's then-boyfriend is doing now. (Andy reckons prison; Mel thinks she heard a rumor that he joined a cult. Elizabeth rouses herself long enough to point out that Mel seemed quite keen on him at the time. Andy and Mel look at each other as though they've won a prize.) There's no reason to wonder where Andy's then-girlfriend is: she's at home, with the boys, and so Mel looks through the photos on his phone and says, “You know I'm not a fan of the smaller members of the human race, but they are cute. They were just little tiny balls of wrinkles the last time I was here. Your eyes.” “Yes, and Lucy's smile,” Andy says.

But both of them are horribly aware of the ghost at the table, and the almost-ghost he has left behind, pushing rice around her plate and trying to smile, which is more pitiful than when she cries. The only other time Elizabeth has anything to offer—Mel and Andy have understood that as yet the conversation can do no more than nod toward Michael—is when Mel talks about the discomfort of the single bed in the spare room. Andy, who spent the first night after Michael's death in it, agrees.

“I didn't think it was too bad,” Elizabeth says. For a second, Andy and Mel catch each other's eyes, then Mel asks, gently, when her sister has slept in that bed. “Oh, when I can't bear to go into our bedroom,” she says matter-of-factly, and then something happens to her face—it's like watching a time-lapse film of one of those daisies that only come out in the sun—and she gets up from the table and goes upstairs.