The Secrets She Carried (14 page)

Leslie eyed him stonily, giving nothing away. After a moment she turned back to the counter, busying herself with a damp cloth and a sticky jar of marmalade. “How much money are we talking about?”

“Not as much as you’ll make down the road if you invest it back into the vineyard with me.”

Leslie spun around, still holding the jar. “Have you been practicing that one, or did it just roll off your tongue?”

“Angie said you had a real estate agent here.”

“I haven’t signed anything.”

“But you’re thinking of selling and going back to New York.”

Leslie shrugged. “Initially, that was the plan. Now I find myself wondering what I’d be going back to. I sublet my apartment when I left. The magazine I worked for folded almost a year ago, and the job market in my field is currently a disaster.”

“Then why even consider going back?”

Leslie set the marmalade on the counter. “Because it’s what I know. And because it’s not here.”

“Is here so bad?”

The question seemed to confuse her. She reached for her wine, taking a deep sip. “If you’ve been here any length of time, you’ve heard the rumors about my mother’s death—and about my father. I was eight when it happened, but the memories are still pretty fresh. So, yes, here is a little bit bad.”

Jay searched her face, noting the way her eyes never seemed to settle long in one place. There was something more, some other piece she wasn’t telling him. He saw it now, as plain as a neon sign, in the rigid set of her squared shoulders, the wary tension in the angle of her jaw. How had he not seen the vulnerability before?

“It’s been thirty years,” he said quietly. “Maybe it’s time you made some new memories. Good ones this time.”

Leslie tipped her glass again, her eyes drifting beyond the kitchen
window. “Do you think that’s possible—to wipe the slate clean with brand-new memories? Or does that only happen in books?”

Jay cleared his throat, unsettled by her words, by the combination of cynicism and wistfulness. “I think it’s what we all hope for.”

She glanced up at him then, as if she’d just remembered that he was in the room, her green eyes suddenly keen. “You too?”

How had this become about him? Pretending to sip his wine, he fumbled for an answer. “I was speaking hypothetically.”

“Not from experience?”

Leslie’s gaze was just penetrating enough to make him squirm. “Everyone’s trying to forget something, I suppose. Some have more luck than others.”

Mercifully, her gaze shifted again, back beyond the window. She was quiet a long time before she finally responded. “I don’t know the first thing about growing grapes or making wine.”

Something like hope fluttered in Jay’s belly. Had she just said she was staying?

“Buck and I can teach you that. But really, there’s something else you can do for us, something besides not selling your share of Peak, that will prove far more helpful than you poking around in the vines and must vats.”

Her head came around. “The
what
vats?”

Jay grinned. “You’ll learn the jargon. For now, it’s your marketing skills I’m after. We’re going to need a logo, label designs, photos of both the crush barn and the tasting barn for our brochure, and I was thinking—since I stink at that kind of thing, and you’ve got a bit of experience with it—I’d like to offer you the job.”

“I know absolutely nothing about wine.”

“Do you know anything about marketing? About creating an image?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“Then say you’ll do it, say you’ll stay and be a part of this thing.”
He picked up her nearly empty glass and pressed it back into her hands. “I’ll tell you now, there won’t be much up front. It takes a while to see a profit. But you’ll have a roof over your head, and somewhere, your grandmother will be smiling at the thought of Peak in the hands of yet another Gavin woman.”

Leslie closed her eyes with a groan, then pulled in a long, deep breath, holding it for what felt like an eternity. Finally, she let it out and opened her eyes. “All right. I must be out of my mind, but I’ll stay. For now.”

Adele

M
ama always says the worst sorrows come after dark.

It begins at two in the morning—a quiet rush of bloody water, a high, thin wail of despair. Too early, Susanne knows at once, much, much too early. Like the others. When the pains commence she nearly loses her mind, cursing God and raging against her body’s betrayal, her eyes all queer and wrung of color. She pants like an animal, one minute howling for me to fetch Henry, vowing me to silence in the next, as if the man won’t see that she’s lost his child.

The horror goes on forever, hour after hour of savage, sticky anguish, of sweating and keening and writhing, all for a child who will not—who cannot—live. It’s a merciless thing, I think, as I stare down at her paper white face on the pillow, to be torn apart for nothing, but sometimes life is merciless. And then, finally, it ends, with one last rush of fluid and a terrible silence.

An hour after Dr. Shaw first cracks open his satchel of instruments and vials, it’s all over. He says what Susanne already knows, what we all know, that he’s come too late, though sooner would have made no difference. He scoops the little thing up, silent and blue, and swaddles it in a towel. A boy, he murmurs apologetically, and hurries
it away. There is a pall over the room, a blackness that is only partly to do with the child, a sense of things ending.

Henry stands at the foot of the bed, gray and stony. He can’t bring himself to look at Susanne, can’t bring himself to look at me either, as I strip away the bloody sheets, ruck up the cotton nightdress, and sponge the blood of his dead child from his wife’s pale thighs. I try not to look at her belly, white and flaccid, empty. For more reasons than I can name, I despise her. But I never wanted this—not this.

She’s quiet now, lost in the merciful haze of whatever the doctor has given her. For now at least, the thrashing and wailing are past, and Henry and I are nearly alone in that wretched room. His eyes are shiny wet, his sun-lined face so near to breaking that I can hardly bear it. There’s a misery about him, a despair so complete it hangs on him like one of his old plaid shirts, and I realize with a start that his pain is my pain too, as alive and searing as if it were my own heart breaking.

My hand goes to his, curled tight on the footboard. It is not my place to touch him, to comfort him, and yet I cannot seem to stop myself. The roughness of his skin, the warmth of it against my palm, acts on me in a way I have never known. I drop my eyes and draw my hand away, wondering as I scurry back to Susanne’s bloody sheets where this sudden breathless ache has come from, and how long it has been crouching within me, unseen and unbidden.

If Henry guesses what I feel, he gives no sign. He’s numb, blind just now to anything but his grief, and I am relieved, at least, for that. I cannot bear the thought of his knowing. I can hardly bear to think of it myself.

For weeks, Susanne is too frail to leave her bed. She has lost too much blood—and too much hope. Her cheeks are sallow and chalky,
the color of Lottie’s biscuit dough, but she will take no food, only her tincture with a little of the bootleg. Dr. Shaw has increased her dosage again, to ease the pain of her empty womb, though in truth I think he has done it for Henry, to give him a little peace and spare him Susanne’s rantings.

I do my best to calm her when she’s in one of her moods, though at least once a day I find myself cleaning up some bit of crockery—cups, saucers, whatever is at hand to smash to the floor or hurl against the wall. She will receive no visitors, though they come in a steady stream. She will not sit by while they gloat, she tells me miserably, and of course they will gloat, happy to see her brought low yet again, denied the one thing—the only thing—she wants in all the world. They’re jealous, she rails, because she has Henry and Peak, and so they’re glad she cannot do and have this thing every true woman must do and have. I assure her they’ve come because they are her friends, to cheer her and offer condolences, but each time I say it I think of Celia Cunningham, and I know Susanne is right.

Weeks fall away like the flesh from her bones, so that by spring Susanne is only a shadow of the haughty woman who greeted me that first day in the downstairs parlor. She is older somehow, shrunken and withered, as if ten years has passed instead of ten weeks since that terrible night. Her face, never pretty, is ravaged now, by misery and too much sipping from her teacup, and so she keeps to her room, too vain to show herself for the wreck she has become.

Her moods are worse too, blank and reckless, swinging like a clock pendulum between self-pity and rage. She no longer cares for Peak and its daily workings, content to leave it all to me. And so between hair washings and letter writing, trips to the dime store, and trips to the druggist, I must now confer with Lottie about the menu for Henry’s dinner, must order about the woman who comes in to clean and polish once a week, and must oversee the household accounts. When there is a squabble among the help, it is mine to solve.
When there is a choice between roasted or fried, it is mine to make. And when dinner is set out for Henry, it is mine to share.

The first time I am invited to dine with Henry, I go numb with panic and can barely summon the sense to nod my head. I feel dull and plain in my boiled white apron, but Henry pretends not to notice me chasing my carrots around my plate. It rings in my head every minute that Susanne will choose tonight to end her exile, that she will come down to find me in her place, instead of in the kitchen with Lottie where I belong, and I am torn between bolting my food to hurry the meal and pushing it away untouched.

The next night is easier. I leave my apron on the bed in my little room upstairs and slip into the chair across from Henry as if I belong, as if I were not the daughter of a French Quarter seamstress. And while Susanne pecks at the dinner I’ve brought up on a tray, I pass her husband the yams and the black-eyed peas, and I learn about tobacco, about priming and suckering and topping, about flue curing and the virtues of oil versus wood. I listen not because it enthralls me, but because tobacco is who and what Henry is, and because it’s important to this place he loves with his whole heart.

When Lottie comes in to clear and sees me sitting in Susanne’s chair, she stops dead in her tracks. Her eyes shift from me to Henry and then back again. They say nothing good can come of this. She’s right, of course. How could good ever come of such a thing? Henry is fifteen years my senior, married to the woman who counts out my pay at the end of every week. But we are here now, standing on the edge of this thing that makes me want to cry and soar and sing all at once, and that is all I care for.

That night, and every night after, we share our dinner, then go into Henry’s study. There is nothing improper, only Henry and me sitting among his books while he sips a bit of bourbon and enjoys his pipe. We do not speak of Susanne or the child or of that night. Henry pretends it never happened, and I let him. Still, it is there between us,
this dead son, and all the ones who came before, etching quiet chinks into his armor, binding me to him.

I see him guarding his bruises, veering wide of the grief he will not share, but I have come to know every inch of his face, every line and crease, and I see behind those suede brown eyes the part of him that longs to spend its sadness, to empty itself and crumble, and I wonder if he knows how desperately I want to be there for him when he does.