The Secrets She Carried (21 page)

I have never mentioned the men outside the barbershop, or the way Celia Cunningham looked back at me that day. I didn’t want it on his mind while he was away at market, but he’ll need to hear it when he gets back, need to know what’s being whispered. Not that they’d ever have the guts to spout their pack of lies to Henry’s face. They wouldn’t. They’ll just keep pecking at it like seed corn, until they’ve got it scattered all over town. And nothing on this earth would delight Celia Cunningham more than to see that their talk finds its way to Susanne, even if it means having to pay a personal call.

Meanwhile, I am certain Susanne will drive me mad. From sunup to sundown I am forced to sit with her in that airless room, with its sealed windows and drawn curtains, listening to her talk of the child
she insists she will soon have, the son who will one day inherit Peak. I pray it does not happen, now or ever. For Henry’s sake and for mine.

The day Henry is scheduled to return, Susanne orders me to draw a bath, telling me to be sure to add a few drops of her favorite oil to the water. I know what she’s up to, but I can’t allow myself to think of it. I have let myself believe—
made
myself believe—that because Henry and Susanne do not share a room, they do not share a bed. It is a silly thing to believe, a girlish thing, I know, when the memory of Susanne’s swollen belly is still so vivid.

Susanne is pink and fragrant when she steps out of the bath, trailing a sickly-sweet cloud of gardenia in her wake. She makes me brush out her hair and curl it, then lay out a nightgown I have never seen her wear. Her husband is coming home, and tonight, because there is something she wants, she will play the wife.

As I slide the sheer gown over her head, I sneak a look at her wrists. The welts are still there, some scabbed over, most fresh. She is still rail thin, though she’s been eating a little, for the sake of the baby, she says, as if the thing has already been done. But there is an air of decay about her, like a house that has been vacant for a very long time, and I am amazed that she could believe herself capable of bearing a child, let alone mothering one.

It is well past dark when I hear Henry’s truck cough its way up the drive, and my heart begins to knock against my ribs. I take a deep breath and peer over Susanne’s shoulder at my reflection. I wanted to look my best for him. Instead, I look like what I am, hired help. I’m wearing the navy blue dress that was once my best, limp as a rag now, and faded with too much washing. And I’ve had no time to fix my hair. It’s a fright, escaping its pins and sticking damply to my neck. I only hope Henry is too weary to notice.

I breathe a sigh of relief when Susanne sends me away, but it is short-lived. I am to go down and tell Henry she is waiting. My throat goes dry when I hear the heavy clomp of his boots on the porch. And
then he’s through the door, dusty and stiff after the long drive back. Our fingers brush as I take his hat and smooth out the rumpled brim. Has it really been only a week that he’s been gone?

“Hello, Adele.”

The words are like a tonic, rough and sweet and deep. But before I can answer, Susanne’s voice floats down, thin and shrill with impatience. Henry’s eyes shift to the top of the stairs, and he shuffles his boots. There’s no need to give him my message. He knows what is expected of him and will do his duty. I turn away, fighting the sting behind my eyes as I hear the first step groan beneath his weight.

He is with her nearly an hour.

I am in the kitchen with Lottie when he finally comes down. That he has missed me is all over his face, but he smells like her now, the cloying scent of gardenia clinging to his clothes like a poison. It is not a betrayal. How can it be when he is not mine? But it is a bitter pill to swallow.

Even Lottie can feel the tension, though it’s clear she’s glad to have him home. At the table she fusses over him like an old hen, heaping his plate with sweet potatoes and fried chicken, hovering at his elbow to top off his tea every time he takes a sip.

“You look tired,” he says to me through a mouthful of pecan pie. “Thinner than when I left, too. Hasn’t Lottie been feeding you?”

I can’t seem to find my tongue. I’ve had a week to think of what to say. Now I choke on every bit of it. I want to tell him it’s because I had no appetite for eating alone, that I was miserable while he was gone, but I don’t. I don’t say anything. Instead, I plead a headache and go to my room. I can feel his eyes between my shoulders as I walk out of the kitchen. I know that I’ve hurt him, that I am being unfair. I have no right to feel the way I do, as if something between us has died. He is Susanne’s husband. It’s time I remember that—time I grow up.

But by the end of the week, I catch sight of Henry out in his fields,
and my resolve falters. I shouldn’t go to him, but I will. I tell Lottie I’ll bring his lunch pail today. She cuts her eyes at me but starts packing up the sandwiches, grumbling and sucking her teeth all the while.

Henry straightens and shoves back his hat when he sees me coming. His clothes are gritty and dark with sweat, his face flushed with the midday heat. I swallow the lump in my throat and pat my apron pocket to make sure the book of poems I have bought him is still there. Even now, with the weight of it against my hip, I still can’t make up my mind to give it to him. Not because I’m prideful but because I have written his name in it. Why I would do such a foolish thing I cannot say, except that I missed him terribly.

He is smiling when I reach him, a timid smile that sits uneasily on his craggy face. It fades when I hold out the lunch pail but say nothing.

“Will you wait for me here?” His fingers brush mine, warm and coarse as a cob. “Please. I won’t be long.”

I wait while he stalks to the old truck and fumbles beneath the seat. He drops something into his shirt pocket, then lifts his eyes to Susanne’s window. She isn’t there. She has been in bed all day, still feeling last night’s bourbon and this morning’s dose of tincture.

When Henry returns, the face I’ve come to know so well is unreadable, his jaw firmly set, as if he’s trying to settle an argument with himself. He takes the lunch pail from my hands and we begin to walk, moving farther and farther off, until we can barely see the house. The silence between us is cumbersome, heavy with unspoken things.

I’m startled when he halts suddenly and turns to face me. We’ve come to the base of the ridge, to the mouth of a rough clay track that winds its way up into the trees. I know the path well enough, though I’ve never taken it. The ridge belongs to Henry, his refuge from the world when disappointment and duty sit too heavily on his shoulders.

I pull in my breath as his eyes lock with mine. There is a question in their depths, an appetite that has nothing to do with the lunch I’ve
brought, and for the first time I’m afraid—of Henry, and of myself, and of the lies those men told outside the barbershop no longer being lies. And yet, Henry is all I can see. When he holds out his hand, I take it.

By the time we reach the crest, my lungs are on fire and my hair has come free from its pins. I don’t care. It’s quiet at the top, wide and dizzying and glorious, the breeze sharp with grass and fresh-churned earth. Above us, the clouds sail and shred, close enough to touch. Below, the rutted fields shimmer in the August heat, stripped as bare as the first time I saw them. It’s hard to remember now that I ever hated those fields.

We sit in the tall grass, sharing Henry’s cheese sandwich. The trees make a patchwork of the ground, sun and shade dotted with small yellow flowers. When lunch is gone, Henry stands and hurls our apple cores into the trees; then he stoops to gather a small spray of tiny blooms and presses them into my hand. He has always been a man of few words, and I see as he reaches into his shirt pocket that he is struggling for them now.

“For you,” is all he manages as he presses a small box into my hands.

Inside, in a nest of crushed black velvet, is a cameo set in delicate loops of silver, its stone the dusky blue of a storm sky. It blurs in my hand as my eyes fill with tears. I have never had anything so fine.

“It’s beautiful,” I whisper, thinking miserably of the small book of poems in my apron, a paltry gift compared with Henry’s. “I have something for you, too.” I slip the book from my pocket and put it in his hands. “It isn’t much, just some poems.”

When he turns it over to peer at the spine, his face softens. “It’s the one we talked about—
Sonnets from the Portuguese
.”

“I wrote your name in it,” I confess softly. “I shouldn’t have, I’m sorry. I missed you.”

Before I can say another word, Henry pulls me to him, his hands
caught tight in my hair. When his mouth finds mine it’s like coming home, inevitable somehow. I am lost. I forget the spray of flowers crushed between our bodies, forget Barrett Browning’s poems, forget everything but the raw joy of Henry’s mouth on mine.

There are no eyes on us here, no portrait over the fireplace, no wife upstairs. We are alone, utterly and perfectly alone beneath an aching blue sky. His eyes ask the question again, and again I say yes. It is a pledge—one neither of us is free to make. Still, we make it. We cannot go back now. Or will not.

He smells of earth and smoke as he spreads me back onto the grass, leaving a trail of fire on my skin as he works at my buttons and straps. I shiver as his hands explore, stripped bare now to the breeze and Henry’s gaze. His hands tease but take all I freely give. And then suddenly there’s nothing in the world but the two of us, flesh and breath and bone, mingling beneath that blinding blue sky, a tender undoing that binds us in a way no law or preacher ever could. From this day, for better or worse, I am Henry’s.

Later, I try to find some scrap of shame as I pull myself back into my dress. I cannot. There is only a raw, pulsing joy in me, a shiver at the memory of our bodies moistly fused. I think of Mama, of her heartbreak if she ever learns that I have echoed her mistake.

But then Henry’s eyes are on me, warm and shining. He opens the Barrett Browning and begins to read. I lay back again in the grass, eyes closed, reveling in the deep, rusty thrum of his voice as he recites each aching line. The final words are snatched away as he reads them, lost on the wind, but not lost in my heart.

He’s silent as he reaches for my small spray of flowers and closes them between the pages. For a while at least, the ridge will belong to us, and we must be content with that.

H
enry’s child will come in the spring.

The midwife from Level Grove is being lauded as a miracle worker, the bringer of life where no life seemed possible. At last, Susanne will have her precious heir, and I must learn to live with that, learn to pretend the very thought of it does not break me into a million pieces. It is November. Beyond the windows the trees stand stripped as skeletons, grim and bony, dripping with a steady autumn rain. Susanne’s room is cold, awash in watery gray light. The fire has dwindled, so I throw on some wood and take up the poker. Susanne’s eyes are on me. I have grown used to them, following with vague disdain as I go about my daily work, but today they are different, sharp and feverish, skittering after me so that I hold my breath against my spine and turn away.

My gaze slides to the window, and I silently curse the rain. There will be no lunch on the ridge today. I’m about to turn away when I catch sight of Henry leaving the barn. I cannot see his face; his head is down to ward off the rain. But I would know that lanky, loose-framed stride anywhere.

I am still clutching the poker when I hear Susanne behind me. Her eyes follow mine—to Henry. Before I realize what she’s about,
she has snatched me by the wrist and is yanking me around to face her. I look down at her fingers, clawlike as they bite into my flesh, and see the cool metal wink of her wedding band. Her breath on my face is sickly-sweet, like the reek of spoiled peaches. I feel my breakfast scorch up into my throat. For a moment the room swims.

I am dimly aware of the poker clattering to the hearth as I fight to keep my legs beneath me. The crack of her hand against my cheek is like breaking glass, tiny shards flashing and dancing behind my eyes like flakes in a snow globe. I taste blood, the tang of iron, the sting of shame. I have always known this moment would come, that one day she would peer through my backbone, straight to the truth. There are things a woman cannot hide, especially from another woman.

Her expression is one of not astonishment, but affirmation, and I see she has suspected for some time, that she has only been waiting to be sure. And now she is, though not a single word has passed between us. Even now I say nothing. It occurs to me that I should have prepared for this moment, but what is there to say? If there is something, I am too numb to think of it.

Something—I can only call it willfulness—steals over me, a little curl of anger that flares white-hot in my head, a voice that says Susanne Gavin is not worthy of my guilt, that a woman who cannot love a man like Henry deserves to lose him to someone who can. It is not true, of course, but it is what I must hold tight to at this terrible moment.