The Secrets We Keep (26 page)

Kate had spent the autumn full of an unwavering certainty that Mike would change his mind. It wasn't as though he hadn't done this before: avoided her, kept away from her, ignored her. Come back for more. And Kate knew what made him come back, so she kept out of his eye line. She watched him run but she stayed well behind. She petted Pepper outside shops but she was gone by the time he came out, newspaper under his arm, asking Pepper what on earth he was eating this time. She worked double shifts in the restaurant, a place she knew he would never come to, and she read books in front of the fire on her days off, although she probably couldn't have told you anything about them once she finished them and put them aside. She helped her mother with a work project and she answered the phone in Rufus's office for a week when his receptionist left without giving notice.

And her feelings boiled and rolled like a solstice sea. She longed for Mike. She missed him, she ached for him. She let herself cry at night, late, when the rest of the house was sleeping, but most of the time she presented a pale, serene face to the world.

And she waited.

Weeks passed, then a month. Almost another. These seven weeks had felt like a lifetime. The only thing that kept Kate's little ship of hope afloat was the fact that Mike didn't seem to have been doing much. There were no signs of him reembracing married life: no trips, no hand-in-hands through the streets of Throckton or around the shores of Butler's Pond. Mike seemed to be doing, mostly, solitary dog walking. Sometimes he was with the other policeman who had a greyhound, and Pepper scuttled along around the taller dog's legs. Once, she saw him with Elizabeth, arm in arm, but that was at Beau's Heights, and Kate thought this proof positive that she was not forgotten, that Mike, loyal, would not take his wife to the place that was so special to the two of them.

Christmas had threatened, then loomed. Kate had accepted invitations to parties and drinks from her friends who were coming home from their travels for a week or two. She had even made some halfhearted plans to join Bella for a fortnight in Morocco in the spring, but she knew that, if Mike had come back to her by then, she wouldn't be able to leave him, and if he hadn't, she wouldn't be able to leave Throckton in case he did.

Her world was transcribing a smaller and smaller orbit in the sky. She didn't mind, because her aim was to make a world smaller still. Just her and Mike.

And so came the ritual of the buying of the Christmas tree. It was the one thing that the Micklethwaites had always done together: come hell or high water, spitting rows or furious silences, on the second Saturday before Christmas, the three of them would get in the car and go to the garden center. There was an unspoken agreement between Richenda and Rufus. They both knew that a perfect Christmas was out of the question, that depending on where they were in the biorhythms of their marriage, either Richenda would be sulky and Rufus sneaky, or one or both of them would be noisily disappointed in the other for something, or both of them would be exhausted from the effort of trying to make things good. But a perfect Christmas tree was within their reach. It must be bushy and thick at the bottom, and arrow straight at the top, and the tree must be exactly seven feet tall, with the single top branch long enough to be striking but not so long as to be stringy. Richenda would ask the garden center staff to take off the netting in order that she could check the trees they had short-listed. They wouldn't like it, muttering about how busy they were, but Kate's mother would smile, and they would do it, and then Rufus and Richenda would stand with their heads together, as close as Kate ever saw them, earnest as owls, deciding. And Kate, watching, would wait for the moment when her blessing would be sought, and then the three of them would pay for the tree, arrange for delivery, and go out for lunch. It was the only time in the year when Kate could see why her parents might, once, have loved each other, seen enough in each other to attempt a life together.

This year, she'd left them to it. With her parents' marital relations frostier than the winter air this Christmas, the decision was clearly going to take some time, so Kate wandered through the rows of trees, thinking how different this year was from last. Last year she had had to be persuaded away from her books, focused as she was on doing well, doing better than well, getting away from this place and off, up, away in the world. This year, she was in possession of her four meaningless As at exams, no turtles nurtured, no foreign adventures apart from a fortnight sniveling in a shared house in Paris, and none of it mattered. All that mattered was where Mike was, what he was doing, what he was thinking. Whether he was thinking of her.

And then she'd seen them.

Mike and Elizabeth were holding hands. She had an ugly coat on, the sort that Richenda sometimes wore for bedding down the garden in the autumn, when she'd catch her daughter's look and say, “Kate, I don't care what I look like so long as I'm warm.” Mike was wearing the leather coat, the one he and Kate had sometimes lain on. In all the people and the trees, with her head down and her hood up, Kate had been able to get close enough to hear what they were saying.

Elizabeth's eyes had been bright. Kate hadn't known that the brightness was to do with the terrible feeling Elizabeth always had in places like this. Christmas trees meant Christmas, which meant children. Children at every stage. Elizabeth always felt as though she was walking through an illustration of everything that she would miss: maneuvering a buggy up and down steps and through doorways; walking around, high with tiredness, a baby squalling on your chest; holding a little mittened hand; hoisting someone onto your shoulders so they could inspect the top of a tree. Watching sons tumble and race like Labrador pups, their ears and feet too big for them. Refereeing arguments. Marshaling the overexcited, calming the tired. Trying to get an unwilling adolescent to take their earphones out for long enough to contribute to the discussion. It had been all around Elizabeth, as usual, making her feverish with disappointment, beaming with determined love for the life that she does have.

But all Kate had seen was someone confident and happy, someone that she wanted to be, or at least, someone who was in the place that she wanted to be her place.

As she watched, Elizabeth had stood on tiptoe and reached up with her hands. She had dropped Mike's hand, as though the holding of it was nothing, and she'd said, “We have this conversation every year, Mike; you always say the ceiling of the alcove is higher than it is and we always buy a tree that's too tall and then we have to hack bits of it off. So I measured it, and it's this big.”

He had laughed.

She had said, “Don't laugh. You know this morning, when you came back with Pepper and you were asking what I was doing, and I said I would tell you later? I was seeing if I could touch the ceiling, because I knew we would be having this conversation. And now here we are, having this conversation.”

As Kate had watched, Elizabeth had pouted, and Mike had caught her around the waist and kissed her, such a kiss, as though the two of them were in love. And he'd whispered something, and she'd laughed, and he'd laughed, and Kate, who had been skewered to the spot by the sound of Elizabeth's voice, had found that she could move again.

She'd come up behind them where they stood, still entwined, and bumped Elizabeth's arm as she passed.

Elizabeth had turned and Kate had been able to say, “I'm sorry, I didn't see you there” clearly and smilingly, and there'd been that second's space when she'd been able to look at Mike, her eyes flicking to him and away, just for a blink, before she had walked on, past, to the place where her parents were still wondering between trees, and it was as though she'd never stepped away from them.

What Mike had understood in that moment was simple—he'd hurt Kate, and he'd hurt her very, very badly. He'd hardly given her a second thought since the day he'd told her that things had to stop. It was as though Elizabeth whispering that she was on his side had brought him home, and if he did think about Kate, it was in the way that he thought about a trip once it was over: within three days of being back into the routine of your usual life, it feels like another world.

He had turned back to Elizabeth, who was watching a mother cradling a scrap of a baby, the baby's cry hardly making an impact on the air, and he had thought about what an easy thing it was to hurt someone, how much less simple to save them.

• • •

When the tree was decorated, Elizabeth had opened some wine, and she had said, without preamble, “I think you ought to tell me what's wrong, Mike.”

They'd been sitting opposite the tree, the room lit only by its lights. It was the right height for the alcove, for once, something that Elizabeth had delighted in pointing out when they brought it in. When Patricia had popped around to “check the arrangements for Christmas Day”—as though they would dare to spend it anywhere but with her—and commented on what a good fit it was, Elizabeth had winked, and Michael had thought that the knock he had taken from seeing Kate had gone unnoticed.

But then Elizabeth had asked her question, and oddly enough, that moment when all was right in their world was the moment when he could have told her everything. Kate's pale eyes, the way she was there every time he turned around, until she seemed like a part of his life, the taste of mints and the smell of lip gloss, the way he thought it wouldn't, couldn't last, but it kept on lasting. (Sometimes he tells himself that, in the scheme of things, four months from Throckton Fair to the definite end was nothing compared to more than a decade with Elizabeth.) How every time, he had thought it would be the last, had understood that it was all wrong, but then she would be there again, and somehow disappointing her would have been worse than walking away, because she was there to be disappointed while Elizabeth didn't know. The curious addictiveness of secrets, for him who had never had any. That had been the moment when he could have told her everything; that had been the moment when she could have forgiven him, or started to, and the constant nagging thought that Kate might turn up at his door with one of those stupid pictures that she took would have been gone for good.

He had almost told her.

Then Elizabeth had said, “This all started just after the fire. Whatever it is, it started after the fire.”

Michael had thought of the fire, a series of memories making a storyboard. First, the initial catch of the smoke in his face, the hot choking, the solidity of the heat he was pushing through. Then the terror on the mother's face when he found her, guided to her, it seemed, by the force of her need. The sight of the baby, who seemed already to have life threading out of him, wisping away. Pushing them through the smoke and out, back into the day, safe. The cold air as shocking as the hot had been not two minutes before. The paramedics, quick and professional until the baby cried, when their spines relaxed with relief and, just for a moment, they sought another eye to say, wordlessly, “I thought we were on a loser there.”

Elizabeth's face at the hospital, horrified and pale. Kate's face at the summer fete, sun in her hair, another sort of pale.

He had said, “Yes, it started after the fire.”

“Why did you do it?” she had asked. “I know I asked you at the time and I know you said you didn't know. But now…” And she had looked at him, as if to say,
Now
you
can
talk, now I can listen. Now the shock is over and the world is coming back to being the way it should be. Now we can make some sense.

He had sighed, blowing the last of the moment to talk about Kate out of him. “It was the thought of that baby,” he had said, his words slow as they stretched to make themselves fit the things that there were no words for. “It was the thought of that baby. I thought about you saying how getting pregnant was only the first thing, then you had to keep the baby safe and help it grow and anything could happen to it, any time.” Without looking at her, he had known that she was crying, although she wasn't making a sound.

“I see,” she had said, and he had felt as though there could be an end of it, just as, a few moments ago, there had been a moment for Kate.

But he had kept talking, finding truth as the words came out, as though saying them was the only way to discover what he meant. “I couldn't bear the thought of that. I thought, what if those people were like us? What if it took them five years to have a baby? And now the baby is dying. I couldn't stand there.”

Elizabeth nods. “I can understand that.”

“And then, afterward, everyone was angry, and I could see why, but I felt—I felt disconnected from it. From all of you.”

“Did you ever think that you might die? Because that was what I thought.” She had said this before, at the time, but then it had been an accusation, and Michael had had to defend himself against it. As a statement of fact now, it was different, harder to hear.

“I don't think so,” he had said, wishing for more words, better words. “I was just…lost. In the moment. Not thinking about anything. And that's a strange feeling. Hard to shake.” He corrects himself, striving for some sort of accuracy. “It's been hard for me to shake, I think.” Now Kate seems like a part of his recovery, the thing that's brought him back to his wife.

Elizabeth had nodded, and her body, taut as a rower's in the last strokes of a race, had relaxed and sunk toward his. “Have you shaken it now?”

“Yes,” Michael had said, pulling her to him with arms full of everything he couldn't find words for. “I have.” And he had been almost completely certain that it was true.

Elizabeth is neither awake nor asleep. She's lying in a clean white bed in a clean white room and, tempted as she is to think of herself as dead, she's fairly sure that heaven would smell better than disinfectant, and hell worse. Also, her head is banging, and she can feel the stiffness in her hand where she thinks a drip must be. Her stomach aches. She thinks someone might be sitting next to her. Keeping her eyes closed, she feels around her memory for clues, gently, so as not to make the headache roar. She finds: sleeping pills, whiskey, birthday; Mike, Kate, baby. She feels like a fool. She feels like a failure.