The Art of Keeping Secrets Read online

  Until his death, she had counted those weeks among the worst of her life. Sitting now in her car, on the way to Newboro, she saw those days clearly and vividly, as though they were a video playing on the windshield. That September, the start of classes corresponded with a recurring nausea and a dull ache she attributed not only to the loss of their relationship, but to the loss of her dreams for the future.

  She carried this grief the way other people bore illness: in her bones, her marrow, her very heartbeats reminding her of a changed life. Not once did she feel the thrill of new possibilities that her friends were telling her about. Belle, they’d say, you can start a whole new life now, dream bigger and newer. You’ve been dating him since ninth grade, for God’s sake. Spread your wings. Meet someone new. Go out. Get drunk, have fun, make new friends.

  She couldn’t do what her friends suggested. She trudged to classes. Before each day, she threw up in the small bathroom in the house she rented with Mae and two other girls who long since had faded from her memory—girls who partied all night, thought her preoccupation with a high school boyfriend absurd.

  The nausea continued, and she visited the college chaplain, believing she needed some type of counseling. The chaplain was kind, bald and looked like Thomas Merton, whom she had studied in her freshman year religion class. He spoke in soft tones, warm words of encouragement about broken hearts and life lessons, about not understanding the meaning of events until one had time to step back from them.

  Many words were said, an hour’s worth, but all Annabelle took home with her were two sentences: “Just because we don’t know why things happen doesn’t mean there aren’t reasons.” This phrase she’d echoed many times in her life to friends and family, so much so that they often repeated it back to her. The second line was “And you need to make sure there’s not a medical reason why you’re throwing up every morning.”

  Not once had she considered that possibility—that the nausea was caused by more than heartbreak.

  On the way home from the chaplain’s office, she stopped by the medical clinic and discovered that her white blood cell count, her red blood cell count and all other counts were normal. They wanted to try a pregnancy test.

  She’d laughed. Actually laughed. How could she be pregnant by someone she wasn’t with anymore? Until she counted backward and realized she’d missed a cycle.

  She knew before they told her, before the nurse came into the examining room with the pinched mouth, the pamphlets on pregnancy options and the lecture on birth control. In a daze Annabelle stuffed the pamphlets into her backpack.

  Pregnant.

  With child.

  Knox’s baby.

  Each thought shot hope through her—he would return to her now. Then immediately came the dread, the emptiness she’d felt for weeks now. Maybe he wouldn’t return; maybe this news wouldn’t bring him back.

  The thoughts bounced through her as she signed out of the clinic, drove from Charleston to Marsh Cove without stopping by her rental house. During that hour she was lost to her senses and her emotions, which warred inside her mind and soul. This kind of thing only happened to those girls—not to her.

  So many dreams ruined—so many hopes undone by this simple fact: she was pregnant with her ex-boyfriend’s child. A nightmare from which she was not going to wake up, in which all her options were bad ones.

  Twenty years old, a senior in college and pregnant.

  She rolled down the windows of her beat-up Camaro and let the ocean air wash over her face. It was hurricane season, and rain from a tropical storm was forecast for the next two days.

  Annabelle formulated a short-term plan: have her mother call the college and tell them she was deathly sick, tell her parents she’d come home with something akin to the bubonic plague and spend the next days in bed, sleeping and deciding what to do with her life, what to do with her and her baby’s life.

  The thought made nausea rise as she drove over the river. She watched the water rush toward the sea and she wished, for only the slightest second, that she could follow it far away.

  When she pulled into town, she drove past Knox’s family’s home first, parked and stared at the long, rutted driveway, which led to the farmhouse and then farther back to the barn and stables. Live oaks lined the drive; a wrought-iron fence with a scrolled “M” was shut tight. She got out and walked to the gate, fingered the ironwork. She wanted to push the code to open the gate, run to Mrs. Murphy and tell her everything, beg her to go find her son and bring him back.

  The smallest voice inside told her to go home. Whether it was ingrained etiquette, fear of what she’d discover about where Knox was and had been or just complete fatigue, she wasn’t sure. She climbed back in her car and drove home through the familiar streets of Marsh Cove.

  In college everyone had told her that there was more to life than these streets and lanes, more than these tidal creeks and wide rivers, more than this one small town. Of course she understood that—she just didn’t care to go there. She loved learning about other places, reading about them, even visiting them. Her mild obsession with archaeology was an enigma to those who knew she never intended to leave this town, yet she hungered for information about other places and what they revealed beneath their layers of silt and rock.

  As she neared Palmetto Street, an extended honk jerked her from her thoughts. She’d driven straight through a stop sign at Route 23 and barely missed being plowed down by a chicken truck. The truck swerved; chicken feathers flew from the caged coops and the driver shot her an obscene gesture, yanked the vehicle to a halt at the side of the road. Trembling, she pulled her car over.

  Annabelle grimaced, mouthed, I’m sorry. The truck driver shouted expletives and pulled back into traffic. Annabelle sat frozen, afraid to take the steering wheel, to drive. To make a single move right then seemed impossible. The chicken cages jostled back and forth as the truck turned a corner. She felt a pang—as if from seeing a dead deer on the side of the road—and she wasn’t sure whom the sorrow was for: the caged chickens or her frightened self.

  Her feelings were so misplaced and disquieted she couldn’t decide where to let them rest. She drove toward the only solace she could think of: home. Her brother, ten years older than she was, had moved to Texas years ago to run a software company. Her dad would be at work, and Annabelle would have her mother to herself.

  She pulled into the driveway, parked her car and came through the back door into the kitchen. Grace Clark sat at the kitchen table, dividing mail into piles. “Oh, Belle, darling, what a nice surprise.” She dropped the mail and went to Annabelle’s side, hugged her.

  “Hi, Mom.” Annabelle bit back tears. She wasn’t ready to tell her mother her news yet.

  “Are you okay? Aren’t you supposed to be in class? What’s wrong?” She put her hand on Annabelle’s forehead.

  “I don’t feel well at all. I think I’m getting sick.” Really sick.

  “Is it Knox?”

  “No,” Annabelle said. “I just don’t feel well. I went to the nurse. . . .”

  “Okay, baby. Go on upstairs. Get in bed. I’ll make you some soup while you sleep.”

  Annabelle dropped her head onto her mother’s shoulder. “Oh, Mom.”

  The fact did not escape her that soon she would be a mom also—that the name she was calling out was the name she herself would soon be called. A single mom. Alone.

  Her mother smoothed the hair from her face. “You look terrible. Have you lost weight?”

  “A little. I’ve been sick to my stomach.”

  “Okay, get to bed. Where are your bags?”

  Annabelle shrugged. “I didn’t bring any. . . . I came home straight from the medical clinic.”

  The bed beckoned with sweet denial and Annabelle burrowed under the covers, into the pillow, and found solace in pretending none of this was happening. In this pale purple bedroom with the Eagles and Bon Jovi posters and the cheerleading trophies, with the bulletin board full of old notes, a dri
ed corsage and tiara from homecoming court (she hadn’t been the queen, only in the court; Mae had been the queen), she could be fifteen years old and in love, believing in her own Southern belle status, in her own goodness and her love for Knox Murphy.

  Some people dreamed of the future and what it held for them, and at one time, she had also. Now she dreamed of the past, of what she could have done then to change today.

  Sleep finally visited Annabelle, and she drifted off into disjointed dreams of missed classes, car wrecks with trucks and being lost in a maze of familiar marshes and creeks. She awoke to her mother standing over her bed with a tray of soup and toast—a balm for all evils, according to family lore.

  Annabelle sat up in bed, rested her back against the headboard. “Thank you.” Dreamscapes washed over her, and in the split moment between her mother lifting her hand and reaching to touch Annabelle’s cheek, she made a decision to speak.

  “I’m pregnant.” There were better ways to have said this. She could have prepared a speech, written a letter, asked her brother to tell her parents. She could have said it any other way but this abrupt announcement that would surely shatter her mother’s heart.

  But there they were: the words bold and shimmering in the room, across her mother’s stricken face. And just like the night when she’d made love with Knox, she couldn’t take it back.

  “Did you have a bad dream?” her mother asked, and Annabelle knew her mother fervently wished she’d only imagined her condition.

  Annabelle shook her head and waited for the tirade that would surely follow. Maybe it was why she had told her mother in the first place—she needed to be punished.

  Her mother hugged her. “Oh, Annabelle.”

  “I’m sorry, Mother. I am so sorry,” Annabelle whispered on choked tears.

  “Knox?” her mother asked.

  “Of course,” Annabelle said, closed her eyes.

  Her mother stroked her head. “Have you told him?”

  “No, I just found out . . . and came home.”

  “Try to sleep now. We have a lot to talk about and decide. I’ll tell your father when I find the right moment. For now . . . sleep.”

  For the next two days, her mother offered comfort in measured doses until her father came home early and haggard from a business trip, stating that Hurricane Hugo was headed toward coastal South Carolina and they needed to evacuate immediately.

  Evacuate.

  Annabelle glanced around her room, at all her belongings, and wondered what to pack. She climbed from bed at her father’s prodding, grabbed her suitcase from the back of the closet.

  Her room smelled of chicken noodle soup, chamomile tea and lavender—all scents from childhood. In those distressed days of her life, she didn’t want to leave her room. Something unalterable was about to occur: she felt it in every part of her body, and wanted to crawl back under the covers. Leaving this room meant a million things, including facing her pregnancy and possible damage to her home, but she felt that her emotions were distilled into one: fear.

  Annabelle’s hands shook as she lifted the suitcase onto her bed, from the nausea, fear of telling her father the truth about her illness and dread of the incoming hurricane. She’d been through this before: hurricane warnings, evacuation, deciding what was really worth keeping. The last time had been two years before, and all that had come was rain and wind knocking down her childhood tree house.

  This time there was more at stake than a tree house full of tea-party paraphernalia. How was she to face possible disaster without Knox? Loneliness spread through her like warm water, left her weak with regret and loss.

  “Shit,” she said, trying out a word she rarely used. She threw a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt into the suitcase. Then she looked around her room for what she would really miss, what would cause her grief if Mother Nature took it on wind and rain.

  She crawled under her bed, grabbed the large box full of Knox’s letters, notes and photos. Losing this, above all other losses, would fill her with anguish, and she placed the box into the suitcase along with a few more clothes, her journal and the small oil painting on her dresser, done by Shawn in fifth grade.

  Father poked his head in the room. “You ready, pumpkin?”

  She nodded.

  “Only one suitcase, right?”

  “Only one, Dad. See?” She pointed at it. “Do you really think this . . . one will hit?” she asked, already knowing the answer from his pinched mouth and unshaven cheeks.

  “Yes, I do. Let’s just pray it doesn’t hit us too hard. But it’s bearing down on South Carolina like a locomotive gaining speed.” He nodded toward the door. “I’m sorry you don’t feel well, but we have to go now.”

  “Where are we gonna stay?” Annabelle slammed her suitcase shut, locked the latch.

  “We’ll head toward Atlanta and stay with your aunt Barbara.”

  Annabelle nodded, which made her dizzy and nauseous. “Can I make one quick phone call before we leave?”

  He nodded. “Hurry.” He grabbed the suitcase and left the room.

  Annabelle dialed Knox’s phone number, not knowing what she would say, but needing this one touch point before she could walk from her room and face whatever came next.

  Mrs. Murphy, breathless, answered the phone. “Hello.”

  “Hi, Mrs. Murphy, it’s Belle.”

  “Oh, hello, dear. Please tell me you know where Knox is.”

  Annabelle’s stomach plummeted. “I have no idea. That’s why I was calling. I wanted to talk to him before we . . . evacuate today.”

  “Oh, dear. Oh, dear. That’s why we’re trying to find him. We’re leaving within the hour or we’ll be stuck here, and I haven’t heard from him in a couple days. He said he was going to stay with Cooper, but Cooper hasn’t seen him.”

  Annabelle dropped to her bed as her knees gave way. “Okay.” What else was there to say?

  “If you hear from him, will you please tell him we are crazy trying to find him and that we’ll be in Columbia staying at his grandfather’s house?”

  “Yes, and if you find him, please tell him I’m looking for him also. I’ll be at my aunt Barbara’s in Atlanta.”

  “Okay . . . okay.” Mrs. Murphy hung up without saying goodbye, which she had never done since Annabelle had known her. So much was changing. The world seemed to be turning into a place she didn’t recognize.

  She stood at her doorway, stared at the bulletin board, the pink bedspread, the pale purple walls—all paraphernalia from her childhood. She swallowed her grief as one does a bitter pill, and she understood, as she had not before, that when she returned to this place neither her soul nor her room would retain anything of their childish airs.

  The hurricane hit with an angry force, as though it had a vendetta against the South, against the history and beauty of coastal South Carolina, testing her fortitude and alliances as the Civil War had decades before. And, as always, her people rose to the challenge with determination and courage. It was the Southern way.

  Entire houses were washed into the streets of Sullivan’s Island, neighborhoods destroyed on Isle of Palms. Charleston was left battered and bruised. Annabelle watched the devastation from the static-filled TV screen in Aunt Barbara’s apartment in midtown Atlanta as the wind and rain whipped through the land she loved. They all sat transfixed as they waited for at least one shot of Marsh Cove, their home or neighborhood. But even the familiar names and streets were unrecognizable in the chaotic aftermath.

  They weren’t able to go back for at least a week; the authorities prevented everyone from Awendaw to Charleston from returning to their homes. Annabelle felt as though she floated, so dislocated from time and place that she couldn’t find her bearings. She’d heard of pilots who spun out of control when they lost all sense of up or down. This was how she pictured herself, spinning, spinning, unable to find the horizon to right herself.

  In those gyrating days she almost forgot about the baby, about Knox, her mind never reaching for a
solid thought. Until Aunt Barbara took her into the back bedroom.

  “Honey, is there something you need to tell me?”

  “What do you mean?” Annabelle sat on the edge of the guest bed, fingered the fringe on the quilt.

  “You’re different, dear. And I know why. I’ve been there, remember?”

  “You mean when Uncle Mark left you?”

  “No, when I was pregnant.”

  Annabelle closed her eyes. There was no way she was showing—no way Aunt Barbara could know unless her mother had told her.

  “I hate her,” Annabelle mumbled under her breath, and then opened her eyes. “I hate her for telling you.”

  “No one told me anything.” Aunt Barbara took her hand, held it. “There are some things women know. Fortunately your dad wouldn’t notice if you came out wearing my old maternity clothes.” She smiled, touched Annabelle’s cheek.

  “For a few minutes, I forgot about it.” Annabelle shrugged. “For just a few minutes.”

  “Tell me everything.”

  “There’s not much to tell. I’m pregnant with Knox’s baby, and he hasn’t called or talked to me in six weeks. And I can’t find him and neither can his parents.”

  Aunt Barbara pulled Annabelle to her. “He doesn’t know?”

  “No. Only Mother and the pinched-mouth nurse at the medical clinic. I truly don’t know what to do. Mother hasn’t mentioned it since I told her, and I figure she’s ignoring it or she didn’t hear me. All she’s done is cook for me and let me sleep.”

  “Sometimes that’s all a mother can do, Belle.”

  “But so many . . . decisions.”

  “Well, dear, go ahead and list them.”

  “The first, above all else, is tell Knox or not tell Knox. Like option A or B in a multiple choice test, and I want to pick C.”

  Aunt Barbara stroked Annabelle’s hair. “I won’t ever tell you what to do.”