Secret Lives Page 8

  From her adult perspective she knew Kyle had been absolutely right. But she had been getting attention from her peers for the first time in her life. She'd experienced a confidence on stage she'd felt nowhere else. She could pull a role over her head like an article of clothing. But the drama crowd had been wild and she'd been ripe for the attention of the boys. Their long hair and earrings intrigued her. They plied her with their grass and poetry, those unrhyming verses that always had a sexual overtone to them, so that when they stopped reading and started touching her it seemed to be the natural progression of things. She learned to slip into a role, into someone else's skin, and do things the real Eden might not want to do. She convinced herself that seventeen was a magical age. No one could hurt her anymore, and her life suddenly filled with excitement, with a joy she'd thought she would never know. She couldn't understand back then how Kyle could ask her to give that up.

  And now she felt something of that old teenage rebel in her at his words about Ben. Ben was not trying to use her. That was the most important thing. He was troubled, yes, she could see that. But someone could give him the same warning about her, couldn't they?

  “Are you ready for the next notebook?” Kyle asked.

  “I guess,” she said. Last night's notebook had left her so drained she wouldn't have minded if Kyle slowed down a bit in dealing them out to her. She looked around the living room and added quietly, “This is the room where your mother killed herself.”

  He nodded.

  “Finding her must have been terrible for you, Kyle.” The words slipped out easily, but even so she knew it was the first empathic thing she had ever said to him.

  “She was sitting in a rocking chair right where you're sitting now,” Kyle said. “My father burned the rocker. It was caked with blood. There was blood on the ceiling and the floor and pieces of her head back there.” He pointed toward the wall behind her. “Nothing I saw later in the war compared to what I saw in this room that night.”

  She looked up at the ceiling. It was painted a clean white, crossed with huge oak beams.

  “She left you and Katherine to raise each other.”

  “We'd already been doing that for years.”

  “Katherine seemed a little sexually precocious for fourteen.” She shifted uncomfortably in the Barcelona chair. She'd meant to change the topic but hadn't expected those exact words to come out of her mouth.

  “Did she? Seems to me the only thing any of us had on our minds in those days was sex.”

  “Was she really that nasty to other kids?”

  “Worse.” Kyle laughed. “She makes herself look like a saint in her journal. But she was nasty in self-defense. The other kids weren't very nice to her either.”

  “You were all she had. Didn't you resent her dependency on you?”

  He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “I was dependent on her too. It doesn't come across in the journal—maybe Kate never realized it. I talked a good line about wanting her to be with other people, but later on, when she became friends with Matt, I was pretty jealous.”

  “The journal's not as easy to read as I thought it would be,” Eden said. “It's harder to stay objective than I expected. Katherine's become so real to me.”

  He nodded as though he'd fully expected that to happen.

  “What will this be like for you, Kyle? I mean, the film. Seeing yourself—the actor who plays you—finding your mother after her suicide, coping with all you had to cope with. Can you stand it?”

  “It was a long, long time ago, Eden. All I ask is that you present the past honestly, that you don't exploit it.”

  “When I finish the first draft of the script I'd like you to read it,” she said, surprising herself again. “I want to be sure you're okay with it.”

  “I'd like that,” he said.

  Eden squeezed the mug hard between her palms. “Kyle, I understand why you've waited so long to tell me about the journal. I know I'm reading your story as well as Katherine's. I just want you to know I appreciate it.”

  He nodded slowly, a thoughtful smile on his lips. Then he stood up and walked to the door. “I'm glad you're here, Eden,” he said. “It's time.”

  She called Cassie from the phone in the kitchen before leaving for the site.

  “I'm brown as a strawberry, Mommy,” Cassie said. Eden heard Pam's laughter in the background. “Just a plain berry, Cass,” Pam said. “Brown as a berry.

  “Oh. I'm brown as a berry, Mom.”

  “Don't get burned, honey.” She pictured Pam standing next to Cassie, pretending to be engrossed in some chore as she listened in on this conversation. “Does Daddy have some sunscreen for you?”

  “Pam does. We have a raft for everybody! Mine's blue.”

  “Your favorite color.”

  “Yes, and you know what?”

  “What?”

  “That's April's favorite color too!”

  “I miss you, Cass.”

  “And you know what else? Tomorrow we're going to Hershey Park!”

  “That's wonderful, Cassie.” She struggled to get some enthusiasm into her own voice, which sounded depressingly flat to her ears. “I'll call you tomorrow night to hear all about it."

  “Okay.”

  “I love you, honey.”

  “I love you too, Mommy.” Eden listened as Cassie planted a dozen messy kisses on the mouthpiece. Then she heard Pam's voice in the background.

  “Oh Cassie, that's disgusting. Other people have to use that phone too, you know.”

  Eden heard the click of the phone being hung up. She listened to the silence for a few seconds before hanging up herself. Then she climbed the stairs to her room and made it all the way to the wicker rocking chair before the tears started.

  –9–

  Ben woke up the same way he'd fallen asleep: angry with himself. His shirt was still beneath his head on the pillow, but it had lost Eden's scent overnight. Time to step out of fanta-syland and back to the real world.

  The phone rang and he raised himself up on one elbow to answer it. “Hello?”

  “Ben? This is Alex.”

  For a moment he said nothing. He'd called Alex Parrish twice since he'd gotten out of prison, and the last time Alex had asked him not to call again. “I'm surprised to hear from you,” he said.

  “This is business, Ben. Do you remember Tina James?”

  “Sure.” Tina had been one of his most promising students.

  “She's applying for a position with Stanford and wanted me to ask you if you'd write her a reference letter.”

  So that was it. Poor old Alex had no goddamned choice but to call him. “I think a letter from me will do her more harm than good, don't you?”

  “I talked to her about it. Her thinking is that no matter what you did in your personal life you still have a name in the field and—”

  “Yeah, I'll do it.” He picked up the pen and a pad of paper from the apple crate. “Give me her address and I'll mail her a copy."

  “Well, she said maybe you could just mail it to me and I'll send it on to her.”

  Ben sighed. She wanted a reference from him but didn't trust him with her address. “Whatever,” he said. “So, are you teaching this summer?”

  There was hesitation on the other end of the line as Alex debated whether or not to prolong this conversation. “Yes. Just one class.”

  “How's Leslie?”

  “Fine.”

  “And my goddaughter?” Ordinarily he would refer to Alex's eight-year-old daughter as Kim, but he wanted to remind him of just how close they'd once been.

  “She's okay.”

  “Her birthday's in a couple of weeks.”

  “God, you have an incredible memory. I'd forgotten myself.”

  “Alex…I wish you'd see me.”

  “We've been over that.”

  “You've only heard things from Sharon's perspective. Give me a chance to talk to you.”

  “I can't, Ben.”

  “Co
uld you at least talk to Sam? Let him tell you…”

  “I've spoken to Sam. I know he thinks you're innocent, but frankly I don't know what he's basing that on other than brotherly love.”

  “You've got some legal background. You might be able to help him figure out a way to—”

  “Forget it.”

  “How long have we been friends, Alex? I really think you owe it to me.”

  “I don't owe you anything.” Alex's voice had a nasty edge to it. “I'll tell Tina you'll get that letter out within a week or so?”

  Ben clenched his teeth. “Right,” he said, and he hung up the phone.

  “Good morning.”

  Ben looked up from the pit to see Eden shading her eyes against the morning sun. He was relieved to see her. He stood up. “I was afraid you might not come back after last night,” he said.

  She climbed down the ladder into the pit. “I wanted to see what else I could find.”

  She's been bitten, he thought. Like her mother. Like himself.

  “Plus I have the feeling Kyle can use all the help he can get before the grant's up.”

  “Yeah, you're right. He had a couple of graduate students, but they left about the time I came.” Actually, the two women had left the day after his arrival. Kyle made up some excuse for their abrupt departure, but Ben knew that he was the cause of their flight.

  Eden lifted the plastic from the square of earth she'd been working on the day before and picked up her brush.

  “Eden,” he said.

  She raised her eyes to him.

  “I want to apologize for last night. It's been so long since I've been out with anyone. I was nervous. Sorry.”

  “It's all right,” she said. She wasn't saying, It's all right, we can try again. She was dismissing him. I’ll forgive you, but you blew your chance.

  He sat down on the ground at the other side of the pit and began working. The silence was intolerable to him. He could feel her behind him, content to work quietly. Maybe Kyle had told her last night. Maybe she'd gone home and said to Kyle, “That guy's really screwed up,” and Kyle nodded and said, “Yeah, well, he spent six months in prison, you know.”

  “I'm finding some little clumps of stuff,” she said suddenly, and he turned around to see her examining the soil in her hand. “But I swear they're just dirt.”

  He moved next to her, and she set the little brown lumps on his palm.

  “They're pottery all right. Probably pieces of that bowl you found yesterday.”

  They worked together quietly for the next hour, dusting the ground in front of her, charting her finds on the graph paper. It was close to eleven when he stood up to stretch.

  “Want some o.j.?” he asked.

  She looked up at him. Her lips were dusty and beautiful. “That'd be great.”

  He got two bottles of juice from the cooler in his truck and returned to the pit. She sat with her back braced by the corner of the pit, twisted off the cap and took a long drink. She no longer looked the Hollywood actress. Brown dust coated her calves and traced the line between her temple and jaw.

  He lowered himself into the opposite corner and took a swallow of juice. “So, what's your mom up to these days in her journal?” he asked.

  Eden stared at the toes of her tennis shoe as she spoke. “Well, her mother committed suicide, the Japanese invaded Pearl Harbor, and she learned to make love to herself.”

  Ben smiled at her candor. Kyle must not have told her after all. “I guess when the world's crumbling around you the only way to survive is to comfort yourself,” he said.

  She looked up at him. “I hadn't thought of it quite that way.” She pulled a pad and pencil from her shorts pocket and wrote something down.

  “I didn't know Kyle's mother killed herself.”

  “She was crazy.” Eden fingered the crumbs of pottery lying next to her on the newspaper. “She did crazy things. She hallucinated. She beat my mother and Kyle. She shot herself in the head. Kyle found her. He was only about fifteen.”

  “Jesus. That must have been horrendous. Did you know before you read the journal that she was crazy?”

  Eden nodded. “I got teased a lot for being the daughter of a woman who lived in a cave and the granddaughter of a lunatic. The kids at school used to jump rope to this song.” She shut her eyes and began to recite.

  “Old Lady Swift was crazy as a loon,

  Washed her clothes from night till noon,

  Ate bugs for breakfast and bats at night,

  And blew her head off when the time was right.”

  Eden opened her eyes and looked at him. “No one cared that my mother had published twenty-six books. I learned to talk about my father even though I'd never known him, because he was respectable. He started the Coolbrook Chronicle.”

  “I didn't know that.” He was completely certain now that Kyle hadn't told her. She would never speak this openly to him if she knew.

  “But anyway, I learned that my grandmother was not actually my grandmother after all. Katherine and Kyle were cousins. Kyle's parents adopted her after her own mother killed herself.”

  “A lot of early deaths in your family. A lot of suicide.”

  “They say it runs in families.”

  “Have you ever felt that way?” he asked.

  “Like killing myself? No. You?”

  “The thought ran through my mind after my marriage broke up.”

  She set her juice down on the ground between her feet. “What ended it, Ben? Or is that too personal?”

  “Sharon ended it because…” He hesitated a long moment. He could think of no lie he was willing to tell her. Omission was one thing, lying another.

  “It is too personal.” She let him off the hook. “Sorry I asked. Kyle told me you used to teach. That you're well known as an archaeologist. Why are you here in a failing site?”

  “Kyle didn't tell you?”

  “He just said your divorce was traumatic.”

  Ben nodded. “It was bad. And I…couldn't keep up with my job, really.” Well, okay. So there it was. The lie. Not bold-faced, exactly, but now she probably assumed he'd had a nervous breakdown. Still, that was preferable to the truth: “Kyle heard about my problem and rescued me.”

  She smiled. “That's his hobby, rescuing people. He rescued me a couple of times too. Will you be ready to go back to teaching when the grant's up here?”

  He looked at the streak of dirt across her cheek, at the strand of blond hair that had fallen free to rest against her throat, and wished he could be as open with her as she was being with him. “It's a little more complicated than that,” he said.

  Eden stared at the blank screen of her word processor, trying to concentrate on her mother but able to think only of Ben. The morning with him had been thoroughly comfortable. She'd worn no mask and she'd survived. She hadn't meant to spill quite so much to him, but he'd treated her words with interest and respect.

  His sadness touched her. He's harmless, Kyle. He'd sat there in that pit with the body of a football player and the aching vulnerability of a little boy. God, he was attractive. He lacked Michael's polish, and perhaps that was what pleased her. Nothing stirred inside her when she was with Michael. The fact that he'd been voted People magazine's sexiest man of the year had no impact at all on her body. He thought she was exercising herculean willpower when she refused to sleep with him, but the truth was, she found him extremely easy to resist.

  Could she resist Ben? Would he ever give her the opportunity? She liked the feel of his gray eyes on her as he drank his juice in the pit this morning. The cut of his jaw, the dark hair on his chest where it curled ever so slightly above the neck of his green T-shirt, the splay of his dusty fingers as he swept them across the earth…She had no desire to play a role with him, and that scared and excited her at the same time. If he ever touched her again she wanted it to be Eden Riley the woman, not the actress, he touched.

  But he hadn't come near her today. She'd felt her body longing for it, j
ust for his fingers on her knee. She smiled at the thought of her mother, whose breasts ached when she passed the boys at school. Katherine was so real to her now, so very human. She switched on the word processor and began to write.

  –10–

  September 9, 1942

  Kyle begun courting Sara Jane this summer. He goes to her house about two evenings a week, and on those evenings I write and write and write to keep from thinking. Sara Jane is my enemy and I don't understand why Kyle likes her so much. At first he asked my advice about what to say to her and how to ask her out. He'd say, “What would you think if a boy said 'Would you like to go to a movie with me?' or 'Can I come to your house this evening?' ”

  I was amazed he trusted my opinion to be like other girls', and I tried to answer like other girls might, saying “I'd be pleased to have your company,” etc, not at all sure what words Sara Jane would use. I realize how little I know about these things.

  He dresses pretty to go out with her and stops by the cavern to ask “How do I look?” and I tell him how handsome he is and how thrilled Sara Jane will be by the very sight of him and I can see the excitement in his eyes. I asked him the other night if he's kissed Sara Jane yet.

  “Sara Jane loves to kiss,” he said and I was sorry I asked. I believe Sara Jane is trying to be nicer to me. She offers me sweets and tries to talk to me before school, but I ignore her. She thinks if she is nice to me, Kyle will like her even more.

  The other girls are jealous of her. She and Kyle hold hands or tip their heads together to share a secret. Kyle is no longer off with the boys at recess and lunch but now is with Sara Jane. They sit on the bench close together and talk. The girls make their circle without Sara Jane, but their eyes are always in the direction of the bench and I wish I could hear what they say. I sit on the stoop, reading as always and watching. I'm beginning another school year the way I ended the last one, reading, writing, and watching the world go by. Only this year is worse in a way because I feel real nervous in school, like I'm going to pass out or get sick. I can't wait for that bell to ring at the end of the day.