Laura Lippman - Every Secret Thing

“So you in trouble?” Clarice asked, her voice casual, as if the answer didn’t matter.

“Maybe,” Ronnie said. Then: “Yeah, I guess I am. But I didn’t do anything. Honest.”

Clarice shook her head. She was a black woman living in Baltimore. She knew a lot of people who were in trouble and hadn’t done anything. She also knew people who were in trouble and had done something, but maybe not the something for which they were in trouble. And she knew people who were in trouble and had done the very thing of which they were accused, but still had good reason to lie about it. They said confession was good for the soul, and perhaps it was. But it was hell on the body. She had boys in her family, nephews and cousins, who had come out of lockup with lumps and bruises, still halfheartedly denying the charges hanging on them.

Ronnie-well, Ronnie didn’t have a mark on her, unless you counted her eyes. Dark, dark blue, they reminded Clarice of pansies, but not the fresh ones you saw in window boxes, holding their heads up to the sun. Ronnie’s eyes looked like flowers after a heavy rain, their little faces pounded flat into the earth.

Cynthia Barnes was no longer interested in food, but she insisted on preparing elaborate dinners for Warren even in the heat of summer. Tonight, it was grilled tuna with a mango-papaya relish and cold tomato-corn soup, served with jalapeño corn muffins. The muffins had been baked in an old pan of her mother’s so they came out looking like miniature ears of corn. It was all delicious, all perfect, but the only part of the meal that interested Cynthia was the pinot noir that Warren selected to accompany it.

“This is wonderful,” he said, brave and polite. Warren had never outgrown his plebeian palate. He would eat sausage and ham and meatloaf every night, if he could. He would also weigh three hundred pounds and have hypertension and diabetes. But as Cynthia had told him when Rosalind was born, “I’m not planning on raising this child alone. You can choose your vice, but you get only one-workaholism, gluttony, drink. For I am definitely not raising a child alone.”

He had not said then what he never said. And perhaps he never thought it, either, but Cynthia did. If she were Warren, she would think it every day. If only you had raised our first baby instead of leaving the job to some dumb girl .

She had yearned for this reproach for seven years, only the blow never landed. Yet she could not bring herself to ask the direct questions that would force him to say what he thought of her.

Sometimes she felt it was these unsaid things, not the loss of Olivia, that weighed them down. Other times she wondered if they had made a silent pact to sacrifice their marriage as a tribute to Olivia. It would be wrong, wouldn’t it, for them to be happy again? Sometimes, with Rosalind, she had an unguarded moment of happiness and it terrified her. To be happy was to forget. To forget was to risk it all again.

“Did you know,” she asked her husband, “that tuna costs as much as steak?”

“Get out.”

“More, sometimes. As much as a good cut of New York strip, per pound. Of course, there’s no bone, no fat.”

“That’s true.”

She wondered if he slept around. She might, if their roles were reversed. He was, if anything, more handsome than when they met and so much more accomplished. Her parents had been critical of them in their early years together, chastising them for their luxury-filled life and the debts that it carried. But they were rich now, richer than anyone suspected, despite the fact that Warren’s victories were a matter of public record. They were actually living below their means, piling up money they no longer had the heart to spend, except on Rosalind and her future.

Olivia had a college fund of five thousand dollars when she died, Cynthia suddenly remembered. Even their accountant had been flummoxed by the tax implications of that. They had left it, gathering figurative dust, thinking it might show up one day in those “unclaimed account” advertisements. When Rosalind was born, they were allowed to roll it over without penalties.

“Do you like this wine?” Warren asked.

“I love it,” she said, her fingers tight on the stem of her glass. In fact, she knew no better sensation than the first taste of wine she allowed herself each evening, unless it was the caffeine jolt that started her day. Those were her two mileposts, the signs that she had survived another day, another night. The subsequent sips were never as good, but the first ones were fabulous, like the first bite of an apple.

“Should I get a case? They discount by the case.”

“I don’t see why not.”

A better woman would have set him free, and done it in such a way that no one would think less of him. She should have had an affair, or a breakdown, or both. Warren was simply not as damaged-not because he was a man, but because he did not shoulder as much of the blame. Maybe Cynthia should find him a new woman. A few years back, the local paper had run one of those interminably long stories about a woman who had destroyed her own health to give her husband a baby. Ill with cancer that she blamed on the fertility treatments-with no scientific basis, Cynthia couldn’t help noticing-she had picked out her husband’s next wife. With a supreme arrogance that Cynthia could almost envy, she had looked over her friends and settled on one who had never married, and made it clear that she would consider it an honor to her memory if the friend and the husband hooked up after her death. At the time, Cynthia had read it with her usual dismissive attitude toward any woman who dared to think she had suffered.

“White people are crazy,” she kept exclaiming to Warren at intervals, yet she read every installment of the story, fascinated by the dying woman’s sly cruelty. It was clear that she had not chosen her best-looking friend, or her most accomplished one, but one who could never upstage her. The woman died before her daughter was two. The husband and the friend married two years later. Cynthia gave them five years, tops. Living with a ghost was tough.

At least Olivia was an undemanding little wraith, so generous with those she had left behind. She never complained, never castigated. She had been colicky as a baby, but she was peaceful now, asking only that they not forget her.

“I love this cornbread,” Warren said.

“Guess what-it’s low-fat. And that spread you’re slathering on isn’t margarine, it’s yogurt.”

“I’ll live.”

“That’s the general idea,” Cynthia said. “For you to live.”

The joke-that Warren could barely endure Cynthia’s attempts to keep him healthy-was an old one, yet they had never expressed it so baldly before, and the starkness of her words made Cynthia want to wince. That had been the general idea for Olivia, too. To live, to grow up, to take advantage of all the things to which she was entitled, by birth and blood and class and education.

She forgot sometimes. For up to an hour at a time, she might forget that she was the mother of a murdered child. But Rosalind changed everything. She could not look at Rosalind without thinking of Olivia. She was the tuna steak to Olivia’s New York strip. Just as precious, better for them in some ways, but Cynthia couldn’t help preferring one over the other. Warren probably felt the same way, too, but that was another conversation they could never have. They worried more about Rosalind, yes, and their imaginations had been stretched to limits that other parents could not fathom. It was one thing to get your old body back after pregnancy, another to reclaim a mind flabby with fear and anxiety. They could not love Rosalind as much as they loved Olivia because they knew she could be taken from them.