The Secrets We Keep by Stephanie Butland Page B

with the effort to be the person Mike would want her to be. “That he died. It wasn’t your fault.”
    For Kate, the truth of this widow, her neglected hair and sallow face, wrenches her heart this way and that, while her body stands, mute. She sees that Elizabeth is wrapped in a man’s dressing gown that’s too big for her, and suddenly her hand is alive and grasps at the sleeve, stroking. Now they are both watching Kate’s hand on Elizabeth’s sleeve, as though it’s something on television, something neither of them has power over, and then Elizabeth takes hold of Kate’s wrist and she says, “Tell me. Tell me what happened. Please. Tell me. I beg you. I beg you.” She looks at Kate, cannot tell whether her mouth is sulking or planning to speak, and says, desperately, “Please. He was my husband. He was my husband and I was his wife and I need to know.”
    And the tears come, really come, a tempest, and Kate is suddenly free to move and she says, “No, no,” the first words she has said to Elizabeth, and then she’s out of the garden and gone.
    â€¢ • •
    Two hours pass before Mel gets up and heads out to the garden for her first cigarette of the day. She had worked late the night before, translating a Spanish novel with so many characters that it made her head spin; although she keeps on telling Elizabeth that she can work anywhere, which is true, she is finding that she can only really concentrate when she’s certain her sister is sleeping.
    When she sees Elizabeth sitting by the fence, still in her pajamas and Mike’s dressing gown and—well, just still, so still—for a second she thinks her sister has died too. Elizabeth’s hands are freezing; she’s wet from sitting in the grass; she doesn’t respond to her name. Mel thinks about a conversation she had with Andy yesterday, about how if this was the 1800s he’d be confidently diagnosing Elizabeth with a broken heart, and he’s not sure that the diagnosis would be too far off today.
    But as Mel gets closer she sees a pulse in Elizabeth’s throat, and takes her hand and rubs it, rubs her fright and fear into it, and Elizabeth looks at her and says, “Oh, Mel, I should have known,” and she starts to cry, and she sobs the whole story out, her foolishness and hope, before she’ll move a muscle.
    Mel calls Andy at work, and until he arrives there’s nothing she can do but sit in the grass too. It takes both of them to get Elizabeth—who seems to have only the slightest of connections to her body, and have no idea that she’s cold, or wet—into the house, out of her wet clothes, and into bed, where she lies shivering, silent. Andy gives her some sleeping pills and a glass of water, and Mel says “no arguments,” and so Elizabeth does as she’s told and sleeps for six hours without moving a muscle, her color and warmth seeping back like morning through a northern sky.
    â€¢ • •
    When Elizabeth comes downstairs, it’s early evening, and Blake, Andy, and Mel are gathered around the kitchen table. Three pairs of cautious eyes turn toward her, assessing, appraising. “How are you doing?” Mel asks.
    Elizabeth makes a gesture with shoulder, eyebrow, chin, which means, “I could say something in response to your question, but I have absolutely no idea how I am, so my answer would be meaningless.” She says, “I should have told her off and sent her home, or called someone, or brought her inside and talked to her properly, instead of—instead of being stupid.”
    â€œWell,” Blake says, “you need to remember that if she’s upset it’s not because of you. It’s because of what happened to her. And she wasn’t to know—”
    â€œThat I was thinking her flowers were gifts to me from beyond the grave? No, she wasn’t.”
    â€œI’ve spoken to