Free The Secrets We Keep by Stephanie Butland

children—even though, in this house, there is no five-year-old being woken in the night by the strange, sad sound of muffled crying—she wants to save her from her mother’s fate. She wants to do it with the kindness and the gentleness that, if she was the wishing sort, she would have wished for her five-year-old self.
    But she can’t do it. And when she tries, she says something that she shouldn’t, and she could bite out her own tongue. In her heart she is saying, Seeing my friends, having them touch my arm and say kind things will make me remember that I’m not as monstrously alone as I think I am. Taking home a recipe will mean that on one of these mornings when I wake up and I don’t know quite how I’m going to make the day go by, I’ll get out my jars and take the last of the elderberries from last autumn out of the freezer, and there’ll be something to fill up the time, and there’ll be a jar of warm jelly to take to a friend, and that’s the only way I can do it.
    Elizabeth pauses for a moment and Mel looks at Patricia as if to say, Well, here it comes , but nothing happens. Or rather, nothing happens outside Elizabeth. Inside, she thinks about making an effort—about lifting her head and explaining her world to her mother-in-law, who she knows doesn’t have a cruel bone in her body, not really, but that doesn’t stop the things she says from sounding cruel, at a time when Elizabeth has nothing with which to protect herself from even unmeant cruelty. She thinks about how much of an effort every day is, that sometimes she feels as though she’s going to have to reach into her own guts and move her own diaphragm up and down because her lungs can’t find the strength to fill and empty, or her heart to pump and pull.
    Instead, she says, “I think I’ll have a lie down,” and she goes upstairs and puts on her husband’s sweater and waits for enough strength to get up again.
    â€¢ • •
    Andy, Blake, and Mel have discussed the protocol for tonight and come up with a simple strategy for what should have been Michael’s day: they will follow Elizabeth’s lead. So when she comes downstairs, showered, hair brushed, and with the palest of smiles, Blake opens wine, Andy makes much of his allergy to dogs—Blake has brought Hope with him, and two dogs seem like one too many for the doctor as he sneezes and blows—and Mel begins some cautious reminiscing.
    It’s the closest thing to normal, or what any of them remember as normal, that there’s been in the five weeks since Michael died. Elizabeth is unpredictable—sometimes present, sometimes worlds away, as quickly as if she is being switched on and off—but she is herself too, hand gestures and smiles breaking through the encrusted grief as if to remind her companions that she’s in there, still, and might come out one day.
    Every now and then she remembers that she will have to have her own birthday without Mike this year, and the next, and the next. Grief stacks itself up, waiting.
    It’s after eleven o’clock when the very-definitely-not-a-birthday-party breaks up. Mel walks home with Blake, taking Pepper, she says, “to give him some air.”
    The sound that comes from Elizabeth shocks them all with its strangeness. She’s laughing. It’s a rusty half laugh, but a laugh none the less.
    â€œTo give yourself the chance to smoke all the way home, you mean,” she says. “I hear what you call Pepper when you think I’m asleep.”
    â€¢ • •
    As soon as Blake, Mel, and the dogs have gone, Elizabeth looks straight at Andy and asks the question she’s sworn she doesn’t want to know the answer to. Except that, after a drink and a loosening of the fear that binds her, it’s all she can think about.
    â€œWhat would it have been like,” she asks, “for Mike?”
    His expression tells