When Secrets Die (15 page)

It had to be the bathroom wall, of course, because it had to be the bathroom, and she had to be sitting on the linoleum floor in front of the toilet. The toilet lid was up, seat down because sometimes she had to use it to support herself. She set a watch on the bathroom counter, propping it so she could see it from the floor, next to a glass of water for rinsing her mouth. She wet a washrag, wrung it out, and folded it neatly.

This morning she'd forgotten the sweater and the socks. The first wave of intense nausea floated like an oil slick in her belly. She dreaded it—the wrenching vomiting coupled with the pain in her side and the not knowing where it came from or why. The first time she'd thought it might kill her. Then she realized that whatever it was would only kill her slowly, and she'd suffer, so there was no happiness there. She didn't like doctors, or hospitals, or emergency rooms. Well, how stupid, who did? But somehow in the middle of these attacks she didn't care what they might do to her in an emergency room. They could cut her open and remove things and leave angry red scars like zippers in her pale skin. They could drug her and overcharge her and put her in debt. They could be rude, or boss her around, or treat her like she had no choice and no control. Those kinds of things only worried her when the attacks were over. The one thing she could not let them do, and the one thing they very well might do, was take her daughter Blaine off to foster care. They would say she was making herself sick. She was not to be trusted. And that was the one thing she could not allow. You could say she was being paranoid. Or you could say she was being a good and careful mother. You could say she was playing with fire and taking a risk, you could say she was letting them bully her, you could say she was letting them win. You could say every one of those things, and all of them would be true.

But you couldn't really say she had a choice.

She was cold. Shivering. She staggered to the bedroom.

She'd put her arms through the sleeves of an old cotton sweater just as the nausea became impossible to keep down, and she popped her head through the neck hole and ran back to the bathroom, throwing up so violently that she had to balance on one knee and stretch the other leg out behind her, toes to the floor, like a runner's stretch. She held the edges of the toilet bowl so she would not fall. She heaved again and again, managed to catch a breath, heaved again. Kept heaving still after every last bit of food and fluid was flushed from her system, and there was nothing left but the burn of acid in her throat, and the white froth that she threw up now instead of bile. Her body wasn't making bile anymore, and she did not know why, but she was researching it, along with her other symptoms, online. She wasn't going to let whatever this was kill her. She had boundaries.

Pain level eight, she would tough it out. Pain level nine, she would get help, and pain level ten, go to an emergency room. Vomiting bright red blood—emergency room. Attack lasting over eight hours—emergency room. She had done her research, and was careful to take no medication for pain or nausea so she would mask no symptoms, not flying blind like she was; she didn't want to die, after all.

The vomiting subsided. She rinsed her mouth, spit spit spit into the toilet bowl, flushed it again. Wiped her mouth on the front of the sweater, spit again, wiped her mouth again, used the washrag to bathe her face.

Wally watched from the doorway, head on paws, a look of compassion in her eyes. She did not question Emma, she was just there. Dogs never questioned you, they never got mad, not even when Emma once told Wally to stop wagging her tail did the dog so much as blink. Dogs were so much better than people.

Emma wanted to lean against the wall, but she was afraid to move. If she stayed very very still, she might not throw up for a while. She checked her watch. Only twenty minutes into the attack. Two hours and forty minutes more, at the very least.

Just be very still, she thought, back aching, but her side hurt too much, and she shifted against the wall, and that set the nausea off, and she was once again on her knees throwing up hard and loud. Sometimes she cried when she felt like this, but not today. Today the pain was no more than a six, and she sweated and shook with the chills and leaned against the wall and watched the clock.

It was over in three hours and fifteen minutes, leaving her exhausted but relieved. She slept awhile afterward, dreaming of her mother, then woke, hungry but afraid to eat. She often thought that something she was eating set these attacks off, but as soon as she'd decide she knew what it was, it would be set off again by something else entirely.

She sat on the couch for a while, scratching Wally's ears and looking at the mess of her house.

Her mother had not been the most particular of housekeepers either, and that was something that she and Emma shared. Emma found herself thinking a lot about her mother these days—not so strange. When you were in trouble, you always turned to Mom.

Not there, of course, but somehow always with her, particularly in this small cottage of Great-Aunt Jodina's. The presence was subtle, but nonetheless quite a particular thing, like a scent, like the crisp feeling one has just after a breeze has blown through the window, scattering loose papers and enticing the dog to sit up, nose twitching.

The older she got the more she looked like her mother—bon vivant, curvaceous, dark hair, eyes electrically blue. Her mother had often been asked if she wore colored contacts, when such things became common. Emma had stood with her mom in a grocery store line while the woman ahead of them turned and said to her mother, “Are those your eyes?” as if they might have belonged to someone else.

Her mother had been enough like the other mothers to land in the comfort zones, but different enough to make Emma—and everyone else—pay attention. Everything had to be pretty—pretty paper towels, pretty tissues, pretty napkins. Yes, the white ones in packs of one-point-twelve million were cheaper, at three cents a thousand, but so long as the budget was not too badly stretched, much better to buy fifty for three dollars and eighty-seven cents because they were thick and heavy and folded long-ways, and because they came in rich colors—deep greens, cobalt blues, the maroon of a marching band. Cloth napkins were even better, as far as Emma was concerned, but her mother had never used them. Her father, of course, had been king of the blue-light specials at Kmart, in the days before the domination of Wal-Mart, and Emma remembered walking way ahead of him in the parking lot once, pretending they were not together as he carried two bundles of toilet paper stacked twenty rolls high and swaying over his head like columns of embarrassment. He pretended not to notice how she had distanced herself, but her mother had laughed and called to her across the asphalt, shouting, “Emma, hon? Can you come help us with this
toilet paper?
” Good ole Mom. Now, of course, she was disposed to torture her own daughter Blaine in the same way. You never really appreciated how amusing these things could be until you had a teenager of your own to annoy.

Her mother's passion was her old horse, Empress, a skittish mare, half Arab, half saddlebred, and all nerve. Her mother had bought the show horse, then freed her from the cruel bits and the severe German martingales used to tie her head down. People were afraid to ride this mare without fierce controls, because for the horse, riding meant
pain
, and pain meant run, which meant the only way to stop her was to apply more pain or pray.

But Emma's mother had seen the mare's gentle heart and her will to please, and had brought her home, and never again put anything but a simple snaffle bit in her sensitive, damaged mouth. The mare was never safe to ride anywhere but in the tiny round pen, where Emma's mother would walk her, round and round, cutting across, making a figure eight, the mare always moving with the action and grace that had racked up ribbon after ribbon in horse shows in Kentucky, Florida, and Tennessee, back in the days of cruel bits and martingales and the breakneck speed of the hand gallop. Empress moved so sharply in the oval of the show ring that her rider could have scooped dirt between his leather-gloved fingers, had he felt inclined and safe enough to take his hands from the reins.

Her mother had sent the horse to a trainer once, someone known to work slowly and with kindness, but he'd sent the mare back in two months, bringing her himself in his silver six-horse trailer and battered pickup truck. Emma had been watching, listening. She remembered his heavily gloved hands and the matter-of-fact way he led the horse out of the van; she remembered the mare rolling her eyes and snorting as if she'd never seen the barn before, quieting only at her mother's touch, but still dancing sideways at every shadow and sound.

The trainer had just kind of shrugged at her mother. “The mare's just too old—experience wise, if you know what I mean—for me to make that much difference. I'm wasting your money, and to tell you the truth I'd rather be working a horse where I can make a difference.”

“She's a good horse,” her mother had said.

“I don't mean that.” The trainer had pointed to the grooves over the mare's eyes. “That's always the sign of a kind heart and an old soul, but she's never going to trust me or anybody else enough to get where she doesn't spook six ways to Sunday over every little thing. I've sacked her out; she's better. But if you don't work with her every day, she'll just go back to her old self. You're not going to get the spook and run out of her—not with those bloodlines, and not with the kind of past she's had. Course, you can get another opinion.”

But Emma's mother had not wanted another opinion, and she'd seemed content to just ride Empress around that round pen, and gradually the horse had calmed down and learned that riding wasn't so very bad. She'd walk around that pen quietly with her head down, instead of nose to the air like she'd been when Emma's mother had first brought her home. Emma remembered somebody stopping by watching her mom on the horse, and saying what a quiet little mare she was. She remembered how her mama had grinned at Emma over the woman's head and then just smiled and said “thank you very much.”

She was a smart horse. She'd had a bad infection once, and Emma's mother had to inject her twice a day with penicillin, a painful shot, and yet Empress had stood quietly, and her mother had been able to administer the shot in the mare's short, stocky neck, with one hand, while holding the halter with the other.

And while the house might be kept half-assed, the barn was always clean and organized, and one thing Emma remembered more than anything was leading the mare into her stall at the end of the day. In her memory it was always fall, and chilly, and getting dark early enough that it was dark by the time Emma brought the horse in. She remembered the red and gold of the leaves, the crisp chill in the air, and the way the barn looked, all lit up, as she walked in the dark through the field. Empress would trot along beside her, anxious for her bin of sweet feed, and the evening pleasure of slowly munching the orchard-grass hay after the lustful gorging on feed, the stall clean and pungent with the smell of cedar wood shavings, a bucket of cold clean water, and the mineral block the horse liked to scrape with her teeth. Emma loved tucking a horse into a stall for the night, and no matter what anybody told her about horses being better off outdoors twenty-four hours a day, she knew that Empress, at least, liked the coming and going, in the barn, out of the barn, and being snug inside a clean, well-bedded stall with plenty of good food and clean water, a bit of apple or carrot, and always a kind loving word.

Her father had sold that little country cottage where she grew up, the three acres with the sagging tobacco barn and the little round pen, and the paddock circled by the black four-plank fencing that had to be patrolled and maintained. She had a strong memory of her mother, in that torn blue flannel shirt she used to wear around the barn, hammering away at some sagging board with a mallet because as usual she'd misplaced the hammer, and the mallet worked better anyhow.

Her mother had depressions. Times when she was listless and sad. She still did the mom things—the laundry was clean, if not folded, the meals were cooked—but only the bare minimum was done, and then her mother would spend hours curled up with a radio, unmoving and dull. It was something that Emma accepted then and now. A brilliant exuberance like her mother's was often balanced, or, more accurately, weighed down, by dark things. It had driven her father nuts, and she had memories of him shouting at her mother, telling her to snap out of it, and her mother telling him to go to hell.

It was the horse who always brought her mother out of the dark periods. Emma learned to facilitate with small steps—just an invitation to come with her to the barn and keep her company while she groomed the horse. But then she'd hand her mother a brush, and the very act of stroking the horse seemed to provide some kind of comfort for her mother's soul. It was hard to explain, but something Emma felt herself. She had not gotten the depression gene, but it was something that ran strongly in her mother's family, from what she gathered from little hints about sour maiden aunts or angry cousins. For that reason, Emma saw depression as a sickness, not a weakness. Nothing shameful, mainly just miserable, something that had to be taken care of so it could pass. She watched Blaine and found that her daughter had the same tendency. One could not be sure—all adolescents had bouts of depression—but Blaine seemed to hit the searing depths, like her grandmother. Depths that made Emma read up on antidepressants. It was a subject of conversation she learned to avoid. She found that the word
depression
meant other things to other people, and that she was rare in her inclination to take it in stride, like a sprained ankle, a tendency to freckle and burn in direct sunlight, an allergy to wool.

Emma had canceled all her dance lessons for the week as soon as the article in the paper came out. She knew it was the worst thing she could do, but she did it anyway. She wasn't ready to face people. But it was a mistake staying in the house all the time. She needed to get out. And she knew where she wanted to go. She gave Wally another pat and wandered through the house, looking for her car keys.