Where Secrets Lie (17 page)

“
I understand.”

“
Nothing like that can ever happen again.”

“
It won’t.”

During the extended silence that followed, Lee’s resolve began to erode, and she steeled herself against her own sentimentality. Obviously, having both men was not possible. Lee had to choose. Regardless of how much it pained her, her newfound feelings for Jack had to be set aside.

~

Lee and the girls left to begin their school shopping, and Paul tried to motivate himself to leave as well. He was apprehensive that he was about to incur his father’s wrath, an occurrence he spent his lifetime avoiding, but it would only make matters worse if he were late.

Paul left the study, meandered into the kitchen, grabbed his keys off the counter, and entered the garage. Once he got into his car, his mind shifted into autopilot. His drive to work was a short one, which he would walk if his father did not insist on formal business attire.

Paul always drove the same route to the Boulder office, which never had much traffic, so there was nothing to demand his attention along the way. Consequently, his anxiety about his imminent meeting was foremost on his mind as he backed out of the driveway and onto the road.

When Paul’s father summoned him to meetings, he often neglected to divulge the meeting’s topic beforehand. He preferred to wait until they were face to face to disclose whatever it was he wished to discuss. Paul was accustomed to his father’s tactics, and under normal circumstances, when it pertained to business issues, it didn’t bother him. However, today his father’s fury might be directed at him personally.

Last week, after Paul decided to check out a new club in Denver, he called Lee and told her he’d be home late because he was going to the gym to work out. Most of the time, when he told her this it was the truth, but two or three times a month he used it as a ruse in order to spend a few hours relaxing at clubs the guys at the gym let him know about.

Just as Paul was entering the club, he heard someone call out his name, and he tensed. For a split second, he considered ignoring the call and ducking into the club, but that would definitely raise suspicions, so instead, he turned around.

A car pulled over to the curb, and when Paul glanced inside the car’s open window, he recognized a couple who were friends and neighbors of his parents.

Paul reined in his panic and feigned a calm demeanor as he walked over to the car, shook hands with the husband, and exchanged pleasantries with them both.

It turned out they were lost and trying to find a restaurant where they were supposed to meet an out of town friend who was visiting Denver on business. Paul straightened them out in terms of their directions and sent them on their way, but the encounter unnerved him so much that he no longer had any interest in the club. He went back to his office and fretted.

In all the years Paul had been frequenting these clubs, he had never run into anyone he knew from Boulder. On a rare occasion, he would run into someone he knew from Denver but only when he was already inside the club. In that case, he assumed they were as motivated as he was to keep their presence there under wraps. As long as he kept their secret, he could count on them to keep his. It constituted an unspoken oath of sorts. At least in Paul’s experience, no one ever breached it.

At the gym, Paul’s workout buddies comprised a similar society of men who went to great pains to retain their anonymity. They used their first names only, never mentioned where they lived or worked, and never spoke about their families. Paul was pretty sure most of them were living in the same predicament he was.

Soon after he started working for his father, Paul was entrusted with the firm’s Denver office, and it became more convenient for him to work out at the Denver branch of his Boulder gym. While there, he stumbled upon a group of men he became intrigued with.

The first time he noticed one of them checking him out, he was amused. The next time, he was flattered. Before long, Paul looked forward to the attention. None of the men ever made any overt moves toward him, only suggestive looks or compliments about his physique as they passed nearby. Paul found it all strangely appealing. After a few weeks, he began to mingle with the group now and then. Eventually, he was working out with them on a regular basis.

One of the group’s main topics of discussion were clubs you could go to in order to meet other men, many of whom were married, all of whom were discreet. At least, discretion was the expectation.

Although Paul had liaisons with men he met in the clubs, he had no desire to become emotionally involved with them, so he made it a point never to get together with the same man twice. For the same reason, he avoided being physically involved with any men at the gym. He wanted his interactions with them to remain superficial and platonic. They were work out buddies only.

Paul couldn’t resist the allure of the world he discovered in Denver, a world that allowed him the freedom to become immersed in an exploration of a part of himself he had never dared to acknowledge before. In this world, no aspect of his personality needed to be pushed aside and neglected in order for him to do what was expected of him. He could be himself in a way he had never been allowed to fully experience before.

However, at the same time, it was of paramount importance to him that his family remained intact and untouched by what transpired in Denver.

In that regard, he failed in only one respect. Since Paul believed that if he allowed Lee to glimpse any of his innermost thoughts or feelings, he risked revealing all of them, he was forced to cordon his deepest self off from her entirely. It was a regrettable repercussion, but one that was necessary in order to isolate his life in Denver from the rest of his life.

Now the painstaking care he took to retain and balance the elements in his life could all be for naught. He’d been seen by friends of his parents, who were certain to pass along news of their encounter. When they did, if their discussion included the name of the club, if anyone was curious enough to look it up online, Paul’s carefully orchestrated life would spiral out of control. The possibility tormented Paul ever since he’d run into them, and his anguish was exacerbated when his father requested this meeting.

Paul’s trepidation dominated his thoughts as he approached an intersection a couple of blocks from his office. As soon as the car across from him turned, Paul rashly proceeded into the intersection without checking the cross traffic, which did not have stop signs. The gardening truck that barreled into the passenger side of his car had no time to apply their brakes. The crushing force of the impact sent Paul’s car careening through the intersection and into a tree where it came to an abrupt halt.

~

A sparsity of floral watercolors decorated the pale yellow walls of the diminutive waiting room. An aquarium bursting with goldfish dominated the right side of the room, and a television blaring an afternoon talk show occupied the left. Several people clustered near the television. Lee sat apart from them, her vacant, trancelike stare aimed toward the aquarium. Jack dashed into the waiting room, caught sight of Lee, and hurried into the empty chair beside her.

“
I came as soon as I heard,” he said.

Lee remained motionless.

“
How is he?” Jack hadn’t heard any details about the accident, only that Paul was in the hospital because of one.

“
I don’t know,” Lee said. Her voice was hushed, her words halting. “He’s still in surgery.”

“
How long will it take?”

“
I’m not sure… I don’t think they said.”

“
Have you been here long?”

“
A while.” Lee was incognizant of the number of hours she’d been there, hoping she’d get news Paul was all right, dreading she’d get news he wasn’t.

“
Have you seen him yet?”

“
No, he was already in surgery.”

“
So you didn’t get to talk to his surgeon?”

“
One of them talked to me.”

Jack waited a few moments. “What’d they tell you?”

Lee closed her eyes, then opened them.

“
He’s in bad shape, Jack. Lots of broken bones and a traumatic brain injury. At least, I think that’s what she called it. I don’t remember exactly.”

Paul’s head injury petrified Lee. His brain had bruising and torn blood vessels. There could be permanent damage or disability. He could have problems with speech, memory, motor skills, personality, anything really. Whatever recovery was possible could take months or possibly years. The doctor stressed that you never knew for sure what would happen with the brain. You just had to wait and see.

“
He was thrown around inside the car.” Lee’s voice quivered, and her eyes filled with tears.

Jack suppressed the impulse to reach over and grasp Lee’s hand. He didn’t want her to pull away.

“
The police said he wasn’t wearing his seat belt,” Lee said, which was still unfathomable to her. “They told me his injuries wouldn’t have been this bad if he had been.”

“
That doesn’t sound like Paul.”

“
I know, that’s what I told them.”

The police behaved as though it was commonplace for Paul to be reckless. How could they know anything about who he was or what he was likely to do? They’d never even met him.

“
His car was so mangled they had to get the fire department to cut him out of it.”

“
Jesus, how fast was the other car going?”

“
I don’t know. Paul was distracted, that’s what the police said. The men in the truck that hit him said he never looked, just pulled out in front of them.”

“
Are they all right?” The last thing Lee needed right now was for Paul to be deemed responsible for someone else’s injuries.

“
I think so.”

“
Were you at the scene?”

“
No, by the time the police got a hold of me Paul was already in the ambulance, so I came straight here. Well, I dropped the girls off at Tammy’s first.”

Tammy was a neighborhood friend who had a daughter and a son around the same age as Sara and Katie. Tammy and Lee shared play dates and often traded babysitting favors.

“
They sent me in here to wait. The doctor came to see me, then the police.”

Jack wished he’d arrived earlier to provide Lee with moral support during those distressing conversations.

“
Have you told your mother yet?” Jack asked.

“
No, I haven’t had the chance.” Lee gestured toward a phone that was positioned on an end table near the door. “That’s only for local calls, so I used it to get a hold of Paul’s parents.”

“
I was wondering why they weren’t here.”

“
Paul’s parents?”

“
Yeah.”

“
His mother’s trying to get back as soon as she can. She’s on a cruise in the Mediterranean with her sister.”

“
And his father?”

“
That man doesn’t leave work for anything.”

“
Not even this?”

Lee shrugged. “He’s not here.”

Apparently, Jack was the only one who was going to show up to support Lee.

“
Do you mind if I stay and wait with you? I’m concerned about the outcome of the surgery myself.”

The prospect of sitting there all alone again was unbearable to Lee, so she said, “I’d appreciate that.”

~

The next morning, Paul was in intensive care hooked up to a ventilator, an IV, and various monitors. His eyes were closed, and his head was swathed in bandages. His face was swollen and bruised. His left arm and right leg were in casts.

Lee sat to the right of Paul’s bed in a large upholstered chair. She wore jeans, a plain tee shirt, and no makeup. Her hair, pulled back in a ponytail, exposed her ashen, overweary face. She discarded her flip-flops on the floor and tucked her bare feet underneath her on the chair. She leaned forward, toward the bed, and held Paul’s hand in hers, careful not to disrupt any of the protruding lines.

Jack walked into the room. “Morning.”

“
Good morning.”

“
How is he?”

“
In a coma,” Lee said and fought back ensuing tears. She’d just finished a consultation with Paul’s doctors, and this was the first time she’d spoken the words aloud.

“
Oh God,” Jack said.

“
The doctors aren’t alarmed.” Lee envied their composure. This development unnerved her. “They say it’s not uncommon with head injuries this severe.”

“
So he’ll come out of it?” Jack sat on the edge of a chair at the foot of Paul’s bed.

“
They don’t know, we have to wait and see. That’s all they can say. Wait and see if he wakes up. Wait and see if he has brain damage. Wait and see if he can recover from the damage. Just wait and see.”

Brain damage? This was not at all what Jack expected to hear this morning. Yesterday, after they learned the surgery went well, Jack was optimistic about Paul’s recovery.

“
Wait and see, huh?” Jack asked. What kind of an alternative was that? Paul might come home brain damaged with no guarantee of improvement. Lee deserved so much better. At the very least, she deserved hope. If the doctors wouldn’t give it to her, Jack would.