The last secret_ a novel - Mary McGarry Morris [98]
For a moment Nora isn't sure who Maizie means, abused or abuser. Both, she decides, entering the room, and herself as well, here again, victim of her own mistakes. Eddie's bad penny, because on it goes. On and on. Pain and cruelty. Everywhere. To think she once considered herself somehow apart from all this. A spectator. Helper. But in the end, what is the difference between her and any of them?
Alice is sitting up in bed. The ice pack for her face is in her lap. Her head turns from the gleam of entering light, from Nora.
“I'm sorry,” Nora says. “Is there anything I can do?”
“No.” Emptiness. A door closing on an abandoned house. Hope smothered. Love. Children, every youthful dream snuffed out with its utterance. No. Nothing.
“Things will get better. You're strong. I know you don't think you are right now, but you'll see. You'll find out. Your strength will come from your children, Alice. That's what he keeps trying to beat out of you. But he can't. Because you're not going to let him, are you? Ever again.”
“I wish I was dead.”
“No, you don't. You don't mean that.” She leans on the bed and Alice winces. “You have everything to live for. You do.”
“Not anymore,” Alice says with a slow, almost foolish smile. “I'm pregnant. That's why it happened. He's so mad. He said I did it on purpose. To trick him. Because I didn't know what else to do with my pathetic life.”
“That's ridiculous! Of—”
“No, it's true. He's right. I did. All I wanted was for us to be a family, to be happy,” she bawls, sobbing into the duvet. “Each one, that's all I ever wanted.”
Nora lets her cry. She wants to hold her but can't. Robin would, so easily and naturally, she knows. She remembers Robin's tears the day she told her she was pregnant with Lyra, sobbing because she didn't want to be and had even called an abortion clinic but then had decided that it was a sign, because maybe a baby, new life in her troubled house, might change all that had gone wrong in her marriage, Robin had said, bawling, as if at the shallowness of her hope, holding out her arms, shaming Nora with her plea to be held. Still now, Nora wonders, what reserve, what coldness, what emptiness kept her from comforting a woman she had loved. Yes. Loved, with a depth and joy she had never felt for another woman before Robin. And so, how cruel, how heartless, of them for what they did, for using her. And in the end, how predictable. How complicit she was, time after time, in her quick dismissal of the obvious. How easy she made it for them. Because as long as they loved each other, she was loved.
“No matter what happens, you've got your children, Alice. You're still a family. All that matters is them. You'll be a better family without him. You will.”
Alice buries her bruised face in the bunched-up hem of the bed covering. Nora Trimble Hammond who can't even let food pass her lips under this patched roof sits on the side of the bed. She puts both arms around this broken woman. A child really, she tells herself, waiting for something, goodness, wisdom, some energy to flow between them. She will not pull back, but all she feels is dread.
“There. There, now,” she whispers, her hand at the back of this snarled and sweaty hair, days of an unwashed muskiness, she thinks, then realizes it must be the heavy bleed. The smell is blood, sickeningly strong. And familiar. “It's going to be all right. You'll see. I promise,” she makes herself say, makes herself sit there, trying not to gag.
A small plane flies overhead. For a moment it drowns out the children's voices. He watches from the corner. The wind gusts and he turtles his chin deeper into his collar. He hates the cold. With the exception of the one child, the others wear hats and mittens. She runs around the carousel, screeching with laughter. Two small girls chase after her. Alone, under the gnarled locust tree,