Let them cut their feet to ribbons, she thought. She then filled the urn with water and arranged the zinnias inside, placed the urn on the kitchen table, where they couldn’t miss it. She thought about ripping the marriage certificate to shreds and leaving that on the table, too, but instead she just crumpled it up and threw it in the kitchen trash with the coffee grounds and eggshells.
They knew about David and they had scattered the ashes without her.
Her instincts told her to get out of the house. She couldn’t see the twins; she would kill them. Strike them, at the very least. Garrett had the Rover, and so Beth changed quickly into running clothes, tucked two bottles of water into her fanny pack, and took off down the dirt road.
It was hot, and before Beth even reached the end of Miacomet Pond, she stopped to drink. How dare they-that was all she could think. How dare they delve into her past, how dare they unearth her secret, and how dare they punish her for it. They never thought what it might be like for her. They never considered how difficult each day was, each night alone.
She had visualized scattering the ashes at sunrise on the morning of their last day-out in front of Horizon, into the sand and the dune grass. She had planned to say something meaningful; she had wanted to write a prayer. Well, it hardly mattered now. The twins had stolen Arch from her.
Beth reached a section of dense woods on Hummock Pond Road. She wanted to disappear among the cool trees. Let the kids raise themselves since they thought living was so easy. Let them get from age seventeen to middle age without making any mistakes. Then Beth heard Arch’s voice in her head: Your mistake isn’t the problem, honey. It’s that you concealed it. She had hidden the truth from him, too, her own husband, dead now. On the ride home from the Ronans’ cocktail party six years ago, she had almost told him. Her joints were loose from too much wine, and just the fact that they’d spent three hours in the same house with David made Beth want to confess.
There’s something I want to tell you about David, Beth had said to Arch, as they sped through the night toward home. Something you should know.
Arch chuckled. I liked the guy well enough. You’d better not say anything or you might change my mind.
Even though she was drunk, those words registered. There was no reason for Beth to bring up the unfortunate, unchangeable past. There was no reason to upset Arch or herself. For years, she had felt her brief marriage to David Ronan was too private to share, and that was how it would stay. Her private history.
When she got home she was dismayed to find the Rover in the driveway. She had downed both bottles of water, she was slick with sweat and her vision was blotchy. She needed to eat, she needed rest. She couldn’t bring herself to face her children. What would she say? Where could she possibly start?
When she walked inside, the house was quiet and Beth removed her socks and shoes on the bottom step of the stairs. She might be able to forego lunch and just pull her shades and climb into bed. She was so overwhelmingly tired that she knew she could sleep until morning. But then she heard whispering and she forced herself to tiptoe down the hallway and poke her head into the kitchen.
Garrett and Winnie were sitting alone at the kitchen table staring at the urn now filled with flowers. The broom and dustpan were out, and beyond the twins, Beth could see the deck had been swept clean. When the kids looked up and saw her, Beth had a hundred simultaneous memories of their faces. She remembered seeing them for the very first time, when they were an hour old, sleeping in their incubators in the hospital nursery. She pictured them on their second birthday, their mouths smeared with chocolate icing. She saw them at age ten, the first time they ever took the subway alone-the six line down to Union Square where Arch was going to meet them. She visualized them in the future, walking down the aisle at Winnie’s wedding-Garrett in a tuxedo and Winnie in a pearl-colored slip dress, arm-in-arm, Garrett giving Winnie away. More times than Beth could count in the last five months, she had thought, It should have been me who died. But now, gazing at her children and the urn of flowers, that sense of guilt, guilt at surviving, vanished. She was their mother. They needed her more than they needed anyone else. Including Arch.
Beth poured herself a Gatorade. The only sounds in the kitchen were the cracking of ice, and the distant pound and rush of the waves outside. Beth drank the entire glass of liquid, then poured herself another. The silence was helpful. This was going to be the most important conversation she ever had with her children and she wanted to pick her words carefully. She couldn’t help herself from asking, “You scattered the ashes without me?”
Winnie traced a scar in the table. Garrett said, “Yes.”
Beth sat down; her legs felt weak. “Why?”
“We were angry,” he said.
Beth imagined Kara Schau as an invisible fourth party at the table. She would praise Garrett for identifying his emotions. Beth wasn’t as pleased. What she thought was: When you’re angry you break a vase, you yell, you resort to sarcasm. You do not deceive your mother in the cruelest possible way.
“Angry about what?” she asked.
“You were married,” Winnie whispered. “And you never told us.”
“That’s right,” Beth said. “I was married and I never told you.”
“And you never told Dad,” Winnie said.
“And I never told Dad.”
“You lied to all three of us,” Garrett said. “Your family.”
“I did not lie.”
“You lied by omission,” Garrett said. This was a legal premise that he’d learned from his father. What you didn’t say could be just as damaging as what you did.
“It happened a long time ago,” Beth said. “Before your father, before you. It has no bearing on your lives.” She swallowed some more Gatorade. “It is none of your business.”
“Except you’re our mother,” Winnie said. “We thought we knew you.”
“You do know me.”
“It doesn’t feel like it,” Garrett said.
“We want to know the whole story,” Winnie said. “We want to know what happened.”
“Oh,” Beth said. This she wasn’t ready for. She had devoted so much energy to not thinking about the details of August 1979 that to conjure them up would be like calling a voice or spirit back from the dead. “I’d like you to respect that it’s my private past. It’s not something I want to share-with you or anyone else.”
“Piper knows the whole story,” Garrett said. “But I wouldn’t let her tell me about it. I wanted to hear it from you.”
“Piper heard the story from David?”
“From Rosie, actually,” Garrett said, knowing that this detail, beyond all others, would prod his mother to speak. “So I wasn’t sure how accurate it’d be.”
“It wouldn’t be accurate at all,” Beth said. She was livid at the thought of Rosie giving away her secret. Rosie!
“Just tell us, Mom,” Winnie said.
Beth leaned back in the chair; it whined. “Where did you put Daddy’s ashes?”
They were both quiet and Beth watched them exchange a quick look. She wanted to tread carefully here because she wanted the truth.