Secrets Best Kept

Secrets Best Kept

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It isn't all a lie.  Not all.

Sometimes she means the things she says to him, sometimes she feels like this is good and right, sometimes there is a serenity to the life of domesticity she's living and sometimes she doesn't hate it.

But most of the time, it's a facade.  It's a smile when one is requested, a big house that feels empty and a world that she simply lives in and has no control over.  A strict, unspoken, unbroken routine.  Breakfast at seven.  Everyone into the car at eight fifteen.  Wave daddy off to work, Aaron, there's a good boy.  Playtime in the park with all the other moms and their respectable Volvos keeping guard.  Pretending not to see the truck and the man inside on the occasions it turns up.  Once, when he comes over to talk, smile and act surprised.  Go back to the house and clean away.  Nap time and a chance to read the newspaper.  Once in a while spend a frivolous afternoon on the Playstation shooting the unknown; strangely nostalgic.  Kill time, cook dinner.  When Jack comes home, it's good to see another face over the age of three.  It's good to talk.  It's easy to listen.

On the days when the nanny comes, there is no routine for Kate.  Jack's remains unbroken, but Kate's day is her own.  She doesn't need a job now and she's never been good at keeping one anyway.  For three weeks she volunteers reading to the elderly.  Another time she wants to help with blood donations but only lasts half a day.  She sometimes sits in a Starbucks, pen and paper before her, ready to write that book everyone keeps telling her she should write.  But it never happens.  She's too caught up in knots that twist in her stomach that are the lies she'd have to tell if she wrote it.  She's sick of telling the world lies, sick of telling herself lies.  But she'll do it, for Aaron.

For an entire month she fosters a secret obsession with the local library.  Once, she sits in the children's section on a ridiculous pink beanbag and spends the whole day reading Judy Bloom novels.  It is a strange world presented to her.  So different to when she was thirteen and yet so true to what she knows of it.  But she never looked forward to getting her period like this girl does.  Books about childhood don't do Kate very much good and later Jack notices something is wrong.  The next time she goes to the library, she leaves the children's books behind.  It is after many books that her obsession with the place ends.  Still, she keeps a worn copy of Watership Down next to the bed and she thinks Jack assumes she's just too busy to finish it.  She finishes it three times.  Once whilst in bed next to him.

It is a paralysis.  She knows it's what's best; what every girl could ever want.  But she hasn't thought of herself as a girl in a long time.  She was supposed to be a woman, out on her own and escaping those that kept her before.  She is not supposed to play the princess, locked up in the castle.  There's no prince charming coming to rescue her.  There's no wicked witch keeping her in this life.  But she stays.  She stays because it's what's best for all of them.

At night, she's glad of his body next to hers.  The comfort, the familiarity and the love - because in some way she has always loved him and still does, even now.  He loves her too, she knows, but it's not enough because it's not the right kind of love.  It's destructive, not even the kind of destructive that tears the whole world down, the destructive passion of two people bringing all manner of things down with them.  This destruction is quiet; it's brutal.  The love between them eats itself away with every moment they spend together and every lie they tell themselves.

But Aaron needs a father and Jack is by far the best candidate.  And he means well, she knows he does.  She knows he'll take care of her.  When he kisses her, there's a spark that's lit inside her.  A validation that says she's a good person.  When they're intimate it's ... different.  Different to most of the men she's been with.  It's nice, but generally without much passion.  You can't build a life on passion.  Romeo and Juliet didn't exactly live to sit out on the porch complaining about kids today, did they?  And if there's one thing Kate and Jack both want, it's to keep surviving through this.  Sometimes it seems so much harder here than it did back there.

So Jack doesn't need to know about the things she does alone, the secret obsessions and the promises she keeps.  Because these are the things that keep her paralysis from becoming complete.  These are the things that keep her sane.

She wonders, sometimes, if it could have been different.  She knows it's futile.  This is the way that it's supposed to be.  This is the hand that she has been dealt.  She'll keep bluffing her way through until the chips are down.  Then it'll be time to rethink.  Then she might feel alive again.