“Was any of the furniture left?”
She told him about the settee, the desk, the chair. “Everything was against that back wall by the reflecting pool.”
Kyle nodded. “That's where they found Kate. You don't remember it at all, do you? The flood?”
“No.” She turned her head toward him and asked him almost shyly, “Can you tell me?”
Kyle looked toward the cavern. “My father and I were sandbagging the fire station in Coolbrook and suddenly it occurred to me—I don't know why so late—that if the flood could get as high as the fire station, it could get as high as the ground here by the cave. I left to come back here, thinking at first that I was overreacting. So I forced myself to walk slowly, but as I got closer I could see how high and wild the creek was and I started running. I pictured you and your mother in the cavern with cotton in your ears, not able to hear the water coming. By the time I got here, sure enough the water was pouring through the entrance. Not as quickly as it is now, but quick enough. It was only up to my ankles at the entrance but it was much deeper inside. Deep enough to put out most of Kate's lanterns. Just two were still burning.
“I couldn't see her at first. I called to her from the entrance to the great room and she called back to me, and after a minute I could see her as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. She was holding you in her arms and trying to fight her way to the entrance, but the water was coming in so fast she couldn't make any headway. She said, 'Take Eden,' and she was holding you out to me. You were screaming your little head off.” He smiled. “Trying to hang on to your mama, not making it easy for her to hand you over. I went in as far as I dared and she nearly had to toss you to me. You latched onto me like a monkey, and I managed to get you back out here. I set you up there on the road.” He pointed to where the truck was parked. “It was just a dirt road then. I told you to stay there. I remember thinking that without being weighed down by you, Kate could probably get out on her own, but by the time I got in again, she was pushed back even further. The water was to her waist and she was holding on to a stalagmite, trying to keep from being pulled deeper into the cave.”
Eden hugged her knees, queasy from the images forming in her head.
“I got closer,” Kyle said. “I was scared we'd both drown. I kept looking back toward the entrance and could see the space between the water and the ceiling getting smaller and smaller. And I kept thinking about you out there alone on the road. I was afraid maybe you'd try to get back into the cave, or maybe get swept into the creek.
“I was holding on to the stalagmites, trying to work my way toward Kate, when suddenly it went dark. The last lantern went out. It was black as pitch in there. Kate screamed out my name. 'Kyle!' she screamed. Her voice bounced off the walls loud enough to hurt my ears. I called to her. I called and called but…” He shook his head. His eyes had filled and Eden slipped her arm through his and set her head on his shoulder.
“Sometimes I still think about it,” Kyle said. “That maybe if I'd had a rope ... Maybe if I'd run from Coolbrook instead of walked…”
“Maybe if you didn't have to get me out first,” Eden said.
“No.” He touched her hand where it rested on his arm. “No, that's one thought I've never had.”
“All I remember from that whole episode is that your hands and arms were scraped up.”
He smiled slightly. “You remember that?” He turned his hands palm side up in his lap, but the scars were gone. “I guess from the tites and mites. Your mother's arms were covered with scrapes too when they found her.”
“Who found her?”
“Daddy and a neighbor. They went in the next day after the waters went down. I couldn't go in. Not until after she was out. Then I went in for the journals, and when the water was completely gone I sealed the goddamned hole in the ground—for eternity, I thought.”
He let out a long sigh. “Poor Eden,” he said. “You kept asking for your mama, and we'd explain the best we could that she was dead, and I thought you finally understood. But then the next year when I came to visit, you asked if Kate was with me. You said you wished she'd come back.”
They were quiet for many minutes, watching the savage waters churn below them.
“I loved her so much, Eden,” Kyle said. “When I look back, it's amazing that we didn't make love much sooner than we did. We had so many opportunities, we were so close, and I certainly wanted to, but I knew it could only hurt her, someone who already lived on the edge of reality. I only gave in to it that once and I regretted it. I can't tell you how ashamed and filled with remorse I was. I regretted it until the day you were born. Once I looked at you, once I held you, I stopped regretting.”
“I love you, Kyle,” she said.
He put his arm around her, kissed her temple. “I love you too, sweetheart.”
For a moment neither of them spoke. A sense of contentment, half formed and fragmentary, fell over her and she knew what she needed to do to make it complete.
“There's something I have to tell you.” She lifted her head from his shoulder. “About Lou's accident.”
He dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “I know all about Lou's accident.”
“No,” she said. “You don't know what really happened that night.”
“Yes, I do.”
“How could you? Lou said she never told you.”
“She didn't. She wouldn't betray you. But that boy you were running off with—Tex?—wrote me a letter shortly after the accident. He was in a drug program and his counselor made him write to me. He pretty much spelled out what happened.”
Eden pulled away from him. “You've known all these years?”
“Yes.”
“Weren't you furious with me?”
Kyle sighed again. “I was furious with myself, Eden. I failed you somehow that you wanted to run away, that you couldn't tell me the truth. I always felt as though I failed you, right from the start. I couldn't be a real father to you. I should have fought to take you after Kate died, and I should have told you I was your father long, long before I did.”
She left Kyle sitting on the bridge and drove to the Lynch Hollow house. She should get the truck back to Ben, but there was one thing she needed to do that couldn't wait.
She sat down in front of her word processor and opened the screenplay. She scrolled through the pages until she found the love scene she'd written between Kate and Matthew. She read a few lines. It was a beautiful scene. Wrenchingly lovely. The dialogue rich, the sensual tension compelling. She pressed the button that would delete the scene in its entirety and smiled at the blank screen left in its wake. Later today she would fill that screen with something even richer, something real. But not right now.
She pulled up the title page and changed the title from A Solitary Life to A Secret Life, then scrolled to the very end of the document, where she wrote:
THIS FILM IS DEDICATED TO MY FATHER, KYLE SWIFT
She put paper in her printer, centered the lines on the screen, and hit the print button. Then she sat back to watch the letters take shape on the clean, white paper.
The End
About the Author
Diane Chamberlain is the author of 18 novels. A former medical social worker and psychotherapist, she lives in North Carolina with photographer John Pagliuca and her Shetland Sheepdogs, Keeper and Jet. Visit her on her home page http://www.dianechamberlain.com or on her Facebook page at: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=57525775363&ref=ts
Other Novels by Diane Chamberlain
The Lies We Told
The Shadow Wife (originally Cypress Point)
Secrets She Left Behind
Before the Storm
The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes
The Bay at Midnight
Breaking the Silence
Her Mother's Shadow
Kiss River
Keeper of the Light
The Courage Tree
Reflection
The Escape Artist
; Brass Ring
Fire and Rain
Lovers and Strangers
Private Relations
Diane Chamberlain, Secret Lives
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