The Art of Keeping Secrets Part 15

"No." Sofie opened the stairwell door.

"Hmmph."

Sofie thought this must be Ms. Fitz's favorite response because she used it on every possible occasion. She opened the door, turned to nod at Ms. Fitz. "Have a good day."

"Well, you had an art historian named Michael, a woman named Anna or something like that and a young man named Jake. They all seemed quite interested in seeing you and asked after your dead mom."

Sofie felt the slap of the word "dead" like cold water thrown over her body. She shivered, turned away from Ms. Fitz and slammed the door, although she knew she'd pay for it when Ms. Fitz called the owner of the building and complained about Sofie's visitors and loud living.

A sheet of white paper lay on the pine floor just inside Sofie's front door; she picked it up and read: Please meet me for coffee-I'll be waiting at the Full Cup. Jake.

Sofie stared at the paper as though it were an ancient doc.u.ment intended for someone else.

"I can't," she said out loud as if Jake could hear her. "I have to get to the marine center. I really do." She looked up and caught her reflection in the far mirror: her pale face, her hair pulled back into a ponytail. She released her hair, shook it out to let it fall over her shoulders, dabbed clear gloss on her lips. She spoke out loud: "I can't meet you for coffee. I must get to work."

The canvas behind her blinked in the mirror, and she turned around, took small steps toward the painting and ran her finger along the edge. This was a unique piece; she had seen it in the way her mother bent over the canvas, her eyes often filled with tears, her bottom lip bitten in concentration.

Her mother had used tiny brushes on this piece, painting words that Sofie could barely read through the large, translucent starfish imposed over the letters. Sofie knew what the words were about, but she couldn't form sentences from them. She compared it to the dolphin's language-knowing the essential message, but not the exact words.

This canvas was the most beautiful piece her mother had ever done, and yet she had never finished it. Sofie had had a million heartbreaking realizations about her mother's death, but the biggest one was that her mother had been unable to finish her favorite project; she'd left her work in a corner of a room, waiting for her return.

When her mother had been working on this painting, Sofie had had a deep conviction that this canvas would break her mother free of her sadness, free of yearning for the man she couldn't have. It would allow her to love again.

In the end, her mother did break free-but not through her art.

A tube of pale blue paint lay on the easel-just as her mother had left it two years ago. Sofie reached out, touched it, then picked it up while her heart pounded against her chest. She rolled the tube between her palms, then placed it back on the easel.

Sofie turned away from the canvas, grabbed her purse and drove directly to the Full Cup. Her hands shook as she sat in her parked car. This was outrageously foolish-meeting the son of the woman who wanted to know the whole story. The son of Knox Murphy.

Anger at having to keep her secrets, at having to lie again, overcame Sofie. The therapist Bedford had made her see for a while should have told her that sorrow and fear resembled each other so closely that you could barely tell one from the other. But she also knew anger, and she welcomed it.

She was angry at Bedford for being so clinical, angry at Ms. Fitz for being so nosy, angry at her mother for leaving her, angry at Annabelle Murphy for showing up in Newboro. The cure, oddly, seemed to be to meet Jake Murphy for coffee.

Most of the tables were empty, although there was a long line of customers getting their coffee to go. Sofie saw Jake at a corner table and tilted her head to observe him. He was reading the newspaper and hadn't looked up yet. A thin sliver of memory returned to her.

She and Jake had both missed the bus while they were playing capture the flag in the school playground. The day was unusually cold, and she'd pulled her hood around her face, tied the strings so tightly that only her eyes and nose showed. Jake had run up and pinched her nose. "You look like one of my sister's dolls all wrapped up like that. A little tiny china doll."

She had felt a strange thrill, as though he had just told her she was the most beautiful ten-year-old on earth. He'd run off, and then they both realized they'd missed the bus. After they'd gathered their books, they'd walked to her mother's art studio, only two blocks away, to call Jake's mom to come get him. They'd sat on two stools and sipped hot chocolate from cracked mugs, rejects from the potter who sold his wares at the studio.

Sofie looked at Jake. "Are china dolls pretty?" she wanted to know, needed to know.

Jake laughed, then squinted at her. "Of course they are." Then he'd jumped off the stool to run to his mother coming through the front door.

That same boy, now a man, looked up from the newspaper he was reading, stared directly at Sofie. He smiled, placed the paper down on the table. A chill ran through her: this man had the potential to make her tell secrets she hadn't told Bedford, secrets her mother had so insisted she keep that they had become part of her family's DNA. She walked toward Jake, sat down and nodded, not trusting her voice to say anything that made any sense.

"Hi, Sofie."

"h.e.l.lo." She waved toward the coffee bar. "Do you want something?"

He laughed and the sound was deeper than she expected, as though he had more substance than it first seemed. "I've already had my share of caffeine while waiting for you. Would you like something?"

"I think I would," she said, glanced up at the board.

"Let's wait until the line goes down a bit."

She laughed. "Yeah, when you're the only coffee shop in town, it gets a little packed before work."

"Only one?"

She shrugged. "There's pretty much only one of everything here. One bookstore. One coffee shop. One pharmacy. One-"

"Art studio," he finished for her, leaned his elbows on the table.

She needed a change of subject, and as she often did when she was nervous, she began to speak too fast. "Well, there are four restaurants, and two gift shops . . . so there's more than one of some things."

He nodded. "I stopped by the art studio, but it was closed."

"Yeah, Rose took it over a couple years ago and she sort of sets her own hours. No one is sure exactly what they are, but . . ."

"I remember you and your mom at the studio in Marsh Cove."

Sofie's stomach fluttered. She stood. "Listen, I didn't want you waiting all day for me. I didn't want you to waste your time, but I have to go to work now. Okay?"

Jake patted the table. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have brought your mom up like that. I should know better-I hate when people do that about my dad. It's like they want to tell me they care about and think about my dad, but all they're really doing is reminding me of everything I've lost. I'm sorry."

"You know I lost my mom?"

"Yeah, in a car wreck?"

Sofie felt the speech on her tongue-the one she'd repeated so many times that the story was more real than reality itself. She felt the robotic quality to her words, but they must be said in their precise order, or something bad would happen. Simple, but absolute truth.

"Yes, when we moved here from Colorado, we left my sweet grandma there. Then my mother opened the Newboro Art Studio, but she often went back to visit her mother. They were in a car wreck and died together. I decided to stay here since my life is bound to the water."

Jake squinted. "Sofie, you lived in Marsh Cove, not Colorado."

She blinked. Of course Jake knew that . . . of course. How could she alter the story? Her heart pounded; her head ached; her hands clenched into fists under the table. "Yes, before Colorado."

"Oh," he said. "And your mom painted here, too?"

"My mother didn't paint. She only owned the art studio."

"We have a painting of hers. . . ." Jake leaned back in his chair, twisted his mug in circles on the table. "I'm confused."

"I don't want to talk about my mom-it's too hard," she said. "Can we change the subject?" She'd said this line so frequently that she was able to say it now with a sad smile on her face.

"Okay," he said, paused. "Then tell me about your work at the research center."

Panic ebbed like a receding tide. She had said the correct words in the correct order-she was out of danger now. "What do you want to know?"

"More about your research with the dolphins. I think it's fascinating."

"Well, I gather data to help determine when, how and why the dolphins get captured in commercial fishing nets so we can find ways to make sure they don't. Did you know about three hundred thousand dolphins die that way every year? Not everyone knows that."

"No, that's a new one for me," he said. "A sad fact."

"But privately, on my own, I am studying their . . . language."

"You mean, how they talk to each other?"

She nodded. "Some experts say that their language conveys more emotion than information. Others say that dolphins can communicate very precisely. Some say they know how to use syntax, and others that we can understand the evolution of our own use of language by better understanding theirs. . . ." She took a sustaining breath and sat back in the chair, as if she'd just run a race at full sprint.

"So," he said, and laid his palms flat on the table, "do they talk to each other?"

"Oh, yes. They use certain clicks and squeals to identify each other-names if you will. Or at least I think so. And they can send warnings and tell each other where food is." She leaned across the table and added in a whisper, "I think they have names for us, too." Words were coming out of her mouth so fast she couldn't stop them. What was she doing?

"Well, I guess that makes sense. If they call each other, wouldn't they want to call to us, too?"

She straightened in her seat. "Exactly. Exactly." She glanced around the shop, realized she was speaking loudly. "Want to meet some of them?" She had no idea why she was doing this-stepping freely and willingly into a danger zone.

"I'd love it. Am I allowed in the research center?"

"With me you are. Come on."

Jake stood, and Sofie glanced out the window at the people pa.s.sing by, at the customers in line. Marty Thompson waved at her. She waved back. What was she thinking? By noon, Bedford would call wanting to know who she had been talking to at the Full Cup when she was supposed to be at work.

Jake followed her in his car, and in five minutes they pulled into the parking lot of the Marine Research Center. She felt about this gla.s.s-and-metal structure the same way others felt about their cedar shake homes or their cottages on the dunes. Her condominium was only a place to sleep, a reminder of her mother's absence. Bedford's place wasn't hers either, and she was still a visitor there, despite the years they'd been together. She'd been working or volunteering in this building since she had been fifteen years old; it was home.

Jake stood beside her as she swiped her card and the door buzzed. She walked with him down the brightly lit hall and tried to see the place through his eyes. Posters of dolphins and sea turtles lined the concrete-block walls until they came to the stairs. "The offices are upstairs. Down here are the research center and injured-animal tanks. There are dolphins, turtles, other sick marine animals."

She opened a large door and Jake followed her down metal stairs, their feet clanging. When they reached the bottom floor, a diffuse light wavered across the tanks. It was quiet this morning; feeding time was over and the staff would be upstairs now. One veterinary a.s.sistant-Marshall-sat on a stool at the far end of the room.

"Hey, Marshall," Sofie called out. "Just showing someone around."

Sofie gave Jake the tour, explaining the kinds of sickness and injury a turtle or dolphin was apt to sustain, how research could be done on them before they were released.

Jake leaned against a water tank, crossed one leg over the other and stared at her. "Do you do all your research in here? Because if I were a dolphin, the only thing I'd be saying is, 'Get me out, get me out, get me out.' "

"Maybe that is what they're saying." She tapped the tank. "But these dolphins need a bit more care until they can go. I do most of my research out on the water from boats, or while diving."

"How do you hear them?" Jake said.

"Recording devices . . . and dolphins come up for air, you know. They cry out and call when they're above water, too."

Jake took a step toward her, and instinctively she backed up. "What do they call you?"

"What?" She lifted her hand to her face, where she felt a flush rise.

"The dolphins. What is their name for you?"

She shivered. How many times had she asked herself this same question? She wanted to know her name: her real name and what they called her when she arrived on the seawall, when she dove into the cold water and reached her hand across their bellies. She wanted to know what they called after her when she left them.

She turned away from Jake, because this was the one question she wanted to answer and couldn't.

He came up beside her. "Guess that's hard to figure out?"

She noticed his eye color for the first time. Someone once told her that you never really knew someone, or could claim to have truly listened to them, unless you could tell what color their eyes were. Now she knew this wasn't true, because she'd been listening to him all along and yet just now dared to stare into his eyes: hazel with brown flecks that seemed to delve far below the surface until the flecks not so much disappeared as became something she couldn't see.

"It's very hard to prove." She shrugged. "Maybe impossible."

He tapped on the tank. "It looks like they're always smiling."

"Everyone a.s.sumes that dolphins are always happy-but they only look like that because they don't have cheeks."

He laughed. "Guess we have to be careful what we think we know because of a big old smile." He gave an overexaggerated grin, showing all his teeth.

She laughed. "I wouldn't exactly call that a smile-and I'm not sure what anyone would a.s.sume about you if they saw you like that."

Jake looked back at the tank. "Well, they do look happy . . . and also as if they really want to tell us something-like they're about to speak."

"I know . . . ," she said, walked away from him and out the back door to the parking lot.

He followed her to the seawall, jumped up next to her. She pointed toward a pod of dolphins coming toward them. "That is the Alpha pod," she said.

"I bet they don't know the names you have for them, just like we don't know the names they have for us," he said.

A quiver trembled below her breastbone, as if someone had shaken only that very particular part of her body. "What?"

"They don't know what we call them, so I guess it's only fair that we don't know what they call us." He made some loud clicking noises that sounded nothing like a dolphin.

She held in her laugh with a hand over her mouth. "They're probably calling you Dumb Human about now."

"That or maybe Big Stud."

She sat, swung her legs over the water. "Yeah, prove it."

He positioned himself next to her. "Some of the best things in life are impossible to prove."

She turned to him, her laughter gone. "Name one."

"The existence of G.o.d. Real love." He clapped his hands together. "There's two right there."