There are certain moments in life that you can remember with all the clarity of a photograph—where you were and who you were with and how the place looked or sounded or smelled. I can see us just as we were, the four of us sitting in Alison’s living room, Heather hunched over on the sofa, hands cradling her midsection as if holding a child, Julie in the chair closest to her, unconsciously tearing a napkin to shreds in her lap, and Alison, so startled that she’d stopped talking, her mouth falling open. Everyone so shocked by what Heather had revealed that for a long minute the only noise you could hear in the room was the faint hiss and pop of logs burning in the fireplace. These are the things I remember with perfect clarity: The slight smell of woodsmoke, the taste of cabernet, dark and dry, the table lamps casting shadows on the walls. The light from the fire illuminating the wine as I refilled my glass, a gush of liquid splashing, deep red, like blood pouring from a wound.
“Well, congratulations,” Julie said at last, voice faint and smile forced, but at least she’d thought to say it.
“Yes, that’s wonderful,” Alison said, and I echoed her, both of us trying to summon an enthusiasm we didn’t feel.
“How far along are you?” Julie said.
“I just found out a few days ago.” Heather’s cheeks were flushed; was she hurt by our muted reaction? Had she planned to surprise us tonight and instead we’d surprised her?
Alison was the one to ask, “Does Viktor know?”
Heather shook her head, giving a tremulous smile. “I haven’t told him—not yet.”
She desperately wanted us to be happy for her, for them, I could hear it in her voice. “But don’t you see, this is even more reason that you’ve got to leave,” I said. “It’s not safe for you to stay with him, not for you or your baby.”
“He wouldn’t hurt the baby.” She must have seen our skepticism, because she shook her head, insisting, “He wouldn’t. And he’s never going to hurt me again—I know he won’t.” Her voice quavered, but she met our eyes, her own wet, but sparkling with some unspoken emotion—anger? Defiance?
In the silence that followed, there was a sudden and insistent buzzing sound. “That’s my phone,” Heather said, standing up and swiping at her eyes as she tracked the noise to her purse, which was sitting in Alison’s front hall. The phone stopped ringing before she finished rooting through her bag for it. We watched her check it, as another buzz announced the arrival of voice mail and then two pings, text messages arriving, one on top of the other. Insistent sounds. Someone demanding her attention. I wasn’t surprised when she said, “I have to go.”
“Don’t leave,” Julie said, getting up, too. “Not like this.”
“I have to get home for Daniel,” Heather said. “I promised him I’d be home in time to read him a bedtime story and it’s already after eight.”
I don’t think any of us believed that it was Daniel she had to be home for, but we didn’t argue. We took turns embracing her at the door, and all of us were tearful by the end. In a shaky voice, she said, “Promise me that you won’t tell anyone. About the baby, but especially about Viktor.”
“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” I said. “It’s not your fault.”
“But I am ashamed,” Heather said, fresh tears in her eyes. “I can’t deal with other people knowing. You have to promise not to talk about it, not to anyone.”
“It’s okay,” Julie said, rubbing her back. “You’re our friend, of course we won’t.”
“No one,” Heather said. “Please. Not even your husbands. No one knows. Promise me?” Her wide-eyed, desperate gaze fell on each of us in turn.
“All right, we promise,” I said in a gruff voice, and Julie made a quick cross over her heart.
“Of course we promise,” Alison said after a minute, caught up in the moment, desperate like we all were to stop her tears. “It stays just between us.”
*
The hardest person for me not to tell was obviously Eric, but in some ways he was the easiest, too, because my husband really never asked any questions about my friends. I don’t think he gave a thought to them at all, unless I talked about them or he could tell that they had upset me in some way. If Eric noticed anything different about me, it was easy enough to tell him I was tired or not feeling well or was just experiencing PMS—the surefire way to get any man to stop asking questions. It wasn’t difficult, in that respect, to keep a secret from him, but it was hard on me emotionally.
One evening, about a week after Heather told us, he came home late from a faculty meeting to find me hunting through old law books in the living room, my laptop open on the coffee table with six different legal websites pulled up in a browser. “What’s all this?” he said, padding around the piles of books and a meowing Hansel to drop a kiss on my head. “Taking up the law again?” His hair was damp from the snow, the first flurries of the season, and icy drips fell on me, as if I were standing under a tree after a storm.
“Trying to help a friend with a question about domestic abuse and child custody,” I said, hoping he’d follow that up with some question of his own so that I’d have an excuse to talk about the situation, even if only obliquely.
“That’s nice,” he said, distracted and already moving away from me toward the kitchen. “Kids upstairs?”
“Yep.” They were playing in their rooms and I had one ear attuned for periodic thuds or faint yelps from above. I heard Eric open the refrigerator and the cats heard it, too, Hansel abandoning me for the kitchen as Gretel, our black Burmese, came padding silently down the stairs, nose lifted as if she could already smell something good. Moochers. I heard rustling sounds as Eric searched through cupboards, annoyed enough to not offer any assistance until he appeared again in the living room to ask sheepishly whether the kids and I had eaten dinner and if there were, perhaps, any leftovers.
“How could he be so oblivious? Didn’t he wonder who I was talking about?” I complained to Julie and Alison when I next saw them, although I was quick to point out that if Eric had asked I wouldn’t have broken our promise to Heather. From the slightly guilty look I saw Alison exchange with Julie, I knew that I wasn’t the only one struggling to keep it.
Perhaps to compensate for our inability to tell anyone else, Julie, Alison, and I now talked about it obsessively, whispered conversations as we huddled on the sidelines at the kids’ soccer games, or at the coffee shop if Heather wasn’t there, or during long phone conversations with one another that consisted mainly of endlessly reviewing our futile efforts to get her to leave.
Every time I saw Heather now I’d surreptitiously check her for injuries. What was that shadow on her collarbone? Was she limping? Did that sweater hide a midriff covered in welts? If she seemed to have more makeup on than usual, I automatically assumed that she was covering something, searching her face for evidence of a bruise or a black eye.
We decided to take turns doing daily check-ins, so our conversations usually opened with that. “Have you heard from Heather today? No? Okay, I’ll call her.” Or we’d drive up to her house to check on her in person, trying hard, initially, not to make it seem like we were expecting the worst so she wouldn’t get offended and shut us out.
It turned out we needn’t have worried. Now that she’d finally shared her secret, it was clear that Heather had been desperate to tell somebody about life with Viktor. It took little prompting for her to reveal the latest horrors happening in her marriage, and they were devastating.
“It was my fault—I forgot to send his shirts to the dry cleaner,” she said one afternoon, when the scarf she wore slipped and we spotted a cluster of purple spots on her neck.