Little Secrets

  God dammit, the room was cold again. She’d had Sean set and reset the thermostat, even change the batteries. Now her face was like ice. Her toes too, way down at the bottom of the bed. Blinking, Ginny tried to see what time it was, but she’d turned the light completely off on her alarm clock. The clock had a design flaw that set the light from its brightest to dimmest levels, instead of the other way around, which meant hitting the button now would bathe the entire room in an eye-searing arc of blue-white light.

  Without the time, all she could do was convince her body to ignore the insistent need to urinate, or risk getting out of bed to pee and discover that the alarm would be going off in about five minutes. Ginny shifted again, pulling her knees up as far as she could to tuck her feet together and try to warm them. This didn’t help her bladder at all, and eventually with a small groan she flipped off the covers and eased herself out of bed.

  At least in the bathroom the night-light had a clock on it. Even though she felt like she’d been sleeping for hours, it was still only just past midnight. Another six hours before Sean would get up and she’d be up too, making his breakfast and pretending she had important things to occupy her time. She peed forever. The bathroom floor was, if it was possible, colder than the bedroom. Her teeth chattered.

  She heard the cries just as she pushed the handle to flush. They were lost immediately in the rush of water, which seemed to echo even more loudly in the dark. Ginny’s head went up, eyes wide. She imagined herself as a gazelle, nostrils flaring at the scent of a cheetah in the grass. Ridiculous, and yet she strained to hear as the noise eased.

  Nothing.

  But she had heard it, she was sure. The faint but audible and unmistakable sound of sobs. Now all that reached her were Sean’s snuffling snores and then the welcome rumble of the furnace kicking on…except that the air pushing up from the vent next to her wasn’t hot. It was far from cold, the way air-conditioning would be, but it was barely tepid.

  She was wide awake now. Even with the promise of a few more hours of sleep, even knowing she ought to relish this time before the baby came and interrupted nights would become her life for the next, oh, twenty years or something like that, there was no way she could get back to sleep. Only out in the hall did Ginny remember she hadn’t put on her slippers, and winced in advance of whatever it was that she would eventually step on.

  Ginny’s mom had been a huge fan of warm milk to aid sleep, usually with a liberal dose of cocoa and vanilla sugar added to it. Of course the sugar and caffeine negated any benefit of the milk itself, but that homemade sleep remedy had always been a treat. Ginny made hers the way her mom had, stirring it slowly on the stove so the milk didn’t burn or get a skin on the top. A perfect, creamy blend of sweetness and warmth. In her kitchen the light over the stove did little to chase away the dark, and she turned it off as soon as she’d finished making the cocoa.

  Maybe she ought to be scared in the dark, she thought with her hands wrapped around the mug as she let the heat from it bathe her face. It was still too hot to drink. She listened to the creaks and groans that were starting to become familiar. She listened for the faint sounds of sorrow, and convinced herself she’d imagined it. Maybe she should be afraid, but there was something comforting instead about standing with her back against the counter, sipping sweetness while the wind rustled the bushes outside.

  The brush of soft fur on her ankles made her jump a little, scraping the legs of her chair on the floor. Then, the jingle of Noodles’s collar. Sean must’ve found it, wherever the cat had lost it, and put it back on.

  “Hey, puss. C’mere.” Ginny reached to pet the cat but got only a waft of air as Noodles ducked out of reach. Her belly made bending under the table too awkward, and, besides, if she grabbed out in the dark, Noodles was just as likely to nip Ginny’s fingers as she was to accept the caress. “Fine. Be that way.”

  She took the mug upstairs with her, but instead of going into the master bedroom, she ducked into the library. Someday, after the garage and the landscaping and the dozens of other things they’d planned, she wanted to add bookshelves to the other two walls to match the built-ins already there. Get some comfy chairs with footstools that matched the Victorian sofa, and good lamps for reading. Maybe they could fix the fireplace in here. She imagined building a crackling fire, the smell of wood burning. Or even a gas insert, Ginny thought as she stood in the center of the room and made a slow circle. That would be cool too.

  Or hot, which would be even better, she thought with a shiver before realizing that this room, at least, was much warmer than the hall had been. Or her own room. She moved toward the window next to the fireplace and pressed her fingers to the glass. Definitely cold. But on the other side of the fireplace, the bookcase had warm air puffing out around the edges. Not just warm. Tropical. It felt so good she pressed her palm to the back of the bookcase and let the wood warm her.

  But why was it so warm? That was the question. This room didn’t face the street, but light from the streetlamps did cut across the side yard here, so with night-adjusted eyes she could make out the hardwood floor. It was also bare, with no rugs, and all the boxes had been stacked along the opposite wall. She found the floor vents easily enough, one on the left side of the fireplace beneath the window. And the other one…

  “Here,” she murmured and nudged the bookcase with her toe. The other one should be there, but they’d built the bookcase over top of it.

  She set her mug on the fireplace mantle to explore. Yep, there was a notch there in the molding along the bottom shelf. When she put her hand there, the air was so hot it almost burned her fingers. She wanted to get down on her hands and knees and bask in it. She wanted to put down a beach towel and pretend she was in the hot summer sunshine, wearing a bikini and tanning oil, frying herself on some beach someplace, instead of getting up to pee at midnight and standing in the dark, freezing, with her belly big and round and full of child.

  Instead, she contented herself with sticking one foot against the notch and warming her toes until it felt like they might start to sizzle like bacon. Then the other. Back and forth she shifted with her hands on the bookshelf to help support her weight, and her eyelids grew heavier. Like she was slow dancing, she thought sleepily. Slow dancing with the bookcase.

  Ridiculous…

  Ginny snapped awake, trying to remember if she’d heard another set of those sobbing cries or if something else had woken her. It took her a good half a minute to realize it was just her body’s way of protecting her from falling over, because she’d dozed on her feet, which were toasty warm at least. Stifling a yawn, she shuffled toward the doorway where her foot connected firmly with something furry and angry.

  “Noodles,” she scolded as the cat ran on silent feet down the hall, making shadows in front of the night-light. “Don’t you know better…”

  Ginny paused. She’d kicked Noodles because she was sitting, quiet. But when she ran, the telltale jingle of her collar had once again been silenced.

  Huh.

  Back in bed and coordinated around her multiple pillows, Ginny’s lovely sleepiness had vanished. Every time she thought she might actually be able to fall back to sleep, Sean let out another grunt or a snuffle, or he shifted in the bed and pulled the covers off her and made her cold again. He’d always been a restless sleeper, but it seemed to be worse now. Or maybe she was just more sensitive to it. At any rate, at last Ginny had to resort to her old trick of counting backwards from a hundred in order to see if she could trick her brain into shutting down.

  She got to eighteen before Sean coughed and her eyes flew open.

  Starting over, she got to thirty-seven before he let out a long, ripping fart that had her gritting her teeth.

  This time, she got to fifty before he rolled onto his back and started snoring in earnest. Ginny sat up. She leaned over and poked him. Hard.

  “Honey,” she said, her tone making the
endearment a lie. “Roll over.”

  He did with another snort and snuffle, and she lay back and stared at the ceiling, even though she knew sleeping on her back was going to be impossible and she could only last a few minutes before she’d have to move. When she rolled onto her side to look out the windows, something like the first gleam of sunrise teased her.

  She was still awake when the alarm went off.

  Chapter Seventeen

  With Sean’s hands over her eyes, all Ginny could do was laugh as he guided her. “What’s the surprise?”

  “If I just told you, it wouldn’t be much of a surprise, would it?” His breath, warm against her cheek, made her want to nuzzle against him. “Okay. Hold on a second. Don’t look until I tell you. Okay?”

  “Okay, okay.”

  She heard shuffling. The scrape of wood against wood. She knew they were in the library because he’d brought her upstairs before making her close her eyes. But what on earth could he be about?

  “Open them.”

  She did, expecting maybe a chair to match the sofa. Instead, Ginny faced her easel—which had been set up in the dormer, with a fresh new canvas in the size she liked best. Beside it was the ugly telephone table. On it rested a new palette. Tubes of paint. A cup bristling with brand-new brushes.

  “I know you threw all your old stuff away. I figured you needed some new things.”

  “Sean…”

  “Look, the light’s great right there. I mean, I’m not an artist or anything, but the sun shines in that dormer almost all day long.”

  She knew it did. She’d noticed. Ginny moved forward to look at the setup, then at him. “You didn’t need to do this.”

  “Sure I did. Consider it a late anniversary present.” Sean smiled. “Since what I got you was lame, I know.”

  She didn’t want him to feel like he had to make anything up to her. She especially hadn’t wanted him to feel like he had to do it by buying her art supplies. Yet, faced with all of this new equipment, the pretty colors, the fresh and untainted brushes, Ginny’s fingers did twitch. Just a little.

  “I got you special paints and some nontoxic brush cleaner.” He sounded so proud. “Natural pigments and stuff. So…you don’t have to worry about the chemicals.”

  It was too much. She should weep, but no tears sparked her eyes. Ginny stroked her fingertips over the canvas gently. Then she kissed him. “Thank you.”

  “You like it?”

  “It’s…so nice.” The lie hardly tasted bitter at all. “So unexpected.”

  “Now you can paint again,” Sean said. “I know you’ve been missing it. I can tell. You want to get started on something now?”

  “Later,” Ginny said. “I’ll do it later.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “I know I have it. I know I have it in a box of things I packed specifically for the house.” Ginny put her hands on her hips and looked around the smallest of the rooms on the second floor. No more than a closet really, it would be just big enough to hold a desk and a chair, maybe a set of shelves. Sean’s office. If they ever moved everything out of it anyway.

  Sean sighed and rubbed at his hair, that bad habit that always left him looking rumpled. She wanted to smooth it, to stroke down the sleek bits that always fell just in front of his ears and stroke it away from his forehead. Too many boxes blocked her.

  “What kind of a box?”

  “A file box.” She indicated the size with her hands, then pointed. “Like one of those. Like any of those, but it’s not one of those. I labeled all of them. It should be marked “Linwood.” Anything we got from Bonnie would be in there.”

  “Do we even know if we have anything about the furnace?”

  She shook her head and bit her lip. “No. I don’t know. Bonnie gave us that entire accordion file of stuff, warranties and receipts and all that. I’d imagine if there was something, it would be in there.”

  “Dammit, Ginny, the furnace guy needs to know this stuff.”

  She frowned at his tone. “He can’t figure out what’s wrong on his own? I mean, isn’t that supposed to be what he does? Figure out what’s wrong?”

  “He says he needs a ductwork schematic so he can compare it to the rooms that aren’t getting hot air. He thinks we might have a blockage somewhere.” Sean cocked his head and leaned out of the doorway to listen. “I think he’s hollering for me, let me go check.”

  “What kind of blockage?” she asked with a grimace, thinking of the sounds in the walls and imagining some sort of nest.

  But Sean was already gone, leaving her among the mess of boxes he’d made when he started tearing things apart. If he’d just looked at the labels, she thought with a sigh, bending to put back a handful of manila envelopes filled with tax returns. But of course he hadn’t. He’d expected her to magically hand him what he needed, and when she couldn’t, he’d gone willy-nilly trying to find it. And couldn’t be bothered to clean any of it up, either, she thought as she put the lid back on the file box.

  It didn’t solve the mystery of where the box had gone, though. She couldn’t even remember seeing it, to be honest, but then why would she have looked for it? The real estate agent had presented them with an enormous, in Ginny’s opinion, amount of trash related to the house. Ginny never looked at instruction manuals for any appliances she ever bought, so the chances of her ever reading through those for ones she’d inherited was equally as unlikely.

  The repairman had been there for an hour already. Ginny tried not to think about the cost as she went downstairs to the kitchen to finish the brownies she’d been baking before Sean interrupted her for the wild-goose hunt for the schematics. The company charged by the hour, plus for parts, so even if he couldn’t find and fix the problem, they were still going to be out some cash.

  “Let me just pull it out of the air,” she muttered, stirring the batter. Beating it, actually, though the recipe didn’t call for such abuse. She slowed her motion, moving the thick, gooey liquid with the wooden spoon.

  The kitchen, as usual, was blistering. She tasted sweat on her upper lip. She poured the batter into a baking pan and settled it in the oven, then set the timer. It took her only a few minutes to clean the mess she’d made, and she finished just as Sean and the repairman came up the basement stairs.

  Grunting.

  Why were they grunting?

  Ginny leaned out the kitchen doorway, astounded at the sight of her husband and some stranger wrestling with a table that looked too big to get around the sharp corner. In the way of men, they huffed and puffed commands at each other. “Turn it…tilt it…tip it…yeah, that’s it.” It sort of sounded dirty, which might’ve made her giggle if she weren’t so astonished.

  “What the…what are you doing?”

  “Take it down the hall,” Sean said to the repairman. With a grin over his shoulder at her, he said, “I got you a dining room table.”

  “From the basement?” Unable to make the angle in this direction, the men had taken the table down the hall and through the living room, but Ginny ducked into the dining room through the other doorway. “Sean?”

  They settled the table in the middle of the room, under the stained-glass light fixture. Her husband looked at her proudly while the repairman-cum-furniture hauler dusted his hands on his coveralls. Ginny could only stare.

  “That’s a nice piece,” the repairman said. “Looks like cherry.”

  Sean, still grinning like he’d brought her a diamond ring wrapped in a rainbow shat from a unicorn, slapped a hand on it. “Totally solid. Look at it. It was down in a corner, under a tarp.”

  “I remember seeing it when we looked at the house.” It was not one of the pieces Ginny’d asked to keep. She bit her tongue in the presence of the repairman, who looked like he might be easily scandalized by a string of inventive invectives.

  “Thanks for the help,” Sean to
ld him.

  The other guy nodded. “No problem. So, like I was saying, the rooms that are too hot are going to stay too hot so long as you’ve got your thermostat set so high. That’s the furnace doing what it’s meant to do.”

  Sean stepped aside to let the guy pass, heading for the front door, and Ginny peeked around the doorway to watch them. “We set the thermostat so high to keep the other rooms, the cold rooms, at least bearable.”

  “I hear ya, fella. I hear ya. But these old houses, you know, sometimes the heat just goes right out the windows. Through chinks in the insulation, whatever. But I tuned it up and reset the system. You’ve got a good unit there.” The repairman paused at the front door to look at Sean. “It would’ve been better if I knew who installed it or had a better idea about where some of those ducts went, if they installed all new ducts or if they used the old ones, or maybe piggybacked…whatever. I mean, some of those ducts look like they’re not even functioning to me, like maybe they were put in with the old unit or something. If I could tell if they put in new ducts with the new unit, that would help. But you should see an improvement anyway.”

  “Thanks.” Sean shook the guy’s hand and closed the door behind him, then turned to the thermostat and fiddled with it before looking down the hall at her. “Hey. He says it should be fixed.”

  “I hope so.” The smell of brownies had begun to permeate the air. She’d been careful not to lick the batter, no matter how tempting it had been, because of the raw eggs. Her stomach rumbled now.

  “If it doesn’t, we’ll have him come back out,” Sean said. “Hey. Brownies?”

  “They’ll be done in a few minutes.”

  “We can eat them on our new table.”

  She looked at the new-old dining room table, which was both exactly and nothing like what she’d wanted. “It’s filthy.”

  “You don’t like it? I thought you’d love it. You wanted an antique table, you said.”