Secret Language

by Monica Wood

  “You’re supposed to be in bed,” Faith says, moving toward her.

  Connie looks wretched, angry, in pain. Her hair is plastered against her face in lank strands. She straightens up, teetering still, the green bathrobe shivering at the edges. Faith sees how wrong the bathrobe is, its frills and flutters hanging useless as dead leaves on Connie’s slender, branchlike body.

  Connie’s lower lip pulls away from her teeth, quivering. “She never does this right.” Her voice is broken as static. It is a moment before Faith realizes she is crying. Connie beats her casts gently against the blankets, the full outlet of her frustration thwarted by the threat of pain. She cries out, a primitive mutter, then thumps her arms, two useless tubes, at the air.

  Faith imagines herself like this, bound and helpless.

  “I’ll do it,” Faith says. She tucks her arm around Connie’s waist and helps her back into bed. She pulls off the bedspread, then lifts it like a magic cape, billowing it back down on her sister. She fixes it to the exact edge of the bed. “Like that?” she says.

  Connie nods. She starts to wipe her tears and knocks her cheek with her right-hand cast. “Damn!” she says, and rocks her head back, her sweaty hair a blot against the clean pillow.

  Faith gives the bedspread another yank. “There.”

  Connie lifts her head, examines the arrangement of blankets. “Thanks.”

  Faith sits on the edge of the bed.

  “I miss my coma,” Connie says.

  Faith laughs a little, hoping this is a joke. “Ben says he’s been playing for you.”

  Connie barely moves her head. She seems exhausted from the effort of crying, of standing up. “He’s not bad, you know. He wants to be Isadora.”

  “I hope he’s not a bother.”

  “He’s an angel.” Connie smiles. “You’re so lucky.”

  At first, Faith can’t place it. Something about Connie’s face. She has watched this face for weeks now, against various pillows, and the face has changed somehow, in that slow way you recognize all at once. Her bruises are gone except for a mild, yellow-green disk lingering over one temple. The stitches on her forehead have disappeared, a small pink scar materialized in their place. After this healing, Faith expected to see Connie again, but this is not Connie: the darkened hair, the clipped, naked nails, the unprotected face, the eyes defined by nothing but their own color. The feathery eyebrows have grown in, and the lips are dry and peach-colored. What Faith begins to recognize is recognition itself, like the first time she saw her own face in the face of her sons. This is indeed Connie, but it is the Connie she has not looked upon for a long time. Stripped of her makeup, her work, her furious hurry, she looks no more than fourteen. Faith has not looked upon this face for more than twenty years.

  “Faith,” Connie says. She’s whispering, looking into the bedspread.

  “Yes?”

  “I’d like a drink.”

  Faith stands up and pats the bedspread down. “You mean water, or apple juice or something?”

  “No.”

  “You mean wine, scotch, something like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re on medication.”

  “Please, Faith.” Her eyes are glittering; she might be about to cry again.

  “I’m supposed to be taking care of you. They said no alcohol. They even wrote it down.”

  “Please.”

  “You don’t know how much you’ve been through.”

  “You don’t know how much I want a drink.”

  They stare at each other a moment, then Connie backs down, a deeper shadow in the pillow.

  “I’ll get you some apple juice,” Faith says, and turns from the room, the bed, her sister’s need.

  Downstairs it’s five o’clock. Nancy waits by the door with her coat on, watching Joe and Chris come up the walk.

  “I’m leaving,” she says.

  “See you,” Faith says. And then: “When you do the bed, would you bring the spread up a few more inches? She likes it to be exactly even with the edge.”

  Nancy nods grimly. “You two are the limit,” she says, then starts out, her galoshes slopping against the snow-damped porch steps. Joe says something to her as they pass on the walk, and Nancy smiles at him, her deep wrinkles jamming against the knitted border of a tied-too-tight pullover hat.

  “You’ve certainly got her charmed,” Faith says when he gets inside.

  “Pity the woman,” he says, smiling. “My God, working for Felix Unger and Felix Unger, what a fate.” With a dish towel in each hand, he’s holding an entire lasagna, another gift from the family. “Will and Sarah,” he says, lifting it to show her.

  Chris breezes past, wordless, his face ruddy but stern. Ben, who is still tinkering with his guitar strings, says something to his brother, and to Faith’s surprise Chris snarls at him.

  “ ’Scuse me for living,” Ben says cheerfully, winding a tuning peg with renewed vigor.

  “Hold it, pal,” Joe says, but Chris ratchets himself past his father, throws his jacket over the newel post, and bolts up the stairs.

  “Was that my son?” Faith says, looking up the stairs as if watching the plumy trail of the Roadrunner.

  “Her Majesty probably broke up with him again,” Ben offers from the living room. “It’s either that or his shooting slump.” Chris’s sudden blackness has somehow made Ben lighter, as if the emotional content of the household ran on a careful ledger, a zero-sum.

  “It’s all this confusion,” Faith mutters, heading into the kitchen for Connie’s apple juice. “I thought he’d be better about all this.” She pauses. “I suppose he had to figure it out sooner or later.”

  “Figure what out?” Joe says, setting the lasagna on the stove, removing his jacket, in for the evening.

  She waves her hand upward, in the general direction of Connie’s room. “That it’s not all sing-alongs and holidays.”

  She senses Joe behind her, then feels his fingers around her elbow. “I think he already knows that,” he says into her ear. “His father lives on the other side of the goddamned city.” She whirls around to answer, or not answer, and finds Ben standing behind him, his newly strung guitar hung like a baby in his arms. On his face she sees a look she remembers. Your father and I … she had told him. Honey, sometimes, even when two people love each other … He had never fought it, neither of them had, they had just accepted the divorce as part of their life, a resignation that had rumbled in Faith’s conscience like an aftershock ever since. She never expected them to be docile. By making it easy, they had made it hard.

  “Ben?” she says, and Joe grimaces, turns around. “Will you tell Connie I’m on my way up?” Ben regards them suspiciously, then turns to go.

  “I’m sorry,” Joe says. “I didn’t know he was standing there.” He leans against the counter while she pours out some juice.

  “I just don’t like all these—these people in my house,” she says. She picks up the juice, puts it back down.

  He slides his arm around her, tugs her gently, until she lays her face against his shirt. “You’re a trouper, Faith.”

  “I’m not. I’m just putting one foot in front of the other.” She relaxes some against him. “Stewart’s coming this Saturday.”

  “Where are you going to put him?”

  “He can stay at Connie’s.” She sighs. “All these people. Greg and Amy were here most of last evening after you left. They brought two casseroles, for God’s sake, and then stayed, thinking they were helping me, I guess.”

  Joe chuckles a little. “Brian and Maggie are coming tonight with Mom.”

  She pulls her head away, looking at him. “Your family is killing me with kindness.”

  “They’re still your family, too.”

  “I hate making conversation. I just want to hide in a blanket. I don’t want to see anybody else.”

  “Does that include me?”

  “No,” she says, and because it is not exactly she herself who has said it—rather some
exhausted, stripped-away version of herself—she realizes how much she means it.

  She relaxes against him once again, fixed in his warm hold. She wonders what others might think of these husbandly attentions in the wake of a divorce. To her they feel natural, and she knows now that Brenda was right: he never left her. They begin to drift into home talk: Ben’s guitar-playing, Chris and Tracy.

  “What’s gotten into him lately?” she says suddenly. “He used to be so easygoing.”

  “Today’s a car problem, Faith.”

  She closes her eyes. “Do I want to hear this?”

  “Nope. He got back-ended by a pickup in the school parking lot.”

  “God, what next. Tell me no one was hurt.”

  “No one was even there. Some kid left his truck in neutral, and it rolled down the lot and hit the Corvair while Chris sat in some classroom solving for x.”

  Faith has always suspected cars of having secret lives outside of human sight, and now she knows. A thought strikes her. “Wait a minute, the engine’s in the back.”

  “Right,” Joe says grimly. “I haven’t taken a look yet. Naturally the other kid is uninsured.”

  “Poor Chris.” She’s thinking of Joe’s old car, her first ride in it. “He must be heartbroken.”

  “It feels like it happened to me,” Joe says. “I told him I’d tow it back here with the truck tomorrow.”

  “You’re going to fix it yourself, aren’t you,” she says.

  “Probably. I’m a sucker for broken things.”

  She moves gently away from him. His arms hang like dead branches. “It’s not your car, Joe.”

  “I know that.”

  “He should fix it himself.”

  “It’ll take him forever.”

  Faith picks up the juice glass on the counter. “That’s how long some things take.” The single toll from Connie’s bedside bell comes as a relief, for Faith is afraid of the web of Joe’s arms, afraid of all it makes her want, all the possibilities for failed hope.

  “Wait,” he says.

  “She doesn’t ring unless she’s desperate.” She moves farther away.

  “Faith, I want to come back.”

  “Don’t, please,” Faith whispers, her eyes cast down. He begins to set the table, readying the kitchen for dinner as if he had never left. Faith can’t bear to watch, and retreats upstairs.

  “I have to pee,” Connie says from her bed. She is half in, half out, trying to right herself. Faith hurries over and catches her around the waist, setting down the glass with her free hand.

  “I thought Ben was up here with you.”

  Connie hops down on her good foot and leans against Faith, her hard angles pressing into the soft spots on Faith’s body. “I told the poor kid to take a break.”

  They hobble down the hall to the bathroom like one slow-moving creature. In the bathroom Faith props Connie against the wall and lowers the toilet seat. “I tell them and tell them,” she sighs, then turns Connie around. Connie makes the effort to help, but her bound hands are useless as stumps; it is Faith who hikes up the nightgown, pulls down the panties, helps her onto the seat. She pulls a wad of tissue from the holder, and Connie bunches it between the tips of her fingers. Faith steps out to wait beside the door.

  On the first day, they had concocted a bathroom routine that would cause the least embarrassment. Connie decided that once she was sitting she could, with effort, tend to herself and with her elbow reach the flush handle behind her. Faith would then return, lift her sister, pull up her underwear and help her stand—as she does now, squaring Connie under the arms as if they were about to have a dance. After a lifetime of not touching, there is suddenly nothing that doesn’t require the laying on of hands. Faith knows the knobby wings of Connie’s shoulder blades, the tender flesh of her upper arms, the pickets of her ribs, and the hard pucks of vertebrae stacked the length of her back. She knows the disappearing bruises on her face, the dwindling weight, the dry nails, the tiny slits in her earlobes that used to hold small, shiny earrings.

  “Would you like me to wash your hair?”

  Relief spreads over Connie’s face, a buttery glow. “Nancy offered, but I’m so sick of strangers with their hands all over me.”

  Faith sizes up the tub, the sink. “We’ll figure this out.” She helps Connie sit on the floor at the side of the tub. Between Connie’s neck and the rim of the tub Faith places a folded towel. “That’s how they do it at the hairdresser’s.” She fishes a basin out from under the sink and fills it with warm water. “Tilt your head back,” she says, then pours the water over Connie’s hair, baptism-style, starting at the forehead.

  “Ahh,” Connie says.

  As Faith’s hands work around the hard ridges of her sister’s scalp, she is visited by a dim remembrance, not of a time or place, but a motion, as if she had washed her sister’s hair a thousand times. Perhaps it’s the memory of her own hair, her own head, so like Connie’s in texture and shape.

  Faith sits back on her haunches, toweling Connie’s wet head. “It feels good,” Connie says. “Thanks.” She pauses. “If I were in Paris my next stop would be the bidet.”

  Faith pauses. “I could give you a bath.” Connie looks at the tub, her foot, her arms. “We can do it,” Faith says.

  They do. Faith helps Connie off with her clothes and sits her on the edge of the tub. After removing her own shoes and socks and rolling up her slacks, she steps into the water herself, locks her elbows under Connie’s armpits, and slides her carefully backwards until Connie is sitting crossways in the tub, her feet dangling over the side, her back against the tiled wall, her arms uplifted, safe from the water. “Oh,” Connie says. “Thank you. You can’t imagine how good this feels.”

  Faith soaps a washcloth and begins to wash her sister, careful to avoid the casts. She washes her face, her neck, her back, gently, for there are tender spots, still, all over. She works her way down, looking discreetly away.

  They say nothing to each other, do not look at each other, yet Faith’s hands are sure, they do what they must, they are taking care in a way that seems to have nothing to do with her. Her fingers tingle with lost sensations: the soap-slicked surface of Delle’s thrashing body; the peachy wet contours of her baby boys’ scalps; the magnificent ridges of her new husband’s back, hot soap bubbling between her hands and his skin. She has not felt or remembered these things since they happened, and recalls them now only as a curious drumming in her fingertips. Her hands drift easily over the bony contours of her sister’s body, as if she had repeated these motions every day of her life, as if they were embedded deep in her muscle memory, as if she had an intimate acquaintance with the tender machinations of care.

  TWO

  The cards came first by the bunch, then by the handful, and now two days have gone by without a word from anyone but Stewart. She lies in bed, sits up, looks out the window, listens to the radio, but there is no escaping. She’s stuck with her own company. Sometimes she presses her casts to her ears, hoping to hear the bones curing.

  Because she can’t bear to remember the crash or the people in it, because she can’t bear the idea of moving ever again through a cabin full of unsuspecting faces, her thoughts careen far back, before her flying days. When Faith stops in to check on her, feed her, help her into the bathroom, Faith could be seven, or nine, or fourteen, the two of them fending for themselves again, defining a weird, wordless domesticity in the midst of chaos.

  They are circling, circling, holding. It is all they have ever done.

  When the present does show itself, it is defined by the walls of Faith’s house, Faith’s life. Connie watches her from the window, planted like a snowman in her yard, flanked by burlap-covered shrubs and flower beds, offering seeds to her restive birds. Where does it come from, this careful tending, this affection for the natural world?

  Faith’s care is something she did not expect, and yet every detail of it, every slip and hollow of its generous landscape, is familiar as a face. Fa
ith’s cool fingers, as she smoothes down the lotion Connie has crudely dolloped onto her own face, are fingers Connie knows. Her dainty tugs, as she coddles the clothing on and off Connie’s body, feel practiced and reassuring. And though Connie sometimes yearns to tear herself from her own body, to beat down the front door of her own apartment to be sure it is still there, when she’s being ministered to by Faith there is no place else, no other time or inclination, there is simply a tending that she submits to.

  But the other times. Alone with Nancy and the dog in the doldrums of a winter day, unwilling to ask for anything, give anything. She has thought of firing Nancy, of taking her chances waiting alone with the dog for the house to fill up, first with Ben home from school, then Faith home from work, then, later, Joe, with the wheel-less Chris in tow from basketball practice; but she needs something besides her own confinement to arm herself against, and so she arms herself against Nancy, secretly enjoying the collusion this rebellion fosters between her and Faith.

  Faith’s care of her is larger than she expected. Joe’s family marches in and out, by ones and twos, in predictable shifts throughout the week for short check-ins, like a platoon on maneuvers. Joe Senior, shy and rattled, has come once. Phoebe comes every day. She brings nail polish, magazines, sympathy. Connie remembers her amazement at the first glimpse of Joe’s family, at a Sunday dinner so long ago. Their health and benevolence had been curiously forbidding then, but now, in her diminished state, she welcomes them. Joe’s brothers, with their heavy shoulders and dark voices, arrive at the door of her room behind their wives, and Connie tells them she’s better, and she is, for seeing them there, for these brief appearances that seem designed to show her simply that they exist.

  Under the surface of all this care, two things fester.

  One, Isadora has not called. Connie slides a little lower into the covers, listening to the quiet house, hoping that the phone will ring and it will be Isadora, out of breath and full of news. Faith placed a call to San Francisco on Connie’s first day here, and Isadora had chattered about the show, the show, the show, a sprightly monologue. Since then, Connie has envisioned her baby sister singing in some rehearsal hall by day, riding the trolley with her leading man by night, telling him about her big sister, the one who survived a plane crash, the one who scared her half to death—to death!—by steeping herself in a twelve-day coma. But Isadora has not called.