Game of Secrets

by Dawn Tripp

  There’s a pull on the arm of the sofa where I sit. A thread loose. I tug at it, gently, unraveling. And still the dig of that coin in my pocket.

  It was after that last dismal blunder—speaking out loud, and then realizing I had without knowing how much or what I had said—some desperately garrulous rush, no doubt, to keep him stalled there, to keep him from walking away—it was after he and his paper-cup coffee with the plastic leaky cap had taken the three steps up and sat down on the porch next to me, and I was thrashing around in the silence, that shiver of feeling him there with me, close, a slim chance to maybe undo, atone, not knowing though where to pick up what we left off, or something like that. Then he cleared his throat, backed up a few months, before sex and other revelations, and asked me, “So Marne, why did you come home, from California?”

  And it was true, almost—the answer I gave him about sailing in the bay off Tiburon and looking back and seeing those cardboard tulip-hued houses on the shore and thinking how I could stab my finger through them—

  It is never entirely clear. What draws you back to this sort of a place, a gorgeous backwater rump of a town. You might like to think you know for sure what didn’t: a mother, for example, that nail-bitten memory of her sitting on the floor of a room upstairs, so intent on those small clothes, so lost in her folding it felt like I was the one who had disappeared.

  So what was it then? A phone call from Alex soon after Christmas. That phone call me gave a little jerk, brought me home. How could I not? But just for a moment, I told myself. Not to stay. I never thought I’d stay.

  All of this, of course, was nothing I could have begun to lay out to Ray sitting on the porch, and so instead I gave him the answer of Tiburon, and then there was a silence, a funny, tippy silence, and I looked across the yard to where some sparrows had been nesting in half a dozen unused lobster pots stacked by the shed. Those pots have sat there all spring, some of them busted up, paint chipped off the buoys, autumn olive growing out through the holes, and those sparrows keeping house. Watching them flick around there, I thought about my parents—I thought about how when you see them together, you can feel that they are still within reach of each other. Body, hands, eyes. He loves her, my father, he has always loved her, the way you can love only, perhaps, a rinsed sky.

  I have never understood it. How he—so capable, level-minded, fatalistic, and wise—could have chosen her.

  I considered remarking on this to Ray as we were sitting there, in that funny flung-over silence that had begun to feel unbearable. I considered mentioning the book about light, in an offhand sort of way—that passage I went back to last night, late, read and re-read, the one I started with that has left its glittering like footprints through my head. The one about how light holds all things—matter, motion, time, dimension, change, the living and the dead. I know it’s night logic. A truth that was never true. But today on the porch, I wanted to ask Ray if he has never noticed how it can happen: that something you know is not true can sometimes feel more real than what is.

  It took me half an instant to think all of this, to say none of it, and by then the moment had passed, and Ray was asking me if I remembered Stevie MacGregor (yes of course I did), and he told me that Stevie was working as a salvager, too, but down in Tennessee, where he made the bulk of his living diving for river mussels, selling the shells to Japan where they get crunched up, smoothed down, turned into the stuff they use to irritate oysters to grow pearls.

  There was a foot of empty space on the step between us, and it suddenly occurred to me that it might feel more right to have my shoes on, so I looked around and found them on the step below the one where we were sitting. I slipped them on.

  Ray glanced at me. “Where are you going now?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Just nowhere.”

  And he gave a little laugh and smiled like he knew that place and how to get there.

  It was less than half an hour, that time of sitting with him on the porch steps, but the grass was sun-touched, the pavement and his face near me suntouched. I could feel that glow in him I feel sometimes, that glow that comes from somewhere deep in him.

  “You’re up early today,” he remarked. I got it then: He’d come by not expecting to run into me.

  “Just that sort of day, I guess.” Creeping anguish.

  He laughed. “What sort of day would that be?”

  I didn’t have an answer, exactly, and he seemed to sense that, because he laughed again, more gently, dug the toe of his boot against a pebble on the step below the one where we were sitting and shot that little rock off the edge. It fell into a clump of daylilies. I heard it, quick-falling, through the leaves.

  From the trees by the shed, a catbird shrieked, and a handful of those sparrows sprayed out of the brush, like shot, and the yard and sky were like a Van Gogh print, everything caught up in the wind-struck throes of some violent motion.

  I could feel a pressure in my chest, like it was my turn, and he was waiting for me to come up with something to say, but all the things I might have wanted to say, or should have said, I couldn’t, and so instead I asked if there was a salvage job he had coming up, and he told me about the job he had just finished, and gave me that coin.

  Then there was absolutely less than nothing to say—nothing, except everything, changed.

  “Well, I’ll see you then,” he said, and took his paper-cup coffee and left.

  The weight of that coin in my hand hurt—the perfection of it, so simple, so slight. I shoved it into my pocket and went back inside. My parents were in the kitchen, sitting at the table, and they both looked up as I walked in, and I felt a heat go through my cheeks because I could see they had overheard and, in their minds, were playing it again—the what-if? game. Tough to win—that game. The soda bread I’d thrown together was already out of the oven—wrapped in a tea towel—nothing left for me to follow through on that front, either. I sat down in the chair where I’d been sitting before Ray showed up, half a piece of toast left on the plate I for sure didn’t want. I picked up the book about light, found my page, pushed through a line or two, then set it down, picked up a Cabela’s catalog, and started thumbing through that instead. And when my father mentioned he was going down to the garden to pick beans, I decided I was feeling a little too edgy to hang around the house, so I went with him.

  And as we walked down the hill into the shimmering heat of the green, he was humming that song, that bluegrass song, about the ’52 Vincent Black Lightning and the man who owned it, the thief who fell for a redheaded girl.

  My father took two baskets off the fence post, gave me one, and we started in, gathering beans, working down the rows. The weight of the sun lay hot across my shoulders. I could feel my hair stuck wet to the back of my neck, clots of dry earth breaking under my feet, and my father still humming that motorcycle song, that free and happy song that has a sad end, and as I felt for the beans through the infrequent shade of the vines, I thought about how he used to go out lobstering, on one of the longer trips, when he might be gone a night or two, my mother would often ask me to drive her down to East Beach. We would sit there, parked on the stones, her eyes just on the ocean, watching the horizon, like she could feel it shudder, like she could feel him out there, on the verge of reappearing on that line, beyond the range of ordinary sight.

  At the end of the third row, my father straightened up, took off his cap, wiped sweat from his brow with his sleeve. And it was as he was setting his cap back on again that I asked him. In spite of what had happened on the porch, or maybe because of it—I have never asked him, and only today I did—standing in the green light-soak of the garden—I asked him if my mother ever mentioned that boy, ever spoke of him at all, that son of theirs who died, whose name was Samuel.

  It was the name that stopped him. I felt it more than saw it, felt something in him catch. He looked at me, looking directly into the scorch of the sun that came from behind me.

  “No,” he said.

  “Do you thi
nk she’s forgotten?”

  “No.”

  And that was all. He started working down the next row. Strange. After years of wanting to know and not knowing, wanting to ask and not asking. It was that simple. I had asked, he had answered, it was done. I took a breath.

  “Why did you marry her?”

  This time he did not stop, he did not turn or look at me, he kept on working down the row, twisting beans from the vines, his hands calm, efficient, swift.

  “There was no one else,” he muttered, loud enough for me to hear, his voice with a gruff indifference like he’d decided once and for all just to say it straight-up, dash any romantic inkling I might have had and just be done with it, give me the unsweetened truth as it stood, since wasn’t that what I was asking for?

  I felt my throat close. No one else? No other half-reasonable option?

  He looked up, still working down the row, and saw me stopped, just frozen there, staring at him.

  “What the hell’s wrong now?” he said, his voice kind of annoyed. It was unlike him, that tone. He tore off a bean, taking vine with it, and shook his head. “You’re looking for a fancy answer. Well, Marne, you should know better, you won’t get that sort of answer from me. That’s just the way of it. There was no one else but her. Never was before, never since.”

  * * *

  The woods now, blue. This side of evening. The lengthened shadows of the trees wrung through the yard. In the kitchen, the timer rings. I hear her opening the oven door, the baking dish slid from the rack, a muted thud as she places it onto the counter to cool. Through the window, the world steeped in sapphire—stones, trees, grass—drunken over in that blue, soaked down.

  A faint scent, from a flower in the sun-window.

  My mother has a gift with things green, which is why I felt quite sure she’d have no trouble with that orchid. But when I look at it now on the end table where it’s kept—its stripped, failed self—I wish she’d get along and junk it. Let go of what’s past losing. Move on.

  From my pocket I draw out the coin; its edge is smooth, unridged. I wonder if it was always that way, or if it was the unseen workings of the sea that wore it down.

  Above the orchid on the wall, that black and white of her—the girl on the bridge. I see that snapshot now and it’s clear to me. She was looking right through the camera—right through the man—whoever he was—who took it. She was seeing something, though. You can see that in her eyes. They are not empty, not flat at all, but filled. That unusual expression in them—her mind like moving water, wind, sky—so much of what I know.

  Outside, it is still not dark. Long summer twilight lasting. Just going on. I can hear my father down back, behind the shed, splitting wood.

  Do you think she’s forgotten? I had asked him down in the garden.

  For three years in my twenties, after New York but before California, I lived in Taos, New Mexico, I worked in a café near the Rio Grande gorge that served breakfast burritos all day, and almost made the mistake of getting married. It was a long relationship, a bad relationship that ended badly, and when it was over I came home for a month before I threw myself at LA. And one night, during that month I was home, my mother, Ada, and Vivienne Butler were going over to Newport Jai Alai. Vivi asked if I wanted to come along, and I went.

  It was a seedy place, that Newport Jai Alai, everything laid over with a fake-gold grime. We sat up in the lounge, looking down through the glass to the courts where men hurled that ball around with the long sticks banded to their arms. We sat in a row of chairs, my mother at one end, an empty seat beside her that soon was taken by a man, some slick-haired natty, alone and not unhandsome. He offered her a cigarette, which to my astonishment she accepted, he lit it for her, murmured something, she laughed. Smoke glowed around her hair.

  There was an air about her that night, as she sat casually drinking her liquor from the cheap plastic cup, with her betting stubs in her hand, her cigarette, next to the well-dressed stranger who kept trying to chat her up, she kept blowing him off, but that air about her—that lovely, disenchanted air—disdainful even, yet intimately so—how at ease she seemed, more at ease than any one of us, even Ada, in that seedy glint of a place, as if this, all along, was the sort of life she had been intended for.

  At one point in the evening, as I was watching her and thinking this, she turned and her eye caught Ada’s, a look exchanged between them, complicit, sly, then her gaze shifted to me, and what unnerved me was the composure in her face as she considered mine, before she turned away back to the courts. It was a look that, as I considered it later, bespoke a certain clarity of mind, a lucidity and intelligence that I knew in that moment I had not accounted for, and still failed to understand.

  What do you think she knows?

  ——

  I glance at the book about light, closed. Inside though, between those pages, in the scattered notes, pencil smoke, stale ash. A drift not meant to be gleaned, as good as unwritten, unread, not meant, maybe ever, to be. From the kitchen, the smell of onion, the smell of chicken baked and on the cool, sharp smells, smells of home, on a draft come through an open window, a draft that has touched her hands, and is touching me now.

  My head hurts, not in the usual way, but like I can hear a whole sky of stars.

  Footsteps then, hers, soft down the hall. She walks into the room behind me.

  WINDOW

  JANE

  July 23, 2004

  Ada is looking at something over my right shoulder. It takes me a moment to realize what, then I do.

  “You know what it is about those lilies?” she says. “It’s not just them themselves as much as how they bloom this time of year—when the world reeks of summer, and every smell reminds you of some other summer come before.”

  I know the smells she means: blueberries, corn on the ripening, the smell of hay, just cut—smells so dank and rich, so much of this place, no other. And when the wind comes around, as it will in the afternoons this time of year, driving out of the southwest, driving in that cooler, sharper salt tang off the ocean—sea-muck, fish, the mudflats at low tide—by those smells, you know just how it looks: the river laid out, all gloss rippled silver against the black static masses of the marsh islands: Little Ram, Lower Spectacle, Ship Rock.

  It’s how you know a place, isn’t it? By its smells. Year in, year out. It’s not a thing you learn. It’s a thing you know—the differences, for example, between the smells of a dry summer and the smells of a wet one. You map the changes in a place by how those smells change.

  Ada takes her turn. She drops two letters, two vowels. Makes the word A-N-E. Six points. She must have crap in her rack to play such a dinky dink.

  “I never used to question it,” she says. “When you’re done, you’re done. There’s no little part of you left over. It was always so cut and dry for me before. I suppose it comes with getting older, Janie, the future starting to look a little skimpy up ahead.” She pauses then, a soft reluctant smile. “This morning, though, I woke up early, so early, such a still and lovely morning, a perfect day. I took my coffee out onto the porch, and as I was sitting there, in that beautiful lonesome morning, I thought about a window in the house where I grew up, that window with the beveled panes on the south side. Every time my pa walked by that window, he swore he saw an Indian woman sitting inside smoking a pipe by a fire he knew wasn’t there. ‘You’ve gone pixilated, Ernest Lyons,’ my mother would say, ‘clear around the bend.’

  “As a child, though, I looked for her. That woman. In between chores, milking cows or filling the woodbox, I’d hunt up some excuse to go by that window ten times a day, hoping for a glimpse. Never did see her.”

  Her fingers drift back to the tiles in her rack, touching one. We are always, it seems, touching these tiles.

  “You asked before about that summer, Janie,” she says, “the summer they opened that new road. That was the year before I left Silas, before I moved with the boys into that ratty old Colonial down the street from y
ou.” She glances up, I nod, and she goes on. “One night that summer, I remember, I went out driving with Junie. It was just him and me in the car. He’d done something crazy to his ’59 Galaxie Sunliner and wanted to take me for a drive. He knew I loved to go fast. We took the highway. The new road. They hadn’t yet opened it all the way down, but we couldn’t keep off it—eleven miles of drag strip—none of us could keep off that road. That night on the highway, we took the hill and he punched it, buried the speedometer. We hit the rise at full speed. All four tires lifted, I swore it after, we were on air—”

  Her voice breaks off. And it occurs to me that this is how it happens, how every story will come back to the one you cannot tell. I know that she is thinking about Green. She never says it. But I will feel it, sometimes, between us, like the air is drenched.

  One afternoon, when I was pregnant with Marne, there was a storm. Alex was just six. He and I were alone in the house. He sat up at the table in the kitchen with his coloring paper and crayons. I was peeling carrots at the sink. The rain beat against the window, it started coming down hard, and we could hear how the time between the lightning flash and the thunder grew shorter as the storm drew near. Once, when a flash of lightning struck, the yard outside turned a sudden white. The overhead light trembled. Alex left his crayons, and I sat down in the chair. He crawled up into my lap. “Mommy,” he asked, “what makes thunder happen?” His hands were tight and damp around my neck, his breath hot, and I knew I could give him some answer about fronts, about waves of warm air meeting up against the cold and, at the same time, I knew all he was really asking was how not to be afraid.

  He was nine the night Green died. It was later than I should have let him stay up on a school night. We were downstairs, Alex and I, on the sofa in the front room watching television, three-year-old Marne asleep in my arms, and Carl had just called from the wharf to say his boat was in, he would be home soon.