The Language of Secrets

by Dianne Dixon

  Ari caught up to Justin and fell into step beside him. “Since I’ve already pissed you off, we might as well go ahead and get into it.”

  “There’s nothing to get into. I’ve told it to Amy; now I’m telling it to you. What happened out here a couple of weeks ago was an accident.” Justin sprinted away again. Ari caught up to him and said: “Is it possible that there are no accidents?”

  “You’re sounding like a shrink.”

  “I am a shrink.” Ari shrugged. “But even if I was nothing more than a new friend and neighbor, which I also happen to be, it wouldn’t get past me that you didn’t answer my question.”

  “All that happened was I went for a swim and I got tired. I couldn’t make it back in.” Justin slowed his running and came to a stop. Ari did the same.

  Observed from a distance, they could have been taken for brothers. They were nearly identical in height and coloring. Justin stepped in close to Ari, warning him. “I didn’t come out here that day to try to fucking kill myself.”

  “I saw you go in,” Ari replied, “and I saw the look on your face when you started to swim out. You may not have been aware of it at the time, but it’s entirely possible that you went into that water wanting to commit suicide. And if I’m right, that’s serious. We need to talk about it.”

  “It’s bullshit.” Justin started to move away. Ari stepped in and blocked him. “I was there,” Ari said. “I helped save your ass. I helped pull you out of the water. And I am, in fact, a goddamned shrink. I know what I saw. Now tell me what the fuck really happened.”

  Justin shifted his gaze away from Ari’s before he spoke. “Maybe you’re onto something. I don’t know. But I can’t get into it right now. It’s too complicated, okay?” As Justin turned back to look at Ari, he saw a lifeguard from a private club farther up the beach sprinting in his direction.

  The lifeguard shouted, “Yo, TJ!” and Justin replied, “Yeah!”—a response that was automatic and instantaneous. It was the reply of a man instinctively answering to his own name; and as he did it, Justin went pale. But the lifeguard didn’t notice; he’d already run past and was exchanging boisterous greetings with a kid carrying a boogie board.

  For a moment, Justin and Ari remained silent. Then Ari came closer. He was mapping every nuance of Justin’s face as he said: “Who’s TJ?”

  The question hit Justin like a grenade. His body buckled under the impact. He slowly collapsed onto the sand and began to tremble. He was in a barrel-rolling darkness, and in the darkness there was a black cocker spaniel puppy with a sky blue ribbon around its neck and a grand piano imploding and the sound of music being shattered and the bitter-sharp smell of gun oil and a click! and a small perfect circle of cold as the barrel tip of a cocked rifle pressed against his temple and his own voice in an eerie childlike register sang the words “Do I Know My Name Yes I Do Yes I Do” and a flow of blood snaked away, coiled back, and snaked away again.

  Ari stood over him and repeated, “Who’s TJ?”

  Justin was shaking so violently, he could hardly speak. And when he replied, “He’s the other me,” he vomited. Puke splattered up from the sand and frothed onto him, foul and chaotic; and he heard Ari ask: “What do you mean, ‘He’s the other me’?”

  “I don’t know,” Justin whispered. “God help me. I don’t know.”

  Caroline and Robert

  822 LIMA STREET, DECEMBER 14, 1975

  *

  It was, in a word, fabulous. Its exterior: a mirror-smooth mocha frosting dusted with scatterings of hazelnuts. The interior: four towering layers, each separated by silken bands of cream laced with brandied cherries.

  Caroline had placed this majestic creation on a cut-glass cake stand that had belonged to Robert’s mother. Now she was putting it on the old oak table in the center of the kitchen. It looked dazzling—and out of place, like an emperor’s crown deposited on a workbench.

  “Well,” Caroline asked. “What do you think?”

  “Big,” Justin said. He was wide-eyed with delight at the magnitude of Caroline’s handiwork. Lissa lifted him up so that he could get a better view of it.

  “Isn’t that the best cake you ever saw, Justin? Ever?” Lissa asked.

  Julie was on the other side of the table, studying the cake. “Mommy, did you really make this all by yourself?”

  “Yes, Mommy made it all by herself.” Caroline put her hand to her forehead in a gesture of mock exhaustion. Then she winked and said, “And, I made a really big mess doing it, so I’m going to need help cleaning up before Daddy gets home and it’s time for his party.”

  “We’ll help. We’ll clean the beaters.” Julie pulled the frosting-covered beaters from the electric mixer and gave one to Lissa.

  “Me, too. Me, too!” Justin held out his hand.

  “When you’re finished,” Caroline told the girls, “you can put the candles on the cake.”

  Justin immediately tugged on Julie’s sleeve. “Candles, please.” She shrugged him off. “You can’t light candles, Justin. You’re too little.”

  Justin was indignant. “Not too little. I’m three!” Lissa picked him up and hugged him. “Don’t worry, Justin. When you’re almost eight, like me, you’ll be able to do candles, too.”

  “Justin, for now you can hold the candles,” Caroline said. “And it will be your job to give them to Lissa and to Julie when they ask, okay?” She gave him a handful of candles and he happily began dispensing them to his sisters.

  It was five-thirty. December. The world outside was already dark. The kitchen was filled with warm butter yellow light, and as Caroline watched her son’s happiness, she was in a gentle reverie. She was remembering driving away from a lunch at the Baldwin Hotel and sensing that she might be pregnant. She was remembering that before she had even turned onto the freeway that would bring her back to Lima Street, she had decided that if the child was a boy, she would name him for the beautiful quiet place in which, earlier in the day, she had touched purity. She would name him Justin.

  As Caroline turned her attention back to the kitchen, she experienced an inexpressibly sweet feeling of happiness. She saw Julie and Lissa, busy decorating Robert’s cake; Justin, trailing after them, holding out additional candles for the taking; and the dog, circling the room, its tail softly thumping against chair legs and cabinet doors. Moments like this proved to her that she’d succeeded in giving her children the exquisite gifts of a home and security—gifts her childhood had never given to her.

  In Caroline’s growing up, there had only been herself and her mother. When Caroline would ask about her father, her mother’s response was always the same: “You don’t have one.” Then there would be a contemptuous laugh, and she would add: “He’s gone.”

  He had never been there, and so Caroline was free to endow him with mythic importance, to believe with all her heart that there was nothing more powerful than the magic that came from not being a fatherless child.

  It was to a father’s absence that young Caroline attributed the knockabout life she and her mother lived.

  He wasn’t there. And they moved from one place to another, often in the dead of night, frequently just steps ahead of a bill collector or lecherous landlord. Never safe. Never settled.

  And once, when Caroline had needed school clothes, she stood beside her mother in a department store and watched an application for credit being dropped into a wastebasket. Charge accounts, the saleslady said, were not available to divorced women. To Caroline, the label divorced had sounded nasty, like a stain.

  A father wasn’t there, and Caroline grew up eating alone in dreary kitchens while her mother paced bleak bedrooms, becoming more bitter and distant with each change of address, with each passing year.

  Now, as Caroline watched Lissa and Julie putting the last of the candles on Robert’s cake, she was thinking about how much safer her children were than she had ever been. She was remembering the earthquake that had occurred, during the time she was pregnant with Justin. It had arrived
in the early hours of the morning, breaking windows and raining chimney bricks into the fireplace. Caroline had been terrified.

  A few days later, the girls had been playing with a friend in the backyard. Caroline had heard the other little girl ask Lissa and Julie if they’d been afraid. “No,” they’d said. “We knew our daddy would save us.” And with that, Caroline had felt a wonderful joy. Her girls were not like her: damaged and needy. They were confident. They were whole.

  “Daddy’s home!” All three children were rushing past Caroline, racing toward the living room.

  She was about to follow them, when she noticed the dog. His nose was resting on the edge of the kitchen table; his attention was fixed on Robert’s cake. The dog was a large animal with an enthusiasm for food that bordered on obsession. Caroline shooed him away. He retreated to a spot near the back door but never took his eyes off the glorious cake.

  Caroline heard the opening notes of the Beach Boys’ “California Girls” boom out of the living room, and Lissa shouting: “Mommy! Mommy! Come and dance with us!”

  “Hey ‘Mommy,’ hurry up and get in here!” It was Robert calling to her now. “It’s my birthday and I want to dance with my wife!”

  “Your wife is on her way!” Caroline shouted. She picked up the cake and went to the door that led to the basement. The door was warped and required Caroline to push against it once or twice before she could get it to open. When it did, a sweep of cold air came up from the darkness of the earthen-walled area below the house.

  At the top of the steep basement stairs was a narrow landing, and a wall into which several storage shelves had been fitted. Caroline slipped the cake onto one of the upper shelves.

  “If you’re not out here by the time I count to three, I’m coming in!” It was Robert again.

  Caroline quickly closed the basement door and left the kitchen.

  In the living room, Robert was dancing with the children. The song was “Little Surfer Girl.” When he saw Caroline, he immediately pulled her toward him. Julie’s and Lissa’s attention quickly turned to determining which of them could execute a perfect cartwheel.

  Justin’s attention turned toward the far end of the hallway.

  The dog was there, leaning his considerable weight against the basement door and working to push it open.

  What happened next took only seconds.

  Justin stepped between the dog and the door just as the door gave way. It banged open and cold air rushed out, bringing the scent of cake with it.

  The dog lunged forward.

  And in that split second, there was the sound of a small body hitting against the stairs. Plummeting toward a cement floor.

  *

  “Mr. Fisher?”

  Robert looked up and saw a very young nurse standing in the doorway of the hospital waiting room. She was holding a clipboard. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I need to go over some of the information your wife gave us.”

  Justin had been brought into the emergency room less than an hour ago. Caroline rode in the ambulance. Robert followed, almost immediately, in the car, after he’d called Mrs. Marston to come and stay with the girls. But it had been Caroline who had taken care of all the paperwork. Then she had gone into the examining room to be with Justin, where she still was.

  The nurse sat down across from Robert. Her movements were tentative and awkward. “Mr. Fisher, I need to ask you some—”

  “Whatever it is, can’t it wait?” Robert couldn’t clear his head of the image of Justin lying on his back, motionless, his gaze seemingly fixed on the landing above him—and on the dog, frantically circling and barking.

  Robert hadn’t noticed when Justin left the living room. He hadn’t heard the scream Justin must have screamed when he began his fall toward the cement floor. Now all Robert could think about was why he had been so blind and deaf. He was sickened by the thought that his lack of connection to his own son had somehow contributed to the awful thing that had happened.

  He had tried to rectify his problem with Justin countless times. But he had never found a way to do it. At some point, he had decided to establish a connection with Justin by taking him on a special father-son outing. Each time Robert discussed this idea, he saw the joy it gave Caroline—and each time his lack of feeling for Justin prevented him from making it a reality, he saw how much it wounded her.

  Robert swore to her time and again that things would change. He needed, desperately, to make Caroline happy. She was the map by which Robert navigated his life.

  From the first moment he had held her in his arms, he had been amazed, obsessed, and afraid. And he’d stayed that way for the entirety of his marriage. He was still amazed that a woman so beautiful and sexual would have him; he was obsessed with keeping her, and afraid that her love for him was something that could be easily erased by someone with the sort of style and confidence that he could never muster.

  It was Justin who had slammed onto the concrete floor, but it was Caroline who had Robert’s attention at the moment. He was thinking about a Thanksgiving dinner four years ago, remembering how radiant she had been.

  He had no way of knowing—during that routine family gathering—that less than a month later Caroline would bring a monumental change to his life, something that would leave him stunned, and feeling furiously cheated.

  As they were all gathered around, watching Robert’s father carve the turkey, Caroline was laughing and joking with Robert’s brother, Tom. An ambergold light was pouring through the windows at the far end of the room, making everyone look resplendent and virtuous.

  It was a beautiful scene, but Robert was too restless to remain part of it. He quietly pushed back his chair and left the table. He wanted to be somewhere else. He was tired of life in the house on Lima Street. He had literally been born in the place—squirming into the world as his mother sprawled on the kitchen floor, comforted by a young neighbor named Mary Marston.

  And on the day of his birth, it seemed to Robert, the house had claimed him and marked him as its prisoner. He tried his best to escape it, but he had failed.

  He spent his teenage years constantly traveling away from Lima Street—to the beaches of Southern California, to Huntington, Trancas, and the Rincon. He had dreamed of a life in which he would craft custom-made surfboards—an existence that would never require him to wear a tie, or carry a briefcase, or possess a neatly printed business card.

  But in his early twenties, the house had abruptly reasserted its claim on him and Robert had returned to Lima Street with Caroline at his side. He had put on a tie, and picked up a briefcase—and he had felt in his pocket the weight of the newly printed business cards that bore his name.

  As Robert walked into the kitchen, Caroline was calling to him from the dining room: “I just told everyone about how you doubled the size of the agency this year.”

  He reached for the bottle of scotch that was in the cabinet above the refrigerator and heard his brother shout: “Hey, congrats, man!”

  “Yeah,” Robert shouted back. “Born to sell insurance. That’s me.” He poured himself a drink, and within seconds his mother was in the room, giving him a delicately constrained smile.

  Her voice was shivery with self-effacement as she said, “If only I could find a way not to be so terribly upset when I see a man I love with liquor in his hand.” She smiled again, this time with a coquettish sparkle. “I should try to be a braver girl, shouldn’t I? Less sensitive, more like Caroline. But I can’t help myself.” She picked up Robert’s glass and poured the scotch into the sink.

  Robert knew what was coming. He’d been hearing it for thirty years.

  “When I was a little a girl,” his mother was saying, “it was so awful to walk in here and see that my father was drinking. It was only when he drank, you know, that he was mean to my mother and me. Only then.”

  She paused and smiled another one of her pretty-girl smiles. “When he wasn’t drinking he was very kind. I see the same kindness in you, Robert. Altho
ugh now, most of it goes to Caroline, of course. But I saw it in you the moment you were born. It’s how I knew you would always be my precious gift from God.”

  She held her arms out to him, and he understood he was once more being taken captive by her delicate despotism. And he deeply resented it.

  His resentment had begun with the arrival of the acceptance letter from his first-choice college, the college his brother, Tom, was attending, the University of Hawaii. His mother had been at the kitchen table. “Oh,” she had said. “Hawaii. You’ll be so far away. And I’ll feel so alone.” Then she had looked off into some sad middle distance and sighed: “But that’s what men who are loved the best seem to do, isn’t it? They abandon you and go away.”

  Later, Robert realized that his mother had never forbidden him to go to Hawaii; she had simply prevented it by making it seem like an act of brutality.

  And after all these years, he was still in this same kitchen, with his mother slipping her arm through his and saying: “You must never tell Tom, but you’ve always been my favorite.” Her hand was cool on his skin, familiar and slightly repellent. Robert wished he could get away from her, and stay away.

  The only woman’s caress he had wanted was Caroline’s.

  It was what he was wanting now as he sat in the hospital waiting room with this fidgety young nurse. He was in need of Caroline’s touch, her presence, her assurance that she didn’t in any way blame him—or his lack of fatherly involvement—for Justin’s accident.

  Before the nurse could launch into her questions again, a burly doctor appeared in the waiting room doorway. “Mr. Fisher, your son’s been taken to X Ray,” he said.

  Robert held on to the arm of the chair as he stood; his knees were shaking. “How badly is he hurt?”

  “It’ll still be a while before we know.” The doctor was already headed back through the doorway. “I’ll come out again as soon as there’s any news.”

  As the doctor left, the young nurse was searching through the forms on her clipboard, mumbling: “Oh, gosh. I didn’t bring the right one.” She jumped up and rushed off, narrowly avoiding a collision with a shabbily dressed man who had edged his way into the waiting room. He was making a stealthy, efficient search of each trash can along the wall before moving toward the exit door. As the man walked past, Robert saw—at the bottom of his threadbare shirt pocket—the outline of a thin hand-rolled cigarette.