The Language of Secrets

by Dianne Dixon

  Again, Robert’s thoughts went to that Thanksgiving weekend, when a joint—and then his brother, and, finally, Caroline—had led him to heartache and to violence.

  It was in the evening, after Thanksgiving dinner was over. A crisp autumn wind was scattering leaves onto the path between the house and the garden shed, and the air had the aroma of wood smoke and fireplaces in it.

  Tom was saying: “Holy crap, Robert. Does Caroline know you store your stash in Dad’s old toolbox and keep it out here where Mom grew all her little seedlings? Damn. That is priceless!”

  “Hey, it’s not just any stash.” Robert held up a plastic bag containing half a dozen joints. “What we have here, my brother, is Thai stick.” Robert removed a joint, then returned the bag to the battered toolbox. Tom leaned over and inspected the contents: a jumble of bulbless flashlights, corroded pliers, and hardened duct tape. “The old man and tools. What a joke,” Tom said.

  Robert put the toolbox back on its shelf above the shed door, and he and Tom walked toward the house. As Tom took the joint from Robert, he lit it and said: “You’ve done a great job with the old palace, Rob.” They stood, passing the joint between them, studying the house: the place Tom had escaped and Robert had resurrected.

  Eventually, Robert and Tom drifted around the side of the house and onto the front porch. They sank into a pair of wicker chairs, putting their feet up on the table that was between them. There was a slight movement at the other end of the porch, and Robert realized Caroline was there.

  She was almost lost in shadow, lying in the wide wooden swing, her head pillowed against its arm and her legs tucked under a light blanket. She looked as if she’d slipped off to sleep.

  It pleased Robert to see that Caroline was nearby; he gave himself over to the lazy haze of a sweet high. He was mellow and, for the moment, content to be with his brother. “How’s Hawaii?” he asked.

  “Good,” Tom said. “The university pays me to read and talk about the same great books I would read for free. I’m adored by my female grad students. I get laid on a regular basis and I can see the Pacific Ocean from the back door of my apartment.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got a lot to be thankful for.”

  “No more than you. You have the big house. Beautiful wife. Great kids. The premier insurance agency in dear old Sierra Madre. You’ve grown up to be the son Dad always wanted, man.”

  “Yeah,” Robert said. “Happy Thanksgiving to us all.” There was a quick, creaking sound, as if Caroline had moved ever so slightly in the swing. Robert was immediately uneasy, wondering if she was awake, worried that she might have heard the undercurrent of sarcasm in his voice.

  Tom held the joint up as if he was saluting Robert with it. “To the Fisher boys and all that they have become!” He chuckled. “Man, back in the day, who would’ve thought you and I would ever be sitting out here smoking dope, with Mom and the old man upstairs, and us not giving a shit if they come down.”

  Robert laughed. “Oh, we’d give a shit. We’d be back being thirteen again in a blink. Because we’re high and it’s half-dark and the old man would be in the doorway, backlit from inside the house. And he’d look like a ham-handed linebacker waiting to kick our butts.”

  “He ever kick your butt, Rob?”

  “Nah. He talked about it a lot though.”

  “He used to pound me like sand.” It was only Tom’s voice that was available to Robert; his face was obscured by the gathering darkness.

  “I don’t remember him ever hitting you,” Robert said.

  “Not that kind of pounding. The ‘in the name of making you a man, my son’ kind. Every football practice, every game, he’d be there standing on the other side of that chain-link fence—for hours. And then later he’d tell me how I needed to be more of a hustler here, less of a hotshot there. You remember how it was, every night at dinner.”

  “He couldn’t help it,” Robert said. “Sports and insurance. That’s all he had. It’s all he knew.”

  “So I got the sports and you ended up with the insurance.” Tom stayed quiet for a moment; then he said, “And thus the two-bit legacy of the father is passed on to his sons.” Tom took a hit and tilted back in his chair. “He ever tell you he loved you?”

  “No.”

  “Me either.”

  “He did, though. He loved you.”

  “I know.” There was uneasiness in Tom’s voice. “He loved me plenty.” Another silence, and then he said, “How high are you, Rob?”

  “High enough.”

  Tom moved across the porch and leaned against the railing. “I almost ended up with both bits,” Tom said.

  “What are you talking about?” Robert looked in the direction of the swing. He could no longer see Caroline. She was wrapped in shadow. He wondered if she was awake; if she was about to find out something he wouldn’t want her to know.

  “I’m talking about the old man’s two-bit legacy,” Tom said. “I almost ended up with all of it. When he had the heart attack. Remember? It was a couple of weeks before Mother’s Day. And on Mother’s Day when I called to talk to Mom, he told me about not being able to go back to work for a while. He said he didn’t have enough savings and he needed to keep the agency going. He asked me to come home from Hawaii and take over for him.”

  Tom had nicked the sleepy gauze of Robert’s high. Robert sat up straighter in his chair. “And you said no? You told him you wouldn’t come?”

  “I told him it would take me a while, you know, to wrap things up at school. I said I was right in the middle of writing my thesis.”

  “And …”

  “And I lied. The thesis was done. I was just buying time, hoping maybe he’d be able to handle things on his own. Shit, Robert. I didn’t want to come home and take the chance of getting stuck being a goddamned insurance agent. I didn’t tell him, but I’d made a deal with myself that if he hadn’t figured something else out by Father’s Day, I’d suck it up. I’d come home.”

  “Father’s Day.” Robert glanced toward Caroline, then lowered his voice and said: “That’s when he asked me. That morning. When I called to wish him a happy Father’s Day.”

  “I know. I called him that night to say I was coming. I’d put it off all day. Then when I called, he told me he’d talked to you about you coming back to help him out, so I didn’t say anything. When I hung up, it was like I’d been pulled off death row.”

  It took Robert a moment before he was able to respond. “How did you know I’d end up saying yes?” he asked.

  “Because I knew you. I knew you’d never run out on somebody who needed you.”

  There was a soft rustling at the far end of the porch, then the sound of the front door closing. His brother’s words had stung him like cuts from a freshly sharpened ax. And Caroline had gone inside. She had left Robert alone.

  All he had seen of her in that twilight was a graceful shadow as she slipped away. And now, in the harsh fluorescence of the waiting room, he hardly recognized Caroline as she was coming down the hospital corridor toward him. Her elegant features looked as if they had been coated in candle wax: blurred, and ghostly pale. She looked broken. And there was such strain and fear in her eyes that Robert was afraid to hear whatever it was she was about to tell him.

  “Caroline, what’s happened?” It came out in a whisper. “What’s happening with Justin?”

  “They’re still running tests,” she said. She leaned against him and then collapsed into his arms. She was shaking like a leaf in a windstorm and saying: “Don’t let him die. Oh please, God. Don’t let him die.”

  Robert was burning with guilt—believing that if only he had been more attentive to Justin, he might have seen him going into the kitchen, and this terrible night would never have happened. “It’ll be all right. He’ll be okay,” he told Caroline as he held her close. “And after this, everything is going to be better. I promise.”

  The smells of the cooking and baking she had done for his birthday were still in her hair, and t
hey took Robert back to that Thanksgiving. To the next morning, after the initial pain had been inflicted, when the violence had begun.

  It had been early, and the house was cold. There were still faint traces of yesterday’s holiday dinner in the air—the smell of roasted turkey and homemade pumpkin pie.

  Robert saw that Caroline had made breakfast. When he took his coffee mug to the kitchen table, there was an open bottle of blood-pressure medication there. He jammed its cap into place and slammed the bottle down.

  “I’ve been looking for this goddamn thing for a half hour!” It was Robert’s father, striding into the room, clutching the morning paper. “Why can’t Caroline use her head? Your mother always left the paper at the bottom of the stairs where a person could see it.”

  “So what? It isn’t your house. Or your newspaper.” Each word Robert spoke was edged with hostility. “You turned this place over to me a long time ago, remember?”

  His father grabbed the bottle and wrestled the cap. “Goddamn it, I left this open for a reason, Robert. Why did you have to go playing with it?”

  “Don’t leave your damn pills lying around where my children can get at them.” Robert snatched the bottle away from his father.

  “How dare you talk to me like that, boy?” His father’s voice was a rumbling roar. Once, when Robert was a child, it had cowed him to the point of public incontinence.

  But this morning, his roar was outdistancing his father’s. “When you asked me to come back here, you said a year. Two at most, and I could go back to my life. But then you stuck me with yours, and took off!”

  “Cut the crap. You got the house. You got the agency.”

  “Want to know something, old man? It was like ripping my own guts out to come back here and help you sell fucking goddamn insurance. But there was one little part of it that almost made the rest of it okay, the idea that when the chips were down I was the son you reached out to.”

  His father’s fist banged onto the table. “You had a knocked-up girlfriend and a pile of student loans. How would you have taken care of all that? … Caroline and her little ‘bun in the oven’? They were about to flatten you. And all you had was some boneheaded notion about surfing for a living. I saved your sorry butt.”

  “You lied to me. As soon as you were well enough, you left me here and took off to Arizona and never came back!”

  “Aw, somebody get me a violin.” Robert’s father went to the kitchen counter and opened a box of cereal. “You’ve got the world by the tail, boy. Stop whining.”

  In one swift, furious move, Robert grabbed his coffee mug and hurled it at the old man. It smashed into the wall just above his father’s head and he came at Robert with a violent lunge, ready to strangle him. Robert stood up and his chair toppled backward onto the floor. As he was about to drive his fist full tilt into his father’s gut, there was a shout of “Jesus God, what the hell’s going on?” and Tom was suddenly in the kitchen, and Robert’s fist was slamming into his face, tearing into the skin, going deep, opening a vicious cut.

  Tom slowly raised his hand to his cheek. He looked stunned. For a moment, there was an explosive calm: the silence separating the aftershocks of an earthquake.

  Then Robert picked up the chair and set it upright again, his hand slick with his brother’s blood.

  The old man plunged some paper towels into water that was in the sink, clumsily dabbed at Tom’s face, and said, “Call Doc Johannsen down the street. See if he’s home. You’re gonna need stitches.” Then he slowly sat at the table, still holding the bloody wadded-up toweling in his hand. “You’ll be fine. I got plenty worse than that when I was playing college ball.”

  “You played for one lousy season,” Robert said.

  “And then I went into a foxhole in France,” the old man snarled. “I played football. I fought for my country. You splashed around in the ocean like a seal, and then, when Vietnam came along, you hid behind the wife and kids and stayed home. The first thing you did when you got your draft notice was to grab a deferment. Don’t shoot your mouth off about things you didn’t have the balls to qualify for.”

  Before Robert could reply, Tom stepped between him and the old man. “Let’s be honest, Dad. I didn’t go, either.”

  “Your number wasn’t called. If you’d’ve been drafted, you would’ve gone, Tom. You wouldn’t have let anything stop you. You’re not a sissy mama’s boy, you understand the line.”

  “What are you talking about?” Robert screamed.

  “Being on the line. A real man hunkers down and holds it no matter what comes at him. And you don’t bitch about it. That’s what a man does. It’s what’s expected. Wherever life puts you, you hold that line and defend it.”

  “Well I hate every inch of the fucking line I’m on,” Robert said. “I’m sick of it!”

  “What’s wrong with you, Robert?” It was his mother. She was standing in the doorway. Caroline was behind her, flanked by Julie and Lissa, the three of them wearing flannel nightgowns patterned in star shapes. “Your life may not be the one you planned,” his mother said, “but look at all you have, Caroline, and your girls.”

  “And this house,” Caroline said. “We have this wonderful place that belongs to us.”

  Robert could see that Caroline was bewildered by what he’d said about having a life he didn’t want. The look in her eyes was pleading with him to desire the things she desired—to need to be on Lima Street as much as she did.

  But Robert was furious. He was too angry to stop himself from shouting: “For Christ’s sake, Caroline. I could’ve had a goddamned house and still have been where I wanted to be!”

  Caroline started toward him, then stopped. Her expression told him that things he had kept carefully locked away from her had gotten loose and stung her. And he didn’t know how to take them back.

  “What’s wrong with Daddy?” Julie asked.

  The reply from Robert’s father was flat and cold. “Your daddy’s sad because he can’t skip out on his life and go live at the beach like some hippie.”

  Robert ignored his father; he was focused on Caroline. He needed to make her understand the pain he was feeling. It was as if his heart were beating against a tourniquet of barbed wire.

  And the bite of that barbed wire had never gone away. It was still with him as he stood in the waiting room of the hospital holding Caroline close, feeling her tremble, listening to her whispered prayer: “Please, God. Let Justin be all right.”

  Robert was echoing that prayer. He wanted his son to be safe. And beyond that, he wanted him, someday, to have a life that truly belonged to him—one that matched the shape of his soul.

  He wished for Justin the kind of life that he had been dreaming of for himself, in the weeks that followed that terrible Thanksgiving, when he had done such damage to Tom’s face.

  The truth was, he had enjoyed doing it.

  In opening that gaping gash in his brother’s flesh, Robert had liberated something in himself—something surprisingly reckless. It had prompted him to make a decision that would change his life. And, of course, the first and only person he wanted to tell was Caroline.

  He was in the living room, at the rolltop desk that had stood against the front wall since his grandfather’s day. It held the musk of old gum erasers and india ink and dust. In one of its wide, deep cubbyholes, he found what he was looking for: a manila envelope filled with a thick sheaf of papers—the business plan he had drawn up in his senior year of college, the strategy for his surfboard company.

  The feel of the envelope in his hand was electric.

  He went upstairs to find Caroline, reveling in the thought that this was the perfect time: The girls were still young, easy to move. They hadn’t even started school, and Robert knew he could, without much effort, sell the agency and give himself a modest nest egg.

  He and Caroline could have a little house at the beach, a location where he could build his business. Even if they had to rough it for a while, it would be fun—an adv
enture. He was only in his thirties, Robert told himself. A bit of a late start, but not too late.

  As he arrived at the top of the stairs, he saw a light coming from under the door of his old bedroom. He put the manila envelope on the flat crown of the newel post, crossed to the door, and opened it.

  Caroline was there, standing near the window, in a pretty nightgown that ended just below her knees. Her face was clean—without any makeup. She looked like a teenager. Like the girl she was when she’d first come to Lima Street. Seeing her made Robert feel as if the things he’d been imagining were not only possible but already in the process of happening.

  He held out his hand to Caroline. “I have something I want to tell you.”

  She smiled but didn’t move from the window.

  He held out his hand again. “Come on. Let’s get in bed. I need to talk to you.”

  There was something hesitant in Caroline’s voice as she said: “Can’t you tell me here? I want to stay for a minute.”

  “It’s cold in here. Let’s go.”

  “The heat’s on. It’s fine.” Caroline led him across the room. Nothing in it had been changed since he’d occupied it as a teenager. She was taking him toward the twin bed near the window—where the sill had a small circular indentation. Robert diverted her. They sat on the bed that was near the door.

  Caroline said: “I have something to tell you, too.” There were faint bluish circles under her eyes, suggesting that she was in need of rest. She put her mouth close to Robert’s ear and whispered: “You’re about to have another house project. For this one, you’re going to need white enamel, and lots of yellow paint, and some Winnie-the-Pooh wallpaper.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re going to have a baby. And I want this to be the nursery.”