The Language of Secrets

by Dianne Dixon

  There was nothing more he could explain.

  Justin had been the embodiment of Caroline’s infidelity and the living proof of Robert’s inability to keep her from it.

  Robert believed he’d had no choice in what he’d done. He could not have imagined staying in this house with Justin in it; nor could he conceive of going away from Lima Street and losing his daughters. But, above all, he could never—ever—think of leaving Caroline.

  Amy

  MAUI, FEBRUARY 2006

  *

  Rum and Cokes in slender glasses. A champagne flute filled with fresh lemonade. A polished wooden bowl full of macadamia nuts. An assortment of French cheeses served on a length of cobalt blue tile. This had become their habit over the last four weeks—a ritual—as Amy and her parents gathered each evening to watch the sunset.

  Amy was carrying the tray out onto the balcony; her father was already reaching for his rum and Coke. “The islands agree with you, kiddo. You look relaxed.”

  “It’s Maui, Daddy. How could I not be?” Amy carried her lemonade to the balcony rail. The evening breeze was warm, and sweet with the smell of ginger and frangipani. To Amy, it had a visceral sensuality. It made her want to run free on the beach, and want to be touched. It made her want Justin.

  She had come to Hawaii intending to leave in a week and had stayed for a month. At first she’d been too angry even to speak to Justin, angry enough to entertain the idea of never speaking to him again. Now she was missing him. She wanted to go back to their life. But she’d been away so long that she was separated from Justin in every sense of the word.

  “Hey, pumpkin,” her father was saying. “I got an idea I need to talk to you about.”

  Amy took a swallow of lemonade. “An idea, Daddy? Or a done deal?” She was cranky, eager for this trip to end and give her the excuse she needed to call Justin and tell him she was coming home.

  “I want to talk about this before your mother gets out here. Be a good girl. Sit.” Her father pulled an empty chair close to his. When Amy didn’t move, he narrowed his eyes and shaded them with his hand. “You’re being a brat, making me stare into the sun for no good reason.” The sun’s fading rays were as mild as a milk bath. She knew her father wasn’t suffering. But she understood what he expected—for her to do as she’d been told.

  After an irritated silence, her father said: “I bought your mother a house here. It’s a surprise and I want you to help with the decorating and the furniture and all that other froufrou crap women need when they get a new place.”

  “You bought a house on Maui? Why?”

  “The other day we saw this ‘Open House’ sign and we went in, and I could tell right away she was crazy about it. So I figured, What the hell? This way, the whole family’s got a place we can come anytime we want. A great spot for Zack in the summer.”

  “But why do we have to do this now?” Amy was stunned. She needed to get home. She had been gone too long. Justin was slipping away; she could feel it. “I … I thought we decided we were going home next week.”

  “Little girl, I don’t know of any pressing reason you have to be back in L.A. Do you?” This wasn’t a question. It was an ultimatum. Her father didn’t wait for an answer. He simply took her hand, kissed it, and went into the house.

  Amy sat for a minute, then glanced at the back of her hand, as if she expected to see a mark there. She could see nothing. The sun was going down. It was already getting dark.

  *

  In Hawaii, Amy and her parents usually frequented restaurants with elegant menus and staggering prices. But today, Amy and her mother and Zack were in a waterfront fish house in a spot they rarely visited, the village of Lahaina; it was far too egalitarian for Linda’s tastes. It was the sort of place where discount coupons were honored, where Hawaii was silk-screened onto peel-off tattoos and pineapple-shaped coffee mugs and “one size fits all” T-shirts. Linda had begun as a member of the tourist class, but she’d come into blossom as the wife of a jet-setter, and had adjusted her tastes accordingly.

  She laughed as Zack banged on the tray of his high chair and howled with frustration. The floor beneath his perch was a litter of fallen Cheerios and soggy crackers. “Zack darling, you are expressing my sentiments exactly. That’s why you and I are getting out of here right now.” As she was saying this, Linda was reading a text message on her phone. “It seems the lovely Willow Chase is running late and won’t be here for another twenty minutes.”

  Amy gathered up her purse and Zack’s diaper bag. “No. No way, Mother. She’s already kept us waiting almost an hour.” Amy, like Zack, was feeling tired and frayed.

  Linda was still looking at the text. “She apologizes for asking us to meet her in this dump, but apparently it’s halfway between her office and her next appointment.” Linda glanced up and laughed. “Willow Chase. What a great name for a decorator. Want to bet she made it up?”

  “Mother, Zack needs a nap. So please, just get your purse and your blueprints and all the other stuff that’s spread all over this table, and let’s get out of here, okay?”

  “Darling, I’m taking Zack out of here right now.” Linda took the diaper bag from Amy. “I’m late for the contractor. But I really do need those fabric swatches from Willow today. So be an angel and wait for her. Zack can come with me and nap at the house while I chat with Bob the Builder. Do you need money, Amykins? For a cab or whatever?” Linda scooped Zack out of the high chair, then dropped a sheaf of twenty-dollar bills on the table.

  Amy shoved the money away, scattering it across the tabletop. “I’m not ‘Amykins.’ I was Amykins when I was six.”

  “Darling, are we fighting? If we are, you’re going to have to give me some help getting up to speed, because I don’t know what we’re fighting about.”

  “We’re fighting about the fact that you’re waltzing out of here and telling me to wait around for your decorator and take a cab home. You didn’t even bother to ask whether or not that works for me. All you wanted to know was how much cash it would take to get it done.”

  Linda collected the money and quietly put it into Amy’s purse. “You still haven’t called Justin, have you?”

  “No, Mother, I haven’t.” Amy was annoyed. Her reply had been loud—loud enough to make several people in the restaurant turn to look in her direction. “I thought we were going home this week. I was waiting till we got back, so I could talk to Justin in person. Then all this stuff with the new house came up. And boom, just like that, we’re staying. And we don’t even know for how long.”

  “It’s not your house, pumpkin. There’s no reason you have to stay.”

  “That’s a load of crap.” Amy had lowered her voice to a whisper, but the intensity in it was fierce.

  “Amy, you’re misbehaving.” Linda settled Zack on her hip and gestured toward the roll of blueprints on the table. “Please get those and carry them to the car for me. I really need to get going.”

  Her mother’s exit was subdued, elegant, accomplished with a graceful nod and a quick smile. Amy’s reaction was complicated: a blind intersection of emotion—a collision of frustration and envy. Linda had the capacity to stand back while others flailed and raged; she responded to outpourings of raw emotion with cool, distanced composure. Amy resented this. It made it seem as if her mother never cared enough about anything to fight over it. And Amy’s stay on Maui had left her spoiling for a fight.

  As she moved her chair away from the table, preparing to follow her mother out of the restaurant, Amy saw a man at the far end of the bar watching her. He was of medium height, slim, with a golden-brown tan. He had sleepy almond-shaped eyes and what Amy had always though of as “poet hair”—dark, wavy, and of a length that brushed the base of his shirt collar. For an instant, she thought she knew him but then realized that what she knew was the look of him; he resembled someone she had once been in love with, a boy she’d almost married.

  The man at the bar gave her a slow, teasing grin. She looked away. When s
he looked back, he was in laughing conversation with the bartender.

  Amy grabbed up the blueprints and the money and the scattered baby toys—the warring totems of her life—and quickly walked toward the door.

  The sidewalk outside the restaurant was filled with a river of slow-moving pedestrians—sauntering honeymoon couples, groups of giggling college girls admiring their own reflections in store windows, and old people standing stock-still and taking tentative licks at cups of sweet Hawaiian shave ice. At every turn, Amy was being forced to weave past, and sidle by, and push her way through. And with each frustrated step, the intensity of the irritation she was feeling toward her mother was being ratcheted higher.

  When Amy arrived at the corner where her mother’s Land Rover was parked, Linda was leaning into the car, buckling Zack into his baby seat, her every movement smooth and serene. It made Amy want to scream. She grabbed her mother’s arm and dragged her away from the car. As she did, she understood that she would lose control while Linda would remain cool and composed. But this was the dance she’d always done with her mother and she didn’t know how to stop.

  Her voice was high and tight. “What did you mean when you said there’s no reason I have to stay here, Mother? You know Daddy asked me to help with the new house. What was I supposed to do? Come on, tell me! What choice did I have?”

  “Amy, have I ever shown you my favorite cartoon?” Linda said. “Two ancient men in a jail cell, one saying to the other, ‘I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is, the door’s open. The bad news is, it always has been.’” Linda took the blueprints and the toys out of Amy’s hands. “The door’s open, my darling. You can walk through it anytime you want.”

  “Just say ‘No thanks’? To Daddy? Anytime I want? What a crock. When have you ever said no to him?”

  “We’re married. We have a contract; every married couple does. My arrangement with your father is my arrangement; it has nothing to do with you.” Linda took Amy’s face between her hands and said, “If you want to go home to your husband, pumpkin, go home.”

  “How can I? The new house is Daddy’s present to us. You know what it’s like when he thinks somebody’s tossing one of his presents back at him. It hurts his feelings. It’s like he’s a big tenderhearted kid.”

  “Or maybe he’s a bully who likes getting his own way.” The comment was delivered blandly, without rancor or judgment.

  “Is that what you believe about Daddy?” Amy was uncomfortable. She wanted to be able to love her father without question.

  “It isn’t important what I think, darling girl. I’ve struck my bargain with the devil. Now you need to strike yours.”

  “It’s like you’re trying to make this all Daddy’s fault,” Amy said. “We wouldn’t even be having this conversation if Justin hadn’t been such a prick about this trip.”

  “The prick is in the point of view, baby. Maybe Justin’s a prick, or maybe he’s a decent guy who wants to call his own shots. Bottom line? It doesn’t matter. Your husband has run out of patience with your father, and you have to choose a side.”

  Linda put her arms around Amy and held her. “Sometimes, pumpkin,” she said, “life’s a bitch.”

  After that, Linda had returned to the car and driven away. And Amy had returned to the restaurant—not because she wanted to sit and dutifully wait for the arrival of Willow Chase and the fabric samples, but because she didn’t know where else to go.

  Several busboys were at the table where she’d been before; they were mopping up pools of soggy crackers and spilled Cheerios. So Amy went to a table near the bar—a place that was polished and spotless.

  She was opening her purse, searching for her phone, when a drink was placed in front of her. The click of the martini glass coming to rest on the brushed steel of the tabletop caused Amy to look up. What she saw was impossibly glamorous. The glass was exuberantly oversized, frosted with a glitter of ice, and filled with what looked like liquid satin. Suspended in the satin—on a curved, thread-thin length of silver—were three tiny perfectly matched olives.

  “Vodka martini. I took a guess.” It was the man Amy had seen at the bar earlier, the one who had been watching her. He smiled. “You looked like you could use a drink.”

  It didn’t occur to Amy to be offended, or frightened. He seemed so familiar. “You look like someone I used to know,” she told him.

  “If I’d ever met you before, trust me, I’d remember.” He extended his hand. “I’m Lucas.”

  When Amy had seen him earlier, she’d thought he looked like Ryan, a boy she had deeply loved. But now that they were only a few feet apart, she could see that he was smaller than Ryan, and not quite as handsome. But the resemblance was there; it made her feel as if she were in the presence of an old friend.

  He sat down and moved his chair closer to hers. “Okay. On our planet, this is how we do it. I tell you my name, Lucas, and then you tell me your name. Which is …”

  “Amy.”

  They shook hands. His skin was warm. His touch had the feel of a tempting question. As Amy pulled her hand away, he grinned at her and said, “How’s the martini?”

  She wasn’t used to drinking during the day, and when she did, it was rarely anything stronger than wine. She could already feel the vodka slipping through her, gliding and flowing, bringing with it a strange sort of giddy relaxation. As she was saying “The martini is absolutely wonderful,” she couldn’t be sure, but it sounded as if she was slurring the word absolutely. It worried her for a moment, but only for a moment, because a man who looked like someone she’d once loved was smiling at her, and she was smiling back.

  *

  After Linda’s decorator had come and gone, Lucas ordered more martinis, and when they had finished the second round of drinks, he offered Amy a ride home. As they walked across the parking lot toward his van, he explained that he worked at an orchid ranch.

  When Amy slipped into the passenger seat, it was as if she had been delivered into the heart of an exotic garden. The van’s entire cargo area was filled to overflowing with masses of orchids as vibrant and sensual as a symphony.

  Lucas drove along a road that ran inland, a short distance from the ocean, and Amy held her hand out of the van window and trailed her fingers in the breeze while she told him about Ryan, the person he so much resembled. When Lucas asked why she hadn’t married Ryan, she surprised herself by saying: “My father. And his fucking money.” The statement surprised her.

  But once she had spoken the truth, it was easy to tell the story behind it. Ryan had wanted to earn his own way and had balked at her father’s insistence on paying for graduate school and buying Amy and Ryan a house. Amy’s father had called Ryan “an arrogant little bastard.” Ryan had stormed out, and Amy’s father had begged her not to marry someone cold enough to deny a father the simple joy of caring for his only daughter.

  Lucas had turned the van off the road and was parking it in a lush grove of trees as Amy was saying: “Ryan wanted me to come with him, but I just stood there, letting my father hold on to me. That was a terrible mistake.”

  A misty Hawaiian rain had begun to fall, and Lucas was leaning toward her, one hand stroking the back of her neck, the other already slipping under the hem of her skirt and slowly sliding along her thigh. His sleepy almond-shaped eyes were fixed on hers, holding her still, telling her he knew about the tingle he was stirring in her, the one that would soon begin to make her shudder and shift against the seat.

  Rain was falling in soft curtains around the van, watering the light, turning it pale and evanescent, cocooning Amy and Lucas in a private place, humid and luxuriant—a bed of orchids.

  He moved his hand from the back of her neck and let it slip around and slide down the center of her, tantalizing, slow. The skin on his fingertips was slightly calloused. His hand came to rest on her breast, cupping and cradling it. The intimacy of his touch startled her, brought her back to reality. It made her know that the only man she desired was Justin. />
  In that instant, all Amy wanted was to get out of the van, to get away from this groping stranger. But he was already covering her mouth with his and filling it with the foreign, bitter taste of his tongue.

  She tried to jerk her head away. He refused to let her. He jammed her back against the seat and the edges of his teeth cut into her lip. The raw sting of it was frightening, and her instinct was to scream, but his open, sliding mouth was suffocating her.

  The hand he had on her thigh clamped down with painful intensity, while the other was raking at her breast.

  Then she felt his upper lip slip between her teeth and she bit into it. The coppery taste of his blood was on her tongue and he was rearing back, shouting: “You fucking cunt!” Suddenly, he was across her, throwing the door open and shoving her out of the van.

  She landed, crumpled, on a patch of grass at the base of a tree. As he sped away, he tossed her purse out of the passenger-side window. The van fishtailed onto the wet road. For a moment, the tires were screaming and the engine was gunned and roaring.

  And then he was gone, and the only sound was the murmur of the rain.

  A long time passed before Amy moved. She was so frightened, she couldn’t stand; her legs wouldn’t hold her. There was no option but to crawl through the marshy grass toward the spot where, when her purse had landed, it had broken open and scattered its contents.

  Heavy veils of rain were misting around her and when she finally found her cell phone, she was chilled and aching. She instinctively pressed the first button she touched.

  The number was automatically dialed and rang twice before the person at the other end said hello. It was then that Amy realized she’d reached a number she hadn’t consciously intended to call. There was a pause. Then, in a rush, before the connection could be broken, she said the thing she had needed to say for weeks.

  “Justin. I love you. I want to come home.”

  Caroline and Robert