The Language of Secrets

by Dianne Dixon

  In the living room, the argument raged on. Kevin was shouting that the Christmas presents Angela had bought for Angie and Kevin Junior were crap. Angela was screaming that crap was all they could afford because he was a failure and she wished he was dead.

  Kevin grabbed at Angela and ripped her nightgown in two. And Angela ran, unclothed, into Kevin Junior’s room. She tried to lock the door behind her, but Kevin kicked it open and sent bits of the door frame splintering onto his son’s bed. Kevin, his face red and the veins in his neck roped and bluish and his breath sour with the smell of whiskey, grabbed his naked, pregnant wife by her hair and threw her across the room.

  In that moment, TJ turned his face away from the wall and saw Angela falling past him, toward the corner, toward his piano, a flow of red slipping between her legs, like a snake, winding down onto the uneven floor. A buckled floorboard was causing the trail of blood to coil back on itself, then slide away again.

  Angela fell. The piano broke apart beneath her. TJ heard the sound of music being shattered. And Christmas Day had come to an end.

  *

  Six other Christmases arrived and departed—most of them listless and forgettable.

  TJ remained with the Loudons, sharing Kevin Junior’s room and coming, slowly, over time, to enjoy his company. Kevin Junior was in some ways as coarse and unpredictable as his parents, but he was essentially a kind child, and a bright one. He taught TJ how to communicate in sign language, and he and TJ spent much of their time together in silent, lively conversation about comic books and Darth Vader and what Disneyland, and traveling there in a jet plane, might really be like.

  At night, after Kevin Junior was asleep, TJ would open the spiral notebook and give himself over to the photographs that were pasted onto its pages. One of them was the image of a little boy in a bathtub, surrounded by tiles patterned in fish shapes. And there was also a photograph of that same boy, barely more than a baby, standing triumphant on the closed lid of a toy chest, tightly gripping the edge of a window frame. Near the boy’s hand was an indentation that looked like the face of a clown.

  Each time TJ gazed at the photos of the two little girls, each time he saw the girl who was invariably smiling, he would hear himself whisper the name Lissa.

  And there would be other flickers of memory. He remembered his mother and how sweet her smell was. And he remembered his father and how fast he moved. When he ran.

  Night after night, as the sounds of muffled rage would come seeping through his bedroom wall, burning and electric, TJ would turn his face to the darkness, and say: “Do I know my home? Yes, I do. Yes, I do. I live on Lima Street … right at 822.” He would whisper it until it sealed him off from the noise and made him safe. Until it erased TJ who lived with the Loudons, and erased their house, and the town in which it stood, and the world in which it existed.

  The world of the Loudons was a jittery place; moods shifted without warning and happiness and unhappiness careened into each other like the cars of a runaway roller coaster. It was a world so disturbed that a thing as simple as looking directly into someone’s eyes could be a terrifying and wounding blunder.

  TJ came to understand that if he (or Kevin Junior or Angie) made the mistake of catching Kevin’s eye when Kevin, drunk and furious, was in the act of upending the dinner table, sending food and glass splattering and shattering across the walls, it could lead to being singled out and grabbed and screamed at.

  To look at Angela could be just as dangerous. To come into her line of vision when she was in one of her moods—usually after she’d had an altercation with Kevin—was to become the object of a tirade, a mad harangue in which she would weep and shout: “I sacrificed my life. I could have left years ago. Men wanted me. They did! Ask anybody. But instead I gave up everything. And for what? For you, you ungrateful little shits! One of these days, I’m gonna go. I deserve better and I’m gonna go! I owe it to myself.” Then she would rush through the house, running her hands over tabletops and chair backs, screaming that the place was a pigsty and pulling out a wash bucket and scrub brush and dropping to her knees and scouring at the floors and shouting that she was working herself to death and that no one cared.

  Because Angie and Kevin Junior were bound to her by the irrational, strangling cord of birth, they could not learn to look away. They couldn’t escape their mother’s face and the craziness that was in it. They were forced to ride the currents of her rants like a series of raging rapids. And when she would finish, they would huddle around her and they would promise to be better. They would take the scrub brush out of her hand and work with all their might to find a way to make clean, for her, a house that was already immaculate.

  And because the same irrational strangling cord tied them to Kevin, they couldn’t look away from him—even when they were dragged from their beds and derided for being lazy and told to polish his cracked work boots until the boots sparkled, even when they were belt-whipped because no sparkle could be made to appear on snow-ruined, salt-stained leather.

  But TJ was no one’s child. He could look away. And he did. Over the years, he developed the ability to look at faces without seeing them. He learned to keep his gaze vague and his thoughts in another place—the world that existed in the photographs in the spiral notebook, the safe haven that was the house on Lima Street.

  Years passed. Social workers came and went and TJ was left adrift as a foster child in the Loudon household. The Loudons continued to cash the checks for his care, and to become a family that was older and angrier and less stable. And finally, when TJ was almost twelve, Kevin Loudon rode out of Middletown in a Chevy truck with a girl named Donna. She wore no underwear and looked like Angela had once looked, in a time long gone.

  *

  In the wake of Kevin’s departure, Angela and her children took up residence in the back bedroom of Angela’s parents’ home on Francis Avenue in Middletown and TJ was moved into the care of Stan and Suzy Zelinski.

  The Zelinski house was a modest place with a manicured square of lawn at its front; a place where storm windows went up each year before the arrival of the first winter snow and promptly came down with the departure of the last.

  Stan Zelinski was heavyset and carried himself with military precision. His daily uniform was a fresh denim work shirt and a pair of khaki slacks with a knife-sharp crease. He owned the same hardware store in Middletown that his father and grandfather had owned, and he was involved in community activities, especially those having to do with young people.

  Stan and Suzy had one son and, over the years, countless foster children—so many, in fact, that they had often been written up in the newspaper and people had given the nickname “Zelinski Kids” to the children who cycled through Suzy and Stan’s care. The majority of the Zelinski Kids had been girls because, as Stan had explained early on, he and Suzy had been unable to have any more children after their son had been born, and Suzy wanted little girls to fuss over. Suzy was sweet and unaffected. Plump and still girlish at forty-two, she was a woman who, when filling out any paperwork requiring the listing of an occupation, proudly wrote mom.

  At the Zelinskis’, TJ had a room of his own. It was small and neat. On the wall above the bed there was a framed poster from an air show. Suzy had told TJ that her son, Ted, when he was about TJ’s age, had liked looking at the poster and dreaming about flying. “I thought you might enjoy having it,” Suzy had said. “But if you’d rather have something else to dream by, just let me know, okay?”

  TJ had no interest in her offer. He was already in possession of the images that fuelled his dreams; they were in a worn spiral notebook at the bottom of his battered blue suitcase.

  The time with Suzy and Stan proved to be a welcome relief from the volatility of TJ’s years with the Loudons—life there had been a Molotov cocktail; life at the Zelinskis’, in comparison, was a glass of warm milk.

  Suzy baked cookies. She had a vegetable garden, and helped with homework. Stan was a scoutmaster, and coached Little
League, and never missed one of the high school baseball games in which his son was the pitcher. Ted was a good-natured kid who handled a ball the way Howlin’ Wolf played the blues; he was a natural. It was from watching Ted Zelinski play baseball that TJ would ultimately develop a lifelong love for the game.

  TJ was twelve and Ted was sixteen when they met; their lives ran in companionable parallel, but in the eighteen months they shared before Ted left the Zelinski house to go to college, there was no deep connection formed between them; nor was any real connection ever established between TJ and Suzy, or TJ and Stan.

  Stan’s life was consumed with scouting, and Little League, and fund-raising for a new community center. Suzy’s attention was given to the foster daughters who came and went from the Zelinski house on a regular basis. While each of the girls was with her, Suzy hovered over her and doted on her, and then when she left, Suzy cried for her.

  When he first came to the Zelinskis’, TJ kept to himself and to his ritual of the notebook and the song. But by the time he was in middle school, he no longer needed the notebook to see the pictures it contained. He had made them his reality and his history. The contents of the notebook and the information in the song had been forged into a body and soul for Justin Fisher: a boy who had always lived, and been loved, in the house on Lima Street.

  Toward the end of his stay with the Zelinskis, TJ was escaping to Lima Street less often; his attention was shifting from the past and moving toward his future. He was occupied with sports and girls and the pursuit of a college scholarship that would propel him out of Middletown.

  In his final six months in Stan and Suzy’s care, his heart was captured by the newest of the Zelinski Kids, a shy doe-eyed girl with ebony skin.

  She was a child who loved books and music, and who wrote poems on bits of pink paper and folded them into tiny squares and kept them under her pillow, hidden, like an accumulation of compressed, unspoken wishes. Her name was Cassie.

  On her first day in the house, she appeared in the doorway of TJ’s room wearing a faded long-sleeved pink dress and a pair of pink socks. Her first words to him were: “Are you real?”

  TJ was at his desk, studying. At the sound of her voice he looked up, and was startled by her intense blackness, and her fragility, and her sweet, little-girl beauty. When she spoke again, her voice was soft and cautious, as if she’d learned long ago to stay small and to keep secrets. “Are you real? Or are you like me?” she asked.

  And because TJ, too, was no one’s child, he knew what she was saying. “I’m like you,” he told her.

  She smiled a smile that was slow and widening and ultimately radiant. It reminded TJ of an Easter-morning sunrise. “I’m glad,” she said. “’Cause I didn’t want to be the only one.”

  The most recent pair of Zelinski foster daughters had left over a month ago. Cassie was the new replacement, and by saying she didn’t want to be “the only one,” she was explaining that she didn’t want to be the only foster child in the house, the only unconnected, temporary interloper, the only Zelinski Kid.

  She came and stood beside TJ’s desk. “How old are you?” she asked.

  TJ grinned. “How old are you?”

  “Ten,” she said. “Are you gonna be here for a long time or a little time?”

  “Six months. I’m going to graduate from high school in June,” he told her. “Then I’m going away.”

  Again the sunrise smile. “Six. That’s a lot of months.” She slipped her hand into the pocket of her dress and withdrew a small smooth stone—milky silver-green and rounded. She put it on TJ’s desk. “It’s a present,” she explained. “I found it under the house in the other place I was at before this one, and I’ve been saving it because it was so nice.” She put a slender finger on the stone and slid it toward him. “It’s for you.”

  “Are you sure?” TJ asked.

  “I’m sure,” she said. “I’ve got two of them.” She opened her hand and showed him a second silver-green stone. “I put both of them in my pocket when I was coming to ask you so that if you said you were like me, I could give one to you and we could have …” She hesitated. “So we could have …” She bit her lip and looked up at him from under lowered lashes, suddenly embarrassed and a little unsure. “I brought it so we could share.”

  “Sharing would make us kind of affiliated, huh?” TJ said. Cassie looked away, shifting her weight from one pink-socked foot to the other and saying nothing. TJ realized that she was not quite certain of the meaning of affiliated. “Sharing would make us kind of a team,” he explained.

  “Would that be okay?” She looked ready to take a step backward and move away. “My name’s Cassie Jackson.” She said it as if it was something TJ should know before making his decision.

  He picked up the stone and held it. It felt warm and vaguely heart-shaped. “I think us being a team would be great,” he said.

  After that, daily, for six months, Cassie continued to bring TJ gifts: puppets made of Popsicle sticks, bouquets of flowers picked from Suzy’s garden, bluebird feathers, twigs that were fragile, delicate, and elegant. In the afternoons while he did his homework, she perched on a chair beside his desk, reading fairy tales and stories of high adventure. And in the evenings, she sat beside TJ at the dinner table, whispering to him about her dreams and her poems and her mama being dead and her grandma being in jail and how someday she, Cassie, intended to have a pony and how, when she did have it, she would ride it to school.

  Cassie trailed TJ like a timid, obsessive acolyte. She was free to do so because the profound blackness of her skin had produced an immediate and dulling effect on Suzy’s interest in her.

  TJ knew that if he’d not allowed Cassie to claim him as her friend, her stay in the Zelinski household would have been a comfortless one.

  *

  In the early evening of TJ’s last day in the house, the day he had graduated from high school, Cassie came into his room as he was packing. A black duffel bag, his graduation gift from the Zelinskis, was open on his bed. Cassie crossed the room in silence and solemnly slipped a sheet of pink paper into one of the bag’s side pockets. The paper was rolled into a scroll and tied with a shoelace. “It’s a poem,” she explained. “For your graduation.”

  Then she stepped up onto the bed and looked him in the eye and said, “You’re the best friend I ever had in my whole life, TJ.”

  After she had stepped down off the bed, she added, “The social worker says my gramma’s out of jail and she’s coming to get me.” Cassie briefly smiled her Easter-sunrise smile. “I’m gonna be real. In one more week.” She gave him a nod and a tight brusque wave.

  TJ understood what she was telling him: There had been too many departures, too many changes, too many losses. All the goodbyes had been used up.

  After Cassie left, TJ picked up the duffel bag and walked out of the Zelinski house. He’d already said his farewells to Stan and Suzy. Now he was in a hurry. He needed to get to the bus station; there was a Greyhound leaving in half an hour that would ferry him out of Middletown and deliver him to his summer job and to college. It would take him to Boston, the place where he could be born again.

  As the bus had pulled away from the station—shortly after he let himself sink back into his seat and draw a deep breath that was intoxicatingly sweet and free—TJ suddenly sat bolt upright. “No!” came out of him with such force that the bus driver glanced into the rearview mirror and gave him a wary look, and several passengers shot nervous glances in his direction.

  An hour later, when the bus rolled out of Hartford, headed for Boston, TJ was no longer on it. He was at the side of the road, hitchhiking back to Middletown.

  The spiral notebook was still in the old blue suitcase under his bed in the Zelinski house.

  *

  It had taken TJ a long time to find a ride. The garrulous old man who had eventually picked him up had driven at such an incredibly slow pace that now, as they were leaving the highway and entering Middletown, it was after eleven
and TJ was in a panic. He was due to report to his summer job in Boston at six-thirty in the morning; he needed to retrieve the notebook and start on his return trip as soon as possible.

  As the old man was making a glacially slow turn, TJ grabbed the black duffel bag and jumped from the car. He rolled onto the soft shoulder of the road and ran the few remaining blocks that lay between him and his destination.

  Stan and Suzy often left the back door unlocked, so TJ sprinted past the front of the house and headed into the alley behind it. He was hoping the Zelinskis would be asleep and that he could get the notebook and be gone without having to cross paths with them. The Zelinskis had never seen the notebook, and TJ didn’t want to share it with Stan and Suzy now that he no longer had any business with them.

  When he entered the alley, he saw that lights were on in the kitchen. He assumed it was Stan who was still awake. Suzy was unfailingly in bed by ten, but it wasn’t unusual for Stan to stay up late watching TV or puttering in the garage.

  TJ moved quietly toward the breezeway that connected the area between the side wall of the garage and the back of the house. The garage side of the breezeway was paneled in clear-lacquered Peg-Board. Hanging from the Peg-Board were a variety of lawn tools—mostly rakes and hoes, all of them vintage, from Stan’s father’s time. They had thick wooden handles and iron blades and tines, all carefully cleaned and sharpened. Stan kept them displayed like rustic L-shaped museum pieces.

  On an area of grass under one of the kitchen windows, a sprinkler was turning. Its spray was falling onto the concrete at the entrance to the breezeway, near the back door. To keep the black duffel bag dry, TJ put it on a wooden bench a short distance away from the pooling water. Then he moved cautiously toward the house.

  He could hear the radio playing. An oldies station. The Beatles singing about Eleanor Rigby. But there were no sounds that indicated anyone was moving around inside the kitchen. TJ knew that Stan was probably in the living room, watching television. As he put his hand on the doorknob, his pulse quickened; the back door was unlocked.