The Language of Secrets

by Dianne Dixon

  “Was it a Mustang?”

  “Why in the world would you ask that?”

  “Don’t you remember?” Justin said. “One of her biggest dreams was to have her own pony.”

  “Truth is, Stan and I never really got to know her. We didn’t have a lot in common with her. She was in and out of here so quick.” Suzy gave Justin an apologetic shrug, and as she was walking away, she was calling to someone: “Honey, you’re going to fall right out of your chair when you see who’s here to see us.”

  She was going into the kitchen; into the room where TJ had last seen Stan, rumpled and sweating and fumbling with his zipper; the place where Stan had put a cocked rifle to TJ’s head. And now Justin was walking through the door of that kitchen, ready to grab Stan and beat him until he was reduced to nothing more than brain matter and bone fragments.

  But the man in the kitchen wasn’t Stan Zelinski; it was Ted.

  Justin’s hostility was replaced by surprise as Ted was shaking his hand and saying: “Good to see you, buddy. It’s been a lot of years.”

  There were lines around Ted’s eyes and gray at his temples, and it dawned on Justin that Stan, Ted’s father, would be a senior citizen now. Justin wondered if that should make a difference, if it should diminish his desire to punish Stan. But what “should be” had nothing to do with what was; his hatred for the man was boundless.

  Suzy was at the back door, calling out toward the breezeway: “Stan honey, come in here. We’re gonna have peach pie.”

  At the mention of Stan’s name, Justin’s stomach clenched. But as Suzy stepped aside, it was a little boy who galloped into the room. A kid with short blond hair and Stan Zelinski’s stockiness.

  “TJ, this is Ted’s boy.” Suzy was beaming with pride. “He’s named after my Stan. He’s the image of his grandpa, isn’t he?”

  “Did you used to know my grandpa?” the boy asked Justin.

  “Yeah,” Justin told him. “A long time ago.”

  The boy’s eyes lit up. “Wanna see Grandpa’s hero stuff?” Before Justin could answer, the boy was already running out of the kitchen, saying: “I’ll get it and show you.”

  Suzy hurried out after him. “Honey, let Grandma find the album for you. I don’t want you climbing up on those bookshelves again.”

  Ted laughed. “They could be gone for hours. Mom never remembers from one minute to the next where that album is.”

  “Is Stan around?” Justin’s question was abrupt. He couldn’t wait any longer. He needed to know.

  Ted’s answer was an unhappy sigh. “Dad’s dead, TJ.”

  It was as if a bomb had gone off. “When?” Justin asked. “When did he die?”

  “The night you left for Boston. After you’d gone. Probably around midnight. That’s what the cops told Mom.” Ted looked toward the hall. “I don’t want Mom and Stan to hear us. Stan doesn’t know the whole story. And Mom, well, you know how much Mom loved Dad. It’s still hard for her to talk about it.” He turned back to Justin. “Mom was the one that found the body, the next morning. Dad died during the night, out in the breezeway. He bled to death out there.”

  Justin was holding on to the back of a kitchen chair. His knuckles had gone white.

  “He was against the wall,” Ted was saying. “One of the old iron rakes was embedded in his back.” Ted stopped for a moment, then added, “He was holding a rifle. I don’t know, there were some funny things about it. He had injuries to his face and a bruise on his chest. But the cops finally decided it was just a freak accident, that he’d been coming into the house and probably slipped in some water that was on the ground and fell backwards.”

  Ted looked at Justin. “I don’t know if I believe that, though. Hell, I don’t know what to believe. I guess the cops were probably right.” Ted stood at the door, looking out toward the breezeway. “The truth is, a man like my father, he was so good and so kind. He didn’t have any enemies. Nobody would’ve wanted to kill him.” Ted’s gaze was open and guileless. “Dad was my hero, TJ. I miss him.”

  Justin wanted to tell Ted Zelinski the truth about Stan’s perversion, and about the circumstances under which he had died. But in the face of Ted’s intense sadness, it felt heartless. Justin hesitated, and in that moment, Suzy came back into the kitchen.

  She was holding a large scrapbook. “This is all of Stan’s honors, the newspaper clippings and such,” she said. “From way back when he was a Little League coach and up through all the years, the awards for his foster parenting. And of course everything about the Stan Zelinski Youth Center. He never got to see it completed but there’s this wonderful plaque beside the front door. You should go see it, TJ. It’s got Stan’s face on it. And a really beautiful tribute to him.”

  “Open it up and look,” Ted’s little boy said to Justin. “Open the book and see. My grandpa was a hero. And his name was Stan. Just like mine.”

  Within minutes Justin had said his good-byes, and he was gone from the Zelinski house.

  He had not done what he’d come to do. He had left Stan’s secret, and his own, undisturbed. The truth was that Stan Zelinski had been a child molester, and that Justin Fisher, when he was TJ, had had a part in Stan’s death and had gotten away with it. But to reveal this would be to deal a wounding blow to Suzy, and Ted, and to Ted’s little boy. It would irreparably wound Amy and Zack if Justin were to be sent to prison, even for a short time. And it would steal something shining and bright from the Little League teams and the Youth Center volunteers who believed in Stan’s legend.

  Justin was beginning to see that the truth he’d traveled to Connecticut to unearth was obscured by a constellation of other, more ambiguous truths. Ones that were fractured and wickedly complex.

  After leaving the Zelinski house, it took him several hours before he could call Amy.

  All she said was: “Well … ?”

  “I’m not ready to talk yet,” he told her. “I need time to figure some things out.”

  There was steel in Amy’s voice. “How much time?”

  “A couple of days. I’m going to rent a car, and drive back.” Justin didn’t have the strength, or the will, to say anything more. He was exhausted.

  He was in the process of hanging up when he heard Amy say: “At the house in Hawaii, my mother discovered somebody had driven a huge nail into one of the trees. She was frantic to pull it out, but the gardener said the damage was done, the nail had been put there a long time ago and pulling it out now would only make things worse. The trunk had grown around it and made it part of the tree. You could see where it had gone in, where the scar in the wood was, but the gardener said the tree was coping and if we left it alone, it would survive. Still be strong. Even with a spike through its heart. Justin, sometimes the right thing to do is to prevail. To let the wound heal over, and to keep on living.”

  After a while Justin said: “I’ll call you in a few days. By the time I get back to California, I’ll have made my decision.”

  “Justin.” There was a brief pause. When Amy spoke again, it was with immeasurable tenderness. “Please be careful.”

  Justin was having trouble keeping his voice steady as he said, “I’m going to hang up now.” And just before he did, he told her: “I love you, Amy.”

  Robert

  822 LIMA STREET, FEBRUARY 2005

  *

  Robert felt eager, aroused, like a teenager. It was surprising him. He wondered if he was about to make a fool of himself.

  He had the sudden impulse to change his mind and put the meeting off until another time, but the female voice at the other end of the phone was saying: “I’d like to do a lotta very interesting things to you. And I’d like to do them tonight.”

  There was something in the way the statements had been delivered, something so blatantly suggestive, that it shot a rush of sexual excitement through Robert. It had been years since he’d experienced such a feeling.

  “I gotta go take care of some business right now,” the woman was saying. “Gimme a hal
f hour. I’ll call you back and let you know where to meet me.” There was a quick beep and silence.

  This was the first time they’d communicated other than on the Internet, and Robert was surprised by the woman’s voice. It had an unexpected roughness, and youthfulness. The minute he heard it, he had been titillated by it.

  Now, it was causing him concern. He was nervous about how his body would look to the eyes of a stranger—worried that it would be too old, too lined and slack, to be a source of arousal to someone who sounded so knowing and so young.

  Robert went to the other side of the bedroom, determined to find something appropriate to wear. He didn’t want to arrive at his destination tonight looking like the grandfather and the widower he was. On several Internet dating sites he’d used the tag line “Mature & Up for Adventure.” He wanted to deliver what he’d been advertising.

  His clothes were in the same location they had occupied since he and Caroline had first come to the house on Lima Street decades ago. Robert’s things were tightly packed into a few feet of space in the far right-hand corner of the closet. The remainder of the space, the area that had always held Caroline’s things, had been empty for months. The vacancy and the bareness made Robert’s heart ache. He quickly grabbed a shirt and a pair of pants and shut the door.

  As he went to toss the clothes onto the bed, he caught sight of the group of framed photos on the nightstand: photos of himself and Caroline, of Julie, and of Lissa and Harrison and the boys. Seeing them embarrassed Robert.

  He had an impulse to call the woman back and cancel their appointment. But in his earlier excitement, he hadn’t thought to ask for her telephone number. There was nothing he could do; he could neither cancel the date nor quell his desire to keep it.

  It had been a very long time since he’d had sex.

  After Robert had told Caroline the truth about what he’d done to Justin, intimacy between them—with the exception of a few disconsolate encounters—had come to a halt. During their life together, Robert had never taken a single lover. It hadn’t been as difficult as he would’ve expected. In those years, love was what he had been possessed by, not lust. And his love had been given to his daughters and then to his grandchildren, and, on those occasions when she would allow it, to Caroline. For the most part, Robert’s life had been happy and full.

  But since Caroline’s death, his capacity for happiness had been permanently altered. For more than forty years, the love and anger Robert had for Caroline were the things that had directed and driven his life. When Caroline had been taken from him, he’d been left adrift and unbearably lonely.

  He lifted her picture from the night table and rested it on his chest as he stretched out on the bed. When his head touched the pillow, he imagined he caught a faint waft of fragrance—Caroline’s scent: perfumed sugar.

  The pain of her loss swept through him. He said her name and the word why. Then he did what he always did when he was grieving for Caroline: He went back to that last day in San Francisco, and to the argument they’d had just before she died.

  He thought about what had started the argument. He thought about Mitch.

  Mitch had been in the airport men’s room when Robert had entered. But Robert had been unaware of it. There had been a line of urinals along one wall, and Robert stepped into the first available open space.

  The man to Robert’s left was old and stooped, wearing a cardigan sweater that was emitting the smell of mothballs. The man to Robert’s right was in a dark suit and had a sleek chrome-colored loop coiled around his ear. He was in the midst of a phone call. He was telling someone that he’d had the jury eating out of his hand from “minute one;” his clients were so happy, they were planning to buy him a Lamborghini as a thank-you.

  The man moved away from the urinals a second or two before Robert, and they ended up at the washroom sinks, not far from each other. Robert could hear the man’s continuing conversation: “My plane’s taking off for Kennedy in a few minutes. I’ve got meetings in the New York offices tomorrow. How about I come straight to your place from the airport tonight? Good. Keep it warm for me, Sweet P.”

  The nickname “Sweet P” had been said with a lazy, arrogant rhythm—Mitch’s rhythm. The same salacious way that the name “Sweet C” had always been said when Mitch used it to refer to Caroline.

  Mitch was turned away from Robert. He’d opened the door and was about to walk through it, when Robert grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pulled him back into the restroom. Several other men, who were on their way out, shot questioning glances in Robert’s direction.

  Mitch had his briefcase in one hand. For an instant, it looked as if he was going to drop it and throw a punch. Then he suddenly recognized Robert. And he laughed. “Rob,” he said. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m thinking about smashing your face in.”

  Mitch laughed again. He shook his head as if he was both amused and confused by Robert. “I haven’t seen you in what, maybe thirty-five years? And the first thing you do is try to start a fight? What in the world is your problem?”

  “You slept with my wife. That’s my problem.”

  “You’re a sad piece of work, you know that, Robby-boy? What are you now? sixty-something? And you’re still the same clueless doofus you were when we were kids.”

  Robert hit Mitch with a shove that bounced him off the tiled wall of the restroom. As Mitch was coming back at Robert, an airport security officer stepped between them. The officer rested his hand on his equipment belt, in the space between a thick baton and a pair of handcuffs. “What’s going on, gentlemen?”

  “Nothing,” Robert said. “It’s over.”

  Mitch casually smoothed his tie. Robert moved past him on his way out of the men’s room. Mitch’s voice was mellow and so low that no one, other than Robert, heard him say: “I fucked your girlfriend, Robby. But I never slept with your wife.”

  “You’re a goddamned liar.” Robert walked out and let the door slam behind him. If the security officer hadn’t been there, Robert would have gone back and pounded the smirk from Mitch’s self-satisfied face.

  The memory of that confrontation still had the power to enrage Robert. He got up from the bed, trying to catch his breath. He suffered from hypertension and he’d forgotten to take his medication. A violent pain was blossoming in his head. His heart was racing; blood was pounding through his body. When his Internet date had called earlier, he had been in the shower, and now he was still in the same condition as when he’d rushed to the phone: He was naked.

  As he was halfway out of the bedroom, he thought about grabbing some clothes, but it didn’t seem important. He needed to get downstairs.

  In the kitchen, Robert searched through the unopened mail and the clutter on the countertops. Finally, he found the medicine in a pile of things that included his wallet and his reading glasses.

  The phone was ringing. He picked up the receiver and heard: “Hey baby. Ready to party?”

  Just as it had done earlier, the woman’s husky voice sent an involuntary thrill through Robert. “Yes, I’m ready.”

  “Lemme give you the address.”

  “Just a minute. I need to find something to write with.” Robert opened a kitchen drawer, rummaged through an accumulation of discarded rubber bands and unsharpened pencils, and found a stub of green crayon. As he was taking it out of the drawer, he thought he heard a key turning in the lock at the front door.

  He was humiliated at the possibility of someone coming in and finding him naked in his kitchen, arranging for a date he hoped would lead to sex. “Give me your number,” he said. “I’m going to have to call you back.” He grabbed what he thought was a scrap of paper from the tangle of things in the drawer. It was an old photo of himself, Barton, Mitch, and Caroline—on a beach. He flipped the snapshot facedown, and with the crayon stub, he scribbled the information that the woman was giving him. He hung up quickly and saw he’d omitted a digit, had written 768884, an incomple
te telephone number.

  Now he could hear footsteps coming down the hallway. Julie’s voice was calling: “Dad, where are you?”

  Robert jammed the photo into his wallet, threw it back into the clutter on the counter, and started toward the laundry area near the back door, intending to find something to cover himself with.

  But before he could cross the kitchen, the headache that had come on him upstairs erupted like lightning, blistering hot. A profound weakness was clenching his body, laying claim to his left side, numbing his arm and leg.

  Robert tried to take a step forward, to reach the privacy of the laundry room. But his movements were beyond his control—loose and stumbling. They pitched him sideways, leaving him tipped against the kitchen counter. With the one hand he could still control, he gripped the counter’s edge, willing himself to stay standing.

  Suddenly Julie was in the room, shouting, “Oh my God! Dad! What’s wrong?”

  Robert was struggling to say the words call and ambulance, but the weakness along his left side was hardening into paralysis and his speech was thick and slurred. He was falling away from the counter’s edge toward the kitchen floor.

  *

  A faded watercolor of the house on Lima Street was the only thing remaining in the living room. It had been hanging there since the house had first begun. Lissa took it down. And then all that was left was a shadow of the painting’s shape: a ghost mark on the wall.

  A month ago, her father had suffered a stroke—one that would require him to remain in a nursing home for the rest of his life.

  A Realtor was descending the stairs, running her hand along the smooth wood of the banister. “This place will sell in a snap,” she was saying. “People are going to feel like they’re in an old-fashioned summer house. Somewhere back east. At the seaside.” As she came off the last stair, she turned in a slow, admiring circle. “How long did you say this treasure has been in your family?”