The Language of Secrets (13 page)

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 she 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.”

Almost two months had passed since Justin’s funeral and it was April. Glorious California springtime.

Robert could hear Julie and Lissa in the front yard, playing a rowdy game filled with bursts of laughter. Through the living room window, he could see that Caroline was on the porch. In a wicker rocking chair. Sitting expressionless and still. The youthfulness and openness that had always illuminated her before were gone. She was like a lovely room abruptly boarded up and closed off—an elegant, empty space to which Robert no longer had any access.

It had been weeks since the last of the winter logs had been burned. Robert was cleaning the fireplace, depositing the dead ash into an old bucket. Each small shovelful had a stale, cold smell to it.

The look of the ash, its odd feathery density, and the enigmatic sighing of it as it sifted down upon itself, was making him queasy. These were the same sights and sounds that had come to him on the day that he had last moved ashes. A day he had spent in a roadside
cabin thousands of miles away from Lima Street. The day he had filled Justin’s cremation urn.

The memory of what he had done on that day—and of his pitiful confession of it to Caroline—sent jolts of shame through Robert.

It had been his intention never to reveal, to anyone, the truth about the places he’d gone and the awful act he had committed in the hours before filling the urn.

But on the morning of Justin’s funeral, Robert’s resolve had been weakened by the overwhelming depth of Caroline’s devastation. It had been staggering. He had called Dr. Johannsen and asked him to bring sedatives.

In spite of the medication, Caroline’s anguish continued to rage unabated. She stopped speaking, stopped making any sound at all. She took scissors to her hair and chopped it ragged. Her movements were so freighted with the weight of heartbreak, so clumsy and slow, that she had been unable to dress herself. And her tears poured in continuous silent streams.

By the time they were leaving for the funeral, Robert was terrified. In eradicating Justin, he had wanted to punish Caroline, but he saw that what he had done had come close to killing her.

At the funeral Caroline seemed to be in a trance, and after they returned home, she went upstairs, alone, refusing any help or comfort from Robert.

He had remained in the kitchen with his parents.

And then the house began to fill with a sound so chilling that it could have been echoing from the gates of hell.

It was coming from the master bedroom, from Caroline. She was screaming like an animal. The noise had no sanity to it; it was pure deranged agony.

When he heard her screams, Robert knew Caroline would not
survive the full brunt of the vengeance he’d inflicted on her. He clearly understood that he would no longer be able to keep his secret. With the image of Justin’s open, hastily dug grave still fresh in his mind, Robert had walked out of the kitchen.

As he climbed the stairs and entered the bedroom, he knew the only thing left to him—his only atonement—was to find a way to save Caroline, and to keep saving her, for the rest of her life.

He saw that she was still in her coat; one of the sleeves was soaked, so wet that it was dripping. She was crouched on the floor near the closet, clutching a toy—a white chenille-covered rabbit.

She slowly turned in Robert’s direction and opened her mouth in readiness to scream, but before she could, he said: “I lied to you. Justin didn’t die in Nevada. I never went to Nevada.”