The Language of Secrets (14 page)

Caroline swayed backward, as if she had been punched. She again opened her mouth, but this time there was no scream; there was only the sound of her gasping for air, trying to ask a question she couldn’t even form.

Robert knelt in front of her; he was wracked with guilt and anxiety. The voice that came out of him was so shattered, he didn’t recognize it as his own.

He began by telling Caroline that Justin’s ashes weren’t in the urn they had buried at the funeral. Then he revealed the truth about the ashes, and about the urn.

Caroline fixed her eyes on him and never moved them.

As Robert told his story, the awfulness of what he had done took possession of him and it felt as if he wasn’t simply recounting his actions; he was reliving them.

In saying the words, he was carried back into that moment when a large man in a black suit had been in the act of opening a double-doored mahogany cabinet and Robert had been stretching past him to grab a plain pewter cylinder from among several others that were on a top shelf. The man immediately stopped him.
“Those contain unclaimed remains, sir. Our available urns are here, on the lower shelves.”

“Then that one.” Robert pointed toward a small bronze-colored urn.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to make the transfer for you, sir?”

“No. I’ll do it myself. I want to bring my son’s ashes back to my wife in something nicer than the cardboard box they gave me at the other funeral home, where he was cremated. But I didn’t think of it until a few minutes ago, when I was on my way to the airport. I don’t know why.”

“People don’t think straight when they’re grieving.” The man snipped the price tag from the urn. “Hard to be far from home and have your child up and die, the way you say yours did, in the time it takes for a sled to overturn. You said your boy died here, but you’re from California?”

“Yes. I … uh … I’d brought him here to … to meet my relatives.” Robert felt a twitch of anxiety. He was afraid he was bungling the lies he had been telling. “It’s a long story. I really need to get going.” Robert tossed several bills onto the counter; they added up to far more than the price of his purchase. He grabbed the urn and ran for the door.

Outside, the sky was low and gray, like a curving expanse of rolled steel. Frigid winter air was pushing through the layers of his clothing and chilling him to his core. His coat, the only one he had brought with him, was meant for February in California and he was the width of a continent away from there.

Robert was trying not to think about the terrible thing he’d done to Justin in this cold, alien place. He was turning his attention to something that, earlier in the day, he’d torn out of a phone book—an advertisement for roadside rental cabins.

An hour later, he was signing a motel guest register. The
woman behind the desk was glancing toward the rental car that was parked in the dusty driveway just outside the door. “By any chance … you hidin’ a body in that car of yours?”

Robert’s head jerked up. She had startled him. She was immensely fat and a deep chuckle rumbled out of her. “Honey, you look about ready to wet yourself.” She tapped Robert’s wedding ring. “Relax. You’re not the first married man ever to slip in here in an ‘empty’ car askin’ for privacy. Usually it means they’ve got a little somethin’ crouched down in the backseat they don’t want their wife and family to know about.” She picked up the registration card and grinned. “Am I right,
Mr. Thomas
, or am I right?”

Robert’s mouth had gone dry. It took him a moment before he could speak. “Yes. I guess you could say it’s something like that.”

Cabin number sixteen sat at the river’s edge, dank and sagging, with a hazy grime on the windows and a burn mark where the triangular faceplate of a hot iron had scorched its imprint onto a faded throw rug. But Robert’s attention went instantly and exclusively to the fireplace. It was the reason he had come.

There was no fireplace shovel but there was an empty soup can, abandoned on a shelf in the seedy kitchenette. Robert went immediately to work. It was cold in the cabin; there was no need to remove his coat. He opened the bronze urn and placed it on the floor beside him. Then he began using the soup can to ferry ash between the fireplace and the urn.

The ash had a stale, cold smell. The look of it, its odd feathery density, was making him queasy. It caused a shuddering moan to come out of him: wordless supplication, a primitive plea for forgiveness.

When he had completed filling the urn he fitted its cover into place and started toward the door of the cabin. But he stopped in mid-stride, suddenly unsure as to whether or not his work was finished.
He moved the urn from his right hand to his left, testing the weight of it, trying to remember the feel of the cylinder he’d lifted from the shelf in the funeral home, the one that had contained actual cremation ashes. It seemed it had felt heavier than the one he was holding. His mind began to race: There were any number of variables to be accounted for, including the possibility that the cylinder had weighed more because it had contained the ashes of an adult, not the remains of a toddler. His instinct was to leave, to get back into the rental car and drive to the airport as quickly as possible. But he was being gripped by a fear that was edging into frenzy; he couldn’t take the chance that the urn would give him away when he returned home.

As Robert put the urn on the floor, and grabbed the soup can, he was already running out of the cabin. Running toward a large tree near the riverbank—toward the wide circle of sandy soil at its base.

Later, when Robert drove past the motel office and pulled out onto the highway, he saw the fat woman at the desk switch on the VACANCY sign. He imagined her picking up a set of clean sheets and shambling down the dirt path toward cabin sixteen; and he knew what she’d discover when she arrived. In the middle of the floor, there was a chaotic spill of fireplace ash and riverbank sand riddled with the tracks of clawing fingertips. And near the door, there was a wash of fresh vomit.

After Robert had driven away from the cabins, he had gone to the airport and boarded a plane bound for California. During the flight, he had used the time to go over the story about the camping trip, and about Nevada being the site of Justin’s death: the story he had told on the phone, at dawn yesterday, when he’d broken the news to Caroline—the same story he’d told his parents when he had called their home in Arizona.

After the flight landed, Robert had gone directly to Lima Street. He stood for a long time outside the front door of the house, holding his suitcase. Although its contents were minimal—some underwear, a shirt or two, a shaving kit, and the small ash-filled urn—the weight of it felt enormous.

Before he could gather the strength to reach for the latch, the door was swung open and a bolt of light shot across the porch. His mother was there, waiting for him. She and his father had driven all night; they had come to offer their consolation.

Almost simultaneously she was embracing and railing at him, sobbing and then screaming: “You have caused me to lose my grandson! I want an explanation!”

Robert had to edge past her to get into the house. “I already explained,” he said. “It was an accident. Justin was bitten by a snake and I couldn’t get him to a doctor in time.” Then he quickly walked away from her and went into the kitchen.

When his mother followed him a moment later, her eyes immediately flickered over the scotch bottle that was in his hand. He tensed, waiting for a caustic comment. But she seemed preoccupied. She circled in front of him and said: “You’re wearing slacks and a sports coat.”

Her observation rocked him. For a panicked moment, he was certain he’d given himself away and that she knew there had been no camping trip.

“You look dressed up,” his mother insisted. “Like you’ve been to a business meeting.”

Robert’s grip on the bottle tightened; he could feel the metal cap pressing hard against his palm. “I borrowed this stuff,” he said. “I had to deal with the funeral home. The cremation. I didn’t want to do it in camping clothes.”

His mother seemed baffled. “Cremation! What cremation?”

“Justin’s,” Robert replied. “The snake venom, it’s poison. The bruising and the disfiguration were awful. I didn’t want Caroline to see him that way.”

His mother sank into one of the wooden chairs at the kitchen table. “Oh God,” she whispered.

She looked undone, and old. Seeing her that way devastated Robert. He sat on the floor in front of her, dropped his head into her lap, and began to cry. His mother made no move to comfort him. She pushed her way out of the chair and left him slumped against it, like a scorned penitent at a makeshift altar.

“I want a funeral,” she said. “I want him buried.”

Robert remained sitting on the floor, his hands covering his face. “I told you. He’s been cremated.”

With an iron-voiced determination, she said, “I don’t care. I want a place on this earth for my grandson. You cannot erase that little boy, Robert. I will not allow it.”

There was a silence, then the sound of shattering glass, and then another silence. Robert didn’t have to look up to know what had happened. Before leaving the kitchen, his mother had smashed the scotch bottle into the sink.

Within hours, Robert had made hurried arrangements for a funeral.

Fred Bryant, the funeral director, considered him a friend; Robert had written the insurance policies on the mortuary for years. Fred’s only thought was to make the situation as simple and easy as possible for Robert and Caroline.

The story of Justin’s immediate cremation after dying from a snakebite was never questioned. The bronze urn that Robert had brought back as a prop to validate that story was never opened. It had gone from Robert’s hands to Fred’s, and then into a child-size silver coffin that had been swiftly sealed and blanketed with a
spray of red carnations. No one, other than Robert, had known that the funeral was simply a palliative for a grieving mother and grandmother; an empty gesture for a little boy who had already been disposed of in a more careless, and much colder, way.

No one had known the truth about what Robert had done to Justin.

But now Caroline knew. Robert had just finished telling her the details of his crime. The knowledge that her little boy hadn’t died in a desert, snakebitten and bruised, was the only comfort Robert could offer her.

For a long time Caroline continued to sit on the floor near the closet, saying nothing, running her fingers over the wet sleeve of her coat. When he could no longer stand the tension, Robert reached out and tried to hold her. She pushed him away and slowly struggled to her feet.

It was clear she was in shock, beyond rational thought. She started to leave the room, then stopped in the doorway. “When you did it, did he realize what was happening?” she asked. It was the first time she’d spoken since Robert had returned from taking Justin away. “Did he cry?”

“Yes, he cried.” Robert’s voice was quiet—so quiet that for a moment he thought Caroline hadn’t heard him.

Then she said, “And you? Did you cry?”

“I cried afterward,” Robert replied. He wanted to hold her. To tell her that what he had done had been done because he loved her, because he wanted her to belong solely to him, because without her he would not have a home, or his daughters. And without those things, he would be rudderless.

“It’s cold back east this time of year,” Caroline said. “Justin’s alone. In the cold. He hated being cold. You should have taken his Winnie-the-Pooh blanket.” She turned to Robert, drugged and
unsteady. A wail came out of her as she said: “You bastard. You didn’t take his blanket!”

“It doesn’t make any difference.” Robert said this as he was again reaching out for Caroline. “The blanket doesn’t make any difference. He’s all right now. I promise.”

There had been tears in Robert’s eyes as he was making that promise, tears that had felt hot and brackish and unclean.

And from that moment to this—from the day of Justin’s funeral until now, for the past two months—Caroline had shunned Robert.

She had deliberately taken a part of her soul and locked it away. She had made herself—in some essential way—gone.

But in another, more pragmatic way, one that comforted Robert greatly, she had never left him at all. She had remained with him—silent and still—on Lima Street.

Robert set aside the bucket of ash. He looked toward the living room window and saw Caroline on the porch. She must have sensed him watching her. She glanced in his direction, then moved to a chair that was out of his line of sight.

He turned his attention back to the fireplace. He had scrubbed away every trace of ash and soot, every stain.

He picked up a copper vase that was new and flawless, filled with daffodils. He set it onto the bare, clean hearth, into the midst of a dazzling pool of sunlight.

He was home early. Amy was thrilled. But when she put her arms around him, she could feel the strange ambivalence that had taken root in Justin during their separation.

Every time they touched, she could feel him simultaneously yearning for her and guarding against her, as if her defection to Hawaii had cut into his soul and the wound was still dangerously raw.

“I have something to tell you,” he said. He moved awkwardly out of Amy’s embrace.

The look on his face sent chills through her. There was an unsettling expression in his eyes, as if he was seeing some dark thing recently emerged into light and uncomfortable with being there. It was so disturbing and so intense that Amy couldn’t stay in the same room with it.

She went outside onto the patio and lit the logs in the fire pit. Then she sat on one of the chaise longues, braced herself, and waited for Justin to come out of the house.

She was steeling herself for the news that he’d been irreparably
hurt by her time in Hawaii, and that he no longer wanted her. The thought was terrifying to Amy. To an equal extent, it was infuriating. She had given up something very precious in order to return to Justin, and now she was preparing for him to say he no longer loved her because she hadn’t done it quickly enough.