The Language of Secrets (19 page)

Margaret knew that at its heart it was indeed a mess. But she needed to believe that her part of it—the part in which she and TJ had found each other—was a miracle. “His name is Thomas Justin Fisher,” Margaret said. “And my name is Margaret Fischer. He was meant to be mine all along. There was simply a little spelling glitch that delayed him in getting to me.”

There was something pitying in Andy’s gaze, as if he was sorry for her naïveté. It embarrassed Margaret; she looked away. Then she reached for the package he’d given her earlier. “Are you sure you want to deal with whatever’s in there?” he asked. “My offer’s still good. I can dispose of it and we can leave it at that.”

“No,” Margaret said. “I want to open it. I want to know everything there is for me to know.” She carefully tore open the brown paper and found a slim spiral notebook. An array of photographs had been hastily pasted onto its lined pages. The photographs were of TJ, of a tree-shaded house surrounded by a deep, wide porch, and of two beautiful little girls. Margaret realized she knew who they were. “These are his sisters,” she said.

She held the notebook so that Andy could see the photographs. “Their names are Julie and Lissa. And this house, it’s in a place called Sierra Madre, California, on Lima Street.”

“How could you know any of that? How could he have told you about it?” Andy was genuinely surprised. “I’ve never heard TJ speak. Have you found a way to get him to talk to you?”

“No, not yet.” Margaret looked down at the photographs again. Encountering the reality of these girls, and of this house, was overwhelming. “There’s this little singsong that TJ does,” Margaret murmured. “The sound of it is so sad.”

Until this moment, Margaret had recognized only one truth:
that her prayers had been answered. And because TJ was an answer to prayer, Margaret had believed having him was unequivocally right. But now as she touched her hand to these photographs that had clearly been assembled with such desperation, she realized her truth was only one of many. She was being told that her joy had its roots in someone else’s sorrow and that she was not as immaculate and righteous as she had believed herself to be. These photographs and their passionate, hectic arrangement were showing her that the account Andy had been given of TJ’s situation was only a small part of some darker, more complicated story.

Margaret instinctively knew who had assembled the contents of this notebook, and she knew why. She understood that when TJ had left the house on Lima Street, only one of his parents had been truly happy to see him go.

As she turned over the last page of photographs, Margaret discovered—tucked against the back cover of the notebook—a single Polaroid snapshot. It had been taken at a peculiar angle, as if the camera had been balanced on a chair seat or at the top of a set of porch steps. It was of a young woman standing on a patch of dormant winter grass. Her hair was the color of chocolate and her expression was utterly still. She was looking straight into the lens. Her gaze was so direct that it seemed she was wanting the camera to see into her soul and to record what was written there. She was holding a toy rabbit. Beneath the Polaroid, folded into a small square no larger than a credit card, was a copy of a birth certificate bearing the name of Thomas Justin Fisher.

Margaret picked up the Polaroid and looked closely at the expression in the young woman’s eyes. The ferocity, and the raw pleading that was there, made Margaret recoil as if she had touched lightning. In that instant, Margaret knew that she and the woman in the photograph were both complicit in the commission
of a crime—a crime in which the identities of perpetrator and victim were frighteningly unclear.

*

“Swing set!” TJ’s eyes were bright. “A swing set and roller skates.”

“You’re sure?” Margaret said. “That’s all?” She pulled her raincoat on and began gathering her books.

A single cornflake was caught in the red cotton of his Mickey Mouse sweater. The twill of his pants was scuffed lighter at the knees from climbing trees in the yard and sliding down the stair banister and crayoning dinosaurs onto large sheets of art paper scattered across the living room floor. TJ’s hands went into his pockets; he lowered his gaze and swayed gently from side to side. His brow furrowed. He deliberated. And then he said, “Maybe one more thing. A piano.”

This unexpected and slightly outrageous announcement caught Margaret off guard. It made her laugh. “A piano? But we already have a piano.”

“It’s not in my size.” TJ scrambled up onto the bench of the baby grand that was in the corner of the living room and spread his arms over the keyboard. “See, Mommy? Too big. It’s not in my size.”

Seeing TJ there, talkative and happy, almost brought Margaret to tears. For more than a year after he’d come to her, TJ had not spoken. But almost from the beginning, he had been drawn to the piano. Every night after dinner, he had allowed himself to be seated in Margaret’s lap and to be comforted by the steady beating of her heart at his back as he listened to the music she played for him, the music of Beethoven and Bach and Chopin.

And then one night, a few months ago, when Margaret had pulled away from the keyboard and stopped playing, TJ had put
his hand on hers and guided it back to the piano and said: “Make more music.” They were the first words she’d ever heard him speak. And behind them came a torrent of others. It was as if Margaret and TJ’s time together, lost in music, had unbound whatever had become paralyzed in him when he had been taken from the house on Lima Street.

Now TJ was asking for a piano of his own.

“Oh how I love my TJ. Oh how I love my baby!” Margaret scooped him up and whirled him around the room—around her simple Yankee living room with its white walls and rag rugs and dark furniture and gleaming brass.

“For this moment in time,” she said, “in this room, holding this child, I, Margaret Marie Fischer, am experiencing perfect happiness!”

“It’s my birthday today so I’m five now, Mommy,” Justin reminded her. “My size is five, when you get my piano, don’t forget.”

“I won’t forget. Now go find Mommy’s bag so she can pack up her books and hit the road, so she can do her summer-session teaching, and her piano buying, and then get back home in time for your birthday party.”

TJ went to the table near the front door to retrieve Margaret’s canvas book bag. Just as he did, the door opened and Kati came rushing in. “Sorry to be late, Maggie. But I had to run a very important errand involving gift wrap and a stop at the bakery.”

“I have a similar errand to run myself,” Margaret said. “Mine’s going to involve the acquisition of a miniature Steinway.”

“Really?” Kati shrugged off her yellow rain slicker. “I didn’t know anything like that was on the list.”

“It was a last-minute addition.” Margaret was smiling as she tucked her stack of books into the canvas bag and buckled it closed.

When she kissed him and left, TJ ran to the window and watched her car pull out of the driveway. “Where’s Mommy going?” he asked. It was the same question he asked every day. It was a game that he and Kati played.

“You know where she’s going,” Kati told him. “Where she always goes. To Wesleyan.”

*

Margaret rushed through the morning English lit class and canceled her afternoon graduate seminar. She couldn’t keep her mind on her lectures. All she could think about was finding a piano—one that would be perfect for someone whose size was five.

To find such a thing, she knew she’d have to search outside of Middletown, the community where Wesleyan was so incongruously located. Middletown was blue-collar, a factory town that banged out rubberized work boots and auto parts and smelled of sulfur and hot metal and was home, mainly, to the children and grandchildren of Italian and Polish immigrants. It was where Margaret had grown up in the company of a mother and father who doted on her. Margaret’s father had been the librarian at Wesleyan—a poetic, scholarly man with eyesight so fragile that it did not allow him to drive. This was the reason he had settled in Middletown, to be near his work. But Margaret and Middletown had never quite fit together; she was always too bookish and (like her mother) too Irish for the place. Margaret had made her first and final exit from it when she had gone north to attend the University of Connecticut. Through her undergraduate years, and through her time in graduate school, and in the summers after she began teaching, she used travel to distance herself from Middletown. She wandered—across Europe and Asia and every state in the United States. Years later, when she’d come back to Connecticut
to accept a faculty position at Wesleyan, she chose to settle in Essex, a quintessential New England village that was twenty miles, and a world away, from the location in which she had spent her girlhood.

Middletown was not the kind of place in which a tiny, perfect grand piano was waiting to be discovered, and as Margaret got into her car to go in search of TJ’s present, she knew she would not rest until the piano was found. She wanted him to have his heart’s desire, to be blissfully happy. Happiness was something Margaret instinctively possessed, and delighted in sharing.

Once when she had been traveling in Italy, she had gone to see a fortune-teller—a woman with skin the color of ripe peaches, who had received her into a cool stone house that was airy and open and looked out from a terraced mountainside toward an expanse of glittering ocean. There had been fragrant almond-flavored tea and a glazed platter filled with tiny buttery cookies. The fortune-teller had told Margaret that God was pleased with her, that she had lived many lives before and had lived them well, and that now, in this life, it was Margaret’s destiny to be happy and to be filled with enjoyment, and to share that happiness with others. And Margaret had gone away feeling the fortune-teller had told her things that she had, in her heart, already known.

Margaret drove half the length of Connecticut in search of TJ’s piano. When, at last she found it, it was waiting for her in a tiny jewel box of an antiques store—in serene and affluent Westport. The owner was as elegant as her showroom, her only accessory a bracelet—a single thick braid of brushed silver. Her white hair was gathered in a neat coil at the back of her head, and her simple black dress and flat shoes had the feel of Paris about them.

Margaret stood beside her looking frowsy and windblown and feeling elated, because, as the woman was leading Margaret
toward the back of the store, she was saying: “I have exactly what you’re looking for. I’m not certain of how it came to be … It might have originally been intended as a window display, or it could possibly have been a custom-made toy.” The woman stopped near a marble pedestal, stepping aside to let Margaret see the item and judge for herself. “Either way,” the woman said, “I suspect you’re going to like it.”

The store was softly lit with small silk-shaded lamps. The light coming through the front window was watery and dim. It had been raining all day and the rain was beginning to come down harder now. But even in the muted half gloom, Margaret could clearly see that what the woman had led her to was a treasure—an exact replica of a grand piano, scaled to miniature, to child size. The black lacquer of its finish was so smooth that it had a kind of liquid depth to it. The fittings and hinges were polished brass. The keys had yellowed with age but were free of even the slightest imperfection. Their sound was rippling and light—the music of fairies, or fireflies, or snow melting in mountain streams.

“It’s a bit pricey.” The woman looked at Margaret and tilted her head slightly—a gesture of genteel inquiry. Margaret answered the unspoken question by opening her checkbook and uncapping her pen. There was no price she would not pay for her son’s happiness.

*

The search for the piano had taken longer than she’d expected, and Margaret arrived home much later than she usually did. It was already dark. The rain had become a storm and was falling in heavy wind-driven sheets.

When Margaret walked through the front door, instead of finding TJ and Kati running toward her in their party hats, eager
to begin the birthday celebration, she found an empty room where crepe-paper streamers were hanging, limp, from the curtain rods and a cluster of helium balloons was floating in a corner like a gathering of blank-faced ghosts.

From near the door came quick movement and sudden sound—a streamer slipped to the floor; a balloon bumped against the ceiling with a single hollow thud. Then the house went quiet again. Margaret quickly put TJ’s tiny piano on the closed lid of her own larger one. She called out to Kati and TJ. There was no answer. She called out again. And still there was no answer.

Margaret took the stairs at a run. As she arrived at the top, she saw Kati standing in the doorway of TJ’s room, pale and tense. “He’s doing it again, Maggie,” Kati whispered. “He keeps doing it, over and over. I’m scared. I can’t get him to stop.”

TJ was in the farthest, smallest corner of the room, where the slatted wood ceiling sloped low above a dormer window. His knees were drawn up against his body, his arms wrapped tightly around them. His little dog, Inky, was circling him, anxious and whimpering.

A muted light was coming into the room from the gate lamp at the end of the driveway, but TJ’s face was in shadow. He was looking toward the window, staring at the pounding rain. In an eerie haunting singsong he was repeating: “Do I know my home? … Yes, I do. Yes I do … I live on Lima Street. Right at 822.”

Margaret knew that it could be hours before he came back to her, back to his life and his happiness. She knew this because, although they were less frequent now, these episodes were a fact of TJ’s existence. They were, for him, a hiding place, a walled darkness into which he fled when he was frightened. They were the hypnotic remnants of his past, fragments from which he had fashioned an ephemeral, self-made sanctuary.

“What happened, Kati?” Margaret kept her voice low. She knelt beside TJ and cautiously put her arms around him, wanting him to feel the safety of her embrace but not wanting to startle him. His body was rigid and his breathing was rapid and shallow. His gaze remained fixed on the rain. “Do I know my parents? Yes, I do. Yes I do. One’s named Caroline. And one’s named Robert, too …”