The Language of Secrets (21 page)

“Yeah. Let’s do it.” As he said this, Justin felt as if he were balancing on the edge of a knife blade—one that was cutting between fear and hope.

Gabriel Gonzales sat down, pulled a sleek laptop out of his
attaché case, and flipped it open. “Okay. I’ll start with the chart topper. I found the red-haired woman.”

Justin’s legs went weak. Something cold and dark was coursing through him—the same nameless fear he’d experienced in the parking lot of the convalescent hospital when he had been struggling to comprehend that his father was dead, when he’d had the first inkling that there was some terrible secret hidden in the house on Lima Street.

He fumbled his way to a chair and sat. A growing sense of dread was overwhelming him.

“I’ve gotta tell you,” Gabriel was saying, “a red-haired woman with a limp, who might’ve had a kid named TJ and might’ve taught at Wesleyan, in Middletown—it wasn’t exactly a bonanza of background information. But after digging through the archives at Wesleyan, going through every picture and article about the faculty members from thirty-some years ago, I found your girl.”

Gabriel swiveled the laptop so Justin could see the screen, and her face was there—in a photograph in a campus newspaper article.

Justin felt his guts jump and tumble.

Below the picture was a name: Margaret Marie Fischer. The red-haired woman was Margaret Marie Fischer. Justin had not imagined her; she was real. He was vindicated, and intensely sad. He had remembered her scent and the feel of that soft place at the base of her neck. But he hadn’t remembered her name. Margaret Marie Fischer.

“And what about TJ?” Justin’s mouth was dry and burning hot, as if he were tasting the distilled essence of fear.

“Once I’d gotten Margaret’s name and address it wasn’t hard to unearth the rest of it. You go through enough public records and
you talk to enough people, you can find out almost anything,” Gabriel said. “In this case I got lucky. Even though Margaret had been an only child and didn’t have any surviving family, I did find an old man living on Margaret’s street who knew her back in the day. He turned me onto the fact that she did, for a couple of years, have a kid named TJ and that she also had a local girl who baby-sat him, Kati Sloane. I tracked her down. She still lives in the area, a food-service worker in a school cafeteria. She told me that Margaret Fischer had adopted a little boy when the kid was maybe two or three years old. A private adoption. Apparently Kati had been pretty tight with Margaret, and Margaret told her all the details.”

Justin’s voice was shaking. “Where did the boy come from?”

Gabriel tapped the keyboard of the laptop and information flashed onto the screen. “According to his birth certificate, he was born in Sierra Madre, California.”

“What was the home address?” Justin whispered.

“It was 822 Lima Street.”

Justin could feel Amy’s hand on his shoulder. He wanted to reach up and hold it, and keep holding it for a long time, but the name
Lima Street
had immobilized him.

“I have the birth certificate info,” Gabriel was explaining, “because the kid ended up in the foster-care system, a ward of the state.”

Amy looked toward the computer screen. “But you said Margaret Fischer adopted him.”

“She did. But a couple of years later, she died in a car accident, and that’s when the foster care started. He was in two different foster homes.”

“Why was he adopted in the first place?” Amy asked. “Where were his parents? What happened?”

“According to Kati Sloane, his parents were around,” Gabriel
said. “They just decided to ‘unload’ him for some reason—that’s her word, not mine. They had two other kids, two girls. As far as Kati and Margaret knew, the parents kept the girls and that little family unit stayed intact.”

Hearing this made Justin feel lost and sick. His parents had disposed of him as if he’d been garbage.

*

After yesterday’s meeting, Justin had gone home and pored over each item of information Gabriel Gonzales had provided. Then he had replayed the audiotapes of his sessions with Ari—every word they had exchanged since Justin’s collapse on the beach. It should have been over; all the questions should have been answered.

But the more Justin thought about the things he’d discussed with Ari, and the information he’d gotten from Gonzales, the more certain he was that his puzzle was still missing one crucial piece.

That missing piece was the reason he was in Ari’s office now.

Ari was settling into his usual chair and saying, “You look tense, buddy.”

“Given what’s going on with me at the moment,” Justin replied, “how should I look?”

“If you’re asking me as your friend,” Ari said, “the answer is ‘As tense as hell.’ If you’re asking me as your psychiatrist, the answer is ‘Relieved.’ You’ve blown away a lot of cobwebs. True, you’ve found out some disturbing things, but you’ve also turned up some comforting ones.”

Justin gave a sardonic laugh. “ ‘Comforting’? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“You found out that, in spite of having information on a gravestone to the contrary, you haven’t been dead for the last thirty
years. And you found out that you’re not crazy. Considering the alternatives, I’d call that comforting.”

“Yeah. Well, right now I’m not feeling anything even close to comfortable.” Justin wasn’t in the mood to be mollified.

“I want you to be clear on where we are here,” Ari said. “What happened was that you were faced with a series of overwhelmingly negative events at a very young age, and you needed a way to process that.”

Justin was impatient to get to the reason for his visit. He cut Ari off. “I know the rap,” he said. “You’ve explained it to me. I get it. Dissociative identity disorder, which means at some point I sealed off TJ from Justin and kept them in two different places in my head.” The statement mortified him; it made him sound pathetic and broken.

He began to pace the room. “I don’t care how much you tell me that what I did was a form of self-preservation. It still feels like a made-for-TV freak show. What I did was find a way to lie to myself on such a monumental level that I was able to block out—what, ten, twelve years of my childhood? I just erased being adopted and living in foster homes, painted over it with my imaginary life on Lima Street. Call it survival all you want. But from in here, it feels like I’m a friggin’ maniac.”

Ari’s tone was calmly professional. “You were barely a toddler when you were thrown into a psychological hell. By your fifth birthday, you’d already been ripped away from two different mothers. And after that, you were in an astoundingly bad foster-care situation. That’s a history of extreme psychological abuse. And, yes, at the point when you left Middletown and went to college, for some reason, in order to deal with whatever was going on, you detached TJ from Justin. You were a kid in a world of absolute chaos. You came up with a way to survive. You should be proud of how well you coped.”

Justin’s voice had a bitter edge to it. “Finding out that I’ve been ‘psychiatrically challenged’ for most of my life makes me feel a lot of things, but proud isn’t one of them.”

“That’s too bad,” Ari said. “Because the truth is, given the same kind of beginning that you had—no opportunity to form even one secure emotional bond in early childhood, no chance to establish any trust with the people who were supposed to be taking care of you—most of us wouldn’t have turned out half as healthy as you did.”

“Being thirty-three years old and thinking I was someone I wasn’t,” Justin said, “that’s your idea of healthy?”

“Actually you
were
that person, there was just more to the story,” Ari said. “But that’s beside the point. What I’m trying to explain is that given your history, it would be expected for you to be seriously dysfunctional. At
best
a dropout or a felon.”

“But I turned out to be a lying fruitcake instead.” Justin shot Ari an exasperated glance.

“Look, it’s very common for kids who are under no psychological strain at all to think they remember things they couldn’t possibly remember, things that may have happened before they were born. But they
believe
they remember because they’ve heard the stories a million times from their parents and grandparents. The only difference is, you told the story to yourself. That little song had everything in it that you needed for the building of an emotional fortress.”

“Ari,” Justin said, “do you want to know what the fortress looked like from in here?” He tapped his forehead. “Like rotting, black … Swiss cheese.”

“I’m going to need you to explain that one to me,” Ari said.

“Imagine watching a movie through a sheet of tar paper with holes punched in it. That’s how it was for me. I could only see pieces of the picture,” Justin said. “In college, when I tried to
think about my life, to remember specifics … I couldn’t do it. It was totally weird. I knew I’d been a kid. I could remember what my room looked like, but the only house I could get a picture of in my mind was the one on Lima Street. And I knew I had gone to school … but I could only remember general things … like that the name of my high school was Wilson, but I didn’t remember the teachers’ names or what the kids in my class looked like. I couldn’t even remember what I looked like.” Justin stopped and gave a wry laugh. “Want to know something? I’ve never seen a photograph of myself as a kid. Only as a toddler, and then in college. Nothing in between.” There was wistfulness as he added: “I have absolutely no idea what I looked like while I was growing up.”

Ari leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. He was studying Justin intently as he said, “All those years, between college and when you came back here from London … you had absolutely no memory of having lived in either of the foster homes you were in?”

“It was crazy,” Justin replied. “I could feel that there were these dark places in my head, stuff I couldn’t get at, and it scared the shit out of me. But all I knew for sure was the Justin Fisher from Lima Street thing. The rest of it was a jumble.”

“You did four years of college and you were in London for ten years afterward,” Ari said. “That’s a long time to live with something like that. Why didn’t you ever try to figure it out? Why didn’t you try to contact your family? Or talk to a shrink about it?”

Justin went to the window and gazed out. He waited for a while and then said, “The truth is, I knew there was part of me that was seriously fucked-up.”

“So why didn’t you do anything about it?”

“Because it was way too scary. Every time I tried to figure out what was hiding in those blank spaces in my memory, I’d get hit
with this horrible feeing that if I didn’t back away from it, I was going to die.”

“What about friends and people you worked with—what did you tell them?” Ari asked.

“Not much,” Justin said. Then he smiled. “Most people are a lot more interested in their own lives than anybody else’s.” As he glanced at Ari, his tone was full of irony. “Everybody thought I was the soul of empathy and charm. You know why? Because in being scared shitless of ever having to talk about me and my story, I learned to make it all about the other guy.”

Justin let out an exhausted sigh. “And then I came home, and the Justin Fisher Who Never Was went to Lima Street. And the crazy came spilling out.”

Ari fixed his gaze on Justin. “You used Justin Fisher from Lima Street to save yourself,” he said. “There was nothing crazy about that. TJ’s life was too hard. If you couldn’t have gotten away from it, it would’ve killed you.”

When Justin heard the word
killed
, he flinched.

His heart was beating with the force of a sledgehammer as he said: “Ari, there’s something I need to tell you. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but if it is, it’s big. Bigger than any of the other stuff we’ve found out about TJ …”

There was a long silence before Justin finished his thought. “It’s bigger. And it’s much worse.”

It was after midnight. The sidewalks on Main Street were empty. She was making a left turn—not far from the Greyhound bus station—coming home from her cousin’s bachelorette party. That was when she saw him running across the street with a duffel bag in his hand.

The minute she saw him, she knew him. Over the years, from time to time, she’d stood at the edges of the playgrounds at his elementary school and his middle school, and she had watched him. And she’d wanted to call to him and say that she loved him. But she felt her declarations of love would have been valueless because, when he’d needed her most, she had failed him.

He was almost eighteen, tall and muscular now, but there was something about the way he moved that was unmistakably TJ. He was alone on the street, passing within inches of her. She was exhilarated and excited from the party, and before she realized she’d done it, she had called out to him and said: “TJ! It’s Kati.”

His stride faltered and he slowed. For a fraction of an instant, their eyes met. “It’s me. Kati, your old baby-sitter,” she said. “How are you?”

There was a flicker of hesitation, as if he was on the verge of stopping and saying something to her. But he turned and sprinted away, quickly crossing the street and disappearing around a corner.

Kati’s initial instinct was to follow him, but the moment had passed and the things she had wanted to say suddenly seemed pitifully insufficient.

As she drove away, she thought about the last time they had been together—the terrible night in which she’d failed him, and lost him, by not finding a way to keep him safe.

After Margaret had left the house to go back to Middletown and retrieve TJ’s roller skates, the sound of the wind and the rain, growing progressively stronger, kept Kati on edge. She was worried that the storm’s increasing noise would wake TJ. She knew if he woke up and discovered his mother was not in the house, he would be terrified.

At some point, Kati began calling Margaret’s office at Wesleyan, hoping against hope that she would suddenly be there, safe and well—with the explanation that she’d had car trouble, or gone for a snack, or fallen asleep at her desk. And then, when Margaret’s phone continued to go unanswered, Kati stopped calling and began circling through the house, terrified, frantic to see a break in the storm, to hear the sound of a key in the lock, to understand what it was that should be done now that she and TJ had been set adrift, in this empty house, on this furious night.