The Language of Secrets (24 page)

Almost instantly, there was a sudden scuffling noise in Cassie’s
room. Her door opened, and TJ saw Stan hurrying out. Stan was rumpled and stumbling. He was hiking his pants and groping for his zipper as he was moving through the doorway at the far end of the hall and disappearing into the kitchen.

The sound of Cassie’s plaintive whimper and the sight of Stan fumbling at the crotch of his khaki pants set off a violent hatred in TJ. It was so intense that, for an instant, his vision was obscured by a flash of red, as if some incendiary, bloody thing inside him had burst.

TJ swiftly crossed the hallway and went into the kitchen. He wanted to put his hands around Stan Zelinski’s thick neck and break it. Stan was at the other end of the room, near the table, hunched over, stuffing the tails of his blue work shirt into the waistband of his pants. He was glancing over his shoulder toward the doorway through which he had just come, nervously looking in the direction of the bedroom he shared with his wife.

“You fucking freak,” TJ said.

Stan whirled around, startled. When he saw TJ, he went white with shock. “How long have you been here?” His voice was a ragged mix of confusion and fear; he was struggling to keep it low, to keep it under the cover of the music coming from the radio—the Beatles singing about a yellow submarine.

“You fucking, fucking freak.” The expression in TJ’s eyes as he was walking toward Stan was murderous. His first blow slammed into Stan’s face and broke his nose. It sent blood splattering across TJ’s knuckles. The second blow plowed into the center of Stan’s barrel chest. TJ knew that if he allowed himself to do what he wanted to do, he would pound Stan, and keep pounding him, until Stan was bloody pulp, until he was dead.

Stan staggered back against the kitchen table. TJ moved away from him and reached for the phone on the wall.

“What are you doing?” Stan’s breathing was labored and wheezing.

“I’m calling the police.” TJ lifted the receiver and began to dial. It was then that he heard a
click!
and felt a small perfect circle of cold pressing against his temple. He knew it was the barrel tip of a cocked rifle.

Stan had crossed the room and was now between TJ and the open back door.

The sound of his own pulse was so loud in TJ’s ears that he could hear nothing else. For a moment, he had the sensation that he was going to lose control of his bowels.

Without thinking, TJ reacted. To save himself, he crouched and drove his head into Stan’s midsection, sending Stan stumbling backward, out through the open door, with the rifle still in his hands.

Stan immediately lost his footing in the pool of sprinkler water on the breezeway floor. His legs skidded out from under him and he was slammed into a sitting position, slammed back, hard, against the Peg-Board wall where the garden tools were. His eyes went glassy and a dribble of blood-pinked saliva bubbled from the corner of his mouth.

“You’re not gonna get away with this.” Stan’s voice was a wheezing rasp. “You little bastard cocksucker. You’re not gonna get away with this.”

Before Stan could raise the rifle again, TJ grabbed the duffel bag from the bench near the breezeway entrance and bolted into the darkness.

As he ran, the spiral notebook was pressing against his spine, and all he could think of was sanctuary—the images of a sister named Lissa and a park swing sailing away from the ground, toward the sky.

When he came into the downtown area, it was after midnight. The sidewalks were empty. He wasn’t far from the Greyhound bus station.

And he was still running.

As he entered Main Street, a car suddenly made a left turn. He was caught in the sweep of its headlights and he heard a woman calling to him, sounding light and happy, like someone who had been at a party: “TJ! It’s Kati.” The voice was strangely familiar. He glanced toward the woman and their eyes met. “It’s me. Kati, your old baby-sitter,” she said. “How are you?”

He experienced a brief shudder of emotion, as if she was a person he knew. He had a momentary impulse to say something to her. But instead, he sprinted away because she had called him TJ and that wasn’t his name.

His name was circling in his head like a song: “My name is Justin. I know my name. Yes, I do. Yes, I do.”

It was no longer TJ who was racing through the midnight darkness with a duffel bag in his hand and the spiral notebook at his back—it was Justin.

The confusion and terror and loneliness that was TJ and the Loudens and the Zelinskis and Stan’s blood in the breezeway had been sucked into a past that could no longer be seen.

Justin was running toward his future. And, as always, toward the house on Lima Street.

“The sins of our youth and of our riper years. The sins of our souls and the sins of our bodies. Our spontaneous sins. Our sins of ignorance. The sins we know and remember, and the sins we have forgotten. Forgive them, O Lord. Forgive them all.”

The minister allowed a moment of silence before he spoke again. “In the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven.” And from the congregation, the response rang out: “Glory to God! Amen.”

Caroline abruptly rose from a back pew and walked out. The minister’s words had filled her with bitterness. The space in her soul that should have been available for repentance and forgiveness was too crowded. It was too full of confusion.

She was bewildered by a myriad of things. Foremost among them was how quickly time had gone by—how swiftly the beginning had become the end, how abruptly youth had collided with age and swept so much beauty out of reach.

The little, exquisite things that had been lost were numberless. And as they had evaporated one by one from Caroline’s reality, they had firmly fixed themselves in her memory. She could still
hear the banging of the screen door and the tinny clatter of metal thermoses rolling against the sides of empty lunch boxes and high, excited voices calling: “Mommy, Mommy! We’re home!” She could still smell the unique scent that was the Fourth of July: charcoal lighter fluid, grilled hot dogs, and backyard fireworks. She could still feel herself as she used to be—the weight of her hair hanging long and thick down her back, the texture of her skin as soft as cashmere, the shape of her body when it had been supple and desired. These were the memories of things she’d once possessed without any real understanding of how pleasurable they were, or how fleeting they would be.

Caroline was in her sixties now. Time had slowed her step and etched lines onto her beautiful face; time had moved her girls away from her and turned them into women, separate and apart, their attention and love given to boyfriends, and husbands, and children of their own.

On her walk from the church to the house on Lima Street, Caroline’s impulse was to weep for the sins she’d committed in her youth and ignorance. But overriding that impulse was a desire to curse God. She wanted to curse him for having failed to protect her from those sins, for having allowed her to fall into motherhood, and womanhood, so profoundly defenseless and stupid and unprepared.

Above all, she had wanted to curse God for Justin’s absence. But the curse always died before it could be uttered—killed by an inescapable truth. It was a truth that had bored into Caroline the minute she learned Robert had taken Justin and given him away. She had immediately seen the awful symmetry: Justin had been stolen from a mother who was, from the very moment of his conception, a thief.

Her first theft had been from her marriage; she had robbed it
of honesty and fidelity. And after Justin’s birth, the proportions of her thievery had become astounding. By wrapping her child in her own complicated secrets and hiding him away on Lima Street, she had stolen a son from his father.

The weight of her complicity in what had happened to Justin was suddenly hitting Caroline with aching force. She was approaching the corner, and the mailbox—the same mailbox into which, all those years ago, she had put the spiral notebook and the photographs: the evidence of the life from which Justin had been taken and the proof of her desperation to have him back.

Full of Valium and loss, she had staggered to that mailbox and pushed the clumsily wrapped package into it and prayed for the miracle of her child’s return. But in a small part of her heart, she sensed that it was a prayer that should perhaps go unanswered. Justin deserved a sweeter life, something better than being raised by a divorced mother who could offer him only an unmoored, scrabbling, hand-to-mouth existence.

Those had been Caroline’s thoughts when she first lost Justin, and they were still troubling her now. But as she rounded the corner onto Lima Street, her mood lifted. There was a large sport utility vehicle parked at the curb in front of the house. On the car’s bumper was a sticker proclaiming FAMILY FIRST, and in the rear window was a decal depicting five smiling stick figures—a father, a mother, and three boys of descending height. Beneath the figures, there were names: Harrison, Lissa, Graham, Fletcher, and Ethan. Caroline’s pace immediately quickened.

As she was walking up the front steps, she saw that it was Ethan who was running to greet her. “Gramma, where’ve you been?” He sounded joyful and breathless. “We were waiting and waiting.”

“I’ve been to church,” Caroline said. She picked him up and
carried him into the house. His skin smelled warm and dusty, the way a puppy smells when it’s been out in the sunshine, rolling on the lawn.

“But church got out a long time ago. You should have been here already.” His expression let her know that in his opinion, as a four-year-old who had just come from church himself, her story was not holding together well. Before Caroline could explain that she hadn’t gone to the same church he had, Lissa came hurrying down the hallway from the kitchen. Newly blond and sylphlike, in tapered pants and a fitted jacket that were dove-colored and expensively cut.

She swept in on Caroline, taking Ethan out of her arms. “What are you doing, Ethan? You’re too heavy for Gramma to be carrying around.”

“He’s fine,” Caroline said. But Lissa was already settling Ethan onto her own slim hip, handling him as if he weighed no more than an empty laundry basket. Caroline wondered if Lissa knew how smug she looked and how patronized Caroline felt; how demeaning it was, this business of being arbitrarily relegated to the status of frail-boned and ancient.

Lissa was already heading back toward the kitchen, calling over her shoulder, “Where have you been? We were getting worried.”

“I went to church,” Caroline said. “A new one. The Methodists.” She made no move to follow Lissa. She stood her ground, determined not to trail behind her daughter. She walked into the living room and sat, irked by the fact that all she ever seemed to see of Lissa were quick flashes of her moving away. Always in a rush, always overscheduled and busy.

The last time Caroline had been alone with Lissa or Julie for any length of time had been the night before Lissa’s wedding,
seventeen years ago, the three of them curled up together on Lissa’s bed, the girls promising that the house on Lima Street was their home and they’d be coming back, often and always. But after the wedding, Julie had gone off to Chicago, to an internship at an advertising agency, and Lissa had sailed away on a honeymoon cruise to Greece. Then Lissa became busy—being a newlywed and the wife of an ambitious young surgeon; being pregnant with her first child, and then with her second and third; and then she was busy with soccer games, and charity balls, and European vacations.

Across the years Lissa’s busyness had become the bullet in which she was encased as she flew past Caroline. It was the opening statement with which she answered call after call: “Hi, Mom. I have to run.” “Hi, Mom. I’m right in the middle of something.” “Hi, Mom. I can only talk for a minute.” And somewhere in the jumbled passing of time, Caroline had stopped calling. There seemed to be no point to it.

Now, sitting in the living room, the Sunday bulletin from the Methodist church still in her hand, she was recognizing the ironic truth of her situation. Meeting the needs of her children had been the thing to which she had devoted her life, and now in the twilight of it, when she desperately needed them, her children had no need for her.

Lissa appeared in the living room doorway, looking at Caroline as if Caroline had lost her mind. “Mom … you went to a
Methodist
church?”

“I was in the mood for a change.”

“A change from
our
church?”

Caroline fought the urge to tell Lissa to mind her own business, to point out to Lissa that she and her sister had been raised in the Episcopal Church only because of Caroline. Because she had chosen it. Because of Barton and his connection to it. She wanted to
tell Lissa that if, over the past decade and a half, Lissa had spent even a little uninterrupted time with her, she might have come to know who her mother was. She might have come to understand why such a woman could be searching for something new—a fresh nourishment for her soul, something to soothe the burn of a lifetime’s worth of regrets. But it was too late to explain any of those things.

Caroline simply said: “It’s good to see you. Why didn’t you call and let me know you were coming?”

“We wanted it to be a surprise. For Dad.”

“For Dad? Why?” Caroline was momentarily confused. It was October. It wasn’t Robert’s birthday, or Father’s Day.

“Dad’s getting that award tomorrow, when you guys go to San Francisco for the insurance convention.”

At the mention of her father, Lissa’s eyes lit up. She looked like a little girl again. And she melted Caroline’s heart.

“This is a big deal,” Lissa said. “He’s been chosen as Outstanding Independent Insurance Agent of the Year. Julie and I thought it would be fun to surprise him with a celebration before you guys took off for San Francisco.” Lissa pulled Caroline to her feet and put an arm around Caroline’s waist. “Mom, I think it’s so great that you’re taking this trip. The two of you never go anywhere together. You’ll have such a blast.”

The feel of Lissa’s arm holding her close flooded Caroline with a sense of possibility, as if her girls were not as far away as she had thought. She felt light and bright. “I have an idea,” she said. “What if you and Julie and I go somewhere together? For a weekend. Just the three of us. Maybe we could go to—”