The Language of Secrets (26 page)

*

“Mitch? You saw Mitch? Here? In San Francisco?” Caroline was thunderstruck by what Robert had just said. She sat on the bench
at the end of their hotel bed in a single rapid movement, as if the wind had been knocked out of her. “Where? Where did you see him?”

“At the airport, this morning, after we’d landed. When I was in the men’s room.” Robert splashed cologne into his palm, then brushed his hand across his face and neck.

“Did you talk to him?”

“Briefly.” Robert picked up the cummerbund of his tuxedo and put it on.

“What did you say?” Caroline felt as if she was choking.

“Nothing that he didn’t already know.” Robert went into the bathroom.

Caroline followed him; a terrible anxiety was building in her. “Robert, I need to know what you said.”

Robert was checking his cuff links now. He didn’t look at Caroline when he replied, “Leave it alone, all right? It’s not important.”

“Then why did you tell me you saw him?” Caroline grabbed his arm. She needed him to pay attention. She needed to see if her secrets were still safe. “I want to know what you said.”

In an old familiar gesture, Robert rested his hands on her shoulders. “Come on, Caroline, we’ve got better things to do than this. There’re hundreds of people filling up a ballroom downstairs, all here for a big overcooked chicken dinner in honor of the Independent Insurance Agent of the Year.” Robert ran his hands down the sleeves of Caroline’s cream-colored lace dress. “And they’re also waiting to get a look at the incredibly beautiful woman that the Agent of the Year is married to.”

This was the moment in which Caroline could back away from the explosion that was waiting to happen. All she needed to do was to let this thing about Mitch go; let it find its way into the
same stale silence where so much of her marriage had gone. But Caroline knew it had the potential to do too much damage.

She was already hammering another question at Robert. “If you seeing Mitch wasn’t important, then why did you tell me about it? Just to upset me?” Robert’s hand was once again on her shoulder; she brushed it away. She was deliberately ignoring his offer of a truce, and he reacted as she knew he would.

There was menace in his voice as he said: “What’s for you to be upset about? I saw Mitch. In an airport restroom. For half a second. He’s somebody I knew a lifetime ago and somebody I’ll probably never see again. That’s all there is to it.”

Robert slammed out of the bathroom and Caroline ran after him. “Did you tell him I was here, too?”

Robert picked up his tuxedo jacket from the bed. “I didn’t think it was necessary to inform the man who used to bugger my weak-willed wife that she was within easy reach.”

Caroline flinched. Robert instantly dropped the jacket and tried to pull her toward him. “Caroline, I’m so sorry.” She batted his hand away. He looked sick with regret. “I shouldn’t have said that.” He reached for her again. “Please. Let it go. Mitch is history. We survived him. And we survived everything that he caused. We got through it. There’s no reason to dig it up again.”

There was a part of Caroline that wanted to agree with him, that yearned to avoid opening their dog-eared catalog of recriminations. But unlike other times when they’d argued about Mitch, and about what had happened on that October day over thirty years ago, this time Mitch himself had taken part in a conversation. Caroline had to know what had been discussed. She needed to reassure herself that certain details of that day still remained obscure.

“Tell me what you said, Robert.” Caroline’s statement had the undercurrent of a threat.

Robert gave her a look that begged her to reconsider. “We’ve been together a long time,” he told her. “We’re in the homestretch now. We’ve already lived the biggest chunk of our lives, and whatever time we’ve got left, let’s not waste it beating each other up for things that can’t be changed. I’m sorry about that ‘weak-willed wife’ crack. I didn’t mean it. Jesus, Caroline, you know I love you. I’ve always loved you. You and the girls, and now Lissa’s kids. That’s my world, that’s my reason for getting up every day. And I know that you’ve loved me. You wouldn’t still be here after all these years if you didn’t.”

“Robert, I need to know!” Caroline was screaming at him with such ferocity that the last of her words came out choked and rasping. “What did you say to Mitch? What did you tell him?”

“It’s not important!” Now Robert, too, was shouting. He walked away from her and went to the window.

“It’s important to me!” Caroline pushed between him and the window. They were less than an inch apart. She could see the pulsing of a vein on his neck; she could feel the heat of his breath on her face.

“Why? Why is it so important?” Robert was furious. “What did you
want
me to tell him? That I’ve spent my life obsessed with the two of you? Eating my guts out over what you did to me three decades ago? That I spent every night, all those years, lying beside you and yearning for you to screw me with even an ounce of the enthusiasm that you had when you screwed him?”

“Shut up, Robert!” Caroline’s voice was wild and shrill, but her words were lost in Robert’s roaring shout: “Because if that’s what you were hoping for, Caroline, you didn’t get it. I didn’t paint you as the beach nymph still pining for her playboy lover. I told him the truth. That you were exactly like the rest of us, sweetheart. Old and ordinary. I said you were a middle-class matron happily married
to an insurance salesman. I told him you were a grandmother. And that for thirty years, every single time I banged you, you came so hard, you passed out.”

There was a bitter vindictiveness in Robert’s voice that Caroline had never heard before. It startled her. “How can you be so hateful?”

“Because I’m sick of this,” he said. “I’m sick of you dragging this crap around with you endlessly. Endlessly, endlessly!”

“What are you talking about?” She was crying now. Because she was hurt. And because she was ragingly angry.

“I’m talking about you,” Robert told her. “I’m talking about how you’ve turned your life into a soap opera, about how you’ve spent thirty years moping and mooning around and making me pay for a crime you committed.”

“I hope I have made you pay. I hope I’ve made your life a living hell. And I hope I keep on making you pay until the day you die. Because you’re the one who’s guilty, Robert. I made a mistake, I slept with someone who wasn’t my husband. But what you did to Justin, that was the crime.”

“I did the kid a favor. At least he probably landed in a home with a functioning mother in it.”

Caroline’s rage flared and she threw herself at Robert, ready to hit him. “How dare you even think of accusing me of being a bad mother?”

Robert calmly pushed her away. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m stating a fact. You
were
a bad mother. I was there, I saw it all.”

“That’s not true.” She was screaming again. “I stayed with you, all those years, even after you stole my son from me, so that Lissa and Julie would have a home, and a father. Everything I did was because I was trying to do the best I could for my children … so they would have safe places to grow up. I was a
good
mother.”

“Good mothers don’t screw around and get knocked up and try to pass their bastard kid off to their husband as one of the family.”

“I made a mistake. One stupid mistake. And you didn’t just punish me for it, you abused me, in the most evil way you could think of. And I hope you burn in hell because of it.” Caroline was crying uncontrollably. Her belief that she’d been a good and sacrificing mother had always been the one shred of righteousness she was able to claim for herself, and now Robert was threatening to take it away.

“You weren’t just a bad mother, Caroline,” he was saying. “You were a rotten one.”

“You’re a liar! You’re a
liar
, Robert!” Caroline was on the verge of hysteria. “I sacrificed everything for my children. My God, Robert, I stayed with you … after everything you did to me, and I only stayed for one reason, to do for my girls what nobody ever did for me. To give them a good home with two parents in it. They couldn’t have asked for a mother who would have loved them more.”

Robert’s reply was swift and wicked. “But they could’ve asked for a mother who didn’t lie around bombed on tranquilizers for over a year, couldn’t they?”

“That wasn’t my fault!” Caroline’s screaming shout was laced with tears.

“Those pills didn’t fly down your throat on their own,” Robert bellowed. “You took them. By the fistful.”

“I had lost a child!”

“Oh, here we go with the soap opera again.” His voice was lower now and had a mocking quality to it. “Poor Caroline lost her bastard baby. Tragic, tragic story. And, man, did you know how to milk it. How many years was it that you spent what you used to call ‘leaking’? Wandering around. Crying at nothing.”

“I detest you.” Her voice was hoarse. She was drawing ragged, gulping breaths.

“You know what?” Now, Robert was seething. “I don’t care. This feels good, to finally tell you the truth. You were a lousy parent, Caroline. Your daughters spent the better part of a decade with a mother who was either stoned out of her skull or crying or staring out a window. They were in high school before you even
tried
to snap out of it.”

“How was I supposed to ‘snap out’ of having a child torn away from me?” she asked. “He was stolen from me and given to people on the other side of the country. People I’d never even seen. You’re not being fair, Robert.” Her voice was filled with anguish.

“Don’t talk to me about what’s unfair, Caroline. Unfair was what landed me in Sierra Madre selling insurance. And it started with you. With us getting married way before we should have. And it just kept coming, with my father’s heart attack, and my brother arranging a life sentence on Lima Street for me so that he could stay put in Hawaii and nail college girls. And then, of course, there was you again … spreading your legs for somebody else and bringing the little bundle home to me. You want to know about injustice? I’m the guy to ask. I’ve spent my life being rolled in other people’s shit.”

Caroline’s fury at Robert was now complete. And it had taken on a killing coldness. “No, Robert,” she said calmly. “You’ve been rolling in your own shit. It’s been pouring out of you since the day you were born. Because you’ve always been timid and scared. Too scared to do anything but stay stuck in your pathetic, second-rate, hand-me-down life.”

She walked over to Robert and backhanded him. The edge of her wedding ring opened a gash on the side of his neck.

When he spoke, his voice was so quiet that she could clearly
hear the threat of violence it. “You’d better leave now, Caroline. Before I hit you back.”

Moments later, Caroline stumbled out into the frigid air of the San Francisco night. She had left the room upstairs without a coat, wearing only the sheer cream-colored lace dress. She noticed that people walking past her were glancing at her. As she stepped onto the sidewalk, she understood why—she wasn’t wearing shoes.

Grit from the sidewalk was pressing against the soles of her feet as she walked away from the hotel and down the steep, hilly street that was in front of it. She was shivering with cold. Among the crowds of people who were moving up the hill toward her was a group of men in Halloween costumes. Most of them were dressed in fantastic and outrageous drag, but one was outfitted as a vampire. And seeing him made Caroline remember another Halloween, thirty-plus years ago. When someone dressed as a vampire had blocked her way when she was trying to go home. At the end of that strange, enchanted afternoon in which she’d been in the company of two men whom she had cared about deeply.

A sense of desperation rose in Caroline. She was realizing that she had unwittingly written her life into a language of secrets, into an indecipherable code riddled with questions.

There were so many things she wanted to know, and that she would never know. She wanted to know if her life had accomplished any good: if she’d been a hero for her children, or if she had been a villain. She wanted to know how time had escaped from her so quickly; how she had, in the blink of an eye, gone from the pretty girl at the center of all the photographs to the older woman at their edges, wedged in behind children and grandchildren.

She thought about a photograph she’d tossed into a kitchen drawer in the house on Lima Street when she and Robert had first moved in. She’d always intended to take it out and to frame it, but
now she realized it must still be in that same drawer, buried under a lifetime’s accumulation of discarded rubber bands and unsharpened pencils. In the photograph, she was on the beach in Santa Barbara, flanked by Barton and Robert, and glancing down at Mitch. He was lying at her feet, looking up at her and laughing.

In thinking of Mitch, she realized she’d always wanted to know why he had kept his word: why he’d never contacted her after he’d come to the house on Lima Street to console her when Justin had been lost. She wondered if Mitch had stayed away out of a sense of chivalry or if he had simply forgotten her because, after a while, she hadn’t been important enough to remember.

But there was a new, much more pressing issue with Mitch now. It was the issue of what had been said between him and Robert at the airport. Had Robert told Mitch about Justin’s having been conceived in that single indiscretion on that long-ago Halloween? And had he told him the truth about what had happened to Justin?

She went to the curb and steadied herself against a parking meter. Her mind was racing with questions. If Robert had told Mitch the date of Justin’s conception and the truth about what had become of him, then there was a chance that Justin’s parentage had been exposed. A chance that the man who was Justin’s father might discover Caroline had borne him a son and let that son become lost from him forever.

The thought of Justin’s father knowing these things made Caroline frantic. It made her turn and begin to run, blindly and without direction. It sent her rushing toward the street.

Then there was the sudden clanging of a cable car’s bell. And shouts from people on the sidewalk.