The Language of Secrets (27 page)

The moment Caroline stepped off the curb, she had seen that the cable car was rushing down the hill toward her. She knew that
what she needed to do was to lift her foot and take a few steps back. But she also knew she was tired. Tired of asking questions that had no answers and tired of waiting for miracles that had refused to come. She knew that when Justin went away, she had sent pictures in a notebook and Justin’s birth certificate, hoping they would someday bring him back to Lima Street. She knew she had waited for almost thirty years; and he had never come. She had stopped believing he ever would. And it had made her tired.

And now it was Halloween again, and Caroline was in a cream-colored dress again. She had been a young woman and an older woman. She had passionately loved and ultimately lost each of her daughters, and had married one man, and desired another, and adored a third. She had cooked ten thousand meals, and grown one perfect rose, and had drunk good wine with good friends. She had betrayed her son and the man who had given him to her. And now she was tired. Far too tired to lift her dirty bare foot. To step back onto the curb, and into her life.

When the cable car hit, Caroline felt the pain. It seemed to last only as long as it had taken her to go from her beginnings in Santa Barbara to this street in San Francisco. Only a moment.

The door was opened by a woman wearing red sandals and a girlish full-skirted summer dress. She was short and plump. Her hair was a drab ash blond. Her face was weathered, her eyes sparkling blue. Justin recognized her immediately. It was Suzy Zelinski.

She seemed confused for a moment. Then her face lit up and she said, “Well, I’ll be … After you left for Boston, we never heard another word … It was like you’d dropped off the face of the earth. I always wondered what had become of you, TJ.”

At the sound of the name, Justin felt a twinge of discomfort, as if it was an alias belonging to someone who had once befriended him. Someone he guiltily wished he’d never known.

“Come have some lunch with us.” Suzy was ushering him into the house, and he was surprised by how modest and cluttered and low-ceilinged it was. When he had been brought here as a little boy, as TJ, it had seemed magnificent.

As Justin moved across the living room, toward the hallway and the entrance to the kitchen, he was checking to see if
Stan’s recliner was still in place. And when he saw that it was facing the TV, exactly where it had always been, he experienced a sensation of lightness, as if he’d received a hoped-for but unexpected gift.

It was information about Stan Zelinski that had compelled Justin to make this trip.

When he had told Ari that he intended to come here, Ari had done his best to talk him out of it. He had tried to convince him to let Gabriel Gonzales handle this final detail. But Justin needed to discover for himself what had happened to Stan—after TJ had left him in the dark in the breezeway of this house, slammed against the iron tines of a garden rake.

Justin needed to know if, at the age of seventeen, TJ had killed someone.

When he had told Amy that he was planning to return to the Zelinski house, she had been frightened, and then she had been exasperated. It terrified her that Justin’s connection to TJ might be a connection to murder. And the idea of Justin voluntarily making himself vulnerable to criminal charges, and possible jail time, infuriated her.

In the minutes just before they had talked about it, they were contented and sleepy, in the mist of lovemaking that had been as languorous and sweet as a river of slowly melting ice cream.

Then, abruptly, Amy was sitting up, glancing at the caller ID on the ringing phone, and saying: “It’s Daddy.”

The minute she said it, the mood in the room was infused with an anxious sense of waiting. Justin lay perfectly still. Amy held on to the phone as it continued to ring.

Finally, she tossed it aside. “Hey, that’s why God made voice mail, right?”

She snuggled against Justin and whispered, “Anyway, I know
why he’s calling. I talked to my mother. Big news. Daddy’s decided he’s speaking to me again. He wants us to come for dinner next week.”

“No,” Justin said. “Not next week.”

“Not a problem. Under the ‘new rules,’ Daddy’s agreed to work around our schedule, so maybe—”

“Not next week, because I’m going to be out of town.” Justin was deliberately interrupting her. This was the time to tell Amy about the outrageous thing he planned to do; otherwise, he might lose the courage to go through with it. “I’m going to Connecticut,” he said. “To Middletown.”

“Why?” Amy’s gaze was full of apprehension.

“I need to find out if Stan Zelinski is dead, because if he is, when I was TJ, I might have killed him.”

Amy’s eyes went wide.

“I caught him molesting a little girl.” Justin was having difficulty getting the words out. “I hit him. He ended up slammed against a wall. I don’t know what happened after that. I ran away.”

Amy sat up in bed and looked around the room as if she was searching for something that would help make sense of what Justin was saying. “But if it was a fight, it would’ve been an accident, right? Why go back? Why dig it up after all these years?”

Justin moved to Amy’s side of the bed. He put his arms around her and said, “Because I need to know if I’m responsible for killing a man. Even if I didn’t mean to kill him. I need to know that I have the balls to tell the truth and take the consequences.”

Amy shoved him away. “How can you even talk about going off and doing something like this, Justin? What about me? What about the stuff that I’m having a hard time with? I blew up my relationship with my father for you. I’ll never have him back, close, the way I used to. I did that for you. And I want the same. I want you focused here. On me. And on Zack.”

Before Justin could interrupt, Amy cut him off. “Justin, listen to me,” she insisted. “You caught this guy molesting a little girl and you’re saying
you’re
the one who has consequences to pay? What is going on with you?”

“Zack’s what’s going on with me,” Justin said. “Amy, if Stan did die after I ran off that night, I can’t look the other way and keep quiet about it. I can’t show Zack what a man’s supposed to be if I’m a coward who cuts and runs and doesn’t take responsibility for the fact that I may have caused somebody to die.”

The look Amy gave Justin was cold and determined. “All you have to do is leave it alone,” she said. “If you do that, then there’ll never be any reason for Zack to know about it.”

Justin was fighting tears. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t live with any more secrets. I’ve spent my life buried in them.”

He rested his head on Amy’s shoulder. “If Stan’s dead, Ames, there’s no way to know what’ll happen … Maybe me doing some jail time, I don’t know. But I want my life to be a clean slate. And I need to know I was the one who had the courage to clean it off.”

Amy got out of bed and walked away. “This is insane.”

“No, it isn’t.” Justin was calm and resolute. “It’s the right thing to do. For Zack.”

He raised his voice a little. He needed her to hear, and to understand, every word he was saying. “I want to be
the
guy for Zack, the father I never had. And I can’t do that unless I’m whole. No blank spaces, no riddles. I want to be solid when I put him on my shoulders and let him ride around up there. I never knew the feeling of that … riding on my dad’s shoulders … seeing the world from where he saw it. From up in the air. Like a king, or a giant.” Justin stopped for a moment.

Amy’s face was expressionless as Justin said: “I want to be a good man, Ames. I want my head clear, free of all the dark stuff. I want to think about things like teaching my son how to play baseball.
And telling him everything I know about cars. I want to give him everything that’s in me. I want him to know things like how much a guy can love his wife. How he can think about having sex with every good-looking woman he sees but still only want to make love to one, the one who really sees him.” Justin paused. He was waiting for Amy to say something. “Ames, please,” he said. “Please understand.”

Amy got back into bed. As she lay down and pulled the sheet around her, she said, “I do understand. But what you want isn’t possible. Nobody has a clean slate, Justin. Everybody’s got secrets and whatever damage your parents did to you because of theirs is done.” She flipped the sheet back on Justin’s side, opening a space for him, waiting for him.

“Amy,” he said, “can’t you see why I have to go to Connecticut?”

“No, I can’t. But go … if that’s what you feel you have to do. Find out what happened. Then lay it, and TJ, to rest.” Her words were clipped, and final. “This weirdness started a year ago, when we went to Lima Street, and I refuse to let you squander one more day of our lives on it. You need to close the door on that place. You need to decide to come home, Justin. Otherwise, this is where it ends.”

Amy had switched off the light, and the next morning—this morning—Justin had gone to the airport and flown to Connecticut. Now he was walking into the hallway of the Zelinski house, following Suzy toward the kitchen as she was saying: “If I remember right, TJ, you were a big fan of my peach pies. And I made one this morning. I must’ve known that you were coming.”

Justin glanced toward an open bedroom door midway down the hall. “Do you know what happened to Cassie Jackson?” he asked.

Suzy laughed and said, “Little black Cassie? Funny you should mention her. She was in the paper a few months ago, big write-up about how she bounced around, lived with her grandmother for a time, then lived on the streets but still found a way to keep going to school. She got herself through college, and got a law degree, on scholarships. Apparently, she’s going to work for the government and they gave her a big send-off at one of the Negro churches. They even gave her a brand-new car to drive down to D.C. in.”

“Was it a Mustang?”

“Why in the world would you ask that?”

“Don’t you remember?” Justin said. “One of her biggest dreams was to have her own pony.”

“Truth is, Stan and I never really got to know her. We didn’t have a lot in common with her. She was in and out of here so quick.” Suzy gave Justin an apologetic shrug, and as she was walking away, she was calling to someone: “Honey, you’re going to fall right out of your chair when you see who’s here to see us.”

She was going into the kitchen; into the room where TJ had last seen Stan, rumpled and sweating and fumbling with his zipper; the place where Stan had put a cocked rifle to TJ’s head. And now Justin was walking through the door of that kitchen, ready to grab Stan and beat him until he was reduced to nothing more than brain matter and bone fragments.

But the man in the kitchen wasn’t Stan Zelinski; it was Ted.

Justin’s hostility was replaced by surprise as Ted was shaking his hand and saying: “Good to see you, buddy. It’s been a lot of years.”

There were lines around Ted’s eyes and gray at his temples, and it dawned on Justin that Stan, Ted’s father, would be a senior citizen now. Justin wondered if that should make a difference, if it
should diminish his desire to punish Stan. But what “should be” had nothing to do with what was; his hatred for the man was boundless.

Suzy was at the back door, calling out toward the breezeway: “Stan honey, come in here. We’re gonna have peach pie.”

At the mention of Stan’s name, Justin’s stomach clenched. But as Suzy stepped aside, it was a little boy who galloped into the room. A kid with short blond hair and Stan Zelinski’s stockiness.

“TJ, this is Ted’s boy.” Suzy was beaming with pride. “He’s named after my Stan. He’s the image of his grandpa, isn’t he?”

“Did you used to know my grandpa?” the boy asked Justin.

“Yeah,” Justin told him. “A long time ago.”

The boy’s eyes lit up. “Wanna see Grandpa’s hero stuff?” Before Justin could answer, the boy was already running out of the kitchen, saying: “I’ll get it and show you.”

Suzy hurried out after him. “Honey, let Grandma find the album for you. I don’t want you climbing up on those bookshelves again.”

Ted laughed. “They could be gone for hours. Mom never remembers from one minute to the next where that album is.”

“Is Stan around?” Justin’s question was abrupt. He couldn’t wait any longer. He needed to know.

Ted’s answer was an unhappy sigh. “Dad’s dead, TJ.”

It was as if a bomb had gone off. “When?” Justin asked. “When did he die?”

“The night you left for Boston. After you’d gone. Probably around midnight. That’s what the cops told Mom.” Ted looked toward the hall. “I don’t want Mom and Stan to hear us. Stan doesn’t know the whole story. And Mom, well, you know how much Mom loved Dad. It’s still hard for her to talk about it.” He turned back to Justin. “Mom was the one that found the body, the
next morning. Dad died during the night, out in the breezeway. He bled to death out there.”

Justin was holding on to the back of a kitchen chair. His knuckles had gone white.

“He was against the wall,” Ted was saying. “One of the old iron rakes was embedded in his back.” Ted stopped for a moment, then added, “He was holding a rifle. I don’t know, there were some funny things about it. He had injuries to his face and a bruise on his chest. But the cops finally decided it was just a freak accident, that he’d been coming into the house and probably slipped in some water that was on the ground and fell backwards.”

Ted looked at Justin. “I don’t know if I believe that, though. Hell, I don’t know what to believe. I guess the cops were probably right.” Ted stood at the door, looking out toward the breezeway. “The truth is, a man like my father, he was so good and so kind. He didn’t have any enemies. Nobody would’ve wanted to kill him.” Ted’s gaze was open and guileless. “Dad was my hero, TJ. I miss him.”

Justin wanted to tell Ted Zelinski the truth about Stan’s perversion, and about the circumstances under which he had died. But in the face of Ted’s intense sadness, it felt heartless. Justin hesitated, and in that moment, Suzy came back into the kitchen.

She was holding a large scrapbook. “This is all of Stan’s honors, the newspaper clippings and such,” she said. “From way back when he was a Little League coach and up through all the years, the awards for his foster parenting. And of course everything about the Stan Zelinski Youth Center. He never got to see it completed but there’s this wonderful plaque beside the front door. You should go see it, TJ. It’s got Stan’s face on it. And a really beautiful tribute to him.”