The Language of Secrets (29 page)

She shot Julie a withering glance. “I’ll take care of the paperwork, and we’ll schedule an open house for next Saturday.”

“Great. Thanks for coming.” Julie went to the front door and held it open.

After the Realtor had left, Julie glanced down at the box near the door. In it were a few books, some old jigsaw puzzles, a skein of knitting yarn, a set of candlesticks, and a small stuffed bunny covered in white chenille that had gone gray with dust and age. “What’s all this junk, Liss?”

“Bits and pieces I found scattered around, you know, in the backs of closets and things. Just trash.”

Julie picked up the watercolor, preparing to put it into the box with the other castoffs. Lissa pulled it away from her. “I’m going to keep this.”

“A picture of this place? Why?”

“Because it wasn’t all bad, Jules.”

There was a sort of wry acceptance in Julie’s voice as she said, “You’re right. We learned a lot of very important things here.” She propped the watercolor against the wall. As she moved past Lissa, Julie took her hand and they began to walk through the empty house.

After they’d made a slow, silent circuit that carried them through the echoes and dust that were taking possession of the living room and the dining room and the kitchen, Julie and Lissa climbed the stairs.

As they moved toward the open doors of the bedrooms, Julie said: “Want to know a sorry truth, Liss? It was life in this place that scared me shitless on the idea of marriage.” She laughed. And in the sound she made, there was sadness and mocking. “Dear old Mom and Dad. What a miserable deal they had … Dad turning himself inside out trying to make everybody happy all the time and Mom moping around, always seeming like her heart was about to break.”

Julie paused in the doorway of the master bedroom. “They were probably in love at some point but look what happened to them. I mean, I think about all those stories about how they were when they were in college. And I remember how they used to be sometimes when Uncle Barton and Lily would come for visits. They were like different people. Laughing and dancing around the living room. And talking about the old days and all the fun they had when they were kids.” Julie’s laugh came again—the mocking gone, only sadness remaining. “But whatever it was they started out with, what they ended up with made it look like they were serving a jail sentence.”

“I don’t think it was like that for them all the time,” Lissa said.

“It sure seemed like it was. For Mom, at least. She turned being married into a kind of living death, and you know it.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” Lissa’s tone was wistful. “On my wedding night, just before I fell asleep, I promised myself I’d be a better wife and mother than Mom had been. And I decided I was going to do it by being everything she wasn’t.” Lissa glanced at Julie, one shoulder slightly raised, hands clasped, like a guilty child. “I’ve never cried in front of my boys. Never. Because of Mom, I’ve made a point of that. I used to get so tired of the crying.”

“What about Harrison?” Julie asked. “Have you devoted yourself to making his life completely awful? For absolutely no reason?
Have you made a career out of being Our Lady of the Perpetual Funk?”

Lissa laughed. “God, I hope not.” Then she looked around the empty master bedroom and said, “Dad got a really bad deal, didn’t he, Jules?”

“Yup. Right to the very end.”

Julie went to each of the windows in her parents’ bedroom and closed the curtains. Then she walked out into the hall and entered the room that had once, briefly, belonged to her brother.

After a few moments, Lissa followed her. Julie was again going from window to window, closing curtains. Lissa went to the one window where the curtains remained open. She stood there for a long time, gazing out. She put her hand on the sill and absentmindedly traced the outline of the circular indentation that was there. “Do you ever think about Justin?” she asked.

“No. Not really,” Julie said.

“I used to think about him. All the time. He was my little buddy. I missed him so much.”

“Maybe he was lucky, Liss. Maybe by getting out early, he got to skip a lot of heartache. Think about it. He’s been an angel for almost thirty years now. Up there. Kicking back. Loving every minute of it.” Julie shook her head and chuckled. “Not growing up in this house isn’t the worst thing I can think of.”

Lissa was lost in thought. “Remember when you and I were in middle school? And it felt like Mom hadn’t looked at us in years … probably not since Justin died. And all that time Dad was trying so hard to please her. I remember thinking maybe they should get a divorce, that maybe it would make things better. I wouldn’t have cared if they did. I just wanted for them to be happy. For us to be happy.”

Julie came and stood beside Lissa and wrapped her arms
around her. “We were a sad family, Liss. I don’t think I ever realized it before, but most of the time, we were. Each of us. In our own way. We were sad.”

“Yeah. Sometimes we were. But a lot of the time it was so great. Remember the s’mores? And playing Barbies on the porch? And those incredible birthday cakes Mom used to make? And how crazy Dad was about all his old records? The Beach Boys? And the Motown music? And remember how all of us would sing into candlesticks and dance around the living room? I used to love that.”

“Me, too.” Julie’s voice had the sound of tears in it. “Even though I hated so much of it, sometimes I wish we could go back. Sometimes I wish we could be back there, Liss. In the good parts. And do something to have it come out different … better. For everybody.”

Evening shadows were slipping into the park across the street, circling at the bottom of the fences and the bases of the trees. When they had filled the park, they flowed across the street. Into the house, and into the room where Justin’s sisters were.

As darkness was claiming it, Julie and Lissa walked out of the space that had once belonged to their lost brother. They went downstairs and they gathered up the faded watercolor and the box with the candlesticks and the puzzles in it.

And they left the house on Lima Street.

The resort was a monochrome of sand and buff carved directly into the face of a mountain. Dotting the landscape, white-hot in the burning morning sun, were several large metal sculptures: a herd of slit-eyed bighorn sheep.

In contrast to the hotel’s rugged facade was the cool decadence of its lobby—expanses of pale green marble and oversize sofas roped in gold braid.

A startlingly handsome dwarf in dark sunglasses was escorting a willowy blonde into one elevator while a pair of beefy freckled women in matching bathing suits was stepping out of another. At the front desk, a concierge with a French accent was conversing in rapid, passionate Spanish with a Guatemalan valet.

In the hotel restaurant, Justin was alone, holding his cell phone to his ear, listening intently to what the person at the other end of the line was saying. He was sitting beside a wall of glass. On the other side of the glass was the infinite sprawl of the desert. In the distance, a mountain peak was still capped with a dusting of winter snow.

It had taken him almost a week to travel back to California—following the path of Route 66 as he meandered across the country through the iron gray crush of Chicago and the green hills of East Texas and the scream and glitter of Las Vegas.

As he watched these landscapes slipping past his car windows, Justin had been thinking about the last session he’d had in Ari’s office: the conversation in which he had announced his intention to return to Middletown, in which he had explained about TJ’s final night in the Zelinski house and what had happened with Stan in the breezeway.

With each mile that Justin had driven between Connecticut and California, he had continued to go over and over that conversation with Ari, searching for answers.

He still wasn’t sure what the truth was about the time he had spent as TJ. Had he honestly, completely blocked all those years out of his consciousness? Or had he, in some twisted way, been lying to himself and everyone around him about what he did and didn’t remember?

And there was the issue of Stan Zelinski’s death. Was Justin’s part in it somehow absolved by Stan’s presence in Cassie Jackson’s bedroom? Did that fact truly negate any obligation Justin might have to tell the truth about what happened between him and Stan just before Stan impaled himself on that garden rake?

After his encounter with Ted and Suzy in Middletown, Justin had called Gabriel Gonzales. Prior to becoming a private investigator, Gonzales had spent years as a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department. When he had heard all the specifics, he assured Justin that Stan’s death wasn’t a homicide—TJ had acted in self-defense. Stan had put a loaded rifle to TJ’s head. It was an accident that Stan stumbled through the open doorway, slipped in a pool of water, and fell back against the iron rake. From a legal
standpoint, Gonzales said, there was no eminently prosecutable crime. But, he’d explained, if the details of Stan’s death were made public, there would be no guarantee that the Zelinski family wouldn’t file a civil suit against Justin.

“If I was still a cop and you came to me with this,” Gonzales said, “I’d tell you there’s nothing here that needs the attention of the cops, or the courts. I’d tell you to go home and close the book on the whole thing.”

But Justin wasn’t sure that he agreed with Gonzales. He knew that telling the truth could land him in court and hold him up to public scrutiny as a killer—things that could hurt Amy and Zack. But he also knew how much he wanted the freedom that would come with being able to clear away the last of his secrets.

This was what Justin had been talking about on the phone with Ari for the last thirty minutes, it was what they were still talking about now.

Ari’s tone was neutral as he was saying: “So we know the possible fallout from digging up Zelinski’s dirty laundry and airing it. But what happens if you let it go? If you say nothing?”

“Then I’m a guy who got away with something,” Justin replied. “For the rest of my life I’d know that part of me, right at my core, is a little bit of a coward.”

Ari seemed to deliberate for a moment before he said: “You do know there are some questions that don’t have one uniquely right answer, don’t you?”

“Then how the hell are you supposed to be able to find the truth?” Justin asked.

“You find it in bits and pieces,” Ari replied. “You sort through the possible answers and somewhere in each of them is a little bit of the truth, a shard of what’s right.”

“What if they all seem equally right, Ari? What then? What do you pick? Which ‘truth’ do you go with?”

Ari’s answer was matter-of-fact: “Go with the one that does the least harm to the most people.”

Justin snapped the phone shut. He was lost in thought, seeing Amy’s face and Zack’s, and Cassie Jackson’s, and Ted Zelinski’s, and that of Ted’s young son, Stan.

A clatter of dishes—a busboy clearing the table—was what brought Justin back to the moment. He was in Palm Springs. Breakfast was over. It was time to finish his journey.

*

When Justin had left Amy to go to Connecticut, she had told him: “The only way I want you is if you’re here completely. I want to know you’ll never let anything be more important than what we need from you … Zack and me.” There was a brutal honesty in the way she’d said it. And it had reminded Justin of fragments from a conversation he’d had with her father last year, shortly after that first trip to Lima Street.

“The only thing any man has to be ashamed of,” Don had said, “is not doing what it takes to keep his family safe and happy. That’s what’s righteous. Everything else gets in line behind that.”

What Don had been saying then was what Amy had been asking for when Justin left for Middletown. His only reply had been to kiss her. And he’d walked out of the house with the taste of her tears on his lips.

That taste had stayed with him the entire time he had been away. It was still with him now as he was on the road that was leading him out of Palm Springs.

The landscape on either side of the highway was extraordinary: expanses of blinding white sand studded with black boulders,
and, rising out of the sand, forests of towering silver windmills, their slim blades a hundred feet in the air, turning in silent unison, moving on currents of hot desert wind.

Justin’s drive lasted a little less than three hours. It carried him out of the Palm Springs desert and along a stretch of freeway that ran for miles beside railroad tracks jammed with open flatbed freight cars. The cars were stacked with massive shipping containers that had bold clean names emblazoned on their sides: UNIGLORY and EVERGREEN.

His attention was caught by the poetry of those names and he wondered if they could be taken as omens, as heralds of the good he might eventually do. He had made his decision. But his cell phone remained closed on the seat beside him. He continued to wait, and to let the miles roll by. He still needed time to come to terms with what he was about to do.

When he felt it happen—when he perceived the shift, the full acceptance of the man he would be from this point on—he was just entering the cities and commotion of Los Angeles County.

He reached for his phone. Amy picked up almost instantly. “Before you say anything,” she told him, “just listen, okay? I’ve been thinking about a lot of stuff.” The sound of her voice made him suddenly feel as if he could breathe again.

“I know that this all has to do with your parents,” Amy was saying. “It’s about them throwing you away. And you think if you’d been able to grow up in a regular house, in a regular way, everything would’ve been better. But that’s not necessarily true.”

There was a pause. Amy seemed to be gathering her thoughts before she said, “I used to know this guy … a long time ago … He got a scholarship to Harvard, but he didn’t take it, at the last minute he went to New York to be an actor instead. And he was always saying ‘I should’ve gone to Harvard,’ like that would’ve
automatically made his life come out right. But there’s no way of knowing. I mean, he could’ve gone to Harvard and been a big-time corporate type and still could’ve married a bitchy wife, or got caught in some sleazy stock deal that wiped him out, or just ended up old and bored. There’s no way to know.” Amy paused. “Are you still there, Justin?”