The Language of Secrets (6 page)

“Like what?” Amy asked.

“All kinds of things. Like I know that at one time I had a teacher who drove this really cool car. An old MG. He kept it in perfect condition, and it was green. British racing green.” Justin paused, took a deep breath. “And I have no idea what his name was or what grade I was in or what my school looked like. Or what I looked like.”

Amy’s response was something between a whisper and a murmur. “What do you mean?”

Justin’s voice was full of strain. “I don’t know.” He reached
across Amy and picked up the box. “At times, it almost feels like I never existed,” he said.

He upended the box and allowed the contents to fall onto the bed. “These are the things my father had with him when he died. Do you see anything of me in here? Anywhere at all?”

The battered wallet landed in Justin’s lap; he picked it up and shook it. Its contents rained down onto the bed: a pair of credit cards, a five-dollar bill, a stained pharmacy receipt for two razors and a can of shaving cream, an expired driver’s license. And then, from a side compartment, came a small snapshot.

It was the creased, faded image of a beautiful girl. She was standing on a beach, flanked by two boys. One was tall, with coppery red hair; the other, blond and holding a surfboard. Both were looking toward the camera, smiling. The girl was glancing at the fourth person in the picture: a boy, lying in the sand at her feet, looking up at her and laughing.

Justin turned the photograph over. The back of it was blank except for a line of numbers: 768884. They looked hastily written, jotted down with what seemed to be a child’s green crayon.

*

Justin and Ari had been running, steadily increasing their pace, for the last forty-five minutes.

“Do you want to turn back?” Ari’s question came out between gasping breaths. “Or do you want to keep going and die?” He glanced over at Justin. And then he grinned.

Justin’s lungs were on fire and his legs felt like jelly. “I’m not stopping till you drop.”

“Ask and you shall receive.” Ari staggered to a halt and sat down. “I’m dropped, man. I am so dropped.”

“That’s what I was hoping you’d say.” Justin jogged to the water’s edge and flopped onto the sand. He lay on his back, letting
the waves rush in around him and then pull away. The stinging cold of the water against the peppery heat of his body was delivering both pleasure and pain. It was a long time before Justin opened his eyes. When he did, Ari was standing over him, watching him.

“I’m in four inches of water,” Justin said. “Can’t have much of an accident in that, now can I?” He got up and jogged away. He didn’t look back at Ari; his tone made it clear he had no desire to pursue the subject.

Ari caught up to Justin and fell into step beside him. “Since I’ve already pissed you off, we might as well go ahead and get into it.”

“There’s nothing to get into. I’ve told it to Amy; now I’m telling it to you. What happened out here a couple of weeks ago was an accident.” Justin sprinted away again. Ari caught up to him and said: “Is it possible that there are no accidents?”

“You’re sounding like a shrink.”

“I am a shrink.” Ari shrugged. “But even if I was nothing more than a new friend and neighbor, which I also happen to be, it wouldn’t get past me that you didn’t answer my question.”

“All that happened was I went for a swim and I got tired. I couldn’t make it back in.” Justin slowed his running and came to a stop. Ari did the same.

Observed from a distance, they could have been taken for brothers. They were nearly identical in height and coloring. Justin stepped in close to Ari, warning him. “I didn’t come out here that day to try to fucking kill myself.”

“I saw you go in,” Ari replied, “and I saw the look on your face when you started to swim out. You may not have been aware of it at the time, but it’s entirely possible that you went into that water wanting to commit suicide. And if I’m right, that’s serious. We need to talk about it.”

“It’s bullshit.” Justin started to move away. Ari stepped in and
blocked him. “I was there,” Ari said. “I helped save your ass. I helped pull you out of the water. And I am, in fact, a goddamned shrink. I know what I saw. Now tell me what the fuck really happened.”

Justin shifted his gaze away from Ari’s before he spoke. “Maybe you’re onto something. I don’t know. But I can’t get into it right now. It’s too complicated, okay?” As Justin turned back to look at Ari, he saw a lifeguard from a private club farther up the beach sprinting in his direction.

The lifeguard shouted, “Yo, TJ!” and Justin replied, “Yeah!”—a response that was automatic and instantaneous. It was the reply of a man instinctively answering to his own name; and as he did it, Justin went pale. But the lifeguard didn’t notice; he’d already run past and was exchanging boisterous greetings with a kid carrying a boogie board.

For a moment, Justin and Ari remained silent. Then Ari came closer. He was mapping every nuance of Justin’s face as he said: “Who’s TJ?”

The question hit Justin like a grenade. His body buckled under the impact. He slowly collapsed onto the sand and began to tremble. He was in a barrel-rolling darkness, and in the darkness there was a black cocker spaniel puppy with a sky blue ribbon around its neck and a grand piano imploding and the sound of music being shattered and the bitter-sharp smell of gun oil and a
click!
and a small perfect circle of cold as the barrel tip of a cocked rifle pressed against his temple and his own voice in an eerie childlike register sang the words “Do I Know My Name Yes I Do Yes I Do” and a flow of blood snaked away, coiled back, and snaked away again.

Ari stood over him and repeated, “Who’s TJ?”

Justin was shaking so violently, he could hardly speak. And
when he replied, “He’s the other me,” he vomited. Puke splattered up from the sand and frothed onto him, foul and chaotic; and he heard Ari ask: “What do you mean, ‘He’s the other me’?”

“I don’t know,” Justin whispered. “God help me. I don’t know.”

It was, in a word, fabulous. Its exterior: a mirror-smooth mocha frosting dusted with scatterings of hazelnuts. The interior: four towering layers, each separated by silken bands of cream laced with brandied cherries.

Caroline had placed this majestic creation on a cut-glass cake stand that had belonged to Robert’s mother. Now she was putting it on the old oak table in the center of the kitchen. It looked dazzling—and out of place, like an emperor’s crown deposited on a workbench.

“Well,” Caroline asked. “What do you think?”

“Big,” Justin said. He was wide-eyed with delight at the magnitude of Caroline’s handiwork. Lissa lifted him up so that he could get a better view of it.

“Isn’t that the best cake you ever saw, Justin? Ever?” Lissa asked.

Julie was on the other side of the table, studying the cake. “Mommy, did you really make this all by yourself?”

“Yes, Mommy made it all by herself.” Caroline put her hand to
her forehead in a gesture of mock exhaustion. Then she winked and said, “And, I made a really big mess doing it, so I’m going to need help cleaning up before Daddy gets home and it’s time for his party.”

“We’ll help. We’ll clean the beaters.” Julie pulled the frosting-covered beaters from the electric mixer and gave one to Lissa.

“Me, too. Me, too!” Justin held out his hand.

“When you’re finished,” Caroline told the girls, “you can put the candles on the cake.”

Justin immediately tugged on Julie’s sleeve. “Candles, please.” She shrugged him off. “You can’t light candles, Justin. You’re too little.”

Justin was indignant. “Not too little. I’m three!” Lissa picked him up and hugged him. “Don’t worry, Justin. When you’re almost eight, like me, you’ll be able to do candles, too.”

“Justin, for now you can hold the candles,” Caroline said. “And it will be your job to give them to Lissa and to Julie when they ask, okay?” She gave him a handful of candles and he happily began dispensing them to his sisters.

It was five-thirty. December. The world outside was already dark. The kitchen was filled with warm butter yellow light, and as Caroline watched her son’s happiness, she was in a gentle reverie. She was remembering driving away from a lunch at the Baldwin Hotel and sensing that she might be pregnant. She was remembering that before she had even turned onto the freeway that would bring her back to Lima Street, she had decided that if the child was a boy, she would name him for the beautiful quiet place in which, earlier in the day, she had touched purity. She would name him Justin.

As Caroline turned her attention back to the kitchen, she experienced an inexpressibly sweet feeling of happiness. She saw Julie
and Lissa, busy decorating Robert’s cake; Justin, trailing after them, holding out additional candles for the taking; and the dog, circling the room, its tail softly thumping against chair legs and cabinet doors. Moments like this proved to her that she’d succeeded in giving her children the exquisite gifts of a home and security—gifts her childhood had never given to her.

In Caroline’s growing up, there had only been herself and her mother. When Caroline would ask about her father, her mother’s response was always the same: “You don’t have one.” Then there would be a contemptuous laugh, and she would add: “He’s gone.”

He had never been there, and so Caroline was free to endow him with mythic importance, to believe with all her heart that there was nothing more powerful than the magic that came from not being a fatherless child.

It was to a father’s absence that young Caroline attributed the knockabout life she and her mother lived.

He wasn’t there. And they moved from one place to another, often in the dead of night, frequently just steps ahead of a bill collector or lecherous landlord. Never safe. Never settled.

And once, when Caroline had needed school clothes, she stood beside her mother in a department store and watched an application for credit being dropped into a wastebasket. Charge accounts, the saleslady said, were not available to divorced women. To Caroline, the label
divorced
had sounded nasty, like a stain.

A father wasn’t there, and Caroline grew up eating alone in dreary kitchens while her mother paced bleak bedrooms, becoming more bitter and distant with each change of address, with each passing year.

Now, as Caroline watched Lissa and Julie putting the last of the candles on Robert’s cake, she was thinking about how much safer her children were than she had ever been. She was remembering
the earthquake that had occurred, during the time she was pregnant with Justin. It had arrived in the early hours of the morning, breaking windows and raining chimney bricks into the fireplace. Caroline had been terrified.

A few days later, the girls had been playing with a friend in the backyard. Caroline had heard the other little girl ask Lissa and Julie if they’d been afraid. “No,” they’d said. “We knew our daddy would save us.” And with that, Caroline had felt a wonderful joy. Her girls were not like her: damaged and needy. They were confident. They were whole.

“Daddy’s home!” All three children were rushing past Caroline, racing toward the living room.

She was about to follow them, when she noticed the dog. His nose was resting on the edge of the kitchen table; his attention was fixed on Robert’s cake. The dog was a large animal with an enthusiasm for food that bordered on obsession. Caroline shooed him away. He retreated to a spot near the back door but never took his eyes off the glorious cake.

Caroline heard the opening notes of the Beach Boys’ “California Girls” boom out of the living room, and Lissa shouting: “Mommy! Mommy! Come and dance with us!”

“Hey ‘Mommy,’ hurry up and get in here!” It was Robert calling to her now. “It’s my birthday and I want to dance with my wife!”

“Your wife is on her way!” Caroline shouted. She picked up the cake and went to the door that led to the basement. The door was warped and required Caroline to push against it once or twice before she could get it to open. When it did, a sweep of cold air came up from the darkness of the earthen-walled area below the house.

At the top of the steep basement stairs was a narrow landing,
and a wall into which several storage shelves had been fitted. Caroline slipped the cake onto one of the upper shelves.

“If you’re not out here by the time I count to three, I’m coming in!” It was Robert again.

Caroline quickly closed the basement door and left the kitchen.

In the living room, Robert was dancing with the children. The song was “Little Surfer Girl.” When he saw Caroline, he immediately pulled her toward him. Julie’s and Lissa’s attention quickly turned to determining which of them could execute a perfect cartwheel.

Justin’s attention turned toward the far end of the hallway.

The dog was there, leaning his considerable weight against the basement door and working to push it open.

What happened next took only seconds.

Justin stepped between the dog and the door just as the door gave way. It banged open and cold air rushed out, bringing the scent of cake with it.

The dog lunged forward.

And in that split second, there was the sound of a small body hitting against the stairs. Plummeting toward a cement floor.

*

“Mr. Fisher?”

Robert looked up and saw a very young nurse standing in the doorway of the hospital waiting room. She was holding a clipboard. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I need to go over some of the information your wife gave us.”

Justin had been brought into the emergency room less than an hour ago. Caroline rode in the ambulance. Robert followed, almost immediately, in the car, after he’d called Mrs. Marston to come and stay with the girls. But it had been Caroline who had taken care of
all the paperwork. Then she had gone into the examining room to be with Justin, where she still was.

The nurse sat down across from Robert. Her movements were tentative and awkward. “Mr. Fisher, I need to ask you some—”

“Whatever it is, can’t it wait?” Robert couldn’t clear his head of the image of Justin lying on his back, motionless, his gaze seemingly fixed on the landing above him—and on the dog, frantically circling and barking.