The Language of Secrets (7 page)

Robert hadn’t noticed when Justin left the living room. He hadn’t heard the scream Justin must have screamed when he began his fall toward the cement floor. Now all Robert could think about was
why
he had been so blind and deaf. He was sickened by the thought that his lack of connection to his own son had somehow contributed to the awful thing that had happened.

He had tried to rectify his problem with Justin countless times. But he had never found a way to do it. At some point, he had decided to establish a connection with Justin by taking him on a special father-son outing. Each time Robert discussed this idea, he saw the joy it gave Caroline—and each time his lack of feeling for Justin prevented him from making it a reality, he saw how much it wounded her.

Robert swore to her time and again that things would change. He needed, desperately, to make Caroline happy. She was the map by which Robert navigated his life.

From the first moment he had held her in his arms, he had been amazed, obsessed, and afraid. And he’d stayed that way for the entirety of his marriage. He was still amazed that a woman so beautiful and sexual would have him; he was obsessed with keeping her, and afraid that her love for him was something that could be easily erased by someone with the sort of style and confidence that he could never muster.

It was Justin who had slammed onto the concrete floor, but it
was Caroline who had Robert’s attention at the moment. He was thinking about a Thanksgiving dinner four years ago, remembering how radiant she had been.

He had no way of knowing—during that routine family gathering—that less than a month later Caroline would bring a monumental change to his life, something that would leave him stunned, and feeling furiously cheated.

As they were all gathered around, watching Robert’s father carve the turkey, Caroline was laughing and joking with Robert’s brother, Tom. An ambergold light was pouring through the windows at the far end of the room, making everyone look resplendent and virtuous.

It was a beautiful scene, but Robert was too restless to remain part of it. He quietly pushed back his chair and left the table. He wanted to be somewhere else. He was tired of life in the house on Lima Street. He had literally been born in the place—squirming into the world as his mother sprawled on the kitchen floor, comforted by a young neighbor named Mary Marston.

And on the day of his birth, it seemed to Robert, the house had claimed him and marked him as its prisoner. He tried his best to escape it, but he had failed.

He spent his teenage years constantly traveling away from Lima Street—to the beaches of Southern California, to Huntington, Trancas, and the Rincon. He had dreamed of a life in which he would craft custom-made surfboards—an existence that would never require him to wear a tie, or carry a briefcase, or possess a neatly printed business card.

But in his early twenties, the house had abruptly reasserted its claim on him and Robert had returned to Lima Street with Caroline at his side. He had put on a tie, and picked up a briefcase—and he had felt in his pocket the weight of the newly printed business cards that bore his name.

As Robert walked into the kitchen, Caroline was calling to him from the dining room: “I just told everyone about how you doubled the size of the agency this year.”

He reached for the bottle of scotch that was in the cabinet above the refrigerator and heard his brother shout: “Hey, congrats, man!”

“Yeah,” Robert shouted back. “Born to sell insurance. That’s me.” He poured himself a drink, and within seconds his mother was in the room, giving him a delicately constrained smile.

Her voice was shivery with self-effacement as she said, “If only I could find a way not to be so terribly upset when I see a man I love with liquor in his hand.” She smiled again, this time with a coquettish sparkle. “I should try to be a braver girl, shouldn’t I? Less sensitive, more like Caroline. But I can’t help myself.” She picked up Robert’s glass and poured the scotch into the sink.

Robert knew what was coming. He’d been hearing it for thirty years.

“When I was a little a girl,” his mother was saying, “it was so awful to walk in here and see that my father was drinking. It was only when he drank, you know, that he was mean to my mother and me. Only then.”

She paused and smiled another one of her pretty-girl smiles. “When he wasn’t drinking he was very kind. I see the same kindness in you, Robert. Although now, most of it goes to Caroline, of course. But I saw it in you the moment you were born. It’s how I knew you would always be my precious gift from God.”

She held her arms out to him, and he understood he was once more being taken captive by her delicate despotism. And he deeply resented it.

His resentment had begun with the arrival of the acceptance letter from his first-choice college, the college his brother, Tom, was attending, the University of Hawaii. His mother had been at
the kitchen table. “Oh,” she had said. “Hawaii. You’ll be so far away. And I’ll feel so alone.” Then she had looked off into some sad middle distance and sighed: “But that’s what men who are loved the best seem to do, isn’t it? They abandon you and go away.”

Later, Robert realized that his mother had never forbidden him to go to Hawaii; she had simply prevented it by making it seem like an act of brutality.

And after all these years, he was still in this same kitchen, with his mother slipping her arm through his and saying: “You must never tell Tom, but you’ve always been my favorite.” Her hand was cool on his skin, familiar and slightly repellent. Robert wished he could get away from her, and stay away.

The only woman’s caress he had wanted was Caroline’s.

It was what he was wanting now as he sat in the hospital waiting room with this fidgety young nurse. He was in need of Caroline’s touch, her presence, her assurance that she didn’t in any way blame him—or his lack of fatherly involvement—for Justin’s accident.

Before the nurse could launch into her questions again, a burly doctor appeared in the waiting room doorway. “Mr. Fisher, your son’s been taken to X Ray,” he said.

Robert held on to the arm of the chair as he stood; his knees were shaking. “How badly is he hurt?”

“It’ll still be a while before we know.” The doctor was already headed back through the doorway. “I’ll come out again as soon as there’s any news.”

As the doctor left, the young nurse was searching through the forms on her clipboard, mumbling: “Oh, gosh. I didn’t bring the right one.” She jumped up and rushed off, narrowly avoiding a collision with a shabbily dressed man who had edged his way into
the waiting room. He was making a stealthy, efficient search of each trash can along the wall before moving toward the exit door. As the man walked past, Robert saw—at the bottom of his threadbare shirt pocket—the outline of a thin hand-rolled cigarette.

Again, Robert’s thoughts went to that Thanksgiving weekend, when a joint—and then his brother, and, finally, Caroline—had led him to heartache and to violence.

It was in the evening, after Thanksgiving dinner was over. A crisp autumn wind was scattering leaves onto the path between the house and the garden shed, and the air had the aroma of wood smoke and fireplaces in it.

Tom was saying: “Holy crap, Robert. Does Caroline know you store your stash in Dad’s old toolbox and keep it out here where Mom grew all her little seedlings? Damn. That is priceless!”

“Hey, it’s not just any stash.” Robert held up a plastic bag containing half a dozen joints. “What we have here, my brother, is Thai stick.” Robert removed a joint, then returned the bag to the battered toolbox. Tom leaned over and inspected the contents: a jumble of bulbless flashlights, corroded pliers, and hardened duct tape. “The old man and tools. What a joke,” Tom said.

Robert put the toolbox back on its shelf above the shed door, and he and Tom walked toward the house. As Tom took the joint from Robert, he lit it and said: “You’ve done a great job with the old palace, Rob.” They stood, passing the joint between them, studying the house: the place Tom had escaped and Robert had resurrected.

Eventually, Robert and Tom drifted around the side of the house and onto the front porch. They sank into a pair of wicker chairs, putting their feet up on the table that was between them. There was a slight movement at the other end of the porch, and Robert realized Caroline was there.

She was almost lost in shadow, lying in the wide wooden swing, her head pillowed against its arm and her legs tucked under a light blanket. She looked as if she’d slipped off to sleep.

It pleased Robert to see that Caroline was nearby; he gave himself over to the lazy haze of a sweet high. He was mellow and, for the moment, content to be with his brother. “How’s Hawaii?” he asked.

“Good,” Tom said. “The university pays me to read and talk about the same great books I would read for free. I’m adored by my female grad students. I get laid on a regular basis and I can see the Pacific Ocean from the back door of my apartment.”

“Sounds like you’ve got a lot to be thankful for.”

“No more than you. You have the big house. Beautiful wife. Great kids. The premier insurance agency in dear old Sierra Madre. You’ve grown up to be the son Dad always wanted, man.”

“Yeah,” Robert said. “Happy Thanksgiving to us all.” There was a quick, creaking sound, as if Caroline had moved ever so slightly in the swing. Robert was immediately uneasy, wondering if she was awake, worried that she might have heard the undercurrent of sarcasm in his voice.

Tom held the joint up as if he was saluting Robert with it. “To the Fisher boys and all that they have become!” He chuckled. “Man, back in the day, who would’ve thought you and I would ever be sitting out here smoking dope, with Mom and the old man upstairs, and us not giving a shit if they come down.”

Robert laughed. “Oh, we’d give a shit. We’d be back being thirteen again in a blink. Because we’re high and it’s half-dark and the old man would be in the doorway, backlit from inside the house. And he’d look like a ham-handed linebacker waiting to kick our butts.”

“He ever kick your butt, Rob?”

“Nah. He talked about it a lot though.”

“He used to pound me like sand.” It was only Tom’s voice that was available to Robert; his face was obscured by the gathering darkness.

“I don’t remember him ever hitting you,” Robert said.

“Not that kind of pounding. The ‘in the name of making you a man, my son’ kind. Every football practice, every game, he’d be there standing on the other side of that chain-link fence—for hours. And then later he’d tell me how I needed to be more of a hustler here, less of a hotshot there. You remember how it was, every night at dinner.”

“He couldn’t help it,” Robert said. “Sports and insurance. That’s all he had. It’s all he knew.”

“So I got the sports and you ended up with the insurance.” Tom stayed quiet for a moment; then he said, “And thus the two-bit legacy of the father is passed on to his sons.” Tom took a hit and tilted back in his chair. “He ever tell you he loved you?”

“No.”

“Me either.”

“He did, though. He loved you.”

“I know.” There was uneasiness in Tom’s voice. “He loved me plenty.” Another silence, and then he said, “How high are you, Rob?”

“High enough.”

Tom moved across the porch and leaned against the railing. “I almost ended up with both bits,” Tom said.

“What are you talking about?” Robert looked in the direction of the swing. He could no longer see Caroline. She was wrapped in shadow. He wondered if she was awake; if she was about to find out something he wouldn’t want her to know.

“I’m talking about the old man’s two-bit legacy,” Tom said. “I
almost ended up with all of it. When he had the heart attack. Remember? It was a couple of weeks before Mother’s Day. And on Mother’s Day when I called to talk to Mom, he told me about not being able to go back to work for a while. He said he didn’t have enough savings and he needed to keep the agency going. He asked me to come home from Hawaii and take over for him.”

Tom had nicked the sleepy gauze of Robert’s high. Robert sat up straighter in his chair. “And you said no? You told him you wouldn’t come?”

“I told him it would take me a while, you know, to wrap things up at school. I said I was right in the middle of writing my thesis.”

“And …”

“And I lied. The thesis was done. I was just buying time, hoping maybe he’d be able to handle things on his own. Shit, Robert. I didn’t want to come home and take the chance of getting stuck being a goddamned insurance agent. I didn’t tell him, but I’d made a deal with myself that if he hadn’t figured something else out by Father’s Day, I’d suck it up. I’d come home.”

“Father’s Day.” Robert glanced toward Caroline, then lowered his voice and said: “That’s when he asked me. That morning. When I called to wish him a happy Father’s Day.”

“I know. I called him that night to say I was coming. I’d put it off all day. Then when I called, he told me he’d talked to you about you coming back to help him out, so I didn’t say anything. When I hung up, it was like I’d been pulled off death row.”

It took Robert a moment before he was able to respond. “How did you know I’d end up saying yes?” he asked.

“Because I knew you. I knew you’d never run out on somebody who needed you.”

There was a soft rustling at the far end of the porch, then the sound of the front door closing. His brother’s words had stung him
like cuts from a freshly sharpened ax. And Caroline had gone inside. She had left Robert alone.

All he had seen of her in that twilight was a graceful shadow as she slipped away. And now, in the harsh fluorescence of the waiting room, he hardly recognized Caroline as she was coming down the hospital corridor toward him. Her elegant features looked as if they had been coated in candle wax: blurred, and ghostly pale. She looked broken. And there was such strain and fear in her eyes that Robert was afraid to hear whatever it was she was about to tell him.

“Caroline, what’s happened?” It came out in a whisper. “What’s happening with Justin?”

“They’re still running tests,” she said. She leaned against him and then collapsed into his arms. She was shaking like a leaf in a windstorm and saying: “Don’t let him die. Oh please, God. Don’t let him die.”