The Language of Secrets (8 page)

Robert was burning with guilt—believing that if only he had been more attentive to Justin, he might have seen him going into the kitchen, and this terrible night would never have happened. “It’ll be all right. He’ll be okay,” he told Caroline as he held her close. “And after this, everything is going to be better. I promise.”

The smells of the cooking and baking she had done for his birthday were still in her hair, and they took Robert back to that Thanksgiving. To the next morning, after the initial pain had been inflicted, when the violence had begun.

It had been early, and the house was cold. There were still faint traces of yesterday’s holiday dinner in the air—the smell of roasted turkey and homemade pumpkin pie.

Robert saw that Caroline had made breakfast. When he took his coffee mug to the kitchen table, there was an open bottle of blood-pressure medication there. He jammed its cap into place and slammed the bottle down.

“I’ve been looking for this goddamn thing for a half hour!” It was Robert’s father, striding into the room, clutching the morning paper. “Why can’t Caroline use her head? Your mother always left the paper at the bottom of the stairs where a person could see it.”

“So what? It isn’t your house. Or your newspaper.” Each word Robert spoke was edged with hostility. “You turned this place over to me a long time ago, remember?”

His father grabbed the bottle and wrestled the cap. “Goddamn it, I left this open for a reason, Robert. Why did you have to go playing with it?”

“Don’t leave your damn pills lying around where my children can get at them.” Robert snatched the bottle away from his father.

“How dare you talk to me like that, boy?” His father’s voice was a rumbling roar. Once, when Robert was a child, it had cowed him to the point of public incontinence.

But this morning, his roar was outdistancing his father’s. “When you asked me to come back here, you said a year. Two at most, and I could go back to my life. But then you stuck me with yours, and took off!”

“Cut the crap. You got the house. You got the agency.”

“Want to know something, old man? It was like ripping my own guts out to come back here and help you sell fucking goddamn insurance. But there was one little part of it that almost made the rest of it okay, the idea that when the chips were down
I
was the son you reached out to.”

His father’s fist banged onto the table. “You had a knocked-up girlfriend and a pile of student loans. How would you have taken care of all that? … Caroline and her little ‘bun in the oven’? They were about to flatten you. And all you had was some boneheaded notion about surfing for a living. I saved your sorry butt.”

“You lied to me. As soon as you were well enough, you left me here and took off to Arizona and never came back!”

“Aw, somebody get me a violin.” Robert’s father went to the kitchen counter and opened a box of cereal. “You’ve got the world by the tail, boy. Stop whining.”

In one swift, furious move, Robert grabbed his coffee mug and hurled it at the old man. It smashed into the wall just above his father’s head and he came at Robert with a violent lunge, ready to strangle him. Robert stood up and his chair toppled backward onto the floor. As he was about to drive his fist full tilt into his father’s gut, there was a shout of “Jesus God, what the hell’s going on?” and Tom was suddenly in the kitchen, and Robert’s fist was slamming into his face, tearing into the skin, going deep, opening a vicious cut.

Tom slowly raised his hand to his cheek. He looked stunned. For a moment, there was an explosive calm: the silence separating the aftershocks of an earthquake.

Then Robert picked up the chair and set it upright again, his hand slick with his brother’s blood.

The old man plunged some paper towels into water that was in the sink, clumsily dabbed at Tom’s face, and said, “Call Doc Johannsen down the street. See if he’s home. You’re gonna need stitches.” Then he slowly sat at the table, still holding the bloody wadded-up toweling in his hand. “You’ll be fine. I got plenty worse than that when I was playing college ball.”

“You played for one lousy season,” Robert said.

“And then I went into a foxhole in France,” the old man snarled. “I played football. I fought for my country. You splashed around in the ocean like a seal, and then, when Vietnam came along, you hid behind the wife and kids and stayed home. The first thing you did when you got your draft notice was to grab a deferment.
Don’t shoot your mouth off about things you didn’t have the balls to qualify for.”

Before Robert could reply, Tom stepped between him and the old man. “Let’s be honest, Dad. I didn’t go, either.”

“Your number wasn’t called. If you’d’ve been drafted, you would’ve gone, Tom. You wouldn’t have let anything stop you. You’re not a sissy mama’s boy, you understand the line.”

“What are you talking about?” Robert screamed.

“Being on the line. A real man hunkers down and holds it no matter what comes at him. And you don’t bitch about it. That’s what a man does. It’s what’s expected. Wherever life puts you, you hold that line and defend it.”

“Well I hate every inch of the fucking line I’m on,” Robert said. “I’m sick of it!”

“What’s wrong with you, Robert?” It was his mother. She was standing in the doorway. Caroline was behind her, flanked by Julie and Lissa, the three of them wearing flannel nightgowns patterned in star shapes. “Your life may not be the one you planned,” his mother said, “but look at all you have, Caroline, and your girls.”

“And this house,” Caroline said. “We have this wonderful place that belongs to us.”

Robert could see that Caroline was bewildered by what he’d said about having a life he didn’t want. The look in her eyes was pleading with him to desire the things she desired—to need to be on Lima Street as much as she did.

But Robert was furious. He was too angry to stop himself from shouting: “For Christ’s sake, Caroline. I could’ve had a goddamned house and still have been where I wanted to be!”

Caroline started toward him, then stopped. Her expression told him that things he had kept carefully locked away from her had gotten loose and stung her. And he didn’t know how to take them back.

“What’s wrong with Daddy?” Julie asked.

The reply from Robert’s father was flat and cold. “Your daddy’s sad because he can’t skip out on his life and go live at the beach like some hippie.”

Robert ignored his father; he was focused on Caroline. He needed to make her understand the pain he was feeling. It was as if his heart were beating against a tourniquet of barbed wire.

And the bite of that barbed wire had never gone away. It was still with him as he stood in the waiting room of the hospital holding Caroline close, feeling her tremble, listening to her whispered prayer: “Please, God. Let Justin be all right.”

Robert was echoing that prayer. He wanted his son to be safe. And beyond that, he wanted him, someday, to have a life that truly belonged to him—one that matched the shape of his soul.

He wished for Justin the kind of life that he had been dreaming of for himself, in the weeks that followed that terrible Thanksgiving, when he had done such damage to Tom’s face.

The truth was, he had enjoyed doing it.

In opening that gaping gash in his brother’s flesh, Robert had liberated something in himself—something surprisingly reckless. It had prompted him to make a decision that would change his life. And, of course, the first and only person he wanted to tell was Caroline.

He was in the living room, at the rolltop desk that had stood against the front wall since his grandfather’s day. It held the musk of old gum erasers and india ink and dust. In one of its wide, deep cubbyholes, he found what he was looking for: a manila envelope filled with a thick sheaf of papers—the business plan he had drawn up in his senior year of college, the strategy for his surfboard company.

The feel of the envelope in his hand was electric.

He went upstairs to find Caroline, reveling in the thought that
this was the perfect time: The girls were still young, easy to move. They hadn’t even started school, and Robert knew he could, without much effort, sell the agency and give himself a modest nest egg.

He and Caroline could have a little house at the beach, a location where he could build his business. Even if they had to rough it for a while, it would be fun—an adventure. He was only in his thirties, Robert told himself. A bit of a late start, but not too late.

As he arrived at the top of the stairs, he saw a light coming from under the door of his old bedroom. He put the manila envelope on the flat crown of the newel post, crossed to the door, and opened it.

Caroline was there, standing near the window, in a pretty nightgown that ended just below her knees. Her face was clean—without any makeup. She looked like a teenager. Like the girl she was when she’d first come to Lima Street. Seeing her made Robert feel as if the things he’d been imagining were not only possible but already in the process of happening.

He held out his hand to Caroline. “I have something I want to tell you.”

She smiled but didn’t move from the window.

He held out his hand again. “Come on. Let’s get in bed. I need to talk to you.”

There was something hesitant in Caroline’s voice as she said: “Can’t you tell me here? I want to stay for a minute.”

“It’s cold in here. Let’s go.”

“The heat’s on. It’s fine.” Caroline led him across the room. Nothing in it had been changed since he’d occupied it as a teenager. She was taking him toward the twin bed near the window—where the sill had a small circular indentation. Robert diverted her. They sat on the bed that was near the door.

Caroline said: “I have something to tell you, too.” There were
faint bluish circles under her eyes, suggesting that she was in need of rest. She put her mouth close to Robert’s ear and whispered: “You’re about to have another house project. For this one, you’re going to need white enamel, and lots of yellow paint, and some Winnie-the-Pooh wallpaper.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re going to have a baby. And I want this to be the nursery.”

Robert felt as if Caroline had lifted him up and dropped him from a gut-wrenching height. She might as well have impaled him on a spike. For a moment, he was so shocked that he couldn’t think.

When he could hear her again, she was in mid-sentence: “… if it’s a boy, I know we’ll have to follow your family tradition about firstborn sons, and his first name will be Thomas. But I want his middle name to be Justin. And I want us to call him Justin. So—”

Robert interrupted her. “Are you sure? Are you positive you’re pregnant?” He felt as if he were seeking information about his own death sentence.

Caroline’s smile evaporated. She sounded weary and overwhelmed. “Yes, I saw the doctor this afternoon. I’m going to have a baby.”

“But it could be a false alarm.” Robert got up, moved away from her. “Like the first time. It could be like that, couldn’t it?”

Caroline looked at him as if he had said something horrifying. “What? You mean when we got married? For God’s sake, Robert. That wasn’t a ‘false alarm.’ I had a miscarriage. I lost a baby. I didn’t invent one.”

Robert came back to the bed and sat on the end of it. “I know. I just meant that it didn’t work out. The baby didn’t make it. I guess all I was trying to say was that it could happen again, couldn’t it?”

There was something close to hatred in Caroline’s voice as she replied: “Is that what you’re hoping for? For me to lose this child?”

Robert rested his arms on his knees and looked down at his feet. They were pale against the dark wood of the floor. The contact calluses on his knees that came from kneeling on a surfboard, the ones that had been there when he was younger, had all but vanished.

He didn’t look up when he said: “It doesn’t matter what I was hoping for.”

There was no way he could make Caroline see that his love for her, and for his two little girls, was as far as he wanted his heart to stretch—that the thought of having another child was devastating him. The only thing Robert had wanted to begin tonight was his flight from Lima Street. But he was already feeling the clench of this new shackle; it was one that was going to force him to remain for a long time, perhaps forever, imprisoned in the place he’d spent his life trying to escape.

“Are you happy?” He asked the question quietly and without emotion. “Are you glad we’re having another baby?”

Caroline rose and walked toward the door. “Yes,” she said. “I want this child very much.”

A moment later, Robert followed her out into the hall. As they were passing the top of the stairs, he hesitated. He was about to come to a stop. But he could sense Caroline looking up at him, so he turned away from the newel post—and from the manila envelope that was resting on it.

He turned, instead, toward his wife. He kissed the glossy crown of her head. And inhaled her perfumed sugar scent. And kept walking.

After that night, Robert and Caroline had gone on with their lives on Lima Street and Justin had been born.

From the minute she first saw him, Caroline was besotted with him. Robert’s love had been, at best, uncertain. On some inescapable level, he had experienced his son’s birth as the arrival of a jailer. Because of that, Robert had never participated in all the little rituals and games of fatherhood. He’d never played submarines or draped Justin in mountains of bubbles while he gave him a bath. He’d never read him a bedtime story. He hadn’t ever taken him to get his hair cut, or taught him how to throw a ball.

No matter how much he had tried, Robert had never been able to love Justin deeply.

And the guilt of that was what was making Robert hold on to Caroline with such intensity as she was pulling away from him, saying: “I need to go back in there. I need to be with Justin.”

She gave Robert a look that was, for a moment, filled with the purest love he had ever seen. Then she disappeared through the waiting room doors.

He started to follow Caroline, but the young nurse pulled him to a stop. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Only one visitor at a time in pediatrics.” She had returned a few minutes ago with her nervous energy and her clipboard.