Secret Language (21 page)

She watches him, her blood moving. “What do you mean, gone? For good?”

“Don’t your sons tell you anything?”

She sets her lip. “Not about Brenda, no. Apparently they’ve gotten the idea that I’ll die.”

“They didn’t get it from me.” The snow is falling harder now, fine and heavy, ricelike beads ticking at the pavement. He’s looking at her but she can’t quite make out his eyes. “We’re fighting,” he says. He sounds pleased.

“
You’re
fighting. This has nothing to do with me.”

“No?” he says. “Brenda left me because she thinks I never left you.”

More hushed, pebbly snow seething on the ground. Faith remains in it, the hard, dry flakes pelting her face. Something she can’t see is being revealed to her, something she ought to know, or already knows but can’t listen to.

“I’m sorry,” she says softly. “I can’t help what she thinks. You have two kids who need you, what did she expect?”

“You’re right,” he mutters. “It has nothing to do with you. She left me fair and square.”

The accusation in his voice disarms her further. The snipe about the boys not telling her anything stings belatedly. He makes to turn from her.

“Fair and square?” she says, holding him there. “There’s nobody else?” She really wants to know. She’s curious about how people leave each other. Too late, she realizes she also meant something else.

“Are we back to that?”

She doesn’t answer.

“
Are
we?”

“I didn’t mean us.”

“Let me set the record for you, Faith. I
paid
the price for hurting you.” He is nothing but a misty shape in the weird parking lot light, half obscured by falling snow, a shape she knows. “I
paid
.”

“Joe, I’m not—”

“And let me tell you another thing.” His outline sharpens somewhat as his voice picks up. “I know you, Faith. I know that somewhere in that mind, that
mind
of yours, we were doomed no matter what I did. I
know
you. You didn’t plan on us making it.”

“Joe—”

“I’m not defending myself. I realize what I did. I’m talking about what
you
did.”

“What did I do?” she asks, defensively, then realizes she is really waiting for an answer. “What did I do?”

He thinks a minute, the snow calling
shhhh
. Then he answers, matter of fact, all accusation gone from his voice: “You didn’t love me.

He disappears around the front of the truck. She hears him wipe the snow from the windshield with his sleeve and knows exactly how this looks, the way he pulls the cuff of his jacket over his bare hand.

Faith waits awhile in the hard, insistent snow, under the tinsel-trimmed lights of the parking lot. A carol stammers out from somebody’s car radio and she listens, numbed by Joe’s words, numbed to the depths of the empty bucket that is her heart.

She wanders over to the cab of the truck, stopping for a moment to watch Chris, a few yards away behind the lit-up storefront of a sporting goods store. He moves through the equipment, hefting basketballs, fingering warm-up gear. He retracts his elbow, bends slightly at the knees, and pushes his arm forward into a graceful, imaginary free throw that swishes through an imaginary basket. He bends his knees, eases forward, releases again. He performs this ritual year-round, with or without a ball, in the kitchen, in the yard, standing next to his car. Muscle memory, he calls it: you do it enough, it kicks in when you can’t afford to stop and think. She believes him: that elegant arc looks exactly the same, every time.

When she opens the door to the truck and slides into the seat, Joe is staring at his son through the snow-dusted windshield.

“Sorry,” he says. “It’s the damn holiday. ‘Jingle Bells’ and all that crap.”

“No, I’m the one. I’m sorry.” She wants the word to cover almost twenty years, but it doesn’t. It’s just a word.

They lapse into silence as the snow covers all the windows, encasing them. It seems they have been this way—together and apart—all their lives.

His voice comes cutting out of the dark. “Can’t you at least deny it?”

She draws her coat around her. “I didn’t have the faintest idea how to love somebody—not even you.” She sounds darker than she means to, but her failures are rearing up again, all the everyday intimacies that had made her ashamed, for she didn’t know the words, the steps, she could never quite keep time.

She’s back at her first bicycle ride, Joe’s sneakers slapping the street behind her as he holds on, then lets go. “I don’t know how!
I don’t know how!” she had screamed, even as she maneuvered the bike down their green street, even as she made the corner and came to a safe stop. He came upon her in a few minutes, yipping joyously, she thinks she remembers him skipping,
that
pleased with her small triumph.

“I did love you,” she says suddenly. This much, at bottom, she knows. “I did.”

He doesn’t answer. His soft breathing sifts through the snow-lit dark.

“I’m sorry you had to go through it again,” she says. “With Brenda. I’m sorry.”

His face is a shadow. “It wasn’t the same. It wasn’t even close.”

Faith sinks lower in the seat, pressed against the door. “At least you tried again, Joe. And you’re not done trying, I know it. I admire you for that.”

“I can’t blame her,” Joe says. “She’s right, I wasn’t home much.” He laughs, a painful bark in the hush of the cab. “I didn’t want to smother her. I was so determined not to make the same mistake twice that I made a new mistake once.”

They sit in silence for a time. Faith finally stirs. “Do you mind if I turn the heater on?”

He starts the truck and the wipers come on, too, revealing Chris coming out of the store.

“He broke up with Tracy again, did you know that?” she says.

“ ’Tis the season.”

She leans over and taps on the horn so Chris can find them. He flings open the door and jumps in, squeezing her between them. “Yow,” he says, snow falling off the fringes of his hair. “Looks like this is never going to stop.”

A calm square of light defines her kitchen window as they pull up, and from the living room flash the white lights of a hopeless, spindly tree the boys found according to her expressed wishes. “Five bucks,” Ben had said, dragging it over the porch steps. “We got robbed.
Free
wouldn’t have been a bargain.”

That same tree is a picture of welcome, one of her own making.
She’s learned something over the years, she thinks, more than Joe realizes.

“Mom?” Faith suddenly finds herself squashed next to Joe, Chris’s empty place stretched out on her right. She slides out of the cab.

Joe puts the truck in gear. “I’ll go get Ben.”

“Thanks. Say hi to your parents for me.” She touches his arm and leaves her hand there. “And be careful driving in this stuff.”

“Hey, someone’s here,” Chris says as Joe drives off. Faith looks toward the porch. A small figure huddles there, arms folded tightly across her chest. Behind her, Sammy’s face appears at the window of the front door.

“Tracy?” Chris calls. He sounds suspiciously hopeful. They’ll be back together in two days, three at the most. He has several presents for her under the tree.

“It’s Isadora,” Faith says. Though she has a hat pulled down over her forehead and is buried inside a big coat, Faith recognizes the tilt of her head, the way she sits with her feet perched on their toes.

When they come upon her she doesn’t move. “I kept thinking you’d be back in a minute,” she tells them. “The lights were on and the dog was in.”

Isadora appears paralyzed with cold, leaning against the dark shape of her suitcases. Faith pulls her gently to her feet, surprised at the strength of Isadora’s gloved hands.

Once inside the house, Isadora begins to shake visibly. The dog whines and walks circles around her.

“My God,” Faith says, “I think she’s hypothermic. Let’s get her out of these things. Chris, get a blanket.” She works automatically now, as she does sometimes in the office. She has attended to fainting spells, insulin shock, panic attacks—all the little dramas of a doctor’s waiting room. She ushers Isadora into a chair and yanks off her hat, jacket, gloves, boots. Chris appears with a blanket and a pair of Faith’s slippers, his face taut.

“She’s all right,” Faith says.

Isadora peers at them from inside the cave of blanket. Her lips are blue. “I feel like a jerk.”

Isadora looks unexpectedly helpless and young. Faith turns to
Chris. “Put on some water, honey. She needs something hot.” Chris goes out like a man possessed.

“Were we expecting you here tonight?” Faith asks politely.

Isadora grimaces and shakes her head. “Connie was supposed to meet me at the airport. When I got in I waited awhile, then called her and got the machine. Then I called you and didn’t get anybody, so I took a cab to Connie’s.” Her nose begins to run. Faith hands her a tissue. She honks on it a couple of times, sounding like a man. “Anyway, when I got to Connie’s, I don’t know why I was surprised to find all the lights out. I had the cab bring me here, figuring you’d show up sooner or later.”

She looks like a small animal in a burrow, and when Chris arrives with tea her hands reach out slowly, like paws.

“She probably got delayed,” Faith says. “She doesn’t always call.”

Isadora lifts her eyes over the rim of the cup. “Thank God you were here.”

“I wasn’t.”

“I mean eventually. Thank God you were here eventually.” Faith glances at Chris, who appears to be containing a laugh. He has his father’s fondness for the absurd.

“I feel like such a jackass,” Isadora says, “plunked on your doorstep on Christmas weekend.”

“It’s all right,” Faith says. “You can stay here tonight.”

“I don’t want to put you out.”

“We have room,” Faith says. She tucks the blanket under Isadora’s feet.

Isadora smiles. “I love your tree,” she says. “I love ugly trees.”

Faith settles Isadora into the guest room, her favorite room in the house. Because it is rarely used, for she rarely has guests, she keeps it exactly the way she likes it. Everything is pink and white, a room she thinks a daughter might have liked. It’s a room she herself would have loved.

She watches Isadora unpack, her movements sinewy, catlike. Isadora talks the whole time, barely pausing for breath. In this sense she’s easy to be with; Faith doesn’t have to worry about holding up half a conversation. She begins to see what has captured Connie so
completely: an enthusiasm for living that Billy and Delle might have once possessed before they twisted it into something else. Faith begins to believe there might be something pure in her heritage, something worth passing on.

“We got Ben a guitar,” Faith says.

Finished unpacking, Isadora pulls the pillows from under the pink spread and props herself against the headboard, as if she plans to stay for years. “What kind?”

“Blue,” Faith says.

Isadora’s laughter cracks into the room. “I meant what brand. Strat? Gibson?”

“Oh,” Faith says. “I don’t know. He’s been practicing from that book you sent him. I think he might be good.”

“He’s a Spaulding, isn’t he?” She pauses. “The show’s going great, by the way. We’ve got most of the money and Garrett’s got a casting director ready for next week. I was born for this part, Faith.” She laughs. “In more ways than one.”

She looks childlike, her hair hazy and angelic under the pinup lamp, and yet the mention of the show puts Faith back on guard. She can’t shake the feeling that Isadora has been sent to show her how unseemly it is to borrow from other people’s lives, the way she once borrowed from Joe.

“This has worked out quite well for you, then,” Faith says. She knows how stingy this sounds, but the revival, and all it will revive, is caught in her throat like a pill she has swallowed by accident.

“Why shouldn’t it?” Isadora says: a simple statement, not a challenge. If this is Isadora’s philosophy of life, Faith is hard-pressed to refute it, although Faith herself has never thought along these lines.

“You’ll feel better when you see the show,” Isadora says. “You
are
planning to come?”

Faith says nothing.

“You don’t like me much, do you?”

“I like you fine, Isadora.”

“You never answer my questions.”

“I don’t have answers you want to hear.”

“You think I don’t know what a creep Billy was? I can tell when Connie’s making it up, Faith. I’m not as naive as you think.”

“I didn’t say you were naive,” Faith says. “Believe me, I never even thought it.”

Isadora looks surprised. “Anyway, Connie makes up Billy stories for my sake, which makes me feel good, and then she begins to believe them a little, which makes
her
feel good.”

“Well then,” Faith says, trying to sound as neutral as possible. “I guess it works all the way around.”

“See?” Isadora says, sitting up with a lurch. Faith moves back. “That’s just what I mean. You don’t like me one bit. I’ve tried to figure it out, Faith, but I’m damned if I know why.”

Faith sighs. “I don’t feel related to you, Isadora. It’s not the same thing as not liking you.” Isadora looks disappointed. She might be nothing more than a lonely girl who misses her mother.

Snow-muted footfalls rumble on the porch. “Joe and Ben,” Faith says, relieved to have an excuse to go downstairs. Isadora follows her, talking.

“I don’t mean to put you on the spot or anything, Faith. It’s just that as long as we
are
sisters, whether it
feels
like it or not, we might as well make a stab at a relationship.”

Before she gets to the landing, Faith senses something wrong. Joe’s expression reaches her from the door. Ben comes in behind him, his boots dripping, his face white. When he pulls off his hat his hair stands up in needles of static.

“How’s everything here?” Joe says. The words hobble out, carved clean of meaning.

She nears him now, breathing the cold off his jacket, trying to see in his face what his words are hiding.

“Everything’s great,” she hears Isadora saying behind her. “Connie’s late, which nearly killed me, literally, but Faith and I managed to make the best of it, didn’t we, Faith? We were just getting to know each other a little better.” She pauses, her words slowing. “Weren’t we, Faith?”