Secret Language (22 page)

Faith knows this man; she knows his voice, his many voices. She places her palms on the front of his parka, a cold wall of blue, then digs in, crunching great hunks of goose down under the thin, silky fabric. She does not let go.

She stares into his face. “Is it Connie?”

“Sit down, sweetie,” Joe says, but she knows already. She knows. He walks her to a chair and sits her down, her fingers caught like a cat’s claws on a sweater, and like a cat she watches him, unblinking. In her periphery she catches moving bits of shirt, a hand, the fleeting halo of Isadora’s hair. She hears the eerie hush of held breath.

“The plane crashed in Boston a few hours ago,” Joe tells her, and she anchors herself to his voice, the way he forms his words, trying to hear everything. “That’s all we’ve got so far.” She is aware of his hands on her face, their cool calluses, their width and pressure, their dogged tenderness.

“We heard it on the news at Grammy’s,” she hears Ben say. His voice is high and heartbreaking. And Chris, sounding like a man: “There could be survivors, Mom. There could be, it happens all the time.”

Joe’s hands press her skin gently. She can feel the shape of her own face by the shape of his hands on it. He is speaking slowly, tenderly. “Mom’s been on the phone trying to get some information.”

Faith can hear Isadora’s quiet whimpering, but she does not turn her head. Her hands relax, drag themselves down Joe’s chest and drop into her lap. “Oh.” She looks at her hands. “Oh, Connie.”

Joe shucks his jacket and reaches for her. Faith presses her face into the soft cotton of his shirt. She feels his hands again, one on her back, the other snugged against her neck. It is here she waits for news.

The strangers in this hospital remind Faith of all the Christmases she has spent in the company of strangers. She remembers one Christmas—after Delle’s death and before she met Joe—when she and Connie sat mutely in a corner of Armand’s brother’s house in New Jersey, listening to one of Armand’s grand-nephews recite “The Night Before Christmas.” She thinks of herself at all the Fuller Christmases—with their vaguely military rituals—trying to fit somehow into their warmth and vigor, knowing herself to be at heart a stranger there.

It is past Christmas now, two days or three, and Connie has not woken up. Faith has lost track of time, place, herself. She yearns to do something—anything—familiar: buy some potatoes, type a letter, fill a feeder. Without her own rituals she is bereft, alone with the quiet of her sister’s dying.

Even here, however—with nurses and doctors roving in and out with news or no news, random trips to the cafeteria, reliance on the kindness of strangers—she has managed, more or less, to keep a schedule. She measures time by the breaths Connie takes, her translucent form lying deathlike under horrifying white sheets; she measures time by the lunch carts squeaking down the hall, the shift change at the nurses’ station; she measures time by the peculiar gradations of Boston light: from the russet morning to the cindery dusk, she measures time.

Connie sleeps.

At noon Faith calls home, talks to Ben or Chris, still on Christmas break but staying near the phone. One of them is always there,
which may or may not be orders from their father, who arrives at the house after work and stays all night. Either way, it touches her. She wants Connie to know all this, that people are waiting for her to wake up.

Each night, late, from Stewart’s apartment, she calls Joe, and they talk for a long time. He gives her the details she craves: what the boys ate for supper, how many birds at the feeder, how far up the porch the snow has banked. He relays good wishes from Dr. Howe and Marion, love from Phoebe and Joe Senior and the family, hellos from some of Dr. Howe’s patients. He asks her, always, how she is.

“Joe, if there’s anything I could have done differently—” she begins.

“Shh,” he says. “You’re a good sister. Hey, remember those card games the three of us used to play?” But she hadn’t meant Connie. She meant Joe. She hangs up with the grimmest sense of disconnection.

She and Stewart and Isadora keep watch over Connie’s lusterless presence. Her skin is pulpy and blue across the eyes and up into the forehead where a swatch of hair has been ripped out, the exposed scalp stitched. Faith has been waiting for her to open her eyes, but isn’t sure how she will know when they open. The rest of Connie’s face, what Faith can see of it around the tape and feeding tube, is eerily white and unscathed, making the unbruised part of her the part that doesn’t fit.

The sheets are tucked under her arms, and her arms fall straight at her sides, in casts from just below the elbow. From the end of the right-hand cast, the chipped red nails of her middle three fingers stick out like broken suckers; from the left, a little more of the hand shows: four fingers, swollen and purple-green. At the end of the bed where the sheet wells up, Connie’s foot, swathed in another cast, lies unseen.

Talk to her
, the doctors tell Faith. She thinks of the other things they tell her, about the swollen brain, the collection of blood, and the things they will not know unless, until, she wakes up.
Just talk to her
.

Stewart and Isadora have no trouble talking: they talk and talk
and talk. Words march out in platoons, timely, apt, voluminous. Stewart, bleary-eyed, gaunt with grief, tells Connie about their friends, entertaining little stories he unravels like ribbons. He tells about Christmas at his parents’, about the precious nephew who turned into a devil-boy and behaved only for Uncle Stewart. His own hand sports a thin bandage, which he waves in front of her face. He tells her that his cut hand was a big hit with his family, that he made up a story about defending Connie’s honor on Boule Miche. His mother kept referring to “Stewart’s injury.” He tells Connie these things with great glee, innuendo, irony, revealing to Faith an old and intimate friendship. He speaks passionately, his face close to hers, as if the tube were the only thing preventing him from kissing her.

He does not say anything about the eight crew members who died. He does not mention the 182 passengers.

Isadora goes on, and on, about
Silver Moon
: the new music, the big-time director, the tour Garrett’s planning, the promotion. She’ll be appearing on “Good Morning America,” she tells Connie, but the husk of her voice cannot penetrate the husk of Connie’s sleep.

Isadora, like Stewart, seems to know about Connie’s friends, seems even to have met them, and offers more: Debbie’s husband came back; Grace quit in a huff; a passenger proposed to Frank and meant it. Perhaps she has these stories second-hand, from Stewart; in any case she has thought to arm herself with them, these stories that expose Faith’s meager knowledge of her sister’s life.

But Isadora always manages to come back to the show, and Faith understands that it is her way of telling them she must leave.

“You don’t have to stay here,” Faith says. Says it for her.

Isadora turns from the bed as if Connie is already dead. “I feel guilty leaving.”

“Of course you do.”

“I have to be there for the casting.”

“Of course you do.”

Stewart looks up sharply.

“I know this might seem a little weird to you, considering everything,” Isadora says, madly yanking her sleeves up and down. “But really I’ve got to be there. The show must go on.” On this last she
drops her voice, as if to imply that the show’s going on will wake Connie up.

Faith begins to laugh. She can’t help herself. “Why are you laughing?” Isadora says.

Faith stops. “That expression. It’s the dumbest expression in human history. Even Billy and Delle never said that.” Then she giggles again, an undignified crack in the climate-controlled air. “The Show Must Go On. I’m surprised they never said that, it’s so—it’s so apt.”

Isadora is shrinking into her sweater. “Don’t feel guilty,” Faith says. “Go do the show, Isadora. The Play’s the Thing.” Another ripple of laughter clangs against the antiseptic walls.

“Faith,” Stewart says. He’s standing next to Isadora, horrified.

“I’m sorry,” Faith says, her lips close together. “Is this mean?” It gets out in spite of her, another cruel snap of laughter that springs tears to Isadora’s eyes. Faith is not surprised at her capacity for meanness: it has been coiled in her, all her life. She listens to Isadora’s soft crying and turns from it, toward Connie’s unearthly repose.

Her meanness then doubles back on her: instead of cutting Isadora away, she instead recognizes her own desire to flee. Her terrible mirth drains from her in an instant. She sinks to her chair, next to Connie’s bed, her eyes trained on Connie’s ravaged fingers. “It’s just that I don’t want you to go.”

“If I didn’t have to …” Isadora begins. “Garrett needs me right now.”

“I’m sorry I made fun of you.”

“I wish I
had
to be here, Faith,” Isadora whispers. “Some burdens are good.”

Isadora’s voice seems to come from far away—far from this little prison Faith has fashioned for herself, as if her ankle were tethered to Connie’s bed. She wants it and doesn’t, this prison of blood ties, duty, history. Isadora remains outside, her hands barely fitting through the bars.

“I’m going,” Isadora says.

Faith says nothing.

“She’s going, Faith,” Stewart says.

Faith stands up, accepts Isadora’s arms. She holds her—such a
tiny person, Faith thinks, who would not have been one of the survivors—and waits until Isadora stops crying. Faith herself does not cry, has not cried, her crying is waiting in line behind everyone else’s.

“Goodbye,” she says. She does not want Isadora to go away. She looks at her hard, in case she never sees her again.

“I’ll be thinking of you,” Isadora says.

Stewart offers to walk Isadora to the lobby, leaving Faith alone with Connie and the doctor’s instructions to talk.

Faith puts her hands on Connie’s sheets, over her chest. Connie’s metronomic breathing spirits Faith’s hands up and down, up and down.
It’s Faith
, she says. Up and down, again, again.
I’m here
. She is not sure she is saying these things out loud.
I’m right here
, she says again. Up and down, up and down.
I’m here, I’m here
. This is all she has said in two days or three:
I’m here
.

Although they are seldom in his apartment at the same time, Faith gets to know Stewart by virtue of shared quarters. His friends call and stop by at all hours. He likes nice things, including nice wine. He’s tidy and organized, but not like her and Connie. After each shift of their vigil and a noisy bus ride from the hospital, a gift waits from one to the other: cold chicken with a garnish, clean laundry, a small Bible with a chapter marked. For Faith, who doesn’t know if there is a God and is inclined at the moment to believe there is not, Stewart has underlined Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3:
To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven …
Her dry, burning eyes can read only the first two lines, but she recognizes the passage, almost remembers it whole.

By the time Faith gets to the hospital, on the fifth day or sixth, Stewart is on his way out with a grocery bag full of food: brownies, homemade bread, muffins, pinwheels. He smells like Phoebe’s kitchen, which is how Faith knows that Phoebe is there and that Joe has brought her.

“Where are they?” she asks.

He shifts the bag on his hip. “In the room. No change.” His eyes flicker over to the nurses’ station. “I had to clear the visitors with the hospital Gestapo.”

She smiles. Faith has forged a peculiar intimacy with Stewart, as if they were strangers stuck for days in an elevator between floors. One of the signs of their forced complicity is the code they’ve devised. They have words for everything, nicknames for the nurses. Stewart dubbed Faith the Keeper of the Gate: as next of kin it fell to her to define immediate family. She had gladly let Stewart in.

She stares down the scoured hall to where it turns abruptly, a clean hook in the architecture braced by a grid of windows, the wintry sun steeled against the panes. The light is intense, but bearable; she can look straight into it. She wonders if this is the sort of light people mention, back from death.

“Have you seen the doctor?” she asks Stewart.

“Once.”

“Did he say anything?”

Stewart rolls his eyes, exposing smeared red veins. “Too soon to know anything. Wait and see. Blah blah fucking blah.”

Faith starts to go.

“What’d you leave for me?” he says.

“A surprise. Thank you for the candy.”

“You liked it?”

“The arrangement was interesting.”

“It was a self-portrait.”

“It was? Then I guess I ate your ears.”

“Faith.” His voice drops, and he peers at her over the rim of the bag. “I thought I saw her fingers move.”

The candy curdles in her stomach. “Did you tell them?”

“The nurse was there. She couldn’t see it.”

Faith wonders if he’s hallucinating. He’s been here on the night watch, and considering how often his phone rings, he can’t be sleeping much during the day.

“It looked like she was shaking,” he whispers, checking the nurses’ station as if he were doing something subversive. The grocery bag rumbles under his arm. “I thought maybe she was thinking of something, maybe remembering the crash, something like that.”

“Okay,” Faith says, patting his arm over the bag. She’s afraid he might cry, or fall down. “Okay. Go home, Stewart. Get some sleep.”

He grips her hand hard. For a moment they simply stand there in the cold gleam of the hospital, and Faith considers that holding Stewart’s hand is the closest she can get to Connie. Except for that brief and painful hug when Connie left Portland to start her life, they have never held each other.

By the time she crosses the distance of the corridor, she has forgotten about Joe and Phoebe, her thoughts blighted by the idea, the prayer, of Connie’s moving fingers, and so when she enters the churchlike quiet of Connie’s room she believes she sees her father there, his yellow hair a spectral shimmer in a gloss of light.