Secret Language (26 page)

“Did you hear me?” she says, chewing a piece of apple.

“She hasn’t called, Connie.”

“I just asked. Did you have a bad day?”

“It was good. He was running on time.”

“Are you sick of me?”

“I’m sick of your asking if Isadora called.”

Connie chews up another piece of apple, thumps her arm on the stack of books. “Ben brought these.”

Faith looks them over. She smiles with recognition. “I hope he’s not trying to turn you into me.”

“Don’t you think it’s strange that she hasn’t called?”

“No.”

A swatch of cold, colorless light streaks through the curtain onto Faith’s cheek, already fading as she sits there. Her skin brightens and pales at the same time. Her face becomes white, saltlike, rendering her immovable as Lot’s wife.

“Do you think everything’s all right?” Connie says.

“Yes.”

Connie presses. What else is there for her to think about? Two hundred dead people? “I don’t understand why she hasn’t called. I hope nothing’s happened.”

Faith blinks, a statue blinking. “Don’t worry about Isadora. We’ll hear from her when she needs something.”

She cuts the rest of the apple into small pieces that Connie manages to maneuver between her fingertips. For a while they sit in silence, the squish of apple between Connie’s teeth the only sound.

Connie pushes the rest of the apple away. “Faith, give her a chance.”

“To what?”

Connie sighs. “Are you doing this on purpose?”

“Look,” Faith says. “I have nothing against her. I
like
her. I believe she’s related to us. What more do you want?”

Connie looks away. “I don’t know.” But something.

Faith takes the plate with the remaining pieces of apple and plunks it unceremoniously on the bedside table. She stands up and looks toward the window, her yard, the street, and beyond that Connie can only guess. She seems to be searching for something. The light is draining rapidly in the way of winter, and Faith’s rigid form darkens from the bottom up: her blue skirt deepens to gray, then the folds in her blouse blur into a murky wave, and finally the maddening secret of her face dissolves into shadow.

“Did she do something?” Connie asks. She wants to know and she doesn’t. She understands, against her will, that Faith is fighting her out of kindness. “You said she was at my bedside, Faith. You said she was there around the clock.”

“She was there. That doesn’t make her a saint.”

“Did I say she was a saint?”

“All right.” Faith takes the plate and heads for the door.

“Wait a minute,” Connie says. At the corner of her vision the picture book lies open, a magnificent photograph of birds in a nest, their beaks open, impossibly huge, bigger than their own heads. They look to her like her own life, her own gaping mouth. She filled it with food, wine, the tongues of men, her own bunched fist in her frightened nights.
I want, I want
, a small voice calls.

“I never said she was a saint,” Connie says. “All I ever said was she’s our sister.” She sits up, scuffs her bare foot on the carpet just to feel herself moving. “God, I want a drink.”

Faith waits, stolid and unhappy, staring at Connie’s jittery foot. She could be nine years old, Connie thinks, mad at me for begging.

“Isadora would get me a drink. It’s not so much to ask.”

“Isadora isn’t here, Connie.”

“If she were here she’d get me a drink.”

Their words are dropping like beads of hail. Faith’s eyes are fixed on Connie’s, like the stubborn little beams from the astro-phones that had to line up exactly.

“Isadora would do it,” Connie repeats, amazed at herself, at her
smallness. She could be five years old, she
wants
to be five years old, demanding what she needs.

It is suddenly dusk. Faith sets the plate on the dresser and presses both hands to her temples. “The things you want, Connie—they’re always so impossible.”

Connie reaches for the table lamp, the silly green scallops of her robe shimmying down the ridges of her cast, and tries to press the lamp on. She can’t quite manage it. “Can you turn this on?” Connie says. She wants to see Faith’s face. Faith doesn’t move. “Faith, turn on the goddamned light.” Faith steps back toward the door, flicks on the overhead light. It sounds like a snapshot and there they are, exposed.

“Was she really at my bedside?” Connie asks. “You said around the clock. Were you lying?”

Faith is squinting in the sudden light. “It wasn’t exactly around the clock, now that you mention it.”

“Just
tell
me.”

“She left after two days, maybe three,” Faith says. “She got tired of playing the grieving sister and went back to New York. I believe her exact words were ‘the show must go on.’ ”

Connie can picture Isadora’s leaving, the narrow shoulders turning away.

“I’m sorry,” Faith says. “Really, Connie.”

“Why did you lie?”

“I didn’t have anything else to give you.” She waits. “When she was there, she was wonderful. She talked to you incessantly, just the way the doctors said to. And then she left.”

“Well,” Connie says. “She had her commitments. I never expected her to drop her life for me.”

“Yes you did.”

Connie looks up, startled at the bitter tang in Faith’s voice. “No I didn’t,” she insists, but she feels found out, caught at something not so much shameful as greedy.

“We thought you were dying,” Faith says. Her voice is flat and tired.

All at once Connie is angry, angry to be trapped in the stingy silence
of Faith’s care while Isadora’s generous voice gladdens the hearts of a pack of strangers in a theater 3,000 miles away.

“You want to hear something really funny?” Connie says. “I had myself believing you two
argued
about taking me in. That I had two sisters out there vying for the honor.” She laughs, a small lonesome sound.

“No,” Faith says. “Only one.”

Connie sinks back on her pillow, crushed under the weight of disappointment. “I thought I finally had a real sister,” she murmurs, then freezes, horrified, but it’s too late, her words are zigzagging into the room like a let-go balloon.

Faith says nothing. A few strands of hair have come loose just at the hairline, the fine glinty strands left over from childhood.

“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” Connie says. “Faith, I’m sorry.”

“You aren’t going to get what you want from her, you know. I don’t think either one of us was quite what she was hoping for.”

“Faith, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

Faith looks fragile and ghostly beneath her undone hair. All this care has taken its toll. “I’m not hurt,” she says. She turns to go.

“It’s not the same for you, Faith. You have what you need.”

Faith lingers at the door but does not turn around. It hurts to look at her.

“I need a drink.”

Faith’s shoulders drop. “No.”

“Will it kill you to get me a drink?” She can only see Faith’s back.

“You know who you sound like?” Faith says.

Connie’s anger returns as a gulping want. “One drink, Faith. A glass of wine, anything.”

She won’t turn around. “Listen to yourself.”

“Will it kill you?”

Finally Faith wheels around, her face crumpled with disgust. “You sound exactly like Delle.”

Connie gasps. “Go to hell.”

Faith snaps off the light, her voice cutting a bitter swath in the dark. “Just
listen
.”

“Faith!” Connie bellows into the room. She stumbles out of bed,
sliding on the carpet and landing with a thud on her hip. “Ow! Goddammit! Faith!”

She hears the harsh whisper of clothing as Faith moves from the door, the furious lash of footsteps against the stairs, a rustle in the downstairs closet, then the languorous groan of the front door opening and closing. A gravelly crunch of snow under urgent footfalls that shortly fade away.

Faith is gone. Connie squints into the dark, unable to move. Her foot cast is locked under the bottom edge of the bed, but in the dark she can’t quite see it. She rotates her caught foot warily—her anger subsiding, fear surging into its place—until a twinge of pain lances her ankle, straight up through the knee. “Damn!” she mutters. She freezes, not daring to move. The dark is heavy and ominous, the outline of pleasant hunks of furniture gone gray and mean in the wake of Faith’s flight.

“Faith!” Connie calls. The house answers, a mild soughing of tree against shingle. Connie drops against the carpet, the rough pile grinding against her cheek. “Faith!” She turns her foot again until the pain stops her. “Faaaith!” Her voice drops to a whisper. “Faith,” she murmurs, then gives up and cries like a child.

The snow in Faith’s yard shines silver-blue from the lights of her neighbor’s house. Faith does not know this neighbor, though he’s lived next door since Ben was born. She waves to him when she drives by in the car or walks the dog, and he waves back. She has never stopped to talk. He has relatives—children and grandchildren, she surmises—who visit from time to time, and three or four cats that sleep inside the windows, draped over each other like a pile of clothes. He and Joe have spoken a bit over the years, about lawn mowers and garbage collection and storm windows, and sometimes she has stood by, watching these conversations with a polite smile. She would probably not recognize her neighbor if she ran into him, say, at the office or in a store. The thought fills her with an inexplicable dread.

She makes her way to the back yard, lit by the neighbor’s rear windows. His entire house is lit, as if he lived there with dozens of people. He must be inside, alone with all those lights. She moves
past Chris’s car, its back end smashed into a fistlike shape. Though it roosts motionless in the quiet gleam, she gives it wide berth, half afraid it might start up on its own, a stark hiccup in the seamless air. Everything in and around this house today seems poised. Coiled.

Though it has been dark for fifteen minutes, maybe more, Faith thinks she hears the wisp of a chickadee in the branches. She stands still a moment, listening to the winter evening descending upon the neighborhood: the muffled hum of Brighton Avenue traffic a few blocks away, the distant voice of downtown, the faraway whine of a siren. In her head still reverberates the desperate call of her name from Connie’s throat. Now she is sure she hears one lisping bird, a smudge of sound. She digs a finger into one of the feeder holes and scoops out a few seeds.

The chickadee is here, she can hear it. She isn’t cold, though she shivers. A few striped seeds glint on her hand. Somewhere below this snow-packed ground, spring is already moving, its earthen scent somehow seeping up. She holds out her palm, out of habit, knowing it’s past feeding time, when the lone bird swoops out of the dark and lands on her hand. She is so astonished, so thrilled by the pronged feet stabbing her skin, that she whips her hand away and the startled bird disappears into the night.

“Oh,” Faith says aloud. Her fingers open, scattering the seeds over the luminous snow. “Oh,” she says again. She’s staring at her hand, seeing again the scattering of her fingers like the afterimage from a flash bulb. Not her fingers, though; the fingers she sees are pink and gnarled; and not seeds, but jacks, silver-colored jacks rolling off the tips of those fingers and spilling over the hardwood floor of an upstairs room of the house in Connecticut.

The hands must be her grandmother’s. She thinks she remembers a ring, a gray braid, and perhaps a song. She bites down on her lip, staring into the snow for the lost seeds.

Suddenly cold, filled with remorse, she remembers Connie lying helpless in the guest room. She slips around the unlighted side of the house to avoid the specter of the damaged Corvair. The house is dark and lifeless. She hangs up her coat, removes her boots, tiptoes up the stairs, heart pounding, turning lights on ahead of her.

Connie is lying on the floor, facing the door. When Faith snaps on the light, Connie flinches, turning her face into the carpet. “I’m stuck,” she says. Her voice is a soft croak, as if she has been hollering or crying for a long time.

Faith moves to Connie’s side, drops to her knees, and cautiously extricates the cast from the underside of the bed. She’s surprised how easy this is.

“Did you hurt yourself?” she asks.

“I don’t think so,” Connie says, her eyes cast down. “I didn’t dare move.”

Faith helps her up, front to front, Connie’s chin knocking softly against Faith’s jaw, their arms entwined, another dance. She sits Connie on the bed, removes the green robe, leaving her in one of the white cotton nightshirts Stewart had fetched from her apartment.

Connie no longer looks fourteen; she looks frail and tired and old.

“I’m really sorry,” Faith says. She sits on the bed, nearly paralyzed with remorse.

Connie’s breathing is slow and labored. She moves her arm, with heavy effort, and tucks a piece of Faith’s skirt between her fingers. “If you weren’t here, Faith, who would be?”

Faith stares ahead, into the room she once papered with the help of her new father-in-law. Her hope back then was for a changed and happy life. She senses Connie’s upturned face, but can neither look at her nor answer her question. To look into those eyes now, to meet green with green, would be to look into her own howling core.

“Connie,” she says. “I think I remember Grammy.”

Connie shifts in the bed, but Faith still doesn’t look at her.

“Did we play jacks?” Faith asks. “With silver jacks?”

Connie doesn’t move. “I think so. Yes, I think we did.”

“I remember her braid.” She can barely hear herself. “And a ring.”

“She was kind to us,” Connie says.

Faith nods. “I remember that, too.”

She gropes along the ridge of Connie’s cast and finds the skinny, sticking-out fingers. She holds them. This is the best she can do.