Secret Language

by Monica Wood

  She heaves a long-suffering sigh, pressing his palm. “I love you, Stewart.” She used to say such things in high school to any boy who might say it back, and then she discovered Rule Number One.

  “Say ‘I love you enough to have your baby.’ ”

  “Will you shut up? Why didn’t you tell me you were this drunk?”

  His eyes rove over her, glazed in their sockets. “We’d be a real family, Connie, close as close. You and me and the baby, Aunt Isadora coming in from New York—”

  “Not now, Stewart.”

  He’s quiet for a moment, watching her hand on his hand. “Close as close,” he repeats. “Close as … close as those brothers and sisters you hear about who have their own secret language. That’s how close we’ll be.”

  “You’re raving.”

  “No, no, I read this. They make up their own language so nobody can bother them.” The cloth is blood-soaked now and she lifts it. To her relief the cut has stopped spurting. She grabs a clean towel and presses. “I’m not kidding,” he says. “You ever hear of that?”

  “No.”

  “Can you imagine being that close to someone?”

  “No.”

  “What about you and Faith?”

  “We weren’t close.”

  “No secret language?”

  “Not unless you count silence.”

  He’s laughing now, leaning heavy against her, drunk and blood-drained. She watches the towel for signs, but it’s still white on the surface. She keeps pressing, thinking about silence, and words.

  “What about you and precious Isadora?” he says.

  “Stewart, just keep your hand still, would you?” She thinks of all the words that have careened back and forth between her and Isadora, over the phone, over a restaurant table, over the bulky form of the cat, Bob. All those words, and her little sister is still a dream, something she has made up, a new friend she has a crush on, a stranger who shares some of her blood and none of her memory, and Stewart is a bastard for knowing it.

  The Atlanticair Boeing 747 hits a wall of sleet over the English Channel. The seat belt signs flash on, but there is no word from the cockpit except a cryptic instruction for the attendants to buckle up. The crew is all New Guard, including one skinny novice in her first month of flying. After a stomach-gouging drop in altitude she begins to cry softly. “Just strap yourself in and sit there,” Connie snaps, nervous herself over the wild rocking and bumping. She has a reputation for being rigid, and this is a good time to invoke it. The girl sits, humiliated and petrified, smoothing her plum-colored skirt over her knees.

  After a few more minutes of bucking and heaving, during which several collective gasps escape from the cabin, Connie leaves her seat, raps on the cockpit door, and marches in.

  “You’re supposed to be sitting,” the captain says, not turning around. His face glows eerily over the control panel.

  “I think the passengers could use some reassurance, Evan,” she says. The copilot, a novice himself, looks up.

  “What do I look like, a fucking tour guide?” Evan mumbles. She has heard him say this before. He hasn’t much use for the crew; he refers to all of them, even the men, as “the waitresses.” Connie dated him for a while a long time ago, and then his brother, and he’s held it against her ever since. She sometimes entertains herself with thoughts of having to land the plane herself someday, the way beautiful stewardesses once did in the movies, after Evan suffers a type-A, stress-related, particularly painful heart attack at the controls.

  “I’ll speak to them, then,” she says.

  “That’s what they pay you for, honey.”

  She whirls around and snaps the door shut behind her on her way back into the cabin. The jet retches again, nearly knocking her to her feet. She straps herself in and reaches for the PA. Her voice, even through the crackle, is calm. Her own anxiety settles as she hears herself; she has always been good at this, and she can see the relief—perhaps even gratitude—in the faces of her charges. Her blood still pulses against her ears, but she senses the change, the slowing, the collective relief.

  After a bumpy landing at Heathrow, the connecting passengers file past, pallid and subdued, nodding at her with small smiles. Word comes then to unload everyone, there will be a delay before leaving for Boston.

  The skinny novice approaches after all the passengers have deplaned. “I’m sorry,” she whispers.

  “It happens,” is what Connie discovers herself saying. It once happened to her, when she was twenty-two, her first emergency landing. “You’ll do better next time,” she tells the girl, and believes it.

  In the flight lounge she sits around with the crew, their young voices shimmying mawkishly, as if they had just saved the inmates of a burning orphanage. She pretends to listen, but her thoughts are elsewhere, with Stewart in Paris, his bandaged hand and six stitches and a promise to call when he reaches Boston. Only now does she begin to shake, the terrifying flight and the scene with Stewart behind her.

  She looks out at the slushy runway. She murmurs a prayer for a short delay, for she wants to be home. She thinks of her hollow apartment, Isadora arriving to fill it with her rickety laughter. She imagines a Christmas visit to Faith’s house, a blue snow cloaking its eaves. Perhaps Faith will say something surprising, something about all of them being there together; perhaps she will have bought a present—not a bottle of perfume or more towels, but a prettily wrapped bauble, some small surprise that Connie does not yet know she wants. She hopes Joe will be there, she hopes the boys will run the dog through its tricks.

  She imagines herself walking through the door of the house she once lived in, joining the gathering in the kitchen, and in this vision they can’t stop talking. Their words rain into the room, a downpour of voices, a lifetime’s worth of catching up. And if this part is merely a dream, Connie thinks, the people in it are not; they exist, an ocean away, and she knows exactly where they are, waiting for her to come home.

  THREE

  “This is the one he wants,” Chris says. He holds up an electric guitar in an eye-destroying shade of blue.

  “This one?” Faith asks, hoping he’s wrong. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.” He shrugs, not looking particularly regretful. “Sorry.”

  The guitar is shaped like a crescent moon, and the tuning pegs are black, with eyes—or what look to Faith like eyes—painted on each one. Joe looks it up and down as if he’s planning to run it through a lathe.

  Faith examines it helplessly. “Chris, it’s hideous.”

  “Hey, I’m only the messenger,” Chris says. “And I hate to clue you, but you can’t get the guitar without an amp. We’re talking major bucks here, folks.”

  The store is full of last-minute Christmas shoppers, mostly teenaged boys in denim jackets, black T-shirts. The few adults, like her and Joe, look as though they’ve just gotten off a tour bus. She wonders what kind of Christmas they are readying for in their homes, what their homes look like. Near the window a man is trying “Chopsticks” on an electric piano with his daughter; they have the same red hair. She hopes they could likewise spot Chris as her son.

  “Well,” Chris says. “I’m outa here.” He hands off the guitar to Joe, who holds it by the neck like a chicken. “Meet you at the truck.”

  “Wait a minute, I thought you were going to help us with this,” Joe says.

  Chris backs away, lifting his arms the way Joe likes to. “Hey, I did my part. All you guys have to do is pay for it.” Faith watches him saunter out the door. She hopes he will always look this at home with himself, so like his father.

  Joe turns to her. “I vote we get it.”

  “Did you see the price?” She taps the tag. “That’s not even counting the amplifier.”

  “Just give me what you can,” he says. “I’ll pay for the rest.”

  “If we’d done this earlier we could’ve shopped around a little.”

  “Faith, I’ve been busy, okay?”

  “Fine.”
She doesn’t look at him. “I just hope he uses it.” She runs her fingers over the strings, the knobs on the body. “Isadora taught him a few chords and now he thinks he has some kind of destiny.”

  “Maybe he has.” She hears him trying to make up. “He’s got music in his genes, after all.”

  They buy the guitar, and the amplifier, and a beginner’s book on blues. As they walk out to the truck, struggling with the boxes, Faith turns her lineage into notes across a staff: tuneless, indecipherable, their identifying stems snapped off.

  “Any plans for Christmas Eve?” she asks.

  “Nope. Not a one.”

  It is snowing, light and grainy, gathering on Joe’s black hair, turning it white as his mother’s. Faith watches this soft aging and wonders if she had ever, even in the first blush of love, believed they would grow old together.

  “I thought you and Brenda might be doing something,” she says.

  He slides the boxes into the back of the truck and closes the door of the cap, yanking once on the handle. “Brenda’s gone, Faith.” He sounds bitter. “As if you didn’t know.”

  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 s
tuff.”

  “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.”