Secret Language

by Monica Wood

  “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.

  She makes some sound.

  When the ghost turns around it is not her father but Chris.

  “Hey, Mom,” he says. His voice is strained. His eyes have the glassy look he gets watching those rented horror movies with his friends: mummies gone wild, their tattered wrappings unraveling as they chase a band of teenaged archaeologists. Connie, with her purple face and mummified arms, is, Faith realizes, a horror.

  She reaches out to hold her son, but his arms are bigger, he holds her. He is no apparition, and against his clothes she catches the scent of other clothes squashed against them in the closets of her own house; that, and laundry soap, cedar, the dog, the musk of boys’ bedsheets.

  “Were you shocked?” she asks him.

  He moves. “A little. Mom, I feel so bad.”

  He sits now, in a chair far from the bed, staring at the hummock of sheets. He is sad, she realizes, and surprised by his sadness. He wants his aunt back, not because he loves her, not because he’s made memories with her or confided in her or traveled with her; he wants his aunt back because she is his aunt. His mouth seems slackened by the loss of expectation, a surrender to the earth’s vagaries.

  “I missed you,” she tells him. She squeezes the back of his neck, the way she used to when he snuggled next to her, pajama-clad and out of the bath, to hear a few pages of Mr. Popper’s Penguins until he fell asleep. Unlike Joe, who read in expressive grumbles and squeaks, she used an earnest monotone, and the boys preferred her voice to his.

  “Dad and Gram went to call you,” Chris says.

  She hardly hears him; she is watching the battered, trembling tips of Connie’s fingers. At first she believes she must be sharing Stewart’s hallucination; she has seen one ghost already, after all. But it’s there, a subtle tremor, as if a spider were spinning a web between her fingers. She has seen this before, exactly this, in her mother’s spiny hands, whenever she was desperate for a drink.

  She drags a chair to her spot at Connie’s side, and begins to talk the ghosts away.

  “It’s Faith,” she tells her sleeping sister. “I’m here.” She tries to chuckle, manages a dry riff in her throat. “Connie, remember that doll you had with no hair?”

  She hears Joe and Phoebe come in behind her, but she doesn’t move, doesn’t stop, afraid that if she stops talking Connie will die. Joe’s hand lands on her shoulder, and she takes it, still talking, her lips close to Connie’s face. “Remember that card game we used to play on the tour bus?” she says. “Remember when Armand took us to Coney Island, that man who let us on the roller coaster for free because he thought we were twins?” Another clicky rasp from her throat that sounds like a crow laughing. “Remember the bees on that big bush in the Connecticut yard?” She holds the four chipped fingers of Connie’s left hand between her own fingers and thumb, and it is not clear to her whose pulse she feels. She goes on and on, stumbling in and out of the years, show to show, school to school, back and forth and back again. When she stubs against Silver Moon she stops short, and though she cannot sing she sings the only thing she remembers from the show, the chorus of the title song. It comes out in a talk-singing whisper, but in her head she hears her scrub-faced, gingham-shrouded parents as they two-step cheek to cheek:

  The day is dying, my darling.

  Evening will be here soon.

  On this star-filled night

  How we’ll welcome the sight

  Of the sil-verrr moo-oo-oon.

  Her shoulder is warm where Joe holds it. She’s ashamed of her awful voice and wishes she could be talking to Connie of her friends, her job, her present life, but she doesn’t know anything of Connie’s present life, nor Connie of hers, and she must talk to keep her alive, and so she offers the only part of her life that somehow belongs to them both.

  Faith gets to Stewart’s apartment very late. Joe and Phoebe and Chris have gone back home, after persuading her to leave the hospital long enough to go out to a restaurant, and though she wanted them to stay they had to go back to Ben, who had somehow figured out he wasn’t ready for this kind of sadness and stayed home with his grandfather. She steals in, suspecting that Stewart has decided to sleep this night, but finds the light on, the place vacant, another gift on the table.

  A tape, unmarked. She puts it in Stewart’s tape player, turns off the lights, lies on the couch, and waits. She hears the heads turning, but no sound, and is about to get up when the first strains of Isadora’s guitar drift into the dark like a salve.

  Like most of Isadora’s songs, this one is about losing love and then coming back for it, over and over again. Faith closes her eyes, awash in the warm timbre of Isadora’s voice, a resonance that lends the briefest shape to the most wild and shapeless wants.

  FIVE

  Armand has sent Connie a present, which means today—or yesterday, or tomorrow—must be her birthday. Without ripping anything, she undoes the brown postal wrap, the purple ribbon, the orange dotted paper, and reads the card, a huge card with a cartoon lion on it. HOPE YOUR BIRTHDAY IS A ROARING SUCCESS, says the lion. She isn’t sure if she is seven, or six.

  She shows the card to Faith. For some reason Faith likes lions. “What’s the present?” Faith asks. Armand always sends something they have to share.

  In the box are two big plastic things that look like hair dryers. ASTRO-PHONES, the box reads. One astro-phone is red, the other yellow. Connie sits down; she takes a bite of the chocolate bar the desk boy brought up with the package, and lets it melt on her tongue as Faith reads the astro-phone directions. When he doesn’t send books, Armand sends things with directions you have to read.

  “Stand over there,” Faith tells Connie, “and put your astro-phone so that round thing faces me.” Connie runs to the window, holding her astro-phone in front of her. The lights of the city are just coming on, all at once a lot of blinking, making the city look like the scrim in Billy and Delle’s new play. In the play the city is New York, but they’re really in Los Angeles.

  “Hold it up like this,” Faith says. Connie does.

  Across the room Faith adjusts her astro-phone, the yellow one, so that the round thing on hers lines up exactly with the round thing on Connie’s.

  “Press down on the button and say something,” Faith says.

  Connie does. “Can you hear me?” she asks.

  “Not through this.”

  Connie takes a couple of steps.

  “Don’t jiggle it,” Faith says.
“It has to line up exactly. It’s an invisible light beam.”

  “I’m not jiggling it,” Connie says. “Can you hear me now?”

  “Are you pressing the button?”

  “Yes. Can you hear me?”

  “Step closer. Try it now.”

  “Now can you?”

  “No. Come closer.”

  Connie steps, one, two, three. Another, just in case. “Now can you?”

  “Not through this. Line it up again.”

  And on, and on, until they are a few inches apart. Connie presses again, speaks again, and when she’s close enough to touch, Faith hears her.

  They play with the astro-phones all evening. Connie asks the questions, her mouth close to the red plastic, which smells like a new doll. She asks, “Can you hear me?” and “How do I sound?” but also other things—“What color is your hair?” and “How many letters in the alphabet?”—just to get some garbled voice noise through the round thing on the astro-phone. Connie hopes her questions aren’t too babyish, hopes Faith isn’t getting bored, but the astro-phone is irresistible, even to Faith; the voices through them are otherworldly. Connie pretends they’re martians meeting on the moon but doesn’t tell this to Faith.

  When Billy and Delle return, it is long past midnight, but Connie is still awake on the fold-out couch, Faith asleep next to her, the astro-phones on the end table in their box, the orange dotted paper folded underneath it, Armand’s card placed on top like a cover. She closes her eyes, listening to them fumble and whisper. She hears the astro-phones being lifted out of the box, hears the card being sifted open, the orange paper being picked up and put down.

  “Damn,” she hears Billy say. They whisper some more and go back out.

  Connie gets up and puts the astro-phones back in the box, folds the orange paper, tucks Armand’s card into the envelope.

  Connie is sleeping. Suddenly the lights come on with a burst of noise. She sits up, cowering. She can only get one eye open at first but she recognizes the noise as Billy and Delle singing “Happy Birthday” in harmony. Their teeth gleam, bigger than the light. Connie sits up, her nightgown twisted around her legs so badly she can hardly move. Faith is up, too, just behind her, a startled cool breath on her neck. Billy is holding a cake, a perfectly square cake with coconut frosting that looks like it was put on by a machine. Connie counts the candles and finds out that she is seven. Delle hands her three books, unwrapped, books she read when she was five.

  Billy and Delle settle onto the bed, balancing the cake, laughing, the smell of brandy floating over the blankets. Connie moves over, squashed against Faith, to make room for them all. Billy lights the candles one at a time and they look beautiful.

  “Make a wish,” Billy says to her, but she can’t think of anything that has the barest hope of coming true. She wishes anyway: for a pony, for glass slippers, and for her grandmother to come back.

  “What are these things?” Delle says, waving the yellow astro-phone in the air.

  Faith plucks it from her hand so fast it seems to disappear. “We’ll show you.” She sits on her knees. “Get yours,” she says to Connie.

  Connie fumbles for the red astro-phone, hers, and sits back on her haunches, twirled into her nightgown and assaulted by the stink of liquor and bought cake, waiting for Faith to tell her what to do.

  “Can you hear me?” Faith says, and her voice comes groggily through the round thing.

  “Yes, can you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What color is your hair?” Faith asks.

  “Yellow. What color is your hair?”

  “Yellow.”

  Billy and Delle are laughing, hearty as sailors. But Faith’s voice remains straight and stony, her little questions monster-big. They are inches apart, alone together by the grace of Faith’s gargly voice through the astro-phone, in a slender capsule of space that does not include anybody else in the world.

  Her nightgown becomes more and more tangled and the hazy static of the astro-phone falls away from Faith’s voice. Connie can’t move her feet and somehow the sleeves of her nightgown have trapped her arms in the way its hem has trapped her feet. The astro-phone is gone, but Faith’s voice is still there, ringing, clear as anything she has ever heard: “Can you hear me? Can you hear me?”

  She lifts her leaden eyelids, a slow and painful fluttering. The voice continues. At first she can see nothing but a whitish blur, reminiscent of a face. She has lost all sense of place and time, she cannot feel her own body, she cannot remember her own name. Panicked, she fights her way through this disconnection, willing the image before her to resolve itself into something she might understand. Finally, she sees it: the oval of pale skin, blessedly familiar. And the green eyes, inches from hers, watchful, wary, unbelieving. Her name returns to her, and then the other name: Faith.

  VI

  MUSCLE MEMORY

  ONE

  Faith doesn’t like Nancy, the home-health nurse who mixes up the dishes, puts back the newspaper in the wrong order, leaves wet tea bags to dye the bottom of the kitchen sink. Even as she retreats to the comfort of work—the stellar gleam of her computer screen, the austere hunk of telephone at her elbow, the plain wants of the faces in the waiting room—Faith imagines her house being plowed up like a cornfield by the scarecrow form of Nancy, her short stalk of a body and strawlike limbs zigzagging through the rooms like a chicken in a barnyard. Faith’s one comfort is the certain knowledge that Connie, imprisoned in the guest room, is somehow making Nancy pay.

  After the transfer from Massachusetts General Hospital to Maine Medical, where the doctors ran more tests and finally pronounced Connie cured, they’d handed her to Faith with a sheaf of instructions, a fistful of appointment cards, and peculiar, self-satisfied smiles, as if the New England medical community had brought her back to life, saved her blood-swollen brain. Faith knew better. Connie had saved herself: Faith saw the way her skin moved upon waking, pulsing weirdly as if her spirit had been working itself up through a dream.

  There had been some small discussion about where Connie would convalesce. With her lower arms, both hands, and one foot rendered useless for at least five more weeks, she would have to have care. Care was the word they kept using, care that would require a certain degree of intimacy.

  Faith was the next of kin.

  Stewart had lifted Connie out of the car and carried her up the walk, over the threshold of Faith’s house, up the stairs and into the guest room which Faith had prepared with a few things she had picked up from Connie’s apartment. They were the wrong things: she’d gone through Connie’s closet and dresser drawers with no more than a stranger’s notion of what she was looking for. What she found was a green satin bathrobe, all scallops and ruffles, that she’d given Connie for Christmas the year before. Hanging among the plain-cuffed cottons that Connie apparently preferred, it looked garish and silly, the kind of present you made jokes about. Faith took it anyway, because it was the only thing in the closet that looked familiar.

  Stewart made jokes all the way up the stairs about brides and grooms as Connie hung grimly in his arms. Faith could see how mortified she was to be helpless, to be an invalid in someone else’s house.

  It has been only a few days now since Connie arrived, a fragile collection of bones and fiberglass and tape, and already Faith’s house is transformed by the chaos she has always suspected of lurking just inside the lining of her life. For the first few hours she and her sons skulked along the stairs and in the hall, stumbling into each other, excusing themselves for taking up space. Things she used to be able to put her hands on turned up in foreign places, as if these alien presences—a sick relative and a visiting nurse—had invaded not only her consciousness but the inanimate soul of the house itself. She is a little surprised to see the same old rooms behind the front door when she comes in after work.

  “How’s Connie?” Faith asks Nancy, who is packing up her satchel of knitting. Nancy always leaves on the stroke of five.

>   “Just fine,” she answers, showing her chicken teeth. “Not the ideal patient.” Nancy said this yesterday and the day before.

  Ben is sitting in the living room, changing the strings on his blue guitar. “I’ve been playing for her,” he tells Faith.

  Nancy gives Faith a smoldering look, then turns her gloomy gaze on Ben, his guitar, the lethal-looking amp on the floor next to the chair.

  “Not too loud, I hope,” Faith says.

  Ben shakes his head, and the soft, sticking-up part of his hair trembles like some strange species of black milkweed. Since the first awkwardness of Connie’s arrival, he’s barely left the house except to go to school. It fills Faith to watch his fierce solicitude—taking plates in and out of the room, bringing home school yard riddles—part duty and part care, tenacious and somewhat perplexing. Whatever is going through him is, she believes, a kindness inherited from his father.

  Chris, on the other hand, has turned out to be more like her than she thought: for the first time that she can remember, he has receded from the household. He stays late at basketball practice or at work, or else hides in his bedroom or at Tracy’s house. He has eaten dinner there for several nights running, indifferent to the swell of well-wishers (his Fuller relatives, whom he loves) that troop into his own house daily, with casseroles and breads to stock Faith’s freezer.

  Nancy pulls a scrap of paper from the pocket of her uniform. She clears her throat. “A Stewart Hayden called. He’s coming in Friday night, late, and will see you Saturday.”

  “I’d better get over to clean Connie’s place,” Faith says, half to herself.

  “He said not to,” Nancy tells her, and Faith gets the impression that she’s being judged. “ ‘No cleaning’ were his exact words.”

  Nancy is waiting for the stroke of five, and though she has only fifteen minutes left Faith decides not to dismiss her. Let her wait. Faith goes upstairs to check on Connie.

  From the hall she hears a labored grunting, and at the door she stands watch, mesmerized by Connie’s dogged concentration. She’s out of bed, teetering on her one good foot, tapping her casts together like a seal on land, trying to catch the edge of the bedspread between them.