Secret Language

by Monica Wood

  “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.

  VII

  SILVER MOON

  ONE

  Her fingers hurt in certain weather and she has a slight limp when she is tired. These minor infirmities remind her not of the crash but of Faith’s guest room, its furl of white curtains and the dapple of pink flowers on the walls. There are times, alone in her apartment, when she longs to retreat there, to give herself up again.

  It is morning, spring, the blue sky and powder-puff clouds surreal as a stage set. Her table is laid out for breakfast, everything matched and proper. A spray of tulips from Faith’s garden blooms in a vase, their colors so clamorous they almost have voices. On the window sill sits a sprig of leaf and stem in a pot, a piece of Faith’s house that she brought back with her.

  Stewart is late. He’s due here with Adam, his new lover, a technician at Maine Medical whom he met in her days there. Adam is a nice man, intelligent and gracious, but to Connie his best virtue is keeping Stewart in Portland so much. He doesn’t live far away, just a couple of blocks down Brighton Avenue, in fact.

  She looks at the set table, the monstrously cheerful tulips, the days on land stretched out before her like a plain.

  Stewart knocks jauntily on the door. He never uses the bell, a peculiarity of his, his notion that friends never ring, they knock, as if the door might open on its own for them. “Hi, neighbor,” he says.

  Adam comes in just behind him and they both follow her into the kitchen. “For our fair hostess,” he says, presenting her with an expensive bottle of champagne that she has no intention of drinking. He’s a beautiful mixture of obscure ethnic origins, small and wiry with dark skin, a lot of black hair, and pale hazel eyes. Exactly Stewart’s type, she thinks, mentally riffing through a deck of relationships, all failures in one way or another. Stewart could say the same of her, of course; they’re always her type but they never work out. A petty forecast crosses her mind, a dim notion of Adam’s fate.

  “Thanks,” she says, and puts the bottle in the refrigerator, out of her sight.

  Stewart is poking around the apartment as if appraising it for a bank. “The place looks great, Connie,” he calls from the living room. “The home of a woman on the mend.” He wanders back into the kitchen. “Let’s think of this as your welcome back party.”

  She smiles. “I feel good. It’s about damn time.”

  After she returned from her convalescence at Faith’s, AtlanticAir provided her with services she was hardly allowed to refuse. She sat through a mortifying four sessions of a crash survivors’ group, most of whose members were already flying again. Healthy, was the implication. And yet she couldn’t. They took a field trip into a grounded cabin but she couldn’t even bring herself to leave the gate.

  She drove four times to Boston for this so-called therapy, and stayed alone at Stewart’s, for he was either in flight or in Portland with Adam. She could barely contain herself on the rides back, looking long before she ought to for the subtle jag of the Portland skyline. She would drive by Faith’s house to make sure her car was in the driveway, then by Adam’s to check for Stewart’s car, counting heads the way she used to before takeoff. Thus reassured, she would finally go home, her thoughts fixed on sleep.

  “So,” Adam says. “What’s next?”

  Connie scans the counter: vegetables cut into frilly pieces, eggs set out and ready to be beaten.

  Adam grins. “No, I mean what’s next for you, after your accident and all.”

  Stewart wraps his arm around her. He fashions a microphone out of his free hand. “Adam, we prefer to think of it as Connie’s learning experience.” She laughs, but catches his eye: it could have been him. Now that she’s all better he’s spooked. His glibness is just his way of showing off for Adam.

  Adam is chuckling now. “And what did you learn?”

  Connie moves Stewart’s fist and talks into it. “Adam, I learned that I don’t want to die. Not in this lifetime, anyway. Back to you, Stewart.”

  Stewart lets go of her, his smile gone. “You can’t ground yourself forever, Connie.” He turns to Adam. “Starting Monday she’s going to be interviewing nineteen-year-old twits who want to be flight attendants—right here in Portland, Maine.”

  Adam raises his eyebrows. “Is that what they’ve got you doing?”

  “It’s where old flight attendants go to die,” Stewart says. “Pardon the expression.”

  “It’ll be a nice change.”

  “You’ll be bored stiff.”

  “How do you know? Regular hours might do me some good.” For weeks she watched Faith leave for work and come back, feed her dog and her kids, tend her birds, her house, her sister. She can imagine living that way, an ordinary life.

  Stewart sits down at the table next to Adam. “I think she was at her sister’s too long, staring at that pink wallpaper.” He puts his fingers to his temples. “You should have seen it, Adam—billions and billions of flowers.”

  “Why do you put up with him?” Adam asks.

  Connie looks straight at Stewart.
“Because I’ve known him forever. Lucky for him, time counts for a lot.” Then she blinks him away. “Anyway, things have worked out. AtlanticAir’s been good to me.”

  “They should be,” Adam says. “What’s it been, twenty years?”

  “Not quite. It only seems that long.” She checks with Stewart for confirmation, but he’s looking at Adam in a way that makes her feel a shade has been shut in her face.

  After a moment, Stewart comes to. “So,” he says. “You want my news?”

  “What is it?” she asks, though she thinks she knows.

  “I’m moving in with Adam.”

  Connie doesn’t say anything, until it’s too late for anybody to say anything without feeling awkward. Adam excuses himself and heads for the bathroom.

  Stewart frowns. “What’s with you?”

  “Nothing,” she says. “What happened to having babies and being a family, close as close?” She’s appalled to be bringing this up now, a ludicrous idea in the first place, one she never considered for an instant. She still wouldn’t, of course not, but she wants to be asked again.

  “You were right, I was raving,” he says. “Besides, first things first.” She assumes he means Adam.

  “And why did you bring champagne, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Adam bought it. I didn’t have the heart to say anything.”

  “You two can drink it, then.”

  Stewart cups his hands under her elbows, a gesture she has always found endearing. Of all the men she has ever known, his affections touch her the most. “I thought you’d be happy for me.”

  She snakes her arms around his waist. “We can’t both be happy at the same time,” she says. “It’s not allowed.”

  He laughs. “Does the world have rules?”

  “Yes.” She looks up. “You can love him all you want, Stewart, but you can’t like him better than me.”

  He gives her a squeeze. “Not a chance, sweetheart.”

  She reaches down into their history, reeling back through her illness, his ghostly face next to Faith’s at her bedside; back through endless conversations about their love lives or their families or their friends; back through their parallel careers, their gossip about the infuriating little soldiers in the New Guard; back through their first days of training when Stewart taught her how to pour a proper glass of wine, one of the many lessons of polite society she had never had occasion to learn.

  “Do you miss Faith?” Stewart asks. “Is that it?”

  She grimaces. “Maybe I do. Isn’t that ridiculous?”

  “You tell me.”

  “She was good to me, Stewart. Really, I couldn’t have asked for more. But we’re back to the same old silence. Nothing’s changed.”

  “Nothing?”

  She thinks a minute. “I can stop by without calling first.”

  “Well, there you go. Next thing you know you’ll be borrowing each other’s clothes.”

  She can’t help smiling. Stewart knows her better than anybody, and sometimes she thinks of him as her real family. The only thing missing between them is blood.

  Now that Connie’s better, Isadora is calling again. As Stewart and Adam are drinking champagne in the kitchen by themselves, she calls from a hotel in Philadelphia, agonizing about the show.

  “We can’t get the music right, Connie. Everyone’s an expert. The director’s a maniac, Garrett’s insufferable, and nobody’s listening to me! Who’s the musician in this crowd, I ask you? Everybody has two cents to put in, and believe me that’s just about what it’s worth.” She groans. “Especially the critics—there must be a special place in hell for them, Connie, some extra-flamey corner where specially trained devils take turns pinching off pieces of skin.” She’s been talking so fast she has to gulp for breath. “In San Francisco they called the show weird. That’s San Francisco, as in California? The weird capital of the universe? God help me, I swear. They hated it in Denver, too, even though they loved me. They said I was refreshing.” Connie already knows this from the reviews Isadora has sent from each city, with certain sentences, and sometimes entire paragraphs, blacked out. Billy and Delle used to do this.

  “Garrett keeps putting more and more of the original songs back in,” she complains. “He’s ruining the whole concept. Doesn’t the poster say ‘The Moon Is Blue’? Doesn’t that mean blue as in blues? It’s my professional identity, for God’s sake, what does he think this is?”

  “His show,” Connie says. This all sounds wearily familiar.

  “I can’t sing that shit, Connie, that twitter-jitter shit, how does he expect me to keep from throwing up? God, what a mess. We won’t have a show left by the time it gets to New York. If it gets to New York.”

  “It’ll be all right, Isadora,” Connie croons. She likes this part. “You’ll be fine. You’ll go to Broadway and be a big hit.”

  “You really think so?”

  “It happened once, didn’t it?” She pauses. “You can sing twitter-jitter as well as anyone. It’s in your genes.”

  Isadora laughs, a spirited cackle over the phone line. “That’s true. You know, I’ve had the feeling since the first rehearsal that Billy’s somehow right beside me, his big hand resting on my shoulder.”

  Billy’s hands were actually quite small for a man his height, small and slim, delicate as a woman’s. Connie doesn’t answer. She’s surprised to see she’s willing to go only so far.

  Isadora lets out a long sigh. “Anyway, how are you?”

  “Me? I start my new job Monday.”

  “What new job?”

  “Interviewing. I think I told you.”

  “Oh, right, right.” Isadora groans. “I’m so preoccupied. Connie, you wouldn’t believe what this takes out of you.”

  “No.”

  “By the way, one of the reasons I called is—don’t say no yet!—I wondered if you might take Bob.”

  “Bob who?”

  “My cat. Bob, you know Bob.”

  “Oh, the cat. Right.”

  “My roommates are threatening to turn him out on the street. He misses me so much he’s clawing all the furniture.”

  From what Connie remembers of Isadora’s furniture, this doesn’t seem like much of a tragedy. She glances furtively at her own furniture, clean and white. “Gee, I …”

  “He’ll behave for you, I know,” Isadora says. She’s running out of breath again. “He’ll know we’re sisters. You might as well be me, as far as he’s concerned. Cats are very sensitive to things like that.”

  “I’m sure they are, Isadora, but—”

  “I’m not kidding. He’ll pick up on your DNA or something. He’ll behave like an angel because he’ll think I’m home.”

  “I don’t know …” She does not want a cat.

  “Please Connie, you can’t imagine what I’ve been going through, worrying about him all these weeks. After my mother died he was my only family till I met you.”

  Connie already knows she won’t repeat a word of this conversation to Faith. “How would I get him?” she asks.

  “Oh, Connie, thank you! I’m having him shipped by plane. My roommate Rosie will bring him to La Guardia and it’s a direct flight from there.” She giggles. “I booked AtlanticAir.” Connie laughs, then stops when she realizes the arrangements are already made.

  When she returns to Stewart and Adam they are getting ready to leave. “What was that?” Stewart asks.

  “I’m taking Isadora’s cat.”

  “Cats are evil.”

  Adam scrunches up his nose. “I hope it doesn’t have claws.”

  All this sounds terribly ominous. She wonders if part of her new life is a willingness to be taken advantage of.

  By afternoon the weather is almost unbearably beautiful. Connie decides to walk, something she has rarely done until recently, when both her physical therapist and the woman who ran the crash group suggested it. Get out, they had said, which Connie believes could mean a lot of things. She dutifully “gets out” because she wants to b
e all better and because she has nothing else to do. Being earthbound has startled her into the sudden recognition of how little she has filled her life with. Without a plane to catch she is bereft. She can’t wait for Monday to come, to have a place to go.

  Connie is wary of these walks, this acquaintance with springtime. They remind her of her thorough disconnection with the address on her driver’s license. Though she has inhabited this city for years, she has never really lived here, has never strolled the mazelike neighborhood that starts at the back wall of her condominium complex. The houses are old, modest, and well kept, with porches and clipped lawns and elderly clumps of rhododendrons. The tipped-over tricycles and tethered dogs in many of the yards remind her of the unease of her childhood, her boundless wanting. She winds her way through the neat curving streets, heading away from the noise of Brighton Avenue, her sneakers padding against the road. Eventually she turns up at Faith’s.

  No one is home. Faith’s house has the same domestic cast as the others, though the Corvair in the driveway, still unhealed, tempers the effect considerably. The front yard is wild with tulips. Connie moves to the back, under the bird feeders, wanting simply to stand on Faith’s ground. Flower beds, black and furrowed, lie open like small graves. Near them, pots of frilly pink and yellow flowers sit on the grass. All through the back yard, in tidy clusters, shrubby plants of different sizes are sited like landmarks on a map, and she tries to remember whether or not they will eventually turn up with flowers. She has never paid much attention and regrets now that she doesn’t know what to anticipate.

  Faith’s yard reminds Connie of the way people in big houses sometimes arrange furniture. The bushes and flower beds and rectangles of winter-bleached grass make a careful, deliberate pattern that must be moved through in a certain, predetermined way. It would be impossible to run through this yard; Faith has created an ironic order out of wild, wild things. But it’s early, Connie thinks; it could still snow, an ice-blue mantle spreading itself over the leafy shape of all this hope.