Game of Secrets

by Dawn Tripp

  “Did the same stupid thing about a year ago,” she says.

  waken

  To the judge blown bedlam

  Of the uncaged sea

  She is beautiful. Even now. You cannot look at Ada Varick and say that she is not, her face filled with the elaborate and delicate crossing of lines a life has wrought. On occasion, she might say something, or throw a glance at me, a spark in her eye like tinder lit, and in that moment, the architecture of her face will rearrange into how I might have seen her once. Before I knew her name, the first time I saw her perhaps, if there was ever such a time, walking the old bridge, fishing the slack tide, one of her boys trailing after her. I will see that lost moment like a shiver, her face as it was then, the flow of black hair off her shoulder. How the wind took it.

  I see her so clearly it’s hard sometimes to imagine there will be a time when she is not here waiting for me.

  I touch the X. I could play it, but something tells me, wait.

  Wait.

  From the street, the sound of a car going by. Fast. The rush of air after.

  It’s my favorite letter. X. Master of those two- and three-letter words I love that Ada calls “dinks.” As a rule, she doesn’t like small words. She doesn’t like how I know them all, have memorized them, even ones I don’t know the meaning of.

  “How can you play a word and not know what it means?” she’ll ask me.

  “Because in this game, all I need to know is that it exists.”

  And she will shake her head, but technically she knows I am right, and it gets her all in a twit. She doesn’t like how I work those dinks, braiding them close to tighten the board.

  wot, od, nix, xi, kae, em, avo, nu

  “I know what’s coming,” she says. “You got that playing scrappy look, that little scowly-crease. Here.” She touches the spot between her own brows. “You get that look, that polecat look, and it reminds me of him. You know, Janie, it’s the only time you remind me of him.”

  She says this, and I hear a slight bend in her voice, away.

  For a moment I want to ask her.

  ——

  A week or so before Vivienne died, there was a game we played and a moment in that game, when Vivi threw up her hands and cried out, “Girls, you just won’t believe this—I’ve got P-A-S-S-I-O-N, and no place to put it.” Then, like she’d do sometimes, she turned her rack toward us, so we could see the letters there before she went to break them down. Like we might not have believed her otherwise.

  It was four years ago this coming August, Vivi was out feeding the birds, stooped to pull a weed, and went toes up to the sun. A ruptured vessel in the Circle of Willis at the base of her brain. The result of a congenital defect they discovered after the fact, as they so often do. A weakness in an arterial wall. Asymptomatic. One of those silent, hidden tics afloat in the body we’re born into.

  Unknowable.

  FROST FISH

  JANE, TWELVE

  October 1957

  Every Saturday her father, Luce, came for her. And she would wake early, every Saturday, go before dawn down the road to her grandparents’ house for her chores: bring in the milk, water the hens. Then she’d run back up the road home to change into a decent dress and start her waiting.

  She told herself that she remembered the time he lived with them, that perilous time held in the balance, if a balance at all, the three of them—her mother, him, her—adrift together through the small house. She did not really remember, only knew that his shadow used to fall across the knots in the wide-pine boards of the floor, that he shook out his tobacco onto paper, rolled his cigarettes, sat near the woodstove, his long legs stretched toward its burning, while her mother turned a sock or the pages of a book, the snap, snap as kindling burned, and the cradle rocking with the baby that once was her, and his voice, the smooth low edge of it, mixed in with cooking smells—bruised onions, bread fried up—the scrape of a spoon against a pan—his voice she thought she could still sometimes hear like it was held in the walls, their whitewash and lime.

  And even after he left—every Saturday, he would still come for her. Would always come, would never not, it was a promise that he kept, and she would wait in the parlor of that fall-apart house where she still lived with her mother, his once-upon-a-wife. And he would come for her there, even on the rainy Saturdays when you could hear the water slushing down the gutters; and even in dead winter, her favorite season, that certain honesty of winter, all things stripped back to being only what they are; even then, on those Saturdays of the most unkind weather, when the northeast gales drove in off the sea, and the cold flooded under the walls of the house that had not settled well—the wind in a high-pitched sudden whistle swelling up the belly of the carpet by a gust.

  She would wait in the parlor, touching winter through the window in the patterns of frost, two coats on, rubber boots, a woolen hat and mittens she wore even inside, it was so cold. Her mother would be in the kitchen, and Jane would wait alone, until she saw the big blue Buick winding its lackadaisical way down Main Road, pulling up out front, her father leaning across the seat to open the door to her slipping inside.

  They always headed north. Winter, spring, summer, fall. He’d turn around in some driveway, go back the way he’d come. Never went through the village at the Point, never by the wharf or over the Point Bridge. He knew, and she did as well, he was less than welcome there. Too many hated him: Jane’s grandfather Gid being one. Gid, who always said he was a con. Bootlegging swindling no-good. Swig and Jimmy Lyons also, two others he stole something from once—she’d heard talk—they were fishermen both who carpentered wintertimes, and the brothers of that woman Ada Varick, whom Jane’s mother never referred to by name, only called her “that woman,” and Jane even young had enough of a sense to guess why.

  They drove slowly through other parts of town. They drove the roads her father knew, the roads his life had been laid down on. He took his time, driving slowly, always seemed to find some different route, and had a different story, it seemed, for every turn, every corner, every house they passed and who was living there, some little bit scraped out, that in the telling took on a glint of something more, and she sat there quiet, listening, until they pulled up out front of the Head store. He’d ask her what she wanted and she’d answer—penny candy or a coffee milk—never really cared much, but for the awe she felt when she was with him, that slight delirious fire. She would wait in the car while he went in, the engine humming, and they would set out again, whatever he had bought for her held tightly in her hand—how slowly he drove, like he was carving the air. He’d take the right turn at Sisson’s corner, and they’d stop in at his mother, Cora’s house, for a mug and a talk.

  And every spring, after the earth had thawed and the plow had turned it under, he took her looking for arrowheads through the fields—she would keep behind him, trailing his shadow as he paced the furrows, carrying the late sun on his back, his head bent, eyes working over the ground until he found a piece—the shape that he was looking for—quartz, whole. He’d dust the dirt off with his fingers, wash it in his mouth so it came clean off his tongue like a language. He would hand it to her and go on.

  “I’m sorry,” he said once, the last Saturday, when he came late, so late. It was deep into autumn by then, the dahlias in her mother’s garden had come up fast, blooming all of a moment as dahlias will do, and it had rained a touch the night before, a soft wet still soaked over everything, slick on the leaves of the maple tree, the white complicated residue of a spider’s work slung between the forked lower branches. She had been waiting by her window in the parlor looking onto the road. Watched the light as she waited—how it started in the morning, just touching in that most intimate way the outer edges of things, touching like it swore, I will not go farther, yet by noon already breaking, driving deep toward the heart of the shade.

  “I’m sorry,” he said when he finally did at last arrive. Only that. It was after four, her mother almost not letting her go, b
ut then she begged and threw a fit, and so they went, even knowing as she did that it was too late to embark on any grand adventure, too late to walk into some green wooded stillness and find themselves gone. It was too late to do anything much, go anywhere, except down to East Beach, past the houses before the road hooked back.

  They parked there, she and her father, Luce, all the way at the end of the beach.

  It was 1957, a day in October.

  “I’m sorry.” He had said that, more than once, I’m sorry. Too late to do anything but sit together in the Buick and watch the waves roll in through the dusk, under the moon. Like a round door in the sky, and near full, she thought. A hole boring right into the evening daylight of their world. He took a long drag, and the smoke circled his handsome craggy face, a patch of it like fog trapped in a corner of the windshield. She watched his hands, his fingertips tapping the top edge of the steering wheel, tapping his fingers quick without seeming to realize. He told her how he used to come down here, to this beach to go for frost fish with his father when he was just a boy, about her age. They’d drive down on the wagon, with spears, a lantern and a bucket, just after the first good frost, when the whiting came in to breed. They’d come on a good dark night, no moon to spook the fish, just him and his father, and wade through the shallows with a lantern, and the fish would come, drawn by the light, beating in around one another, that light making them wild. Then a sea would lift them, wash them up onto the beach, and they’d be stranded: white, tails thrashing, caked with sand. He and his father would spear them up, one after another, handling them off the prongs into the pail until it was full, and when they got home his mother would roll those fish in cornmeal, fry them up, the skins sticking some to the pan, the outer flesh just browned, and he and his younger sister would eat them with their fingers.

  “They’ll only come on a white frost,” he said, “leave at the first sign of snow. Just a flurry is enough to send ’em off. Maybe the start of next month, though, when it gets real cold, I’ll bring you down one night.” As he talked, some lit tobacco fell off the edge of his cigarette where it wasn’t rolled quite tight, leaving tiny holes burned into the dark shirt he wore, holes his skin glowed through like stars.

  She could lie down in the stories he told. Whether they belonged to a world he had lived through or not, there was a comfort to each one, a sheen to his voice in the telling. She knew what he was. A thief. A rum-runner back when. He’d made some money at it, killed a man, went to jail for that. Learned card tricks there.

  When the silence fell in the car, she didn’t break it, didn’t want to touch it for fear he’d pull out his watch and remark that it was time to be getting her home. In that silence, his cigarette burned down, he stubbed it out.

  There was a library book on the floor by her feet. She’d noticed it earlier, facedown, just kind of thrown there, the gilt letters on the cover through the shine of the plastic, the white sticker with the call number stamped crooked at the base of the spine. It surprised her to see it—her father thought little of books, called them birdscratch—she kicked the book over now, read the title aloud. He glanced down.

  “Take it,” he said.

  “You want me to return it for you?”

  “Naw.” He shrugged. “Someone left it there, it’s yours now.”

  He rolled another cigarette, put his window a bit lower, and said something about how that moon, rising there and coming up on full, was a hunter’s moon, but the Indians called it the middle-between-moon, and she knew he knew that kind of thing because at the end of the day, most days, he’d wind up at the Green Lantern up on Route 6, pouring it down with Victor Perry, who was the last of the Troy Indian Tribe from the reservation, that skinny knobbed land they got for fighting against their own in King Philip’s War. Victor Perry was the last male of the last family, the son of a famous herbalist, and when the City of Fall River took the reservation by eminent domain back in 1916 for its water supply, in exchange for the two hundred and some acres, they gave Victor a new house just up the road and a job for life, set him up as a sort of resident caretaker of the land that had once belonged to his people before the city took it.

  Her father had told her that story about the Perrys before, many times, too many times. He told it like it had some bearing, like some other man’s fate or the fate of a tribe might be reason enough to explain why he wore trouble himself, to justify why he stole what he stole and always had, when all it really pointed to was how, for example, he had to go all the way up to the Green Lantern on Route 6 to drink, because he wouldn’t dare step foot into Laura’s down at the Point Wharf. Too many men there who might be tempted to give him what for. Or worse.

  That day of I’m sorry, that day of too late, after a time of sitting in the car, her father asked, “You want to take a walk, sweetheart?” and so they did, down the trail along the cove, to the pond lying still, the water skinned back at the end of the day to its own bone-lit darkness, calm and smooth and round. And a great blue heron they came upon and did not see startled, lifting off, its huge thin papery wings—that strange prehistoric design. The wind searched over the surface of the pond, shuddering once. She felt it enter her, the wind, like it had found the hole inside her, and that hole pulled the wind through. Her father did not speak. He only stood there, like some bloodless shadow near her, staring down, and for a moment it felt to her, without reason, that something had changed, without knowing what she knew, she felt it, something was already gone—drawn through that hole inside her the wind flooded through. Her eyes were dry like stone, and everywhere she looked, each thing seemed to belong only to itself. The trees were the trees. The pond, the pond. Each thing was simply what it was and that was all.

  Come dark, they trudged back to the car. Said nothing. She tripped once on a rock. He reached for her, she caught herself, said nothing.

  As he dropped her off out front of her house, she saw her mother’s hand at the parlor window, the heavy curtain falling, some relief in the drape as it settled itself.

  “You better get on inside,” her father said, his voice gruff like it got sometimes with leaving, and she slid across the seat and kissed him on the cheek, the smell of the cigarette smoke still on him, always on him. She breathed it in, off his skin, quick and deep, like she could take that smell of who he was. She took the library book and slipped out of the car into the stark clear night. Then he was gone, and he did not come again the Saturday that followed. Did not come at all. She waited, and her mother broke a plate that evening. By mistake, she said, but really because she was angry that on top of everything else, he had done this. “The end of it,” her mother muttered to no one in particular, still angry, those hard lines driven across her forehead, two lines that did not waver through her pretty, careworn face. There was a new pinch to her mouth, Jane noticed, a quiet resolution like she would give him a piece of her mind when he came around again. Only he didn’t come. And a few days after, somebody found his skiff floating alone, staked to the shore upriver, in the shallows by the gravel pit on the Drift Road side, his hunting coat with the plaid flannel liner draped over the thwart. They brought the coat to her. She was still, after all, his wife. No one seemed to know a thing. Not even his mother, Cora, had heard word about where he might have gotten himself off to.

  I’m sorry.

  Still she waited, the girl, the Saturday after, in the parlor by the window, and as she waited, she began to read that book that he had given her. She kept reading, waiting patiently, this story of light like a promise, but still he did not come, not the next Saturday, or any other after. I’m sorry, sweetheart. And only when a month or two had passed, it became clear that he would not, no not, never come again. She took a pair of her mother’s nailclippers from the shelf in the bathroom cabinet. She took them into her bedroom, turned the key in the lock, and sat in the middle of the floor. Out of reach of the dirty golden light passing through the window, she rolled up her sleeve and cut, very carefully, into that pale softer skin alon
g the inside of her arm, cut the shape of an eye, and she could see there, deep in it, a small fish working, the flick of a tail, a tiny faint thrash in the cut. The blood came, not fast, it only pooled, slow-like, as shadows worked into the room and the lengthening afternoon moved over the sill across the floor toward the blood on the pale of her arm, drying slow now, growing darker as it dried.

  PART III

  TRIBES

  NYKVIST

  MARNE

  June 10, 2004, 1:30 AM

  Light,

  Nykvist said,

  can be gentle, dangerous, dreamlike, bare, living, dead, misty, clear, hot, dark, violet, springlike, falling, straight, sensual, limited, poisonous, calm, and soft.

  I had forgotten this.

  He must have said it once, was quoted, or wrote it somewhere, and I must have read it in that same somewhere. I only remembered it tonight, late, when I got home from work, still jacked from the tussle that didn’t happen with the party of four at table 25, the remark made by the man with the trimmed beard and green sports coat (who always requests that corner table because he’s one of those who likes to eat looking out at the view)—and it was as I was setting down his plate that he asked if I knew Carleton Dyer, and I smiled and said, “Sure, I know him,” and didn’t think I needed to point out he’s my father, but then the man started in about how he’d hired Carl for some carpenter work and wasn’t he “the real deal, a true local, and what a mind, genius really, in—of course—that non-book-learning sort of way. The real salt of the earth.” He said it just like that, and I felt my ears burn like they’d been pinched, some kind of shame, his oblivious oblivion. I almost tipped his plate as I was setting it down, Chilean sea bass with couscous, grilled pineapple on the verge of sliding off the china whiteness over the table’s edge into his lap. I almost did it, knowing I could manage and manage it well, but in the split second deciding it would not be worth losing the good tip I knew I could expect (he always left a fat tip—a regular, twice a week in the high season) and shouldn’t I know better anyhow just to swallow it, a kind of fool remark that was his luxury to make and not meant to be unkind—salt of the earth—four words to touch a world—shouldn’t I know better than to let it get to me? Bussing tables since I was sixteen, haven’t I heard worse? So I smiled—when in doubt, just smile—I set down the last dinner in front of the woman seated next to him, her hair gorgeous, straight, shocking blond, and asked if there was anything else they might need. Another glass of wine? In fact, yes, he did. I’ll be right back with that, I said. I served, cleared the table, delivered coffee, dessert, and, after an appropriate pause, the check. I did what I was there to do.