Game of Secrets

by Dawn Tripp

  It was early afternoon, this time of day, but hot, yesterday, no breeze, the air so still and white and stifling, you could see the heat settled into the trees, and when I came back inside the house, there was sweat all through my shirt, and I went into the front room, into where it was dark and cool, Marne’s sweater tossed pell-mell on the sofa—that little red sweater, summerweight. I picked it up, matched the arms, folded it neat, and set it back down, then stopped when I noticed the book about light. She’d left it there, the inside foil from a pressed gum wrapper marking the page she was on. Just waiting there, underneath that photograph hanging on the wall.

  It was seeing the two together that threw me. The proximity of one to the other. Like it had been planned. Marne would not have known. I’ve never said a thing to her about that book, what it was to me once, or where it came from. There’s never been reason to. She didn’t know my father. Barely knows his memory. What would it have meant to try and explain? That book was how I found my way back to him—a man despised, whom I adored—Marne wouldn’t understand that. I’ve never come up with the right combination of words to lay it down in a way she could. But seeing that book there on the table below the photograph of the girl on the old Point Bridge, I thought of that last summer, 1962, the summer I fell in love with Carl. The last summer I wrote in the margins of that book. That’s when I remembered the cigar box upstairs.

  Put up in the attic, in a trunk of other things I’d taken from Gid’s house after he died and my mother put the house up for sale. The whole complexion of the village at the Point by then was on the change. The old ones gone, most of them, fallen under or moved away, and my grandparents’ house still with their things in it, dresser drawers still full of folded clothes, photographs and paintings still on the wall, and dishes in the sideboard, but all of it just so empty, that house so empty, except for the something more than silence I could feel, hawking around the battered screen door.

  I helped my mother clear it out, helped her sort through the relics and the kitsch, all the salt junk Gid had collected. He’d kept everything—used tinfoil, flour sifters, ice picks, sugar devils, sinkers cast out of sand, mugs with no handles, old churns, needles someone had used once to mend sail, a pail of square clothespins. Flags. There was a tree swallow’s nest I found deep in the hall closet, near perfect, the rounded shell hollowed out with only feathers, the softest stuff. Once while my mother and I were in the kitchen, she looked at me, her eyes filled, and she sent me from the room. I went down to the old shucking house. I found the cigar box there, set up on a shelf, and I knew right away who it had belonged to.

  Yesterday, when I brought the box down from the attic, I took it out onto the porch and started going through it. It struck me then, how curious it was, these were the things that bridge engineer had left behind, discarded or forgotten, his refuse in that box. His chaff. That small heap of everything had meant nothing to him—those cast-off bits that revealed so much of what we were. They were nothing to him, and he was no one to us. He had slipped in, slipped out, nameless, featureless, as wind.

  Still Ada has not taken her turn.

  “Are we going to have to start playing with a timer?” I say.

  She doesn’t answer. I glance up. She isn’t there. I look around. No sign of her. She must have needed something from inside.

  This morning. Earlier. As I was crossing over the bridge, there was a stain of fish blood on the concrete. Dried.

  I am thinking this. Remembering. The girl I saw, that girl I was, the imprint of her like a weight on the surface of the river, the ebb tide pulling through her hair.

  Ada slides into her seat on the bench across from me. I raise my eyebrows at her.

  “Where did you get off to?” I ask.

  “Went for a pee. Thought you could get rid of me so easy?” She smiles, teasing.

  I search her face, but her eyes are in the shadows. “You haven’t taken your turn yet,” I say.

  “No. I’ve been mulling things over.”

  I slip the cigar box from the bag, pass it across the table to her.

  “What is it then?” she says.

  “You’ll see.”

  “I don’t like the way you say that.”

  “Just open it,” I say, and so she does, sees the photograph first—it is on top, I placed it there, I couldn’t quite bury it under the rest. I can see how it stops her, takes her breath. For a long moment she does not say anything, just looks at it, her fingers tracing lightly in the corner the petaled warp of a water stain.

  “I don’t remember this,” she says.

  She touches her knee in the water, pushing out in a ripple, her fingers pause before the face of the child. Not touching.

  “It’s Green, isn’t it?” I say.

  She does not answer right away. “Yes. Where did you get it?”

  “That engineer man,” I say. “It’s a box of things he left. Scraps of 1962.”

  She nods, her fingers moving now onto the foot of the child, hanging off her hip, his toes brushing the river surface. A mother and her baby. I looked at this photograph yesterday, I looked at it and could not look. I looked at it and could not stop.

  “How long have you had this?” she asks quietly.

  “A while,” I say.

  “Why didn’t you show me before?” It is not an accusation in her voice that I detect, but something deeper, past that. I’m not quite ready to answer. “Are there more?” she says. She looks up at me, and by her eyes I know what she is asking.

  “Not of Green.”

  She lifts that snapshot then, and sees the one beneath—of the little boat, her skiff, staked to the marsh. I see the smile.

  “Look at that,” she says. “What would have struck that funny engineer boss to take these shots?”

  “There’s another of your boat,” I say. “Farther on. There’s a few of the old bridge, one of the kids turning the key and the draw swinging open, some of them hanging on it. There’s one of Swiggie and a fish he brought in on the scales—”

  “Is it all photos?”

  “No. They’re just tossed in with other stuff.”

  “What’s the rest of it?”

  “Old menus. One from Tattersalls. One from the Paquachuck. A gaming schedule from Lincoln Park. There’s some newspaper clippings, typical job reports, drafts of letters to the state. From the state. Some scrap notes he scribbled.”

  “What sort of notes?”

  “Snippets of conversation from the looks of it. Bits he overheard. He seemed to jot down what struck him, you can’t tell really why—it’s a mess of junk.”

  Ada smiles. “Junk.”

  “There’s a few drawings. Charcoal sketches. Cattails. Another of the flats scaled back. Houses. Not much else.”

  She starts sorting through the things in the box. Some of the pages were completely watermarked when I found them in the shucking house, a leak in the roof, no rhyme or reason to what was ruined and what slipped through unscathed. Some of the snapshots were all pocked up, the images distorted, or they’d dried stuck together, and when I tried to peel them back apart, they tore.

  Ada has paused on a sheet of notepaper, she turns it toward her to make out the cramped handwriting, and reads it through.

  “Is this an i or an e, Janie? This word, what does it look like to you?”

  I peer past her hand. “Homily? No. It’s an e, I think. Homely.”

  “Ah, yes.” She goes on reading. When she gets to the end, she gives a little chuckle. “Oh that’s funny—he must have overheard that one. Can’t make that stuff up—I wonder who, though—” Her voice is soft, strangely soft, almost a whisper, some wild quiet like the wind in my head. Past her shoulder, alongside the yellow shed, the trees seem to spin through the sky.

  “Why today, Jane?” she asks me, turning again through the pages. “Why did you bring this today?”

  I have no answer. How can I tell her I don’t think there’ll be another game?

  She is not listening
for a reply. She is studying an image of the street, looking north up Main Road from the wharf. You look at that snapshot and at first glance, you might think it’s the street as it is now, a designated historic district, it ought to look the same, and at first glance it does, and you might not notice the difference unless you went to stand in that same spot and looked north from there. Then you would see how the houses are larger now, lumpy second stories, dormers, ells, odd overlarge appendages built off the old saltboxes and the half Capes. They are caricatures of houses, poofed-up flower gardens, squared stone walls out front.

  “All we wanted then was to be left alone,” Ada says, laying that photo of the street into the pile of what she’s already gone through. Then again, “Why did you bring this today?”

  “It was just a box of things I came across.”

  “But why today?”

  How can I tell you?

  This morning when I told Carl to drop me at the lights so I could walk the bridge, it was you, Ada, I came looking for. But as I was crossing, it was Huck I saw, out there, tonging from that boat of his, that boat I know that holds so much, out past the Point of Pines.

  “Did you see the sky last night, Janie,” she is asking me now, “—that sky last night, it was like a river. Whole week’s been that way, all good-seeing nights, everything clear and bright and still, the stars seem to ring. On a night like last night was, you look up into that sky, and the blackness of it all seems so settled, so stable, so serene, you can almost forget what you know—”

  She pauses. “There was a night once,” she goes on, “over a year ago. A river sky just like that, I remember, it was a Thursday. On Thursdays, Sara used to go to her stretching class, her pilots yoga or whatever, so that night Huck had his little grandbaby Augusta, and it was evening time, and I was at the kitchen sink, washing up the dinner things, when I felt a tugging on my skirt, looked down and there she was, in her little cotton nightgown, her coat, and red cowboy boots, her hair done in its ponytail, some of it tufting up because she’ll never sit still long enough for it to get done right. On her cheek was a black smear, chocolate from the cookie Huck had given her. ‘Gammy come,’ she said. Can’t quite speak her r’s. Her little fingers messy with that chocolate, tugging me toward the door as I dried my hands on the dish towel, she pulled me outside onto the porch, into the porch swing, clambering up into my lap. ‘Gammy, the Moon,’ she said, pointing up. ‘Open it for me.’

  “That night, sitting outside with her on the porch swing under that sky, I didn’t tell her what I could have. About the moon. That it only pretends to shine. Got no light of its own. Just a cold stub of rock. Bone-dry. No memory of water.

  “I couldn’t tell her that, any more than I could tell her that every year I go out to sit in the night, and find some light-object up there that is the right distance away. Twenty, thirty, forty years—that light I see has been on its journey, I mark out time by that. Count one more year I’ve traveled. Some star just doing what it does, burning through its life, throwing off light, with no thought of me. Just burning itself away, not knowing and perhaps not caring none whether I will be down here looking up to catch its light as it falls.

  “I couldn’t tell Augusta this, and by the time she’s old enough to hear it, more than likely I’ll be somewhere up there in that black space falling down through time just like the light is now.

  “So that night, instead, I told her to find me the Big Dipper, and she did, put her hand up, her little fingers and thumb in an L, then she took my hand and did the same, fit them together that way, my finger to her thumb, and my thumb to her finger. She made a frame around those seven stars, and I told her that five of those seven were born together. They were a cluster once, a family, and only over millions of years, slowly they’ve begun to drift apart. And that’s not all, I said, see over there, and I pointed with my other hand to the opposite side of the sky—that bright bright star, just over the scrub oak, by the edge of the dark that’s the dune, that star is called Sirius, I told her, the dog star, and once it was a part of the same group as those stars in the Big Dipper. Don’t seem possible, does it, when it looks so much farther away? It isn’t, though, not really so much farther, only seems that way to us because we’re driving straight between them.

  “Augusta, she got quiet then, real quiet, and I could see she was thinking it over, trying to get her little mind around it all, and we stayed out there that night, her and me on the porch swing, rocking some, and she was quiet. I kept my eyes fixed on the moon in those trees until I could see it for how it really is. Not the moon going into the trees, but the trees passing up the moon. Eight hundred and some miles an hour in these latitudes, that’s how fast we’re turning, those trees on the earth turning fast and the moon only seeming to rise, only seeming to beat its track across the sky. We’re the ones turning into it. And when I looked down again, it might have been a half-hour later, I could see that Augusta had fell asleep, there in my arms. She was asleep, her sweet little face, little mouth falling open a bit with that smudge of chocolate on her chin, her sweet warm breath, and I thought about how, just a week ago, I was her age, not more than five or six. I used to go down below the fields, took the path there between the dutchcaps to the old stoned-in burying yard. I’d lie down there and take a nap, it was all my people buried there, and my pa, he kept the grass cut nice, trimmed short, so it was soft against my cheek. Later in the afternoon, I’d wake and hear them yelling for me from up the house. They didn’t know where I was.” Ada glances at me. “Didn’t matter none. I knew where I was.” Her eyes are green, very green, that blood-rimmed corner. “All turning so fast, Janie. Don’t feel it, though, do you? Don’t feel the wind on your face.”

  She says this and I see it. More than think it, or remember. I see it. Once. He was just out of me, the little one Samuel, just born, and I woke one night in the new hour and found his eyes fixed on my face, skinless there, his eyes, no shell to them, just the deep of him there on the surface, and it was like I was looking into a well of dark nothing filled with an unnamable something, and the bed where we lay was a white speck, falling, slight pale skull, his hair like bone, that skin baby smell, and how when he laughed in his sleep (have you heard this?) the sound like bits of rind cut from the sun.

  The nib of the pen digs. The tip pressing in, this way, in this spot, goes deep, hurts. Ink spreading out in spokes.

  It wasn’t what they thought—

  It wasn’t that the world came unglued after.

  ——

  Once, too, him stomping through the yard—eighteen months he must have been then, not more—it was before his hair was cut for the first time. Before. He was stomping around, this way and that, wearing those yellow rain boots although the sky was parched, no sign of a cloud in it, and his little fist clutching a brown-paper bag full of peas he’d plucked off the vine. That one curl. At the base of his sweet neck. That stubborn curl. So perfect there.

  You see it—in the evanescent once—see it, more than think it, more than feel it or remember. The imprint the dead will leave. That impression of a life, still in this life. How the air is pinched around the outline where someone used to be.

  “Shhhh,” Ada says like she can hear my thoughts, that click, click, click, of thoughts like drilled bits of fired clay strung on a wire—

  It wasn’t what they thought—

  “Shhhhh.”

  I am not saying anything, but she smiles, softly shakes her head—more gentle than I’d expect—her half-dreamt face through the casual shadows, that smile like she knows I am lying.

  Once, I believed there was a grief I could touch, a grief I could dig down to, I believed if I dug deep enough, I would find it, and it would be solid, it would be something I could pick up and carry, a weight in my arms—not this.

  She says my name, her voice a whisper stripped, like winter, her voice like a river pulling down through stones.

  It wasn’t what they thought. It wasn’t that the world came unglued a
fter, but that it always had been, and only after that I turned and saw it as it was. You could lose yourself there, in the perishable brightness of a moment, moment after moment. You are the blink of a lamp, the quick sudden shine of a life thrown, falling, into the dark flowing dark of the endlessly flowing world.

  This then, in your arms only, wind and water moving—

  But that one curl.

  At the base of his sweet neck.

  So willful and forever. That one curl.

  Slowly Ada sorts back through the pages, replacing them into the box, in the order they were—stubs of paper, water-smeared, snapshots, odds and ends—until she comes to the first photograph, the one of her, Green on her hip, his toes still trailing in the river.

  “Keep it,” I say. But it is like she does not hear me. She touches the edge of it again, that odd petaled stain that muddies the grain at the lower right corner. She sets it back in with the rest. It feels heartless, somehow, though I know it is not. I should have known better than to want it otherwise.

  There are shadows on her wrists, on her long fingers, shadows of the oak leaves above us that wrap her hands. She closes the box. Pushes it back across the table to me.

  PART VII

  PARABLES OF SUNLIGHT

  THE BLUE HOUR

  MARNE

  July 22, 2004, 6:30 PM

  I can feel the coin in my pocket, that coin he gave me, the dig of it into my thigh. Through the window, the woods across the yard, the unmistakable stillness that comes at the end of a day. That quiet, desperate hush. On the sofa next to me, the book about light—I am nearing the end of it:

  Those seemingly motionless clouds are moving at the speed of a thousand miles an hour without the slightest evidence of that swift motion recorded on our senses. The earth also—

  Down the hall in the kitchen, I can hear my mother messing around, starting up supper, the oven door closing, the timer set, a knife drawn from the drawer, the snip-ting of the blade, vegetables—carrots or the green beans that we picked—laid on the cutting board.