Game of Secrets

by Dawn Tripp

  We felt the car pass by, the rush of air lifting the night, and when they struck the pole a quarter mile north, there at the corner, the lights snapped out and we were left in darkness, waiting for something without knowing what that something was. We heard a woman calling her son’s name, and we knew then who it was in that car. Soon after, Carl arrived home. We told him, and he left again, drove down to see, and when he came back, some time after, he just looked spent, sad, a slight dark soak where sweat had spread around his collar. He kept shaking his head. “Green was driving. Only thirteen years old and they let him. They’d been racing on the highway, tried to take the same speed to the back roads.” He couldn’t seem to stop shaking his head, saying how nuts it was, how unlikely, that Huck, who they had to pry out of the car with Green, had come clear of the wreck near unscathed, just a cut on his forehead, his elbow dislocated, and Silas—well, he had sailed right out the open window on the passenger side, sailed scot-free, then rolled, struck the ground and passed out, dead drunk as he was, not a single bone broken.

  I did not sleep that night. Lay awake to the smooth black running down the window glass, and sometime that night, Marne awoke, frightened, I heard her feeling her way down the hall, the crack of light at the door, her footsteps on the rug, she crawled into the bed between us, pressed herself against me, and I held her, tightly, her small soft sweet warm body like a heaven held against me. Next morning, I left her there asleep, the speck of her alone in the big bed. I went downstairs to fix breakfast, to get Alex off to school. I buttered toast, poured juice, like it was any other morning, and I sat with Alex outside on the front steps waiting for the bus to come around. It was fall. Early October. A beautiful fall day—that ache in the light—and the wind soft, the dry scrape of leaves on the road, the sound of the tractor from the Wales farm next door, the air full of the smell of plowed earth, the lighter scent of apples. Alex was quiet. He scuffed his toe into the seam where the doorstone met the dirt. I saw the school bus coming over the rise and felt my chest tighten. I didn’t want to let him go. No, not that morning. I kissed him good-bye, and he let me, like he knew. I straightened his coat, went to smooth it once, but he shrugged loose and walked down the drive to meet the bus. I watched him go. Only nine, already gone from me.

  I picked grapes that morning. Took Marne with me down back. There was plenty of other housework that needed doing, but the smell of those grapes, that dusky smell, was ripe and close. We stripped the vines, took every one we could, our hands stained by the time we were done, her little mouth and teeth bruise-colored from the juice.

  The sky weeping. All that fall I remember. The taste of ashes in my throat. Cloud shadows moving through the grass.

  I would see her drive by. Ada. Almost every day, it came to seem, she had some reason to drive by our house, to drive that particular stretch of road to the corner. She was looking for Green, I knew, trying to find her way back to the moment before everything changed. Each day she drove by that spot, whether or not it was on her way to wherever she might have been going, if anywhere—to get her nails done or up to Vivienne’s house on Blossom Road or shopping at the Star Store downtown. I would see her pass by, the window open, black pin curls of her hair escaping from the scarf wrapped around her head, dark sunglasses on, and one long hand draped over the wheel, hell-bent, it seemed, on driving that stretch of the road, no one ever with her in the car. Just Ada alone. Fast. Her eyes fixed on the road, like she could stare it down. Day after day. Taking a knife to the string.

  I came to recognize the sound of her car: her engine, and how she took the hill, her foot to the gas, coming over the rise past the glen.

  Once that fall, I ran into her. At the post office. She was at her box, messing around with the little screw thing, finally got it open, scooped out the letters inside, then turned and, when she saw me, stopped a moment. I could feel the hollow bend of air around her, and she looked at me, and I looked back at her, the space between us bent like the air was caving in, and I saw it in her face, how we were each only just a mirror for each other.

  You don’t get past it, her eyes telling me that day, though she must have known I had learned it myself. You go on, of course, but you don’t get past it. You don’t stop loving them just because they’re gone. You don’t stop, except the part of you that has stopped, the part of you that was your heart outside your body, stopped, stuck there in that before of what you lost, stopped, turned, looking back, like Lot’s wife on her hill gone all to salt, looking back toward the hour of a life when you were sunlight. You didn’t know it then. How could you, then, have known it?

  She fiddles with her nails, a little cluck, cluck noise, her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Get on with it, Janie,” she says, impatient. “It’s not my turn.”

  “Is so. Check the score.”

  She leans forward, looking at the paper. “Did you give me my six? You didn’t yet, did you?”

  I glance down. No.

  “Little sneak.”

  On the paper, her name. The numbers in their clean ordered columns tallied, under the solid dark line beneath her name. I write down 6. Add it to her score. Two sixty-seven now. To my two ninety-two. And my turn.

  In the box-lid, I count the tiles left. Eight. Soon, within half an hour, less, they will be played out. The game will be over. Every word that we will make today will have been made. I will take the board by the edges, bend the two halves toward each other, make that gully in the center, and lift it over the box, tilt it so they go on a rush, that strike of lightweight wood to wood, letters, words, washing into one another, rinsed away.

  It is a sound I love. A sound I have always loved.

  ——

  She has left a hook exposed. The A in A-N-E, the last word she played. It dangles, that A, a niche open to the left of it. I go to set down my M and run E-M-U down, then realize. The Q is still out there. In Ada’s rack or in those tiles still unturned, the Q at large, along with the last precious blank. And three of the U’s already played. I am holding the fourth.

  I put that U by. And use the M in another spot, farther up on the board. I draw my letters. Wish. Wish. First draw: A. Wish again. Yes. There it is. Q. Ten points. And in my rack, a decent setup for it. Q. U. I. A. L. O. E. So far, so good. I can win this.

  Once when Marne came home from California, she brought a T-shirt she’d found at some fancy hardware restoration store out there. She told me at that store, you could also buy mahogany-inlaid Scrabble boards, two hundred dollars a pop; for fifty more, you get your name inscribed. The T-shirt was black, on it written in bold white letters, WHO NEEDS U? and under that, a list of Q words that don’t require a U. I didn’t know there were such words, I said. Marne lent that shirt to me, and I wore it the next time we met here to play. Vivienne was still alive then, claimed she knew about some of those words—qoph, qat, qwerty—she’d seen them in the updated Scrabble Players Dictionary—a dictionary we never kept as a standard for our games. Vivienne got a kick out of that shirt, but Ada had no use for it.

  “Yuppies,” she scoffed. “Had to go invent new words because they’d come right apart if they drew a Q in the eleventh hour of a game and all the U’s played.”

  Yesterday, once, as Carl and I were sitting in the kitchen, and Ray and Marne were out on the porch, I glanced through the window and saw the shivers pass through my daughter’s body when she stole a look at Ray and found he was already looking back at her. I saw it then, how she looked away quick, that shine in her eyes she tries to hide, that quiet secret smile.

  I tell Ada this now. I tell her all of it, expecting she’ll bristle, say something harsh, unkind. But she doesn’t. She just listens, as I tell her about how Ray stopped by yesterday morning, unexpectedly, looking for Alex—how he and Marne sat out on the porch—how my tough little moxie daughter was all in disarray.

  Ada chuckles. “And wasn’t it your Marne who said that thing once about love—it was Marne, wasn’t it—how did she put it? About love being ju
st another four-letter word? Ha!” She laughs. “So doesn’t it all come back around?”

  I hesitate.

  Then I ask her. “Luce,” I say. “My father. What was he to you?”

  And that is all I say. It is, I know, all I need to say. She does not answer. For a moment I am not entirely sure she has heard. She is looking down at the letters still untouched, the scattered pool of them remaining, their blank faces in the box-lid. I see it pass through her—the thought of him.

  “He used to talk about you, Janie, all the time. Your father.”

  She falls silent.

  I wait.

  Her hands resting on the table are strangely still.

  “Was it Silas who killed Luce?”

  Her eyes rise. I have caught her—at last—off-guard. She does not answer, only looks at me. With that look, her eyes filling, some fast steep tide running in.

  All these years I’ve come to play and wondered. I’ve waited for some slip on her part, for the door to open, for there to be a chance, this chance, now.

  I am not entirely alone. I know this. I knew it the day Vivi called me out of the blue and invited me to meet them on a Friday. They met every Friday, she explained over the phone, a little old club of old women. “You’ll be our young one,” she said, and laughed, ebullient Vivi laughter. I went. No hesitation. There was no question, ever, in my mind that I would go. Ada had lost her son by then, and I’d lost mine. She knew the difference between what could be absolved and what could not. It was Ada, I knew, who had told Vivi to call. It was Ada who’d come looking for me—to play some word, to lay down some last story, the one you cannot tell.

  “Do you know?” I ask her.

  “Silas would have,” she says quietly. “And it’s better, don’t you think, we even say he did.”

  I don’t answer, and she does not say more. She will not. I know it now.

  Her eye has shifted. She is studying the board.

  “Curious,” she remarks. “And I almost went and spent them out last turn, but something told me, ‘Hang on a minute, Ada Varick,’ and so I did, and there it is. My spot. That S I needed. Right there. Just like you knew it, Jane. Knew that S was what I’d need down the road. You aren’t going to like this,” she says. She starts dropping her letters, one, two, three, no, not all of them, no. Four. Five. Six. She sets them down, all but one. “Joker’s a T,” she says.

  -R-A-N-P-A-

  I can’t even see where she intends to set them in until she has done it. How has she done it? Laid that word, using the S that I set down five or six moves back, and R-E-N-T, she weaves her six letters into the skinny space, making room where there was none.

  T-R-A-N-S-P-A-R-E-N-T

  She can do this. Ada. This is her gift. Whereas I will look at the board and see the words that fill it, she will see the spaces still left open in between.

  It is not so much: the letters themselves at face value. It is not a high-scoring word—or particularly remarkable. It is a word in common use—a word anyone might know. But how she has done it—slipped it in there.

  “That’s good, Ada.”

  “Only six letters,” she answers, ruefully, “I wanted another boodle.”

  I am adding up the score—that one longer word, and the other incidentals made crosswise off it. Points scored in all directions.

  “You’re going to win,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “No. I’ve done it out twice in my head. It isn’t enough.”

  “It will be.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  A play like that, I want to tell her, so gorgeous and deceptively sly, doesn’t it have to be enough?

  She glances at me, her smile—touch of mischief, touch of the quick—so much her, that smile.

  “Well,” she says, “it’s not quite over yet.”

  THE WORLD

  HUCK, FOURTEEN

  Summer 1962

  On the table up at Charlie’s Diner: some dirty plates, the nib of a roast beef sandwich, coffee cups, and a Life magazine left behind by whoever was there before. Huck grabs the magazine as the four of them slide into the booth. He starts flipping through it, and the waitress comes by, asks if can’t they take another table, one that’s already been cleared. “Naw,” Pard answers, “this one’s good.” Waitress frowns, a punk look, then she starts clearing, cups, dishes, silver, clanging and banging, because she’s ticked, her red hair pulled back tight, she’s an older broad, mid-thirties maybe, still has a body on her, but her face deeply lined like she’s seen her share of bad road.

  She wipes the table surface down. They put in their order. Then she’s gone, and Pard’s looking out the window, watching the outside tables and the walkway that runs alongside where they dropped the wallet.

  “Anybody coming by yet?” Robbie asks.

  “Naw, not yet.”

  Eejit’s elbow bumps Huck’s, and the Life magazine page he’s holding tears.

  “Watch it, Eejit!”

  Red The Waitress walks by their table, carrying a tray piled high with someone else’s food. Pard follows her with his eyes until she’s out of range, then from his pocket draws out an empty pack of cigarettes, peels the tinfoil from the inside, folds that piece of foil up, and slides it in behind the jukebox keys, jimmying it right, so the thing shorts out, lights up. He starts punching in numbers.

  “Play one seventeen,” Eejit says.

  Robbie growls, “That is such a tweet song.” Huck, still flipping through the magazine, pauses on a full-page advertisement for Maxi-Pads, a woman dressed all in white; with his eyes, he traces the slope of her waist. The three others are arguing now, into it good, Robbie saying that Jerry Great Balls Lewis is head and shoulders above Roll Over Beethoven Berry, and Pard snapping back that Lewis at his ultimate best isn’t half the musician Berry is, only Berry don’t get the air-time Lewis does and never will on account of his being a nig.

  “One seventeen, Pard. Put it in. C’mon,” Eejit says again. Pard ignores him, his knuckly fingers working fast, punching in those numbers, punching them hard. One forty-five. Bill Haley and His Comets. One forty-six. The Spaniels. One fifty-one. One fifty-two. One fifty-four. Elvis. “Love Me Tender.” Elvis. “Jailhouse Rock.”

  “One seventeen, Pard.”

  “Mum up, Eejit,” Robbie snaps.

  “One seven-teen,” Pard trills, pushing those last three numbers down, slow and with intent. Then he sits back, weaves his fingers together, his knuckles crack. He hits out a cigarette from his working pack, lights up, glances through the window. His voice drops. “Alright, boys. Here we go.”

  Huck glances up from the Life magazine as the three others shove toward the window. By the outside tables, a man has stopped, chinos, a pressed white buttondown shirt, he is looking down at the wallet they planted there beside the walkway.

  It’s an old trick—always works. One of those tricks engineered by Pard who gets off on seeing how far people will go to fall. Kind of a dumb nasty trick, Huck thinks now—though it’s never struck him as such before. He only saw the prank of it, but now watching his three buddies crowded at the edges of the window, jeering at that unsuspecting fellow outside, he just wants to be gone.

  “Come on, man,” Pard whispers, “pick it up. You know you want it.”

  Pressed-white-shirt man looks around. Sees no one.

  “Greed, man. Feel it. Beautiful greed.”

  Man bends down, slips the wallet quick into his back pocket, then walks into the diner, and crosses to a booth at the other end of the room where a fine-looking woman sits waiting, a brunette, her hair teased, all lipsticked up. He slides into the seat across from her.

  “This should be so good,” Pard says.

  “What if he don’t notice?” Robbie asks.

  Pard smiles. “He’ll notice.”

  Huck glances back down at the Life magazine, starts turning the pages again, a page of all text, then another advertisement, then a longish feature story about the Bay of Pigs, that mess down in s
picquito Cuba—page after page, he keeps turning, no wait, there, stop, back one, the page slips, then he gets it. There. A full two-page black-and-white photograph of a highway running along a seacoast. Title in block white letters: THE NEW CALIFORNIA. His fingers pause.

  The jukebox song that was playing ends, the machine ticks, a soft grind, its skinny arm moving, a new 45 picked out, set down, starting to spin. The voices of the other boys ricochet off the strains of the next song starting up, arguing, laughing, distant-like, other voices too folded in and flung together with the greasy scent of food and the electric light climbing the scabby walls. Pard is talking some shit now, his voice strikes deep and bold, no question in it, ever, no doubt. That sure sane tone of his voice enough to tell he never looks around, too deep in, or back. He knows what it all comes down to. He’s waxing on about Marilyn Monroe, a little eulogy to that something-and-again woman, dead as dead now as of last week. There are some things, he says, that are tragedy in the true sense of the word, and the loss of a woman like her from the world, well, don’t that top every list?

  Voices, music, smells. Robbie whining now about how long is it going to take for that pressed-shirt man to realize there’s a scoop of dogshit in the fold of that wallet he picked up, how long now for that stinky wet stuff to start seeping through?

  Huck hears it all and hears none of it, his mind on the lip of a shell, he touches the photograph, the free winding forever silver of that road running along the California coast, twisting its way down the edge of the page—touching that paved shimmery silver, then jarred out of that, remembering his father’s finger pointed at him as he was walking out the door earlier that evening, unpared tobacco-stained nails, that dirty slab of a finger nagging—

  “Five AM, Huck, you hear me? I’ll be kicking your sorry ass out of bed. Top of the morning tomorrow, first thing, we’ll be at that hay—” And Huck muttering back, “Okay, Dad,” pushing his way out the door into the evening cool and onto his bike, down the drive, past the front field with the corn already tasseling out—pedaling, pedaling, pedaling—get out, away, get gone.