Game of Secrets

by Dawn Tripp

  I go downstairs into the front room and take down that photograph from the wall, the black and white of her. Printed on the back of the frame is handwriting in soft pencil—not my father’s left-handed scrawl, not hers, either—someone else had written, GIRL ON THE BRIDGE, 1962. I sit on the sofa, the snapshot on my lap. The focus is blurred at the edges, an almost spherical ring, like a print made from a pinhole camera—that odd infinite depth of field a testament to the fact that light, left to its own, travels in straight lines. I have looked at this photograph a thousand times. But the eye trims, the eye compensates, skims over what it does not need to see.

  I tilt the frame so the light falls off the glass, and the image of the girl is distinct. I seem to know her, this girl, so much younger than I am now—traces of the woman she will become, beautiful in some changeless, unrestrained way. The river is behind her, the horizon level. The tone of her eyes matches the sky, and her hand, the angle of her arm merges, like it is all of a piece with the bridge rail. It is her. And at the same time, not her. The pale stuff of a dream that slept in her, a place glimpsed once, seized, in that fleeting inadvertent image of her face.

  By the time my father brings her home this afternoon, I will be gone. On Fridays, they are never home before five. I have to be at work by four. They will come home. She will set the game on a shelf and drop her bag on the mudroom chair. She will stand at the sink in the kitchen before she starts supper, and let the water run over her hands, like she is washing the day from her hands. Holding the frame, I tilt the photograph again, tilt it just enough so my face is visible as well—transparent—like I am staring through the ghost of my face and seeing her.

  I call Ray. I call him at home, four rings and his machine picks up, I leave a message, then call his cell. Ring, click, voice mail. His voice. I leave another message—why not? what have I got to lose?—Hi, Ray, it’s Marne, I was wondering if—I was wondering, you know, if—call me back when you can, please. I set the phone back on the cradle. In the room upstairs are Polly’s birds—twenty-seven more to make an even two hundred. I like to wrap a job up, have a thing done. But I’ve got time.

  I eat some lunch at noon. The day is one of those that calls you out into it—warm, but not too warm, enough of a breeze from the south. I take my bike, do the loop, nine miles down to the beach. It’ll be another nine back around.

  It’s not until I am flying down the hill past the sanctuary and the Bayside, and the sea rises up and I take the blind hard curve at the Foot of the Lane, faster than I should, and that rank cool smell of the ocean muck and sand hits me so hard I nearly let go and die into it. It’s not until the road straightens out again, the power lines staggering alongside, that I see him, Huck, parked at the other end of the Town Beach stretch, just this side of the rope where someone has tacked up a homemade sign that reads private, which someone else, likely him, has spray-painted a red X right through.

  There’s junk in the back of his pickup—parked ass toward the road, the tailgate down—an Adirondack chair, rakes and buckets, a milk crate full of driftwood, some of it carved. He’s sitting on the hood of the truck, his back to that heap of junk in the bed, Dutchess the mutt perched next to him. They are facing the sea. He is eating what would appear to be his lunch, and the sky is like an opaque bowl overturned, a globe of sea and sky tucked all-in around him. He’s just sitting there, with his dog, his soda, and a sandwich, in the blue home. I slam my brakes, stop so short I almost go over the handlebars. A Jetta flies by me. I let my foot slip off the pedal, touch ground, staring down the road to where he is, knowing then of course that, without knowing, this has been my destination all along.

  I don’t stay still long enough for him to notice me there. There is no reason, really, for a moment between us. Yet still, biking past him, I take my time, a leisurely pace. I let my eyes turn as I go by. He is like salt wind there, at the corners of my eyes.

  My cellphone rings as I am turning back onto Pine Hill Road. I hear it ring, and my heart jumps. I pull over, but it’s only Yvette, who also works down at the restaurant, wondering if she could swap a shift with me, if I could take her shift this coming Tuesday. A slow night, she knows, and is sorry to ask. She could take a slow one off my hands in exchange. The sun is hot on the back of my neck. I can feel it there, burning.

  Take tonight for me, I say.

  You sure? It’ll be busy tonight.

  No, take it, I say, there’s something I’ve got to do.

  Back at home, I check the messages. No blinking light. No calls. I shower and drag a load of clean laundry upstairs. As I am turning a pair of jeans right-side in, my eyes fall on the library book left on the night table. I pick it up, and flip through until I find a passage I came across early on. My mother had marked it off at one point in her life, written lines in the margin, silvery pencil—

  And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s

  Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother

  Through the parables

  Of sun light

  Who is he then—that boy—I glimpsed you there,

  in his eyes full of nothing,

  I feel a shudder move through me—like I have found her—touched that changeless intangible essence that is her. I wish I could know what this book was to her, I wish I could ask, why she wrote what she wrote, what she was seeing, feeling, what she hid, grieved, hoped, what she knew. For a moment, I want to go back, read every scrabbled note she made into the margins of this book, like all those fragments will come together, reveal a story, make sense. Like loose ends aren’t what we live on—I glimpsed you there—like there is a sense to be made.

  In the kitchen, I use an ordinary knife and take a square from the page. I cut it in such a way that I keep the passage she marked out and her margin note as well. I spread it flat on the table. Her pencil markings have grown lighter with the years, less distinct, but still I regret what I’ve done—this cutting, my handiwork—

  I begin to fold the paper square, the typed words of the text, and the other words in her handwriting, appearing, disappearing, reappearing again.

  I wasn’t here when Ada died. It was Christmastime, last winter. I was still in California. I’d been planning to come back for the holidays, but I had work, and there was no cheap flight. It didn’t seem worth it.

  It was Alex who told me about Ada, when I called home one day and he picked up. She hadn’t been well, he said, caught some cold, it got into her lungs, she went fast. He told me like it was just another older person gone by, some scrap of obit news he’d read. But he knew it wasn’t. He told me then about our mother and the game. He was reluctant, didn’t want to tell me that part, but he did. I hung up the phone and let the implications swim around through me for a day or so before I booked a ticket home.

  My mother doesn’t talk about her Fridays. Just gets up in the morning, drinks her coffee, packs her lunch, and off they go. She’s never said outright it’s Ada she goes there to meet. But I know. I remember coming on her in the unused room upstairs. I remember how tenderly she folded those small clothes, Samuel’s clothes, folding, refolding, with such intention, such exquisite care. She wasn’t crazy, I’m starting to see. She was a woman in love.

  It’s after five in the evening when my parents pull into the driveway. While my mother is in the kitchen, starting on supper, my father walks out to get the mail. I take the Scrabble game from the shelf where she has set it. I bring it into the dining room, unfold the board, set out two racks. In the box-lid, I turn all the letters facedown. I sit at the table, the folded bird I made for her from the page of the book set at her place.

  Once, when I was young, a swallow got trapped in the house. My mother was with me and that little bird flying everywhere through these same downstairs rooms—striking ceiling corners, it dove toward a window, hit the glass, and dropped with a thud to the floor, stunned. It sputtered up again, wobbly. My mother came up behind it and trapped it in her hands. She carried it to the door. “You want to ho
ld it, sweetheart,” she asked, “before we let it go?” I reached for it. “Be gentle. Don’t squeeze.” She slipped the shaking thing into my hands and cupped her hands around mine.

  It’s not a thing you ever quite forget—a heart’s shudder—the silky iridescence of those wings.

  The phone rings. In the kitchen I hear my mother answer it. I hear her say his name. I wait. When she comes in to find me, she sees the board laid out. She looks at me, then smiles.

  “Come on,” I say, taking the phone from her hands. I nod to the empty chair. “Let’s play.”

  For Karen Lustig,

  and for my boys

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For unwavering faith in my work, I am grateful to my editor and mentor, Kate Medina, and to my agent, Kim Witherspoon. Also to Frankie Jones, Vincent La Scala, Lindsey Schwoeri, William Callahan, and Kim Wiley. Every gratitude to Millicent Bennett.

  ALSO BY DAWN TRIPP

  Moon Tide

  The Season of Open Water

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DAWN TRIPP graduated from Harvard and lives in Massachusetts with her husband and sons. She is the author of the novels Moon Tide and The Season of Open Water, which won the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction.

  www.dawntripp.com

  DAWN TRIPP

  on

  GAME OF SECRETS

  My novels start in pieces—on the page for months—fragments of character, story, scene. I write longhand, in notebooks or on scraps of paper, the backs of receipts, the leftover white space of a grocery list—which I then transcribe into my laptop. Some of those first thoughts are imagined, some are stripped from real life. But out of those pieces of raw material, I begin to map a story. I don’t polish up my early drafts. I leave some passages entirely without punctuation. I leave things untidy, open to change. That openness, I feel, is critical. I find that when I can let myself stay open to possibilities in a story that I may not yet have uncovered, when I can let myself be driven by what I do not yet know, the story often turns, deepens, in unexpected, revelatory ways.

  Game of Secrets started with four primary fragments—the real-life story of a skull that surfaced out of gravel fill with a bullet hole in the temple, and three images: a fourteen-year-old boy driving fast down an unfinished highway; two lovers meeting in an old cranberry barn; and two women playing Scrabble. I did not know their names. I did not know the details specific to their lives, but I could feel the undercurrents of tension between them.

  The image of the Scrabble game hit me especially hard. Not just because the unfolding of the mystery in the novel mirrors the playing of a Scrabble game: clue after clue is revealed, the story comes together piece by piece like a puzzle, as in Scrabble, disparate letters are arranged into words, which in turn are arranged into a larger cogent grid. That image hit me hard because I have always loved Scrabble. I grew up playing with my grandmother. She taught me cards as well—pitch, gin, poker, bridge. But it was Scrabble that I loved. I remember the thrill I felt when I was old enough to keep my own letters, to have my own rack. We would play with my father after lunch and, after a game or two, my father would drift off to something else. “You want to play again, Nana?” I’d ask. And my grandmother would nod, light another cigarette, and start flipping over the tiles. We would play game after game. Until it was time for her to fix supper. Then we’d eat, clear the table, wash the dishes, I would dry them for her, then I’d ask to play again.

  The idea for Game of Secrets came to me years after she was gone. The story has nothing to do with her life; the women in the story are not modeled after her, but the sense of my time with her—generational, intimate, lost—is strung all through it. As I wrote, I remembered those long childhood hours: the stillness of the house, the light tick-tack as she lay down her tiles, the smell of her cigarette balanced on the ashtray, just resting there untended, dwindling down.

  And I remembered, too, things she had taught me over the years as we played. She played Scrabble for the words, as many women in her generation did. I always played for the numbers. How we play that game can reveal so much about how we tick, how we live, who we are. In Scrabble, some play to keep the board open, some play to shut it down. Some play with an eye to the sum of the total scores of all players; some play, simply, to maximize their own score. Most players will look at the board and see the words that fill it. But a really good player, a canny player—and she was one of those—will also see opportunity in the skinny spaces still left open in between.

  As I wrote the scenes for Game of Secrets, the game for me became the perfect lens for a story about two women and their families bound together and divided by unspeakable secrets—a brutal past, a murder, a love story. Because what are words if not a bridge—in a game of Scrabble or in a novel? Between one person and another. Thought and reality. Past and present, present and future. Words bridge silence. Words, and the stories they comprise, bridge time.

  QUESTIONS and TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. Discuss the role of love in Game of Secrets, particularly the role it plays in the lives of the three women. How does love relate to the other themes in the novel, such as longing, absence, violence, and memory?

  2. Consider the differences among the three women in the novel, and how these qualities affect their interactions and the courses of their individual lives. How does the friendship between Ada and Jane impact Marne’s relationship with her mother? In what ways are Jane and Marne similar and in what ways are they different? What do the women learn about themselves through one another? Does this reflect dynamics in the female relationships in your own life?

  3. What are the secrets that are kept in the novel, and who keeps them? What are the secrets that are told, and how does the telling impact the story? Are there mysteries that still remain at the novel’s end? If so, what are they and why do you think the author left them unresolved?

  4. Discuss the role of silence in the novel. How do Jane and Ada, as well as the other characters, use—or refuse—language in order to build their lives and their relationships with others? Are there silences in your family and in your friendships that are necessary to keep? What do those silences represent? Discuss.

  5. Luce, and the mystery surrounding his death, plays a pivotal role in the story, yet he is little more than a ghost. How does the absence of this man—rather than his presence—drive the story? How do other forms of loss function in the novel? Do you believe that absence can propel us as much as or more than presence? Discuss.

  6. The bridge that joins the small town of Westport to the world outside is a significant metaphor in Game of Secrets. To Jane and Ada, the bridge and the new highway also mark a distinct separation between the past and the present. Discuss. In what sense does the past keep these characters together and in what sense does it break them apart?

  7. Game of Secrets is a “mosaic” narrative, in that it is told from the perspective of several different characters. It also moves back and forth in time. Why do you think Tripp chose to tell the story this way? What do we learn that we might not know otherwise?

  8. One central motif in the novel is the Scrabble game that Ada and Jane play every Friday. Why do you think Tripp chose this particular game? Discuss the ways the structure of the narrative echoes the game that Jane and Ada play.

  9. Ada and Jane have very different styles of play. What do these styles reveal about how each woman has chosen to live her life? Is your style of play more closely aligned with Jane’s or with Ada’s? What do you think this says about you, if anything? Tripp has said that Scrabble was an important game in her family while she was growing up. Are there games that have been essential in your life, and in the life of your family?

  10. Marne’s hatred for Huck is overt and palpable in the novel’s early stages. Discuss what Huck represents to Marne. Are there commonalities between them as well as differences that breed Marne’s loathing? How do her feelings for him change over the course of the novel? Why? How did your understanding of Huck e
volve in the course of the novel?

  11. Both Jane and Marne have a particular, almost secretive relationship with books in Game of Secrets. Jane writes in the margins of her books of poetry, conversing in a way she doesn’t seem to do in life, while Marne excises passages from books, a habit that then evolves into her work with origami. What do Marne’s origami birds represent to you? How do the birds inform her character, her life, and her relationships?

  12. At the end of the novel, several essential secrets are revealed. Do these revelations change the way you understand Jane and the story? Looking back over the novel, do you now see clues you didn’t pick up on the first reading?

  13. At one point, toward the end of the game, Jane says to Ada: “Love is only this: A tiny nothing, a slip of the tongue, a glance. A world can be built on a glance.” Do you agree? Discuss.

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