Who Will Hear Your Secrets?

by Robley Wilson

  “She was on that flight that blew up over Scotland.”

  “Lockerbie,” Mother said. “I remember. All those people.”

  Jesus, Cinda thought. The poor man.

  “Two-hundred fifty-nine on the plane,” Hansen said. “Eleven on the ground.”

  Details again.

  “It must have been dreadful for you,” Mother said.

  “Excuse me,” Cinda said, rising, “but I’ve got a last-minute term paper to take care of.” If this was the gloomy direction the talk was going in, she’d prefer watching television in her room.

  * * *

  THE NEXT TIME HANSEN came into the EcoMart on her shift, Cinda was on break. Outside the store, on the cement apron between the entrance and the parking lot, were patio tables and metal chairs with mesh seats, and she was sitting alone with a can of Diet Coke she had brought from home. She saw his car as it entered the lot, watched him park between a pair of SUVs that made his Chevy disappear. When he emerged he smiled and headed straight for her.

  “Are you malingering?” he said.

  She scowled at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Loafing,” he said. “Goofing off.”

  “I’m on break,” Cinda said. “It’s part of the contract we have with EcoMart. I’m not bending any rules.”

  “I meant to be joking,” Hansen said. “I must be losing my touch.”

  Cinda took a last swallow from the Coke can and set it aside.

  “I think I’ve got you figured out,” she said. “You do some kind of security job. Used to. That’s why you ask so many questions.”

  Hansen looked embarrassed. “Something like that,” he said.

  “I tried my theory out on Mother. She agreed with me, and she said she hopes you find a situation that suits you.”

  “Thank you both.”

  “And we were both of us really sorry about your daughter,” Cinda said. “I didn’t mean to be rude when I walked out the other day. I just couldn’t deal with it at the time.”

  “I wasn’t offended,” Hansen said. “I shouldn’t even have mentioned Lockerbie. It’s my problem, and it was a really long time ago.”

  “Mother says it was a terrorist bomb.”

  Hansen looked grim. “That was in the days when they were careless about screening baggage,” he said. “Nowadays it’s better—a little.”

  “Mother’s taking me to London for Christmas,” Cinda said. “It’s my reward for escaping high school.”

  “I haven’t been to Britain since eighty-eight,” Hansen said. “I had to go over to claim the body. What was left of it.”

  Was he trying to make her uncomfortable all over again? She hoped he was just talking, just being himself, but how were you supposed to react to somebody else’s grief? She really couldn’t cope with it.

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” she said. She gathered in her Coke can and stood up. “They only give us ten minutes.”

  “That’s fine,” Hansen said. He was smiling again, so it was all right. “I was on my way to the bank. I only stopped off to say hello when I saw you malingering.”

  “Whatever you want to think,” Cinda said. Then she said, “Are you some kind of secret agent?”

  Now he laughed. “You know what, Cinda? You pretend to be tough, but you’re really a romantic.”

  * * *

  OFF AND ON THROUGH THAT SPRING, Edward Hansen was their guest. Sometimes he came for lunch, once in a while dinner; rarely, on lazy afternoons, he would sit by the pool with Cinda and her mother. Mother would make martinis and serve them in pastel-colored plastic glasses with clear stems. Cinda would drink diet ginger ale and try to get a word in edgewise.

  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Cinda would say, “but a lot of the people who shop in a health food store don’t look particularly healthy. I used to think the customers at EcoMart shopped with us because they wanted to improve their health. Now I think maybe eating health food is bad for them, and that’s why they look the way they do.”

  “Chicken and egg,” Hansen said. “Which comes first, the health food or the poor health?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I like your mind,” he said. “Some investigators would call you cynical. But others would say you’re original.”

  “And what do you think, Edward?” Cinda’s mother wanted to know.

  Hansen smiled. “Original, of course. Like her mother.”

  Which was the lamest, fakest kind of flattery, but Mother ate it up. She looked forward to Hansen’s visits, and usually managed to have a hair appointment the day before he was to stop by.

  “I think you’re interested in him,” Cinda said later.

  “He’s pleasant company,” her mother said. “Not like several men I won’t name.”

  Cinda could name them all, but didn’t.

  * * *

  AT ONE OF THEIR POOLSIDE SATURDAYS, it came out that in September Cinda would be studying art and design in Savannah.

  “I’m not surprised to find out you’re artistic,” Hansen said. “It shows up in the way you do your work at the store—your concentration, your poise.”

  What was all that? His ice-blue eyes were melting all over her, and for an instant her early picture of Edward Hansen as deviant flickered in her mind’s eye. Or perhaps he meant to look fatherly, which she thought was slightly worse than being a pervert.

  Mother saved the moment. “That remains to be seen,” she said. “Especially the ‘concentration’ part.”

  “Not to mention the ‘poise’ part,” Cinda added.

  “But you must be excited about it,” Hansen said.

  “Mostly I don’t give it much thought. Every now and then I’ll stop in the middle of doing something and I’ll get this weird, like, swoosh in the pit of my stomach—and then I think how different my life is going to be, and how I won’t be around the people I’ve got used to being around.” She ducked her head in the direction of her mother. “But I haven’t freaked out. Not yet anyway.”

  “What made you pick Savannah?”

  “Cinda’s always been a doodler,” her mother said. As if that answered the question.

  “My art teacher gave me a whole bunch of brochures,” Cinda said. “I wrote to half a dozen places.”

  “She really wanted to go to Chicago—to the Art Institute.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Cinda said. “That’s where you wanted me to go.”

  Mother gave Hansen her famous helpless look. “I only wanted the best for Cinda.”

  “Whether Cinda wants it or not.”

  Hansen laughed and clapped his hands, as if he’d just heard a joke. “You wait, young lady” he began, and Cinda interrupted him.

  “If you’re going to tell me to wait till I’m a mother myself,” she said, “please just don’t.”

  * * *

  THE WORST TIME WAS THE DAY Hansen and Mother got into a semi-argument about terrorism, and bombs, and airplanes.

  “I can’t even hear a plane flying over the house,” her mother said, “without thinking of 9/11.”

  Which was a bizarre thing for her to say, because when the wind was from the south, as it often was, the flight path to OIA was right over their pool. If Mother reacted to every plane she heard, she’d never think of anything except 9/11.

  But Hansen went right along with it. “I know,” he said. “I was the same way. Bad images linger.”

  “I can’t tell you how it upsets me,” Mother said. “I’ll be watching a Friends rerun—and all at once there are the twin towers, half their windows lighted up, and I think, ‘Oh, dear God.’”

  “It’s distressing,” he said.

  “I wish they could go back through all the old TV shows and movies and magazine ads, and somehow remove them—the towers—just edit them out. Make them disappear as if they’d never existed and three thousand people hadn’t died in them when they fell.”

  “But it wouldn’t bring any of them back to life.”

  “I
never said it would.” Her mother sounded peevish.

  “And you know what else?” Hansen said. “Now we can appreciate the others. The Chrysler Building. The Woolworth Building. The Empire State. Those are the real skyscrapers. Those show imagination, and spirit, and beauty, and splendor.”

  Splendor. That was a word you didn’t hear much.

  “Three thousand human beings, dead,” her mother said, as if that was her only point after all. “How can you forget?”

  He looked down at his empty margarita glass. “I can’t,” he said. “But I think when you screw something up, you have to put the best possible face on it.”

  Cinda sat at the side of the pool and listened. Whenever she looked up at an airplane, she didn’t see a second plane exploding into the Trade Center and she didn’t think about three thousand people dead. She didn’t see a plane filled with college students, thinking they were going to be home for the holidays, not dreaming the world was about to end. She only imagined a couple of hundred seats in coach filled with a bunch of parents—more moms than dads—and bratty kids on their way to Disney World.

  “It’s all what your generation calls a ‘flashback,’” Cinda said. “If you asked me, I’d tell you both to stop watching those re-runs on television.”

  It seemed a simple enough piece of advice, but that night after she went to bed Cinda lay awake considering the difference between her mother and Edward Hansen. Her mother was upset by a tragedy that truly didn’t concern her. She didn’t know anybody who had died in the collapse of the Trade Center towers; she didn’t even have friends who knew anybody who died there. She was reacting—even though she might be reacting genuinely—to pictures on a television screen.

  Cinda had seen the same pictures, though not live—she was in English class when it happened—and she had seen commercial flights overhead, sitcom repeats showing landmarks that no longer existed, out-of-date photographs of the New York skyline. But these left her unaffected. Maybe mother’s whole life since Daddy divorced her was what was called “vicarious”: she felt what happened to others as if it were happening to her.

  But it was different for Edward Hansen. It was all real for him— explosives and terrorists and the death of people you loved. He had lost his daughter, for God’s sake. He’d had to go to Scotland and claim what was left of her body, and fly home with the remains of a woman too young dead, stone cold in the baggage compartment under his feet.

  * * *

  HE DIDN’T COME TO HER high school graduation—not that she’d really expected he would, not after that weird discussion by the pool. She’d hung on to her last commencement ticket until the day before baccalaureate, and then she gave it to Fat Alan, who seemed genuinely surprised to have it.

  When another whole week passed with no sign of Hansen at EcoMart, Cinda imagined he might have taken a job with the Homeland Security people—screening baggage, or taking fingerprints, or just looking for terrorists and in-general evil. She wondered if he would always be thinking about the daughter who’d been blown up over Scotland, and whether he used to imagine he might someday come face-to-face with the actual man who’d made the bomb or packed it into the suitcase, or who’d worn the stolen badge of a TWA baggage handler and loaded it onto the plane. And then what? Was that why he’d gone to work as a secret agent in the first place? She didn’t know; she couldn’t put herself in his shoes.

  It was a shame nothing had happened between him and her mother—not that Cinda saw herself as a matchmaker, like one or another of Mother’s friends who came around after the divorce and pushed her into the path of some middle-aged man smelling of cigarettes and aftershave. “Listerine breath,” her mother would report, “and too many hands.” Still, Edward Hansen had seemed a cut above—smart and reserved, and obviously a lonely person. One drawback was that Ruby, if she’d lived, would be almost Mother’s age. Another was the possibility of a Mrs. Hansen, assumed to be divorced, but never once mentioned at poolside.

  On her last day at EcoMart, Cinda decided to find out the range of the hand scanner she had used for almost a year. It was nearly three months since Hansen had vanished, apparently for good, and though she sometimes expected him to reappear in her checkout lane—more wish than expectation, she admitted to herself— he never did. Now that she was packed for college and ready for Mother to drive her to Savannah, it was likely she would never see him again, but the very first question he asked had stayed with her.

  The experiment was a bust. After the last customer had left, and the front doors were locked, she aimed the gun at the magazine display across the aisle—a distance she estimated to be a little more than four feet. Nothing happened; she couldn’t even see the thin line of the laser against any product code: not the TV Guide’s, not the crossword puzzle booklet’s, not even the National Enquirer’s. When she leaned out over her counter to cut the distance in half, she thought she saw a red flickering over the Enquirer’s UPC, but the scanner didn’t register it.

  “What are you doing?” Ronnie said. She had come out of the cash-up room, and now she was standing behind Cinda.

  “Trying to find the range,” Cinda said. “How far away can this thing scan?”

  Ronnie laughed. “Eleven inches,” she said. “Less than a foot. All you had to do was read the manual in the supervisor’s office. You can ask Dolby. ‘From two to eleven inches.’ I’m quoting.”

  “That’s not very far,” Cinda said.

  “It’s enough. What were you going to do? Play ‘Star Wars’ with it?”

  Which, if the truth were known, wasn’t so far off from what Cinda had in mind—not wars, exactly, but competitions among the cashiers. She’d thought they might set up different products at various distances, the more expensive ones farthest away and the cheap ones closer in. Everybody takes a turn, a certain number of scans, and high total wins. At game’s end you could clear the register and the supervisor would be none the wiser.

  “Don’t be silly,” Cinda said.

  Waiting for her ride home, she amused herself by imagining that when she and her mother went through security on their holiday trip to London, Edward Hansen would be the agent at the checkpoint; then she could tell him about the game, and why it failed. He’d pass the metal-detecting wand up and down and around her, looking for keys and belt buckles and the coins that concerned him so much, and she’d say to him, “What do you suppose is the range of one of those things? How far away can you stand before you can’t read me anymore?”

  The Tennis Lover

  When she came into the room, he was sitting up in the bed nearer the window, two pillows propped against the headboard, the TV remote not far from his right hand.

  “So,” she said. “Did you watch?”

  “Yes. I was sad about the last set.”

  “I believe it was my worst ever.” She slid the bag off her shoulder onto the other bed and sat down beside it. “You believe?”

  “Probably one of your worst. There was the Newport fiasco.”

  “You would remember that.”

  “Because your bad matches are unforgettable.”

  “Anyway, that was two years ago almost. I’ve had many good matches since that one.”

  He shrugged. “A few.”

  She showed him a finger. It gave him so much pleasure to tease her. “Bastard,” she said. “I’ve earned enough so we don’t starve.”

  “True.”

  “And keep you in bourbon.”

  “Irish,” he said. “There’s a difference, as I remind you every time the matter arises.”

  “Whiskey,” she said. “It’s all whiskey.”

  “That much is true.” He leaned across to the nightstand between the two beds and retrieved the Kent pack. “Why don’t you shower and get into your civvies so we can have dinner.”

  “What is ‘civvies’?”

  “Your civilian clothes,” he said. “The clothes you wear when you’re not in your tennis uniform.”

  She watched him light a c
igarette, using the lighter she had given him in Toronto to mark their first year together.

  “What I wear for playing tennis is not uniform,” she said. “Policemen are uniform. Firemen. Airplane people.”

  He pointed the cigarette at her. “Shower,” he said. “It’s already cocktail time.”

  * * *

  WHEN SHE EMERGED from the shower, the bath towel tucked above her breasts, a smaller towel wrapped around her wet hair, he was sitting in the chair beside the window, putting on his shoes. Beyond the glass she could see the parking lot, and on the far side of the lot an expanse of green lawn enclosed by chain link. It was like looking at a grass court not brought down to scale.

  He stood up and came to her, his shoelaces not yet tied. He kissed her.

  “You smell clean,” he said. He kissed her again, then sat at the edge of the bed to do the laces. “I thought we should eat in the hotel; it’s easier than driving around a strange city, looking for a decent restaurant.”

  “We could ask the desk person for a nice place,” she said. “We could hire a taxicab.”

  He looked up at her as if she had done something wrong. “I know you like to be extravagant,” he said, “but you only reached the quarters.”

  “Is that so bad?”

  “Come on,” he said. “Dry your hair and get dressed. You must be hungry, and I need a drink.”

  She took a bottle of nail polish from the dresser and sat on the other bed to paint her toenails. “I believe you don’t appreciate me,” she said. “How hard I work.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “You talk like quarter-finals is no big doing. You try to make my accomplishment smaller.”

  He watched her while she applied the polish, left foot first. He was keeping a long silence, and she wondered how he would defend himself. Or would he not defend himself?

  “I appreciate that you reached the quarters,” he finally said. “Don’t misunderstand me. But we have higher ambitions, don’t we?”

  “We have time,” she said. “Am I not young?”

  “You are,” he agreed. “You are indeed young.”