The Language of Secrets

by Dianne Dixon

  Amy immediately opened her arms to him and he lay down beside her. They gazed up at the night sky. It resembled the blank, silent landscape of a deep sleep. It was, Justin told her, much like the place in his mind from which the fragmented knowledge of TJ and the red-haired woman had emerged.

  He said that the information was presenting itself to him in erratic bursts. In bits and pieces. Out of nowhere.

  It was as if he were being granted skittish, fleeting access to the private lives of ghosts.

  A room in a house. Shelves and shelves of books. The walls deep green and the crosspieces of the windows glistening white—like the snow falling outside. And Justin, little. Not yet school age. On a rag rug playing with a puppy. The fur black. The puppy’s name Inky. And a toy train. Wooden. With a string to pull it by.

  A book. Bright, extravagant pictures. The comforting cadence of nursery rhymes. And the red-haired woman’s voice saying, “Come into my pahlah, said the spider to the fly.”

  The red-haired woman leaning over the edge of a deep, curving bathtub, reaching out to float a family of rubber ducklings through a sea of bubbles. The tops of her hands rounded, like pillows.

  A quilt on a bed. Patterned in fields of blue-and-yellow pinwheels. The sensation of being tucked in, snug and safe. Above the bed, a slanted ceiling. Slatted wood. In the air between the bed and the ceiling—magic. The moon and stars. Silver. And dancing.

  The red-haired woman. Her smell fresh, like new lilacs. The soft place at the base of her neck warm against Justin’s cheek. The feeling of being curled in her lap and fitted against her. The creak of a rocking chair. And the sound of her voice. Hushed and vibrant: “Oh how I love my TJ. Oh how I love my baby.” Serenity. Love. Perfect safety.

  A table near a door. Dark wood. Curving legs and clawed feet. Always a canvas bag and a stack of books. The red-haired woman putting on her boots and scarf. The door opening, and a rush of cold. Her fiery red hair and pale skin. Her odd, clipped gait and sloping shoulders. Then the door closing again. And Justin asking where has Mommy gone, and a young female voice saying, “Where she always goes. To Wesley Anne.”

  “Those are the things I remember,” Justin told Amy. “I know I lived in that house and she was my mother. She had the ah sound where the r’s should be when she said parlor. And my name was TJ and I loved her. And every day she left me to go to someone named Wesley Anne.”

  “Wesley Anne?” Amy shook her head, trying to make sense of it. “Are you sure? That’s such a strange name.”

  “I know. But that’s who she said she was going to see.”

  “The ‘pahlah’ thing,” Amy said. “That sounds like maybe she was from Boston. And you said there was snow. Do you think that’s maybe where you lived, Boston?”

  “It’s a possibility. But I don’t know how to start figuring it out. My name was TJ. My mother had red hair, and a friend named Wesley Anne. If that’s all you have, where do you begin?”

  “Are you sure her friend’s name wasn’t Leslie Anne?” Amy asked.

  “No, I can hear it in my head, clear as a bell. It was Wesley, not Leslie. I’m positive.”

  Amy turned toward Justin. She wanted to see him. She wanted to be able to look into his eyes as she said: “I love you. I need you. And I never want to be without you.”

  She paused and looked away. She needed to find the words that would explain to Justin exactly what she had sacrificed for him. She wanted him to know that in coming home from Hawaii, she had defied her father; and in defying him, she’d been banished by him. As she had been leaving Maui, he’d told her: “Baby girl, you’re gonna be sorry you did this.” The statement had blended a father’s unhappiness with a mobster’s threat.

  Later, as her mother had been gathering up Amy’s luggage and preparing to carry Zack to the waiting taxi, Amy had been searching the villa for her father. When she went out onto one of the balconies, she saw that he was on the beach below. And when she called to him, he did something he had never done before: He turned his back on her. He turned his back and walked away.

  As Amy had stood on that balcony in Hawaii, she’d felt heartbreak moving toward her with the same speed that her father was moving away.

  Amy settled herself close against Justin and said: “I need you to be everything to me now. And I need me to be everything to you.” Justin looked at her as if he wasn’t sure he understood what she was trying to tell him. “I gave up my father for you,” Amy said. When Justin still didn’t seem to fully comprehend, she added, “You owe me for that. It’s only fair.”

  Justin looked amazed, and immeasurably happy. “Ames, you still want me? In spite of everything? In spite of all this craziness? You want me even though—”

  Amy stopped him by putting her hand over his mouth. “Even though anything. I want you. All of you. Always,” she said. “No matter what the craziness turns out to mean. No matter how weird or sick or scary it is. I don’t care.” She slid her hand away so she could kiss him. “I almost lost you. I was almost stupid enough to let my father come between us. But I didn’t. And I don’t want anything to ever come between us again.”

  She laid her head on Justin’s chest, and after a while she fell asleep. But all through the night she was circling a dark border between dreams and nightmares.

  *

  “Every day? What kind of person would leave a baby alone every day to go hang out with some friend? That doesn’t make any sense.” Amy was saying this as she was stepping out of the shower.

  Justin gave her a noncommittal shrug. He was shaving and she was hesitating at the shower door, waiting for him to stop, and to wrap her in a towel. It had been their rhythm for years. Whenever they were in the bathroom together and Amy stepped out of the shower, before she could reach for a towel, Justin would already have one in hand and be putting it around her. It had begun in the early days of their marriage and had, over time, grown to be an accustomed intimacy between them. To Amy, it was an affirmation of their closeness as a couple.

  But Justin was preoccupied, almost oblivious to her, lost in the mystery of TJ and the red-haired woman. Amy leaned around him and took a towel from the rack. He rinsed his razor, then walked away.

  When Amy came into the bedroom, Justin was already dressed. She wanted desperately to connect with him, to engage him. “Are you sure that’s what you remember her doing every day?” she said. “Leaving TJ to go hang out with some friend of hers?”

  “Yeah.” Justin was picking up his phone and wallet, slipping them into his pocket.

  “And you’re sure of the friend’s name? You do know it’s a really goofy name, don’t you?”

  “I know. But that’s the name. Every day she took books and went out the door, and that’s who she said she was going to see.” Justin kissed Amy lightly on the cheek as he passed her. In the instant it took her to turn her head to kiss him back, he was gone.

  The room was empty and at the same time ferociously occupied. The space around Amy had been emptied of Justin’s presence, but it was full of the specters who had become his relentless companions—a lost boy named TJ, a red-haired woman, and a faceless entity called Wesley Anne.

  Amy went to Justin’s side of the bed. On the nightstand was an assortment of minor clutter—several discarded credit-card receipts, books on corporate management strategies, and a black leather-edged notepad. Justin had left his fountain pen lying across the top sheet of notepaper. Amy lifted the pen and studied what Justin had written. His handwriting was clean and bold, a confident flow of crisp block capitals. The notation contained only two words: “Wesley Anne,” the odd, lunatic name that had been haunting Amy since Justin had first mentioned it to her last night.

  She slipped into jeans and a sweater, and as she was leaving the bedroom she was murmuring to herself, “Wesley Anne. What kind of person is named Wesley Anne?”

  Amy’s arrival in the kitchen was greeted by a smile from Rosa and excited squeals from Zack. Rosa was wiping down the stove and Zack was near the
breakfast bar, traveling around the base of one of the bar stools in slow, wobbling circles, cautiously propelling himself by hanging on to the legs of the stool as he took one tottering step after another.

  Amy picked him up and covered his face with kisses. “Zack, you’re amazing! You’re an amazing boy.”

  As Rosa passed, she rubbed Zack’s back. “You are going to be walking all by yourself any day now, aren’t you mijo?”

  The television was on. Rosa had been watching a morning talk show. But now it was gone, replaced by a newscast. Neither Amy nor Rosa enjoyed listening to the barrage of local and national mayhem. Rosa reached for the remote just as the aftermath of a fire at an East Coast strip mall was being reported. A middle-aged woman in a lumpy coat was on camera. “I can’t believe it’s gone,” she was saying. “The whole mall. My beauty pahlah was in there. I been going to that place for twenty years.”

  Amy snatched the remote from Rosa, stopping her before she could change the channel. Amy’s attention was fixed on the printed information at the bottom of the screen. It identified the fire’s location as Portland, Connecticut.

  “Connecticut!” Amy handed Zack to Rosa, grabbed the car keys, and ran for the back door. “Did you see that?” she was saying. “It’s Connecticut!”

  *

  Less than half an hour later, Amy was in Justin’s hotel, rushing toward his office.

  She was short of breath as she burst through the door. “Wesley Anne,” she said. “It isn’t a person, it’s a place.”

  Justin was signing letters. He stopped in mid-stroke.

  “I figured it out.” Amy was tingling with excitement. “Some people in the central part of Connecticut have that same Bostony kind of sound when they say words like parlor. And you were a little kid when you heard the name Wesley Anne. Little kids misunderstand things they hear all the time. When I was little, I thought the Pledge of Allegiance was to the Republic of some guy named Richard Stanz … but what people were actually saying was ‘to the Republic for which it stands.’”

  “Okay. But what does that have to do with Connecticut and Wesley Anne?” Justin’s smile made it clear he wasn’t taking her seriously.

  “Just listen,” Amy insisted. “You said the red-haired woman had lots of books in the house, and that when she went to see Wesley Anne every day she always took books, right? Well, when most adults go somewhere every day like clockwork, they don’t go to visit their friends. They go to their jobs.”

  Justin shrugged. “So maybe she worked for someone named Wesley Anne.”

  “No, I think she worked at someplace named Wesley Anne.” Amy’s gaze was intense, and fixed on Justin. “After we graduated, my best friend in high school went to college in Connecticut. I went to see her all the time. Right in the center of Connecticut. A working-class place called Middletown. She went to Wesleyan University.”

  Justin’s smile vanished. Amy had his full attention.

  “Books all over the house,” Amy said. “Books every day. Every day, Wesley Anne. I think the red-haired woman could have been a teacher, and she could have worked at Wesleyan. I think we’ve found the place where some of the answers might be hiding.”

  Caroline

  822 LIMA STREET, JULY 1979

  *

  The touching of Barton’s lips to Caroline’s cheek was as swift and light as the brush of an angel’s wing. “Oh, Caro,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Barton had been walking across the park with Caroline, back toward the house on Lima Street. He had seen that her face was damp with tears and that she was unaware of it.

  “This happens to me every once in a while.” Caroline was embarrassed. “Tears just leak out of me without me knowing. Sometimes the girls have to tell me … ‘You’re leaking again, Mommy.’”

  “I’m a priest. And I’m your friend. And I’m completely worthless to you.” Barton walked a few steps away, let out a frustrated groan, and circled back. “I want to heal your hurt. And I don’t know what to say to make it go away. What can I do, Caro? Please. Tell me how to help.”

  Barton’s eyes were beautiful, changeable. Sometimes they appeared green, deeply flecked with golden brown. At other times the green receded and became burnished gold. In them now, Caroline was seeing the purity of Barton’s love for her. Suddenly, she had the impulse to tell him the truth about Justin. The temptation to unburden herself and receive forgiveness was strong and sweet; and for a moment, it seemed possible. But even as Caroline was forming the words of her confession, she was seeing how innocent and how absolutely fine Barton was; she knew she didn’t want to pollute his soul with knowledge of the perverse thing that contaminated her own.

  In addition to protecting Barton, she also wanted to protect herself. Telling the truth would reveal that she hadn’t been able to prevent the commission of an unforgivable crime against her own child. She couldn’t stand the thought of Barton knowing that. She needed him to see her as he always had—as his “Caro”—someone sweet and good, and innocent.

  So she explained her tears by saying: “My little boy was taken away from me three years ago, Barton. He’s gone and I can’t ever get him back. And I don’t know how to breathe around the pain of it.”

  Julie and Lissa were on the gravel path ahead of Caroline, dashing toward the iron gate at the park entrance. They would soon be teenagers, and the roundness of childhood was beginning to smooth and lengthen into the beginnings of adolescence. But for the moment, they were still little girls with their hair flowing behind them like silken taffy as they ran toward home.

  “Look,” Caroline whispered. “Look at how strong and happy they are.” In the presence of her children’s joy, Caroline’s grief dimmed. It folded inward, becoming quiet, allowing itself to be hidden.

  But in hiding her grief, she hadn’t erased it. She had only obscured it. There was still torment when she thought about the things she had done, and, most of all, the things she had been unable to do.

  As she walked through the park beside Barton, Caroline couldn’t tell him that she was still haunted by what had happened to her in the days and weeks immediately following Justin’s funeral, when she’d learned Justin hadn’t died in Nevada but had been taken from her in the cold of New England.

  Caroline had almost drowned in a swamp of sedatives and grief, unable to think logically or to act rationally.

  She had rampaged through the house with the frenzy of a maniac, hunting for photograph albums and tearing out pictures of Justin. She’d run into the front yard with Justin’s little stuffed rabbit and stood with it, defiant, in front of a Polaroid camera, documenting her anguish. She had grabbed a spiral notebook and frantically taped the torn-out photographs onto its pages and then slipped the Polaroid picture of herself, along with Justin’s birth certificate, between the last page of the notebook and its back cover. And then she had cried. She had wept and howled.

  Caroline had done these things in a desperate fight to reassemble Justin’s life. It had been her mad, futile attempt to do the impossible—to touch Justin again, to somehow bring him back to her.

  She wanted to tell Barton about what she’d done. She wanted to explain, to have him understand. But instead, Caroline took his hand as they were leaving the park and murmured: “Tell me about New York. Tell me about the other side of the world.”

  When Caroline and Barton and the girls walked into the kitchen, Barton’s wife, Lily, was there. She was letting a stream of cool water wash through a colander piled with fresh-picked tomatoes. A shaft of late-afternoon light was slanting into the room. Lily was in a white cotton dress, bending over her work at the sink, her blond hair, cropped and curly, her skin honey-colored. She looked like a beautiful summer sprite.

  Barton went to her and kissed her. Lily let her head drop back and gave a bright, silvery laugh. Caroline saw the potent intimacy in the look that passed between them, and it made her feel a grudging envy. She glanced away and wished that they hadn’t come from New York for this visit.
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  But the kiss lasted only a split second before it was interrupted by excited questions from the girls.

  “Aunt Lily, Uncle Barton said that your friend, the one you went to see today, lives all alone in a spooky cabin in the woods that looks like a witch’s house.” Julie cocked her head to one side, brimming with little-girl skepticism. “Is that really true?”

  “He said the only thing she ever eats is nuts and berries, just like a squirrel,” Lissa added.

  Lily laughed. “Uncle Barton needs to get his facts straight. My friend is not a witch. She’s a writer. And she lives in the mountains in a pretty little house that looks out on a lake. And she eats all sorts of different things, except for meat. She’s a vegetarian.”

  “She’s a very cranky vegetarian,” Barton said.

  Lily looked at him with a teasing grin. “Uncle Barton thinks she’s cranky because she’s a feminist.”

  “What’s a feminist?” Julie asked.

  “Someone who thinks women are fish,” Barton replied. He was smiling at Lily. “And that men are bicycles, which makes us basically useless to anyone of the fish persuasion. But it does categorize us as creatures who exist solely for the purpose of being ridden.”

  “Women are fish? And men are bicycles? That’s silly.” Lissa looked at Julie, and both girls giggled.

  “You are very wise children.” Barton took a box of cookies from the counter. “Now who wants to come with me and watch TV and eat Oreos until we explode?” Barton sprinted out of the kitchen; the girls followed in hot pursuit.

  “Cookies before dinner. No wonder my kids love him so much.” Caroline lifted the colander out of the sink and began to dry the tomatoes.

  “Barton’s great with children … he’d be the perfect dad.” There was an odd hesitancy in her tone. It caught Caroline’s attention. And Lily explained: “We’ve really been trying, but so far no luck. Still no baby for us.”

  Caroline wanted to console Lily, but she didn’t know what to say; she had always felt awkward around her. Lily seemed too rarefied a creature to ever be within Caroline’s grasp.