Secret Language (24 page)

Stewart made jokes all the way up the stairs about brides and grooms as Connie hung grimly in his arms. Faith could see how mortified she was to be helpless, to be an invalid in someone else’s house.

It has been only a few days now since Connie arrived, a fragile collection of bones and fiberglass and tape, and already Faith’s house is transformed by the chaos she has always suspected of lurking just inside the lining of her life. For the first few hours she and her sons skulked along the stairs and in the hall, stumbling into each other, excusing themselves for taking up space. Things she used to be able to put her hands on turned up in foreign places, as if these alien presences—a sick relative and a visiting nurse—had invaded not only her consciousness but the inanimate soul of the house itself. She is a little surprised to see the same old rooms behind the front door when she comes in after work.

“How’s Connie?” Faith asks Nancy, who is packing up her satchel of knitting. Nancy always leaves on the stroke of five.

“Just fine,” she answers, showing her chicken teeth. “Not the ideal patient.” Nancy said this yesterday and the day before.

Ben is sitting in the living room, changing the strings on his blue guitar. “I’ve been playing for her,” he tells Faith.

Nancy gives Faith a smoldering look, then turns her gloomy gaze on Ben, his guitar, the lethal-looking amp on the floor next to the chair.

“Not too loud, I hope,” Faith says.

Ben shakes his head, and the soft, sticking-up part of his hair trembles like some strange species of black milkweed. Since the first awkwardness of Connie’s arrival, he’s barely left the house except to go to school. It fills Faith to watch his fierce solicitude—taking plates in and out of the room, bringing home school yard riddles—part duty and part care, tenacious and somewhat perplexing. Whatever is going through him is, she believes, a kindness inherited from his father.

Chris, on the other hand, has turned out to be more like her than she thought: for the first time that she can remember, he has receded from the household. He stays late at basketball practice or at work, or else hides in his bedroom or at Tracy’s house. He has eaten dinner there for several nights running, indifferent to the swell of well-wishers (his Fuller relatives, whom he loves) that troop into his own house daily, with casseroles and breads to stock Faith’s freezer.

Nancy pulls a scrap of paper from the pocket of her uniform. She clears her throat. “A Stewart Hayden called. He’s coming in Friday night, late, and will see you Saturday.”

“I’d better get over to clean Connie’s place,” Faith says, half to herself.

“He said not to,” Nancy tells her, and Faith gets the impression that she’s being judged. “ ‘No cleaning’ were his exact words.”

Nancy is waiting for the stroke of five, and though she has only fifteen minutes left Faith decides not to dismiss her. Let her wait. Faith goes upstairs to check on Connie.

From the hall she hears a labored grunting, and at the door she stands watch, mesmerized by Connie’s dogged concentration. She’s out of bed, teetering on her one good foot, tapping her casts together like a seal on land, trying to catch the edge of the bedspread between them.

“You’re supposed to be in bed,” Faith says, moving toward her.

Connie looks wretched, angry, in pain. Her hair is plastered against her face in lank strands. She straightens up, teetering still, the green bathrobe shivering at the edges. Faith sees how wrong the bathrobe is, its frills and flutters hanging useless as dead leaves on Connie’s slender, branchlike body.

Connie’s lower lip pulls away from her teeth, quivering. “She
never
does this right.” Her voice is broken as static. It is a moment before Faith realizes she is crying. Connie beats her casts gently against the blankets, the full outlet of her frustration thwarted by the threat of pain. She cries out, a primitive mutter, then thumps her arms, two useless tubes, at the air.

Faith imagines herself like this, bound and helpless.

“I’ll do it,” Faith says. She tucks her arm around Connie’s waist and helps her back into bed. She pulls off the bedspread, then lifts it like a magic cape, billowing it back down on her sister. She fixes it to the exact edge of the bed. “Like that?” she says.

Connie nods. She starts to wipe her tears and knocks her cheek with her right-hand cast. “Damn!” she says, and rocks her head back, her sweaty hair a blot against the clean pillow.

Faith gives the bedspread another yank. “There.”

Connie lifts her head, examines the arrangement of blankets. “Thanks.”

Faith sits on the edge of the bed.

“I miss my coma,” Connie says.

Faith laughs a little, hoping this is a joke. “Ben says he’s been playing for you.”

Connie barely moves her head. She seems exhausted from the effort of crying, of standing up. “He’s not bad, you know. He wants to be Isadora.”

“I hope he’s not a bother.”

“He’s an angel.” Connie smiles. “You’re so lucky.”

At first, Faith can’t place it. Something about Connie’s face. She has watched this face for weeks now, against various pillows, and the face has changed somehow, in that slow way you recognize all at once. Her bruises are gone except for a mild, yellow-green disk lingering over one temple. The stitches on her forehead have disappeared, a small pink scar materialized in their place. After this healing, Faith expected to see Connie again, but this is not Connie: the darkened hair, the clipped, naked nails, the unprotected face, the eyes defined by nothing but their own color. The feathery eyebrows have grown in, and the lips are dry and peach-colored. What Faith begins to recognize is recognition itself, like the first time she saw her own face in the face of her sons. This is indeed Connie, but it
is the Connie she has not looked upon for a long time. Stripped of her makeup, her work, her furious hurry, she looks no more than fourteen. Faith has not looked upon this face for more than twenty years.

“Faith,” Connie says. She’s whispering, looking into the bedspread.

“Yes?”

“I’d like a drink.”

Faith stands up and pats the bedspread down. “You mean water, or apple juice or something?”

“No.”

“You mean wine, scotch, something like that?”

“Yes.”

“You’re on medication.”

“Please, Faith.” Her eyes are glittering; she might be about to cry again.

“I’m supposed to be taking care of you. They said no alcohol. They even wrote it down.”

“Please.”

“You don’t know how much you’ve been through.”

“You don’t know how much I want a drink.”

They stare at each other a moment, then Connie backs down, a deeper shadow in the pillow.

“I’ll get you some apple juice,” Faith says, and turns from the room, the bed, her sister’s need.

Downstairs it’s five o’clock. Nancy waits by the door with her coat on, watching Joe and Chris come up the walk.

“I’m leaving,” she says.

“See you,” Faith says. And then: “When you do the bed, would you bring the spread up a few more inches? She likes it to be exactly even with the edge.”

Nancy nods grimly. “You two are the limit,” she says, then starts out, her galoshes slopping against the snow-damped porch steps. Joe says something to her as they pass on the walk, and Nancy smiles at him, her deep wrinkles jamming against the knitted border of a tied-too-tight pullover hat.

“You’ve certainly got
her
charmed,” Faith says when he gets inside.

“Pity the woman,” he says, smiling. “My God, working for Felix Unger and Felix Unger, what a fate.” With a dish towel in each hand, he’s holding an entire lasagna, another gift from the family. “Will and Sarah,” he says, lifting it to show her.

Chris breezes past, wordless, his face ruddy but stern. Ben, who is still tinkering with his guitar strings, says something to his brother, and to Faith’s surprise Chris snarls at him.

“ ’Scuse me for living,” Ben says cheerfully, winding a tuning peg with renewed vigor.

“Hold it, pal,” Joe says, but Chris ratchets himself past his father, throws his jacket over the newel post, and bolts up the stairs.

“Was that my son?” Faith says, looking up the stairs as if watching the plumy trail of the Roadrunner.

“Her Majesty probably broke up with him again,” Ben offers from the living room. “It’s either that or his shooting slump.” Chris’s sudden blackness has somehow made Ben lighter, as if the emotional content of the household ran on a careful ledger, a zero-sum.

“It’s all this confusion,” Faith mutters, heading into the kitchen for Connie’s apple juice. “I thought he’d be better about all this.” She pauses. “I suppose he had to figure it out sooner or later.”

“Figure what out?” Joe says, setting the lasagna on the stove, removing his jacket, in for the evening.

She waves her hand upward, in the general direction of Connie’s room. “That it’s not all sing-alongs and holidays.”

She senses Joe behind her, then feels his fingers around her elbow. “I think he already knows that,” he says into her ear. “His father lives on the other side of the goddamned city.” She whirls around to answer, or not answer, and finds Ben standing behind him, his newly strung guitar hung like a baby in his arms. On his face she sees a look she remembers.
Your father and I
 … she had told him.
Honey, sometimes, even when two people love each other …
He had never fought it, neither of them had, they had just accepted the divorce as part of their life, a resignation that had rumbled in Faith’s conscience like an aftershock ever since. She never expected them to be docile. By making it easy, they had made it hard.

“Ben?” she says, and Joe grimaces, turns around. “Will you tell Connie I’m on my way up?” Ben regards them suspiciously, then turns to go.

“I’m sorry,” Joe says. “I didn’t know he was standing there.” He leans against the counter while she pours out some juice.

“I just don’t like all these—these
people
in my house,” she says. She picks up the juice, puts it back down.

He slides his arm around her, tugs her gently, until she lays her face against his shirt. “You’re a trouper, Faith.”

“I’m not. I’m just putting one foot in front of the other.” She relaxes some against him. “Stewart’s coming this Saturday.”

“Where are you going to put him?”

“He can stay at Connie’s.” She sighs. “All these people. Greg and Amy were here most of last evening after you left. They brought
two
casseroles, for God’s sake, and then stayed, thinking they were helping me, I guess.”

Joe chuckles a little. “Brian and Maggie are coming tonight with Mom.”

She pulls her head away, looking at him. “Your family is killing me with kindness.”

“They’re still your family, too.”

“I hate making conversation. I just want to hide in a blanket. I don’t want to see anybody else.”

“Does that include me?”

“No,” she says, and because it is not exactly she herself who has said it—rather some exhausted, stripped-away version of herself—she realizes how much she means it.

She relaxes against him once again, fixed in his warm hold. She wonders what others might think of these husbandly attentions in the wake of a divorce. To her they feel natural, and she knows now that Brenda was right: he never left her. They begin to drift into home talk: Ben’s guitar-playing, Chris and Tracy.

“What’s gotten into him lately?” she says suddenly. “He used to be so easygoing.”

“Today’s a car problem, Faith.”

She closes her eyes. “Do I want to hear this?”

“Nope. He got back-ended by a pickup in the school parking lot.”

“God, what next. Tell me no one was hurt.”

“No one was even there. Some kid left his truck in neutral, and it rolled down the lot and hit the Corvair while Chris sat in some classroom solving for
x
.”

Faith has always suspected cars of having secret lives outside of human sight, and now she knows. A thought strikes her. “Wait a minute, the engine’s in the back.”

“Right,” Joe says grimly. “I haven’t taken a look yet. Naturally the other kid is uninsured.”

“Poor Chris.” She’s thinking of Joe’s old car, her first ride in it. “He must be heartbroken.”

“It feels like it happened to me,” Joe says. “I told him I’d tow it back here with the truck tomorrow.”

“You’re going to fix it yourself, aren’t you,” she says.

“Probably. I’m a sucker for broken things.”

She moves gently away from him. His arms hang like dead branches. “It’s not your car, Joe.”

“I know that.”

“He should fix it himself.”

“It’ll take him forever.”

Faith picks up the juice glass on the counter. “That’s how long some things take.” The single toll from Connie’s bedside bell comes as a relief, for Faith is afraid of the web of Joe’s arms, afraid of all it makes her want, all the possibilities for failed hope.

“Wait,” he says.

“She doesn’t ring unless she’s desperate.” She moves farther away.

“Faith, I want to come back.”

“Don’t, please,” Faith whispers, her eyes cast down. He begins to set the table, readying the kitchen for dinner as if he had never left. Faith can’t bear to watch, and retreats upstairs.

“I have to pee,” Connie says from her bed. She is half in, half out, trying to right herself. Faith hurries over and catches her around the waist, setting down the glass with her free hand.

“I thought Ben was up here with you.”

Connie hops down on her good foot and leans against Faith, her hard angles pressing into the soft spots on Faith’s body. “I told the poor kid to take a break.”

They hobble down the hall to the bathroom like one slow-moving creature. In the bathroom Faith props Connie against the wall and lowers the toilet seat. “I
tell
them and
tell
them,” she sighs, then turns Connie around. Connie makes the effort to help, but her bound hands are useless as stumps; it is Faith who hikes up the nightgown, pulls down the panties, helps her onto the seat. She pulls a wad of tissue from the holder, and Connie bunches it between the tips of her fingers. Faith steps out to wait beside the door.