Secret Language (7 page)

Connie is looking at her, half smiling. She sits up.

“Prepare yourself,” Joe says. “The news is amazing.”

Connie’s eyes are barely open. “What are you talking about?”

Joe raises his hand with a flourish and brings it down gently on Faith’s stomach. “Connie Spaulding, your sister is going to be a mother.”

Faith tightens her robe and looks at the floor. She can feel herself separating from her sister, a slow ache. This rending confuses her, for haven’t they always been separate?

“Wow,” Connie says. “You must be happy.” It comes out woodenly,
as if she’s reading a greeting card out loud. Her eyes are wide open now, looking into the chasm that divides them. “A mother. I can’t believe it.”

Joe doesn’t see it; he’s grinning like a child, looking into his imagined future. He doesn’t see Connie’s decision. But Faith sees it; Connie is going to leave. “You can still live with us,” she says softly.

Connie nods. “Thanks.”

How big is a heart?
Faith wonders. The baby inside her is already carving out room. How can she hold all the things she never dared wish for?

Connie’s eyes are resolute, fixed on the hard knot of Faith’s stomach.
There’s room for you
, Faith wants to say, but she is not at all sure.

It is a spring-yellow day. The three of them stand in the yard, Faith big as a walrus, Joe waiting by the car to drive Connie to the airport. Faith claims to be ill, vague pregnancy complaints, but in fact she cannot bear the thought of watching her sister’s plane recede into a silver dot of sky.

“This is it,” she says, her voice catching. She lifts her arms to Connie, takes one awkward step. Their goodbye is tearless, quick, a clumsy hug in which their cheeks accidentally bump together, hard. Faith retreats into the house before the car moves, confounded by physical pain.

Before Faith has time to see it coming, before she can maneuver herself to the window to watch the red Corvair disappear down the street, Connie’s stunning absence rains down on her. Connie is gone, gone; this is Faith’s first day, ever, without her sister. In the empty hall she sits heavily on a deacon’s bench, a gift from Brian and Maggie. She spreads her palm out on her chest, drags it over her massive stomach. Filled though she is with this fidgety baby, she feels empty.

When Joe returns, Faith is wild to see him, meeting him on the porch steps with her arms out. His face goes white. “Is it time?” he says. He’s looking at her stomach, guarding it.

“Oh,” Faith says. “No, no. I’m just glad to see you.”

“I waited till the plane took off.” He helps her into the house. “Look, you want to cry or something?”

She smiles wanly. “No.”

“You want to just sit here a while, maybe take a stroll down memory lane?”

“What?”

“You know, the good times you had together, stuff like that.”

Faith shakes her head. The baby is thumping against her back. “I can’t think of any right now.” Why is her heart breaking?

“It’s okay to be sad, sweetie,” Joe says. He coaxes her into his arms and holds her there. “I would be. I am, in fact.” Faith drops her head on his shoulder. She waits there until her sadness passes.

With Connie gone, the house seems like an echo with walls. She fills it, for the first time, with the sound of her own voice. She begins to talk about the baby, the baby’s room, the baby’s name, the baby’s prospects. Joe’s face, always close to hers, is a sheen of love and longing. They seem to have a lot to say to each other; they have a wealth of good intentions, not for themselves but for their child, their future children. Faith is grateful for this common ground, for with Connie gone she is back to puzzling over Joe, his capacity for joy, his choosing her for a mate.

The family churns around them, with plans and alternative plans and contingency plans for getting her to the hospital in case the baby comes early, or late, or in the morning, or at night. Faith freezes in their midst, continues to work for Dr. Howe just to get away from their overwhelming competence. When her time approaches and the phone rings every night for a progress report to be passed down the Fuller telephone chain, she is paralyzed, she might as well be looking for the bathroom in a new school or listening to sinister voices in a hotel hallway. She is the only person on earth who doesn’t know where things are.

Chris is born exactly on time. When she sees her son, no bigger than an eggplant crooked into his father’s arms, she is felled by love, and by an insidious fear that her heart is indeed a finite thing that has run out of room in a day.

He’s a noisy baby, with long, stringy hands that waggle out of his blanket. When she and Joe bear him home, they are greeted in the front yard by a band of Fullers who move toward her like a parade float, ponderous and colorful, unfurling a baby blue banner.

“Here he is!” Joe says, leaving her side and working his family like a politician, pushing cheap cigars into his brothers’ pockets.

Joe Senior peers into the blanket, then gives Faith a shy smile. “He’s a champ, all right.” Though Faith loves Phoebe, Joe Senior is her favorite Fuller, for, like her, he is a person of few words who prefers to watch the family dance from a chair pushed against the wall.

“Come here, darling,” Phoebe says, and shepherds Faith over the steps and into her own house. “Oh, what a
baby
!” she squeals, lifting baby Chris out of Faith’s arms. “My goodness, Faith, he looks more like you than he did yesterday. Look at those eyes!”

The baby’s eyes are already green. Faith almost feels she should apologize. The baby looks exactly like her.

Joe is laughing, idiotic with delight, yet he’s tuned to her discomfort, her exhaustion. He swoops her into his arms, heading for the stairs. “New mothers need rest,” he announces. The sisters-in-law gather around baby Chris, whose hands are again poking out of his blanket. “Don’t drop him,” Joe calls. His happiness is palpable, dear as the skin on a peach. She closes her eyes and lets him carry her up, jostling against his chest.

In the blessed quiet of their bedroom, he tucks her under their quilt and kisses her hard on the cheek.

“You beautiful, beautiful thing,” he says. “Thank you for our little boy.”

She smiles, her eyes closed, already drifting away from him. She will never catch up to his version of the world.

Not until she is teetering on the very edge of sleep does she stop to wonder if anyone in the family machine has thought to call Connie. She would be on her Rome layover now, or perhaps Frankfurt. Faith can’t seem to remember what day it is.

She surrenders, finally, to sleep, dimly aware of the good-natured noise below, hoping Connie knows already that a new person has arrived in the world, a little boy, a blood relative.

By the time Ben is born, over three years later, Faith knows how the family wheels turn. She gives in to the Fullers’ celebration and awe: Ben might as well be the first baby they have ever seen.
They surge into her house and she does not retreat. She shows off baby Ben, puts on some coffee, listens to their endless talking, passes herself off as family—because Joe is watching. He believes he has finally made her into family, that he has taken her all the way in, but he has not. Giving in is not the same as giving.

Even with Joe and her sons she becomes more and more a stranger: their world, too, is unfathomable, often alarming. She listens to Ben—a flourishing, black-haired Fuller—jabbering in his crib, making eerie, high-pitched squeaks that Joe reminds her are the sounds of joy. And Chris—she holds her breath many times, as his tiny grip tightens on the outside world. He runs through the house with his head pitched forward as if trying to ram himself into the nearest wall. The stakes increase with time: he falls from a bike, swings from a tree, rolls down the porch steps while trying to dance. His father is happy to contribute to the peril, twirling his son round and round into unbridled, hiccupping laughter. Even with the baby Joe shows no fear, dramatically jiggling Ben on his knee, singing to him in a loud, ecstatic voice. Faith prefers the quiet tasks: she reads Chris to sleep, takes Ben for long walks in the stroller, listens to Chris’s convoluted stories. She watches Joe with both sons—his crazy faces and slam-bang play—with a stupefied awe, convinced that the child he once was still exists, dancing just under his skin.

“How can you just let him go like that?” she asks him.

“Higher! Higher, Daddy!” Chris calls from the swing. Joe pushes him higher, pitching him into a scuff of clouds.

“Joe,” Faith says. “That’s too high.”

He stops for her sake, ignores the complaints from the boy on the slowing swing. “He’s big enough to hang on, Faith,” he tells her. “Kids love to go high.”

She believes him, but can’t watch. Joe bends down to kiss the top of Chris’s yellow head. “Your mother’s nervous, pal,” he says, and Chris looks up, resigned. They stop their game and swing primly for her benefit. God knows what they do behind her back.

They hear from Connie, regular but short notes, a few lines on a postcard. She has called four or five times in the last couple of years, but they don’t talk well on the phone. Once she came for a
week’s visit, but without the habit of day-to-day living between them, the time was awkward, full of holes.

Lately Connie has been talking about getting an apartment nearby, using Portland instead of Boston as her home base. Faith hopes so. Without Connie she feels more and more caught in the wrong life, as if she found the right door but tripped over the threshold. She doesn’t know anybody like herself; even her own children are mysteries.

When both boys get old enough to play at danger, Joe insists that Faith experiment with them: two-wheelers, toboggans, hockey skates. “Go, Mom!” they yell down the street. It is her first ride on a bicycle, the sun beating a yellow melting puddle on the street, Joe chuffing beside her, his sneakers slapping the pavement like a metronome, anchoring the wild beating in her heart.

“Keep pedaling!” Joe yells, and she does, furiously, knowing he has let go, and for a moment she knows what it is to be a child, hurtling into the sun.

When she finds her feet again, the feeling is gone, her wits and suspicion of the world returned, and her husband, running toward her ruddy with triumph, looks like a stranger.

“Yes! Yes!” he hollers, laughing, grabbing her hands and shaking them so hard as to send ripples up her arm. He says he loves her calm, yet he is always trying to move her.

“Oh,” she says, catching her breath, laying one hand over her chest. “Oh boy.” Her children are running down the shallow hill of their street.

“All right, Mom!” Chris hollers.

“She did it, guys,” Joe says. He squeezes her hands hard. “It’s in your bones now, lady. Once you learn you don’t forget.”

She falls against him. “Can you hear my heart?”

“Yes,” he says, clutching her with one arm and steadying the bike with the other, his arms awkwardly spread. He manages to make even this look natural. She watches him watching her, trying to see what he sees. He’s enchanted by her monstrous need for him, not understanding the nature of this need, how it mutes her, how cold it has become, how separate it makes them.

Friday night, and Faith is alone. The boys are with Phoebe and Joe Senior for one of their weekends: they’ll go to the Fryeburg fair and eat until they get sick. Ben usually likes the ox pull, Chris the spotted pigs. This year it’s hard to tell what they’ll like, for they’re changing before her eyes. Chris is eleven, still a child in many ways, but already there are signs: he takes a shower every day; he likes salad.

She waits for Joe but he doesn’t come home. The house is tomblike and sad, and she doesn’t know how to break the spell. She considers putting on a record but can’t think of anything she wants to hear.

Joe calls, his voice strained. “I’ll be late,” he says.

“Where are you?”

“At the shop.” She waits, but he doesn’t say anything. Does he want her to tell him to come home? “So, I’ll be late,” he says again. He is warning her and doesn’t yet know it.

“Okay,” she says. She sounds fine. She always sounds fine; it’s an old skill.

She heads upstairs, each footfall like a slap against bare skin. She perches on the edge of their bed, careful not to wrinkle the rose-colored quilt, the wedding present from Phoebe in which they’d wrapped themselves on their wedding night twelve years ago.

Twelve years. Faith tries to back her way through them, but the years arrive in a clump: a rush of love, a baby, another baby, work, family celebrations, a whirl of days. And Joe: his open arms, his endless gifts, his eternal competence. He could fix anything: his
father’s machines, his friends’ cars, his sons’ bicycles and toy trucks and hurt feelings. He had visited his gifts on Faith, too, again and again, but whatever needed fixing had been too long broken.

She must have turned away by inches, for the days refuse to separate in her head. Sitting here now she can’t imagine that they ever laughed together, or shared an inside joke, or reached for each other in the night. Yet she knows they did these things, these married things. How long ago? It has been a languid drifting, and here they are, washed up on different shores.

She hears his truck pull up, the thump on the porch, the quick opening of the front door. These sounds are more familiar than anything else in her life. In a few minutes he stands before her, leaning against the door of their bedroom. She looks at her watch, amazed that she has sat here, in this one spot, for three hours.

“Boys get off all right?” he asks.

His face is taut, the corners of his mouth turned down. Though physically he fills up the doorway, he appears to be shrinking. This is what he must have looked like at thirteen, being told that his big brother was lying dead in a blackened rice paddy on the other side of the world.

“I have something to tell you,” he says.

She looks beyond him. “You slept with someone.” Her voice seems to be coming from someplace else in the room. He slips down, watching her, his back against the doorjamb, until he is sitting on the floor, looking up. He says nothing, struggling against the muscles in his face.