The Language of Secrets (22 page)

Just before one in the morning, the doorbell rang. The abrupt ring of the chime, echoing in the stillness of the living room, sounded thunderously loud. But it was Kati’s scream that had awakened TJ. It had happened when Kati saw the state trooper standing in the doorway, his rain-soaked hat in his hand. The look on his face told her Margaret was dead.

Upstairs, TJ, still half-asleep, had shouted: “Mommy!” And
the night split apart. Everything changed. And by the time morning had come, TJ was gone.

The trooper had placed a series of phone calls as soon as he’d discovered there was a young child in the house who was now motherless and, in the purest sense, an orphan. The house had quickly filled with people—additional troopers, neighbors, and local police. Within hours, arrangements were being made to put TJ into foster care.

Kati pleaded with the troopers. “Please,” she said. “Couldn’t you just let him stay with me until, until …” But even as she was saying it, she knew she had no way to take care of TJ. Her parents had recently moved to Florida, she lived in a tiny apartment with three other girls, and every cent she had was in her purse—less than fifty dollars.

In the midst of the confusion, a social worker had arrived. She was young and pretty, and TJ’s was the last case she was ever going to handle; in a week, she was getting married and moving away. She was scattered and distracted, descending on Kati like a whirlwind: wanting Kati to make TJ stop crying, wanting Kati to admire her engagement ring, wanting Kati to show her where the phone was so she could call her fiancé, and wanting Kati to quickly pack for TJ—whatever Kati could fit into a single suitcase.

The final thing the social worker wanted was for Kati to give her access to Margaret’s files; she needed to locate TJ’s birth certificate.

Kati, numbed by the shock of Margaret’s death and the sadness of TJ’s plight, stuffed TJ’s clothes into an old blue suitcase and handed over a large envelope that had been at the bottom of one of Margaret’s desk drawers.

Across the front of the envelope, in Margaret’s elegant handwriting, was the inscription “For TJ.” Inside the envelope were two items: a birth certificate (folded into a small square, no bigger
than a credit card) and a spiral notebook full of snapshots. Neither Kati nor the social worker examined them closely. The social worker was in a hurry to be on her way. Kati was in a daze of grief.

The last Kati saw of TJ was as the social worker was carrying him away from the house. He was holding his hand out to Kati in a frantic, anxious gesture—as if he were groping for a miracle. And he was asking the question—“Mommy?”—over and over and over again.

Kati closed the door of Margaret’s house, leaned against it, and looked around the living room. It was then that she saw TJ’s piano.

In the driveway outside, the social worker had buckled TJ into the backseat of her sedan. She had opened the envelope and removed the contents—the birth certificate and the spiral notebook. The birth certificate was not the updated document issued when TJ’s adoption had been finalized; it was the one that had come to Margaret tucked inside the notebook. It identified TJ as Thomas Justin Fisher, a boy who lived on Lima Street.

The certificate was put into a file folder—a folder that would, from this point forward, hold the official documentation of TJ’s life and identity.

As the social worker was in the process of tossing the spiral notebook into TJ’s blue suitcase, she looked up and saw that Kati was at the rear door of the car, sliding a child-size grand piano onto the backseat.

The social worker was about to tell her to stop, to take the piano away. But she was looking into Kati’s eyes. The determination that was there was forbidding her to utter a single word.

*

TJ’s new home was a ramshackle dwelling in Middletown, its paint faded to the colors of ash and rusted things, the colors of neglect. The house belonged to Kevin Loudon and his wife, Angela.

The Loudons’ desire to be foster parents had been motivated by their misguided belief that the venture would be lucrative. The child-welfare system’s desire to have them as foster parents had been motivated by necessity. There were more children than places to put them.

The Loudons were gift horses into whose mouths the bureaucracy chose not to look too closely. They were sloppy, aggravated people who wore their disappointments like clumsily concealed war paint. Their failures had stayed stuck to them like gum to the bottom of a shoe. There was a row of aluminum lawn chairs and a pair of young boxer dogs, in a crate, on their sagging front porch. And in the yard at the back, there was an old Pontiac without an engine, and a brand-new cherry red motorcycle.

The interior of the house was surprisingly bright and clean. The walls were painted in pastels and the windows were hung with spotless curtains. The matched maple furniture, bought on credit from Sears, was dust-free and polished. Angela took pride in the rooms she inhabited, the same pride she had once taken in herself, in the days before she had become a Loudon—in the time when she had been Angela DiMarco.

Angela had been born in Middletown and had once been so beautiful that she’d made an altar boy’s knees buckle just by winking at him while she was kneeling at the communion rail of St. Sebastian’s Church.

And then she had married Kevin.

Kevin came from a large brawling family of swamp Yankees—an uneducated, prejudiced clan whose meager allotment of pride came solely from the fact that they were born and bred New Englanders. He was thin and wiry, and violent when he drank. He worked in a supermarket warehouse, forklifting canned soup and breakfast cereal and pinto beans, because the auto repair shop he’d
started with his brother, and his time as an Amway agent, and the job selling swimming pools over the phone hadn’t made him rich, even though he’d been certain that they would.

Angela was now thirty-five and pregnant with a child she hadn’t planned, disappointed that she could no longer make men’s knees buckle with a wink, and unhappy that the man she’d married had taken her no farther than a dilapidated house with an engineless car in the yard.

Kevin and Angela had two preadolescent children—a daughter, Angie, and a son, Kevin Junior, who was deaf. And when, on an August afternoon, TJ came to them, they had their first foster child.

In the beginning, they’d been on their best behavior. It was as if they had been blessed with a paying guest who took up very little space, rarely spoke, and spent most of his time either silently looking at a set of photographs pasted into a spiral notebook or sitting in front of a miniature piano, teaching himself to play and producing disjointed, melancholy music. But it wasn’t long before the Loudons became accustomed to TJ’s presence and their old grievances and failures dragged them back to being themselves. By Christmastime, Kevin had begun drinking again, Angela was into the seventh month of her pregnancy, and they were arguing.

The argument was about money. It started at dinner and continued late into the night. When the muffled boom of their voices reached the room that TJ shared with Kevin Junior, TJ awoke. He sat up with a start and saw that Kevin Junior was asleep, cocooned in his deafness. TJ knew he was alone, and he began to shake.

Since he had been in the Loudons’ house, he had become terrified by, and schooled in, the rhythms of its violence—violence that was like a cradle being pushed and shoved, first by Kevin, then by Angela, each of them moving deliberately faster, until they rocked
the cradle to the point of madness, until it exploded. Then there would inevitably come the sounds of objects being smashed, and Angela screaming, and the dogs barking, and Angie waking up and running from room to room, crying and begging her daddy to stop.

In the darkness of his bedroom, TJ knew from the roar of the voices in the living room that the chaos had been let loose, and soon the house would be raucous with shattering glass and breaking furniture. He scrambled out of his bed like a small wounded animal trying to outrun wildfire. He ran to the closet and took the spiral notebook out of the blue suitcase and quickly crawled back into bed. He lay with his trembling arms crossed on his chest, the notebook held tightly beneath them. The shaking in his body began to subside as he turned his face to the wall and said: “Do I know my name? Yes, I do. Yes I do … my name is Justin. And my name is Fisher, too.”

In the living room, the argument raged on. Kevin was shouting that the Christmas presents Angela had bought for Angie and Kevin Junior were crap. Angela was screaming that crap was all they could afford because he was a failure and she wished he was dead.

Kevin grabbed at Angela and ripped her nightgown in two. And Angela ran, unclothed, into Kevin Junior’s room. She tried to lock the door behind her, but Kevin kicked it open and sent bits of the door frame splintering onto his son’s bed. Kevin, his face red and the veins in his neck roped and bluish and his breath sour with the smell of whiskey, grabbed his naked, pregnant wife by her hair and threw her across the room.

In that moment, TJ turned his face away from the wall and saw Angela falling past him, toward the corner, toward his piano, a flow of red slipping between her legs, like a snake, winding
down onto the uneven floor. A buckled floorboard was causing the trail of blood to coil back on itself, then slide away again.

Angela fell. The piano broke apart beneath her. TJ heard the sound of music being shattered. And Christmas Day had come to an end.

*

Six other Christmases arrived and departed—most of them listless and forgettable.

TJ remained with the Loudons, sharing Kevin Junior’s room and coming, slowly, over time, to enjoy his company. Kevin Junior was in some ways as coarse and unpredictable as his parents, but he was essentially a kind child, and a bright one. He taught TJ how to communicate in sign language, and he and TJ spent much of their time together in silent, lively conversation about comic books and Darth Vader and what Disneyland, and traveling there in a jet plane, might really be like.

At night, after Kevin Junior was asleep, TJ would open the spiral notebook and give himself over to the photographs that were pasted onto its pages. One of them was the image of a little boy in a bathtub, surrounded by tiles patterned in fish shapes. And there was also a photograph of that same boy, barely more than a baby, standing triumphant on the closed lid of a toy chest, tightly gripping the edge of a window frame. Near the boy’s hand was an indentation that looked like the face of a clown.

Each time TJ gazed at the photos of the two little girls, each time he saw the girl who was invariably smiling, he would hear himself whisper the name Lissa.

And there would be other flickers of memory. He remembered his mother and how sweet her smell was. And he remembered his father and how fast he moved. When he ran.

Night after night, as the sounds of muffled rage would come seeping through his bedroom wall, burning and electric, TJ would turn his face to the darkness, and say: “Do I know my home? Yes, I do. Yes, I do. I live on Lima Street … right at 822.” He would whisper it until it sealed him off from the noise and made him safe. Until it erased TJ who lived with the Loudons, and erased their house, and the town in which it stood, and the world in which it existed.

The world of the Loudons was a jittery place; moods shifted without warning and happiness and unhappiness careened into each other like the cars of a runaway roller coaster. It was a world so disturbed that a thing as simple as looking directly into someone’s eyes could be a terrifying and wounding blunder.

TJ came to understand that if he (or Kevin Junior or Angie) made the mistake of catching Kevin’s eye when Kevin, drunk and furious, was in the act of upending the dinner table, sending food and glass splattering and shattering across the walls, it could lead to being singled out and grabbed and screamed at.

To look at Angela could be just as dangerous. To come into her line of vision when she was in one of her moods—usually after she’d had an altercation with Kevin—was to become the object of a tirade, a mad harangue in which she would weep and shout: “I sacrificed my life. I could have left years ago. Men wanted me. They did! Ask anybody. But instead I gave up everything. And for what? For you, you ungrateful little shits! One of these days, I’m gonna go. I deserve better and I’m gonna go! I owe it to myself.” Then she would rush through the house, running her hands over tabletops and chair backs, screaming that the place was a pigsty and pulling out a wash bucket and scrub brush and dropping to her knees and scouring at the floors and shouting that she was working herself to death and that no one cared.

Because Angie and Kevin Junior were bound to her by the
irrational, strangling cord of birth, they could not learn to look away. They couldn’t escape their mother’s face and the craziness that was in it. They were forced to ride the currents of her rants like a series of raging rapids. And when she would finish, they would huddle around her and they would promise to be better. They would take the scrub brush out of her hand and work with all their might to find a way to make clean, for her, a house that was already immaculate.

And because the same irrational strangling cord tied them to Kevin, they couldn’t look away from him—even when they were dragged from their beds and derided for being lazy and told to polish his cracked work boots until the boots sparkled, even when they were belt-whipped because no sparkle could be made to appear on snow-ruined, salt-stained leather.

But TJ was no one’s child. He could look away. And he did. Over the years, he developed the ability to look at faces without seeing them. He learned to keep his gaze vague and his thoughts in another place—the world that existed in the photographs in the spiral notebook, the safe haven that was the house on Lima Street.

Years passed. Social workers came and went and TJ was left adrift as a foster child in the Loudon household. The Loudons continued to cash the checks for his care, and to become a family that was older and angrier and less stable. And finally, when TJ was almost twelve, Kevin Loudon rode out of Middletown in a Chevy truck with a girl named Donna. She wore no underwear and looked like Angela had once looked, in a time long gone.