Game of Secrets Read online

  “Your shirt’s out on the line, Marne,” my mother says.

  “Great. Thanks.”

  “The salt did the trick.”

  “I bet.”

  My brother shoots me a look. “Just be a little bit nice,” he says quietly. Ray walks back into the room. His eyes flick from Alex to me. The toast pops up. Way too fucking light. My mother slicks the butter on and sets the toast on the milk stool beside me. She doesn’t seem to notice the book. She goes and sits down in her corner.

  “No notice yet for Pard,” Alex says, passing the newspaper across the table to Ray.

  “His wake’s on Saturday,” Ray answers, “you’d have thought they’d run the obit today.”

  “Might not have had room to run all of it.”

  Ray laughs.

  “Tell you the truth,” Alex goes on, “I was surprised not to see Huckie’s truck wrapped in black crepe. How’s he taking it?”

  Ray eats a potato chip. “Oh, you know. He’s shot down. Pretends not to be, but they were close.”

  “Fused,” Alex remarks.

  Ray laughs again. He’s got a nice laugh. His face is sunbaked, from work. He is sitting at the end of the table by the door, his legs stretched out, paint on his jeans. He’s a salvager. Raises boats. Goes diving for other stuff on wrecks and takes odd jobs; this week, he’s been working here with Alex, painting my parents’ house. Ray is the youngest Varick boy. Ada and Silas had five altogether: Junie, Scott, Huck, Green, Ray. Ray was youngest by far, kind of an afterthought, I’ve always figured, some last-ditch shot before his parents split. Ray has the look of his oldest brother, Junie, dead now, and he’s tall like Scott, who came home from Da Nang and worked as a cutter at the fishhouse near Coal Pocket Pier. Of the five Varick brothers, Green was the only one I never knew, but I’ve seen photos. They all have a similar look. With the exception of spit-and-vinegar Huck, who’s got light light eyes, near the color of frost, the rest of them were dark. Ada’s look.

  Ray notices me watching him and gives me another smile. He sets his empty lemonade glass down on the table.

  “Were you working down at the restaurant last night?” he asks me.

  I nod.

  “How’s it going?”

  “It’s work.”

  “Been busy?”

  “Starting to be.”

  “I’ll have to stop down there sometime.”

  “Are you nuts?” Alex says.

  “Why not? The food’s good.”

  “Sure it’s good, you just got to take out a second mortgage to eat it.”

  My brother won’t step foot in that place, the restaurant where I work. He says it’s for the summer crowd. Not in a bitter way. To him, it’s common sense, just air. He’s at home here, in this town where we grew up, where nothing much changes except a few more invisible people move in every year. He likes those people well enough: paints the trim on their guest cottages; he wallpapers their bathrooms.

  “I can’t believe there’s nothing yet for Pard,” Alex is saying.

  “Well, don’t lose any sleep,” Ray answers with a smile. “There will be.”

  The dead in question is Pard Islington, Huck Varick’s twin soul, whose hourglass ran out this past Tuesday while he was watching the Red Sox game with some buddies. Pard knew it was happening. He’d started having pains in his chest from the third inning on, kept popping his nitro. It was a good game, tight score, he didn’t want to miss a thing.

  Yesterday, too, was a long-lunch tribute to Pard, my brother and Ray swapping stories like the light is still on him. From what I’ve heard, Huck and Pard together were quite an event back in the day—boosting crates of clams off the floating piers, lobbing M80s, racing their cars down Route 88. Then that legendary Halloween, Huck got into a fight over some girl up at Alhambras when that place was bulging, just going full-bore—he and Pard got thrown out, drove around town in a pickup, fuming, stealing pumpkins off every porch. They smashed so many down on the Head Bridge, the town had to bring in a front-end loader to clear the road. There were two other boys in that illustrious gang: One overdosed on some alcoholic concoction he’d invented that included Robitussin, the other was drafted to Vietnam, got snuffed out there.

  Pard was always an odd duck, some dark streak in him that gave me the chills. I knew well enough to steer clear, even as a kid. Sometimes I’d see him looking at me funny, like I was tainted somehow: Luce Weld’s granddaughter. All that.

  My mother is looking at me from across the room, her eyes steady, level, like she can hear me thinking this.

  My brother and Ray are talking now about those drag races suzerain Pard used to convene at the state beach parking lot, one o’clock Sunday afternoons in the off-season. The homemade Christmas tree he and Huck set up with three lights—red, yellow, green. The dollar-bill game they used to play on that curvy stretch of Reservation Road, and wasn’t it a miracle no one died.

  “Well, there was that one guy,” Ray says, “after he got creamed, nobody—” Alex shoots a look to silence him, then glances at our mother in her corner by the window, her face just turning away toward the screen like she has noticed something through it.

  Alex gets up, sets his dish in the sink, unwraps the plate of cookies on the counter, takes three, and sits back down.

  They won’t tell those darker bits. They don’t talk casualty, at least not here in my mother’s kitchen. The details are cleaned up, in a kind of deference to her. Alex is like our father in that way, he protects her, he is fierce in that. Patient, thoughtful, in ways that I can never be.

  What has always been curious to me is how easily Ray can tell the story of some knucklehead who met a speeding hot rod, struck so hard his shoes were still in the road, his brains scrambled in the sand dunes—Ray can tell that kind of story like a joke, even though his brother Green, at thirteen, wrapped a car around a tree less than a mile from here and took flight of this life. You have to believe the fingerprints of that are on him somewhere.

  I bite off a small piece of toast and glance at my mother again, in her corner at the hem of things, half listening, half in that somewhere else she gets off to.

  “California’ll do it to you,” I hear my brother say, and I realize, too late, I’ve lost the thread. “Hell, just look at Marne,” he goes on. “Been home, what? Almost six months now, still sulking around, sleeping on Mom’s foldout couch.”

  Alex will do this. When he feels I’ve been harsh with her, he’ll bide his time then take a swing at me out of nowhere.

  “I like the couch,” I say.

  “Makes you think it’s temporary, doesn’t it?”

  “What makes you think it isn’t?”

  My brother shakes his head. “Who are you fooling, Marne? If you don’t come to, fifty years from now, you’ll be eighty-something, that couch’ll be at the landfill and you’ll still be sleeping on it.”

  He says this, and something inside of me snaps. I open my mouth, I don’t know exactly what’s going to come out of it, but then Ray clears his throat and says he doesn’t think they take couches at the landfill anymore.

  He says it just like that, in the calm smooth way he has. I feel a smile touch my face. I glance at Alex. He just looks kind of shocked. I don’t know what he hasn’t been seeing all this week.

  I pick up yesterday’s newspaper from the basket next to me, turn it over, read nothing.

  Alex’s phone rings. By the time he’s fished it out and flipped it open, the ringing has stopped, the call lost. Signal out of range, roaming, roaming. He jiggers with it, hits a few buttons. No luck. Swears.

  “I’m going to run up to the Head, Ray,” he says. “Call the wife back, get some cigarettes. You want to come?”

  “I’ll wait here. Get me a Gatorade, though, will you?”

  Alex’s brow furrows. A curt look at me. “Sure,” he says to Ray, then leaves.

  My mother goes downstairs to put the wash in the dryer. I walk outside with Ray, sit down on the porch steps.

&n
bsp; There is paint on his hands, I notice, occasional places the soap has missed. White flecks strung through his skin like stars. He catches me looking at them and gives me that quick half smile that sometimes I know how to read and other times, don’t.

  “You didn’t start in California, did you?” he says. “After high school?”

  “It was New York first.”

  “That’s right, I remember now.”

  “NYU.”

  ——

  I didn’t last. Even with the scholarship. Midsemester, sophomore year, I took a break, a temporary leave that turned out to be the rest of my life. For a month or so, I lived on coffee, cigarettes, and The Christian Science Monitor. I kept my studio in Hell’s Kitchen, read a collection of stories by Camus, a biography of Jean Cocteau. I discovered the indulgence of Kate’s Paperie. I started making origami creatures, boxes, stars. I grew my nails long and perfected the craft. My apartment was festooned with colored paper beasts. I was nocturnal by nature. I liked the sense of being on my feet, a body in motion. I took a job waitressing.

  “So New York, then California?” Ray asks.

  “Via New Mexico. New Mexico to LA. I thought I’d like LA.”

  He nods, and I can tell he’s mapping out those interim years since he knew me as a kid and I was his best friend’s runt sister—tracing out my life like those arced flight lines you see in airline magazines that color-code the usual, and less frequent, routes of travel.

  The air is dry today, slant of spring light. Ray stretches out one leg, his knee cracks, and the silence between us feels a little tipped over, that sense I get when I am near him, everything inside me hanging by a hinge.

  He looks at his watch. “Where’s that big galoot brother of yours? We need to get back to work.”

  “They must not have had his brand of cigarettes.”

  “Either that or he’s parked in his truck, smoking through them.”

  I shake my head. “I keep telling him: If he doesn’t quit those things, it’s going to be his news I’m reading in the paper.”

  Ray laughs. “We’ll have to work on him.”

  “We will.” The we is out of my mouth before I hear it, just slipped out. He is looking down, elbows resting on his knees, but by his face, I can tell he heard it. That tiny nothing.

  ——

  Who wrote that the soul is nothing more than an occasional outburst of the mind? A longing not unlike a cord of sunlight that passing through dust motes lends them the appearance of being something more than what they are.

  “Heard anything on the weather?” I ask.

  “They’re talking rain next week.”

  “You’ll be finished painting though by then, won’t you?”

  “We should have it wrapped up tomorrow.”

  I nod. I consider asking Ray if he knows that tomorrow, being Friday, is the day my mother still goes to sit with his mother at the picnic table under the shade of a tree outside the Council on Aging, to play that Scrabble game she loves.

  “So are you working this weekend?” he asks.

  “Tomorrow, Saturday, Sunday.”

  “That would be the weekend.”

  “Every weekend.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I get to throw myself around the house for a few days.”

  “You still making those little paper things for Polly?”

  I nod. Polly is the florist up at the Head. Now it’s half florist, half gift shop. She sells lighthouse magnets, sea-glass jewelry, handmade greeting cards, and my little origami doo-dahs.

  I’m working on a shorebird mobile for her, I tell Ray, but it’s the little picture frames that have been the sleeper hit. Polly wasn’t sure how they’d go over, but on the weekends, now that the summer people have started buzzing down, those paper frames are getting snapped up. They slide in cut snapshots of their pets, their kids with snow-coned lips and salt-stiff hair. I never pictured myself as someone who’d be making knickknacks for tourists, but I guess you could say it’s working out so far.

  The other day when I was dropping off some stuff, Polly said excitedly, “For Christmas, I want you to make me two hundred birds, gray and white seagulls to do up a huge tree in the center of the shop, like that one they have down at the Museum of Natural History.”

  I just nodded, yeah sure, Polly, thinking to myself: No fucking way I’m still going to be here come Christmas.

  I do not mention this, of course, to Ray.

  “Do you make any money at it?” he is asking me now.

  “I made more in San Francisco. Had a pretty good gig—worked for a baker out there.” Custom-ordered cakes with my red paper parrots, silver bunnies, Japanese cranes stuck into buttercream frosting. It was a chichi place—a boulangerie. Seventy bucks for a ten-inch cake. They paid me well, threw in free packages of chocolate-dunked biscotti. I gained eight pounds.

  “I’ve heard Polly’s cheap as hell,” Ray remarks. I’m surprised by his vehemence, then I remember that Polly is a friend of Ray’s almost-ex-wife. Took her own husband to the cleaners in her divorce.

  “She’s okay to work for,” I say delicately. “I get to fold paper, I make some money—make more down at the restaurant. You know how it goes. You patch it all together, you come out okay.”

  “I’ve got Anna Mondays and Wednesdays,” he says. Anna is his daughter, nine years old, the same age and grade as my niece. “Tuesday I’ve got a pickup game. What are you up to a week from today?”

  “You aren’t asking me out?”

  He shakes his head and laughs. “Just asking what you’re doing next Thursday.”

  “Next Thursday, more than likely, I’ll be sitting right here, in this spot.”

  “Alright,” he says. “Six on Thursday then, I’ll come by—?”

  Growing up, my brother had a few rules for me: Do what you like, whoever you like, but don’t get knocked up, don’t get caught, and never fuck my friends.

  Right as I am thinking this, as if on cue, Alex pulls into the driveway, guns past us a little too fast. I start to stand up, but then don’t. I just sit. Just stay. Just where I am. Ray’s eyes follow Alex’s truck, pulling in to park behind his. Alex throws his keys on the dash and hits the truck door closed. I can see the square outline of the cigarette pack through his shirt pocket. He starts walking toward us.

  “Ran into your brother up at the Head,” he calls out to Ray. “Man, he bent my ear about that old skiff of his. Half an hour later, I’m still there, and he’s still talking.”

  Ray laughs. “Huckie never shuts up about that fucking boat. Hey, where’s my Gatorade?”

  Alex stops. “I got it.” He turns on his heel and walks back toward the truck.

  “So?” Ray says quietly.

  “Thursday’s good with me,” I say.

  I feel him smile.

  And there we have it: Ada Varick’s youngest son, sitting on Luce Weld’s only daughter’s front porch, making eyes at his granddaughter. Who, as fate flipping has it, is me.

  PART II

  GIRL ON THE BRIDGE

  LILIES

  JANE

  July 23, 2004

  There’s a certain hope you feel at the beginning of a game.

  When the board is empty, the painted number squares in their stripped and perfect symmetry. You can see the pattern of them, the bare underlying design, the logical grid of how they connect, extending outward from that central star. The frame you will build a game upon.

  Ada’s wearing lipstick. Red. That fire-engine color that matches the paint on her nails. She notices me looking at it.

  “Have I got a smudge?”

  “Just a touch.”

  She draws her handkerchief from the pocket in her skirt and wipes it over her teeth.

  “Gone?” she asks.

  “Gone.”

  ——

  Just moments ago, when Carl dropped me off, I looked across the yard and she was there, sitting at this picnic table waiting for me. A woman made of sunlight. T
he red scarf at her neck, loose. The bony outline of her, rim-soaked, half shade. Wearing one of those dresses she always wears; this one pink, a faint print etched into the cotton. The style of dress Rita Hayworth wore. With the collar and buttons down the front, the tie belt, still tight around her waist. Her legs crossed under the table, she leaned in on her elbows. Behind her runs the wall that divides this yard from the cemetery next door, light splashed on the stones like the wet is still on them. From that distance, where I paused across the yard, she looked younger than she is. Still thin, a slip of a thing, the starch and the beauty still in her, just a faint glimmer of sorrow clinging to her face, a kind of wistfulness that I only see in Ada when I come on her like this, before she has noticed I am there, when she is just a woman sitting alone, waiting at an empty picnic table by the stone wall, a small black purse on the bench beside her, lunch in a brown paper bag just like always, the top edge of it folded over neatly.

  She has started to turn the tiles over to the blank side. Her fingers are long. She works from one corner of the box-lid. I start from the other. She has her reading glasses pushed back on her head, her hair in its slow pin curls falling. Silver. Some dark still in it. Every Friday when we meet, it seems, I need to learn her face again, her eyes that uncertain color, not quite green or brown, the left one blood-rimmed, a thick water at the corner of it, the eye she has some trouble with.

  “Just now, Janie,” she says, still flipping the tiles, “while I was setting here, waiting on you, I looked over at that line of wild lilies there by the roadside. There’s a clump of them lilies out front of my old house on Main Road. Above Dunham’s brook on the hill. You know the spot, don’t you, where the old wall’s sunken into the brush and the road bends? Every time I drive by that spot this time of year, I see them lilies blooming all of a day like they do, and I notice how the fields look some the same as how they used to. Cows put to pasture in one and in another, the corn just up. They aren’t farmers—the ones that own the house now—some lawyer and his wife from somewhere upcountry, Boston maybe—they lease those fields to the Smith boys for the tax break, but it still looks some the same, with the old gate still there, and the stoned-in burying yard down below where my brothers and I used to go and eat our lunch under that big tree. We’d pick some of those lilies, stick them in a mason jar, and eat in the shade, sitting on the stones, our feet dangling over.”