Game of Secrets Read online

  We are almost ready—our lake of blank tiles in the scarlet box, the delicate markings of wood-color etched into their backsides the only clues to the letters they are. We’ve played this game so many times I should know which is a D, which is an X by those discolorations. How strange to think this may be the last time we flip these tiles. I need to tell her. Her fingers are moving slowly now, some thought unspooling through her.

  “Those lilies always remind me of that gray horse I had. Did I ever tell you the story of that gray horse?”

  “Hmm,” I murmur, noncommittal. I love this story.

  “My pa brought that horse home from up north once when he went up to trade. He’d bring them back green, and sometimes he’d take my brothers with him, but never me. I always wanted to go. He promised someday, but it never did happen.

  “I must have been just seven when my pa brought the gray horse home. I remember my head just come up as far as his shoulder when I was brushing him out. He was big, no beauty, but he was fine. Built for work and he worked hard. Smart, too. He come to learn where the stones were in the field, and year to year he wouldn’t forget, would go to step around them, even before the plow turned. My pa would pair him with one of the younger horses, hitch them both up, and within a day that gray horse would have the younger one trained. It looked after me, that gray horse.

  “I used to go fishing, sometimes with my brothers, but more often on my own, with a cherry stick I cut back in the woods, some string, and a can with worms. I’d go down the path below the fields through the swamp woods and over the little stone bridge to fish trout in the brook. There was a snake living under that stone bridge. A big black one. Near six foot long, and once when I was crossing over, that snake come out from behind a rock and come after me, fast, like it was going to bite, and I ran. Just barely got away from it. And the whole time that day I was fishing, all I could think about was how I had to cross back over that little bridge to get home, and I knew that snake would be waiting on me there. Finally, come eveningtime, I set off, headed home, and that snake, he was there, in the dirt on the other side of the stone bridge, just lying there, skin stamped flat, dead as dead, splattered blood and gore and hoofprints through the dirt around him. Sometimes now when I drive by my old house and see those wild lilies, I remember all of that.”

  They are daylilies, I could point out. Not technically wild. I don’t bother. I have told Ada this before, and she has given me that look and shrugged, that way she has, that little turn in her mouth like she knows one better. They don’t grow just where you put them, she would answer. They get off on their own. Grow where they like.

  December will be her eightieth birthday. Twenty years older than I am, she was born in 1924, when it was still an event to watch a plane pass overhead.

  This will strike me at times—the rift in years between us. By the time I was three, Ada was in her early twenties, already working her stuff on my father. Given that rift, and every consequence since, how unlikely it is that Ada and I should still be drawn here together, to this board laid out, this rite.

  There used to be four of us. Besides me and Ada, there was Ada’s best friend, Vivienne Butler, and Caroline Wilkes. We met every Friday. We used to go bowling up at Midway Lanes next to the drive-in; then Vivienne blew out her knee, and Ada hurt her hip. Around that same time, they closed those lanes, bulldozed the drive-in to put up a Walmart. So we started playing Scrabble instead.

  Caroline didn’t like Scrabble. She said the game went too slow but, in truth, she was just lousy at it, and competitive, which Ada remarked once was a mix that didn’t bode well. Ada was right, and Caroline quit playing with us after a year. We’d run into her in the community room, when we met for our Friday games. In the winter, or if the weather was poor, we’d play inside and Caroline might be sitting at another table there, with Betsy Cornell or Peg Amaral, playing Yahtzee or some other game you tear through in a quarter of an hour and put all your trust in the dice.

  Vivienne was the one who loved Scrabble, even more, I think, than Ada or I did. Vivi was that way. She loved things easily. And she was wickedly good at the game. She could have clocked us both handily any day of the week, but she was a noble player, Vivienne, artful and generous. She wasn’t the kind who’d intentionally make a move to sabotage someone else’s chance. She played with an eye to the sum of the total scores.

  She used to do those round-robin Scrabble tournaments they held in Fall River back when the game was all the rage. It was Vivi’s board we started playing on, and her set of letters in the purple velvet Crown Royal sack with the gold-fringed drawstring, until she lost the Q and one of the M’s. Then we started using mine.

  Vivienne had a knack for making boodles—the term Ada coined for those plays you make when you use all seven letters at once and nab the fifty-point bonus.

  Vivi’s sole flaw: She always played for the words. She’d cling to two S’s and squander three turns, fish or pass if she had to, trying to place P-O-S-S-I-B-L-E. Or she’d lay down some beauty like C-Y-G-N-E-T for no extra points when she could have nailed Y-E-T on a triple-word score.

  “It’s not a game of words, Vivienne,” Ada used to tell her.

  Over and over, she’d tell her.

  “In the end, it all comes down to numbers.”

  Vivienne was an Arsenault, born French Canadian, a good Catholic, went to Mass twice a week, married Lawrence Butler, had fourteen children: twelve girls and two boys. They lived up in North Westport near the old Indian reservation. For over a quarter of a century, Vivienne changed diapers, washed, soaked, bleached them, strung them up like prayer-flags on the line. I remember driving by her house once with Carl when we were just married, and I was pregnant with Alex, and seeing Vivienne out there in the yard. It was all green and sunlight and wind through the grass, babies crawling over one another on her lap, toddlers stumbling, and the older ones laughing, running with a kite, and the hose was out, one of the tall girls, blond and leggy, holding it and water was spraying, shot all through with the light, the wind taking that water, and those diapers, bleached and whitened, lifted by that same wind against a blue sky that seemed to go forever. Vivienne glanced up and saw us as we drove by, and waved. It was one of those moments between moments where life extends, grows endless, and I wanted to stop, to walk into that moment, that idyll of no past or future, only a present of everything possible in those children and that sky. Then the road curved and we sped on. But sometimes still, I think of that. Like now, when I see the blank tiles facedown, all turned over, floating in the box-lid beside the empty board.

  STAR-SPLITTER

  JANE

  July 23, 2004

  “You planning to keep score today, Janie?” Ada asks me.

  “Sure.”

  She nods toward the pad of paper we keep in the box and the pen that reads EYE HEALTH, ROUTE 6, with a phone number. I reach for the paper and pen while she takes out two of the wooden racks.

  I am the one who keeps score. Ada always asks though, just the same.

  She flips over a tile. E.

  I pull a K.

  I write her name at the left top of the blank page, mine beside it, as she draws her first rack of letters. She draws them like she always has, one from each of the four corners of the box-lid and three from the center.

  She sets all seven in her rack. “Crap,” she murmurs. She moves a few of them around as I draw mine. S. F. U. R. E. A. F.

  Suffer. Fuse. Ruse. Sure. Fears.

  It’s an old set, the game we play with now. It was my mother’s. Someone gave it to my grandfather Gid in the early sixties—and Gid having no inkling or interest, gave it to his booksmart daughter, Emily. She taught me to play. After she was gone and I was going through her house, I found that Scrabble set wrapped in a grain bag, in the crawl space under the stairs. It’s not plastic, the board, and there’s no turntable underneath. The box is the burgundy-colored, cardboard kind. Where it has split along the seams, I’ve taped it back with masking t
ape, so the box-lid still fits tight. I’ve never told Ada it was my mother’s. Not that it should bother her any with the time gone by. It does brush through me, though, on occasion. I wonder how my mother would feel about my Friday games with Ada.

  In the fat margin on the side of the board where the letters that spell the word SCRABBLE run down, in the lower corner that today is by Ada’s left hand, my maiden name is written in cursive script. I don’t remember writing it. Only imagine I must have in some long hour of a childhood game.

  “What time did you get here?” I ask Ada now, one of those questions I always seem to ask.

  “Just before you did.”

  “Did Huck bring you?”

  She makes a face. “I drove myself. He got into it with me this morning about that damn boat. He just won’t leave off. Trying to pork-barrel me into glassing it in. Seems that boat is all we’ve got left to fight over.”

  Huck is Ada’s middle son. His given name was Elton, but he shed that quick. He’s the one she lives with now, in the old hurricane house on the postage-stamp lot near the town beach, on one of those skinny lanes that run behind the dunes. Ada had five boys altogether. Lost two: her oldest, Junie, when his scallop boat went down ten years ago in a storm off Georges Bank. And Green.

  She keeps still about Green. Almost never talks about him, even now—more than three decades later. But she’ll chatter on about Junie daylight-to-dark. She’s always claimed Junie was her favorite. And it might be so. She was seventeen when she had him, so they more or less grew up together. She says that of all of her boys, Junie was the one she understood, the one who understood her. She and Vivienne used to scrap about it, Vivi telling Ada you can’t love one more than another, and saying the only reason Ada thought she loved Junie best was because he was her first, so she had him alone for that spell. Four years, it was, before her next one came along. She would drag him with her everywhere: snowshoeing through the woods behind the farm, Junie swaddled in blankets in a laundry basket tied to a sled she pulled. Late June, when the fireflies were out and the swordfish came in, she’d drive with him down to the wharf to watch the boats bring in their catch at the end of the day. Or on a fine morning, she’d strap him into a little cork life-vest and they’d motor out together over the bluegreen surface to the bell because he loved to hear the sound of it. She has told me this before, told it many times, like the memory of those mornings, the lap of a calm sea against the hull is a living thing still in her—

  Even now when Ada talks about those early days with Junie, both of us know how much more isn’t getting said, but I just smile with her and listen. Because when she talks about Junie, her face glows, and it is a simple glow, incandescent, pure, no hardness in it, like thinking of Junie draws her back into that brief smooth time in her life when there was a sort of rustic peace to things, she and Silas newly married, still in love perhaps. She hadn’t started messing around. He hadn’t tried to carve her up.

  “All I’ve got’s a four-letter word,” she says now. “You got something better, Janie?”

  She hates to start the board off small.

  I shake my head. Lie. I’ve never liked to be the one who makes the first move.

  Ruse. Suffer. Surf.

  Ada lays down R-O-V-E. The O on the star, to keep me from using a high-point consonant on the light blue double-letter squares that flank it. She thinks about the numbers. She is good at the game that way. But she won’t play tight like I will. Ada hates a closed board.

  “What’d you bring?” she asks.

  I glance at the package wrapped in the Lees bag. “Just some old junk I came across.”

  “I meant for lunch.”

  “Cheese and tomato.”

  “You always bring cheese and tomato,” she says lightly, casually, but her eyes flick to the other package, curious now.

  A strand of her hair has come loose. She tucks it back in place. “Boar’s Head Ham was on sale at Shaw’s,” she says. “Four ninety-nine a pound.” She draws four new tiles and sets them into her rack. “Picked up two bottles of Planters Mixed Nuts as well. They had them on special, buy one, get one free. Ray came the other night for supper and couldn’t budge the cap open on those mixed nuts, he knocked it so hard on the floor the glass broke. He was stomping around, been in such a funk over that girl of yours. Even with her hair all sawed off.” A pause. “Marne’s a tough little person, isn’t she? Won’t let herself get tied down like she thinks that’ll keep her free.”

  I shake my head. “She’s just afraid she’ll end up like me.”

  Ada snorts. “How’s that now? Happily-ever-after’s not good enough for her?”

  I don’t need to tell Ada that’s not how Marne sees it. That’s not how she sees me. A wife, a mother, nothing else. Never left the town she was born in. Never learned to drive.

  Ada’s just about had it with my daughter. She’s made up her mind about Marne, and once Ada’s mind is set, there’s no wiggle room. She won’t back down. I can’t say it hasn’t been a sticking point between us.

  “I don’t know why such a pretty girl as your Marne would go and cut off all that pretty hair.”

  Marne did have pretty hair. So blond when she was small. Almost white. Not at all like Alex. Like the other one, Samuel, Marne was fair. It was lovely long. Her hair. I remember the flow of it down her small back.

  Thirty-five now, Marne has always been her father’s daughter, trotting around after Carl. He taught her dominoes, pitch, hearts. She didn’t get seasick like Alex did, and Carl would take her out lobstering when they were potting close to shore. She’d stand on a wooden crate and bait the traps. She was never one for dolls or toys, and she didn’t much like hanging around the house unless I was baking bread. She’d help me punch the dough down, shape the loaves, and while things baked, we’d read. Marne always loved to read, loved her picture books, and longer stories, too. I read her the Norse myths and Emily Dickinson’s poems. I’d glance down at her little face, scrunched up in concentration, rapt. It was the one time she’d sit still with me, snug in, her little hand clutching one of mine.

  When did it start? I have asked myself this. When did that coldness begin to gather in her eyes, the disdain in her voice as she’d correct how I talked: “You’re mixing your tenses again.”

  It started before she had left us for the first time—those little barbed remarks. I remember thinking at one point it was just some notion, some late-teenage, mother–daughter muck she was trying to sort through. Give it time, I told myself. That coldness, it will drop from her. Won’t it? She’ll come around.

  “Are you going to take your turn, Janie?” Ada says.

  “I’m still thinking.”

  “So what sort of old junk?” She nods to the package wrapped in the Lees bag.

  “There was a poem,” I say. Her nose wrinkles. I smile. “I took that out.”

  “You know I’m too stupid for poems.”

  “You liked that one I brought about the daylilies.”

  “Fair to middling.”

  “You liked the Robert Frost one.”

  “Which one was that?”

  “About the farmer who burned down his barn to buy a telescope.”

  “What was that one called?”

  “ ‘Star-Splitter.’ ”

  “Right,” she says with a smile. “I did like that one.”

  Ada has always liked the stars. She likes sitting out in the night. She used to say that apart from her granddaughter, the only good thing that came out of Huck’s marriage to that rich girl from the Point was a subscription to Smithsonian magazine they bought for her one Christmas along with a pair of special binoculars that were good for roaming the sky.

  Ada never liked that girl. Called her the carpetbagger. Huck’s whole marital experiment lasted barely a minute. Ada still has those binoculars, though. “They’re quite fine,” she’ll say. “They give you a nice wide view. You can hold them right up to your eye, and they don’t turn whatever you’re looking at u
pside down.”

  She is talking about Marne again now. She is telling me that the mistake I make is letting it get to me.

  I tell her I don’t.

  “Oh, but you do, Janie. How could you not, really? You’re like a piece of tissue blowing around, picking up things. That whippety daughter of yours needs a good talking-to. Needs someone to come along and tell her to get the hell out of that bad mood. How long has she been in that mood anyhow? Fifteen years?”

  I smile. Thereabouts.

  She wants to go a step farther, I can feel it, stir things up. She doesn’t, though, for now.

  A Scrabble board, Ada said to me once, is like the dark space between stars. You look up into that space and think it’s nothing, you think it’s got no use, because there’s nothing in it you can touch or see or smell. But it’s wild, that space, not empty at all, it’s full of dark stars, black holes, heat, and storms that bend and squeeze the light that you can see.

  I remember when she told me this, there was a smile on her face, that funny sort of quiet smile, almost complicit, I have seen her get sometimes, like we share a secret.

  “Think of all the games we’ve played out on this board, Janie,” she said to me that day. “All the words that we’ve laid down.”

  And all those other words we haven’t.

  She did not say it, didn’t have to. I knew.

  Those other words, as yet unplayed but living still between us.

  I used to wonder what would happen then, if we did play out those unsaids. If there would still be reason for us to meet here on a Friday.

  Would I come? Would she still be waiting? I thought about it this morning driving here. Holding the box on my lap as Carl drove, knowing today could be the last game.

  I save one of the F’s. I lay the S on R-O-V-E, and spell F-A-R-E-S going up. I could have written F-E-A-R-S, but there was no reason to make that choice when I had another. I could have made S-U-F-F-E-R for eight more points, but that would have opened up the board a little more than I like to. Besides, an F can be a useful letter to hang on to for a turn. Like an H, an F is the kind of four-point letter you can set on a number square and make it work both ways. Like a secret, it can be a thing worth keeping.