Game of Secrets Read online

  GRAY HORSE

  JANE

  July 23, 2004

  Ada has taken another turn, played W-E-L-K-I-N off the E, running down, she landed the K on the dark blue triple-letter square—twenty-eight points.

  She is talking about Huck and the fight they had over the skiff. I can feel the fire in her, sparks kicked up.

  “So stubborn,” she says, “how that one gets, yip-yapping on about that boat, giving me the bull, when it’s his own damn fault for not looking after it like he should. Every year, Janie, it’s the same. I have to get on him, nagging, to be sure he gets the bottom scraped and painted, and him giving me that hangdog look like somebody’s just stole his bicycle, saying, ‘That skiff don’t warrant the work, Ma, that thing’s just junk,’ dragging his sorry feet like always, because he thinks the world will wait to turn until he’s ready. Just this morning, I was having a nice quiet morning, just me and my coffee alone out on the porch, and he come outside, busting up my good peace and quiet, launching in about how we should either get rid of that boat once and for all, or have Pete Savage glass it in. I turned on him then, told him he can just forget about glass, that skiff’s near as old as he is, it’s mine, and there’s no way I’m going to let anyone glass over that wood because what would it be then?”

  She stops a moment, looking down at her letters, then at the word I have just made. A little word. K-I-P.

  Her fingers drum the table. She is seeing something there, in the letters. Some word. I can feel it.

  “He gets all het up,” she murmurs. “That one. Hidebound just like his father was.” She glances at me. A pause, and then she says, “I remember one winter, Janie, it was good and winter and Silas got into the drink. He started chopping up chairs for firewood, then other stuff as well. He would have chopped up that boat if Junie and I hadn’t hooked up the trailer and brought it over to my brother Swig’s house. All the years I had it, Silas hated that boat, and that night I knew he was so stewed, he’d have gone at it with an ax if I’d given him the chance, chopped it to kindling and splinters just like he did that baby grand piano that had belonged to his grandmother, the piano his mother used to play even when she was old and the rheumatism got bad in her hands, still she’d play, wring such sweet music from those keys. But Silas, he didn’t care none what that piano was to her, or maybe that’s why he went and did it. I’ll tell you, though, I wasn’t going to let him get his hands on that boat. He hated that boat, he did, hated it like everything I loved that had to do with water—”

  Her voice breaks off. She looks down again at her letters. She takes one from the end of her rack, knocks two others apart. She sets it in the gap, and I feel the silence open between us like a field, those fine light threads that have stitched her life to mine—my father, her husband, our sons—

  I never minded that web between Ada and me—before this spring, it never seemed unfree, but when those sparks between Ray and Marne began to fly last month, it dawned on me—it wasn’t only the dead that bound me to Ada and it wasn’t only the dead who were bound.

  She dumps down three letters: C-A-D. Which surprises me. It is unlike her, to play small, not to mention setting a C on an outer edge. C’s and V’s—no way to build off them—they stymie up the board.

  “There’s a word for you,” I say.

  She ignores me. She picks her new tiles.

  “You must be fishing, Ada Varick, to make such a weensy word.”

  She shrugs. “That C was holding me back.”

  I have drawn the X. I could put it against the exposed A. But I don’t have the vowels I need to make it work well. Ada has reached into her lunch bag and pulled out a bottle of ginger beer. She unscrews the cap and drinks, then sets it down, bits of dust or air falling through the amber liquid inside. She always brings a ginger beer. Around the bottleneck, a trace of color, lipstick, glistens. I glance at her rack. She has the letters divided. Five and two. If it were Vivienne, that would tell you she had a five-letter word she was setting up for. But not Ada. Five and two told you nothing about Ada.

  “I saw Huck this morning,” I tell her.

  “That so?”

  “While I was on my walk. He was upriver some, tonging quahogs, in the deeper water off the Point of Pines.”

  Ada glances up. “You walked the bridge?”

  I nod.

  “Haven’t done that in a while, have you?”

  “No.”

  “When was it last, sometime back in the winter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Around Christmastime, wasn’t it?”

  “That day of Christmas Eve.”

  She nods slowly. “Yes, that’s right,” she says. “That day. I remember.”

  As if it was a day either of us was going to forget.

  ——

  This morning, I had Carl drop me at the corner of Drift Road and 88, across from where they diverted the brook when the state made their takings and laid the highway, that corner where the Wilkes family used to live, running across the road to draw their water from that brook. I started from there, and as I walked up the highway toward the bridge, I could see the sky opening ahead of me, that slight darker slip of the ocean between the pine scrub and the dune that faded in and out of view.

  As I was coming up to the bridge, I passed the Cambodian man. He’s been fishing the bridge a few years now, the only one who still does, it seems. He comes out from Fall River, wears a big straw hat. It’s always the same: He’ll fish there for a while, then the Staties come around to kick him off, and he’ll get gone for a few days, then come back to fish some more until they come around to kick him off again.

  “You should have come by to see me,” Ada says.

  “I didn’t know if you’d be home.”

  She smiles. “Now, where else are you thinking I’d be?”

  I put the X by. And set the second F into the cleft between the two I’s. Double word both ways. Twenty points. If. If. Then I draw.

  Ada hasn’t moved. That surprises me. I had expected her to set something down right away. I felt she had something, I felt that sort of humming you can feel at times with Ada. It’s all you can really feel with her. It’s when you know she is holding some good word, just waiting for her chance.

  But she is strangely quiet. Turning something over in her head. Her fingers drumming again, light on the table. A catbird calls from the woods behind us. A car pulls into the COA parking lot and up to the front steps. A woman gets out of the passenger side with a cane. She looks over in our direction, at me and at the game, and frowns a little. She holds the rail tightly as she makes her way up the stairs. The door closes behind her. And still Ada is quiet.

  ——

  This morning, as I was crossing the bridge, just as my foot landed on the draw, pigeons flushed out from underneath, a rush of wings, they startled me. Without meaning to, my eyes followed them, on the wing coasting down. I saw her there: the girl from the snapshot, the girl I was once, I saw the reflection of her face above the shadows of the piles and the rail, the dark geometry of the bridge in the river. The tide was falling, the river pulling fast-like through her hair. I didn’t recognize her at first. Then I did.

  I still have that photograph. A few years after we were married, Carl took it into the city—a shop there—and got it reframed. Now it hangs in the front room on the wall above the little table where I’ve set the orchid Marne gave me for my birthday in April.

  That orchid was a gorgeous thing when I first unwrapped it from the newsprint, three blooms on it, deep purple, a shock of white in the throat of each. But the frost had touched it just in the short distance from Marne’s car into the house, and those blooms went by soon after, so now that orchid is all skinny branch, no bud on it. I know Marne wants me to toss it out. So like Marne to want that. She thinks it’s got no chance of coming back. I keep it on the little table for the warm light coming through the window there, under the photograph of the girl on the bridge. When Marne’s in the room, I’ve notic
ed, she doesn’t look at that orchid or, if she does, it’s with the same little hardness in her eyes she turns at times on me.

  They don’t take well, I could tell her, exotic things in this sort of a climate.

  “Do you remember that man?” I ask Ada now. “That city engineer who worked on the new bridge? He was very tall, he wore those funny blue-tinted glasses. Do you remember the summer he lived at the Point, 1962 it was, the summer before they took the old bridge down?”

  “You mean the one with the ducktail hair, always strutting around?”

  “Yes, him.”

  She nods. “I remember.”

  He wasn’t Westport. You could tell that at a glance—how he talked, dressed. Back then, you could always tell. Back then, they didn’t try to dress local, didn’t try to patch in. And it wasn’t only how they dressed, sunhats or whales on their belts or how their kids tore up and down Main Road on their bicycles in chino shorts and flip-flops. It was that certain sheen they had, every one of them who came from a somewhere else seemed to have it, that city gloss still on them when they started washing in those first few weeks of summer as the weather warmed, their eyes wide, full of the river and the salt wind, all the free and thoughtless beauty this place was to them. We didn’t mix. They were shadows to us. They’d come for their few months, then leave, and the village would be ours again, back to its slow and still, everyone burrowed into their own like eels in the mud. Growing up, I was in and out of every one of those houses down the Point. Now Carl and I walk up Main Road. We pass people. Nobody knows who we are.

  Yesterday, though, I got to thinking about that bridge engineer, about those little snapshots he took. He rented Gid’s shucking house that summer, the summer they opened the highway. It was seeing Marne yesterday dragging my book around, that old library book I picked up off the floor of my father’s car years ago. I’d noticed her flipping through it earlier this summer, in a desultory Marne sort of way. That was right around when Ray started coming by, more for her than for Alex. Then things between her and Ray kicked up, and that book disappeared. Yesterday, I saw she’d dug it out again. All day, it seemed, she moped around the house with her nose in that book.

  “He was an odd man,” I say to Ada now. “That city engineer. Different.”

  Ada shakes her head, looking down at the board. “They’re all the same.”

  She looks past my shoulder toward the road, then her eyes shift back to me. Her fingers are touching one tile on her rack, gently, the smooth bare edge. “Something else,” she says, “about that gray horse. This I don’t think I’ve ever told you. When he got old, his leg got hurt, his knee all swelled up, some infection in it. He couldn’t work, some days could hardly walk. Finally, one morning, I remember my pa, coming down the stairs to breakfast, pulling his suspenders over his shoulders, and telling us that when he got back from the auction in Acushnet, he was going to put that gray horse down. My brothers went with him that day to the auction—it was just me and my ma in the house. Around nooning time, when we were washing the downstairs windows, we heard a sound. It was like a train sound. We felt the ground shuddering through the floor, and we went outside and saw the horses, all of them, somehow they’d gotten loose, broke down the fence or whatever. Somehow they’d slipped through, and that gray horse, he was herding the rest of them, running them one end of the field to the other. My ma and me, we went down with ropes and halters, tried to get them back up into the pasture near the horse barn, and finally we did, but they were wild that day, those horses, rearing up and bucking, unruly-like. He had made them wild. At last we got them settled, gave them grain and water, and they were all there, all except the gray one. We looked everywhere for him, even down the lower fields and in the fields across the way. We couldn’t find him nowhere. When my pa and brothers got home, they set out searching, combing the fields, and it was down in the lowest one, close by the river, my pa saw a little place where the brush was broken down, just barely. They hacked in there and found him, the gray horse. He’d worked himself down into a little hollow, right down by the river. I remember my pa shaking his head. No moving him now, he said. He’s chosen his spot. That’s the spot it’ll be. So Pa called on Albion Parks from up Cornell Road, and Albion, he come down with his bulldozer. Horse was dead by then, and they mounded the dirt right over him there where he lay.”

  Ada stops. She leans to the left some, gives a little stretch to her back. Cat-like. Then she smiles at me, her eyes green now, a true green. The sun in them is bright.

  “Now, Janie. Isn’t that the way it should happen?” she says.

  I look up at her, startled, surprised almost she’d say a thing like that, but then I see the impish look in her eye.

  And I know. I know what is coming. I know by how she took her time with that story. Like she had all the time in the world. I know what is coming even before she starts taking the letters off her rack, even before she lays all seven of them down.

  BOODLES

  JANE

  July 23, 2004

  T-I-N-C-T-U-R-E

  She has built it off the C in C-A-D, using a blank for the R. T-R-O-V-E-S running across.

  “Such a funny thing isn’t it, with those joker tiles?” she remarks lightly, drawing her new letters. “Do you remember how Vivi would come right apart every time she drew one of those blanks like she just couldn’t cope with the freedom of it?”

  I don’t answer. I am tallying her score.

  “Twenty for the words,” she says. “Don’t you forget my fifty for the boodle.”

  I should have known. She would never play a small word unless she was using it as a foothold to fling the board open. She’s got no charity for my style of keeping things tight. The part of me that shies from risk rankles her. It’s as close to a doctrine as I’ve ever known her to hold: Ada has always played for an open board.

  “Cad indeed,” I say. “You were fishing.”

  She doesn’t answer, but by the faintly smug expression on her face, I can tell.

  “Shining me on.”

  “I’m not the one who plots out her dinks twelve moves ahead.”

  “You plotted this one.”

  She laughs. “A little serendipity never did hurt.”

  She made that word once. Serendipity. Got a boodle for it. Ran the end of the word off S-E-R-E.

  She takes another sip of her ginger beer, sets the bottle back, flicks something off her hand.

  You remember the boodles. Those plays made, all seven letters dropped at once, a rack emptied. Even after every other detail of a game has been bleached from your mind, you will remember those words. Not just because each is worth that extra fifty-point bonus, even before the word itself is tallied, but because that play is so often the one that changes the flow of a game.

  I-N-G-E-S-T-S

  S-H-A-T-T-E-R-E-D

  S-T-U-P-E-F-Y

  S-I-L-E-N-C-E

  T-E-N-S-I-O-N

  T-R-I-B-U-N-A-L

  E-X-T-O-L-L-E-D

  Q-U-I-X-O-T-I-C. That was Vivienne’s. As was A-L-T-R-U-I-S-T. Appropriately so.

  C-A-M-O-U-F-L-A-G-E-D. That was mine, built off F-L-A-G.

  Once, and this topped all else, Ada made U-N-K-N-O-W-A-B-L-E.

  N-O-W was already on the board. She dropped U-N-K at one end, A-B-L-E at the other.

  I remember that play like it happened an hour ago, Vivi shaking her head in disbelief, looking from the word to Ada’s empty rack, then at me. “Only you, Ada,” she said as she wrote down the score. “I can wake up and die right, now that I’ve seen that one.”

  And she did. Just a short time later.

  Unknowable. It was funny, that word. When Ada set it down, at first blush, looking at it, I almost challenged. That quick doubt, my mind tipped. It didn’t feel like a true word. I remember going down a list in my head, even as Ada was filling her rack with new letters.

  know

  knowing

  knowledge

  known

  knowable<
br />
  unknown

  I kept thinking it should have been unknown.

  There was a story my father, Luce, told me once about the standing stones off S’cunnet Point. Part of that old Indian legend about the Giant who, weary of the world, took his children out to play on a spit of land. He drew a line in the sand with his toe. The tide rushed in, the water rose. He turned his children into fishes and they were swept away under the waves. When the Giant’s wife came home and learned what he had done, she made such a storm with her crying and her grief, kept up such a racket that finally the Giant took her body up and threw her down hard, and where she struck became those standing stones.

  T-I-N-C-T-U-R-E

  It haunted me as a child—that story of the stone wife.

  ——

  Ada is watching a car turn in to the parking lot. “There’s Louise,” she says, but makes no move to call to the woman getting out. “Good Lord. Is that Louise? What in hell has she done to her hair? She looks like a carnation.”

  Her face turned slightly now, I notice a cut on the bone above her eye. I don’t remember that. A thin darker line woven through her brow, a slight reddened swelling around it.

  “Did you fall?” I ask.

  “Hmm?”

  “Your eye.”

  “Oh that. Dropped a pill under the table while I was talking on the phone, bent down to pick it up and managed to coldcock myself with a chair. Figured with Silas not around anymore, I’d have a go at it myself. Hurt like the dickens. For a few hours, I was hobbling around like a half-bred cow. I must have looked a sight. Huck got all in a state when he come home that afternoon and found me on the couch, watching Oprah with a black eye and an ice pack on my head. ‘Not a word,’ I said to him as he come through the door, ‘not one word about that damn boat or I’ll go and tell everyone you did this to me.’ There’s still a bit of a shine.” She points. I see it then, a deeper blue half circle under that one eye, like salt-glisten, I hadn’t noticed it before.