The Language of Secrets (23 page)

*

In the wake of Kevin’s departure, Angela and her children took up residence in the back bedroom of Angela’s parents’ home on Francis Avenue in Middletown and TJ was moved into the care of Stan and Suzy Zelinski.

The Zelinski house was a modest place with a manicured square of lawn at its front; a place where storm windows went up each year before the arrival of the first winter snow and promptly came down with the departure of the last.

Stan Zelinski was heavyset and carried himself with military precision. His daily uniform was a fresh denim work shirt and a pair of khaki slacks with a knife-sharp crease. He owned the same hardware store in Middletown that his father and grandfather had owned, and he was involved in community activities, especially those having to do with young people.

Stan and Suzy had one son and, over the years, countless foster children—so many, in fact, that they had often been written up in the newspaper and people had given the nickname “Zelinski Kids” to the children who cycled through Suzy and Stan’s care. The majority of the Zelinski Kids had been girls because, as Stan had explained early on, he and Suzy had been unable to have any more children after their son had been born, and Suzy wanted little girls to fuss over. Suzy was sweet and unaffected. Plump and still girlish at forty-two, she was a woman who, when filling out any paperwork requiring the listing of an occupation, proudly wrote
mom
.

At the Zelinskis’, TJ had a room of his own. It was small and neat. On the wall above the bed there was a framed poster from an air show. Suzy had told TJ that her son, Ted, when he was about TJ’s age, had liked looking at the poster and dreaming about flying. “I thought you might enjoy having it,” Suzy had said. “But if you’d rather have something else to dream by, just let me know, okay?”

TJ had no interest in her offer. He was already in possession of the images that fuelled his dreams; they were in a worn spiral notebook at the bottom of his battered blue suitcase.

The time with Suzy and Stan proved to be a welcome relief from the volatility of TJ’s years with the Loudons—life there had been a Molotov cocktail; life at the Zelinskis’, in comparison, was a glass of warm milk.

Suzy baked cookies. She had a vegetable garden, and helped with homework. Stan was a scoutmaster, and coached Little League, and never missed one of the high school baseball games in which his son was the pitcher. Ted was a good-natured kid who handled a ball the way Howlin’ Wolf played the blues; he was a natural. It was from watching Ted Zelinski play baseball that TJ would ultimately develop a lifelong love for the game.

TJ was twelve and Ted was sixteen when they met; their lives ran in companionable parallel, but in the eighteen months they shared before Ted left the Zelinski house to go to college, there was no deep connection formed between them; nor was any real connection ever established between TJ and Suzy, or TJ and Stan.

Stan’s life was consumed with scouting, and Little League, and fund-raising for a new community center. Suzy’s attention was given to the foster daughters who came and went from the Zelinski house on a regular basis. While each of the girls was with her, Suzy hovered over her and doted on her, and then when she left, Suzy cried for her.

When he first came to the Zelinskis’, TJ kept to himself and to his ritual of the notebook and the song. But by the time he was in middle school, he no longer needed the notebook to see the pictures it contained. He had made them his reality and his history. The contents of the notebook and the information in the song had been forged into a body and soul for Justin Fisher: a boy who had always lived, and been loved, in the house on Lima Street.

Toward the end of his stay with the Zelinskis, TJ was escaping to Lima Street less often; his attention was shifting from the past
and moving toward his future. He was occupied with sports and girls and the pursuit of a college scholarship that would propel him out of Middletown.

In his final six months in Stan and Suzy’s care, his heart was captured by the newest of the Zelinski Kids, a shy doe-eyed girl with ebony skin.

She was a child who loved books and music, and who wrote poems on bits of pink paper and folded them into tiny squares and kept them under her pillow, hidden, like an accumulation of compressed, unspoken wishes. Her name was Cassie.

On her first day in the house, she appeared in the doorway of TJ’s room wearing a faded long-sleeved pink dress and a pair of pink socks. Her first words to him were: “Are you real?”

TJ was at his desk, studying. At the sound of her voice he looked up, and was startled by her intense blackness, and her fragility, and her sweet, little-girl beauty. When she spoke again, her voice was soft and cautious, as if she’d learned long ago to stay small and to keep secrets. “Are you real? Or are you like me?” she asked.

And because TJ, too, was no one’s child, he knew what she was saying. “I’m like you,” he told her.

She smiled a smile that was slow and widening and ultimately radiant. It reminded TJ of an Easter-morning sunrise. “I’m glad,” she said. “’Cause I didn’t want to be the only one.”

The most recent pair of Zelinski foster daughters had left over a month ago. Cassie was the new replacement, and by saying she didn’t want to be “the only one,” she was explaining that she didn’t want to be the only foster child in the house, the only unconnected, temporary interloper, the only Zelinski Kid.

She came and stood beside TJ’s desk. “How old are you?” she asked.

TJ grinned. “How old are you?”

“Ten,” she said. “Are you gonna be here for a long time or a little time?”

“Six months. I’m going to graduate from high school in June,” he told her. “Then I’m going away.”

Again the sunrise smile. “Six. That’s a lot of months.” She slipped her hand into the pocket of her dress and withdrew a small smooth stone—milky silver-green and rounded. She put it on TJ’s desk. “It’s a present,” she explained. “I found it under the house in the other place I was at before this one, and I’ve been saving it because it was so nice.” She put a slender finger on the stone and slid it toward him. “It’s for you.”

“Are you sure?” TJ asked.

“I’m sure,” she said. “I’ve got two of them.” She opened her hand and showed him a second silver-green stone. “I put both of them in my pocket when I was coming to ask you so that if you said you were like me, I could give one to you and we could have …” She hesitated. “So we could have …” She bit her lip and looked up at him from under lowered lashes, suddenly embarrassed and a little unsure. “I brought it so we could share.”

“Sharing would make us kind of affiliated, huh?” TJ said. Cassie looked away, shifting her weight from one pink-socked foot to the other and saying nothing. TJ realized that she was not quite certain of the meaning of
affiliated
. “Sharing would make us kind of a team,” he explained.

“Would that be okay?” She looked ready to take a step backward and move away. “My name’s Cassie Jackson.” She said it as if it was something TJ should know before making his decision.

He picked up the stone and held it. It felt warm and vaguely heart-shaped. “I think us being a team would be great,” he said.

After that, daily, for six months, Cassie continued to bring TJ gifts: puppets made of Popsicle sticks, bouquets of flowers picked from Suzy’s garden, bluebird feathers, twigs that were fragile, delicate,
and elegant. In the afternoons while he did his homework, she perched on a chair beside his desk, reading fairy tales and stories of high adventure. And in the evenings, she sat beside TJ at the dinner table, whispering to him about her dreams and her poems and her mama being dead and her grandma being in jail and how someday she, Cassie, intended to have a pony and how, when she did have it, she would ride it to school.

Cassie trailed TJ like a timid, obsessive acolyte. She was free to do so because the profound blackness of her skin had produced an immediate and dulling effect on Suzy’s interest in her.

TJ knew that if he’d not allowed Cassie to claim him as her friend, her stay in the Zelinski household would have been a comfortless one.

*

In the early evening of TJ’s last day in the house, the day he had graduated from high school, Cassie came into his room as he was packing. A black duffel bag, his graduation gift from the Zelinskis, was open on his bed. Cassie crossed the room in silence and solemnly slipped a sheet of pink paper into one of the bag’s side pockets. The paper was rolled into a scroll and tied with a shoelace. “It’s a poem,” she explained. “For your graduation.”

Then she stepped up onto the bed and looked him in the eye and said, “You’re the best friend I ever had in my whole life, TJ.”

After she had stepped down off the bed, she added, “The social worker says my gramma’s out of jail and she’s coming to get me.” Cassie briefly smiled her Easter-sunrise smile. “I’m gonna be real. In one more week.” She gave him a nod and a tight brusque wave.

TJ understood what she was telling him: There had been too many departures, too many changes, too many losses. All the goodbyes had been used up.

After Cassie left, TJ picked up the duffel bag and walked out of the Zelinski house. He’d already said his farewells to Stan and Suzy. Now he was in a hurry. He needed to get to the bus station; there was a Greyhound leaving in half an hour that would ferry him out of Middletown and deliver him to his summer job and to college. It would take him to Boston, the place where he could be born again.

As the bus had pulled away from the station—shortly after he let himself sink back into his seat and draw a deep breath that was intoxicatingly sweet and free—TJ suddenly sat bolt upright. “No!” came out of him with such force that the bus driver glanced into the rearview mirror and gave him a wary look, and several passengers shot nervous glances in his direction.

An hour later, when the bus rolled out of Hartford, headed for Boston, TJ was no longer on it. He was at the side of the road, hitchhiking back to Middletown.

The spiral notebook was still in the old blue suitcase under his bed in the Zelinski house.

*

It had taken TJ a long time to find a ride. The garrulous old man who had eventually picked him up had driven at such an incredibly slow pace that now, as they were leaving the highway and entering Middletown, it was after eleven and TJ was in a panic. He was due to report to his summer job in Boston at six-thirty in the morning; he needed to retrieve the notebook and start on his return trip as soon as possible.

As the old man was making a glacially slow turn, TJ grabbed the black duffel bag and jumped from the car. He rolled onto the soft shoulder of the road and ran the few remaining blocks that lay between him and his destination.

Stan and Suzy often left the back door unlocked, so TJ sprinted past the front of the house and headed into the alley behind it. He was hoping the Zelinskis would be asleep and that he could get the notebook and be gone without having to cross paths with them. The Zelinskis had never seen the notebook, and TJ didn’t want to share it with Stan and Suzy now that he no longer had any business with them.

When he entered the alley, he saw that lights were on in the kitchen. He assumed it was Stan who was still awake. Suzy was unfailingly in bed by ten, but it wasn’t unusual for Stan to stay up late watching TV or puttering in the garage.

TJ moved quietly toward the breezeway that connected the area between the side wall of the garage and the back of the house. The garage side of the breezeway was paneled in clear-lacquered Peg-Board. Hanging from the Peg-Board were a variety of lawn tools—mostly rakes and hoes, all of them vintage, from Stan’s father’s time. They had thick wooden handles and iron blades and tines, all carefully cleaned and sharpened. Stan kept them displayed like rustic L-shaped museum pieces.

On an area of grass under one of the kitchen windows, a sprinkler was turning. Its spray was falling onto the concrete at the entrance to the breezeway, near the back door. To keep the black duffel bag dry, TJ put it on a wooden bench a short distance away from the pooling water. Then he moved cautiously toward the house.

He could hear the radio playing. An oldies station. The Beatles singing about Eleanor Rigby. But there were no sounds that indicated anyone was moving around inside the kitchen. TJ knew that Stan was probably in the living room, watching television. As he put his hand on the doorknob, his pulse quickened; the back door was unlocked.

He pushed the door open slowly. There was no one in the kitchen, but the air was full of the bitter-sharp smell of gun oil. On a towel on the Formica tabletop was one of Stan’s rifles, freshly cleaned. Beside it were an open box of shells and three or four hunting magazines. The room was long and narrow. On the wall immediately to TJ’s left, just beyond the table, was a doorway. It led to a hallway that ran parallel to the kitchen and accessed the bedrooms. At the far end of the kitchen was another door leading to the same hallway. That door was closer to the living room, where TJ assumed Stan was, but it was also directly across from TJ’s old bedroom.

He exited through the far end of the kitchen. In four swift, light steps, he had crossed into his former bedroom and was out of sight. When he carefully closed the bedroom door, he could still hear the Beatles singing in the kitchen. The radio had been turned up loud enough to be audible in the bedrooms, and he was grateful; it would help mask any noise he might inadvertently make.

TJ pulled the suitcase from under the bed and removed the notebook, positioning it between the small of his back and his belt. Then he went to the bedroom door and began the process of easing it open. He was straining to hear any sound or movement that might be coming from the direction of the living room. As he stepped out into the hall, he heard the Beatles singing about Strawberry Fields.

And then he heard something else, just below the music. It was coming from the other end of the hallway. From Cassie’s room. It was the sound of whimpering, high-pitched and fearful. He instinctively moved toward it. As he did, he bumped into a low bookcase that was against the wall. A porcelain figurine fell from the top shelf and broke, loudly, onto the floor.