Secrets

I have three muddy secrets, which I have hauled around these past many years. Like a first-class traveler, I stash them in the overhead bin, drink a dry martini to help me forget. But they are crafty, my secrets--morphing, changing, moving--as I plod along, trying my best to ignore them. On good days, they become as thin as reeds, smooth themselves out like a new coat of paint. Slip unnoticed into the landscape of history.

But the good days are not every day, and so these same three secrets sometimes gorge themselves on my living, compete with me for breath. They settle heavily on my tongue, sit themselves on one wary shoulder—as I craft elaborate stories around them, trying to hide that they're there. And when that happens, even I can hear the marbles in my mouth. Even I can hear the falseness, the movement away from where those secrets lie. Shhh, I say when they tip-toe onto my tongue some nights when I ache to reveal....

It is many years ago that she calls to say that I must come home, that she has something to tell me. I know this woman of drama and risk, this woman who has leaned on me, has cried. I know how the vein snakes along her left leg, how she trembles sometimes, how she lashes out whenever she's angry. We have been hungry together, she and I; we have been cold. We have lived through turned-off electricity and night time stories shared in the dark. After the phone call, I drive the hour’s drive north, up to that town, wondering what I possibly don't know.

When I arrive, she is sitting at the table, alone in that house. Sit down, she says, and soon the tears come. I wait. Finally: What? I say. Tell me... She lifts an unsteady hand to cover mine. Swallows. Talks of a baby born twenty-seven years ago. A girl. Her daughter. That she gave away a few years before I came along…

I felt only this: the weight of my mother’s secret—like a ball and chain crashed to the floor. Felt the pull of it, felt the heft and magnitude of it. Thought of the birthdays, the wondering. Recalled mid-morning gazes, her hands stilled in the dishpan. Recalled her eyes trained on me. I studied her face as she cried, that day, her pinched shoulders moving. Saw her shame and regret cupped between two tired hands. The telephone ringing one late afternoon, and her lost daughter there...

Why didn’t you tell me? I whispered. Why didn’t you say?

But she did tell me. I just wasn’t listening, didn't decipher the code. The year before with my own swollen belly, my own dashed lover--my star-shaped youth. She hugged me that day when I told her, and promised me that I would be safe... Still, I gave up my baby a different way, and then carried that secret, tucked away in my skin.
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