Game of Secrets by Dawn Tripp

Author:Dawn Tripp [Tripp, Dawn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-60495-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-06-05T04:00:00+00:00

BIRDS

MARNE

June 25, 2004

The days lug by.

Wednesday. Thursday. Now it’s Friday again. I have to be at work at four, and we’re not even pushing ten thirty. My parents are gone for the day, my father driving my mother over to the COA, dragging that Scrabble set, her brown-bag lunch, the new sordid twist in the tale—the star-crossed lovers. Is that how she’d cast it? Ladies Montague and Capulet sitting down for the ritual game.

The tick of the clock on the mantel—tick tock, tick tock.

The silence feels hermetic, unfinished.

I sit out in the sun and fold paper. Four picture frames, four stands. Four African violet pots. Four paper window stars. Colors interlocking, I use more paper than is worth a single star. I am not saving with it. The folds are tight and strong, nothing slips, but I’ve begun to bite my nails, and the sun feels too hot, and I can’t seem to make more than four. I quit for the day and drop them off at Polly’s—she’s with a customer, no time to talk, I leave them on the counter—on my way to Best Buy to buy an iTunes card—which is more the kind of errand you need to run when you’re waiting for life to jump-start. The nineteen-year-old kid who sells it to me has acne and has never heard of Nina Simone. Lena? he asks, trying to be affable, he’s got a great smile, and is trying to find a point of connection with an old broad like me before he gives his pitch for some new fancy gadget with a two-year service plan.

Friday-night work. Thank God.

Saturday work. Sunday work. Hours cycling by at a faster clip, brisk, around the weekend corner. Then hit the wall. Two days off. Everything stalled to a screeching halt. Stuck.

So goddamn stuck.

I hurl myself into a late-night movie binge. Wim Wenders. What better way to drown? His Road Movie Trilogy. Wings of Desire. Those two angels roaming through West Berlin before the wall came down. Unseen, unheard, they wander. Their work to observe only—assemble, testify, preserve. Do no more than look!—until one falls off the wagon, falls in love, and gives up his foreverness for her. He bleeds, wriggles his toes, feels cold, runs into walls, and the film shifts from monochrome to color. Foolish choice, I mutter, foolish, foolish.

The credits unscroll. I glance at the photograph of my mother above the end table, the girl on the bridge.

It must have been effortless for him—that nameless man who took it—to come into town, snap that photo, do his work, and leave. It would have been just another stop to him, another job wrapped up, the fate of the old bridge settled, that quarter-mile stretch of state-owned road at the hell end of the world’s end, done—a final report in a manila folder stashed under two suitcases in the trunk of his car, as he drove north up that new single-lane highway for the last time.

I can see it, his hands knuckling

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