There's something simultaneously scary and
thrilling about keeping a secret. Scary, because you know what
you know would have irreversible effects on certain people if
they discovered what you were hiding, but thrilling, because you
have the power to withhold or divulge information that could
change the course of the lives of certain people
completely--including your own.
Then the paranoia sets in. Every phone call is someone ratting
you out. Every sideways glance people share is about what you
think they don't know. Then it becomes almost physically
impossible to keep your lips and your tongue and your vocal cords
from acting independently of your head and robbing yourself of
that heady power. Every time you see the person or people from
whom your secret is kept, you find yourself speaking extra slowly
to keep from letting anything accidentally slip out, until they
become convinced you have gone mental and start avoiding you
altogether.
I can handle keeping secrets. It's my forte. But he just couldn't
live with it, and there is something exciting about being
on the verge of changing your life and the lives of everyone
around you with a few little words, so I decided to let this
happen. We made a battle plan: first Ned and Irene, then Jack,
Fi, Clu, and Annie.
It never occurred to me that we had left someone out.
I became aware of his displeasure with our connection the morning
after our decision to tell the secret. Carey had gone out early
as usual, so as not to be noticed by the other members of the
household; the sun wasn't yet up, and I was somewhere between
awake and asleep when it happened. My entire hand suddenly seemed
to be on fire. The sensation jarred me awake and I stared at the
offending hand in horror until I realized that my hand was cold
to the touch and it was the ring that was causing my discomfort.
The Celtic thumb ring seemed to be angry, glowing furiously. My
instinct was to yank it off and throw it across the room or out
the window, but when I made the move to do exactly that, I only
ended up with burned fingers and the conviction that the ring was
stuck. Ugh. The pain was starting to dull, anyway. I was ready to
go right back to sleep when I finally figured out what was going
on.
"Oh, fuck off," I whispered, so as not to risk waking
anyone. Wherever he was, I knew he was listening hard enough to
hear. "You have no right to object to anything, so just stop
it. You know what I finally figured out? I wasted all those years
feeling sad and sorry for myself that you had been taken from us.
But you weren't taken from us. You left. Everything
you ever should have wanted was right here. I was right here. We
just weren't enough for you. It was your choice to leave that
night when any sane man would have stayed. So I loved you, and I
know you loved me, and I'm sorry about what happened, but you
don't have any right to stand in the way of the rest of my life
anymore."
The pain grew more intense for a moment, and then faded slowly. I
took off the ring for a second, and drew back my hand with the
intention of pitching it as I'd first been inclined to do, but
thought better of it and slipped it back on my finger. I could
talk the talk, but I wasn't ready to completely forsake the past
for the future just yet.
Our argument had fully awakened me, though, and with this much
angry adrenaline pumping through my veins there would be no more
sleep this night. Instead I padded down the hall into Jack's room
and weaved a precarious path through the clutter on the floor. I
sat down on the end of the bed and took a long last look at a son
who believed in his mother. I could have cried, just thinking of
how he would never look at me the same way again after he found
out. When I hadn't registered any particular objection to his
relationship with Annie, she had squealed "Wicked!" and
thrown her arms around me and practically started calling me mom
on the spot. I wondered if he had worried about my reaction to
that revelation the same way I was so worried about his now.
I knew him well enough to know what it would
be: intense anger, disbelief, resentment. And that would all give
way, eventually, to a grudging acceptance. But things would
never, ever be the same. Not even if I ended my attachment to
Carey within five minutes of telling him about it. It would be
the very fact that I hadn't been honest with him from the
beginning, not to mention the unalterable fact that Carey had
been a part of our family for so long that saying it now,
"our relationship," felt strangely Oedipal and morally
outrageous. Of course, that didn't change who we were apart from
the other people in our lives, or how we related as individual
adults--because he was an adult, and I didn't initiate this, I
pointed out to... well, no one. Just practicing, I guess.
In a strange way it felt like I was saying goodbye to Jack, like
one of us was about to die. I guess death is something we live
with our whole lives until that final moment. The past dies with
every new morning; potential dies with every wasted second. A
relationship dies and a new one springs up in its place.
Maybe in order to really live, you have to let yourself die a
little every day...
