What is the cost of swallowing a secret?
By B.K. Jackson
In a black and white photograph with deckled edges, I stand grasping the railing of my crib, my eyes peering over my fingers and staring into the camera lens. I like to pretend my mother took this picture on our last day together — that she snipped a slender strand of hair that fell down my forehead and later taped it to the back of the photograph. Maybe she tucked the photo into a small silver box she carried with her move after move, always placing it on the highest shelf in her closet, underneath a pile of sweaters. Maybe each year she took it out on my birthday, remembering how I fussed when she cut the lock of hair or the way I clutched her scarf trying to make her stay, leaving a sticky handprint and a sweet-sour milk scent that still slays her in her dreams. Maybe over time the photo grew brittle and creased, with flecks of emulsion wearing off and its corners crumbling. Maybe many years later, when her children became old enough to snoop, she took the box down from her hiding place and held the photo over the sink, struck a match to it and watched it buckle and warp, the flame moving inward from its white deckled borders, the fire enveloping me in my crib. Maybe she dropped it in the sink but couldn’t take her eyes off it until there was nothing left but charred confetti. Maybe she thought that immolation would annihilate the memories and let her leave me — us — finally, in the past.
Maybe. I’ll never know. For 50 years, she was a mystery to us while we were skeletons in her cupboard. She left no evidence of my brother and me or her marriage to my father. We had existed only as rumor to the six children born after she left us, children named as her sole survivors on the obituary I discovered three years after she died.
I wonder when we became a secret. There must have been a particular moment when she decided to tuck her past life away, like the photo in the box. Did she have to sever ties with everyone who knew her, who knew us? Did she walk away from her mother and father too? Did she expect we’d try to track her down and so covered her tracks? What did it cost her to keep us under wraps? After all, it’s not easy to shed one’s skin — to slough off the memories and never turn back. It takes work to put on a new face for strangers, paint over your history, scrape away your failings and regrets. It takes practice. Once you start keeping secrets, there’s no turning back. You have to pay attention to detail and remember what you tell people so you don’t trip yourself up. You have to be resolute, even when someone tender enough to consider loving you tries to pry open your heart and extract your deepest secrets.
Or maybe it took no effort at all. Maybe she simply started over and let her old life fade away. Let us fade away.
I don’t know what her truth was. Maybe she carried us in her heart like thorns. Maybe she buried her memories deep down only to have them rise back up, like grasping tendrils of a stubborn weed, like tiny hands reaching out to grab a scarf.