SHARON LEACH

All the Secret Things No One Ever Knows

Jamaica

I

Ten years ago, I found out that I wasn’t my father’s only girlfriend. For years I’d been hearing my mother accuse him of screwing around on her. I’d always believed she was talking about me. After all, he’d told me I was the only woman he ever needed. What did I know? I was fifteen; I believed him.

What happened was this: There had been an uprising downtown, that day in September 1998. A popular area leader and enforcer was arrested and carted off to the Central Police Station on East Street, a few steps away. His loyal supporters hurriedly organised an angry protest by mounting roadblocks, looting offices, and harassing people doing legitimate business downtown before converging in front of the station demanding his release.

My father’s girlfriend operated a beauty salon on East Street, smack-dab in the middle of this craziness. The shop came under attack by a group of rowdy area toughs who held up the staff and customers at knifepoint and robbed them. Thank God, nobody was hurt and the boys fled after they’d gotten the loot. Later, when things quieted, my father was able to rush to the salon. Marshall, his driver, who had taken me to a dentist’s appointment in Half Way Tree, instead of taking me home as he was supposed to do, had chased in the opposite direction, back downtown, to see if his help was required.

My father owned a top-rated construction company that had erected the complex that housed the salon. Now, in the underground garage of this building on East Street, I felt vulnerable and scared. Rather than staying in the car as I was instructed, I followed Marshall, hurrying, afraid I would lose him. And then, there it was. Marshall, my father, and a woman standing by a pedestal chair beneath colour posters of black women with elegant processed hairdos. My father still had his sunglasses on.

I was just in time to see the woman—well, girl, really; she couldn’t have been very much older than me—slap him hard in the face, theatrically, comically almost, as though she were some movie actress. I froze where I stood. My father was a real Jamaican businessman, which meant that regardless of how refined he was on the outside, inside he was a street fighter. I couldn’t imagine anybody taking that kind of liberty with him—my mother knew better than that—let alone such a young woman. She was a tiny thing, good-looking in a cheap kind of way that kind. She had too much of everything: yards of too-black fake hair, too much makeup, too-big boobs, too-long acrylics. Too much.

I waited for the fireworks. None were forthcoming. My father just stood there watching her sadly, like a puppy whose chew toy had been taken away from him.

“You just coming now, Raymond?!” she screamed at him. “You just coming? Now? Dem hold us up and rob we! An’ you jus coming now?”

Then she launched herself into his arms and suddenly they were kissing, deep and greedy, and he was rocking her back and forth. Neither of them noticed, until it was too late, that I was loitering by the door.

On the drive back home I caught Marshall watching me in the rearview mirror. How long had he known about this girl? What other dirt did he have on my father? Marshall was a former amateur boxer who’d fallen on hard times; my father had admired him and was giving him a break. I held his gaze. He wouldn’t tell me anything, though, even if I begged him. I knew enough to know his lips were sealed—in the same way I knew he would never tell my father about us. That we’d gone to his flat on two occasions after he’d picked me up from school. That the only thing he’d allow me to do was give him a blowjob. That after both times he’d emptied himself into the palm of his hand and blubbered like a little bitch, “Jesus, you’re just a child,” before promising we’d never do it again.

He was watching me in the mirror now, waiting for me to tell him whether or not to detour. I imagined his erection straining against his pants. But I turned away without a word. My stomach felt queasy. I kept picturing my father kissing that woman. That kiss wasn’t just a kiss. That was the kiss I wanted him to reserve for me.

II

I hated eating dinner with my parents. Back then, my mother still insisted that the three of us dress and eat dinner together, carrying on the charade of being a regular family. This was non-negotiable, the one area where my father insisted we give in to my mother. He told me this one night as we snuggled in bed, his arm around my middle, his mouth latched onto my breast like a greedy baby. “I’m the only man who will ever satisfy you,” he’d just whispered to me. “We’re cut from the same cloth.” Then he told me about my mother’s dinner request.

Who were we trying to impress? Who were we fooling? Dressing for dinner made even less sense now that my two older brothers were no longer at home. I missed my brother James especially. He was the one closer to me in age, the one I’d grown up playing with when we were children, then followed around when he’d become a moody teenager. Then I’d become a teenager too, and we’d again grown close. He’d always made dinner bearable by making faces across the table, or joining in, as if it were a game, when I rolled my eyes.

That evening, when my father sat down to dinner he refused to meet my eyes. It was the same way he’d ignored me earlier that afternoon after realising I’d found out his secret, before bluntly telling Marshall to take me home. I would have preferred carrying up a tray to my room and chatting on my private phone line to my friend Sigrid about the guy I’d met earlier that day until we had to hang up and start our homework. Some kids would be sitting at the table nervous from the strain of trying to act normal, from trying to decide how their loyalties should be split. But, no, my loyalty was always with my father, to him alone. I was used to keeping his secrets. And I wasn’t twitchy or anything from what I’d found out about him earlier that day.

“I’m starving. Something smells good,” he said to no one in particular.

My mother beamed as though she’d cooked the meal herself. She had never cooked a meal in her life. She was a former Miss Jamaica contestant who’d gone straight from her mother’s house to my father’s. “Doesn’t it smell good? Adele made her world-famous rum and black pepper–glazed filet mignon.”

She nodded at Adele, the squat weekday maid, who hovered worriedly in the doorway.

“Mm,” my father grunted, digging into the tenderloin. “Excellent, Adele,” he said, glancing up after a moment. “As usual.” My mother looked rebuffed for a moment, disappointed at not receiving more of an acknowledgment for at least coordinating the dinner.

“Well, don’t fill up too much,” my mother soldiered bravely on. At forty-two, her looks were nowhere near beginning to fade. She was still slender beneath the long dress she wore, and her long black hair, which she tied in a low ponytail, had only a few barely noticeable strands of grey at the front. Turning her green-eyed gaze toward me, she said, “There’s chocolate ice cream for dessert. But if your mouth feels sensitive, sweetheart, you can have cheesecake. You can have cheesecake, can’t you, baby?”

“My mouth is fine,” I replied, rolling my eyes. The eye-rolling was now almost involuntary. “It was just a filling; not an extraction. And I hate cheesecake.”

“Well, I can ask Adele to—”

“It’s fine. I’m not even hungry. I don’t want dessert.”

My father cleared his throat and aimed the remote control, which was resting on the table beside his wine glass, toward the family room. On the TV, the newscaster, who wasn’t very au fait with her use of the English language, was reporting on the disturbance downtown earlier that day.

My chair scraped against the brick floor and I found myself on my feet. I stood there for a while glaring at my mother. I wanted to tell her that I thought she was stupid. I knew things she didn’t. She didn’t know these things because she was too busy being pretty, just some rich man’s concubine, a man who was screwing another woman. What kind of wife didn’t know these things? I would have made a better wife for my father.

Throwing my napkin down on my plate, I stormed off. “Leave her alone, Camille,” I heard my father say, sighing wearily before turning back to finish his dinner. “Just leave her the fuck alone.”

III

Upstairs in my room, I fell onto my bed, staring at the head of the lizard that was peeking out from behind the painting on the wall above the bookshelf. My father standing up for me at the table was nice, though I craved so much more. I’d always understood that our relationship had to be a secret. But everything was fucked up now I knew there was someone else. People would never understand our relationship, that it transcended the laws of society. It wasn’t as if he was some creepy pervert who fooled around with his daughter. He’d been coming to my room since I was twelve but he’d waited until I was ready, when I got my period, before taking our relationship to the ultimate level. Which other man would have shown me that consideration?

I flipped on the TV. The eight o’clock news on the other station was about to start. They were leading with the downtown story too. I pointed the remote at the screen. I didn’t need something else to remind me about my father kissing that girl.

I reached for the phone and pulled it onto the bed beside me. I started to dial Sigrid’s number, and then hung up. My mouth felt weird from the filling and I was suddenly very tired, not in the mood to talk. Sigrid was the daughter of Spanish expats who went to the international school I attended. She was the only person I knew who was as smart as me and who possessed a similar sense of humour. She was my only friend, the only person I trusted with private, intimate details of my life. The private, intimate details of my life I wanted her to know, the ones that weren’t off-limits, that is.

After a while I got up and sat at my desk. As the computer booted up, I scanned my notebook and realised there was still a pile of homework. I didn’t mind. Actually, it was weird, I loved homework. But tonight it wasn’t homework that interested me. I dug into a pocket of my book bag and found the business card I’d put there earlier that day. It was cream-coloured with embossed gilt letters that read simply: Ronrico “Rick” Anderson. For Private Security.

In the bottom corner was a phone number. Earlier that day at his girlfriend’s salon, my father had called the police station and, because of his influence, a detective was dispatched there, almost immediately. After the detective had taken a statement about the robbery and passed out business cards, my father looked him straight in the eye and said, “From now on, I expect you to check in here as often as possible.” Then he handed him a thick brown envelope.

I knew, of course, it was a bribe.

When the policeman, a youngish muscular guy dressed in jeans and a Michael Jordan jersey, brushed past me as he was leaving, I put a detaining hand on his. “I’d like one of your cards too, officer.” I said it in a flirty way, tipping my head to one side and raising an eyebrow. I don’t know, I felt bold, as if seeing my father with his girlfriend had changed something. I pictured myself in bed with him.

I sat at my desk now, trying to conjure up the policeman’s face. He was cute. Sexy in a working-class kind of way. I wasn’t one of those girls who had a particular type: if the package came with a fairly nice-looking face and a working penis, I was good. Thinking about being with him, I knew, was wrong. And not because he was a grown man—it wasn’t as if it would be my first time with an older man. It was wrong because Ronrico “Rick” Anderson was a cop, and a girl like me simply wasn’t supposed to shit outside my social circle. But I figured if my father could do it, then so could I.

I slid down in the chair and pulled my panties down around my ankles before making my fingers blades and sticking them between my legs. Ronrico “Rick” Anderson had looked speculatively at me, standing there in my school uniform. I was tall, with a curvy body that men, if they didn’t bother to look at my face, tended to mistake for a grown woman’s. I closed my eyes and remembered Ronrico “Rick” Anderson furtively glancing over his shoulder to make sure my father wasn’t watching before he stuck his business card in my hand. My fingers moved urgently as I tried to block out the sounds of my parents arguing, focusing instead on the feeling of pleasure that was shimmering on the horizon. I imagined Ronrico “Rick” Anderson’s big hand squeezing my neck as he pushed inside me, his breath warm against my ear as he whispered dirty things. I wasn’t the kind of girl who read Danielle Steel romances; I wanted a man who would violate me, do to me what I imagined my father did to Mignonette in bed. I smiled, excited by the smutty look I’d seen in his eyes, and his willingness to betray the man who’d just put him on the payroll.

IV

Sigrid and I spent most of our senior year obsessing about colleges. I stayed over at her house on weekends and we would lie in her bed, smoking cigarettes we stole from her parents’ bedroom, with Fifi, her Jack Russell, panting excitedly between us as we went through brochure upon brochure trying to decide which schools could best accommodate us both. When we’d started thinking about advanced studies, we hadn’t been 100 percent sure what we wanted to do with our lives or what we would study, but we had a general idea. Now we knew what we wanted. “Definitely not Ivy League, the pressure is way too much,” Sigrid would say absently by the window, blowing stealthy smoke rings outside, steering them away from where her mother’s yoga circle downward-dogged in the garden below. I wanted to go to a school with a good English department, one that also offered a diverse set of extracurricular possibilities. Sigrid was more of a Renaissance type of girl, who was contemplating some kind of combination of her two loves: science and music. Her parents were returning to Spain at the end of the year and although they wanted Sigrid to attend school there, they’d agreed to let her choose the place she wanted to be, which was wherever I was going.

My parents, meanwhile, didn’t care where I went, just so long as I was going somewhere. To say they were overjoyed that I was going to college was an understatement. My brothers, who were both just as smart as me, maybe even smarter, had squandered everything. Stephen, the eldest, had dropped out of school, even before he turned eighteen, and shacked up with his form teacher. We’d heard Casey had kicked him out after a few years and that he was smoking crack on the streets downtown. What my father had never talked about was that Stephen spent most of his day on a cardboard bed along with other dropouts in a burnt-out building across the street from his girlfriend’s salon.

Then there was my brother James. Jimmy, whose elevator didn’t go all the way up to the top floor, had been expelled from more local schools than my parents cared to remember. Finally, they’d sent him away to Florida to a school for children with behavioural problems. He had been there only one semester when a junior at the school reported that Jimmy had sodomised him. Of course, there was a lawsuit and everything, an out-of-court settlement, and Jimmy had returned home in disgrace.

And then, just when things couldn’t get any worse, Stephen had come home one day and killed himself in my father’s study.

A normal family might have used these kinds of crises to band together. But my family and normal didn’t share the same PO box. We drifted even further apart, our secrets stretching tightly between us.

Meanwhile, nights, I waited for my father in my room. After he ate dinner he’d disappear again for hours, returning in the wee morning, long after my mother had succumbed to her wine-soaked dreams, dead to the world. My room felt cavernous, filled with the scent of an occasional early-morning breeze perfumed by jasmine, and my longing. I was alone, limp with fatigue, staying up long after I’d finish my homework or studies, fighting sleep while listening for his footfalls on the staircase just outside my room, which he had to pass before reaching his, which was at the end of the hall. I tensed, waiting for him to pause at my door before softly turning the knob. But he would increasingly pass by without stopping, leaving me exhausted and with dark circles under my eyes the following morning, and causing my mother to cup my face in both her hands and remark, more than once, “You’re studying too hard, sweetheart.”

The more he pulled away from me, the more I reached for Rick. I pretended he was my father and allowed him to do to me in bed all the things it would take to keep him with me forever.

But what did I know about forever? I was, by this time, almost eighteen; still a child, although I didn’t believe it then. I knew about forever in the same way I knew about love, which was not at all.

Sigrid and I had narrowed our applications down to a few schools in the States, with Cornell University my number one choice, although I didn’t tell her. I was no longer sure I wanted to go to school for another four years with Sigrid. I was excited to be heading off on my own—I even began yearning to leave Rick—and I realised I wanted a clean break from everything that reminded me of Jamaica. Sometimes it didn’t seem possible that I could be so unhappy, considering how much I had compared myself to other kids my age, and believe me, I understood how extremely lucky I was. But there it was. Sometimes things didn’t add up.

V

I started college in 2001, thinking everything would be different. I was mistaken. I was homesick, sure, but the foreign students always are. To make matters worse, the pall of the terrorist attacks hung in the air like a shroud. After the initial rallying together in the face of a national trauma, things silently returned to the status quo, the mistrust of foreigners. It wasn’t exactly the best time for foreigners to be in New York.

Incomprehensibly, one of the people I missed the most was one I’d been in a hurry to leave behind. When I told Rick I was going away to study, he’d been upset but there was nothing he could do. I was beginning to feel suffocated by him and couldn’t pack my bags fast enough. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him. I did; our relationship was exciting. There’s nothing better than secret sex; I’d never been able to have any other kind. But Rick kept acting as though we were a normal couple—he threatened me with violence when he knew I was with another guy—as though he couldn’t have been brought up on charges as a sexual offender if my father found out what we were doing.

In those first weeks on the campus, however, I missed him, and I maxed out my credit cards on plane tickets for him to come up so we could be together almost every weekend.

When my father was finally confronted with the bill, he was furious. “Who the hell is this man you’ve been screwing?” he shouted at me over the phone. Across the ocean I could hear the single ice cube in his Glenlivet hit the side of his glass.

I was thrilled that he was jealous. “You don’t know him,” I taunted. I remembered Troy, the boy from my class I’d dated for a week in my senior year, just to see what his reaction would be. I’d invited Troy over to study with me in my room every evening. At the end of the week, my father had come into my room and told me that if he ever saw another boy there he would kill me.

“Sweetheart,” he said now, his voice low and soft, the voice I hoped he used only with me, “you mean more to me than my own life. You know that. I know these past few years have been, well, I know you’ve felt abandoned—you know why—but I love you.” He was flying to New York the following week.

I met him at his hotel in Manhattan one chilly October night while rain misted down in the streets. Beneath my trench I wore a black leather catsuit that had a zipper up the front. I’d packed an overnight bag that contained sexy new La Perla playthings that I didn’t even wear for Rick.

When I called up to his room, a woman answered. I knew her voice instantly.

He was still Mr. Movie Star. He wore tan leather boots, a sports blazer, and his jeans tight, as though they were a second skin. As though he didn’t know how sexy effortless looked on a man his age.

His eyes slid down my body when I took off my coat, and his hand rested on the small of my back as we followed the maître d’ to our table. All through dinner I kept waiting for him to tell me that he’d taken his girlfriend along with him on the trip. He didn’t. Conversation was desultory. I was moody and I wanted him to know I was pissed off.

When our dessert appeared, I said, “Why are you even here?”

He looked at me and put down his fork, squared his shoulders. “Your mother and I are getting a divorce. I wanted to tell you in person.”

I stared at him hard and long. “Is that why you brought that whore with you? Am I going to be introduced to my new mommy?” Then I said, “I thought you wanted me in your bed again.”

My father did not break character. He cut off a piece of cheesecake. A tiny piece of crust had landed on his moustache. He brushed it off deliberately. When he spoke, his voice was cold. “What are you talking about?”

I stared at him, finally understanding. He wasn’t here to tell me he was divorcing my mother. He was here to dump me. “All these years, I told myself that what we did was my choice,” I said, and stood up. “I know what you did to Stephen and Jimmy. You did the same thing to me. I don’t know why I convinced myself that you and I were something else. You’re a sick piece of shit.”

My father watched me pick up my leather Louis Vuitton weekend bag. A sly smile played around his lips as he looked pointedly at it. “Sweetheart,” he said, taking another bite of his cake, “if I am, then what are you?”

VI

Every family has its secrets. Mine had more than seemed possible. On the day my brother Stephen killed himself he’d come upstairs and knocked on my door. His eyes were wild but he was lucid. “Hello, kiddo,” he’d said, and smiled broadly. Of all of us, he was the one who most resembled my father. Even now I’m embarrassed when I think about how I’d recoiled when I smelt his body odour. He’d handed me a letter and asked me to give it to my father when he got home.

After he’d broken into my father’s safe and shot himself with a gun he found in it, things happened fast. The letter had been stashed away in my desk and forgotten until I was packing to go to college. It was addressed to my father but I’d opened it and read how it had started with them, how my father had gone into Stephen’s room and sat on his bed and spoken to him like an equal. When his body had cooperated—this is what haunted Stephen all his life—my father had made him feel complicit, made him feel as if he was the one who’d asked for it. And, worse, my father had done the same thing to Jimmy.

I’d ripped up the letter and flushed it down the toilet, refusing to believe what I’d read. But I knew the truth, even if I didn’t want to acknowledge it: my father had seduced all his children in exactly the same way. I was not special to him at all.

VII

Rick and I were in bed at the motel where we’d met two or three days a week for the last few years since I came back to Jamaica. I’d just told him that my father was finally going to marry his girlfriend, and that he’d told me I had to move out of the house. “You understand, sweetheart,” my father had said. “She wants to start married life without any baggage. Anyway, it might be a good time to get off the gravy train. You need to find a job. Getting out on your own will be good for you.”

There’s no such thing as water under the bridge. Forgive and forget is just something pipe-dream losers, helpless victims, hang onto because they’re unable—or unwilling—to do anything else.

I told Rick this, and he agreed with me.

“You know what turning the other cheek gets you?” he said, smiling just a smidge so I’d know there was a punch line waiting in the oven.

I smiled back at him, waiting.

“Bitch-slapped on the other cheek.”

He reached over and kissed me, pleased with himself. This was one of the reasons I liked him so much. He was the only person I’d ever told who my father really was, yet he didn’t act as though I was some damaged little bird, which he knew I would hate. I wasn’t some pathetic victim like my brothers. Like my mother. Rick hadn’t even made me feel like a loser when I’d returned home after being expelled from Cornell in my sophomore year—a bit of foolishness, which I never spoke about—and was bumming around, doing nothing, depending on handouts from the man I hated more than anyone else in this world. Of course, I did not tell Rick how I yearned for him—my father, that is, even now—and was unable to imagine what my life would be without him when he was gone.

And he would be gone.

Ronrico “Rick” Anderson promised me he would.

* * *

Ten years ago, downtown Kingston hadn’t quite yet become the complete social and political clusterfuck it is today, with its diminished-seeming offices, burnt-out buildings, dilapidated storefronts, sleazy wholesales, and zinc-fronted, graffiti-ridden holes-in-the-wall behind which people actually live.

The day before Rick shot my father to death when he made his customary early-morning visit to his girlfriend’s beauty salon, traffic had streamed down East Street. Overhead, sullen clouds drifted by like bits of gauze.

I parked across the road from the salon and stared up at the window, trying to imagine what the day after tomorrow would be like. But I couldn’t. All I could think about was tomorrow, and hope it would be a perfect day for a murder.