The Family Secret(Charles E.J. Moulton) The Family Secret

A Short Story by Charles E.J. Moulton


As I stirred my son’s cocoa with vanilla marshmallows, I watched my own hand with fascinated anticipation. I think it was the energy of the moment. I had no idea why my hand fascinated me at that given moment. It was the promise of an upcoming conversation, the feelings of an awakening of sorts and the wings of a butterfly stirring in the wounded soul of a spiritual squirrel.
It was not intellectual, but emotional. Okay, a well-manicured hand, my wedding ring on the finger, my engagement ring, all that. But I had to stop and think for a minute. I don’t know what it was that struck me, really, but I watched my hand with fascination. Really, what does a Mom do when she suddenly realizes she has a hunch but has no idea what to do with it.
“Jimmy?” I called out to my son’s buddy.
“Yeah, Mrs. Vera?”
I loved how the kid called me by my first in name in that way.
I chuckled. “You want marshmallows in your cocoa just like Josh?”
“Yes, Mrs. Vera.”
My son reprimanded his buddy. “Call her by her first name or just say Mrs. Richardson.”
Jimmy growled something unintelligible and both of them started bantering. “Hey, guys. Jimmy can call me anything he wants as long as it doesn’t have four letters.”
“Mrs. Love?” Jimmy chuckled, flirtatiously.
“Okay,” I corrected. “Other four-letter words,” I reprimanded, walking into the living room, setting the cocoa cups next to the plates of corn puffs and cheese doodles. As I watched the TV-screen, I noticed they had paused the film right where Aragog, the spider had died and was being granted a funeral.
“Do you guys still have eyes?” I inquired. “How many hours are you at it now?”
“Sixty,” they cackled.
The boys jokingly felt their closed their eyes, feeling their own eyelids. They looked like the little goblins from the later Harry Potter-movies.
“Yes, Mrs. Richardson,” Jimmy said, “we do have eyes.”
I nodded, appreciatively.
“Now,” I said, smiling, “if the next movies get too spooky, just tell me and I will come and hold your hands. Okay?”
“I’ve seen the movies,” Jimmy said, bravely, and I noticed how the boy seemed to blush when looking at me. Something told me he wanted me to hold his hand. “Don’t worry. Besides, I have to protect Josh. He’s like Ron. I call him Sir Eats-A-Lot.”
My son packed a big hunk of cheese doodles into his own hand and stuck them in his mouth, spitting a crumbly mess onto the couch. “Get out of here.”
I suddenly witnessed how our big leather sofa got sprayed by loads of left over saliva crumbs. “Hey, big guy,” I spat, “paper towels are in the kitchen. I don’t mind you eating in front of your marathon, but please remain tidy.”
Jimmy sighed, trudging off. “Unfair. Dad is not tidy.”
“That’s why I yell at him when he is not tidy,” I growled.
“Kit is the tidy one,” Jimmy corrected. “But he is the older boy.”
“Well observed,” I added, a bit anxious about the oldest of my boys. “I hope that my older son really makes sure that he tells my husband to shake off his fishing boots when they get back in here tomorrow. Last time, it took me a week to get rid of the muck.”
Jimmy got really thoughtful, looking out toward the Atlantic coast where my Carl was fishing with our older kid. My younger son’s friend really reminded me of my younger brother as a kid. Suddenly vanishing into some dream land that no one but he could take himself away from. I noticed how Jimmy also had this specialty of adoring anything female. As if women were sacred or something. It had made my brother into an incredible writer, but also turned him into a very toxic self-harming guy. Jimmy had a mother complex. Why I do not know. I do know why my brother had one. Only he did not know that himself.
I don’t know where this sting of worry came from, but I knew it had nothing to with my son’s friend Jimmy. It was my brother hurt that stung me. I had spent all my life worrying about him.
As Josh returned with paper towels, cleaning up his doodles and spit, I decided to ask Jimmy what he thought of.
“Why are women tidy and men not?” Jimmy finally said.
“Well, there are tidy men and untidy women,” I said, thoughtfully contemplating this twelve-year old’s thinking patterns, “but I think Mother Nature actually saw that women remain tidier because they have their nurturing instincts intact.”
“Huh?” Jimmy croaked.
I giggled. “Women took care of the home while men were out hunting. We provided our babies with tidy houses. We still do. Although I wish my husband would do as much.”
Jimmy nodded, while Josh went to the kitchen, muttering something unintelligible about his paper towel chore. “That’s changed, though, right? I mean, the role of women just being the household caretakers?”
“Yeah, things always change, but some things always stay the same,” I said, my head involuntarily heading toward my brother sitting in the sitting-room by the patio, looking like a lost puppy. Damn, I thought to myself, what should I do with that guy? Lucky for both of us, my man was out fishing and his wife out shopping. Talking might help Murph.
Josh sighed, looking up at me with a really irritated look. “Can you guys postpone your small talk to another day? Huh?”
I nudged his nose. “I am not a guy, but thanks for cleaning up your mess nonetheless.”
I did notice that Jimmy was hitting puberty just a little earlier than my Josh because of the way he followed my behind while I walked into the sitting room. I knew it, felt uncomfortable about it, but knew that I would be doing his family a disfavour if I told them my son’s friend was actually glancing at my behind and breasts more than into my eyes. But I guess guys will be guys.
When I walked into the sitting room, Murph fingered the petals of the yellow roses while looking out into the waves dreamily. He was gone. I don’t know where he was at that moment. In space? Neverland? Oz? Somewhere very distant at the very least.
I sat there, looking into his elegant face and his extraordinary resemblance to Matthew McConaughey, wondering how someone that good looking and suave could be such a mess.
“Penny for your thoughts, Murph,” I whispered, touching his rose-twitching hand.
I woke him out of his dream, his cheek again sporting that nervous tic I had come to love.
“Oh,” he hiccupped. “Just thinking.”
“About what?”
He shrugged, very insecure again, making me recall all those times I had to save his ass in school. Getting into a weird conversation where someone else was testing him. Not daring to defend himself when bullies pressed him against the wall.
A bloody nose. A sprained arm.
He was younger than me, but his hands now looked old. That was when I saw his shaking hand. Now, I knew what had startled me about my own cocoa stirring hand. I didn’t shake like he did.
Murph looked down, very shyly. “I break stuff.”
I raised my eyebrows waiting for the punchline. He looked up, waiting for a reply. “I know. You’re my little brother. You’ve broken more glasses in your life that the Argus Steak house downtown will ever own.”
I still waited for the punchline, reaching for his other hand, forcing him to stop making another petal fall. “Did Dorrie scream at you again?” I asked, this time more worried that he would go back to the bottle. That’s Jim Beam, guys, not dairy milk.
He nodded.
“She gets really angry at me and I leave the house in the middle of the night, sending someone who wants to listen a thirty minute weeping message.”
“A girl?” I asked.
“A girl,” he answered.
“Not a call girl, I hope,” I asked.
“No.”
He chuckled.
“I mean, I walk around our living room and mumble something … ‘I’m tired’ or something … and Dorrie shouts ‘I can’t hear you when you mumble’ …”
He gave his impression of high-pitched fish-wife voice.
“… and all I need to do is tell her she mumbles, too.”
My scared brother then lit up, as if he liked telling the story, but I think he just liked that I listened.
“Then I make myself something to eat, reach for the frigging raisin bran Tupperware box with the strange free knob and the lid goes off, I try to fix it, the whole thing breaks and I stand there and Dorrie goes frigging ballistic and screams at me like nuts, banging her fork against the damn oven calling me names and all, running up and showering and going to bed, saying I break her stuff, accusing her of being a victimizer when actually she is the victim and my daughter sits playing with her smartphone ten minutes while I lay on the kitchen floor, weeping.”
I waited, sighing through my pursed lips, blowing my air into the thin air. “That was a run-on-sentence, you know that? And you seem to be describing Liz Taylor and Richard Burton … or Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner. It sounds funny. Not that it is. It would be if this was ‘King of Queens’. At least, she did not try to throw you out the window like Frank tried with Ava in that Las Vegas hotel.”
He nodded. “I am so sensitive, I know.”
I cocked my head, shrugging. “Really?”
I waited to reply. In earlier years, Murph had actually left the room screaming if I told him to think about what he was doing to himself. But, in spite of that, he was having more panic attacks these days than ever before, so I gathered he was open for a change.
“You take everything personally,” I whispered, ever so tenderly. He looked over at the two boys watching Harry Potter. Now, my brother had the look of Forrest Gump when he realized he had a son. “It was always your problem in school. Why did you think that boy Kevin and his tough dudes had such fun teasing you, causing you pain?”
Murph looked down, little bits of his OCD returning in tics.
“You have our mother’s panic, God rest her soul,” I added, stroking the hand I still held, “until the cancer ate her.”
Murph stared into my eyes and now I saw our father in him. That manic plea to understand the mystery of life. “Why am I like that?” He shook his head, biting his lip. “I mean, look at you. We had the same parents, but you turned sane. Me?” Her laughed. “I am nervous wreck.”
I paused. I waited again, but I had to agree. “You know what Kevin called you in school behind your back?”
His head shook in a way that didn’t negate but hated. Suspicion.
“Peter Panic, the boy who worries even about tinkling.”
I bit my lip again, quite decisive about not chuckling.
“The boy that never dares to land in Neverland.”
There was a moment in my brother’s spirit now where I really saw he was deciding if he should laugh or not. He fought with himself. I could see it bubbling in him, though. A chuckle finally did protrude from his lips. “In retrospect, I can see the wit in that.”
He looked lovingly at the boys in the living room, his one hand leaving my grasp and fingering the fringes of the orange tablecloth, stroking it onto the IKEA oak table. He really wanted to be a kid again. I knew that. I saw that. No responsibility. Guy stuff.
“Evil shall see itself and it shall die,” I mumbled, looking down onto my lap, wondering if my brother would go nuts on me again.
Murph’s hand now shook more intensely, his stare manic.
“What?”
I grabbed his other hand again. “I know you’re superstitious, Murph, you always have been, but this is not about superstition. What I mean is that you have gotten into so much trouble because you worry about absolutely everything. You worry about worrying.”
I showered him with my sisterly love, looking into his eyes and trying to reach his dependent spirit.
“You have your issues with OCD, with alcohol and your past with call girls only because of something I pleaded for our parents not to do to you. I even had a fierce fight with our mother while you were in kindergarten one day. She screamed at me, throwing the wash towels at me, telling me to get the hell out. But all through your childhood, I knew what the problem was. They knew I was okay, because I had a very loud and nasty mouth. But you …”
He sat back, taking away his hands and putting them into his lap.
“Me?”
I sat back, too, playing his game.
“Okay,” I sighed, nodding. “You almost died at birth, Murph. You had so much water in your lungs, they called you ‘The Mayor’ not because you were heavy at birth, but because they were so surprised you made it. The doctor, Mr. Rosanelli, was amazingly creative. He had to open Mom’s belly with a Caesarean that actually obliterated any chances of her having kids again. But thank God. You lived. Our folks were so happy. Me, too. But then it turned into a family secret and I wondered why.”
I paused again, now seeing that his hands were not fidgeting. He seemed calm, realizing that, maybe, just maybe, he was facing the truth.
“That birth mark on your head,” I smiled, “was Rosanelli’s mistake. He cut your head with the scalpel, which had our father screaming for us to literally throw our lawyers at the hospital staff. But our mother, sweetheart,” I said, leaning forward, “she wanted nothing of it. We were not to say anything of the sort. As far as she was concerned, it was a birthmark, and we were not to tell you ever that you almost died and were almost killed by the doctor and were in intensive care for a week.”
The look on Murph’s face was unbeatable. He had always known, I think, that Mom and Dad had lied to him to protect him from harm. “They tried to spare me.”
I noticed the look on his face. He knew this was the problem. “Now with both of our parents gone into heaven, I can tell you. You were a miracle because you were the kid who survived. So, our parents were adamant to lie to you and actually treat you like a priceless jewel. Our Dad put up all your kiddy drawings in his office and invite his students to inspect the Murph Gallery. Dad wanted you to like his fave movies to make sure you made no mistakes, like the operas he loved to insure to give you a good life. He wanted you to be his perfect son, his perfect everything to protect you like no one had before. When you farted, it was a big deal. Hey, the guy who almost died farted. Laura, the girl in ‘The Glass Menagerie’ spent all her life taking care of the glass figures in her closet, so afraid that they would break that, one day, they actually broke. So much for you breaking stuff. You are scared shitless that stuff will break.”
“It’s official. I am Laura.”
I looked out onto the ocean again, where my boys were now fishing, somewhere, someplace. I knew they were safe, though.
“All they did was make you fear to make your own move, because all you did was trust others to move for you.”
Murph got that look of hurt again, but this time it was an adamant hurt, thinking about all the times he was home from school because of a snivel that was actually just fear of being bullied or our mother yelling “Murph, no!” because he dared to stroll out without a winter cap. I had really wanted to tell Mom not treat him like a baby.
There are moments when magic happens and I witnessed it live that day. A soul realized then and there that the answers to all his problems was super in its simplicity and not far off fetched like a star or weird like a monster in a horror movie.
“So it was that easy, huh?”
“Nobody ever told you to dare to take risks. I was out and about getting laid and living in condos with bozos on popcorn and tacos and you were still living at home, afraid to take any risks. You were Mr. Protected, taking any blame for anything that went wrong. No, he shouldn’t take risks. He is the guy that almost died.”
Murph now had a life review. I could see it in his eyes. Especially the last few years with his past life memories and all that were going through his mind.
“The family secret turned you into a wreck.”
I shook my head.
“I have no frigging idea how we kept it from you. You knew you almost made it, but Mom was actually quite adamant about not telling you too much. Mom and Dad really fought over this. Mom was so overprotective of you that was only a question of time before you developed OCD. You had no idea how scared she was to lose you, hence her hatred of any girl you took home. No wonder you blasted so many relationships because they never lived up to our mother’s expectations. You even sabotaged one night with a new girlfriend and went and called a call girl. I screamed at you that day that you were nuts.”
My sarcastic chuckle must have caught Murph’s attention. He looked up, now calmer than before, his hand not shaking anymore.
“Remember Maria?”
Murph nodded. “My first real girlfriend? The one that came home with three pieces of cake and handed them to Mom as a sign of good faith?”
I smiled, mischievously. “She never even thanked for the cakes. She didn’t even look at them. No one was good enough for you. Let alone the smut mags you kept in your sock drawer. Holy Moses, she even sneered when you asked Aunt Bertha to teach you how to draw nude portraits. Nude? No way is my son going to have anything to do with nudity. My son has to be a monk. He’s the guy that almost died.”
“No wonder that relationship only lasted for three months.”
Jimmy and Josh were now cheering when Harry Potter and Ron Weasley did something spectacular. I heard my son spitting cheese doodles on the couch and Jimmy cackling at him to be careful.
“Paper towels, Josh.”
“Oh, Mom. Please.”
“Now,” I screamed even louder.
Harry was put on standby. “Oh, alright.”
I looked over at my brother.
“Risks, Murph. You have to take them.” I leaned forward and looked him in the eye. “I know you have memories of being murdered in your previous life, babe, but it’s not Whitechapel that is haunting you. It’s not even narrowly escaping death in this life. It’s the fact that you were never taught to know about it. It’s not even our parents’ fault. They just tried to protect you. Now it’s time for you not to make a big deal of stuff, even when Dorrie goes nuts. I go nuts, too,” I said, pointing at my son behind me, cleaning up his saliva drenched cheese doodles with paper towels, “but that’s my job. I pep my boys into a good life. Everything is not a big deal. And everything you do is not a big deal, either.”
I could see that my brother now saw his own life unfolding before his inner vision. I will not know to my dying day what made this miracle happen, why he suddenly saw why people had used and disrespected him. The boy from Neverland came of age in midlife.
I know that my brother always did alright in spite of everything. He had a steady job, a wife, a daughter, was reasonably successful and a nice man, although a very complicated guy. He just had never stopped worrying because everyone had treated him like a glass figurine with their sacred silk gloves. That darned only family secret had created havoc inside him. Poor Murph now left his inner clinic.
Soon enough, my brother was sitting with my son and his friend watching Harry Potter movies 7 and 8. I chatted with a lady friend, looking at my brother actually not worrying, almost behaving normally. Not having to guzzle booze or leaf men’s magazines to secretly rebel against our mother’s prude attitudes.
Yes, I got drunk that night. But it was worth it.
Just as a sweet WhatsApp message from my husband and older son came floating through midair, I saw the most incredible sunset I have ever seen in my life. And I knew it was the universe showing me what it was about.
Love is Queen.
I am very sure there was meteor shower that night and as far as that slow moving star that I saw, it could have been aliens in a UFO. But who am I to say about such things?
All I know is that Murph cleaned up his act after that. He broke nothing after that, and his hands stopped shaking. Even his OCD disappeared.
Our mother appeared in a dream years later that night and thanked me for revealing the family secret. I had been right all along. That taught me that no one needs protection from any physical source. Faith in the truth will cause any spirit to bloom beyond comprehension.
Life is mysterious, yes, but if acrobats can survive dancing on tight ropes, all you need is a little trust to keep things going. Family secrets or not. Love and fear. Which one of the two would you choose?

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