Virtual Silence Read online

  “I’ve decided to change my name,” Lilly announced as she scooped up more vegetables.

  “Oh, you have, have you?” Charles cried out. The adults had all had their share of wine by then and were getting louder by the moment.

  “I’m serious, Daddy. What kind of a name is Lilly for me?”

  Mom nearly spit her food out laughing. “What, are you so sinister?”

  Lilly smiled, not quite politely, and turned her attention back to Charles. “I mean it Daddy, legally,” she whined. “Lilly is a name for someone with light hair and light skin. Look at me.”

  We all did, except for Diane who had just rapped her knuckles on a slice of my bread and was puffing her cheeks with repressed laughter. Lilly was right, I thought. With her long black hair and olive skin, she looked more like a raven than a white flower. “I was thinking of something like Dolores or Donna,” Lilly said.

  “Oh, Donna, oh, oh, Donna,” Charles sang in an exaggeratedly deep voice.

  Ida joined him. “I had a girl, Donna was her name …”

  The twins, who had phone calls to make to their old high school buddies, disappeared soon after the meal. They had taken their plates into the kitchen, but neither had offered to help with the cleanup and Ida, whose face was by now pink, didn’t seem to mind. So it was just the three of us, Mom and Ida and me in the kitchen, trying to organize the dishes in the sink and figure out what to do with all the leftovers. Charles was in the family room, standing in front of the TV, gesturing and shouting out orders to the football players. “Things seem better,” Mom whispered.

  Ida turned abruptly from the sink and put a wet hand on her wrist. “Oh, they are,” she whispered back. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you yet, but we’re going to charter a sailboat sometime around Christmas. Just the two of us. Somewhere in the South.”

  Mom placed a hand over hers and squeezed. “Oh, darling, I’m so happy for you. How romantic that’ll be.”

  “And I get to be the captain,” Ida added, glancing at Charles in the family room. “Remember when I took those sailing classes last year? It’s the one thing I know more about than he does.”

  “See,” Mom chirped, “I told you everything would be all right. You were imagining all this time, making yourself sick for nothing.”

  “Yes!” Charles shouted.

  We all turned to look at him. He had his fist up in the air, and his face was so full of joy that he looked as if he might cry. On the screen, several men were piled up in the snow. Beyond them, the crowds in the bleachers were rising, cheering, applauding the clash. “Touchdown?” asked Mom.

  “I suppose,” Ida said. Then she pulled Mom closer. “We had this really big fight, see, about not doing things together anymore? You know we hardly ever go out, and I thought, That’s it, I can’t take it anymore, he can’t stand the sight of me. And I was just about to call and ask you for the number of your therapist when he comes in from work, puts his arms around me, and tells me about this idea … this boat thing. Don’t say anything about it yet. We only just began to discuss it. I mean, it might not even come to pass. The twins were invited to spend Christmas skiing with a friend in Vermont. If that falls through, of course we wouldn’t go. But that’s not the point. Whether we go or not almost doesn’t matter. The point is that he thought of it, that he likes me enough to want to spend an entire week with me … alone … on a boat no less!”

  What does Goliath do? I wrote. Then I realized my mistake and scratched out Goliath and wrote Rita above it.

  I was at my father’s apartment. I had left Mom watching football with the Newets and promised to return to pick her up in an hour. My father had been watching football too when I came in—alone, thankfully—but he turned the set off as soon as he saw me, and gave me a hug from which, for some minutes, there was no escape.

  Now we were sitting in the kitchen, across the table from each other. His computer was there of course, along with an empty aluminum TV dinner tray, so that I knew that he had spent most of Thanksgiving either working or playing one of his many computer games. He read my note and then tapped a finger on it. “Is this why I don’t see you anymore, Ginny?”

  You know I’m working, I wrote on another sheet.

  He sighed, then smiled half-heartedly and scratched his ear. I could see that I was going to have to help him along. Is she a yoga instructor? I wrote.

  “Charles?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  He sighed again. “Did he? …” he began.

  No, I wrote. He didn’t mention it to Mom. He just said he had an instructor and I figured it out.

  As if to encourage an elaboration, he looked at my hand. I put my pencil down and folded my hands on the table.

  “All right,” he said. “All right. I said something to Charles one day over lunch, to the effect that it was difficult meeting … people … when you sit at home all day in front of a computer. This was before Rita ever called him.”

  He lit a cigarette and sat for a moment with his head turned aside, his cheek resting on his thumb. “Rita had been a dancer for several years, but she never really made enough money to support herself; she always had to have other jobs. So then she got the idea to teach yoga, which she had always practiced and has some sort of a degree in.”

  He stopped to take a drag of his cigarette, then stubbed it out. “She was giving classes in her living room at first, but the apartment wasn’t big enough. She couldn’t afford to rent space, so she started calling local businesses to see whether there might be a need for that kind of thing. Charles was one of those she called.”

  He clasped his hands together, rubbing them vigorously. “And then he called me. He said he had this very nice single woman coming in to teach yoga for a half hour a day and did I want to meet her. She’s a friend, Ginny. You can’t expect me to sit in this apartment day after day, night after night …”

  What about Mom? I wrote.

  “Your mother is still very angry with me.”

  She sent you the cookies.

  “Yes, she did,” he said, and he bent his head over the table as if the thought disheartened him. Then he got up, went to the refrigerator, and took out a container of milk. “How ’bout I make us some hot chocolate?”

  I nodded. His offer, I assumed, implied that he would have more to say about Mom, that he just needed a moment or two to collect his thoughts.

  He moved about slowly. His thick wavy hair, which was long enough to cover the back of his neck, was entirely gray and his posture was not great, probably from years of hunching over a computer. From the back, you might easily mistake him for an old man. But when he turned and you saw his face, you were pleasantly surprised. He was rugged-looking, with a taut, wide jaw. His hands were big, with long fingers, and his eyes were narrow and steady, a penetrating blue which I, unfortunately, had not inherited. He looked great on the jacket of his last book—a novel about a fisherman who just got in his boat one day and never turned back. (Mom and I should have known then what was coming.) The photo was in black-and-white and Dad, who was wearing a dress shirt and a tie with faded blue jeans, had his shirt sleeves rolled up, revealing his muscular forearms. The tie was loose, the shirt was opened at the collar, and his head was slightly cocked, so that the light accentuated the hard lines of his jaw and cheekbone. One reviewer, a woman, naturally, had said that the protagonist was no less robust and virile than the author himself.

  After extracting the Nestlé Quick, he removed two spoons from the drawer. I found myself impressed, as I often was, with how soundlessly he did things. He was a quiet man—thoughtful, some might say. I didn’t know, myself; he seldom shared his thoughts. Goliath, however, was loud, an in-your-face sort of woman. I couldn’t imagine the attraction.

  He got out the Cool Whip and floated a large spoonful in each of our cups. Then he sat back down at the table, smiling feebly. “This not talking thing,” he said, tilting his head, “it worries me a little.”

  Mom used to say that he was
the king of evasion, that no one in Rock Ridge could change a subject as subtly as he did. We were talking about Mom, I wrote.

  “No, we weren’t talking, Ginny. That’s the point. I was talking and you were passing notes. I don’t know whether we can have a serious conversation that way, sweety. Your mother, as you know, would like you to see a therapist. And at first I didn’t think it would be a good idea. But now …”

  I held a finger up to stop him. I started to write something but then changed my mind and crumpled up the paper and threw it on the floor.

  I heard the door open as I was flying down the catwalk, but he didn’t call me back. I wanted to peel out of the parking lot, so that he would know just how angry I was, but it took me a moment to get the car door unlocked, and although I popped the clutch, the Yugo only rattled in response. I recalled that Mom was the one who had taken that picture of him for his last book. She’d made him sit on a stool in the middle of the living room. “God, you’re good-looking,” she’d said. He’d smiled. Then she’d snapped. And right up until he finally confessed, Mom had taken credit for the look of self-possession she’d achieved with the shot.

  I put the pedal to the floor, but I couldn’t get the needle to do more than throb near fifty. I screeched my way around a bend in the road and almost hit the owl that was swooping across it.

  I drove into my own neighborhood, past Sharon’s house. (I still had her statement excerpt—if that was what it really was—in my bag. I had shown it to no one. And Terri, through her avoidance of me, had made it clear that she didn’t want to discuss it either.) There were no lights on; they’d probably all gone to her grandmother’s. I drove past Terri’s. The lights were on there, but there was a car in the driveway with Texas plates. Evidently her sister Jill, who I didn’t much like, was up for the holiday.

  I turned on Glen Road, then Hill. As I was nearing my own house I heard Surge barking. Like Mom, he’d been having bladder problems lately. We had left him outside, chained to a tree so that he wouldn’t be tempted to go off into the woods and sample some of the viscera that the hunters always left behind. My first inclination was to pull into the driveway, just to make sure that he hadn’t gotten himself all tangled up. As I came closer, however, I realized that his barking was not the half-hearted greeting that he extended to passersby. He was barking fiercely, investing everything he had in it. Someone had to have been in our yard, or worse, in our house. I recalled the hunter that I had seen in the morning. Images jammed together in my head. I hit the gas and raced for Ida’s.

  I was a wreck by the time I arrived. There had been no car in the driveway, no cars in the road. Whoever it was that was stalking us had come on foot, probably from the woods behind the house. There were prisons in our area from which sometimes convicts escaped and took shelter in the woods. Once someone held a family hostage until the road blocks were removed and he felt it safe to proceed to more populated areas in search of anonymity.

  I threw open the door and was hit with a blast of music which I recognized, in spite of my state, as Meatloaf’s Bat out of Hell. Mom and Ida were in the corner of the room, dancing to it with more abandon than I would have thought either of them capable of. Charles was standing in front of the TV, which was also blaring. The wrong team made a touchdown, apparently, for Charles angrily clapped a fist into his palm.

  “Someone’s broken into our house!” I screamed.

  Ida smiled and waved for me to come and join them. Mom, who couldn’t have heard me over all the noise, did a thing with her hips which I guess she thought was cool. I dashed to the stereo, thumbed some buttons until it went off. Ida’s mouth dropped open while Mom glared at me. “Thank you,” Charles said.

  “Someone’s at our house!” I cried.

  Mom’s lips quivered moronically. “You’re talking,” she whispered.

  “I was coming back from Dad’s and I went past our house and Surge was barking.”

  “He barks all the time,” Ida said. She went to the TV set, lowered it.

  Mom came towards me with her arms outstretched. “My baby. Let me hold you.”

  I ducked her and rushed to Charles, who was looking back and forth between me and the football game. “Please, call the police.”

  Charles made a face. “You can’t call the police on Thanksgiving.”

  “Charles!” Ida cried.

  “It’s hunting season,” he snapped. “It was probably just someone coming back from the woods.”

  “Did you actually see anyone?” Ida asked.

  The twins came bounding down the stairs. “What’s going on?” they asked in unison.

  We piled into the Four-Runner, all six of us, with Charles at the wheel. He drove fast, not because he had begun to see this as an emergency but because he was in a hurry to get back to what must have been the third football game of the day. His lips were pressed together, and every now and then he gave his head a little shake of exasperation. The twins and Mom and I were all squeezed together in the back seat. Mom had her arm over my shoulder, but she was stiff, and I could tell it was not a gesture of love as much as one of necessity.

  I was quaking as violently as I had under the table in the diner after the shots had been fired. I wanted to insist that we go to the police station, let them handle it, but I had lost my tongue—and perhaps my mind as well, for my thoughts were sketchy. I had the feeling that this was all preordained, that nothing I could say or do would change it.

  Then I understood why. I had experienced many emotions since the day of the killings—grief, frustration, despair among them. But until tonight, until my father’s attempt to circumvent my concerns by inventing some of his own, I hadn’t really been angry. Even the night that I had met Goliath I had been more surprised than anything else. Now here I was, angry again, not only at my father but at all of them.

  It was going to happen again. Again, I had unleashed the anger that my father instilled in me and let it loose on others. Think good thoughts, I told myself, let it go. But when Charles shook his head again, I realized that if I had been behind him instead of Ida, I would have kicked the back of his seat.

  Why should I be angry with the twins? I asked myself. It wasn’t their fault that they’d shared the same womb for nine months, that they remained a unit to the exclusion of everyone else.

  Diane whispered something to Lilly, and Lilly laughed. They were beautiful girls, tall and dark like Charles, but with Ida’s flawless complexion. Although I’d seen no evidence of it myself, they were supposed to be very smart. Diane was majoring in economics, Lilly in anthropology. Lilly sat forward suddenly. “Ma, I’m taking your ankle bracelet back to school with me this time whether you like it or not. You know you never wear it.”

  As Charles pulled into our driveway, his headlights revealed a silhouette rising from the stoop. I buried my face in Mom’s coat and held my breath. I heard Charles yank up the emergency brake and then throw open the door. I felt the car bounce as he jumped out of it and shouted, “Who goes there?”

  One of the twins laughed.

  “It’s just a kid,” Ida said.

  I disengaged myself from Mom and looked. A figure was coming toward us, and Surge, who had been unchained, was at his side. Frankie Stewart stuck his hand out. “Mr. Jarrell?” he asked.

  Charles turned. “It must be some friend of yours, Ginny.”

  Both twins were laughing uncontrollably now, and Ida turned around in the front seat to offer me a sympathetic smile. I tried to smile back at her, but the muscles in my face had gone slack from all the tension. Frankie bent down and peered in. “Ginny?” he said. “Ginny Jarrell? Are you in there?”

  I felt Mom’s body relax against me, and it occurred to me that maybe she hadn’t been upset with me after all, that maybe she had also been afraid. “Why don’t we all go in,” she said weakly. “I’ll make some coffee and Charles and Ginny’s friend can watch what’s left of the football game.”

  Emotionally depleted, I went directly to my room and l
istened from there to Mom, Ida, and the twins in the kitchen. Fortunately, Diane and Lilly had plans for the evening, and as soon as the game was over, they rushed their parents right out.

  “Can I speak to Ginny?” I heard Frankie say.

  “Third door on the left,” Mom said. That she was cranky again was apparent in her voice. “Please leave the door open,” she added after Frankie had already started down the hall. “We always ask that of her male visitors.”

  As if I had any.

  He entered and spent a full minute looking around my room, his gaze pausing on the computer, the television, the bookshelf, and finally, the photograph of Sharon, Terri, Surge, and me that hung over my bed. Mom had taken it the year before, outside in front of the house. Sharon was sitting on the stoop, slouched over with her feet turned in and her arms crossed so that she looked as if she was in pain. Terri had bent to pet Surge, and I was posing with my hands on my hips and one toe pointed, cheerleader fashion.

  “You’re whacked,” Frankie said.

  He looked over his shoulder. Then he closed the door halfway. “What’d you tell those people? That Charles guy said you thought I was robbing your house. What are you, paranoid or something?”

  He walked to my desk and pulled out the chair there. I had painted it white some years ago, and Terri, who was the most artistic among us, had painted little red roses on it. Frankie looked at them, curled his upper lip, and replaced the chair. He looked around for another place to sit, but other than the chair and the bed, where I was sitting, there wasn’t any.