Virtual Silence Read online

  “I’d have to see for myself,” I said.

  He considered this for a moment, then shrugged. “Whatever, I don’t care.”

  I nearly froze to death that day, sitting on the cold rocks at the top of the mountain, but it was well worth it. Frankie, who had made it clear to me over our sandwiches the week before that he didn’t like talking about himself, broke down and proved otherwise—which is not to say he came right out and told me his story. Actually, it was more a game of Twenty Questions, and, as in the game, he answered mostly yes or no, or, more accurately, he shrugged or nodded. Nor was there any continuity to our discussion: I accumulated my information here and there over the course of the entire day while he threw sticks for Surge, fetched sticks Surge couldn’t find, rubbed sticks together (as we had no matches) unsuccessfully when he thought that Surge might be getting cold, skimmed stones over the stream that meandered through our mountain playground, kicked at leaves, displaced rocks in his search for salamanders, and pursued a hundred other futile endeavors.

  I learned the following: Until he was five, he and his mother and brother had lived out west, in some small town in northern California. His parents had divorced when he was a baby and he had had no recollection of his father at all. His mother had it tough, raising two sons on a waitress’s salary, and because she worked nights, he and his brother often had to fend for themselves. But in spite of all that, they were a happy family—right up until his father returned.

  His father then made apologies for whatever it was that had gone down before (his mother had never explained) and asked his mother to give up her life of hardship there in California and come with him to New York. He said he was living in a little cottage with a great view, had a decent job, and that she could stay home and take care of the boys; she wouldn’t have to worry about anything. A picture book ending, but really only the beginning.

  “You saw the house,” Frankie said, looking out over the valley into which he was pitching rocks—he wasn’t much for eye contact. And his father’s job turned out to be at the town dump, though it had a fringe benefit, because when no one was around, he got to root through people’s garbage and find things to bring home.

  His mother, of course, saw that she would have to return to work, and she landed a job cleaning office buildings. She smoked a lot, and they were both hard drinkers. She was under a lot of stress because they fought so much, and one day when Frankie was ten she had a heart attack and died.

  Then his father had an accident: a backhoe slipped in the mud and crushed one of his legs, and he’d been on disability ever since. Now his brother worked at the dump. In fact, he was the supervisor there, having quit school to take on the position. His father sat at home all day and drank himself silly. Vehemently, Frankie confided that he was not about to follow in their footsteps. He had a part-time job at a 7-Eleven and was putting aside money to buy a car. As soon as he had it, he was taking off, to start fresh somewhere.

  He stated only the facts, and I was left to ponder the emotions that he must have experienced along with each of these ordeals. I envisioned his parents, toothless and drunk, shouting and hurling things at each other while Frankie and his brother looked on in fright. I saw him standing over his mother’s corpse, wondering if her slight smile signified that she was glad to have escaped it all, promising himself that for her sake, if nothing else, he would find a way to escape as well. I saw his father, supine on a couch, a drink on the floor beside him, watching the TV (would they have one?), sliding his eyes from the set to Frankie, mumbling something like “Hang out the laundry, asshole,” or “Get dinner going, asshole.”

  Had I not seen the house, I don’t think I would have believed such an improbable story, but as I had, there was no reason to doubt him. I thought of Sherwood Anderson’s “Queer,” from his Winesburg, Ohio. We had read the short story in English the year before, and our teacher had said that Anderson’s character, Elmer Cowley, could not shake his crass beginnings, that what Anderson was suggesting, with that ending particularly, was that Elmer’s life would be quite the same wherever he went, that always he would carry his “differences” along with him; he would always be “queer” no matter where he escaped to. I remembered that Sharon had defended Elmer, arguing that Anderson had meant to suggest that he would change his life. As evidence, she brought in some biographical material on Anderson, who had once been a successful but unhappy businessman. According to the author, he just got up one day, left his thriving business behind him, walked to another town, and started a new life, as a writer.

  I hadn’t given it much thought at the time, but now I hoped with all my heart that Mrs. Rosen was wrong and that Sharon was right.

  The following week was much too cold in my opinion for a dog as old as Surge to be hiking, so I came up with an alternative strategy. I simply left a note on Frankie’s locker saying that I had half of the money that I still owed and would he mind coming over to get it before I spent it on something else. Of course he came. He brought a soiled ball for Surge, and they had quite a noisy game of catch in the living room, leaving marks on the walls which I would later have to clean off.

  Mom was out that day Christmas shopping with Ida and some woman from her support group, so we had the house to ourselves. I made him lunch, which he ate sitting sideways in his chair so that he could watch Surge gnaw his rawhide bone, and then, when he seemed about to take his leave, I asked whether he would mind giving me his opinion on something I had got in the mail from a friend the day before.

  Yes, this time Sharon had sent her correspondence to me. As if she thought I might be too stupid to realize that I should share it with Terri, she sent an extra copy with For Terri scrawled at the top. Like the last one, it was unsigned and no note was enclosed.

  I read the pages over Frankie’s shoulder:

  Letter written by asylum inmate Geraldine Love to her father three months after the murder of Geoffrey Bates:

  Dear Daddy,

  I know you haven’t come because you don’t believe me, so I’m going to tell you one more time. Please listen.

  The evening before it happened, I got this call. I answered, “Kleeman’s Cleaners, How can I help you?” like I always did, and the man at the other end laughed, a horrible laugh, Daddy. He said, “It’s me who’s going to help you.” And I said, “Oh, yeah, how’s that?” And he whispered, “I’m going to help you put an end to it all, to your miserable existence, tomorrow night.”

  I should have called the police, but I kept thinking, It’s probably someone who was just dialing randomly, calling lots of people and saying the same thing. The next day I told Mr. Kleeman, and he said that the only difference between me and the other people this nut might have called was that by answering the phone that way, I had let the nut know where to find me. He said there was no sense calling the police because they always got people complaining about crank calls and would just say not to worry about it. But he showed me where he kept his gun, just in case.

  He left then, and I was okay at first. We didn’t have much business, but the few people who did come in were familiar to me. But you’ll recall that the other stores at the strip mall closed at 9, and since we closed at 9:30, I began to get really nervous that last half hour. I kept pacing back and forth between the window and the drawer where the gun was. Finally, I got it out and put it in my smock pocket. I had it cocked, all ready to go.

  Please, Daddy, try to understand. Someone had threatened to kill me. You can’t imagine what that kind of thing does to your mind. I should have closed up. I should have called Mr. Kleeman and told him I was leaving early. But you know how I am, Daddy. I hate to make waves.

  At 9:17 I went to the register to count out the money. My hands were quaking, and I kept losing my place. I heard a car pull up, but I kept counting, trying to stay composed. I told myself that it must be Mr. Kleeman, that he’d realized how scared I was, but of course it wasn’t him.

  The man just stood there, Daddy. If he’d said, �
��Hi, I came to pick up my laundry,” anything …

  But he just stood there. I was so sure it was him. I didn’t have any doubts. I was scared for my life! I shot.

  He fell between two machines, so that only his feet were sticking out. I put down the gun and was moving to the phone to call the police when I noticed that he had a ticket stub in his hand. I recognized the numbers as belonging to a suit that I’d cleaned earlier. Then the door opened again.

  I had my back to it, and I didn’t turn around. I was frozen, paralyzed. “I’m here,” he said.

  He came forward slowly—I heard his footsteps on the tile—and then he must have noticed the dead man between the machines because he stopped and made a noise, a kind of growl. There was a long, horrible moment of silence, and then I heard his footsteps retreating.

  That’s the truth, Daddy. That’s what I live with, all day in my thoughts and all night in my dreams. “I’m here,” I hear, over and over. And the man who said it is loose somewhere, stalking other young women for all I know. And I’m here, locked up like a criminal.

  I hope you’ll come to see me, Daddy. I’m so alone.

  Love,

  Geraldine

  He put the pages down and stared at me. “What the hell kind of a letter is that?” he asked.

  “Well, you’d have to know Sharon,” I began. “She’s not like the other girls at school. She’s not like anyone.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  As Frankie had never asked me a question about myself, I took this to be a close cousin and lavished my response with detail; I told him all about Sharon and Terri and me back in the old days, all about Sharon’s dedication to her investigations. In short, I took the opportunity, via my connection to Sharon, to make myself sound interesting. And Frankie, if not exactly spellbound, did appear to be mildly intrigued.

  It might have gone the other way; I had taken a risk by showing him the typed pages. He might have held her correspondence up as a warning to me, about what can happen when you carry a gun. But he didn’t. He was much more concerned with determining whether Sharon had made the letter up or had actually come upon it somehow. (“Where the hell did she get it?” were his exact words, I think.) I showed him her previous correspondence then, the statement she had sent to Terri. He read it carefully.

  “She was that fattish girl with the raincoat, right?”

  He shook his head, as if to say, Funny what you might learn about fat girls who wear raincoats. “Geraldine Love,” he muttered. “Sounds like a made-up name. Why don’t you just ask her?”

  I explained why I couldn’t, which of course necessitated a detailed account of everything that had happened to Terri and Sharon and me in the first weeks that followed the killings. When he indicated that he had some interest in that day itself (“Cool,” he said when I first mentioned it), I realized I had another subject on which I was well versed to speak to him.

  He looked at me while I spoke, and not from the corner of one eye and with his head tilted back like he usually did. I had the feeling that he was seeing me for the first time. His life being what it was, it was likely that he seldom tried to imagine what life must be like for other people. I imagined that we would be close now, that in the days to come, we would tell each other everything—as Terri and Sharon and I had once done. To test my hunch, I described something of the emotions that I had experienced and was still experiencing as a result of that one day. But I could see that he was not as interested in my recurrent nightmares and my struggles to cling to my sanity as he was in the facts. He had heard the story from Tom Heely, he said, who had heard it from someone else. As in the children’s game of telephone, it had reached his ears distorted, with some things thrown in that hadn’t actually occurred. In his version, which could only have come, albeit indirectly, from Sharon herself, Sharon had seen the killer’s gun aimed at Bev and had tried to throw herself on top of her.

  I set him straight. Then, in one final attempt to get him to focus on me, on who I was aside from that one day, I took my narrative back one day in time, so that I could include my first encounter with Goliath. At this point his gaze drifted off toward Surge. He nodded, as if to indicate that he was still listening, but he patted his leg simultaneously, and Surge came to him.

  I quit mid-sentence and offered, instead, to make him a cup of coffee before he left.

  11

  The children painted with relish, and with a great deal of noise as well, though the result of their labors was a terrible thing to see. Ida had encouraged them to mix their own colors, and most of them had gotten carried away. Their skies were muddy and punctuated by missed spots, patches of brown cardboard that looked like debris flying across the firmament. Their mountains were worse, some red and volcanic-looking, some blurred at the edges, some snowcapped with a thick white that dribbled down the cardboard into the more temperate zones.

  When she wasn’t in the back with the painters and me, Ida was in the front by the tables, where Flo and the younger children were laying out the animals and flowers and clouds they had been working on for the past months. The errors that had for so long evaded Ida caught her eye now, and she extracted the worst of the projects and set them before Flo, whose task it was to patch them up. The children, who had been led to believe their projects were perfection itself, were no more surprised by this change of attitude than Flo and I.

  On the way home, Ida spoke not a word to me, and I was left to consider my own bleak thoughts. Frankie and I were spending quite a lot of time together, but Surge was always at the center of it. The poor old dog, who had at first reacted to Frankie’s affections with such enthusiasm, was showing his true colors now. It had been a charade, apparently, and he could not keep it up. Now when Frankie arrived, Surge stood just long enough to wag his tail in greeting and then settled himself again on his rug. And Frankie, who feared the wintry weather was responsible, spent most of our time together cataloguing the changes that spring would bring while the object of his apprehension drifted off to sleep.

  For the most part I was content to sit on the edge of my bed and observe the two of them, loving Frankie for his tenderness. But there were times when, watching Frankie stroke Surge’s back or rub his palm on Surge’s nose, I thought I would explode with jealousy. Once my craving for his touch got so bad that I challenged him to a game of arm wrestling. He looked at me as if I were crazy, then got up and moved the lamp back on my night table. We locked hands, joined elbows, looked into each other’s eyes. But before I could make my face lovable, kissable, my arm was down and Frankie was back at Surge’s side again.

  I didn’t know that Ida intended to visit with Mom until we pulled into the driveway and Ida turned off the ignition. Before I could even collect my school books from the back seat, Ida was up the walkway and rapping on the door. I was just heading up the walk myself when Mom appeared in the doorway. I saw her look go from surprise, as Ida always called first when she was coming, to concern—a reaction, I suppose, to Ida’s face. She pulled Ida in and was about to close the door when she noticed me.

  I followed them into the kitchen where Ida, who was still wearing her coat, immediately began to pace. Mom offered her a glass of wine, but Ida didn’t seem to hear her. “What?” Mom asked. “What? Tell me, Ida.”

  “It’s Charles,” Ida said, wringing her hands. Her voice was so low that it sounded more like a growl than a reply. She reminded me of those tigers that you see pacing in the zoo, the ones that cannot be distracted from the reality of their imprisonment.

  “What?” Mom asked. “What did he do to you?”

  “He invited another couple,” Ida said flatly.

  “What? To go on the boat?”

  “He said it would be more fun that way, people to share our time with and so forth.”

  Mom’s lips moved, groping for an appropriate response. “Oh, Ida, that’s not the end of the world,” she said at last. “You’re still going. That’s the important thing. It doesn’t mean
that he doesn’t care about you.”

  Ida’s expression did not alter, nor did she quit pacing. I stood in the corner of the room clutching my books to my chest, longing for my bedroom but afraid to draw attention to myself by making any sudden movements. “Who’s the other couple?” Mom asked weakly.

  “Ed.”

  “Ed!” Mom laughed bitterly.

  “Ed and some woman he’s apparently been seeing.”

  Mom pulled out a chair and slowly sank into it, her expression now as dazed as Ida’s. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t know,” Ida said. She reached the counter and turned sharply. “Until last night.”

  Mom turned towards me, wide-eyed, then away again.

  Ida shook her head. “I can’t go. I won’t.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Mom said. Her tone was testy. “You like Ed. I’m sure his friend is very nice. You’ve been looking forward to this trip for weeks. You can’t cancel it on my account.”

  “I can’t do this to you.”

  Mom lifted herself from the chair and went to the refrigerator, nearly colliding with Ida on her way. She extracted a half-empty bottle of Zinfandel and sank into her chair again, then realized that she had forgotten to get a glass and looked beseechingly in my direction. I put my books down quickly and got out two glasses. Mom filled them, holding one out for Ida.

  Ida stopped to stare at it, greedily, I thought, but then she shook her head. “Oh, come on,” Mom said with forced cheerfulness. “It’s no big deal. Charles is right. You do make mountains out of molehills sometimes. Stop that damn pacing, would you? You’re driving me crazy.” She furrowed her brows. “Actually, why would Ed want to go? He has no sailing experience.”

  “That’s why he wants to go,” Ida mumbled.

  “What? Speak up, damn it.”

  “Charles says he wants to come because of some book he’s writing. About pirates. He wants the experience on a boat so that he can get it right.”