Virtual Silence Read online

  It amazed me that in spite of the fact that the only thing on my mind was Surge, I was able not only to make sense of his words but also to respond to them. “But you didn’t tell anyone. How come?” I asked.

  “The shock of knowing that my own daughter was carrying a gun … Besides, Ida and Charles were sleeping by then. I assumed you were too, out in the living room or somewhere. The house was quiet and dark. There didn’t seem to be any point in waking everyone up to announce that my daughter—”

  “You thought I killed her, didn’t you? Because she was your girlfriend and you knew I wanted you back with Mom.”

  “I never—”

  “You did. If you hadn’t, you would have told Ida and Charles in the morning, when we were waiting for the Coast Guard to come.”

  “You’re wrong. I never thought that for a second,” he insisted.

  “You did, Dad. Ida woke up certain that Rita had killed herself. And Charles had been certain from the start. And the two of them were nearly nonsensical with the ramifications of that. Ida begged you to go and look for her one more time, and you just kept saying, ‘Rita wouldn’t do that. I’m not going to look for her because I know she’s not dead. She’s only hiding and when the Coast Guard comes, she’ll come out.’ But really, all that time, you didn’t want to look because you were afraid that you would find her. I saw your face when the Coast Guard said that she had come in with the kayakers to say where we were. You were amazed.”

  Dad’s head drooped over his computer.

  “It’s okay. You were just trying to protect me.”

  “I’m not going to have this discussion with you, Ginny. I never for a minute thought that. Oh, by the way, I removed your bullets. I forbid you to replace them. And now, I want some answers from you. For starters, where did you get the gun?”

  “I borrowed it from a kid at school. He got it from his older brother,” I lied. “It’s registered and everything.”

  “Fine. You’ve got exactly twenty-four hours to return it to him.”

  “Okay.” I pulled my gloves off and held my hands out to look at my stiff red fingers. Dad reached for the hand nearest him and held it. His head was still bent, and when I heard him sniffle, I realized that he was crying. I wanted to go to him, to comfort him, and to tell him about Surge and be comforted myself, but I was still numb, emotionally if no longer physically, and I couldn’t bring myself to get out of my seat. Besides, to tell him about Surge, I realized, would be to contradict the lie I had just offered him. In effect, I had traded my dog for the gun.

  I freed myself from his grip and began clumsily to peel the wrappers off the cheese sticks he had set before me. I popped the tab on the Pepsi and took a sip. Then I told him what I had overheard and why I had shot off the gun. He kept his head bent the entire time, shaking it almost imperceptibly. I tried my best, too, to explain why I hadn’t told anyone that Rita had left the island with the kayakers, a considerable task since I didn’t quite understand my motivations myself. “Are you mad at me?” I asked.

  He lifted his head and looked at me so hard and long that I began to fidget. Finally he said, “I love you, Ginny. I’m sorry I put you through so much. I never intended it.”

  That my father loved me only made matters worse. It was too much to take, on such a cold night. It had come as a shock; in fact, I may have recoiled when I heard the words. It was easier somehow when I assumed he didn’t really love me, when I thought he was too preoccupied to give it much thought either way, to have him living away from us, away from me, away from my day-to-day affairs, to know that he was eating without me, going to bed without first stopping by my door to whisper goodnight.

  The truth, now, was unbearable, and one more infliction in an emotional body already so badly wounded that I thought I might explode. I was in the car again, driving again with my mouth open, trying to cry the way I had when I had come from Frankie’s so that I could vomit again and then feel the emptiness that had followed my last expulsion. But however much I tried, I couldn’t even bring forth tears.

  I had a quarter of a tank of gas, and I was torn between the desire to drive until it ran out and a more logical but less intense longing to lie down in my own bed with my down comforter tucked tight around me. I had eaten nothing but the cheese sticks all day, and I was still hungry. As I headed towards the diner in town, I envisioned a scenario wherein my lasagna dinner was disrupted by an obviously drunken male. I pulled my gun from my bag to warn him away, but when he only laughed, I knew that he knew that my father had emptied the chamber. When I actually reached the diner and saw that it was bright inside, and empty except for one waitress who was staring out wearily at the snow, I decided not to stop after all.

  Logic got the better of me and I headed home. The snow was falling harder now and the little Yugo kept to the road with great difficulty. I imagined that Frankie and Surge were in California by now, getting ready to spend the night on the beach. Surge had never been to the beach before. Somehow I didn’t think he would like it.

  I remembered all at once that my letters were still in the Stewarts’ mailbox. I considered going back for them, but then decided that Mr. Stewart would likely read them and have a good laugh, which he sorely needed. If he passed them on to Frankie, so what? At best, Frankie might try to contact me, in which case I might be able to get my dog back. At worst, Frankie would have a good laugh too. Who cared?

  I pulled into the driveway and turned off the ignition. When I’d left, late in the morning, I’d told Mom that I’d be back in an hour or so. The events of the day had been such that it hadn’t even dawned on me that she might have needed the car, that she was probably worried sick about me after all this time. I stared at the door, wondering how long it would take her to realize that I was out in the driveway, expecting her to come stomping out, screaming about the anxiety I’d caused her.

  I decided to stay in the car for a while, until the heat left it and I was cold and sluggish again. I was already dim-witted. My thoughts had been so clear and buoyant earlier in the day; now I could hardly grasp them. It seemed that they were being transmitted to me from someplace very far away. Miraculously, I recalled that Frankie had left me a note and that it was in my pocket. I removed my seat belt, unbuttoned my jacket, and retrieved it. My hands were already so cold that it took me some moments to unfold it. I turned on the overhead light. Thanks, the clothes fit good, it read.

  “Thanks, the clothes fit good!” I said to the dashboard, and I threw my head back Goliath-style and laughed. I turned around to look in the back seat. “Thanks, the clothes fit good!” I declared.

  I stayed turned like that, looking at nothing, imagining girls in the back, friends smiling in response to me and to Frankie’s note. “Let me see that,” I thought I heard one of them say.

  In my mind I handed it over to her, and she read it and passed it around to the others. They all laughed, all my friends. We all laughed. Because that was what teenage girls did. They drove around in their mothers’ cars in threes or fours or fives and they shared their experiences and their deepest thoughts and their plans for the future, and their troubles too. And then they laughed. And their laughter, coming all together like that, was a magical thing, and eventually it diminished their troubles. “Can you imagine?” I said to my laughing friends. “Can you imagine where my self-respect has been? Can you imagine, me, Ginny, writing love letters to a boy who nearly knocked me down when I went to kiss him? To a boy who would steal a dog from a girl who he knew very well was already emotionally damaged?” I threw my head back and shouted at the roof. “Thanks yourself!”

  My friends laughed harder. We laughed harder. We laughed so hard the Yugo shook. Then, finally, the tears came.

  They didn’t last very long, however, because I happened to turn and notice that there was not one but two other cars in the driveway. One, of course, was Ida’s Four-Runner. I couldn’t say who the other belonged to because it was completely covered with snow.

  My fi
rst thought was that it must be Charles. He had called the house several times, but Ida had refused to speak to him. I imagined that that was why my mother had not appeared at the door shouting that I was ten hours late getting the car back to her, and here she was worried sick. Charles had to be creating some scene in there for my mother to have forgotten all about me.

  I opened the car door at once and marched to the house in the snow. If he was hassling Ida, I planned to throw him out. If he refused to go, I planned to show him my gun. Unlike the drunk in my diner scenario, Charles would be too stupid to realize that the chamber was empty. Charles, who was afraid of ghosts, would flee at once.

  I was just reaching for the knob when the door opened and a woman appeared. She was wearing a dark red silk blouse and baggy pajama-style flowered silk pants. Her hair was pulled back into a bun, and her diamond earrings twinkled when she tossed her head. “Finally,” she said, laughing. “We were making bets on how long it would take you to come in.”

  It took me a moment, but I recognized her. “Sorry about the car, Mom,” I whispered.

  She swiped at my concerns as if they were cob webs. “Don’t worry about it. If I had wanted to go somewhere, I could have used Ida’s. Come in, come in. We’ve got a lovely surprise for you.”

  I didn’t think I could take another surprise, lovely or otherwise. I stood where I was with my lips moving in some absurd attempt to inform her of the condition I was in, but this lovely, cheerful creature who was my mother didn’t seem to notice. She drew her head back from the door, to smile her lovely smile at Ida and Charles or whoever it was. I could hear music playing. Apparently they were having a party. Harry Chapin was singing, “All I’ve got is time, nothing else is mine, All I want is you and one more tomorrow …”

  My mother, who was usually reduced to tears by this tune, closed her eyes, smiled, and inhaled deeply, as though to drink in Harry’s optimism. If I’d had my wits about me, I might have reminded her of what had become of him. When she opened her eyes, she seemed delighted all over again to see me there. She opened the door wider and I stepped in.

  Ida, who was sitting in the rocker, saluted me with her wine glass. Sharon, who was sitting on the sofa, released the peanuts she had just scooped up from the bowl on the coffee table and stood. “Ginny?” she asked in a squeaky voice.

  “Sharon?” I squeaked back at her.

  She was wearing her shabby brown raincoat, of course. The two heavy sweaters that she must have been wearing beneath it were now on the arm of the sofa. Her hair was longer, and her sneakers were new. Otherwise, she was just the same. “Sharon?” I asked again.

  “See,” said my mother, “I told you you’d be surprised.”

  I glanced at her, open-mouthed.

  “Ginny!” Sharon cried, and in her attempt to get to me quickly she stubbed her toe on the leg of the coffee table and hooted with pain. Then she laughed, and then I was in her arms and everything was all right again.

  18

  We were up on the top of the mountain, lying on our backs on the ground in the very same clearing of the birch forest where I had come with Mom and Ida back in October the year before. Our heads were together, our legs out at angles like the spokes of a wheel. The sky was full of stars, and the forest was full of night sounds—if you listened hard enough. But we had arrived just before sunset, when the other hikers were quitting the area, and we’d had plenty of time to acclimate ourselves to the dark.

  No one had said a word in some time. No one had moved. The waterfall could be heard in the distance, a mellow flow—there hadn’t been much rain all summer. It was as mesmerizing a backdrop as you could ask for, and it was a pleasure to be mesmerized after the day that we had put in saying farewell to family and friends. The three of us would be sleeping at my house, and in the morning Mom would be driving us to Boston where we would be attending different colleges. Over the summer we had bullied our parents into agreeing to pay for us to share an apartment together for the first year. After that, we’d see.

  “Are you sorry we didn’t go to New Jersey?” Sharon asked, her voice as soft as butter.

  “No, not really,” I answered.

  We had made our farewell list back in January, when we all got back together again and agreed that we would all go to school in Boston. At the time it had been months since I had even thought about Herman Gardener, but in the course of telling Sharon and Terri every single thing that had crossed my mind since we had gone our separate ways back in the fall, his name had come up. My desire to see him was revived and I added him to our list. Sharon, who still clung to her investigative ways, became so interested in pursuing the encounter that I didn’t have the heart to tell her that my own interest was diminishing proportionally as the months went by. I had removed him from the list as recently as last week. I had my own father back now, emotionally speaking at least, and no need to elicit the concern of a stranger. “Can you believe my father?” I asked.

  “Was that the first time you ever saw him cry?” Terri asked, referring to how he had broken down when we had been there earlier to say good-bye.

  “No,” Sharon said. “Don’t you remember? He cried that night when Ginny was there telling him about the gun, the night Ginny found out about Surge.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Terri said. “I’d forgotten.”

  “Surge,” I sighed.

  “The gun,” Sharon sighed.

  “We’d better get on with it soon,” Terri said.

  “Soon,” Sharon and I answered simultaneously, but no one made a move.

  We were silent again for a long time. Then Terri said, “Do you think we’ve grown up this past year? Do you think that what happened in September pushed us into adulthood prematurely?”

  “Ah, a breeze!” Sharon whispered. We watched the fingernail clipping of a moon disappear behind a cloud and then reappear. “The forecast is for rain.”

  “Good thing you’ve got your coat,” I teased her. In spite of the hour it was still very warm, and Terri and I were wearing only shorts and T-shirts. Sharon was wearing jeans, and she had her raincoat spread out over her legs, to keep the bugs off her, she’d said. I inclined my head towards Terri’s. “I don’t feel grown-up. I feel different, of course, but I wouldn’t call it grown-up.”

  “And Ginny would know,” Sharon added.

  “How’s that?” Terri asked.

  “Well, while you were searching for the genie at the bottom of the bottle every night and I was pursuing new friendships so as to appease my therapist, Ginny was cultivating relationships with adults.”

  “You know very well,” I said, “that the adults I spent my time with didn’t show any signs of maturity.”

  “Well then, there’s your answer for you, Terri,” Sharon stated. “There is virtually no difference between teenagers and adults. None of us know what the hell we’re doing.”

  “It’s depressing to think so.”

  “No it’s not. Not really. Actually, I think it’s a contradiction in terms to say that someone is mature … or wise. You fall into a ditch, you scramble around for a while in the dirt, you figure out which way is up, and you emerge smiling and thinking you know something. Then you trip and go down and it starts all over again. The adults who appear to be wise are the ones who simply don’t have any ditches in their backyards.

  “Look at the Newets, for example. There they were, coasting along in their fancy house, blind to the fact that their daughters are abominable—”

  “You never met them until today.”

  “Ginny told us. Anyway, the Newets seemed like wise, mature adults to me when I first met them. I remember sitting in your kitchen, Ginny, once when they were over, and we were talking about money—”

  “Yes, I remember that.”

  “And Charles was saying that it was impossible to save money on a weekly basis from your paycheck, because all middle-class Americans spend every penny they make. That was when I’d gotten that $3000 from my grandmother and I wante
d Charles to sell me a computer with a modem and the rest of it. And Charles said he wouldn’t take my $3000 because I might not have a lump sum like that again for some time, and that the one thing you should never do with a lump sum is spend it. He said I should buy the computer on time and pay it off with my allowance and birthday money and baby-sitting money and so on. I took his advice and before I knew it, the computer was mine and I still had the $3000 to boot. And let me tell you, I thought Charles Newet was the wisest male adult in the world—after Ginny’s father, of course.”

  “I see your point,” Terri said. “So here Charles understood how a large amount of money might never come one’s way again but didn’t see the parallel where Ida was concerned.”

  “That’s right. He was prepared to empty his entire marital account for the sake of a … a …”

  “Bimbo,” I supplied.

  “Bimbo. Thank you.” Sharon said.

  “Well, Charles was lucky, wasn’t he?” Terri replied. “If today was any indication.”

  Our voices were smooth and low and inflectionless, like the voices of people in dreams. When we broke off again, to reconnect with the stars and the night, it seemed as if we had never spoken at all. Another cloud crossed over the moon, but this one was so delicately put together that it did not entirely diminish her light. When it had passed, Charles drifted back into my mind. He was the one who had come to the door when we arrived there earlier. He’d made us coffee and then he’d had us sit down in the dining room and tell him all about our apartment. Ida had been up in the shower. She hadn’t realized we were there, and when she came down she was dressed in a bathrobe with a towel wrapped around her head turban style. When she sat down, I saw Charles’s arm move; he had taken her hand under the table. Ida, who had been talking, stopped to giggle and then went back to what she had been saying. But Charles must have been doing funny things to her hand under there, because Ida’s face got red and you could see by the way she kept biting down on the corners of her lips that she was trying not to laugh. They had reminded me of the Gardeners.