Virtual Silence Page 3

  “We’re taking a risk,” Terri said softly, keeping her eyes on the traffic. “We’re cutting classes.”

  Sharon barked a laugh. “Some risk,” she said. “I don’t know about you guys, but my mother is always so overwhelmed by my grades that she never even looks to see how many days I was absent.”

  “I got a C last year,” Terri said.

  Sharon sat as far forward as her seat belt would permit. “Oh yeah? You never told me. In what?”

  “AP calc.”

  Everyone laughed, even Bev. I sat back in my seat, proud to have broken the spell. I had stuff to talk about too. Since I’d gotten up, I’d been rehearsing what I was going to say to my friends about Dad and Goliath. Like Bev, I was just waiting until we got some place where we could see one other’s faces. But that didn’t mean we had to sacrifice the entire day. “There’s a diner coming up,” I said. “Let’s get something to eat and then see if we want to reevaluate our plans.”

  I figured Bev was upset with me, so I avoided making eye contact with her as we got out of the car and approached the long glass-and-concrete building. In fact, I was so preoccupied with how I was going to sell the idea of the City to Terri, who would have the final word, that I tripped on a crack in the walkway and went down on my knees. Terri and Sharon laughed and kept walking. I assumed the tug on my arm was Bev, who had been walking just behind me, but when I looked up, I saw that it was a man.

  “Are you all right, young lady?” he asked. His features were so crumpled with concern that his glasses slid down and he had to thumb them back up his nose.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I answered, embarrassed.

  Sharon and Terri had stopped by the glass door. “She’s fine,” Sharon said. “She’s a gymnast. She knows just how to fall.”

  As the man reluctantly released my arm, his wife stepped up over the curb to stand at his side. “A gymnast?” she asked. She had a pinched nose and gray-streaked, blunt-cut hair.

  I shook my head. “She’s teasing me.”

  “Oh,” the woman said, her sudden smile bright against New Jersey’s smog. “Because our daughter was a gymnast when she was your age.”

  I wondered what age she thought I was.

  “She’s gone now,” the husband added. “We just took her up to college in Vermont last weekend.” He had been smiling, but the moment he concluded his sentence his nostrils flared and his lips began to decline. I saw him lift one hand as if to cover his face, but then he regained control and lowered it again.

  “He’s a softy,” his wife explained.

  Sharon and Terri stood back and let the couple go in first. They glanced at the “Please seat yourself” sign, smiled at us over their shoulders, and headed off to the left. Terri was about to follow them when Sharon elbowed her, cocking her head in the other direction. “The last thing we need is some nosy adults who just said good-bye to their baby asking us why we aren’t in school today,” she whispered.

  Something about the man’s softness had struck a chord in me. Bev should have had the floor first, of course, but as she reached for her menu the moment we sat down, I took the opportunity to tell my companions all about Goliath and how my father had tried to push me out the door before she arrived. Bev and Sharon studied their menus while I spoke, but Terri removed her glasses to look at me. “What have we got here?” she asked. “He offered you tea, he didn’t laugh when you described your teachers, he got up to see you to the door, and he put his hand on your back as you were saying good-bye. Personally, I think you’re reading too much into it. If he’d invited her over, he would have said something as soon as you came—”

  “No, you don’t know how he operates—”

  “Then, if he was trying to keep it from you, he would have shown some sign of nervousness, like looking at the clock every couple of minutes. I say it was a surprise visit, if it was a visit at all. Besides, she doesn’t sound like your father’s type.”

  Sharon laughed, her brown eyes twinkling in her fleshy face. “How would you know her father’s type?”

  “Her mother’s small, and that computer woman was practically a midget,” Terri said seriously.

  Sharon laughed again and shook her head, rubbing her thumb over one eyelid. Ordinarily I would have been offended, but I found myself forgiving her levity because I knew that it had more to do with Bev being with us than with anything else. She put her menu down and cleared her throat. “What do you say about all this, Bev?” she asked.

  Bev studied first Sharon and then me over the top of her menu, her dark eyes steady and expressionless. She hesitated for so long that I began to think she would go back to her menu without saying a single word. Then she licked her upper lip. “Did you mention the woman to your mother?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I wasn’t sure. I wouldn’t tell her something like that unless I was certain.”

  “You weren’t sure. Your father’s allowed to have friends, isn’t he? Maybe it was someone who lives downstairs coming up to loan him a book or something.”

  “She had more than a book in that bag of hers.”

  “Is there a laundry room at his end of the catwalk? Or some kind of a storage area?”

  I shrugged, though in fact, there was a laundry room. I had forgotten all about that.

  “Maybe she was going in there. You said you didn’t see where she went. Maybe she had laundry in her bag. I don’t even know why we’re discussing this anyway. You’re his daughter, not his wife. It’s really none of your business, is it?” And she disappeared behind her menu again.

  Dumbfounded, I looked to Sharon and Terri for help. Sharon’s eyes shone with the prospect of a confrontation, but Terri, ever the peacemaker, shook her head and dropped her gaze to her menu. I thought I knew what she was thinking. We had crossed the line with one another over the years, many times, but we didn’t really even know Bev. She was Sharon’s acquisition, and although Sharon herself didn’t seem to think that my behavior could sabotage their relationship, Terri clearly thought otherwise. Not that she cared much about Bev except for Sharon’s sake.

  The waitress, a heavyset young woman with a high brown ponytail, appeared at our table and asked if we had made up our minds. While she took the others’ orders, I scanned the other side of the diner and located the man and his wife. They were in a booth, sitting not across from each other but side by side, as if they’d left the other seat empty to commemorate the memory of their daughter. The man picked up his coffee cup, but before he sipped, he said something to his wife that made her toss her head back. Her nostrils were long and narrow above her smile. Then he said something else, and this time she laughed outright and elbowed him. His eyes widened, and he looked down to his lap, where a drop of his coffee had apparently spilled. He pointed it out to her and she shook her head good-humoredly and made some comment, probably about him being a slob. He considered her comment for a moment, then leaned over to say something directly into her ear. It might have been erotic, because she lifted her brows and offered him a devious smile.

  “Wake up,” Sharon said.

  The waitress was glaring at me, the tip of her pen pressed into her pad. “Eggs,” I said quickly.

  They loved each other, that was clear. They were older than my parents and not nearly as good-looking. The woman was too thin and prim-looking in her old-fashioned gray suit, and she could have used a little makeup. The man was flabby and bald, and his eyes either bulged or appeared to because of the thickness of his glasses which, being framed in black, didn’t help matters. But their daughter was off somewhere in Vermont, starting college with the full knowledge—or so I thought—that when she came home for Thanksgiving, her parents would still be together.

  “And how would you like them done?” There was an edge in the waitress’s voice. Her head was cocked and her chin was tucked back into her neck.

  “I don’t know. Scrambled,” I said—a little sharply, I suppose, because Terri g
ave me a reproachful look.

  She put her hand out to collect our menus, and as I was handing mine over, I noticed an entry for pancakes with strawberries and whipped cream. I hadn’t even looked at the menu until then. “Miss,” I said, but she was already turning and either hadn’t heard me or was pretending she hadn’t.

  I would have called her again, but she moved to the table to the left of ours and started taking the orders there. I kept my eye on her, waiting for her to finish. The more I thought about it, the more fervently I wanted to change my order. Mom and I would be spending Thanksgiving either with my grandmother in Florida or, if at home, with the first person who invited us. My father would probably nuke a TV dinner and watch the football game with Goliath. Bev’s words had stung me and the waitress had been rude to me. I wasn’t about to settle for anything less than what I wanted. “Miss,” I said again.

  She couldn’t have heard me. But I had been watching her back so intensely that it took an instant for the shot to register, and when I saw her shoulders tense, I thought at first she had. Unable to move my head, or any other part of my body for that matter, I watched in horror as the back of her blouse began to darken. I saw her pad and pencil slip from her hand. When she went down, I saw the man, the one who had helped me to my feet, the one who I had secretly wished had been my father. His mouth was wide open, poised for laughter, as if he could not conceive of this as being anything other than a joke. His head began to bob. I wanted to shout out to him, to tell him to close his mouth, to stop bobbing his head. I wanted to scream that he was too vulnerable with his head bobbing like that, too foolish-looking to go unnoticed. But when the next shot rang out, it was his wife who slumped.

  Then I went down.

  I took stock of myself. It seemed a few seconds passed before I was certain that my arrival on the floor had been self-motivated. I saw their legs, Terri’s and Sharon’s and Bev’s. I tugged at Terri’s, whose were nearest. She was just sliding down beside me when I saw Bev’s legs fly up in the air and hit the underside of the table. Her chair tipped and went over. I couldn’t see her face.

  There were two more shots, then screams, then, I don’t know how much later, whispered queries, shouted orders, sirens in the distance. Someone tried to lift me up but couldn’t manage it. Someone draped a sweater around my shoulders. Someone, maybe the same person, whispered, “He’s dead. He shot himself. It’s over.” But although I couldn’t say whether the Samaritan’s voice was male or female, I recognized with certainty the fear in it, and I knew that it was not over, that it would never be over.

  3

  I didn’t see Sharon and Terri the next two days. We were all in shock and spent our time being catered to by our families. Together again at the funeral, we stood at the rear of a tremendous crowd, Sharon in the middle, erect and unflinching, pressing us to her sides as if we were children she meant to protect. It was drizzling that day, and of course she had on her brown raincoat. She held me so close that I could feel the wad of tissues she always kept handy in her pocket. But she didn’t need them; she didn’t cry.

  The principal sought us out, to say that he would understand if we waited until Monday to return to school. I knew this only because Mom, whose doctor had prescribed some medication for me, related the information afterwards. But I took the last of the near-coma-inducing pills on Sunday, and by Monday, I was ready to talk about the event that had necessitated them. Mom, who hadn’t left my side, agreed to call her office and ask for yet another day off. On Tuesday, I had her call in again, and her boss, who of course knew about everything, told her to take as much time as she needed.

  I spent my days following her from room to room, talking frantically while she cleaned out closets she had never taken note of before and sucked on the plastic cigarettes she had substituted for the real thing some months back. I described the event, or at least my perception of it, over and over again, and begged her to help me make sense of it. I informed her of the ambivalence I had felt towards Bev, the guilt I now felt as a result of it. I talked about death generally, crime generally, the prospect of an afterlife, the process of decomposition, and a hundred other terrible things that seemed to be connected. At first she was kind, and when I burst into fresh tears, she would stop what she was doing and hold me, whispering reassurances into my ear. But after several days had passed—when all the closets in the house had been set to order, when the floors shone and the marks on the walls had been wiped away—I could see that I was getting on her nerves. “I don’t have any answers for you,” she said. “Maybe it’s best to consider therapy when something like this happens.”

  I spent the evenings on the telephone, talking to Terri and Sharon, both of whom had opted to return to school the Monday after the funeral. Sharon was strangely matter-of-fact. The first few days, she reported, were nearly intolerable, with teachers and students alike bursting into tears in the corridors or in the middle of classes. The flag was still flying at half-mast, and the principal had called an assembly to talk about Bev and her academic contributions. But there had been so many sniffles and sobs in the auditorium that he broke down himself, and then the students sat for the rest of the period watching him weep into the palms of his hands. Boys and girls who had not even known Bev approached Sharon to say that they were sorry and to talk about other deaths that Bev’s had stirred them to remember. The guidance counselors and the school psychiatrist put aside their other work and made themselves available to anyone who wanted to speak to them. Sharon had had her own private session, with all nine of them at once, and it was actually very helpful, she related. In all four grades, English teachers were having their classes write essays about their fears and insecurities. There was a great outpouring of good will going on.

  When Terri and I spoke, it was mostly about Sharon. “She seems all right,” I said over and over. “How can that be? She loved Bev so much.” Terri admitted that she didn’t understand herself. I was the one, she said, who she was really worried about. She said that I should consider returning to school.

  But I couldn’t, because it was my fault. I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing Jack in the halls, or any of Bev’s other friends. I was the one who had suggested stopping at the diner, even if it was Bev, as Sharon and Terri constantly reminded me, who had summoned us together in the first place. She had been so gloomy, they said; it was almost as if she had known that she was going to her death all along.

  Yes, and I had cut her off just as surely as her assailant had, telling my own tale of woe when I knew she had brought us together to tell hers. Terri and Sharon never admitted that that part of the story had been repeated, but I knew it had. Not that I imagined they’d repeated it out of malice. It was simply the truth, a part of a greater truth which was too urgent to be tiptoed around.

  Our conversations did little to comfort me, though that didn’t stop me from insisting we have them. It amazed me when, after a week or so, Sharon began to suggest that we get off the phone so that she could finish her homework. Terri was kinder; she did her homework while we spoke, which wasn’t too difficult a task since I did most of the talking. “Weren’t you afraid?” I exclaimed one night well past midnight when Terri mentioned that she had been to the supermarket with her mother. (Except for the funeral, I had not been out of the house at all. And I had let my own mother leave it only once, and that was to get a dead bolt for the front door. Then I sat in the dark holding a Cuisinart blade in my hand like a Frisbee, counting the minutes that it would take her to drive to the store, park, make her purchase, explain to whatever acquaintance that she was bound to run into that she was in a hurry, and drive back home again. And when her actual return preceded the one I had estimated for her by three minutes, I dialed 911 and told them to hold on until I was sure it was her banging on the door, shouting to be let in.)

  “I was,” Terri said.

  “At first I was really afraid. But I looked at every person in every aisle, and I saw that there was no one there who was capable
of doing anything like that.”

  We concluded that part of my problem was that I had never even seen the assailant. By the time they got me out from under the table, a good half hour after the event, he had been covered over with a sheet and was surrounded by police and reporters. Terri and Sharon had seen him come in. They agreed that they had known even before he drew the gun from his wind-breaker that something was wrong with him. His eyes were glazed over, as if he had just gotten out of bed. And something about the way he held his mouth suggested despair. Terri said it was that his lips were quivering, as if he were cold. There was great pain there, she said; if only I had seen it I would know.

  Nor had I seen Bev when the shots were being fired. “Do you think she knew?” I asked my friends anew each evening. Sharon had no idea; she had seen the man and the gun, and then, as she put it, she shut down, lost consciousness without actually fainting. Terri insisted that Bev could have known nothing; she had had her back to the guy, and it had happened too fast, one shot after another. I argued with her on this point, for my experience had been otherwise, but she insisted that Bev hadn’t had time to turn around, that she had just begun to say something an instant before the first shot rang out. Terri remembered being surprised to see her lips moving, to learn that her own face revealed no warning of what was to come.

  I longed to believe Terri, but being compassionate by nature, I feared she had made her story up for my sake. I hounded Sharon to try and remember. She insisted that although her eyes had witnessed the event, her mind never took it in; she could tell me nothing about it. After some days Terri advised me not to pressure her, to just leave that part of it alone. So we didn’t talk about that anymore, and we didn’t talk about the brief space of time between that and the arrival of the ambulances. In fact, much of their conversation turned to other matters, things I was missing at school, books that I had better read if I ever wanted to catch up.