Virtual Silence Read online

  There were nights when I took Surge to bed with me, although I knew it cost him something to make the leap. Then I would talk to him, whisper into his big floppy black ear about injustice and fate. “Why Bev?” I asked him a hundred times. “Because she was beautiful? Because she had everything going for her and he had nothing? And what was she going to tell us? What was the secret?” He seemed to listen sympathetically enough, but when I reached for him in the middle of the night as I struggled to free myself from my bleak recurrent dreams, I realized that he had returned to his place on the floor at the foot of my bed.

  I was just beginning to think that Terri and Sharon might be extraterrestrials when Terri called one night and said, “We sure started the school year off with a bang, didn’t we? I’ll tell you one thing, I’ll never eat at that diner again!” She laughed like a mad woman, not her little hee-hee-hee, but something gruesome and perverse. On and on she went, laughing over my pleas for her to take deep breaths and try to quiet down. When her laughter subsided, she began to sob, deep throaty gasps that I imagined shook her entire body. I stopped talking, mesmerized by the sound of her sobs and the images they evoked.

  She was drunk for the second time in her life, the first being the night of the funeral. She had stolen a bottle of gin from her father’s liquor cabinet and swallowed down more than a third of it. Her words were so slurred that it took several minutes before she could make me understand what had happened. Sharon had begun private therapy that afternoon, and her therapist had outlined a course of action that was guaranteed to restore her to her former self. Her first recommendation was that Sharon stop spending so much time talking to Terri and me, that she make new friends, pursue new interests. Mrs. Michener was delighted. She’d been telling Sharon for years that she was too gifted a student to be attending public school. They agreed that Sharon would finish up her senior year at the private school in Highland. “So now we’ve lost them both!” Terri cried into the phone.

  We talked for several hours into the night, initially rehearsing what we would say to Sharon to get her to see that the therapist and her mother were wrong, that she needed us more than ever. I said that I couldn’t imagine that it would take that much of an effort to turn her around; of the three of us, she had seemed to be coping the best. But then Terri began to sob again, and when she was done, she related some changes in Sharon’s behavior; changes, she said, which she hadn’t planned to tell me about just yet. Sharon had begun to smoke, not only out in the school yard where it was permitted, but also in the bathrooms, and once she even lit up in the hall. The teachers went easy on her because of what happened. But as soon as they released her, she headed straight for the nearest bathroom and lit up all over again. And while she had always been sloppy, now she had taken it to an extreme. She had worn the same green shirt to school for two weeks straight.

  I didn’t want to hear it. “She gets attached to things,” I interrupted. “Look how long she’s been wearing that raincoat of hers.”

  She’d stopped combing her hair, Terri reported, ignoring my outburst, and she had reason to believe that Sharon wasn’t showering either. When I asked her why she had kept all this from me, Terri admitted that she was afraid that if I learned what shape Sharon was in, I’d never come back to school.

  She told me other things too. One day in English, for instance, Sharon leaned over to Terri and said, “She set us free in dying. We’re immortal now,” and when she looked up at her, Terri saw that Sharon was smiling rhapsodically. Then one night Terri arrived at her house unexpectedly, because she had taken one of Sharon’s books home by mistake and wanted to return it. She found Sharon writing copiously in a notebook she had never seen before. Sharon covered it up with her arm, but not before Terri saw the word “Corina” written on it; she was still working on the play.

  “Maybe it was the Faust thing that Bev wanted to talk about,” I said. “Maybe she didn’t like the idea. Sharon said she was excited about it, but then Sharon was blind where Bev was concerned.”

  In the end we decided to respect Sharon’s decision. We were okay, we told each other, we were getting by. If Sharon wasn’t, then she had every right to test the therapist’s suggestions. We could only pray that after enough time had passed, she would come back to us. We vowed to stay out of therapy ourselves, to lean on each other when things got tough.

  My father had an eerie fascination with the whole business. He came to the house every afternoon during my convalescence and talked to me about it in my room. Had I been myself, I would have realized sooner what he was up to, but as it was, it took a couple of weeks before I began to see that his interest in the assailant, whose name was Thomas Rockwell, was linked to the pirate book that he was working on. His research, he had told me once when he had first begun it, demanded not only that he immerse himself in the times, but also that he come to terms with the nature of evil. And now here he had a shining example—if not of evil, at least of its consequences—right in his own former home. Not that I minded. It was enough to have him in the house, to be able to listen to the brief but civil exchanges that passed between him and Mom as he came and went from my room.

  They only argued once, but it was a bad one. He had closed my door behind him, but I opened it a crack and listened to them out in the kitchen. What Mom wanted to know was whether he’d talked to me yet about going into therapy. He admitted that he hadn’t. When did he think he’d get around to it? Mom asked. Apparently she’d been hounding him for some days, because there was bitterness in her tone, and Dad, who wasn’t big on therapy in the first place, reacted to it by making some crack about Mom’s therapist having done her more harm than good. “When the house is already built,” he said, “you don’t go messing with the foundation.” To which Mom replied, “You’re threatened, aren’t you? You’re afraid that your name might come up, that you might have to take some responsibility for her inability to cope.”

  I closed my door then, but they got louder and I could hear what was said anyway. “Is that what you think?” Dad shouted. “That I would stoop to put my own insecurities before her welfare? Well, I’ve got news for you. I happen to think she is coping. Shutting yourself off for a time is not an inappropriate response to what happened. And I happen to think that a girl as smart as Ginny will reach her own conclusions about how to deal with all this in the long term. I trust her judgment!” “And I don’t?” Mom screamed back.

  Since I was unable to do any reading myself at the time, it was Dad who read me the newspaper articles describing Rocky’s life and his neighbors’ impressions of him. Rocky, who was thirty-two when he died, had worked in a bakery, but he had lost his job some months prior to the killings, not because of anything he had done but because he was low man on the totem pole when a second bakery opened in the same neighborhood and took away half their business. The woman he had worked for was quoted as saying, “He kept to himself, did his work, and went home. The only thing that I could say that was peculiar about him was that he could never remember to punch out his time card, had a blind spot when it came to that.”

  He lived alone, had never been married, never had any friends over that anyone knew about. He watched a lot of TV, his neighbors at his apartment complex said. He kept the volume up high and they could hear it through the walls at all hours of the night. Until the advent of his unemployment, however, they had only actually seen him coming and going. Then, this past summer, he had spent a lot of time stretched out in a lawn chair down by the pool. When asked about his mood, the other sun-bathers admitted that they had never spoken to him. He always seemed to be asleep or verging on it. “He didn’t have much of a life,” Dad said.

  I might have said the same of him, with his barren kitchen counters. I remembered Goliath then, but she had been swept so far from the forefront of my mind that I was unable to formulate any questions concerning their relationship.

  He read me other articles, about the victims. Our waitress, the first one to be shot, had had a life. I
n addition to her part-time job, she had been taking courses at Farleigh Dickenson and had wanted to go into physical therapy. She had been married and had two small children. The second shot had claimed the life of Martha Gardener, wife of Herman Gardener, mother of Sheila Gardener, whose Thanksgiving dinner would not be the one I had imagined for her. Martha had been a bookkeeper, the organist at their church, a girl scout leader, and a Mensa member. The third shot had taken Bev, whose story my father had the decency to refrain from reading. The fourth did not kill its victim. Michael Brine’s shoulder wound would heal and he would eventually return to his wife, child, and his dry-cleaning business. The fifth, of course, Rocky had swallowed.

  When each day was done, when I had exhausted my mother, been exhausted by my father, and put down the phone receiver for the night, I thought about Herman Gardener. I thought about the way he had flirted with his wife, and, moments later, the way he had opened his mouth and bobbed his head in defiance of reality. I learned from my father’s newspaper articles that he lived in Ridgewood, New Jersey.

  Herman Gardener, the man who had helped me to my feet after my fall in front of the diner, helped me out again, this time unwittingly. I had called him once, but when he answered, I lost my nerve and hung up the phone. I decided that it would be better to talk to him in person. But when I asked my mother if I could borrow her car, she said that I appeared to be in no condition to drive and offered to take me wherever it was that I wanted to go. I could no more arrive at Herman Gardener’s house with my mother than I could with my father, who also offered to drive me when I asked for his car. So, four weeks after the event, I made up my mind to return to school—if only for the sake of appearances.

  4

  I was nervous. It had never before occurred to me that anyone at my school might be dangerous, but now I had learned the hard way that people can snap and I did not want to be around them. Furthermore, although I knew from what Terri had told me that the general hysteria had died down, I expected to be surrounded the moment I stepped off the bus by a host of curiosity seekers looking for yet another angle on the story. I had prepared a brisk response, the kind officials offer when they are questioned on issues they haven’t yet come to terms with. But either the curiosity of my peers had already been sated or Terri had warned them about what my mother referred to as my “breakdown”, because only a few people approached me, and that was only to pat me on the back and welcome my return to school.

  My throat was scratchy from a cold that was coming on, and after having talked for four weeks straight and gotten nowhere, I found I didn’t even want to talk to Terri. During English, I passed her a note saying that I didn’t want to see anybody at lunch, that I felt the need to be alone. She misunderstood and sent a note back saying not to worry, that she had been sitting at our old table over by the trash cans ever since Sharon had left school.

  Back in the old days, I might have taken my Webster’s out of my backpack and copied down the definition of “alone” and passed it back to her. Back in the old days, Terri would have giggled and copied something nasty—the definition of “hard-hearted”, say—from her own dictionary. But this wasn’t the old days, so we sat in the cafeteria together, nibbling at our sandwiches and nodding at our more jovial classmates when they came our way to dump their trash. The only one who actually stopped at our table was Jack, Bev’s boyfriend, or ex, I guess you’d say. For one terrible moment he stared at me. Then he lowered his eyes and nodded like the others and turned to sweep his empty milk carton into the metal can. “Ain’t much to say, is there?” Terri whispered.

  “How was school?” my mother asked that evening.

  “Okay,” I said to her back.

  She was slamming things around in the cupboard, trying to find the new jar of mustard so that we could get on with our hot dogs. She had just begun to mutter to herself when, happily, she found it. When she turned around, she was smiling. It occurred to me that her well-being hinged these days on the outcome of just such minor challenges. “That’s all? Just okay?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t feel like talking.

  “I made up my mind not go to my class tonight,” she announced.

  I made no comment. She furrowed her brows, staring at me as if she had anticipated a specific response.

  “It’s not that I think you’re still too … what? … fragile … to be left alone. Or that anything’s going to happen. I don’t want you thinking that. It’s just that I’ve missed so much that I don’t think I can make it up.”

  Until the day at the diner, there were several events that she had attended in the evenings. I had no idea which one she was referring to now. My expression must have reflected my confusion because she said, “Tai Chi; tonight was Tai Chi.”

  There was some resentment in her tone, but the absence of the smart remark that I would have ordinarily spit back enabled her to hear it for herself. “It’s not a big deal,” she said, stretching her lips. “He’ll be starting a new class in a month. And of course my missing the others, my book club and my support group and bingo, won’t set me back at all.” She laughed abruptly. “Which isn’t saying much for any of them, is it?”

  In spite of the fact that I was only smiling, she sang, “Oh, it’s good to see you laughing,” and got up from the table. She opened up the refrigerator and got out a can of diet Coke, our drink of choice, popped the tab with her thumb, and refilled both our glasses. “But I did invite someone over tonight,” she continued cautiously. “Ida Newet. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Again she furrowed her brows and scrutinized me. I had told her many times that I didn’t want anyone over except Dad until I had come to terms with this whole thing. But now I only stared back at her. She bit down on her bottom lip and released it. “She’s been asking about you,” she said finally. “‘How’s Ginny? When can I see her?’ So I figured it was best to get it over with.”

  Two things were immediately clear to me: One, Mom was lying about why Ida wanted to come over, and two, Mom felt guilty for saying that she could. Not a very interesting observation, perhaps, but one which, I realized with some surprise, had I not been silent, I might not have gleaned.

  Ida and Charles Newet were the only couple from their former lives that my parents had remained friends with. Or, rather, my mother still saw Ida, although infrequently, and my father still saw Charles. Ida ran a day-care center somewhere in town, and Charles had a business machine store that employed some thirty people.

  When she knocked, Mom and I had just finished the dishes and were back at the table. I was making an effort to read the newspaper and Mom was having her plastic after-dinner cigarette. I got up before Mom, asked who it was, and unbolted the door. Ida embraced me immediately and whispered “poor baby” into my ear. Then she held me by the shoulders and looked me over. “Well, you look much better than you did at the funeral,” she said. I smiled. I didn’t even remember her being there.

  She sank into a chair at the table, across from where Mom was sitting. She was a short woman, but unlike Mom, who worked out and watched her weight, Ida had let herself go. She wasn’t exactly fat, but her ass had spread, and the bulk around her middle had kept her from wearing her blouses tucked in for the last couple of years. Her hair, which was a shiny light brown and very healthy-looking, was her best feature, though she didn’t make enough of it. She wore it short, cut just below her ear, and since it was thin, it clung to her round face. The skin of her face—her second best feature—was ivory white and virtually wrinkleless. If not for her weight and her hairstyle—or rather lack of one—and the brown-and-yellow mottled glasses she wore, she might have been youthful-looking. “Oh, Janie,” she said. “It’s so good to see you.”

  Mom stretched a hand across the table and patted Ida’s. “It’s good to see you too.”

  They both turned to look at me, their thin smiles quivering on their faces. “Homework,” I said, and I cocked my head towards the hall.

  Back in the old days, I had always don
e my homework with earphones on. I liked classical, usually Mozart, for English, jazz for social studies and the other subjects where you had to read but not necessarily to form an opinion, and grunge for everything else. It was a habit I had acquired some time ago when my parents had first begun to argue. But as I was hungry for whatever morsel of distraction Mom and Ida might provide me with, I put my Walkman aside and left my door slightly opened. A new thought had come to me during the course of the day, and I marveled that it hadn’t occurred to me sooner. Of the four people who had died that day, I had not only spoken to three of them just before their deaths, but I had also been angry with each of the three—Bev and the waitress for their disregard of my needs, and Martha Gardener for being married to the man I had wished had been my father. My anger, it was conceivable, had put a spot on them. And like the bull’s-eye drawn on the target-practice figure, it had shown Thomas Rockwell where to aim. I hadn’t spoken to or been angry with Michael Brine and he hadn’t died. If I had, he might have.

  Out in the kitchen I could hear Ida Newet saying, “His eyes are glazed over when I talk to him, Jane. It’s like he’s not even hearing what I say.”

  “It’s work,” my mother offered. “He’s under so much pressure there.”

  “Oh come on, Jane. Don’t patronize me. I came to you for help. Tell me the truth. Was Ed like that, when it was going on?”

  Mom laughed. “Ed was always like that, so I can’t say.”

  I opened my notebook and began to review for a math quiz. Luckily, we were still going over stuff we had learned last year, so I hadn’t fallen too far behind. The phone rang, twice before I picked it up. “How you doing?” Terri asked.

  “Not bad,” I said. “Have you heard from Sharon?”