Virtual Silence Page 9

  So empathetic was I to the child’s plight that I thought I would volunteer to do the next house too—right up until we arrived in front of it. A shack in considerably worse shape than any that we had come across, it dipped severely on one side, so that I thought the foundation must be crumbling. Not that you could actually see the foundation, with all the tires, rusted appliances, and automobile parts heaped around it.

  There were clotheslines strung between the house and the small dilapidated shed beside it, all laden with shabby garments, holey underwear, and stained stretched-out T-shirts that looked brittle enough in the freezing air to shatter. Scattered about the yard were plastic container lids, broken toys, beer cans, and plastic game parts. “Oh,” Ida said as we turned to look at each other.

  She got out, but she hesitated a moment, and I could see that she was scared too. Don’t ring the bell, I wanted to call after her; just put down the bag and run.

  At first, when she turned from the stoop, I thought she would, but then I saw that she was only coming back to the car for a second bag. This was our first two-bag family, which meant, I assumed, either that they were especially poor or that they were exceptional in number. The shack could not have been more than fifteen feet in length. Where did they sleep?, I wondered, in sleeping bags all in a row?

  Ida knocked, since there was no bell, and was just turning when I saw the curtain move, then a hand, and a face—a rough-looking man who was, apparently, shirtless. As if he had just tasted something bitter, his lips pulled back. He turned aside to say something to someone, I guessed, because just as Ida was getting back into the car, another face appeared, a boy my age. He looked out, his expression as disinterested as when Tom Heely had first pointed me out to him.

  It was almost dark. We had our headlights on. I was slouched down in my seat. He couldn’t have seen me.

  The shack looked considerably worse in the daylight. The chimney, which was puffing smoke, was missing bricks, and some of the roof tiles lay on the ground. The window—there was only one that I could see—was so scummed up that it was a wonder that I had been able to recognize Frankie Stewart’s face through it. What I had taken to be a curtain now appeared to be a length of fabric, a blue sheet which was probably tacked to the frame. The siding was uneven, and the red-trim paint was peeling badly. The small yard, which was enclosed by a chicken-wire fence, was shrubless and treeless. But the worst thing about the house was a kind of blatancy about its disorder—maybe because no effort had been made to cover the rusted appliances that surrounded it. Or maybe it only seemed so because it was so close to the road—as if its inhabitants were defying the passerby to make a judgment. I was scared, of course, but coming here meant I would have something on him; there was no other way to proceed.

  I knocked and prayed that he would come to the door. If he didn’t, I planned to smile as pleasantly as I knew how and to tell whoever did that I was from the church and had come to make sure that their food had been delivered. I didn’t think they would try to harm anyone associated with the church. But just in case, I had in my shoulder bag a can of Mom’s hairspray, with the cap off, and my fingertip fluttering on the nozzle.

  The door opened a crack, and I saw one of Frankie’s blue-gray eyes. “What the …?” He bit down on the “f” and didn’t say it.

  “I need to talk to you,” I said quickly. There was no time for passing notes. I had borrowed Ida’s car and had promised to have it back to her within a half hour. “Do you mind stepping outside for a moment?”

  He mumbled something, but with the door covering half of his face, I didn’t get it. “Please,” I said.

  “I’m not dressed,” he answered in a low, angry voice.

  Involuntarily I moved my head, and before he could step aside, I saw that he was wearing only cut-off jeans, very short and opened at the top. “Could you get dressed?”

  “Wait a minute.”

  The door closed, then opened again. Now he was wearing the stained denim jacket that he wore to school every day. He was still shirtless and his feet were bare. “If this is about Tommy …” he warned.

  I laughed at the thought, but I stopped when I saw that his face was utterly grave, his full lips not sneering as usual but motionless. He had his head turned slightly to the side; he wasn’t even looking at me. “Are we alone?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” He flicked his head to get the hair out of his eyes. “So get on with it.”

  I took the twenties out of my jacket pocket and fanned them before his face. If they sparked any interest, he didn’t show it. “I need a gun,” I whispered. “A small one. Something I can fit in my bag. A pretty ivory handle, if you can get it.”

  He said nothing.

  “You must have known,” I continued. “I’m sure Tom told you.”

  “He told me you wanted to get something started with him and that he said no way.”

  “Oh, well, I guess he lied,” I responded. He shrugged, and I shrugged back at him. “So, can you get it for me?”

  “You want to kill someone?”

  “Maybe.” I smiled; I was trying to keep things light.

  He released his hold on the door just long enough to touch his fingers to his head. “Oh, I get it. You want to kill someone and then let me take the rap for it? That’s cute. That’s real cute. Wait till the guys hear—”

  His threat infuriated me and I took a step closer. “Wait till the guys hear what, Frankie? You get a delivery last night? Some food from the church? You want me to get you another bag? I can do that. I can bring it into school, right into the cafeteria. Or better yet, I can get some of my friends to drive me over here and—”

  “Shut up, bitch,” he said evenly. “I get the point.”

  I stepped back, stung. Nobody had ever talked that way to me before. Then I realized what I had said to him. I was shocked, horrified to find myself engaged in such a base performance, but equally incapable of doing anything about it. The one thing I didn’t want to do was cry, but I felt the tears welling up nevertheless. I turned and looked at Ida’s car, then pivoted back to face him.

  “I never would have said where I got it from,” I cried defensively. “I’m not like that. You don’t even know me. And I’m not planning on killing anyone. I just want it for protection, for my mother and me. We live all alone, and I was almost killed. You know that. Can you understand what that feels like? No, how could you? No one does. I was right there, and if …”

  I realized I was rambling and stopped to catch my breath, but it was too late; I had lost all control. “I hate you,” I cried. “You’re just the kind of mean person who winds up …”

  I stopped myself in time to hear him mumble, “No, I’m not.”

  We stood in silence for a few moments, not looking at each other. I stared at his hand on the door, at his knuckles, white with cold or anger. “I got an older brother,” he said at last. And then, as if that explained everything, he unclenched his fingers and his palm turned upward. I put the bills into his hand. His fingers closed around them. “I’ll take this as a deposit for him,” he said.

  “A deposit? That’s $160. How much more do you think you’ll need?”

  “Three hundred.”

  “I can’t get that much. Or I can, but it will take forever. I want to do this now. And how do I know you won’t just keep it, and then laugh in my face like that day with Tom Heely?”

  I saw his lips writhe in contempt. “What was that bit about bringing your friends here?” he whispered. “I’d call that blackmail. What do they call it over on your side of Rock Ridge?”

  I looked down at my feet, deeply ashamed. “Blackmail, I guess, would be accurate.”

  “Well, at least we understand each other. Now go. Get the hell out of here.”

  9

  We got off to a rough start Thanksgiving morning. There were some eighty wooded acres behind our house, all owned by an elderly woman who never permitted any hunting on her property. When I awoke and went to the window, however,
I saw a flicker of red, a hunter’s hat, deep in the woods. I wrote a note suggesting that Mrs. Peterson be called immediately and awakened Mom, who liked to sleep late when she didn’t have to go to work. She told me to mind my own business and then, after she’d had her coffee, and as if she thought I had only been imagining, she started in again about me seeing a therapist.

  I hardly heard a word she said; I was too busy looking out the window, checking for footprints in the light snow that had fallen.

  Then later, when we were baking our respective contributions for Ida’s dinner, my grandmother called. I could tell right away that it was her because Mom stopped what she was doing, pulled a chair into the corner, and spoke with her back turned half toward me. She kept an ashtray on her lap and puffed on a plastic cigarette the entire time. With her legs curled under her and her long hair hanging in her face, she looked like the little girl Grandma’s phone calls always reduced her to. Grandma fired questions and Mom answered in a thin, whiny voice that I was not usually accustomed to hearing. “Thirty thousand …” Mom said, “three hundred … two forty-nine round trip.”

  Grandma was of the opinion that my father should have been turning his advances over to Mom, that she should have been giving him an allowance from them and not the other way around. She must have been sitting there in her Sunrise condo with a calculator on her lap, lamenting the fact that we had not been able to afford to fly down for Thanksgiving, and then calculating how much more Mom would need to extract from him to insure that we got down for Christmas. She was a bitter woman, twice Mom’s size and as strong as a horse. An Italian whose husband (now deceased) had been a mason, she trusted no one who worked with his head instead of his hands. She had been telling Mom from the getgo that she had no business marrying a writer, that either he wouldn’t make it (he was a copywriter for an ad agency back then) and would thus be frustrated and hard to live with, or he would, and then he’d drop her for the first woman who caught his eye.

  Before it happened, Mom despised her of course, and then even for some months afterwards. Once enough time had elapsed though, they fell back into what must have been their relationship when Mom was a little girl—which is to say that Mom complained and Grandma spewed her poisonous words at the objects of Mom’s vexations. “We’d be eating all alone if not for Ida,” I heard her say. “Yes, that’s right, all alone … no, you’re right, he doesn’t care … why should he?”

  This was a side of Mom that I didn’t like to see. I guess she didn’t either, because after they hung up, Mom was always downcast and self-effacing.

  Now she tasted the sweet-potato casserole that she had been working on so happily all morning and made a face. “This isn’t going to work,” she said tartly. “Why don’t you just give it to Surge and save me the embarrassment of having to see it on the table with all of the wonderful stuff that Ida makes.” She pushed her hair behind her ears and tightened the belt on her bathrobe. “In fact, I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you just go on without me. They’ll be so merry over there with the twins home and everything … I’ll just bring them down.”

  She slumped out of the kitchen, and I was left alone to consider my own concerns. I hadn’t slept well. I was still having terrible dreams, sometimes about the day at the diner and sometimes based on the newspaper articles that I read. I shouldn’t have been reading them, I knew, but like the arachnaphobic who cannot keep from going to the back of the pet shop to look at the tarantulas, I couldn’t help myself. Lately, I had begun to have another sort of dream as well, and in some ways these puzzled me more than the frightening ones. I had begun to dream about boys. They stalked my subconscious, opening doors, calling out my name. Some of them held their hands behind their backs, so that I suspected that they might be concealing boxes of candy or bouquets of flowers. Some were boys from school, the popular, ultra good-looking ones who never talked to me. Others were strangers. None seemed particularly threatening, but then why was I always hiding? I was so alone without Terri and Sharon that you’d think I would have been happy to have suitors, if only in my psyche, but I wasn’t. The dreams troubled me.

  When Mom slumped back into the kitchen, some twenty minutes later, she had dressed in her favorite gray sweat suit, and had put on her dolphin earrings and combed her hair. “Aren’t you ready yet?” she snapped. She went to the refrigerator, removed her casserole which I had put away for her, and then stood with her arms folded, and her eyes, which were puffy and red, fixed on me until I was done with my baking and ready to go.

  “So,” Mom said, “what’s new?” and she laughed nervously.

  Charles pursed his lips like duck bills. “Oh, not much really. You know how it is. I work, I eat, I sleep.”

  “He’s doing yoga,” Ida called cheerfully from the kitchen.

  Mom already knew that of course, and Ida knew she knew, because she had told her some time ago, but Mom pretended to be pleasantly surprised anyway. “Yoga, really?” She picked up her wine glass and took a sip.

  We were sitting in the family room, which had been decorated to look like it hadn’t been. Most of the furniture was blonde, but a few darker pieces had been thrown in to create an illusion of indifference. Likewise, the lamps on the end tables were not a set, but if you looked carefully, you realized that the same colors ran through them, green and a kind of pinkish gold. It was all new, all from Ethan Allen, Ida had told Mom, who hadn’t been to the house in over a year.

  The twins were not about. Lilly was upstairs, talking to some friends on the phone, and Diane was out delivering the pumpkin pie that Ida had baked for the overly appreciative old man who we had encountered the other night. Charles glanced nervously at the door. As he was usually talkative, I couldn’t tell whether it was Mom being here without my father or something else that was making him edgy. “I’m not the only one taking it,” Charles said.

  “It’s everyone, all his employees,” Ida called from the other side of the snack bar where she was taking things out of the refrigerator and setting them down along the counter.

  Mom turned back towards Charles. She had asked to help several times, but Ida wouldn’t hear of it. “So,” she said, “your whole company is taking yoga classes?”

  “Yes, we got this woman in …” He glanced at me. “… And she’s been giving instructions over lunch hour.”

  “You mean, so instead of eating—”

  “Oh no. Can you imagine what the reaction to that would have been? What I did was extend the lunch hour to an hour and a half. That way we can all do yoga for a half hour, and then we still have time to eat afterwards. Her theory, this woman’s, the instructor’s, is that the half hour lost from work time will be more than compensated for by our proficiency when we do get back to business. That’s what sold me, actually.”

  “And, so, is it working?”

  “Yes, in fact. It seems to be.” He laughed. “In any case, everyone seems happier.”

  Mom laughed too, with some ease this time. “It might be that they’re just happy to have an extra half hour tacked on to lunch.”

  “Is that any way for a devoted Tai Chi student to talk?” interrupted Ida as she carried a dish of cranberry sauce into the dining room.

  “I guess Ida told you I’ve been taking Tai Chi,” Mom continued. “That’s almost the same. I like to think of it as yoga in motion.”

  Charles sat forward. “Well, actually, I knew about Tai Chi from that Bill Moyer show and from Ida telling me that you were taking it. So when she first called, this … ah … woman, I asked her about it and she said that Tai Chi doesn’t really incorporate the breathing techniques that you use in yoga. The effects of Tai Chi are more subtle, while yoga produces quicker results. So I decided to go with her, this woman.”

  “Does this woman have a name?” Mom asked.

  Charles smiled, then glanced at me. “Of course she does,” he replied, but he sat back in his chair and didn’t say it.

  With the exception of Mom’s sweet-potato dish and a l
oaf of home-baked bread which was so hard it could have been considered a weapon (which I made, but those who knew were too polite to mention it and those who didn’t were too polite to ask), the dinner was wonderful, foodwise, and awkward at every other level. We began with a Circle of Thanks, Ida’s idea, in which each of us was asked to express our appreciation for at least one thing besides the dinner itself. Ida went first, saying that she was thankful for Charles; Diane was next and thankful for Boston; Lilly was thankful for some thing or some one called Poke (nobody dared to ask); Charles was thankful for his business (Ida looked stung, but only briefly); Mom was thankful for the entire Newet family; and I was thankful, much to her delight, for Mom. As it didn’t seem any more appropriate for me to bring my pad to the table than it would have been for Mom to bring her ashtray and plastic cigarette, I was limited to hand signals, so she was the only thing I could be thankful for.

  Diane and Lilly asked me a few questions, but my head movement responses clearly made them uncomfortable, so before long they gave up on me and tried to stay tuned to the older generation’s conversation. When there was a lull, the twins spoke about some of the things that went on in Boston, toning them down, I could tell, for their parents’ sake.

  I hadn’t really known the twins that well before they went off to college. They were two years older than me, and by the time our parents became close friends some seven or eight years ago, they were old enough to stay home when Ida and Charles came to our house. When I was dragged along to the Newets’, the twins never seemed to be about. “Why don’t you go look for them?” Mom would encourage me. But when I went upstairs, the giggling coming from behind Lilly’s door, which was where the second TV was, intimidated me, and I would wander into Diane’s room instead and jump quietly on the edge of her bed until I heard someone coming.