A Maiden's Grave (16 page)

Budd sighed loudly.

"Thank God," muttered Frances.

Angie said nothing but Potter noticed that her hand had strayed to her weapon and now held the grip tightly.

"Lou, you there?" he called. Then again.

There was a crackle, as if the phone were being wrapped in crispy paper. "Can't talk, Art," Handy said through a mouthful of food. "It's suppertime."

"Lou -"

There was a click and then silence.

Potter leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes.

Frances applauded, joined by Derek Elb.

"Congratulations," LeBow said quietly. "The first exchange. A success."

Budd was pale. He slowly exhaled a cheekful of air. "Brother."

"All right, everybody, let's not pat ourselves on the back too much," Potter said. "We've only got an hour forty-five minutes till our first helicopter deadline."

Of all the people in the van only young Tobe Geller seemed disturbed.

Arthur Potter, childless father that he was, noticed it immediately. "What is it, Tobe?"

The agent pushed several buttons on the Hewlett-Packard and pointed to the screen. "This was your VSA grid during the exchange, Arthur. Lower anxiety than normal for a mildly stressful event."

"Mildly," Budd muttered, rolling his eyes. "Glad you didn't take mine."

"Here's Handy's average ten-second sequence for the entire exchange." He tapped the screen. It was nearly a flat line. "He was in the doorway with a dozen guns pointed at his heart and that son of a bitch was about as stressed out as most people get ordering a cup of coffee at 7-Eleven."

She felt no thud of gunshots, no quiver of scream resonating in her chest.

Thank you thank you thank you.

The butterball Jocylyn was safe.

Melanie huddled with the twins in the back of the killing room, their long chestnut hair damp from tears, plastered to their faces. She looked up at the bare bulb, which – just barely – kept the crushing waves of the Outside from smashing her to death.

Her finger nervously entwining a strand of hair again. The hand shape for "shine." The word for "brilliance."

The word for "light."

A blur of motion startled her. The huge bearded form of Bear, chewing a hamburger, stormed up to Stoat and snapped a few words. Waited for an answer, got none, and shouted some more. Melanie couldn't read a single word of their conversation. The more emotional people became, the more ragged and fast their words, making them impossible to understand, as if just when it was the most important to say things clearly there could be no clarity.

Brushing his crew cut, Stoat stayed cool and looked back at Bear with a sneer of a smile. A real cowboy, Melanie thought, Stoat is. He's as cruel as the others but he's brave and he has honor and if those are good qualities even in bad people then there's some good in him. Brutus appeared and Bear suddenly stopped talking, grabbed a packet of fries in his fat hand, and wandered off to the front of the slaughterhouse, where he sat down and began shoveling food into his messy beard.

Brutus carried a paper-wrapped hamburger with him. He kept glancing at it in an amused way, as if he'd never had one before. He took a small bite and chewed carefully. He crouched in the doorway of the killing room, looking over the girls and the teachers. Melanie caught his eye once and felt her skin burn with panic. "Hey, miss," he said. She looked down quickly, feeling stomach sick.

She felt a thud and looked up, startled. He'd slapped the floor beside her. From his shirt pocket he took a small blue cardboard box and tossed it to her. It was an asthma inhaler. She opened it slowly and handed it to Beverly, who breathed in the medicine greedily.

Melanie turned to Brutus and was about to mouth "Thank you," but he was looking away, staring once again at Mrs. Harstrawn, who'd fallen into another hysterical crying fit.

"Ain't that something – she… keeps going and going."

How can I understand his words if I can't understand
him
? Look at him – he crouches there and watches the poor woman cry. Chewing, chewing, with that damn half-smile on his lips. Nobody can be that cruel.

Or
do
I understand him?

Melanie hears a familiar voice.
So you'll be home then
…

Get up, she raged silently to the other teacher. Stop crying! Get up and do something! Help us. You're supposed to be in charge.

So
you'll be
-

Suddenly her heart went icy cold and anger vaporized her fear. Anger and… what else? A dark fire swirling within her. Her eyes met Brutus's. He'd stopped eating and was looking at her. His lids never flickered but she sensed he was winking at her – as if he knew exactly what she was thinking about Mrs. Harstrawn and that the same thing had occurred to him. For that instant the pathetic woman was the butt of an inexcusable, mutual joke.

In despair she felt the anger vanishing, fear flooding in to fill its place.

Stop looking at me! she begged him silently. Please! She lowered her head and began to tremble, crying. And so she did the only thing she could do – what she'd done earlier: closing her eyes, lowering her head, she went away. The place she'd escaped into from the slaughterhouse earlier today. Her secret place, her music room.

It is a room of dark wood, tapestries, pillows, smoky air. Not a window in the place. The Outside cannot get in here.

Here's a harpsichord carved of delicate rosewood, florets and filigree, inlaid with ivory and ebony. Here's a piano whose tone sounds like resonating crystal. A South American berimbau, a set of golden vibes, a crisp, prewar Martin guitar.

Here are walls to reflect Melanie's own voice, which is an amalgam of all the instruments in the orchestra. Mezzo-sopranos and coloratura sopranos and altos.

It was a place that never existed and never would. But it was Melanie's salvation. When the taunts at school had grown too much, when she simply couldn't grasp what someone was saying to her, when she thought of the world she'd never experience, her music room was the only place she could go to be safe, to be comforted.

Forgetting the twins, forgetting gasping Beverly, forgetting the sobs of the paralyzed Mrs. Harstrawn, forgetting the terrible man watching her as he inhaled for sustenance the sorrow of another human being. Forgetting Susan's death, and her own, which was probably all too close.

Melanie, sitting on the comfortable couch in her secret place, decides she doesn't want to be alone. She needs someone with her. Someone to talk with. Someone with whom she can share human words. Whom should I invite?

Melanie thinks of her parents. But she's never invited them here before. Friends from Laurent Clerc, from Hebron, neighbors, students… But when she thinks of them she thinks of Susan. And of course she dares not.

Sometimes she invites musicians and composers – people she's read about, even if she's never heard their music: Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt, Gordon Bok, Patrick Ball, Mozart, Sam Barber. Ludwig, of course. Ralph Vaughan Williams. Never Wagner. Mahler came once but didn't stay long.

Her brother used to be a regular visitor to the music room.

In fact, for a time, Danny was her only visitor, for he seemed to be the only person in the family not thrown by her affliction. Her parents struggled to coddle their daughter, keeping her home, never letting her go to town alone, scraping up money for tutors to come to the house, impressing on her the dangers of "her, you know, condition" – all the while avoiding any mention of her being deaf.

Danny wouldn't put up with her timidity. He'd roar into town on his Honda 350 with his sister perched on the back. She wore a black helmet emblazoned with fiery wings. Before her hearing went completely he'd take her to movies and would drive audiences to rage by loudly repeating dialogue for her. To their parents' disgust the boy would walk around the house wearing an airline mechanic's ear-muffs, just so he'd know what she was going through. Bless his heart, Danny even learned some basic sign and taught her some phrases (naturally ones that she couldn't repeat in the company of adult Deaf though they would later earn her high esteem in the Laurent Clerc schoolyard).

Ah, but Danny…

Ever since the accident last year, she hadn't had the heart to ask him back.

She tries now but can't imagine him here.

And so today, when she opens the door, she finds a middle-aged man with graying hair, wearing an ill-fitting navy-blue jacket and black-framed glasses. The man from the field outside the slaughterhouse.

De l'Epée.

Who else but him?

"Hello," she says in a voice like a glass bell.

"And to you." She pictures him taking her hand and kissing it, rather bashfully, rather firmly.

"You're a policeman, aren't you?" she asks.

"Yes," he says.

She can't see him as clearly as she'd like. The power of desire is unlimited but that of imagination is not.

"I know it's not your name but can I call you De l'Epée?"

Of course he's agreeable to this, gentleman that he is.

"Can we talk for a little while? That's what I miss the most, talking."

Once you've spoken to someone, pelted them with your words and felt theirs in your ears, signing isn't the same at all.

"By all means, let's talk."

"I want to tell you a story. About how I learned I was deaf."

"Please…" He seems genuinely curious.

Melanie had planned to be a musician, she tells him. From the time she was four or five. She was no prodigy but did have the gift of perfect pitch. Classical, Celtic, or country-western – she loved it all. She could hear a tune once and pick it out from memory on the family's Yamaha piano.

"And then…"

"Tell me about it."

"When I was eight, almost nine, I went to a Judy Collins concert."

She continues, "She was singing a cappella, a song I'd never heard before. It was haunting…"

Conveniently, a Celtic harp begins playing the very tune through the imaginary speakers in the music room.

"My brother had the concert program and I leaned over and asked him what the name of the song was. He told me it was 'A Maiden's Grave.' "

De l'Epée says, "Never heard of it."

Melanie continues, "I wanted to play it on the piano. It was… It's hard to describe. Just a feeling, something I
had
to do. I had to learn the song. The day after the concert I asked my brother to stop by a music store and get some sheet music for me. He asked me which song. 'A Maiden's Grave,' I told him.

" 'What song's that?' he asked. He was frowning.

"I laughed. 'At the concert, dummy. The song she finished the concert with.
That
song. You told me the title.'

"Then
he
laughed. 'Who's a dummy? "A Maiden's Grave"? What're you talking about? It was "Amazing Grace." The old gospel. That's what I told you.'

" 'No!' I was sure I heard him say 'A Maiden's Grave.' I was positive! And just then I realized that I'd been leaning forward to hear him and that when either of us turned away I couldn't really hear what he was saying at all.
And
that when I was looking at him I was looking only at his lips, never his eyes or the rest of his face. The same way I'd been looking at everyone else I'd talked to for the last six or eight months.

"I ran straight to the record store downtown – two miles away. I was so desperate, I had to know. I was sure my brother was teasing me and I hated him for it. I swore I'd get even with him. I raced up to the folk section and flipped through the Judy Collins albums. It was true… 'Amazing Grace.' Two months later I was diagnosed with a fifty-decibel loss in one ear, seventy in the other. It's about ninety now in both."

"I'm so sorry," De l'Epée says. "What happened to your hearing?"

"An infection. It destroyed the hairs in my ear."

"And there's nothing you can do about it?"

She doesn't answer him. After a moment she says, "I think that you're Deaf."

"Deaf? Me?" He grins awkwardly. "But I can hear."

"Oh, you can be Deaf but hearing."

He looks confused.

"Deaf but hearing," she continues. "See, we call people who can hear the Others. But some of the Others are more like us."

"What sort of people are those?" he asks. Is he proud to be included? She thinks he is.

"People who live according to their own hearts," Melanie answers, "not someone else's."

For a moment she's ashamed, for she's not sure that she always listens to her own.

A Mozart piece begins to play. Or Bach. She isn't sure which. (Why couldn't the infection have come a year later? Think of all the music I could have listened to in twelve months. For God's sake, her father pumped easy-listening KSFT through the farm's loudspeakers. In my bio, they'll find I was reared on "Pearly Shells," Tom Jones, and Barry Manilow.)

"There's more I have to tell you. Something else I've never told anyone."

"I'd like to hear it," he says, agreeable. But then, in an instant, he disappears.

Melanie gasps.

The music room vanishes and she's back in the slaughterhouse.

Her eyes are wide, she looks around, expecting to see Brutus approaching. Or Bear shouting, storming toward her.

But, no, Brutus is gone. And Bear sits by himself outside the killing room, eating, an incongruous smile on his face.

What had dragged her from the music room?

A vibration from a sound? The light?

No, it was a smell. A scent had wakened her out of her daydream. But of what?

Something she detected amid the smell of greasy food, bodies, and oil and gasoline and rusting metal and old blood and rancid lard and a thousand other scents.

Ah, she recognized it clearly. A rich, pungent smell.

"Girls, girls," she signed emphatically to the students. "I want to say something."

Bear's head turned toward them. He noticed the signing. His smile vanished immediately and he climbed to his feet. He seemed to be shouting, "Stop that! Stop!"

"He doesn't like us to sign," Melanie signed quickly. "Pretend we're playing hand-shape game."

One thing Melanie liked about Deaf culture – the love of words. ASL was a language like any other. In fact it was the fifth most widely used language in America. ASL words and phrases could be broken down into smaller structural units (hand shape, motion, and relation of the hand to the body), just like spoken words could be broken down into syllables and phonemes. Those gestures lent themselves to word games, which nearly all Deaf people grew up playing.

Bear stormed up to her. "What the fuck… with…"

Melanie's hands began to shake violently. She managed to write in the dust on the floor,
Game. We're playing game. See? We make shapes with our hands. Shapes of things
.

"What things?"

This is animal game.

She signed the word "Stupid." With her index and middle fingers extended in a V, the shape vaguely resembled a rabbit.

"What's that… be?"

A rabbit
, she wrote.

The twins ducked their heads, giggling.

"Rabbit… Doesn't… fucking rabbit to me," he said.

Please let us play. Can't hurt.

He glanced at Kielle, who signed, "You turd." Smiling, she wrote in the dust,
That was hippo
.

"… out of your fucking minds." Bear turned back to his fries and soda.

The girls waited until he was out of sight then looked expectantly at Melanie. Kielle, no longer smiling, asked brusquely, "What do you have to say?"

"I'm going to get us out of here," Melanie signed. "That's what."

Arthur Potter and Angie Scapello were preparing to debrief Jocylyn Weiderman, who was being examined by medics at that moment, when they heard the first shot.