Child of Silence (13 page)

“Now, now, now,” it demanded.

She couldn't ignore it.

“Bo, it's Es,” the first message chirped as Bo toweled her dripping hair over the machine. “You must be asleep. I'm going to bed too. Mildred's fine; she's shedding all over Henry's favorite chair as I speak, and Madge is handling the confidential placement for the kid. Call me when you wake up, okay?”

The second message was quintessential Madge Aldenhoven, the soul of efficiency. “Bo? It's Madge. This case is too complex for handling at our level. I've arranged the foster care placement. CPS will monitor, but make no contact with the child until the police have done their work. It's too dangerous. In fact you are to have no further involvement with this case. I hope I've made this clear, Bo. My decision is in your best interest, and the child's. See you Monday.”

Too late, Madge. The message would have been recorded as the plane flew toward Houston. A million years ago.

In the bedroom Bo pulled on her favorite sweats, teal blue with Mayan symbols on the sleeves. The answering machine clicked and buzzed to the next message. A strange voice. Unfamiliar. Weeping. Through the damp hood of Bo's sweatshirt the voice was muffled, the words indecipherable. A voice from some netherworld. Bo shivered, marshaled her thoughts.

There are no voices from the grave
,
Bradley
.
It's not Laurie
.
It's not even Caillech Bera
;
and she'd moan in Gaelic
,
not English
.

Shakily Bo punched the rewind and then the playback. Madge's message again. “See you on Monday.” And then the other.

“My name is Delilah Brasseur,” it keened at contralto level. A rich, deep female voice. Tremulous with emotion. “Until two weeks ago I was the housekeeper for the Rowes. I know about the baby, the little boy.” Here the voice broke in a silence so intense even the plastic tape captured it. “I don't know who you are,” Delilah Brasseur sobbed now, “but don't let nothin' happen to my baby! I called the daddy to come get him, an’ he did, but if somebody tried to kill the child out there, that mean the daddy already come to harm. There's danger! So much danger it can't be told! Get the baby and get him somewheres where ain't nobody know you at, till Tuesday. Then it be over. I cain't call the police, cain't do nothin' more. It up to you, lady, whoever you be. You got to trust me, do as I says! Please! It all up to you!”

Here the tape clicked off and over to automatic rewind. In its hum Bo heard the final sentence echo and echo.

“It all up to you... up to you. . . you, you, you.”

She could hear nothing else.

In her purse lay a plastic pharmacy bottle containing the tranquilizing drug that would let her sleep, make her sleep until the middle of tomorrow. The drug that would allow her body to rest and fight to restore some balance to the skewed chemical battle raging in her skull. With that help and a few days of disciplined quiet, she might make it through. Might avoid the hospital, the locked doors, the cement-walled “garden” where you could pace and smoke. There was always a “garden.” It never had flowers.

“Reality there's nothing but reality,” Bo pronounced solemnly. But what was it? Maybe she'd imagined the message on the tape. Maybe it wasn't there at all. No “Delilah Brasseur.” No clear, uncompromising instructions. Just the quiet hiss of blank tape.

Bo knew as a personal catechism the difference between manic-depression and schizophrenia. Both were hell, but one more often involved audial delusions—hearing voices produced from within one's own brain, but seeming to come from outside. She'd seen it. Other patients, hospitalized, hearing voices from unplugged TVs, silent radios, blank tape recordings. As a young woman struggling to make sense of psychiatric chaos, she'd believed for a while that those suffering from voices must be picking up the thousand invisible radio waves webbing the air. Maybe in the fillings of their teeth. Something. But she didn't believe it anymore. There was no explanation yet for the tormenting voices. Nobody really knew where they came from. Or why they came. What Bo knew was that she never heard voices. Which would mean that the message on the recording was real.

She pushed the playback button again. Estrella, Madge, and Delilah Brasseur. It was
there
.

“Get the baby and get him somewheres where ain't nobody know you at. . .”

She played it again. And then again. A black woman. Mature. Frightened. But deeply courageous. In the voice Bo could hear a resonance of valor, the steel edge of a desperate decision made with finality. That decision had been to call Bo!

The tinny buzz was back. Like twin metallic mosquitoes living in her ears. The countertop, her pottery dishes, a Mexican sugar bowl purchased whimsically for the ant imbedded in its glaze—all seemed strange. Temporal. Fake. Vaguely familiar, but not really what they seemed. Not substantial, as if they might vanish at any moment, or turn into something else. And it wouldn't matter. Nothing mattered, except the message.

“... get him somewheres where ain't nobody know you at. . .”

Wandering aimlessly through her own apartment, now a landscape of objects retreating from their functional definitions, Bo called up the ghost of Lois Bittner from her mind. The imaginary conversation. Favorite gimmick of Gestalt therapists everywhere. Bo had chatted with more empty armchairs in Bittner's office than she cared to count.

Fixing her attention on one of the two pine barstools regrettably whitewashed during a Taos period, she imagined the petite psychiatrist perched on it, regarding Bo quizzically.

“You say a total stranger left a message on your answering machine directing you to abandon self-preservation and run away in order to save a deaf child from some wholly incomprehensible danger?”

“It's not running away,” Bo answered aloud. “It's not running away from anything. . .”

“A deaf child?... a danger you know to be real but can't understand? Doesn't that sound like Laurie? Like her depression for which you always blamed yourself, because you felt that you abandoned her?”

“I know Laurie's depression wasn't my fault. She was a depressive. Another version of the weird brain chemistry I've got, Grandma O'Reilly had, and that great-uncle in Ireland who spent thirty years writing a poetic history of the wee people in McGillicuddy's Reeks and then hanged himself in Derrynane Abbey. I know! But this is different. . .”

“How is this different?”

“This is real...”

The ghost of Lois Bittner looked pointedly over the top of half glasses.

“Real,” she enunciated with precision, “is only what you think it is!”

Something was wrong. Lois Bittner had never said that. The eminently practical psychiatrist never hinted that reality might be fungible, having aspects that could replace one another as two nickels might replace a dime.

Bo stared at the empty barstool. She'd known it all along. Only framed it in Bittner’s accent to give the notion authority, credibility. Her reactions to this case, to the little boy, were certainly colored by Laurie. Laurie's tortured life from which Bo had fled. Embarrassed. Ashamed.

But there was something else. Some pattern plaited with wisps of fog, penned invisibly across a clutter of events and people. Just a glyph, an occasional whole word drifting into sight at random. A grocery receipt, a Texas politician, a little boy learning that red has a name.

Bo could taste the pattern with her bones. All around her, in her.

“It's the sight,” her grandmother's voice insisted.

“Something like that,” Bo acknowledged.

And she would have to choose. Delilah Brasseur's urgent instructions, or the correctly prescribed capsules waiting in her purse. Self-preservation or a part in a deadly drama that could only be described, metaphorically and realistically, as madness.

Bo sifted her mind for answers and instead found images. Laurie at Cape Cod, screaming in the wind. Mark holding a baby that was not hers. Weppo, his huge, burnt-sugar eyes calling to her from a world of silence at the edge of a small grave.

“No!”

The word rose up in her, a torrent of certainty that rattled the furniture, echoed beyond the walls and out over the sea.

She might be crazy, was crazy by any standard definition, but beneath it all she was still Barbara Joan Bradley whose deaf little sister had named her Bo. And Bo Bradley would not walk away from reality, ever again.
Her
reality, no one else's. It might be skewed, but it was the only reality she had. And in it was a little boy with almost no time left.

Four thousand feet above the desert floor, the Sierra Nevada purple at her back, Annie Garcia stood silent in her grandson's yard. She was watching the sky dance. Watching color shift from magenta to lavender to gray. Sunsets came early to the land her people claimed. A land far from the cities, hidden between the Sierra and Inyo Mountains.

Chilled, she turned to go inside, but something was happening in the sky. From the distant desert, spirals of alkaline dust twisted upward, writhing like snakes trying to walk upright. A visual contortion of light and dust. It was the whirlwind!

“Grandmother,” Charlie Garcia called respectfully from the door behind her, “it's getting cold. Come inside.”

Annie allowed her gaze to linger briefly on the dust clouds. They climbed and fell, joined and collapsed, tore at the sky with their urgency. The spirits, again. Rising up cloaked in dust to shout messages no one could comprehend except the shamans.

Annie was no shaman. But she had an idea what it was all about. Hadn't the spirits been giving her signs for two days now? Always about the child. And the white woman who had no children and said she was loco. This whirlwind was a warning, about them. A warning thrown up from the desert to the south, toward San Diego. They were in danger, the two of them. Annie knew it. But what could she do up here, six hundred miles away?

Walking thoughtfully toward the house, she pointed to the sky.

“The whirlwind,” she stated.

Charlie nodded somberly. “But what does it mean? It is Nu'mi'na'a?”

Annie sighed. It was difficult, being an old woman with a grandson who'd gone off to college in New Mexico and come back more “Indian” than any Paiute Annie'd ever known. Charlie, who had been named for her husband, was a member of the tribal council and the area intertribal council. He'd worked in Los Angeles long enough to save money, and then bought a gas station here in Lone Pine, married a Shoshone woman, and settled permanently. Charlie didn't drink. He was waiting to be old enough to become a singer. Being Paiute was his life, he said. And that meant he expected his grandmother, as an old one, to know everything.

“There is a child,” Annie began, “who can't hear. . .”

“Wait,” Charlie Garcia cautioned as he helped her into the house. “Everyone should know about this.”

In the steamy kitchen Annie enjoyed a plate of fry-bread with honey as Charlie gathered people out of the woodwork. Within minutes fifteen Indians, all visiting for the pow-wow celebrating Charlie's daughter's first menstruation and entry into womanhood, were gathered in the warm room.

Annie surveyed the collection of plaid shirts, the wide bronze faces, and chuckled. She felt good, not sick at all. Maybe she'd been wrong about the cry-dance. Maybe she wasn't going to die after all.

“There is a child,” Annie explained slowly, “who is in great danger.”

Everyone was listening. It would be a good story.

Bo selected a tape—Bach's Toccata and Fugue in C—and then hit the eject button. The sonorous organ was too religious.

You're not the flaming Virgin Mother
,
Bradley
.
Cool it
.

One of the Brandenburgs would be better. Less likely to create the additional burden of a halo around her already throbbing head. Grabbing a random Brandenburg, she stuffed it into the cassette deck and attempted to arrange her thoughts in time with the music.

“Get Weppo and go someplace,” she chanted with the Baroque chords.

But where? And what would that involve?

Buses and trains were too slow. She was sure of that. But too slow for what? A plane. Too risky, too easy to trace even if she used an assumed name. Weppo would be noticeable and so, unfortunately, would she.

“Oh, you mean the deaf-mute kid and the lunatic redhead? Sure. They got on Flight 89 for Denver.” Bo could hear the ticket agent explaining her whereabouts to anyone who asked.

And what was the penalty in California for kidnapping? Bo saw herself in the dock, handcuffed, wearing a white choir robe as bewigged barristers argued that this case represented the single instance in the entire history of American jurisprudence in which the insanity defense might justifiably be employed. Except American lawyers didn't have wigs, and why was she wearing a choir robe?

Something clanged over the music. The phone. The phone was ringing. Bo watched it, but didn't answer. After four rings the machine clicked on.