Child of Silence (4 page)

The third-floor charge nurse on duty at St. Mary's was new—not one of the regulars Bo had come to know during frequent visits there required by her job. Visits in which the most bizarre questions became commonplace.

“Can you tell me what room you were in when Daddy kicked your tummy?”

“When did Aunt Margaret make you eat the cat's food? Was it daytime or nighttime?”

The Juvenile Court demanded specific information. Reports prepared by the investigators were accepted as “clear and convincing” proof of wrongdoing. Often in the absence of witnesses, a typed report alone stood between a child and further abuse, perhaps death.

It had taken Bo months to construct the protective shell that lay between every child abuse investigator and the fits of rage, sleepless nights, and nervous exhaustion that went with the job.

She could sit on the floor and chat calmly with three-year-olds about unusual sexual practices. She could photograph burns left by lit cigarettes on the genitals of babies. She could even observe an occasional autopsy without popping Valium or gaining fifty pounds of buffering flesh as so many of her peers did.

Years of psychiatric treatment notwithstanding, she really lay the credit for her equanimity at the feet of Bach—that hypnotic sanity of sound her violinist mother had taught her to love. The music that her sister, Laurie, had never been able to hear. She hummed the opening bars of “Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring” as the charge nurse looked at her expectantly.

“Yes?”

Bo resisted the impulse to reply “No,” and remembered that she hadn't clipped on the requisite Child Protective Services badge with which she could gain entrance practically anywhere. She found it in her purse between her wallet and a flattened pack of Gauloises.

“I need to see a Johnny Doe brought in this morning from the Barona Reservation,” she explained, snapping the badge to her sweater. There was something about the pink-cheeked blonde Bo found unnerving.

“We're taking good care of the little guy,” the nurse cooed. “He's in room 323.”

“I think I've got the flu,” Bo mentioned. She scanned the nurses' station for information that might explain the unpleasant impression. “I'll need a gown and a mask and I won't get too close. But I have to see him.”

“Of course,” the nurse sang and pulled a clean gown and mask from a closet. “But I'm afraid this little one lacks some of the blessings we all take for granted, poor thing. He may be severely retarded.”

Blessings? Bo's swift gaze pounced on the answer. Beside the intercom was a hard-back copy of something titled
Shepherdology: A Map for Your Life
. The book's jacket depicted a sailboat aground in the pages of a Bible. The day was running true to form. At this rate, Bo predicted, she could expect to be hijacked to La Paz by extraterrestrials in Elvis costumes before noon.

“Have you read any of Dr. Hinckle's work?” the nurse asked.

“Uh, no. Is he a medical doctor or a Ph.D.?’

Or a charlatan with one hand in the frightened psyches of people like you and the other in a numbered Swiss bank account
?

Laurie had fallen in with one of these when she was in college. A suave phony with a mail-order ministerial degree, he'd convinced the impressionable young woman she didn't need to take the medication prescribed by her psychiatrist for depression. She only needed to give him every cent she had, and trust in God. Bo dreamed of what she would do if she ever ran across the guy.

“Oh, Dr. Hinckle's just marvelous!” the nurse gushed. “Why don't you let me lend you one of his books? I've got all of them.”

“No, really, I never have time to read,” Bo lied. “Is 323 this way?”

She coughed dramatically behind the surgical mask to keep the nurse at a distance and walked toward the kid's room while struggling into the gown. It turned out to be a size meant for juvenile surgical patients. Over her bulky sweater the duckling-and-bunny-imprinted garment served the purpose of a straitjacket. She looked, she thought, like a medical journal ad for a major tranquilizer.

The kid on the bed thought so too. A small but refreshingly sardonic smile crossed his pale lips as he watched her enter the room. He was white as a cave fish and his hair looked like a thatch of rusty steel wool. But the body beneath his hospital gown was sturdy, fleshed-out. Nobody had starved this kid, and he bore none of the telltale scars, bruises, and body tremors of abuse. Under feathery lashes his huge tan eyes betrayed fear, but something else as well. A spark, bright as the sun on desert quartz. In Bo's experience that spark was the only thing that mattered in the end. Still, she wasn't sure.

“Hi.” Bo smiled uselessly behind the mask. “My name's Bo, like a clown!”

Kids always grinned at that, but this one merely looked at her, watched her intently. Bo found the boy's look strangely familiar, but couldn't identify it. She noticed the bright plaid restraint vest over the boy's chest. Its ties, Bo knew from her own experience, were secured to the bed frame out of the boy's reach.

“Why the restraints?” she asked Nurse Sailboat, who was hovering behind and reeking of a perfume that intensified Bo's wooziness. The whole room seemed to be humming now. A sense of immediacy, of compelling importance. But without reference in any rational framework. Objects, the boy himself, appeared to shimmer.

Oh shit
!
This is how it begins
.
Don't let it
.

“He kept flapping his little hands and trying to get out of bed,” Sailboat replied softly. “Of course he's upset, poor thing.”

Bo wrapped a hand over the cool metal footboard of the boy's bed to regain her equilibrium. The rational course would be simply to document the boy's current condition, return the case file to Madge, and drive straight to the university drop-in psychiatric clinic. That sudden awareness of objects in a room, of the hidden personalities possessed by items of furniture, and the inchoate messages beamed by the play of light on surfaces—these Bo recognized for what they were. The first groundswells of mania.

But the intensity of the boy's odd eyes cut through the illusion and gleamed at Bo. Reached out. Touched her. A light, a presence. She could no more walk away from it than she could stop breathing. It was her talisman, that gleam.

Her own source of strength and endurance. It was intelligence! She was sure. She'd know it anywhere.

“Didn't you say you suspect severe retardation?” she asked without breaking eye contact with the child. Everything in the room had a halo and the hum continued, but she ignored it.

Sailboat stroked the boy's incredibly thick, wiry hair and crooned, “Johnny doesn't talk, doesn't understand anything. Do you, Johnny?”

The child continued to stare at Bo. His pale golden eyes with their sorrel irises spoke volumes. But volumes of what?

Sailboat went on. “All he can do is flap his hands. We'll know more when the neurological workup comes back.”

Flaps his hands. Bo steadied herself and watched the boy's right hand. It was “flapping” for sure, but the flap wasn't random. He'd curled the three middle fingers inward toward his palm, extending his thumb and pinky. At first Bo thought he was finger-spelling the letter Y. But the hand jerked sideways, thumb pointing down toward his mouth. It was a gesture common to college students, and beer drinkers in general.

“I think he wants a beer,” Bo gasped.

The humming subsided. The shimmers faded to haze.

What the hell is going on
?

A sense of mystery, and of mission, flooded Bo's awareness. The manicky delusion that she had been brought to this place by magical forces was at once ludicrous and impossible to shake.

“Don't be silly,” Sailboat said professionally.

Bo pulled her mask off. The boy's condition seemed obvious, but she had to be sure.

“Bo,” she pronounced soundlessly, pointing to herself.

“I'm afraid you'll have to keep the mask on. You said you had the flu—”

“No, no. He has to see my face.”

Moving to the bedside table, Bo poured water into a plastic cup from a pitcher. Making the beer-drinking gesture with one hand, she handed the cup to the boy. He took a sip and then threw the cup on the floor, his eyes never leaving hers.

She was sure!

“See, he's not thirsty,” the nurse sighed. “Now I'll have to call housekeeping to clean this up. Be careful you don't breathe on him.”

Bo knew the boy wasn't thirsty. He couldn't be thirsty with a half gallon of nutrient-enriched sugar-water dripping into a vein in his left arm. Thirst had not been the point of the gesture. Communication had been the point of the gesture.

“Bo,” she mouthed again, pointing to herself. Her heart was racing.

Slowly the child curled a stubby index finger toward his own chest. A sound came from the small mouth, hoarse, hard to distinguish. Like the call from a distant hawk.

“I scream because I am a bird.” The words of the Paiute chant echoed in Bo's ears. She shook her head.

The boy tried again.

“Ww-eh-po,” he whispered, watching Bo avidly. Somebody had tried to teach him to pronounce his name. Somebody, Bo knew, had labored for months, face close to his, hands on Adam's apples, to teach him there was a sound he could make that identified him. A grin swept her face as she hugged the little boy impulsively. He was warm, soap-smelling, trembly.

“Weppo! Your name's Weppo!”

The boy smiled weakly, his gaze still fastened to her face. And then his eyes closed. The effort had been exhausting.

“This kid's not retarded, he's
deaf
!” Bo yelled. She felt a flush tingle through her cheeks as the earlier dizziness subsided but didn't quite vanish beneath her elation.

Crazy or not, she was right.

“Shh, he needs to rest.” Nurse Sailboat pushed Bo toward the door.

“He can't
hear
me; he's
deaf
!” Bo yelled again.

“Well, all the children up here aren't deaf. You'll have to be quiet.”

The wary, nervous look on Sailboat was one Bo had seen before.

“Besides, what makes you think he's deaf?”

Bo made a massive effort to control her emotional level.

“My sister was born deaf,” she pronounced softly. She never talked about Laurie. “I
know
.”

“What's going on in here?” a quiet baritone voice with the barest French accent inquired from the doorway. Andrew LaMarche's gray eyes registered controlled contempt at Bo in the tiny surgical gown. “You must be the worker from CPS.”

“Dr. LaMarche,” Bo said with a sigh as she tried to pull the gown off and succeeded in stretching the neck of her sweater over her shoulder. Her bra strap had tiny strings fraying from it.

Great
.
Now on top of everything else he'll think all CPS workers throw bras in the dryer
.

“I know you're upset about the Martinelli case; we all are. And I know you hate CPS; we all do. But this kid's
deaf
!”

Andrew LaMarche was taken aback. There was a frenzied logic in whatever the woman was saying. And a certain
feu de joie
that was rather interesting.

“Over coffee?” he suggested. “I was here when the boy was brought in. I'll be supervising his case.”

Bo regarded the dapper physician she had hoped to avoid. It was hard to get a sense of the man, who might be modeling for
GQ
or only posing as a doctor to avoid discovery as a retired cold war double agent with unwholesome interests in Argentine coups. Well-cut seal-brown hair, graying at the temples. Equally tidy mustache over courteous smile. Hand-tailored jacket in an exceptional Donegal tweed that would have cost, Bo assessed approvingly, more per yard than she made in a day. If Dr. Andrew LaMarche harbored a secret interest in medieval saddlery or spent his weekends making grape jelly under a rule of silence in some mountain monastery, Bo would not have been surprised. An unusual, courtly man. A gentleman.

“Lean as a hound and shirted in silk,” her grandmother would have said.

“Sure,” she replied, suppressing a grin at the phrase Bridget O'Reilly invariably used to describe an attractive suitor. “Coffee sounds great.” Her grandmother's phrase fit Andrew LaMarche like a kid glove.

The cafeteria at St. Mary's was huge and lit by banks of fluorescent lights concealed above Plexiglas panels. The few off-duty personnel enjoying coffee in small, muted groups had all chosen to face the bank of doors opening onto a cement courtyard. Bo had been there before.

“Do you mind if we sit outside? I could use a cigarette.”

Mercifully LaMarche elected to forgo the lecture on lung cancer and merely answered, “Of course.”

Bo allowed a spasm of gratitude as she opened Weppo's case file on a cement table.