Louder Than Words (2 page)

I knew she must be as devastated as I was, but I had no room in my heart for empathy. Feeling sorry for myself was taking up all my energy.

What’s the point of saying goodbye to three wooden boxes? Like that’s going to help me get over it? They’re already gone
. The tip of my pencil snapped with the force of my words.

Charlotte gave Stuart a pleading look. Standing at the island in the kitchen, he stirred his tea and looked on helplessly. I felt bad for him. This wasn’t supposed to be his life either. Putting down his spoon, he came and sat down next to me on the sofa.

“Sash, funerals suck, and going to your family’s funeral is an unthinkable task, but it’s just something you have to do. It’s not right, but it’s what everybody’s expecting. If you don’t show up, they’ll never leave you alone. So let’s get this over with, and then you can come home and I won’t let anyone bother you. I promise.” He held up three fingers in a Boy Scout salute.

That made sense. If I knew my public misery was limited to an hour or two, I could manage. I nodded. No wonder Stuart was so good at his job: he knew how to get things done. As horrible as I felt, I wasn’t immune to logic, and Stuart’s plan was reasonable and finite.

“But Stu, what about the reception afterward?”

Charlotte stood in front of us, filing her fingernails furiously. She was like a taut guitar string, ready to snap at the slightest touch, but Stuart maintained his cool.

“Sasha and I are coming straight home after the funeral. No reception. You can go, and you should, to represent the family, but I don’t think any good is going to come of standing around talking about the good old days. It’s too soon.” Stuart kissed me on the forehead and patted my knee. “She’s just a baby,” he whispered into my hair. “She needs time.”

Charlotte sighed and wiped her eyes, inspecting her hands for mascara. “I suppose you’re right. Of course that makes sense. I was so busy thinking about what we were supposed to do that I wasn’t thinking about what was the right thing for Sasha. I’m so sorry, kiddo. This is all new for me. We’ll figure this out. It’s just going to take time to get used to everything.”

My tears dripped on the yellow paper, smudging my words.
It’s okay. I love you guys. Thank you for taking me in. I know you didn’t want to have a baby, and now you have me. It must be hard
.

“Don’t
ever
say thank you for this. It’s a privilege to have you in this house. No more discussing it—let’s get this over with. Go get dressed, Sasha,” Stuart ordered. Everything about Stuart made me feel safe.

It was a graveside ceremony, and all three coffins were lined up, just as I had pictured. Shiny dark wood, they looked like giant cigar boxes. Two of the caskets were blanketed with pink roses—my mother, sister, and I had all loved pale pink roses. Not anymore. Although it was bitterly cold, there must have been close to a hundred people huddled around the trio of holes in the ground. I didn’t recognize most of them—amnesia or shock, I didn’t know which—so I sat between my aunt and uncle, surrounded by a crowd of strangers, staring at my muddy shoes, trying not to think about my parents and sister being dropped into those pits and covered with dirt.

The worms crawl in
… I remembered that Liz hated bugs. When there was a spider in the bathroom, she would holler until someone came in to kill it for her. And although she didn’t like to admit it, she was a little afraid of the dark. I used to make fun of her, because even though she was two years older, she was the scaredy cat in the family. Now she was alone in the dark, with the bugs, and I couldn’t help her. Jamming my fists into my eyes, wishing I could scream out loud, I tried to erase the image of three dead bodies, maggots crawling in and out of their ears.

The minister rambled on about lives cut short, some heavenly grand plan, and the duty of the living to carry on the memories of those no longer here. It sounded like a load of crap to me, but I couldn’t speak and I don’t think the words I wanted to say would have been very well received. What kind of fucking higher power would let this happen? And if He/She/It were going to let this happen, then the least He/She/It could do would be to wipe out the whole family at once. I didn’t even have any grandparents: two cancers, one heart attack, and a stroke had decimated my family tree long before the crash. Leaving one person behind, a child no less, smacked of poor judgment and bad planning. Where was the mercy in that? Somehow I knew I wouldn’t be finding comfort in religion.

Twenty minutes later, it was all over. Three hunchbacked men in black raincoats and rubber boots lowered the caskets into the holes with some cranking device. Charlotte, Stuart, and I stood like a tiny receiving line at a vampire wedding, while people said horrible, well-meaning things. “We’re so sorry.” “If there’s anything we can do …” “Are you all right?” “How do you feel?” Stupid, obvious, unanswerable questions. And then, as they walked away, I could still hear them, talking about me instead of to me. “How will she survive?” “Did you hear that she may never be able to speak again?” “She looks terrible.”

“Come on, sweetie, let’s get you home,” Stuart said, wrapping his arm protectively around my shoulders. “You’re frozen solid.”

I nodded and leaned against him, comforted by the feel of his rough wool coat against my face. His other arm was around Charlotte. If not for Stuart, we would probably both keel over.

“Honey, are you all right? You don’t have to go to the reception, either.”

Charlotte sniffled. “I have to go.”

“There is no such thing as ‘have to’ in this situation.”

“No, I want to go. I won’t stay long.” We stopped in front of the black Lincoln Town Car that had brought us to the cemetery. “I’ll see you at home.” The three of us stood with our arms around each other for a long minute.

My life was at the bottom of three holes in the Riverside Cemetery, but I had to keep on living. How was I supposed to do that?

Dr. O’Rourke specialized in the treatment of posttraumatic stress. But after four years, I was still mute, and my memory was still murky—mild retrograde amnesia she called it. Maybe my tragedy was too mainstream for her. Girls my age who had been raped and beaten, or soldiers who had seen their entire units blown up before their eyes—these were the tough cases, the seriously damaged psyches that the doctor was accustomed to cobbling back together. My family was dead, but it was nobody’s fault. No one had purposefully hurt me. There was no evil in my life. I was just the victim of bad luck and black ice, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In the beginning, once a week, and then later twice a month, I visited Dr. O’Rourke. I listened to her talk, did the homework assignments she gave me, unsuccessfully tried hypnosis, swallowed all kinds of colorful pills, meditated, kept a dream journal. But nothing helped. The books on her shelf spoke to her expertise.
Lost and Found: Rediscovering Yourself after Experiencing Tragedy; Why Not Me?—Navigating Survivor Guilt; Now What?—Reconnecting with Life after a Near-Death Experience;
and my personal favorite title,
Climax: Healing Your Psyche with Sex
. Reading her books, except the last one, had been part of my homework over the last few years, and as educational as they were, they did nothing for my voice, or for my dreams, for that matter. She was a very nice lady, and she had helped plenty of other people, but I think I could have saved Charlotte and Stuart thousands of dollars and been in exactly the same place: plagued by a really bad nightmare and dependent on a computer or pad of paper to communicate.

Approaching the four-year anniversary of the accident, Dr. O’Rourke had scheduled an extra session. She did that every year, probably in the hopes that some major psychological breakthrough would coincide with the date my family died. So far it hadn’t, and the idea sounded a little bit too much like a Lifetime TV movie, but after four years of silence, I was willing to try anything, no matter how hokey it sounded or how miserably it had failed in the past. Maybe this would be the year when all my stars would be in alignment, and I would emerge from my silence like a songbird from its shell, fully formed, with a sweet, clear voice. Who was I kidding?

“For the thousandth time, there is nothing wrong with you physically. It’s called somatoform conversion disorder.” Her voice betrayed her growing frustration. A doctor’s failure to cure a patient was like Charlotte or Stuart losing a lawsuit, and I knew my aunt and uncle took such defeats very personally. “There is no physiological reason you cannot speak. Your mind is controlling your body.” Dr. O’Rourke flipped through my chart, which had grown thick in the last four years.

For the umpteenth time I nodded my head. This speech was a regular part of Dr. O’Rourke’s repertoire. She hauled it out when she was feeling discouraged by my lack of progress, which usually happened around this time of year—as predictable as Christmas carols and fruitcake. But if she truly understood my disorder, then why was she acting as if I had some conscious control over this? Didn’t she believe me when I told her that more than anything on this earth I wanted to be able to talk again? Didn’t she realize how hard, and lonely, my life had become in the last four years? But she was the doctor, so she must have a good reason for rehashing my diagnosis and berating me again.

Obediently, I opened my mouth, straining to make a sound, but nothing came out except a puff of air as I exhaled. Dr. O’Rourke’s irritation was obvious in her furrowed brow and the way she chewed on her pencil. This was our 168th session, and I was no closer to making a sound than I had been at the first. In truth, I hated to disappoint the doctor as much as I hated not being able to speak. She really seemed to care about me as a person, not just a customer who paid three hundred dollars an hour to stretch out on her couch.

“I’m not sure what we should do with you. I don’t want to diminish the horrible thing that has happened to you, but it happened, and now you have to choose whether or not you are forever going to let that experience dominate and define your life.”

Ah, her tough love, hard choices sermon. As earnest and compassionate as Dr. O’Rourke was, I was as lost four years later as I had been in the months after the accident. Swimming in circles in my kiddie pool of self-pity, hopelessness, and rage, I couldn’t seem to find the ladder. There was no breakthrough looming on my horizon, at least not this year.

Writing everything on a pad of paper was inefficient and exhausting, so I used a voice-synthesizing device that spoke whatever I typed into it. Everything came out sounding like I was channeling Stephen Hawking, the famous English physicist who had lost his voice to ALS and used a similar device. I called it the Hawkie Talkie. A variety of voices and accents was available, from “female, English, mid-twenties” to “male, Midwestern, child.” But the default voice, the robotic monotone with which it spoke my words, perfectly reflected the emptiness I felt. The kids at school found this incredibly entertaining, no matter how many times they heard it. As a result, I didn’t tend to contribute much in class, furthering my metaphorical solitary confinement. Changing the voice setting to something more normal would be a no-brainer for most people. Why not make life a little easier? But stupid and stubborn, I refused to alter it. If I tried to fit in and still didn’t, I would feel worse than I did having made no effort at all. By shutting myself off before anyone could slam the door in my face, I naively thought I was protecting myself. A classic “cut off your noise to spite your face” philosophy of life—not a recipe for success—just proof of what a total loser I was.

“BUT HOW CAN IT NOT INFLUENCE MY LIFE? MY FAMILY IS GONE, MY MEMORIES OF EVERYTHING THAT CAME BEFORE ARE HAZY. I HARDLY KNOW WHO I AM SOMETIMES.”

“Well, as we’ve talked about before, over time your memory may improve. I had hoped hypnotherapy would have helped with that, but you are apparently immune to hypnosis. The most we can do is try again in a few months. I’ve usually had incredible luck putting my patients under. It doesn’t make sense.”

“IS HYPNOSIS MY ONLY HOPE?”

“It may just take time, or maybe some random event will trigger something in your mind, but the human brain is still very much a mystery, even to us so-called experts. The one thing I do know is that you were at a pivotal point in your development when this happened, so it may take longer. And please understand, I’m not saying that you can be who you were before. Everyone is influenced by experiences, so you will never be the person you would have become had you not lost your family, but you can become an equally wonderful person. And ultimately, you don’t need to recover all your memories in order to recover. That is a key point. You can’t lose sight of that.”

“IS THERE A POSSIBILITY I’LL NEVER GET MY VOICE BACK?”

It was the first time I had expressed this concern to anyone, but after so long, I was beginning to realize that I could be stuck like this forever. My heart started to race.

“Don’t think that. At the end of the day,
you
hold the power to heal your voice.” Dr. O. reached across and put her hand over my heart. “It’s hard for me to say this, but my methods have failed you, and now I think it’s up to you. Only you can give yourself the permission to move on. I’m still here for you, but I think the time has come for you to explore your own inner strength. Your recovery rests inside of you.” Folding her hands in her lap and leaning back against a cushion, Dr. O. said, “I’m afraid our time is up, but I’ll see you in a month, just to check in. Introspection—that’s my new prescription for you.”