Silence (10 page)

Alison was clearly nervous. Determined, but nervous.

Eric, leaning on the warped wood of the stair railing on portable D, watched her, waiting. He didn’t look bored, and he didn’t look angry; he didn’t seem confused. He just…waited.

When it became clear that waiting was going to be rewarded with a lot of awkward silence, he cleared his throat. “You wanted to talk to me?”

She nodded. And then said “Yes,” just in case.

He waited for a bit longer. “Alison—”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and looked at her feet. “It’s about Emma.” She looked up in time to see the way his expression changed. It closed up, like a trap.

“Ah. I’m not interested in Emma in that way,” he said carefuly.

“She’s realy not looking for anyone,” Alison said, at the same time. The words colided. It was al so awkward.

“Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

“Beginning?”

“You want to tel me why she’s not looking for anyone. Or “You want to tel me why she’s not looking for anyone. Or anyone special.” When Alison nodded, he took his arm off the railing and shoved his hands into his front pockets. And waited.

Then, when it became clear the awkwardness wasn’t going away anytime soon, he very quietly took the threads of the conversation into his own, figurative, hands.

“You’ve known her for a long time?”

“Since we were six. Wel, I was five.”

“You’ve been friends since then?”

Alison nodded.

“You’re not realy like her, though.”

“No.”

“And you’re not realy interested in the same things.”

“Some of the same things, but…no.” Alison hesitated.

“You’ve met Amy.”

“It’s impossible to be a student at Emery and not meet Amy.”

“Do you like her?”

Eric shrugged. “She’s a girl.”

“I hated her, in junior high.”

Eric’s brow lifted slightly, as if in surprise.

“I hated that age,” Alison added softly. “I thought she was so ful of herself, and so cruel. But Emma liked her,” she added.

“Emma liked you.”

“Out of habit. But it was Emma who told me that Amy’s not cruel on purpose. She doesn’t enjoy being mean—she’s just thoughtless; she’s caught up in her own life and in her own problems. Just as I was then. To Emma, Amy was important.

Amy’s friendship was important. You’ve seen Em,” Alison Amy’s friendship was important. You’ve seen Em,” Alison added. “Emma fits in with them. She always has.”

“She doesn’t seem to spend much time with them, now.”

“No. She worked hard,” Alison said, staring out into the field, or into a memory. She lost the nervous look, and her hands fel to her sides. “She worked hard to belong. She did what they did, went where they went. I was so afraid of losing her. I was jealous. Of them.”

“Ah.”

“But…we survived. It was even harder, for me, when Emma started seeing Nathan.”

“Nathan?”

“Her boyfriend. He died this summer, in a car accident. They were always together. Things she’d do with me—things that she couldn’t do with Amy and her friends—she started doing with Nathan instead. She spent al her time with him. Even Amy was getting annoyed. Nathan was quiet, though. He was never mean, and he was never showy. I liked him,” she added, “and I hated him. I never told her about the hate part.”

“I won’t,” he said softly.

“But when he died…It was bad. I don’t even remember who told me, but it wasn’t Emma. She came to school and she did her work and she hung out with Amy, but…she’d stopped caring. She always seems so self-confident to people who meet her now. It’s not that, though—she just doesn’t care anymore.

She says what she’s thinking because she doesn’t care what other people think about her. None of it matters.

“And I felt guilty for a long time, because I sometimes wanted “And I felt guilty for a long time, because I sometimes wanted Nathan to go away. I wish he hadn’t,” she added, her voice stil soft. “Because Emma is always “fine” now. Even at the burial, she was fine.” She took a deep breath. “And Amy, who I always thought of as selfish? After Nathan died, she gathered al of us together, and she tried to arrange a different schedule for Michael, so that Emma would have time to grieve and pul herself together.”

“She offered that to Emma?”

“No. But she was thinking of Emma, of what Emma had lost.

They treat her a little differently now than they used to. They understand, and they try to give her space. Al the stupid social games they used to play? They don’t play them with Emma anymore.” She frowned. “They stil play them with each other, though.”

“So if Amy arranged for someone else to meet Michael, why is he coming to school with the two of you?”

“I told them no.”

He stared at her, his expression odd. “Why?”

“Because Michael hadn’t changed. He stil needed Em. And I think Emma needed the responsibility of watching him, the way she’d always done. Besides,” she added, with a grimace, “Michael would have taken three months to readjust to a new routine, and Michael needed to know that Nathan, not Emma, was gone. Nathan understood Michael. It was why Emma started to like him in the first place.”

“You’re worried about her.”

Alison nodded. “Emma has always gotten along with Michael because Emma sees Michael. She doesn’t see what she wants him to be; she doesn’t see what he lacks. She just sees what he is, and she understands it. She sees me the same way. She doesn’t think about “normal.” She just sees what we are. Mostly only the good parts,” she added. “But they’re stil true.

“When Nathan died, Emma’s mother always tried to offer comfort, and Emma didn’t want it. She spent a lot of time at my house, because my mother didn’t. My mom didn’t need Emma to cry or scream or be angry or grieve. She let Emma be. And that’s what Emma needed. It’s hard,” Alison added.

“Sometimes it’s hard. But I try to do the same.”

“And you’re teling me that’s what I have to do?”

Alison nodded.

History was the last class of the day, and Emma approached it warily, watching for any signs of the odd dislocation that could be mistaken for concussion symptoms. Alison was watching her as wel. They made their way to their seats.

Emma blinked.

“Em?”

She heard the word from a long way off; it was a tinny sound, something smal and so stretched she could tel it was Alison talking only because Alison used that single sylable so effectively. She could hear the droning of Ms. Kagayama, but that, too, could barely be resolved into a familiar voice; there were no words.

were no words.

No, that wasn’t true. There were no familiar words, and the words that she could hear were spoken in so many voices, al overlapping, they almost made her dizzy. But the voices were clearer, and if it seemed as if there were thousands of them, they were distinct. This time, instead of fading into painful noise, they stayed at the edge of a shout, a chorus of shouts.

She blinked again, and she realized why.

She had thought that light hurt her eyes. Yesterday and the day before, she would have sworn it. But she realized now that it wasn’t the light, it was the images that swirled around her vision, sharpest at the periphery. They formed an aurora of scintilating colors—but they had shapes now, textures that she recognized.

Clothing. Hair. Faces.

None of them stayed in one place long enough for her to realy look. But she had the sense that she was standing stil and they were streaming past, shouting, screaming, or crying as they did.

“Em?”

She lifted a hand. She couldn’t speak and look at the same time. And she wanted to look. She had told Eric she would try, but she wanted to see her father. Or hear him. She wouldn’t touch him again, she promised herself that much. But it was hard. Her head began to pound with the effort it took to keep looking, to listen, to break out one voice from the multitude.

But she managed, somehow.

And realized, as she did, that it was not her father’s voice that she had reached for and not, therefore, her father that she could see.

see.

Instead, she saw fire, and she shouted, bringing her hands up to cover her face. She would have let go, then. She would have let go and slid into oblivion and nausea and darkness. But she could see, wreathed in fire, the face of a smal child, and she could hear, in the distance, the screams. No, the scream. One voice. One voice shouting words that were familiar because Emma had typed them, in a half-trance, on the day of the first headache.

Oh my god Drew help me help me Drew fire god no She stood—she managed to stand.

Alison was standing as wel; she felt Alison’s hand on her arm. And then she felt a familiar arm encircle her shoulder. It was tight, meant to brace her and hold her up. She swalowed, closed her eyes, and forced them open again.

She heard Eric’s voice, and his voice was blessedly clear.

“Strength, Emma.” It was a whisper of sound, a tickle in her ear.

But she could hear it. She nodded and managed to say, “Take me home.”

She felt herself being lifted.

“Strength,” Eric said again.

She nodded.

She threw up in the parking lot. Eric seemed to expect this, and although he set her down, he hovered. “Where’s Alison?” she asked, as she pushed herself to her feet.

“I told her to stay. There’s not much she can do.”

“And she listened?”

“And she listened?”

He chuckled. “Very reluctantly. I’m not sure she trusts me.”

“She’s smarter than I am,” Emma said. She caught his arm.

Her knees felt like rubber, but they held. “I think I can walk,”

she told him, as he put an arm around her shoulder.

Drew

She closed her eyes. “How can you live like this?” she whispered.

“I don’t see what you see now.”

“Oh. Did you ever?”

“Never. I am not what I fear you are, Emma.”

DREW

One voice in the maelstrom. She opened her eyes to fire; fire and black, thick smoke. She could almost taste it, and fel to her knees against the asphalt. Eric picked her up. He had never looked particularly large to Emma, but he carried her as easily as Brendan Hal had when she had been a smal girl.

“Eric.”

His arms tightened, but he continued to walk. “Em,” he whispered. “Don’t do this. Please.”

She opened her eyes; she could see his profile, because her head was resting against his shoulder. His eyes were faintly luminescent in her vision, although they were also dark brown; his jaw was tensed, as if with effort. She said, “Eric, there’s a child—”

He almost missed a step, but he caught himself—and Emma —before they both fel.

“There’s a child, in the fire.”

“There’s a child, in the fire.”

“What fire, Emma?” He asked it as if she were a fevered child. It should have irritated her, but it didn’t. She wasn’t sure why.

“I don’t know. There’s a fire and a child standing in it. There’s smoke, it’s thick and heavy. And I can hear one voice, over al the other voices.”

He had reached his car, and now set her down close to the front passenger seat. He unlocked the door manualy, and then put an arm around her waist as she slid into the car. She felt the vinyl against her legs; it was warm.

“But, Eric,” she continued, as he closed the door gently and walked around the front of the car to the driver’s side. She waited while he slid behind the steering wheel. “Eric?”

“I’m here. Take this,” he added, and handed her a smal bucket. “I thought you might need it.”

“The voice I hear sounds different. It’s not—it’s not like the other voices.”

“How is it different?” He spoke patiently and slowly.

“I don’t know for certain—I can’t shut the other voices out, not completely, so it’s hard to listen.” She grimaced, and added, “and I can see the child.”

“Now?”

“Yes.” She’d already nodded a couple of times, but this time remembered that speaking was less painful.

Drew oh my god oh god

He started the car.

He started the car.

“He’s not very old. I think he’s four. Maybe a bit older, maybe a bit younger, it’s hard to tel.” And she was concentrating now. Her vision was a strange colage of things she expected to see and things it should have been impossible to see.

The phone rang. She blinked. The fire wavered, its roar diminishing to a crackle. She automaticaly reached into her pocket before she realized that the ringtone was wrong; it wasn’t her phone.

It rang again. “Eric, I think that’s your phone.”

He said nothing, and Emma listened to it ring three more times before it fel silent. When it did, the roar of the fire returned.

The child’s eyes were wide, and she could see black tears trace the delicate lines of his cheeks. He was staring at her, his lips slightly open.

“Yes,” Emma said, although she couldn’t say why. “Yes, I’m coming.” She turned to Eric. “Go left here.”

The car roled to a halt. He opened his mouth, and shut it when the phone rang again.

“Are you going to answer that?”

“No. I know who it is.”

“Without looking?”

“Not many people have my number. What do you mean, turn left here?”

“We have to drive that way,” she replied, lifting a shaking arm.

“Why, Emma?”

“Because we—we just have to drive that way.”

Eric lifted a hand to his face. “Al right. Al right, we’l play it Eric lifted a hand to his face. “Al right. Al right, we’l play it your way for now.”

Eric folowed Emma’s ad hoc directions. Emma concentrated on staying upright. She gave right, left, and straight cals, and he folowed them, paying attention to the lights. But she must have given him the wrong direction, because he turned instead of going straight, and Emma screamed as the car drove up a curb, over an unwatered lawn, and into a large shed.