Silence (25 page)

Amy roled her eyes at him in the mirror. “If you’re finished?

He can help with the ladders,” she added. “Where are we going first?”

Emma grimaced. “We’re going to get Maria Copis.”

“That’s the mother?”

Emma nodded. She gave Amy the address, waited until Amy had fiddled with the talking map, and then took it back.

Maria Copis lived wel away from the downtown core, in a neighborhood of semi-detached homes with uniformly neat lawns and trees that had grown to a reasonable height, obscuring the boulevards. Emma looked at them as the car slowed, and Eric said, “Her mother’s house. Number sixty-two.”

“Oh.”

“Where did you think she would go?” Chase asked.

Eric took one hand off the wheel to slap his shoulder.

“No,” Emma told Eric. “It’s fair. I didn’t think.”

“Listen to Emma,” Chase told Eric. To Emma, he said, “Did you think about what you were going to say?”

When Emma didn’t answer, Chase snorted. As the car roled to a stop, he opened the door.

“No, you don’t.” Eric grabbed his shirt. “You’re not going anywhere near that house. Emma, Alison, this is al yours.”

Emma nodded and glanced at Alison, who nodded back and opened her door. She got out first, waiting for Emma to join her.

Emma’s hand was shaking on the car’s handle as she pushed the door open. She got out slowly.

I don’t want to do this.

“Emma?”

Emma glanced at Alison.

“I think we should get Michael.”

“We look more harmless without him.”

Alison said nothing, and after a moment, Emma nodded. She almost regretted it, but it bought her time. I don’t want to do this.

this.

Alison walked over to Amy’s car as it puled up, and after a minute, she returned with Michael. “She’s got kids,” Alison told him. “An eighteen month old and a baby. We might need you to help with them while we talk.”

Michael nodded and looked at Emma, who hadn’t moved.

Emma shook herself, took a deep breath, and started up the driveway. Yes, she didn’t want to do this.

But she couldn’t let that stop her.

As she walked, she thought of how she would feel if two strangers—of any age, any description—had shown up at her door, promising her they could take her to Nathan. Teling her that unless she believed them and went with them, Nathan would be trapped in a miniature version of hel for a long damn time.

She knew that she would stand in that door, Petal practicaly under her feet, staring at them as if they were either insane or unspeakably cruel. Knew, as wel, that while most of her would want to slam the door in their faces, some stupid part of her would want to believe them. Not about hel, but about the necessity of her involvement.

And that part of her?

That stupid, selfish part would want to believe it because then she’d see him again. Just once. Just one more time. She could say good-bye. She could tel him she loved him. She hadn’t been able to do that. He hadn’t survived long enough for Emma to reach the hospital.

“Em?”

“Sorry.” She’d stopped walking. Wrapping her arms around “Sorry.” She’d stopped walking. Wrapping her arms around herself, she started again. But she was aware, as she walked, that it was the stupid, selfish part of herself that she needed to understand here: the part that hoped in the face of the worst possible loss even when it knew al hope was pointless.

Emma approached the bright red door. Flecks of peeling paint showed that it hadn’t always been bright red, and this was exactly the type of detail she noticed when she was nervous. She cleared her throat, straightened her hands, reached for the doorbel and hesitated for just a moment.

Alison said nothing. Emma was fiercely glad that Alison was beside her; if she’d been Amy, she would have already pushed the doorbel and taken a step back. “Sorry, Aly,” she said. “I’m just—I’m not certain what to say.”

Alison nodded. Because she wasn’t, either. But she had just enough faith in Emma that Emma could push the doorbel. Heard from the wrong side of the door, the chime was tinny and electric.

They waited together, listening for the sounds of footsteps.

They heard the sound of shouting instead, and it got louder until the door opened.

A woman with a red-faced child on her hip stood in the doorway, dark strands of hair escaping from a ponytail and heading straight for her eyes. She was younger than Emma’s mother; she looked as though she wasn’t even thirty. The child’s voice gave out in the presence of strangers, and she—Emma remembered the eighteen-month-old daughter—shoved a baled remembered the eighteen-month-old daughter—shoved a baled fist into her mouth.

“We’re sorry to bother you,” Emma said quietly, “but we’re looking for Maria Copis.”

The woman’s dark eyes narrowed slightly. “Why?”

“We’re not trying to sel anything,” Emma said quickly. “Are you Maria Copis?”

The child reached out and grabbed a handful of her mother’s hair, which took some effort, and made clear why so much of it had escaped its binding. “Don’t do that,” the woman said and, catching the perfect little fist, attempted to retrieve her hair without tearing it out. “Yes, I’m Maria Copis. As you can see,”

she added, “I’m a little busy. What can I do for you?”

“We just want a—a moment of your time,” Emma replied.

“I’m Emma Hal, and this is Alison and Michael. Do you mind if we come in?”

The answer was clearly yes. Maria set her daughter down inside the hal. The child immediately grabbed the edge of her mother’s shirt and tried to drag her away from the door. “I realy don’t have time to talk right now,” Maria said. “Maybe you could come back when my mother’s home from work.”

“I’m afraid we won’t be here, then,” Emma told her.

Before she could answer, her daughter let go of her shirt and walked in that precarious way that toddlers do, half leaning forward as if taunting gravity. She reached the edge of the front step and pointed up—at Michael. Michael knelt instantly, putting his hands in reach, and she leaped off the step to the sound of his hands in reach, and she leaped off the step to the sound of her mother’s quiet shriek. Michael caught her, and she caught his nose. He laughed and said ouch, but not loudly enough to discourage her.

“Cathy, don’t pinch people’s noses,” her mother said.

“I don’t mind. It doesn’t hurt,” Michael told her. Cathy grabbed his ear instead, and he stood, lifting her off the ground.

He also let her pul his head to the side until she was bored, which, since she was eighteen months old, didn’t take too long.

She went on to discover the pens Michael sometimes carried in his pockets, when he was wearing shirts that had them. She grabbed one, and they had a little tug of war over it.

Maria Copis stood in the door for a minute, watching Michael with her daughter. Her shoulders relaxed slightly, and she glanced at the two girls, shaking her head in wonder. “She’s going through a shy phase. She won’t even let my mother pick her up.”

“Michael likes kids,” Alison said. “And they’ve always liked him. Even the shy kids.”

“I guess so.” She exhaled. “You might as wel come in, then.

It’s not going to be quiet,” she added. “And the place is a mess.”

The place, as she’d caled it, was undeniably a mess, and they had to pick their way over the scattered debris of children’s toys just to get out of the doorway. Michael tried to put Cathy down, but she grabbed his hair. So he sat crouched in the hal, surrounded by toys that were probably hers. He picked up a stuffed orange dinosaur and tried to exchange it for his hair.

stuffed orange dinosaur and tried to exchange it for his hair.

When she ignored it, Michael made baby-dinosaur noises, which was better seen than described, and Cathy laughed when the baby dinosaur tried to lick her face. Emma glanced at Maria Copis, who was watching while a smile tugged at the corner of her lips. It was a tight smile, and it faded into something else as Emma watched.

She wanted to leave, then, because she knew what the expression meant, and she hated invading this woman’s privacy —and her grief. But stil, watching her daughter play with Michael was peaceful, and Emma remembered watching Michael play with Petal in just the same way. Life went on.

Some lives.

She let it go on for a while, because she was a coward and she stil didn’t want to do this: bring up Andrew, her dead son.

Add to the pain.

But Andrew was waiting, and he was waiting for his mother.

Emma found courage from somewhere, and she spoke.

“I know this is going to sound bad,” she said quietly, and Maria started slightly and turned to face her. “And I want to apologize for that up front. I almost didn’t come here today.”

The woman looked confused. Not suspicious, not yet; that would come. Emma glanced at the living room, which was also mired in toys, and after a pause, she walked toward it, forcing Alison and Maria to folow. Michael, absorbed in little shrieks of laughter, would notice eventualy, and even if he didn’t, Maria could stil keep an eye on him if she wanted.

“What did you want to talk to me about?” Her eyes

“What did you want to talk to me about?” Her eyes narrowed. “You’re not reporters, are you?”

“No! I mean, no, we’re not. We’re stil in school,” Emma added.

“I’m sorry,” the woman replied. “The only strangers recently who’ve wanted to talk to me have been reporters. Or ambulance-chasing lawyers. And no,” she added, again looking at Michael, or more accurately, at her daughter’s face, “you realy don’t look like either.”

Emma bit her lip. “We might as wel be,” she replied quietly.

“Because we are here to talk about your son.”

THE EASE—AND THERE HADN’T BEEN MUCH OF IT

—drained out of Maria Copis’ face. What was left was raw and —drained out of Maria Copis’ face. What was left was raw and angry. Emma flinched, even though she’d been expecting it.

“I think,” the woman said evenly, “you’d better leave, now.”

Her hands, Emma noted, were baled in fists, and they were shaking slightly.

Emma raised both of her hands, palms out. “Please, hear me out. Please. I don’t—I wouldn’t do this to you, I would not be here, if there were any other way. I lost my father a few years ago. My boyfriend died this past summer in a car crash. Both times people let me grieve in peace. They gave me privacy, and I needed it. I know just how much I’d hate me if I were in your shoes.

“Please, just let me say what I came here to say. If you—if it makes no sense to you, if you don’t believe it, we’l leave and we wil never, ever bother you again.”

The edge of anger left Maria’s dark eyes, but her hands were stil clenched, stil shaking. Michael, behind her, was crawling around the floor on al fours, barking like a dog.

“Your boyfriend died last summer?”

It wasn’t what Emma had expected to hear, and she flinched again, for entirely different reasons. But she swalowed and nodded.

“Were you there?”

“No. I would have been, if I could have. I went to the hospital the minute his mother caled me to tel me—but none of us made it there in time.” She closed her eyes and turned her face away for a moment, remembering the industrial gloss of off-white hals and the klaxon sound of monitors in the distance. She shook and the klaxon sound of monitors in the distance. She shook herself and looked back to Maria Copis.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” the woman said quietly. As if she meant it. Her eyes were ringed with dark circles, and she lifted a hand and pushed it through her hair. No fists, now. No obvious rage.

“It was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” Emma replied. “And even so, I can’t imagine what it must be like for you. I can try. I can think I understand it—but I don’t.” It was hard for her to say this, because she wasn’t even certain it was true. Just one week ago, she would have said that no loss was greater, or could be greater, than the loss of Nathan. But…for just a moment, she thought Maria Copis’ loss might be.

“Why did you come here, Emma?” The question was quiet, weary.

Emma took a deep breath. “I can see the dead.”

Cathy shrieked with delight; it was the only noise in the house. It was folowed by Michael’s voice. Neither of them erased the heavy weight of the words Emma had just spoken.

Maria Copis said, “Pardon me?”

“I can see the dead,” Emma repeated. She swalowed. “I know it sounds crazy. I know it sounds stupid, or worse. But I’m not pretending to be a medium or a—a whatever. I’m not going to tel you that I can reach the afterworld and put you in contact with your son, or offer to do it if you pay me. I don’t want your money, and I’l never ask for it.”