Silent Girl (10 page)

They agreed to tell the paramedics, then later the police, it was an accident – that the boy had tripped over a toy. No one would suspect. Her visits to the shelter had been confidential. The neighbours had never called the cops on them. Brian placed a Tonka dump truck on the landing and tipped it on its side while Sona kneeled by the boy at the bottom of the stairs until the ambulance arrived, stroking his cheek, saying, “It's okay, it's okay, it's okay.” She dared not hold him and make his injuries worse, didn't know it wouldn't have mattered.

When they moved to the bungalow, she shredded all photos of him, disposed of his clothes, his toys, and his bedroom furniture. In the lull before sleep finally takes her, she often sees his pinched eyes and worried mouth. He would have been twenty-two by now. Out of university or maybe going on for a graduate degree. He'd been bright enough, walking and talking early. Did her pretzel baby have difficulty learning to walk? Had she needed leg braces?

For nearly a year Sona and Brian constructed separate lives on the surface of what went unsaid and the secret they shared. He'd leave early and return late each day. She'd listen for the click of the front door as she lay awake in the boy's room where she took to sleeping after the funeral. She began studies toward a graduate degree, finding refuge in the evening and weekend classes, the assignments. She didn't ask where Brian had his meals. When they found themselves in the same space in the house, they were civil. Fine, thanks. Yes, thanks. Pardon me. They begged off when friends invited them out and eventually people left them alone.

He came to her one night after a storm knocked out the power, the heat.

“You cold?” he said.

“Yeah,” she said, opening the duvet to him. She'd been off the pill for months.

9:30. “It took me a long time to say, ‘Enough already.' It took me getting pregnant again. Brian exploded when I told him, said no way the baby was his. He claimed he'd had a vasectomy a few months after the boy died. When he eventually admitted he'd lied about that to see how I'd react, I said, ‘You need serious help.' He said, ‘You know dick all.' I laughed because he hardly ever said things like that. He didn't appreciate my sense of humour. I ended up with three broken ribs. It's a miracle I didn't miscarry.

“The shelter helped me apply for a restraining order and find a place to stay. If that had been the end of it, I wouldn't be in front of you today. But Brian was so shaken he enrolled in anger management therapy. He apologized over and over, said he'd care for the baby so I could get back to work sooner. He was always supportive of my career, I'll give him that. He promised he'd never hit me again. There seemed to be no good reason not to go back.” She smiles ruefully. “I know, I know. How stupid can you get? I realize now that he didn't intend to change. He wanted revenge.”

The woman in black frowns and sits back in her chair as though she's been shot. A surge of rage catches Sona off-guard, making her first hot then cold. The woman reminds her of someone hateful, she can't remember who. The impression is almost psychic. She's weary all of a sudden, almost too tired to go on. But she's expected to talk up the good work of shelters in support of the contribution pitch. And she does, barely hearing her own words until the merciful end: “What happened to me can happen to you. I tell my story so you won't ever have to tell yours.” Applause enters her ears as static and the moderator appears from nowhere to stand beside her.

“For the generosity of your time,” the woman says into the microphone, handing Sona an elegant blue box with brass hinges and clasp. Inside, a silk-lined groove cradles a delicate crystal hourglass. That someone might have chosen it specifically for her makes her feel both honoured and violated. She mumbles her appreciation and exits the room as quickly as dignity allows. On the way to the subway, she phones her assistant to say she won't be back in the office today.

11:20. The house smells of citrus plug-in air fresheners. Brian would be impressed at how housewifey she is now, how attentive to details that once bored her. She gets the eaves troughs cleaned out twice a year, the fireplace every two years. The roof was re-shingled five years ago. She opens a bottle of expensive red wine and leaves it to breathe while she changes into jeans and sweater. There was a time she couldn't uncork a bottle without making a mess of it.

She carries her glass and the blue gift box over to the window and sits in the wingback chair she bought for nursing Nicole. For a few minutes she watches leaves swirl in an autumn gust, their street dance mocking her mood. She's often depressed this time of year. She took drugs for it once upon a time but they made the pain too remote for too long. She prefers the more temporary effect of wine.

She was the one who was supposed to leave with Nicole. After a few months, once she and the baby were strong enough. She had played along with Brian partly out of compassion, partly to give herself more time. He'd been all lovey-dovey during her long labour, rubbing the small of her back, spooning ice chips into her mouth. It gave her pause, made her wonder if maybe they
could
start over. When he said, “This one's mine,” as he held Nicole in the delivery room, she didn't hear the intent in the words. She just thought about the boy and felt wounded on his behalf.

She lifts the crystal hourglass out of its groove and turns it carefully. Tiny white grains of sand rush from one end to the other, completing their journey in seconds. She turns it again more slowly, hoping to capture the instant each shift in time begins.

The phone rings once and stops. She puts the hourglass back in the box. A few minutes later the phone rings again. She hurries to the kitchen to answer it. Whoever it was has hung up. Brian, she's sure, relying on nothing but instinct, a premonition from early morning that this day would be singular. And it has been. If the woman in black hadn't so unnerved her, she might have gone to the office. She was meant to come home, to receive his call. She leans against the refrigerator and stares at the phone, willing it to ring again.

Nicole is with me,
he'll say. Age will have lowered his voice but she'll recognize it.
I never gave her up. I couldn't have done that. I just wanted to get you off our trail. I told her you were dead. That was terrible, I know.
He'll pause.
You still there?

Yes
, she'll say, already adrift in deep, dark waves.

She's asking questions I can't answer, now. She needs to know the truth.

After a brief silence during which he'll think she's absorbing the shock, she'll say something that conveys gratitude and understanding. Something to make him feel safe enough to continue. Maybe they'll speak about that day and all the days since, what has happened in the world, how many more things there are to fear. She'll tell him she's a vice president and has him to thank for it, in a way – all those years free of distraction, all those years to devote to work. He'll tell her how he came to type out the note he left that Christmas Day, how he waited until the house was dark to pass it through the slot. She'll remind him the house is still half his, the property worth quite a bit more thanks to the immigrant shrines. He'll tell her who took them in – she won't care if it was another woman – and how scared he was that Nicole would die without Sona's milk. How regretful he's been every day since. She'll tell him his father retired last year, spends six months in Arizona and never gives up hope of hearing from his son. Should he mention reconciliation, she'll say there's plenty of time to talk about that later.

She retrieves her wine glass from the living room and hoists herself onto the kitchen counter. Sits and smiles at her legs, dangling like those of a ventriloquist's dummy. She studies the raised veins on her hands. After a while, she pulls out an open box of Triscuits from the cabinet above and finishes them off. Pours more wine. At dusk, she gets down and flicks on the overhead light. In the sudden illumination, it comes to her who the woman in black reminded her of: the director of the shelter she and the boy went to. The one who had spilled over with kindness the first few times, making Sona cups of tea, frowning with concern over her predicament. The one whose manner turned brusque and whose eyes turned cold the last time Sona agreed to go back to Brian.

“You don't seem interested in writing a happy ending for yourself,” she'd said.

If Sona knew where that woman was today, she'd look her up, lean into that sanctimonious face and get right to the point. “I've spent sixteen years writing my story,” she'd say, “and it
has
no ending.”

Nobody; I Myself

Emilia:
O, who hath done this deed?
Desdemona:
Nobody; I myself.

—
Othello

I AM NOT A VICTIM. YOU'RE NOT TO FEEL SORRY FOR ME.

Feel sorry for Joe, whoever you are; speak out for him, please.

I try to stay on my side of the bed but sometimes I drift and his hands find my neck and squeeze it so hard I nearly swallow my tongue. His eyes are full of such fear and loathing you'd think I'm the enemy come clear across the world to take him out. He's sorry when he comes to, hates himself for the bruises he leaves.

Nearly six months since he returned but the nightmares don't quit. Ever try getting through to the
VA
? A waste of time. If he'd come back with no legs, they'd have him in rehab. He'd flip if he knew I made those calls.

Our only friend these days is Brother Darnell as he calls himself; no help at all.

He was over again last night, cranking the ancient bell –
brang, brang
, schmoozing our landlady, Mrs. Will. I can't hear what he says but I feel the smarm in his words. Slow as a cellar snake in winter, he climbs the warped, wooden stairs to the rooms we rent, scraping his shoes, driving me crazy with the urge to nail the swollen door shut. He no longer knocks. Says, hey, brother, how you feeling, before taking over the sagging horsehair couch, making points like a preacher, as if what he has to say can save Joe from the shivering sweats. I'm supposed to disappear when he arrives, hover in the kitchen in case their cups need filling.

Brother D – I call him that because it ticks him off – wears the same outfit every time: white drip-dry shirt, black rayon pants, and a thin black tie that buckles on his caved-in chest. Except for a halo of bushy hair, he's boring to look at.

The colored boys at school weren't boring, dressing like Sunday every day in vests and bright jackets and fedoras with feathers, bopping down the halls, laughing and calling out to the popular girls. Mocking us, it feels like now, daring us to be sluts. But who were they supposed to date if not us? Sixteen colored boys in my graduating class. Only four girls, names I can't remember, who hated themselves so much they bleached their skin and conked their hair.

Twenty out of 277 in my class and my mother thought they were taking over. Why do they have so many children? she says. Reads about Samoan tribes in
Ladies' Home Journal
but is not the least bit curious about anyone in our own country who doesn't look like her. Hangs up on me. It hurts less if I think of her as Faye.

I'm on lunch, writing in a closet customers use to open their safety deposit boxes in private. Stuffed what I wrote yesterday into an envelope and hid it in the drawer with the savings bonds, but I'm not sure if I want Earl – he's the head teller – finding it if I don't show up one day. Earl intends to be president of the bank one day, no humility about him at all.

Joe's on the new G.I. Bill, hundred bucks a month for going to school, taking mechanical drawing because, as he says, ha ha, there are way more jobs doing that than bayonet-sharpening. He could have gone to college three years ago on a football scholarship but it wasn't a full boat and he couldn't come up with the rest. It bothers me that he lets Brother D take up so much of his time; he could blow this chance to get out, to be somebody. At nine last night, I came into the front room and stood over him as he sat cross-legged at Brother D's feet, thighs straining against the fatigue pants he insists on wearing even though he didn't re-enlist. He looked miles away, untouchable. Hey, Marine, I said, trying to keep it light, school tomorrow, time to wrap it up. Without even looking, he waved me away.

Brother D rocked back on his skinny butt and laughed. To have a white woman who wasn't the town whore, he said, used to mean something. Joe stayed silent, just gazing into emptiness. Stand up for me, I wanted to say, but it would have put him in a bad spot. He's too kind-hearted to tell anyone off.

Brother D turned up a couple months ago with talk of an underground militia of colored vets. He was Lance Corporal Darnell Natson when he and Joe served together near Da Nang, getting high like everyone else to forget where they were. Joe thought Brother D was putting him on at first when he said he quit smoking and drinking so
LBJ
would have less tax money for killing. He wants Joe to go to Newark with him and teach the brothers there how to fight, brought it up again last night.

None of that turn-the-other-cheek, We Shall Overcome crap, he said. What'd it get for King and the brothers in Chicago? Bottles and rocks, that's what, and rotten eggs, don't forget the eggs. Shit, what a waste. Needed you and me there to take the enemy out, brother, play Bong the Cong. Gotta bring down the cities to make Whitey pay attention.

I try not to take that Whitey crap personally. If you suck up any more of that anger, I told Joe once we were alone, it'll poison you. What I loved about Joe even before I loved him was his detachment. Where is it now? When he says, right on, or I hear you, after one of Brother D's rants, I want to barf.

He's got nobody else to talk to, Joe said, least not anybody who knows what he went through, how disappointed he is. Thought people would shake his hand and say, thanks for risking your life for me. Thought they'd see he'd become a man. Back in The World he's still a nigger, a boy. Angry's his way of grieving.

What about you, I asked, are you grieving?

Oh, yeah.

I waited, but he didn't say more. I don't know when to press, when to let him be.

We need someone else over for a change. My best friend Natalie was home from college all summer and she didn't come, said she felt funny, why couldn't Joe and I have just shacked up instead of offending people by making it legal? I told her to bring Carol if she needed support – the three of us used to have a blast – and she said okay but it never happened.

We were watching a new show about space travel last night, holding hands on the couch, first time in ages, when Brother D arrived. Thought he'd be pleased to see a colored woman playing something other than a maid, but it got him so agitated he switched off the set like he owned it.

What's up, man? Joe said.

Where's her pride? Brother D said, pacing the room, stabbing the air with a finger. Can't go at our women on the plantation anymore, so they put a high yellow one on TV in a skirt cut up to her snatch. Bunch of crackers be jacking off tonight.

What plantation did you live on? I asked.

How about some coffee? Joe said, – then, as I left the room, Darnell, why you got to start trouble?

Look in the mirror, Brother D said, your green eyes, the red streaks in your hair. Pollution, brother, from the rape of your mama's great-great-grandma by a slave master.

Joe laughed so deeply it warmed my heart. He said, you been looking up my family tree? and Brother D said, don't need to. Your last name says it all. No self-respecting tribesman would have a slave owner name like Huff, Natson neither. That's why, people ask me, I tell them I got no last name, it was stole from me. I tell them something else they didn't learn in Sunday School: Adam and Eve was black.

That a fact? Joe said, still laughing, making me grin out there in the kitchen, making me feel almost confident.

Can't get a black person from a white one, Brother D said, because the white gene is recessive. Except he said ree-cessive, bugging me the same way the guy on the blues station bugs me when he says, listen up now, brothers an' sisters, hop in you Cadulac an' get you'self on down to Ray-moan Boulevard for some fresh futes and vedge-a-ta-bles. That's not a New Jersey accent. It just makes colored people more difficult to accept, screws everything up for Joe and me.

Anyway, the whole Adam and Eve thing is baloney, so I called out from the kitchen: If everyone came from just one man and one woman and they were colored – excuse me, black – where did that ree-cessive white gene come from?

Brother D scraped his way to the kitchen door, crossed his arms, and tried to stare me down. I stuck out my tongue. You got no respect, he said, and that's your man's fault. He looked over in Joe's direction. A man's gotta control his woman.

Joe went to bed right after Brother D left, then nearly strangled me around midnight, frustrating the hell out of me. I had to get up for work this morning, for crying out loud. How are we supposed to get by if I'm too tired for work or lose my voice? I kicked and punched him until he woke up and rolled off me, trembling so bad it scared me more than the choking.

They played Russian roulette with us, he said. Sent us on peace patrol into villages where snipers and five- and six-year-olds with grenades waited to knock us off one at a time. Never knew when your day would come up. It psyched me out, girl, called up something dangerous in me, something mean. We weren't supposed to fire on anyone, but I did.

(Like there's a fair way to fight a war.) You had to, I said, it was either you or them. You have nothing to be ashamed of. I couldn't bear to ask if he'd killed a child.

Darnell says we should have refused to go over there, Joe said, refused to exterminate those people like the government's trying to exterminate us, says we been brainwashed. I don't know who's screwing us over anymore, who isn't.

From Vietnam, Joe sent me a photo of himself cleaning a rifle, smiling, looking relaxed. I saw dreadful scenes in the papers but could never picture him in anything worse than a camp with bad weather where mortars flashed like holiday fireworks.

I pulled him to me and rubbed his head, something that usually turns me on – the prickly crew cut against my palm, the spicy smell floating up from his scalp – but slumping against my chest, he was a little boy needing to be held. Trust in us, I said, trust in you and me.

I wouldn't be with Joe today if not for the Conference of Christians and Jews the summer before my senior year. The faculty chose Sarah Silverstein and me to represent our school; I was the Christian, she the Jew. Busloads of us arrived at a campground bigger than a football field. We saw a film about a Negro couple who couldn't rent the apartment they wanted in New York City. (Everyone thinks this stuff happens only in the South, but look at Joe and me, stuck on Haydock Street and lucky to get in only because Mrs. Will remembered Joe from his varsity days. He was in the paper a lot then.) I was so humiliated for that couple it made me ashamed to be white – or, more accurately, yellowish pink, this black/white thing a pet peeve of mine. I'd describe Joe as kind of pecan; Brother D, the color of soot.

Every day, groups of us sat in circles on the ground, except for a girl from the Bronx with great thigh muscles who crouched like a Vietnamese peasant. We talked about fear and hate and the power they have. One night, we were hanging around the canteen, drinking sodas, someone playing guitar. A boy from my group and I were so hyped about what we'd discussed that day, we couldn't let it go. When the lights flashed at 10:30 for the girls' curfew, we were still at it.

I'll walk you to your cabin, he said, and we went hand-in-hand, talking so intently, nothing else mattered. I can't tell you that boy's name or if his hand eventually got warm and sticky in mine, that's how focused I was on what we were saying, how focused I was on his mind. Only when I got inside the cabin did I realize he was Negro. For the first time ever I'd been unconscious of color. You might say, big whoop or, disgusting. I don't know who you are, so I don't know what you'd say. It was the most amazing moment in my life. I must've looked looped, bouncing from girl to girl, sharing my revelation.

You're crazy, Sarah said – she who was in love with a Catholic who wanted to be a priest. Anyway, when I got back and my parents picked me up at the bus station, it was the first thing I told them. Imagine, I said, if the whole world could hold hands like that; if everyone, when they had to fill out a form and say what race they were, wrote down Human.

I was in the back seat of the car, my folks in the front, and they exchanged a look that said: I told you we shouldn't have let her go, next thing you know she'll be bringing one home.

When Joe and I eloped, they went into mourning, holing up in the house with the shades down for a good two weeks. Part of it, I'll admit, was the shock of not knowing anything about him, not knowing we'd written to each other for over a year.

You'll burn in Hell for your selfishness, Faye said, when I called from a motel on Route 1 to say I wouldn't be home for a few days.

You never think things through, my father got on the phone to say. Where are you going to live? You can't bring him here.

That was nearly six months ago. My father hasn't worked since, due to the breakdown. Faye parks that at my curb. And get this: she tells everyone he's depressed because he has cancer and not to speak about it in front of him but people know better. He doesn't have cancer. He's in the choir, teaches Bible class, sits on the ecumenical board – the whole shebang; it would shame him to confess that he can't accept Joe. When a colored family joined the church a couple years ago, he was a regular Welcome Wagon, urging everyone to be tolerant. I hate that word. Church people are the least like Jesus you can imagine.

What should I call what I'm writing – a journal, a testament? You will have searched the apartment and eventually found it in the cedar chest I got for my seventeenth birthday (my hopeless chest, I call it). I embroidered six sets of pillowcases and hemmed a stack of tea towels before losing interest in filling it. As you've discovered, I keep sweaters in it now. The orangey-brown accordion folder holds Joe's letters from Vietnam, organized by month; he may want them back. When I picture someone digging through my stuff, I get goose bumps, as if I've buried a time capsule. Makes me want to tell the whole truth, as they say, to be sure I don't mislead anyone.