The Silent Waters (9 page)

“You okay today, Maggie May?” I asked with my hands holding my MP3 player as I stood outside of her bedroom door. She was standing by her window, staring down at the street when I arrived. She turned slowly my way and wrapped her arms tightly around her body. Her eyes looked sad, which made me sad, but I didn’t show it. I just gave her a small smile. “You okay today?” I repeated.

She nodded slowly, and I knew it was a lie, but that was okay. She could take all the time she needed to be okay, I didn’t mind. I wasn’t going anywhere.

“Can I come in?”

She nodded again.

When I stepped in, I straightened my tie—the green one she loved. My palms were sweating against my MP3 player, and my nose sniffled as we both sat on her bed. I didn’t know what to say. I mean, most of the time when people had a friendship, both sides talked. The more silence there was, the more nervous I became. My feet started tapping on the floor, and I watched as Maggie’s hands stayed clasped together in her lap. Her skin was extra pale, her eyes were extra heavy, and in that moment, I missed it. I missed the one thing that had annoyed me for so long.

I missed her voice.

“Can I hold your hand again?” I asked.

She slid her left hand into my right, and I sighed. Her fingers felt like ice.

“Squeeze my hand once if the answer is no, and twice if it’s yes, okay?”

She agreed and closed her eyes.

“Are you scared?”

Two squeezes.

“Are you sad?”

Two squeezes.

“Do you want to be alone?”

One squeeze.

“Do you think maybe…do you think I could be your friend?” I whispered.

Her eyes opened and locked with mine. I wondered if her heartbeats matched mine—wild, dizzy, panicked.

She looked down at our hands and squeezed once. Then she squeezed again, and my heart exploded.

I released the breath I had been holding.

With my free hand, I reached into my pocket and pulled out Mom’s necklace. “This is for you. It’s a friendship necklace. An anchor. I promise to be your friend, and be a good one, too. I mean, I’ll try my best. I’ll be your anchor. I’ll help you stay grounded when you feel like you’re drifting away. I just…” I sighed, staring down at the charm in my hand. “I want you to smile again. I want you to have the things you always wanted, and I’m gonna work hard to make sure you get them, too, even if it’s a dog named Skippy and a cat named Jam. I want you to know…” I sighed again, because whenever her eyes watered over, my chest hurt so much. “I need you to know that even if you decide to never speak again, you’ll always have someone around to hear you, Maggie. All right? I’ll always be there to listen to your silence. So do you want it? Do you want the necklace?”

She squeezed my hand twice, and a tiny, almost nonexistent smile found her.

“And if you want, we can listen to my music together. I know I said I’d never let you listen, but I mean, you can, if you want. Jamie made me a new playlist on his computer last night, and I put it on my MP3 player. I don’t know what he put on it, but we can listen together.”

She squeezed my hand twice again. I gave her one of the earbuds, and I took the other. We lay backward on her bed with our feet dangling off the edge. I hit play on the MP3 player and the song that started playing was “Low” by Flo Rida featuring T-Pain.
Geez, Jamie.
Not the perfect song for the moment. I went to change it, but Maggie squeezed my hand once, stopping me. Her eyes were closed and a few tears fell down her cheeks, but I swore I saw it: a tiny smile. It was so tiny some people would probably think it was a frown, but I knew it wasn’t.

My chest hurt, seeing the almost smile on her lips. I closed my eyes, and a few tears fell from my eyes, too, as we listened to Flo Rida. I didn’t know why, but whenever she cried, I did, too.

In that moment, I knew she had been right about everything all along.

She was right about me, and her, and us.

She’d be the one girl I’d love until forever.

No matter how life tried to change us.

May 15
th
, 2016 — Eighteen Years Old

Mama and Daddy never danced anymore.

Over the past ten years, I’d noticed a lot of changes between the two, but that was the saddest one. They still hugged each other each morning, and Daddy always kissed her forehead before he went to work at the university each day. As he walked out the front door, he always said, “I love,” and Mama would finish his sentence, “You.”

They still loved each other, but they never danced.

Normally at night, Mama spent time on the telephone, talking to her college best friends about me, different therapists, reading articles online, or paying bills. Daddy sat in the living room grading a stack of his papers from his graduate students or watching
The Big Bang Theory
.

In the past, Daddy used to try to turn on their wedding song, but Mama was too tired to sway with him.

“Dance with me?” he’d asked.

“Not tonight. I have a headache, Eric,” she’d reply.

She never knew it, but I always saw how Daddy frowned when she walked away.

“I love,” he’d say, staring at her back.

“You,” she’d murmur out of routine.

When she’d glance up the staircase, she’d see me and frown. She always frowned at me, as if I were the crack in the family portrait. “Bed, Maggie May. Then up early for school.”

Sometimes she’d stand there looking at me, waiting for some kind of reply. Then, when one wasn’t given, she’d sigh and walk off, more tired than she had been a moment before.

It was hard knowing how much I exhausted her.

It was harder knowing how much I exhausted myself.

“You okay, sport?” Daddy asked, peeking his head into my bedroom.

I smiled.

“Good, good.” He rubbed his hand against his beard, which was now peppered with gray. “Joke time?” he asked. My father was a nerd in the best way. He was an English professor at Harper Lane University and knew more about literature than most, but his real talent was knowing the worst jokes in the whole wide world. Each night he delivered me something awful.

“What would you find in Charles Dickens’ kitchen?” He patted his legs as a drum roll and then shouted, “The best of thymes, the worst of thymes!”

I rolled my eyes, even though it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard.

Walking over to me, he kissed my forehead. “Goodnight, Maggie. The world keeps spinning because your heartbeats exist.”

As I lay in my bed each night, I listened to Calvin playing music down the hallway. He always stayed up late, listening to music while doing homework or hanging out with his girlfriend, Stacey. I could always tell when she was over because she giggled like a girl who was madly in love with a boy. They’d been together for so long that they each wore promise rings that pledged them to one another forever.

Around eleven at night, I’d wake up to hear Cheryl tiptoeing out of the house to go visit her boyfriend, Jordan. Jordan was the classic bad boy type I’d read about in so many books, and Cheryl was much better off without him, but I couldn’t tell her that. Even if I could, she wouldn’t listen.

Each of my family members had found a certain way of dealing with me and my silence over the past ten years. Calvin became one of my best friends. He spent a lot of time with me, along with Brooks, playing video games, watching movies we weren’t supposed to watch, and discovering the best music before the rest of the world.

Mama kind of shut me out after she realized I wasn’t going to speak again. She left her job to homeschool me, but she hardly spoke to me about anything that wasn’t school-based. Truth was, I could tell she kind of blamed herself for what had happened to me. Seeing me each day seemed a bit hard for her, so she built up a wall. She didn’t know exactly what to say to me, so after some time, the blank stares were a bit too much for her. Sometimes, when I walked into a room, she’d go the other way. I didn’t blame her, though. Seeing me was a reminder of how she hadn’t noticed that I’d left the house to meet Brooks all those years ago. Seeing me hurt her.

Daddy was always the same, though, if not even goofier and more loving than before. I was thankful for that. He was my one constant. He never looked at me as if I were broken, either. In his eyes, I was completely whole.

Cheryl, on the other hand, she hated me. Hate might’ve seemed like a strong word, but it was the only one that came to mind. She had plenty of good reasons to dislike me, though. Growing up, she was sort of put on the backburner because of my issues. There were family trips that couldn’t be taken, talent shows that had to be missed due to my in-home therapy appointments, money that wasn’t available because of the cash my parents spent on me. Plus, since Mama couldn’t look at me, she was always looking at Cheryl, yelling at her for little things, blaming her for everything. It wasn’t a surprise that when Cheryl became a teenager, she began to rebel against the world. Jordan was her biggest rebellion, her perfect mistake.