Unseaming (23 page)

Photos from her parents’ wedding hung in the main hall. It took a long time for Tarissa to be able to walk past them without tearing up and trembling.

She tried to explain to Grandma what she heard when Ballinger spoke, but her grandmother insisted on her own interpretation. “You heard that man’s evil. God let you hear it, and he got what he had coming to him.”

Tarissa wasn’t so sure, because she’d heard it other times since. When people tried to talk her about her parents. Always the same things, they said.

I’m so sorry for your loss. My heart goes out to you. I’ll keep you in my prayers. My condolences.

Some said it with passion. Some by rote. Her teachers. Her school principal. The reporters who tried to talk to her after the trial. The ladies at church. Her classmates, the ones who cared enough to try to understand.

Language wasn’t designed to address what she endured. How anyone suffered through grief. The anguish. The outrage. The fury. The abrupt sorrow. The emptiness. The sinking realization, when she saw a movie advertised and thought, Dad would love that, when she passed a math test with a B+ and thought, I’ve got to show this to Mom.

Those repeated phrases, those stopgaps meant to give comfort or maybe just ward off the bereaved. When she heard them, she heard that background echo. A black hole bleeding through the syllables.

She began to avoid the topic like her life depended on it. In desperation she asked her Grandma to let her stay home from church. She couldn’t take that good-natured chorus of condolences any longer.

Her grandmother scowled at her across the kitchen table, motes of dust blazing between them like warnings in the Saturday morning sunlight. “Alright, child,” she said. “But don’t think you’re going to be sleeping in late.”

Tarissa was more than happy to do Sunday morning chores. Even the ones that left her back sore and her clothes soaked with sweat, trimming hedges, weeding the vegetable garden, scrubbing the kitchen and bathroom floors. Anything was better.

Afterward, exhausted, she thumbed through her grandmother’s Sunday paper—something she’d never have done otherwise, no one her age did—and she discovered she could summon the noise when she read. It wasn’t as intense, but it was unmistakably there.

She developed an obsession with obituaries. She noticed, in stories about the dead and somehow significant, the people quoted tended to say the same things.
She had a great sense of humor. He’d do anything for anybody. She always had a smile. He’d give you the shirt off his back. She never had a bad word to say.
When the words sounded in her head, they could have been an incantation. Beneath them, she heard the noise, that sigh from the bottom of the world, though nothing disturbed the air, though silence wrapped the kitchen tight.

So she questioned, more and more, where the sound came from—the newspapers provided incontrovertible evidence that it happened in her head and only in her head. But she refused to believe it.

She didn’t imagine that sound. It didn’t originate in her mind. So she told herself, over and over.

She didn’t talk about this to anyone else. Not even to Grandma.

One day her grandmother walked in on her as she was using a black magic marker to obliterate the offending words in a story about a woman, president of the arts council, who’d died unexpectedly. (“She had such a great sense of humor,” her secretary told the paper.) Tarissa couldn’t explain what she was doing or why. She withered under Grandma Davis’s glare and never touched the paper after that.

* * *

Four years went by before she heard the noise again.

She begged her grandmother to go to the clinic. The pain in Grandma’s stomach grew worse and worse, but still she wouldn’t see a doctor, refused with a little more snarl in her voice each time. Tarissa never let up. Nothing her Grandma could do to her could possibly be worse than what she had already been through.

A tall hook-nosed man with a gentle Mr. Rogers demeanor, Dr. Keller ordered a barrage of additional tests, then told Tarissa, “I’m glad you nagged her to come in.” He said little about what might be wrong, but his eyes spoke volumes. “I’m so sorry you’re going through this.”

The way Dr. Keller recoiled, her expression must have rivaled the one in that horrible newspaper photo.

She learned at last not to wince when the sound rasped in her ears, because from that moment on, she heard it again and again and again, from so many sources. The nurses. The technicians. The insurance guy. The ladies from church, who insisted on helping out. The cousins who never used to visit before word got out Grandma had cancer of the pancreas.

From the attorney and the notary. From the preacher. From the hospice workers. From the funeral director.

In most, she sensed no malice. Yet those words—
I’m so sorry. My condolences
—always summoned the noise, an incantation that never ever failed. At times she thought of it as the voice of her grandmother’s cancer, broadcasting stronger and stronger signals as its tendrils spread into stomach, intestine and bone. The new avatar of a monster that first spoke to her through her parents’ murderer, that was determined to never leave her alone.

Tarissa’s great aunt Olivia stayed with her in Grandma’s house during the final days. She kept offering words of comfort, and nearly came to hysterics herself when Tarissa hid in her bedroom and locked the door, shrieking, “Stop it! Stop it! Please, please stop!”

“Honey, I’m sorry,” Aunt Olivia hollered. “I can’t imagine what you’ve been through—”

Tarissa screamed back, “GO AWAY! GO AWAY! GO AWAY!”

* * *

At last she heard the sound unaccompanied by words.

Sitting vigil in the hospice beside Grandma’s bed with its short, sturdy rails, listening to her labored breathing over the hiss of the oxygen tank. And then something else slid up from underneath, pulsed in time with the rise and fall of her grandmother’s chest.

Panic jelled. The noise grew louder. Tarissa wanted to flee the room, but she forced herself to stay. Plugging her ears did nothing to help. Her grandmother’s eyes moved beneath her eyelids, but they never opened.

She kissed her grandmother’s hand. Her cheek. Her forehead. “Goodbye,” she said. “I love you.”

The sound stopped when her grandmother did.

* * *

She didn’t want to brave the funeral, but for her grandmother’s sake she steeled herself and weathered it. The noise ground at her start to finish.

Her relatives invaded the house, packed away the saltshakers. She had no legal right to stop them. But they weren’t unkind. Days later, as Tarissa huddled in her bedroom, Olivia knocked. She didn’t say anything to Tarissa—for better or for worse, she’d learned her lesson—but her great aunt handed her a piece of flower-printed stationary.

Dearest Tarissa,

I hope this letter finds you well. Don’t be sad for me. I’m in a better place.

I want you to know I love you and always have loved you. You’ve made me proud so many times. You have a strong soul and a smart mind. I think you’ll be able to do anything you set your mind to do.

I’ll miss you, child, until I see you again.

Love,

Tarissa heard no sound within those words, no void behind the universe.

Just her grandmother’s voice.

* * *

Cecilia had heart surgery before she was even a day old. And again at two months. Tarissa was drowning in debt.

Providence took her side in one significant way, for which she was especially grateful. Lamont didn’t run. He stayed with her, stood by her on the deck of the sinking ship. So many men wouldn’t, especially men who hadn’t planned on becoming fathers.

They celebrated Cecilia’s six month birthday with convenience store ice cream. That night, the sound that Tarissa had attuned her entire being to detect began again: her baby gasping, grunting, struggling to breathe.

Lamont was up the moment she was. The alarm clock, the only light source in the room, shone a cruel 1:22 AM.

He drove them white-knuckled to the emergency room. By the time the goddamn doctor actually came to see them, Cecelia’s breathing had calmed, and this quack who came off more like a bureaucrat than a physician told them he could find nothing wrong.

But when he said, “I’m so sorry you had to go through all this trouble,” and Tarissa heard something else in his voice, she wanted to howl.

Lamont, God bless him, said, “Thanks for nothing, Doc.”

By the time they got Cecilia to sleep in her crib and crawled into the too-small double bed, the clock on the nightstand read 4:03 AM.

Tarissa woke exactly twenty minutes later. Lamont snored softly beside her. A hollow thrum lurked beneath the ambient nighttime murmur. She didn’t hear Cecilia. No crying. No breathing.

She vaulted from the bed, almost stumbled headfirst into Cecilia’s crib. Lamont moaned but didn’t wake. She wanted to shout,
Don’t you hear that? Can’t you HEAR that SOUND?
but she didn’t. She knew he couldn’t.

Cecilia’s face was warm, her breathing a whispery hiss. Her poor heart beat bravely in her chest. Amazing she didn’t wake up bawling, with all the ruckus Tarissa had just made.

The noise. It fluctuated ever so slightly with Cecilia’s inhales and exhales.

She thought about those words, the ones that always held the taint.
Sorry for your loss, my condolences.

She never wanted to hear those words again, couldn’t bear the thought. No. Not for Cecilia. Those words weren’t for her. That sound wasn’t for her.

Her ears rang with it, amplifying the crackle of night. She couldn’t pinpoint a single source. Any source. Where was it coming from?

She closed her eyes and concentrated, thought she could glean a hint of a direction. Opened her eyes, immediately lost the focus.

So be it. She would search with her eyes shut.

She took shuffle-steps, arms extended in front of her, the carpet harsh against her bare feet. Her hands found a dresser, a stretch of wall, groped to the door, creaked it open. She kept her eyes closed as she stepped into the hall of the apartment, and yes, that awfulness sounded slightly louder, angled just a fraction to her left.

She had no way to go but straight ahead, down the short passage to the combination living room–kitchen. She pressed herself to the left-hand wall and inched forward, mindful of the long, heavy box Lamont had left on the floor, a cheap plyboard bookshelf still in its packaging. She found it with her feet, managed not to trip or stub her toes.

She didn’t think about what she’d do if she did in fact find a physical source for the noise. She kept listening, the air cold against her legs, the wall colder against her arm.

And the sound grew stronger, closer. She forged on. Soon she heard nothing else. An absence of music, an opposite of laughter, as if a throat sculpted pure mourning, emitted waves that drained away power and life as they washed over whatever they touched. Her body didn’t shiver, but a sensation akin to ice on skin invaded her flesh, chilled her sinuses, her tongue, the spaces in her belly. The wall she leaned against could have been sheered from a glacier.

She connected, then, how long she’d walked, an astonishing distance. She should have stumbled against the love seat in the living room several minutes ago.

Yet the the space leading to the noise kept on going.

She raised her right hand, immediately discovered the opposite wall, equally cold, closer than it should have been, just inches from her body. No carpet roughed the soles of her feet. She walked on ice. She had not noticed the transition until that moment.

Nowhere in her apartment was there a passage this long or this narrow. Gut intuition shouted down the impulse to open her eyes.

She continued forward. The noise should have been shaking her teeth with its volume. But she experienced its intensity in a different way, as a relentless electric current that affected something other than her physical nerves.

An obstruction barred her way. When she placed a palm against it, the barrier shifted away from her a fraction of an inch, and the sound increased. She heard nothing else, not even her own heartbeat.

She groped with featherlight fingertip touches, careful, so painstakingly careful, and gradually determined from its angle, its texture, its edges, that this object she dared not look at was a door, hinged on the right, open on the left, slightly ajar.