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  SILENT WORDS

  Lisa Fenwick

  Chapter One

  Amy

  The Past

  May 15th, 2000

  Barney was on the television again. I was a little too old to still be watching Barney, but I loved the idea of him beaming down from a satellite in outer space and bringing happiness to my home.

  This house did not have its own happiness. It needed to come from somewhere else.

  “Amy! Didn’t I tell you to stop sitting so close to the screen?” Mommy shouted at me.

  I ignored her like I did every time that she said it.

  “Amy—”

  She didn’t finish because the doorbell interrupted her. I turned around and saw that she looked scared, nervous. She only looked that way whenever she thought that he´d forgotten his keys. He did that a lot, rang the doorbell when he wanted back in but didn’t have his keys. Especially when he went out during the day, ran out of money, and needed to come home early.

  I heard her take a deep breath, even though I was so close to the TV that I could feel the electric static on my face. I should have moved. I should have gotten out of the living room to get away from what was about to happen, but it didn’t matter if I went to my room. I would still hear it if I went to the kitchen. I would still hear it in my bedroom. Every room in the house was too close. It made no difference where I went unless I sat still and kept my face right up against the TV with it turned all the way up.

  The only time Mommy didn’t yell at me about the TV was when he came home upset. Then she would come in and turn up the TV all the way to make sure that I didn’t hear her. So close to the television, I could barely hear her screams. They seemed like nothing more than little whimpers, like the ones I made when it was all over, and he came over to me to turn off the TV. He always told me not to look behind me, just to go to my room and not make a sound.

  It was different this time. As soon as the door opened, I heard her sigh with relief.

  “Thank God you’re here!”

  I turned and saw Auntie Jean, standing by the door. I should have moved to say hello to her, but right then Barney was singing his happy song. Knowing that it wasn’t him and that Mommy wasn’t going to turn the TV up all the way so that it hurt my ears, I decided I could turn it up just a little bit. My small fingers moved, and I turned it up just enough. I wouldn’t be able to hear what they were saying, and that suited me just fine.

  Barney was on, and I knew that whatever it was that they talked about would probably be the same thing they had said the last time Auntie Jean was here. And the time before that too. They always talked about the same thing, her and Auntie Jean wanting him to be as far away from us as possible.

  I glanced at them for a second to see Mommy pacing as Auntie Jean told her, “We need to leave before he comes back. Now.”

  That was the thing; we always needed to leave before he came back, but Mommy never did. She always stayed and then made me see the one thing I never wanted to see. That was the reason I sat so close to the TV. So that I didn’t have to see it again. I put my face so close to the TV that my nose almost touched it. She was quiet when he hit her sometimes. So quiet that if I didn’t know any better, I would have said that it was all a lie. Other times, even the TV couldn't hide his rage-filled shouts and her terrified, pain-filled screams and those other sounds.

  When he was finished, he would shut off the TV and send me to my room. I sometimes saw the broken glass, table, and plates. All the things that were broken in this house were a result of him and what he did to her. I hated him for it, but I hated her sometimes for staying and letting my dad hurt her all the time.

  I'd asked her why he hurt her, and she told me over and over again never to drink.

  I didn’t understand what she meant, because I drank all the time. But I had stopped trying to take the odd soda when no one was around; I stuck to water. In case I got angry like him. I didn’t want to be anything like him, not after all he’d done. I knew that I wouldn’t hurt Mommy. Not like he’d done over and over again.

  I was fighting back the tears, the ones that came whenever I thought about the way he hurt Mommy.

  I turned, surprised when I felt someone tug at my arm. I didn’t realize that Mommy and Auntie Jean had been moving up and down the stairs, from room to room. I didn’t notice that Mommy had a bag in her hand, not a small one but a big one. Auntie Jean had bags too. Big ones.

  I heard Barney sing again, but Auntie Jean caught my attention and smiled.

  “Good, let’s get out of here!” she said to Mommy. “Amy. Let’s go upstairs real quick. Who is your favorite stuffed animal? We should get him.”

  “Cherry-Berry,” I told Auntie Jean and tried to get back to Barney. She didn’t know that it was the only thing that made me happy in this house. The only thing that made me laugh and sing. I didn’t want her to take that away from me. Not now. Not ever.

  “And she’s a girl, not a boy.”

  “Let’s go get Cherry-Berry. Come on.”

  I remembered Auntie Jean frowning like she was trying to lie to me. Mommy always had the same frown whenever she tried to lie to me.

  “Did you know that the ice-cream store has a new flavor called Cherry-Berry, but we have to go quick if we want to get some? It’s really good, and I think a lot of people will want to get it.”

  “Okay,” I said. I knew it was a lie, but Auntie Jean had been talking to me for so long that Barney was over. I didn’t care about Cherry-Berry, let alone ice cream. I was sad, because the next show was Teletubbies, which was for babies, and I didn’t like to watch that one, so I let Auntie Jean take me upstairs.

  All of the drawers in my dresser were open, and it looked like Mommy and Auntie Jean threw all of my clothes on the floor. I knew Daddy was going to be very, very upset when he saw my room like that. I wanted to cry, but I also knew that I didn’t need to cry. I had to look for Cherry-Berry in the mess that Mommy and Auntie Jean had made of my room. A big red dog should not be hard to find, but I always kept Cherry-Berry hidden from Daddy. With all of my blankets in a pile on the floor and things in my closet all messed up, she was really hard for me to find because she wasn’t where she should have been. “Here!” I said when I finally dug my way to the little hiding space I’d made between my bed and dresser.

  “Okay. That’s him?” Auntie Jean asked.

  “Her. Cherry-Berry is a girl,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, Cherry-Berry,” Auntie Jean said, booping her nose. “Are you ready to come to get ice cream with Amy and me?”

  “We are,” I said for Cherry-Berry. She didn't talk in words grownup people could understand, so I always had to talk to them for her.

  Auntie Jean picked me up and almost ran down the stairs. Mommy was already in Auntie Jean’s car, and I saw the bags they'd had in the living room and my backpack and some pillows.

  I knew then that we were never coming back here again. The whole idea of not watching Barney again made me feel a little sad, but the idea of not having to see Mommy hurt anymore made me smile. I hated seeing her put make-up on all the time, thinking that no one knew the truth. Everyone knew about Daddy, including me. Auntie Jean didn’t have to tell me twice to get into the car. I opened the door and hopped in.

  “My car seat!” I said. Auntie Jean didn’t have one in her car. She would always take it from our car when she’d take me somewhere, but Daddy had our car.

  “Auntie Jean will drive extra safe. We’ll just buckle your seatbelt, like you’re a big girl. Okay, Amy?”

  “Okay, Mommy,” I said. I tried to help her, because it was the first time I was getting to sit in the car with just a seatbelt.

  “We have to hurry, dear.” Mommy was sounding a little upset now. I didn’t know
why. She sounded the same way that she would do, whenever Daddy was coming home, and I’d made a mess. But it didn’t matter, because we were in Auntie Jean’s car. Not Daddy’s.

  “Cherry-Berry ice cream!” Auntie Jean said from the front seat.

  “Okay. I’ve got her,” Mommy said, closing my door and hopping up front next to Auntie Jean.

  As we pulled out of the driveway, I flipped my middle finger up at the house thinking that I’d never have to see it again. I remembered that one time, Auntie Jean did it once as she left the house. That day, I remember Mommy being so sad as Daddy dragged Auntie Jean out to her car. She did it to Daddy, and it made him mad, but Auntie Jean got into her car and Daddy never touched her. She’d never been back to this house, not when he was around, anyway.

  Auntie Jean pulled out of the driveway, and I started screaming.

  “Amy, darling. What’s wrong?” Mommy asked.

  “Auntie Jean is going the wrong way. This isn’t the way to the ice-cream store,” I said, thinking that I hated it when grownups lied to me. Because I thought that she was saying that to make me happy, and maybe, just maybe we would go to the ice-cream store. But now not only were we not going to the ice-cream store, I didn’t get to see all of Barney, and that just made me mad.

  “We’re going to a different ice-cream store. It’s over by my house,” Auntie Jean said. “See, this is the way to my house, right?”

  She was right that we were going toward her house, but I knew she was lying about ice cream. We didn’t put bags and backpacks into the car to get ice cream. And Auntie Jean never took me anywhere without my car seat. I stopped screaming, as I said, “If we don’t get ice cream, I am going to be really, really mad!”

  “We will get ice cream,” Mommy said to Auntie Jean.

  “We’ll make it work,” Auntie Jean said.

  “Can we slow down?” I asked Auntie Jean. She was driving way too fast, and that was starting to scare me, even though I was already really scared because she and Mommy were lying to me and because they made a huge mess out of my room and we all left the house fast.

  “We need to hurry up to get the Cherry-Berry ice cream,” Mommy said.

  “I don’t want the ice cream.” I didn’t like the way that they were talking to me. And I was scared, because they were acting strangely, and that made me worried. As if they were scared, so I had to be too.

  Auntie Jean said a really bad word.

  “What?” Mommy asked.

  “We took too long.” I saw her looking in the mirror. Mommy turned around to look out the back window of the car.

  I unbuckled my seatbelt so I could look out the back window too.

  “Amy!” Mommy yelled. “Sit back down! Honey, you need to keep your seatbelt on.”

  Auntie Jean turned. She said the really bad word again.

  “Buckle up, Amy!” she yelled.

  Too many people were yelling. I started to scream again as I rolled around in the backseat, wishing that I hadn’t said anything about the ice cream, feeling as if everything was going wrong and it was all my fault.

  If only they’d left me to watch Barney, then I would have been happy and singing as I did for a good few hours after the show. Right now, all I was was scared, and Cherry-Berry was no longer in my arms. She was somewhere rolling around on the floor.

  Chapter Two

  Noah

  The Present

  I took a deep breath as I closed the door to the apartment that I’d lived in for the past ten years. I had to sell it… it had become a home that was no longer mine. Or, it was no longer ours, since Ashley and I were no longer together. Even though I owned the apartment before I’d ever met her, we’d made it so much our space that I just couldn’t bear to be in it anymore without her. In a way, it had stopped feeling like home long before we broke up. It was when I got home from the hospital, after the accident, that I realized something in the space had irrevocably changed. Somehow, in those days that I’d been unconscious, comatose, I’d lost Ashley.

  I came back to a woman and an apartment that were both alien to me. Between trying to understand that and to adapt to the damage the accident had caused, I’d cut myself off from everyone and everything else that I’d known in Manhattan. I was isolated and alone in a metro area of twenty million people. Despite that loneliness, I was relieved that Ashley moved out first. I looked around the hollow shell that had once contained my life. Even the empty rooms and bare walls felt too painful, as if the air itself were saturated with constant reminders of her. The apartment, like everything about my life in Manhattan, was something that I needed to get out of my mind.

  It wasn’t entirely true that I had nothing left, between what I’d lost and what I’d cast aside. I had my one new friend to replace the old ones I’d alienated or cut myself off from, who was wagging his tail and eager for us to get on the road.

  “Boy...” I looked at his dark, curly coat and thought about the fact that he needed a better name than Boy. He was an average-sized poodle. A standard, not a toy, and I kept his fur natural instead of having it shaved into that silly show pattern. Maybe on the way to Berwick, I’d come up with a real name for him. It was more than a four-hour drive, and he’d be my only companion.

  I’d spent most of the night putting together a playlist for the ride, even though I’d feel the vibrations coming through my car’s sound system much more than I’d hear the music. But I still did it. I’d lost most of my hearing but not all of it.

  I sighed as I looked at my phone and knew that I had to make one more phone call before I headed out.

  “Mom,” I said, as she picked up on the first ring.

  “You’ve left already?” was displayed on the phone’s screen. “I thought you said noon. I was just on my way to come and say bye.”

  Something that I didn’t do well to begin with and had been doing a lot of lately was saying goodbye.

  “You were really going to leave without saying goodbye?” she added to the text on my screen.

  I hated having to read her words instead of hearing the sound of her voice, but then I knew that it would be filled with tears and accusation and all sorts of dramatics, so maybe it was better this way.

  “Mom, I’m not going forever. I just need time.” I sighed, thinking that I sounded like a broken record. I’d told her so many times why I had to leave and how I just couldn’t stay in town any longer.

  “I know. I know. It’s just that I don’t know how long you’re going to be gone, and I feel as if I’ve just got you back, and now, you’re off again.”

  She was right about one thing. I’d been going around and around like a tornado, thinking that my life was perfect, until that one night changed everything. After that night, my life became nothing but a constant struggle to just return to normality. After months of that, I found myself needing just one thing. To get out of Manhattan for a while. Just to breathe again and put everything in perspective, even if it was going to hurt Mom for me to focus solely on taking care of myself and not her or my career.

  “Mom, I’m not going to do anything silly. I just want some time away to get my life back together. Well, what's left of it…”

  “Don’t be silly; you’re just pushing thirty. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

  As I was about to respond, Boy started getting fed up. He was circling by my feet as if to say, “Are we going or not?”

  My Manhattan apartment wasn’t my home anymore. I couldn’t stay even if I wanted to, and besides, there were too many memories here. Some good ones, but lately the only thing that had kept me up at night were the tons of bad ones.

  “Noah, are you there?”

  I nodded and then blurted out, “Yeah…” as her message appeared repeatedly on my screen.

  “Yes, I’m here. Mom, I hate saying goodbye, but I promise you one thing. I’ll be back before you know it.”

  “Okay. Drive safe and let me know when you get there,” she said.

  “I will,” I
replied without hesitation before hanging up the phone and thinking that the app didn’t download the songs properly. I hated the idea of talking into the phone and not listening back with most people. The silence was the one thing that I hated before losing most of my hearing. Now, it was just echoes at times. The hybrid act of me speaking and her words being converted to text actually made our conversations feel almost natural after a while, instead of manipulative. I couldn’t hear the emotion in her voice, but she could still hear mine, even if I couldn’t hear it myself.

  I reminded myself that I needed to send a message to Dr. Carlton to thank him for encouraging me to get the app I was using on my phone. Not only did it allow me to make voice/text hybrid phone calls, I could also just pull out my phone in conversations, so it would transcribe everything being said so I could read it. I wasn’t great at lip reading, but it was something that I’d been studying more, now that I’d come to terms with my deafness. Making phone calls with Mom felt less of a burden and ended up being an added bonus.

  Even with the phone and some other technical adaptations, I needed to get away for a while, away from sympathetic expressions when people called my name from behind and expected me to hear them. And then when they’d remember the reason I wasn’t responding, they’d say the same thing to me, over and over again. “Sorry, Noah. Forgot.”

  I’d read their lips and strain to make any sense out of the fuzzy, indistinct sounds that came from my hearing aids, knowing exactly why they were apologizing. I would be in a good mood, thinking that everything would fall into place eventually, and just like that, they’d be standing there looking guilty for screwing up again, and the light that was bright would turn dull again.

  I took a deep breath and grabbed hold of Boy’s lead. I could see him barking, but it was at a pitch where I couldn’t hear it at all, even with my hearing aids.

  I wanted to go to this place that Peggy had told me about so many times before. A place far from my apartment and the shambles of what was once my life. A place where no one knew that I had been able to hear until less than a year earlier. Sure, they’d pity me and feel bad for me in a way, poor deaf guy, but they wouldn’t remember the person that I used to be, the guy whose hearing had been taken from him in an accident, and whose fiancée had fallen out of love with him while he was in the hospital in a coma with massive head injuries.