Breaking the Silence

by Diane Chamberlain

  Carolyn glanced at her watch. “I’ll leave you two to get to know each other,” she said. “Enjoy your visit.”

  Sarah led Laura to the couch after Carolyn left. “Won’t you sit down, dear?” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Would you like some coffee? Or lemonade? I think I have some in the refrigerator.” She started walking toward the small kitchenette, but Laura stopped her.

  “No, I’m fine,” she said. She looked awkwardly into her lap. “I’d like to explain why I’m here.”

  Sarah sat down at the other end of the couch and looked at her attentively, hands folded in her lap.

  “I believe you knew my father,” Laura said. “Carl Brandon.”

  Sarah’s expression did not change.

  “He died a few weeks ago and he’d asked me to…visit you. He wanted to be sure you were all right.”

  A small cloud of confusion slipped over Sarah’s face. “That was nice of him,” she said. “I can’t remember who he is, though. I don’t remember things too well anymore.” She looked apologetic. “What did you say his name was?”

  “Carl Brandon.”

  “And where do I know him from?”

  Laura smiled. “I don’t know. I was hoping you could tell me. He didn’t say. I figured maybe you were old friends. He pays for your apartment. And he still will, of course,” she added hastily, not wanting to worry her. “He set up a trust for you in his will.”

  “My!” Sarah said. “I thought my social security paid for it.” She pressed her fingers to her temples. “I truly must be losing my mind. I just can’t remember him. Where did you say I know him from?”

  “I don’t know, Mrs. Tolley. He was born in New York City in 1918. He grew up in Brooklyn. I think he moved there when he was about twelve and lived there until he was in his early twenties. Did you ever live in New York?”

  “New Jersey,” Sarah said. “I grew up in Bayonne.”

  “Well, maybe you didn’t meet him in New York, then. How about Philadelphia? He moved there when he was twenty-four or so, and he worked as a physicist at Allen Technologies. He had a passion for astronomy—everyone who knew him knew about that. He married my mother when he was around forty. My mother died when I was a child, and my father never remarried. I don’t know if he ever dated anyone or not. But maybe he knew you during that time? Could you have gone out with him at some time?”

  “No, I don’t know how I knew him, but I’m sure that wasn’t it. I only went out with one man in my whole life.” Sarah’s gaze drifted to a photograph on one of the end tables. It was an old, sepia-toned picture of a good-looking young man.

  “Was that the man you…went out with?” Laura asked.

  Sarah nodded. “Joe Tolley. He was my husband. The love of my life.”

  Laura sensed something in the tone of her voice. There was a long story behind that photograph, and she didn’t have the time to get into it.

  “So, you didn’t date my dad, then,” she said. “Could you have worked together?”

  “I was a nurse,” Sarah said. “And I never lived in Philadelphia. I lived in Maryland and Virginia most of my life.”

  “Well, this is a challenge.” Laura smiled, trying not to let her frustration show. “If you were a nurse, could he have been your patient? He was sick for quite a while before he died. He had cancer, and was in and out of hospitals.” She realized how ridiculous it was to think that Sarah, in her seventies, could have been her father’s nurse. “I guess that doesn’t make sense,” she said.

  “I grew up in Bayonne,” Sarah said again, and Laura guessed she was seeing the Alzheimer’s at work.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I was a nurse on cruise ships.” She stood up and handed Laura another framed photograph. This one showed Sarah, in her fifties, perhaps, standing beneath a palm tree, a cruise ship looming behind her in the distance.

  “That was in St.Thomas,” Sarah said. “Or maybe St. Lucia. My favorite was Alaska, though.”

  “Well, what a wonderful job,” Laura said. “You got to see the world.”

  “They have an Alaska show on the TV sometimes.” Sarah picked up the TV Guide from the end table and began flipping through it, and Laura felt antsy. She thought of Ray at home, staring gloomily out the window of his study, and Emma playing with the puzzle in her room. Looking at her watch, she realized she’d been gone well over an hour already.

  She stood up. “I have to go, Mrs. Tolley,” she said.

  Sarah looked at her in surprise. “Oh, you do?”

  “I’m sorry we couldn’t solve the mystery of how you knew my father.”

  “Did you say he was a doctor?”

  “No. A physicist. And an amateur astronomer.”

  Sarah looked as though she didn’t quite understand what Laura was saying, but she nodded. “Well, you come see me again, dear,” she said, walking toward her apartment door.

  Laura only smiled, unwilling to make that promise. She had no more idea of why her father wanted her to take on the responsibility for Sarah Tolley than she did before her visit.

  4

  SOMETHING WAS WRONG. LAURA KNEW IT THE MOMENT SHE stepped out of her car in the town house garage, although she couldn’t have said what triggered her sense of dread. As she neared the door, she could hear a child crying inside the house. Was it Emma or some other child? The sound was unfamiliar. A wail. A keening.

  Panicked, Laura struggled to fit her key in the lock, finally managing to push the door open. Stepping into the foyer, she found Emma sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, hunched over as though her stomach hurt. Her wailing turned to screams, and she leapt from the step into Laura’s arms.

  “Sweetheart!” Laura tried to keep her own voice calm. “What is it? What’s wrong?” Maybe Emma had bugged Ray to read to her and, in his sour mood, he’d yelled at her, but this seemed an extreme reaction. Emma was usually more resilient than this.

  Emma didn’t answer her. She clung to Laura, standing now, but pressing her head against Laura’s hip.

  Laura looked through the living room toward Ray’s office, a patch of cold forming at the base of her neck. Emma’s screams could not mask the stillness in the rest of the house. “Where’s Daddy?” she asked as she walked toward the office, Emma clinging to her more tightly with each step. “Ray?”

  The office was empty, the pages of Ray’s manuscript still piled on his desk. “Ray?” she called as she walked back toward the foyer and the stairs.

  “Stay here,” she told Emma, gently pulling the little girl’s arms from around her hips. “I’ll be right back.”

  She climbed the stairs, the cold patch at the back of her neck spreading down her spine. She walked through the doorway of the bedroom she shared with Ray. It was empty. Ray must have gone out. He’d left Emma alone. That’s why she was so upset.

  That would not be enough to undo Emma, though, and Laura remembered seeing Ray’s car in the garage. She was about to leave the bedroom when she noticed a stain on the wallpaper on the other side of the bed—a red stain in the shape of a butterfly. Biting her lip, she walked slowly around the foot of the bed. Ray lay on the floor next to the window, his head in a pool of blood, a gun in his hand.

  Staggering backward, Laura crashed into the dresser, knocking her jewelry box to the floor. She scattered the jewelry with her feet as she fled from the room and down the stairs.

  Emma’s wails had turned to a whimper, and she sat huddled on the floor of the foyer, her eyes on Laura. Laura grabbed her by the arm and led her into the kitchen, where she used the phone to call 911.

  “Is this an emergency?” the dispatcher asked.

  Laura’s brain felt foggy. Ray was dead. There was nothing anyone could do to change that fact, no matter how quickly they got to the house.

  “Is this an emergency?” the dispatcher repeated.

  “My husband shot himself,” Laura said. “He’s dead.” She had a sudden, desperate need to get out of the house. Ignor
ing the dispatcher’s questions, she dropped the receiver to the kitchen floor, grabbed Emma once again and ran with her outside to the small front porch.

  Sitting down on the old wooden bench Ray’d picked up at a garage sale, she pulled Emma onto her lap. I’m in shock. The thought was clinical and detached. She was nauseated and a little dizzy, and although she knew the air was cold, she couldn’t actually feel it. This is what shock feels like. Her eyes couldn’t focus, even as the police cars, the ambulance and the fire truck pulled in front of her town house, sirens blaring. Neighbors came out to their yards or peered through their windows to see what was happening, but Laura simply stared at the snow covering the front lawn. All she could see, though, was the butterfly-shaped stain on the wallpaper in the bedroom.

  “He’s upstairs,” she said to the first police officer who approached her. She pressed her chin to the top of Emma’s head as the army of EMTs marched past them and into the house, and she closed her eyes against the image of what they would find in the upstairs bedroom.

  Emma had stopped crying, but her head remained buried in the crook of Laura’s shoulder. She was really too big to sit on anyone’s lap, but she had made herself fit, and Laura did not want to let go of her. The little girl shivered in her light sweater, and Laura rubbed her arms. What had Emma seen? Had she heard the gunshot and gone into the bedroom to investigate? Might she have actually been in the room when Ray did it? Laura should not have left her with him. She should not have been gone more than an hour.

  It seemed like a long time before one of the police officers returned to the porch, carrying jackets for her and Emma. He’d brought Ray’s down jacket for Laura, and she put it on, pressing the collar close to her nose to breathe in her husband’s scent.

  “Who was in the house when it happened?” the officer asked, pulling a notepad from his pocket. He stood on the walkway, one foot resting on the step.

  “Emma.” Laura nodded toward her daughter, who had once again folded herself to fit in Laura’s lap.

  The police officer studied Emma for a moment and seemed to decide against questioning her.

  “And you were out?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know why the jewelry box and its contents were on the floor?”

  “I knocked into it after I found him,” she said. The image of the jewelry spilled across the floor seemed like something she’d seen days ago, not mere minutes.

  “There was a note in the bedroom,” the officer said. “Did you see it?”

  “A note?”

  “Yes. Taped to the dresser mirror. It read, ‘I asked you not to go.’ Does that mean anything to you?”

  Laura squeezed her eyes shut. “I had to visit someone this morning and he didn’t want me to go.”

  “Ah,” he said, as though he’d found the missing piece to the puzzle. “There was a big age difference between you and your husband, huh?”

  The question seemed rude, but she didn’t have the strength to protest. “Yes,” she said.

  “So, was this ‘someone’ you had to visit another man?”

  Laura looked at the policeman in confusion. “Another…? No. No. It was a woman. An old woman. But he asked me not to go, and I went, anyway. I was always leaving him. Always working. I left him alone too much. It’s my fault.”

  “Now, don’t jump to conclusions, ma’am. Did your husband suffer from depression?”

  She nodded. “Terribly. I should have realized how bad it had gotten, but—”

  “He has an old scar obviously made from a bullet in his left shoulder,” the officer said. “Was that from some previous botched suicide attempt?”

  “No. He got that fighting in Korea.” He had survived Korea. He had not survived his marriage to her. Guilt rested like a boulder in her chest.

  The police officer nodded at Emma. “Do you think I could ask her a couple of questions?”

  Laura leaned back to shift Emma’s head from her shoulder. “Honey,” she said, “can you tell the policeman what happened? Can you tell me?”

  Emma looked at them both in silence, her eyes glazed. And that’s when Laura realized that her daughter had not spoken a single word since she’d gotten home.

  5

  LAURA SAT NEXT TO STUART, RAY’S YOUNGER BROTHER AND only sibling, during the memorial service at Georgetown University. Ray had taught at Georgetown for many years, and the chapel was completely full. People stood in the rear of the building, some of them forced into the foyer by the crowd. Many were his former sociology students and fellow professors. Ray had left his mark at the university.

  He’d left his mark in the streets, as well. A busload of homeless people and the staff from several shelters were already sitting in the chapel by the time Laura arrived. The news of Ray’s death had brought an outpouring of sympathy from the entire metropolitan D.C. area. Ray had been loved and respected. She hoped he had known that. He’d been so wrapped up in his inability to get his book published these last few years that he’d lost sight of all the good he’d accomplished. Seeing the somber crowd in the chapel made her heart ache. She wasn’t sure how she would get through this service.

  She glanced at her brother-in-law. Stuart gazed straight ahead, and she could see the tight line of his jaw as he struggled to maintain control. She wrapped her hand around his arm. The hardest call for her to make after Ray’s death had been to Stuart. He lived in Connecticut, and as a marketing representative for a textbook company, he traveled frequently. She’d worried he might be on the road, but she’d found him at home. Stuart had cried when she told him. Big gulping sobs that frightened her, they were so out of character for him. He’d adored and admired his older brother. Ray was all the blood family Stuart had.

  Stuart was staying in the town house while he was in Leesburg, but he was staying there alone. Laura had barely been able to set foot in the house since finding Ray’s body. All evidence of his death had been scrubbed away by some people the police had recommended, but still, it was impossible to be there, to sleep there, without feeling Ray’s presence. Stuart, though, had no negative images attached to the town house. Besides, he told her, he would feel closest to Ray there.

  Laura and Emma had been staying in the vacant, above-garage apartment of some friends. As soon as Laura could get things organized, she planned to move Emma and herself out to the lake house. She’d told the Smithsonian and Johns Hopkins she would be taking some time off, sending them scrambling to find replacements for her. She would probably sell the town house. She could not imagine ever living there again.

  Nancy Charles, one of the geologists from the Smithsonian, stopped at Laura’s pew, leaning over to take her hand.

  “I’m so sorry,” Nancy said. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m okay.” Laura tried to smile.

  “You just lost your father, and now dear Ray. It’s not fair.”

  “No,” Laura agreed.

  “How’s Emma?” Nancy asked. “She’s not here, is she?”

  “She’s with a sitter.”

  “Do you need any help with her?”

  “No. Thanks, though,” Laura said. “It’s been rough on her, but she’s hanging in there.”

  John Robbins, a minister who’d worked with Ray in creating programs for the homeless, stepped into the pulpit, and Nancy whispered goodbye. John began to talk, and although Laura struggled to listen, her mind was still on Emma, who had refused to come to the service. All the energy Laura had put into doing everything “right” with Emma after Poppa’s death had drained her, and she had no reserves left to help her daughter cope with this new tragedy. She was angry at Ray for piling a second loss on Emma in such a short time. And, of course, she felt guilty for her anger.

  Emma had not uttered a single word in the four days since Ray’s death. A policewoman had spoken to her the day after it happened, her questioning gentle and sensitive. Emma had sucked her thumb, something she had not done in more than a year, as she stared blankly into the wo
man’s eyes. She’ll come around, the policewoman assured Laura. Laura should talk to her, she said. Draw Emma’s feelings about the trauma out in the open. But Laura could not get Emma to speak. Not through gentle coaxing, or sharing her own feelings, or even trickery. Emma had lost her voice.

  It was Emma she thought of now, through speaker after speaker, until Stuart finally stood to deliver his eulogy. She found it difficult to look at her brother-in-law as he took his place in the pulpit; his resemblance to Ray was striking. He had Ray’s bulky body, his large, soft chin, straight nose and wire-rimmed glasses. Nearly the only difference was that Stuart still had a full head of dark hair, while Ray had lost much of his.

  “Ray Darrow was a caring brother, a loving husband and father, a dedicated teacher, a volunteer committed to the homeless, and a writer of uncommon talent,” Stuart said. “He was my only brother, my only family, and he was also my best friend. He was the sort of person you could tell anything to, and he wouldn’t judge you or criticize you. As most of you know, his primary concern was the welfare of others. He was a good man, and the good are often those that suffer the most. Depression had been his enemy all of his life, and he bore frustration poorly. He bore failure poorly. He bore his inability to help others poorly. He wrote a book, No Room at the Inn, a beautiful work of art and compassion he hoped would draw attention to the plight of the homeless and the poor, but no one would publish it. It was decidedly unglamorous. And finally he could take it no more.”

  Stuart bowed his head, and Laura could see that he was struggling for composure. She willed him to find it, even though she was losing it herself. Behind her, she heard sniffling.

  Stuart continued. “Those of you here who are committed to the same causes that so moved my brother, please continue them in his name,” he said. “That is what he would have wanted.”