Small Silent Things

by Robin Page

  3

  WHEN IT IS TIME FOR BED, HE CLOSES HIS EYES TO SLEEP, BUT THE LETTER from his “maybe” daughter is in the way. He pats his pajama top, the pocket. He grazes the rumpled paper with a dry fingertip, checking. He unfolds the letter, looks at it in the quiet dark, and then puts it away again. In the morning, he will place it in the pocket of his suit. When he returns from work for dinner, it will go out onto the table. When he reaches for it, the wrong pocket, the wrong room, the wrong drawer, and finds it missing, his heart will go—beat, beat, beat, a staccato drum of panic until it is found.

  He has read it and reread it too many times to count. He has looked at her written name, tried to find answers in the shape and swerve of the letters themselves. Is the writing like his? Like Vestine’s? Is her articulation as theirs was? It is useless. It was an entirely different language. There is nothing. He must wait.

  He is restless in his bed. He tosses and turns and thinks of his neighbor asleep in the unit beside his. What wall do they share? Lucy is asleep too. Safe. Sound. At the thought of the girl, he rises. He goes to do her work.

  4

  BEFORE SHE LEAVES HIS APARTMENT, LUCY GIVES HIM AN ASSIGNMENT. IT is as if she knows she already owns him: Put some swans in the park, Mr. Simon. Ducks too. A smile alights on her face as she waves goodbye to him. My mama is afraid of swans, but I love them. I want them in my park.

  “Swans,” he says to the dark room, embracing his insomnia. “Ponds and ducks and all the rest too!”

  The night unfolds as he paints. In the waves of her pond, he hides Lucy’s name. She is with me, he thinks. I will not be lonely.

  IN THE EARLY-MORNING HOURS, HE DRIFTS OFF TO SLEEP AT HIS TABLE, and a dream, a recurring one, comes to him again and brings back his own daughter. In the dream, he is in Kigali. He holds his daughter’s tiny hand. She leads him. He follows. She, pulling with pretty little fingers, drawing him into his old bedroom, so that he can safely tuck her in. On the way, she chatters on and on about a girl in school, a not-so-nice one, and somewhere between the front room and her cot, she disappears. There is a smudge of gray on the floor where she was standing, and he kneels to touch it, to pat it. He panics. He stands. He races around the small room. When he turns again, back to the tiny cot, she is somehow there. It is magic. She is sleeping. At the sight of her small breathing body, relief sweeps through him like something fatal. She has not disappeared after all. She has not been taken from him.

  “Baby girl?” he says. “Baby girl?” wanting to wake her gently, wanting to be reassured. There is deep joy as he watches her turn toward him. Alive, blood through the body, his daughter, his house. The world is right again.

  The turn of her head is slow in the dream, like a fan’s oscillation. And although he has dreamed this dream a thousand times, he is never prepared for it: the child becomes the pygmy; Claudette’s baby teeth replaced by a solid piece of ivory, a penis as long and as thick as the python at the president’s palace, between her small legs. It unrolls as a fire hose might. There are three hundred pounds of it, filling up the room.

  His head jerks up from his worktable. He gasps, a drowning man emerging for breath. He tries to shake off the dream. A paint smear, the name lost, a finger to his chest. He taps the pocket where his heart lies. The letter is still there. I would like to meet you, the words say. I believe I am your daughter. I do not know. Will you know? He doesn’t know if he will know. His breath settles, his heart slows. My parents are dead now, she writes. You will remember my parents.

  “Your parents?” he says to the dark room. “I am your parent. Vestine is your parent.” He reaches up again to the pocket, a folded corner, a pricking. The letter is a knife. It cuts a wound open. Something that will never heal.

  5

  WHAT IS THE DEFINITION OF GENOCIDE? THIS HE KNOWS BY HEART. HE knows it as well as his social security number or his own middle name. Once she was taken from him, none of the rest mattered. Only that last one. That final atrocity.

  In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

  Killing members of the group;

  Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

  Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

  Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

  Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

  Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

  Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

  Chapter Five

  Jocelyn

  1

  SHE IS ALWAYS AWARE OF BEING APPROPRIATE. TO NOT LET ON. THE NAME is inside her: Kate. Kate. Kate. She comes up with ways to communicate with her, texts to send, privates to take. She arrives early to drill, and they spend a few minutes together alone. Gladys is dead in her presence, no one is grieving, Jocelyn’s past stays in the past. Now is now, before is before. She doesn’t care about after.

  “How was your week?” Kate asks.

  She wonders how to answer. “Great,” is all she says, not missing a beat.

  “We kicked butt against Maud and Erica,” Kate says, putting on her sunglasses. There isn’t any sun.

  “You’re an optimist,” Jocelyn says. “We barely won.”

  Kate is wearing a pleated skirt today—a rarity. The skirt is designed by a company that is very popular. The sizes go up to 10. Women who are larger than size 10 don’t exist for this company. The clothes are made for tall, skinny women. White women without asses. Kate definitely has an ass, but somehow still looks good in the skirt. Jocelyn is very distracted.

  “Winning is winning,” Kate says.

  Jocelyn grabs her racquet. She moves a step closer to Kate. She wants to touch her, the blonde fuzz on her thighs. The skin would be chilled there. A cool day. She is aware that she is experiencing a kind of obsession, but that’s as much as she understands.

  I can keep a secret, she wants to say. No one will know.

  She is good at secrets. She has practiced keeping secrets her whole life.

  “Let’s hit some balls while we wait for the others,” Kate says, eyeing the opposite end of the court. A smattering of freckles on her cheek, blonde lashes.

  “Yes,” Jocelyn says. “Let’s.”

  2

  AFTER THE DRILL CLASS, SHE PLAYS A FRIENDLY WITH MAUD AND Theresa and another girl, Missy, whom none of them can stand. She’s unattractive and intense and talks too much during drill classes. She’s the type of woman who thinks she’s wealthy but has no idea what real wealth is. The only good thing about her is she is always around if they need a fourth. Maud secretly calls her “No Life” and has identified her as Kate’s “stalker.” They all laugh. The irony is not lost on Jocelyn.

  The friendly is won easily by Jocelyn and Maud. There’s a little edge to the losers after—they explain that they were practicing new shots. Missy says she is on her period. Maud and Jocelyn look at each other and pretend to throw up. Jocelyn keeps looking for Kate. Is she gone for the day? When will she see her again? A blonde streak by court 4, but is it her? It isn’t clear. She says goodbye to the other women.

  “See you at pickup,” Maud says.

  “I’m driving through,” Jocelyn says and is off to Lucy’s school.

  On the way there, the coast road curves, and Kate is in every turn. The fact that Jocelyn didn’t see her after the drill is more distracting, she realizes, than if she had. Where did she go? Who is she with?

  Jocelyn drives up Sunset, past the Temple of Absolution, past the polo fields and the golf course and then onto the campus. The security guard tips his hat, sits up in his chair, sets his mobile phone down. He allows her to pass. She belongs there. The ride has been brief and beautiful, but Jocelyn still feels intense and distracted by thoughts of K
ate. It is as if Kate were in the seat beside her.

  She slows, searching the small pool of children’s faces until she sees Lucy waiting by the curb. She and Ali Feinstein are holding hands. Her daughter hugs her friend goodbye and walks carefully over to the loading zone—the legs like matchsticks under the dark plaid of the skirt. Jocelyn pulls forward, so slowly. She unclicks the lock on the door, welcomes her daughter inside. She forces herself to engage, to talk. She tries to push Kate out of her mind. Seat belts fastened, booster checked, and then she guides the car away from the school.

  “How was your day, lovey?” she asks, and Lucy says that she has a new teacher.

  “What do you mean a new teacher?” Jocelyn asks. There is the sway, the imbalance.

  “His name is Mr. Baird,” her daughter says, as if reporting the weather. “He’s taller than a basketball player.”

  Jocelyn feels her emotions spread. She doesn’t like the fact that the new teacher is a man. She doesn’t like that she hasn’t been told. She is suddenly panicked. She remembers the men who were her teachers when she was growing up. The heavy hands that touched her when she didn’t want to be touched. Lucy goes to a private school, so she thinks she should feel better about things. She is certain that there are background checks and fingerprints, but still she is uncertain.

  She adjusts her hands on the wheel, looks in the rearview mirror. Her daughter is pretending to read a book. Her expression is serious, almost angry. The book is about a magical tree house and time travel. They have read it many times. Jocelyn studies her daughter, looking for the thing that might let the men in the world—the Mr. Bairds—know that they can have her: Is there a mark?

  Gladys’s voice is in her head instantly. She searches and searches Lucy’s reflection, but there is nothing there. Nothing damaged or unclean. Jocelyn makes a mental note to ask Maud if she should have Lucy moved out of the class. Maud knows everything about children. She has three boys and two girls, and a house off El Medio North on four acres.

  From the back seat, Lucy interrupts Jocelyn’s thoughts by telling her that Mr. Baird is married. The traffic light changes, and they move on to PCH.

  “How do you know?” Jocelyn asks, lightly, but wonders why the conversation would ever come up.

  “He told us. Duh!”

  “Lucy!” Jocelyn says, but then doesn’t really scold her. She thinks it’s sort of funny—adolescent annoyance in a six-year-old.

  When they get to their building and take the elevator up, Lucy won’t stop asking for Conrad. There must be something in her new teacher that makes her miss her father. She walks along the hall, skipping aimlessly.

  “I want to see my papa. Where’s my papa?” Lucy asks.

  “At work,” Jocelyn says. “As always.”

  The annoyance Jocelyn hears in her own voice surprises her. She has promised never to be impatient with her child. Never to lose her temper. It will be different than it was with Gladys. Fear is something that will never exist between them. “Your father has to work so Mama can be home with you.”

  She gives the second answer more calmly, trying to make up for the impatient tone of before. She wants to say, So I can keep you safe, but doesn’t.

  “Let’s go see Mr. Simon, then,” Lucy says, stopping at his door. There is the threat that she will knock without permission. “I want to see the pond. I want to see my swans and ducks. I want to see my name.”

  Jocelyn finds it hard to focus on what her daughter is saying. Mr. Baird is married, she thinks. Is that better?

  She watches Lucy doing a little dance in front of Simon’s door, her slight body. She is a beauty. It is a truth. It’s not just because she’s her daughter. Jocelyn will have to keep an eye out. She will have to stay vigilant. The conversation in the car has reminded her. Friends, family, teachers—synonyms for perpetrator. She should be careful even of Simon, right?

  Blood will out, Gladys would say to them, when she and Ycidra had the audacity to see themselves as good, as having even the smallest light within them. Trash will stay trash.

  “Can we? Can we go and see Mr. Simon?”

  Lucy is taking tiny little jumps in place now. She turns her head and Jocelyn sees a shadow, just the edge of something blooming, like a bruise on the cheek.

  Jocelyn feels her forehead crease. An eye squint. Is it there after all? Has it come through the blood? But then, as soon as she thinks this, the shadow is gone.

  You are me, she hears, and feels herself tremble. It is her mother’s voice, right here, right now, in this hallway, in this luxury condominium complex on PCH. It is as if she’s risen from her grave.

  You are dead, Jocelyn says to Gladys’s voice. You are dead. My birthday wish come true.

  You’re always going to be me, her mother’s voice says. Ain’t nothing to be done about it.

  “Not today, sweetheart,” Jocelyn manages to say to her daughter. She pulls the small arm, the small body, gently away from the door and down the hall.

  She better not get close to the man, she realizes. A man is a man. A thought delivered. By Gladys? A warning. “A different day maybe, but we can’t visit Mr. Simon now.”

  3

  WHEN LUCY IS THREE, ALMOST FOUR, SHE ASKS ABOUT JOCELYN’S SCARS. They are visible only in a certain light. A Beverly Hills dermatologist has been at them with a laser, but the sheen of the skin there, where the leash came down, where the extension cord snapped, where the belt buckle beat her, is glossy as floor varnish. There is a crisscross pattern on her upper back. On her buttocks and thighs too, and on this day, as Jocelyn sits putting makeup on, lost in the luxury and care that her husband has provided for her, she feels her daughter’s tiny fingers tracing the scars, and this startles Jocelyn. She hasn’t realized until just then that she is in her bra and underwear—that she is exposed. She has forgotten her scars as those who are scarred do.

  “What are these, Mama?” Lucy says. “Why is your skin so weird?”

  The fingertips are almost weightless. Feathers. A cartographer going over a raised map. Jocelyn feels her heart cinch. She sits unmoving.

  “It’s like a net, Mama,” her daughter says. “It’s like the net the fishermen use at the pier.”

  Jocelyn recalls the pain, the burning laser, checking weekly after the treatments, the focused pinpricks of tiny needles—an experimental study. Happiness at the progress, feeling almost free of it.

  “Your pigment,” the dermatologist said in her sterile office, “makes the treatment less effective. It’s never going to be perfect.”

  She lifts her little girl. She sets her on her lap. What to say about a mother who beat you? A mother who let her boyfriends beat you. The weight of her child is reassuring. Lucy is alive. She is loved, untouched. I love her. She is mine. It is always a wonder to Jocelyn that she is the mother of this child.

  “Well,” she says, making up the story. “I never told you this, but . . . I was born a mermaid.”

  The dark brown eyes of her girl grow big. Jocelyn touches one little shoulder, cups it, to pull her girl in.

  “And a fisherman caught me in his net.”

  “Really?” Lucy says. “Really?”

  “Really,” Jocelyn says and pauses, building the story. “I struggled, and the net cut me, burned me. The scars are what’s left behind.”

  She waits, looking to see if her daughter believes her.

  “Like a rope burn?” Lucy asks. “Eddie Banks got a rope burn when he went sailing with his papa.”

  “Exactly. From the rope.”

  “Wow,” Lucy says.

  “I didn’t know I was coming out of the sea to be your mother. I thought I’d always be a mermaid. I was afraid, so I struggled. Maybe I shouldn’t have struggled.”

  Lucy’s eyes fill with wonder. “Am I a mermaid too?” she asks. “Since I’m your daughter.”

  “It’s a secret,” Jocelyn says to her child. She whispers low and intense in the small seashell ear. “You can’t tell a soul.”

  “A
m I?” the child asks again. “Tell me.”

  “A mermaid,” Jocelyn says. She points one finger into her daughter’s chest, identifying her. “A mermaid, just not in a net.”

  4

  SHE PINPOINTS THE MOMENT THAT IT SEEMS POSSIBLE. THE SECOND IT moves from fantasy to reality. The obsession requires constant accounting: Is there progress? Does she like me? Is she looking at me? Can I try? Jocelyn is exhausted by it.

  There is a friendly foursome: Jocelyn, Erica, Theresa, Maud. A match like any other day. Kate is walking, returning the ball cart to the shed. Like a moth disoriented by light, Jocelyn turns to watch her, wants to look away but can’t. Kate sees her looking, stumbles, and the cart turns over. The neon yellow tennis balls roll, bright and harsh against the forest-green artificial grass.

  “Let’s help,” Jocelyn says.

  “Let’s not,” Maud says. “We’re playing.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  They do—four of them picking up balls for Kate, putting them back into the cart.

  “You need a cabana boy, a slave boy,” Erica says.

  “A cabana girl,” Theresa says.

  “In a bikini,” Kate says, and they all laugh.

  They speak about girls in bikinis, about them in bikinis. Their ages. It feels like flirting, like they are talking about something else. She looks up, and Kate is watching her. Her body warms. She is instantly wet.

  “Go finish your match,” Kate says to all of them, but she is looking at Jocelyn. “I’ve got this.”

  The other women go, but Jocelyn holds fast to the cart. She walks beside it, acting as if she is necessary to push it along. Kate rebukes her, tries to peel her fingers from the cart, but Jocelyn holds fast. Their fingers open and then close, an easily deniable touch. Jocelyn is pleased, an evil satisfaction fills her. A click of power. Kate’s intense insistence that she go away makes Jocelyn certain that she feels and fears the attraction too. Jocelyn pushes on, afraid the opportunity might not come again. It might be lost in the wind.