Silent Words

by Lisa Fenwick

  “You can open your eyes now, Amy. Nice and slow, remember?”

  I nodded and slowly opened my eyes. They must have been really, really tired because all I could tell was that they were open, but I couldn’t really see anything. Doctor Herbert was a big blob in front of me and if I looked down, the bed was a big white shape and the rest of the room was very dark.

  “How’s that?” Doctor Herbert asked.

  I reached up to rub my eyes because maybe I had a lot of eye boogers which was why I saw just big shapes, but he stopped me. “Don’t touch, Amy. Your eyes are still healing.”

  “But I can’t see!” I told him.

  “Can you see anything?”

  “You’re a big snowman.”

  “Ok…” he said. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “None,” I said, because he didn’t move his hand. He was still just a big blurry snowman.

  “Are you sure? Right here. How many fingers?”

  “No!” I said.

  “Let’s try this,” he said. "I need to shine a light in your eyes. It will be bright and might hurt a little bit, so if you need to close your eyes and look away, that is fine.”

  “Ok,” I said.

  The big blurry snowman leaned really close and I could see the light he flashed in my eyes, but it didn’t hurt at all and it didn’t help anything because I still couldn’t see when he was done.

  “Interesting,” Doctor Herbert said. “It looks like your eyes still need to heal up for a while.”

  ◆◆◆

  Doctor Herbert lied to me. He put the bandages back on me, and they took them off every day and put in eye drops, but they never did get any better. Everybody was still just big blurry snowmen. My bed was just a big blurry square. When I ate, I had to carefully feel where the food was on my plate.

  Mean Wendy wasn't so mean anymore now that she didn’t have to keep me from touching my bandages. She was a lot nicer than she used to be, and she helped me eat and drink and go potty, and she would read books to me.

  I started to call her Nurse Wendy and sometimes even Nice Nurse Wendy.

  “Hey, kiddo,” Nurse Wendy said as she came into my room. “I need you to meet someone.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “This is Miss Hannah. She has to talk to you about where you will go now that you’re ready to leave the hospital.”

  “But my eyes aren’t better!” I said, thinking that there was no way I could leave. I still couldn’t see.

  “Doctor Herbert and I have been telling you for a while now that your eyes have healed up as much as they will. Because of the accident, this is the best you will ever see.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said.

  “Hey, Amy. I'm Miss Hannah. Could we talk about what we’re going to do next?”

  “After my eyes are better?”

  “No. Now. Nurse Wendy told you that your eyes will not get any better, so we need to find you a home now.”

  “I have a home.”

  “Yes, but with your parents gone, you can’t go back there. We need to find other people to take care of you.”

  I didn't like what Miss Hannah was telling me. I didn’t want to go anyplace else. Only home or stay in the hospital, now that Nurse Wendy was nice to me.

  “We have families that take care of kids who don’t have mommies and daddies anymore. We want to have you live with one of them.”

  “No!” I said.

  “We have sent somebody to your house to get all of your things from your room, and we’ve moved them in with Bob and Judy Morrison. Bob and Judy are very good with kids your age, and they will take good care of you.”

  “I don’t want to go with them.”

  “They will be coming in a couple of hours to meet you. We need you to be on your best behavior, because they’re going to take you home with them.”

  I got mad at Miss Hannah and I stopped talking to her until she left. A little while later, Miss Wendy came into the room.

  “Hey, kiddo,” she said.

  “What?” I asked. I used my angry voice.

  “I’d got something for you. Could you hold your arms out for me?”

  I knew before she said anything what it was. I could see the red color in front of her snowman blob as she walked toward me.

  “Cherry-Berry!” I yelled. I almost fell out of the bed reaching for her, and I felt Nurse Wendy grab me suddenly and move me to the middle of the bed.

  “One of the ambulance people took her out of the car when they got you, because he thought it might be important to you. The nurses downstairs made sure to bring it up here, and I took it home to clean it.”

  “Cherry-Berry is a girl,” I said.

  “I brought her home and cleaned her up. She got some really good baths, and I combed her hair out and everything for you.”

  “Thank you, Nurse Wendy!” I said, wrapping my arms around my Cherry-Berry. “But she smells funny.”

  “I had to use lots of nice-smelling soap to get her clean. She got very, very dirty in the accident.”

  “Did she have an accident?” I asked.

  Nurse Wendy laughed. “I thought she did. Poor girl.”

  I curled up with Cherry-Berry, and when the Morrisons came, they promised they wouldn’t take her away from me. I told them that I used to have to hide her in my room all the time so Daddy wouldn’t hurt her whenever he got mad at me. They promised that they would always take good care of her and that I wouldn’t ever have to hide her again. They didn’t sound like they were lying, so I said goodbye to Doctor Herbert and Nurse Wendy and went with them the very next day.

  ◆◆◆

  It was my thirteenth birthday, and I was celebrating it at the Birch Hills Juvenile Hospital. Again.

  Birch Hills, or Bitch Hills, as we all called it, was essentially a psychiatric hospital for troubled girls. There was a secure wing for the ones committed for criminal activity and another secure wing for the ones committed for bad depression or anxiety or for being too far over on the spectrum for their parents to deal with. I lived in a separate building, a small dormitory with five twin rooms for girls like myself who just weren’t wanted. My roommate, Karin, was neglected by her parents from a young age. Like, seriously neglected. Not fed, not changed or let outside. She told me she was half the weight she should have been when CPS got her out of the house when she was nine. At fifteen, she was still such a tiny thing, that was for sure. We had a few other neglect cases in our dorm, plus another girl named Melissa, who was just like me—blind with no family to care for her, and none of the foster families in the area were willing to deal with it. The Morrisons wanted to do it for a while, until they realized that there was no extra income for having a blind girl. As soon as the first check came in, they decided against it and returned me as if I was something that they bought at their local supermarket and had no use for anymore.

  The last girl was Terry, who had some rare disease that none of us could pronounce that messed with her balance and coordination really bad. Mentally, she was sharp like you wouldn’t believe but could barely walk five steps without falling over. Ten steps if she used a walker or crutches.

  Terry liked having Melissa and I push her in her wheelchair. She told us when to stop and go and which way to turn, or if we were drifting toward a wall or the edge of the sidewalk or something. In return, we got to walk around the dorm and the grounds at full speed instead of needing to move slowly with a cane.

  Melissa did well with a cane, but I didn’t. I had just enough vision to be able to make out the presence of big things or moving things, so using a cane didn’t improve my mobility much. It made it very hard for me to take practicing with it as seriously as I should, so I’d never gotten good with it. I preferred to just walk slowly and not call attention to myself by tap-tap-tapping along. Overall, life at Birch Hills wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad either. We all knew that we’d essentially been dumped in here because nobody else wanted us. But the staff were decent, th
e food could be better but was at least edible, and we had each other.

  One of the women that worked at Birch Hills came up to me after we’d cleaned up from my little birthday party. “You’ve got a visitor,” she said.

  “Who?” I was perplexed. I’d never had anybody come by on a social visit, and if it were somebody looking to foster or adopt me, they’d come and watch me at the dorm for a while. That was how it usually worked if it looked like one of us was a candidate for external placement.

  “A lawyer. He has some information that he was supposed to deliver to you on your thirteenth birthday.”

  “About what?” I asked.

  “He didn’t say. Come on. It's your birthday—you shouldn’t be cleaning up today.”

  We went over to the administration building, where there were a couple of small conference rooms. “Miss Martin?”

  I turned toward the sound of the voice. “Yes.”

  “Hello. I'm Tom Shipmann. I'm an attorney from Westminster.”

  “Okay. What's this about?” I kicked myself, because I didn’t want to sound as paranoid as I was feeling, but the whole situation was rather odd.

  “You are the sole beneficiary of your aunt Jean Dunham’s estate.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Before she died, Miss Dunham worked with our firm to set up a trust for you in case she were to pass before your eighteenth birthday, and seeing as she died before such time, unfortunately, I am here to inform you that you have such a trust set-up for you for when you reach of age.”

  “I know she’s dead. I was there when it happened,” I replied.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. There seemed to be genuine regret in his voice.

  “Please go on.”

  He went on to explain to me about how Mom had made sure to pass everything on to Auntie Jean for my care if anything happened to her, which meant that Jean got everything my parents had and that it was all being administered by the trust. They were renting out Jean’s cottage and my family home through a property manager and putting all of that income into the trust as well.

  “With no other surviving blood relatives, you were remanded to the care of the state. We kept control of your assets, according to Miss Dunham’s directives, in a blind trust for you. The legal framework of the trust was set up such that even the state was not able to seize the assets themselves to pay for your care. However, the trust does direct that any interest or income accumulated by those assets be handed over to your parents to benefit you. With your parents also being deceased, the state did make a successful argument that we make those payments to them.”

  “Interesting,” I said. Mainly because I had no clue what a blind trust was or why the state took some of my money.

  “Yes. And now that you are thirteen, you have been granted limited control over how those assets are to be used. The property you inherited will remain under the sole control of the trust until you are eighteen, but now that you are thirteen, the trust gives you control of the monthly stipend from this point forward.”

  “What?” I asked him. I didn’t think kids were allowed to make decisions about their own lives, not from what I’d seen. If that was so, I wouldn’t have been in this place to begin with.

  “Essentially, Miss Martin, right now, you have access to a stipend of approximately one thousand, seven hundred and fifteen dollars a month. The trust allows you to use part or all of that money for your ongoing maintenance. The trust did not foresee that you would end up as a ward of the state, though, so I need to discuss your options for how to handle the stipend going forward. The state will certainly argue that they should continue to receive the money to provide for your ongoing care. We would argue that this money is yours to dispose of as you will and that the state is not entitled to direct how it is spent. We would like to put forward a case that you should be allowed to return the stipend to the principal of the trust, to be held for you until you are eighteen.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “I know this is a lot to take in, Miss Martin. Would you like me to give you a moment before we start reviewing the specifics of the different options in front of us?”

  “Please,” I said. Then I shook my head as I realized that it didn’t matter. I couldn’t see, and it sounded as if he had my interests at heart. Before today, I didn’t even know I had any money, let alone property.

  “Can you do the best thing for me?”

  He said with pride, or maybe he was just happy for the job, “I wouldn’t think of doing anything less than looking after your interests. After all, that is what your Aunt Jean hired me to do.”

  I wondered if he was more than just Auntie Jean’s lawyer. It didn’t matter because for the first time in a long time, I had something to look forward to. I imagined getting out of this place and living on the streets like I heard most girls did after leaving here. I didn’t have to do that. I had a home, something that I hadn’t had in a long time, and it was waiting for me as soon as I got out of here, and I couldn’t wait.

  ◆◆◆

  I was celebrating my eighteenth birthday at Birch Hills. Karin turned eighteen a year and a half earlier, but she still came by to visit us. She was still the tiniest blurry snowman I knew. Terry and Melissa would be leaving a few months after me.

  Officially, I was free to leave at seventeen if I’d wanted to, but I decided to stay, since the dormitory had become home and the other girls in it my sisters. Besides, I had decided to reinvest my monthly stipends back into the trust, so I would have had nothing to live on, and that didn’t appeal to me at all.

  So, I stayed the extra year. Once I was eighteen, I had to leave Birch Hills. It wasn’t as scary as it probably was for the other girls, though. I had a house and a cottage waiting for me back in Berwick. Tom Shipmann was coming to pick me up in a few hours. He was going to give me a big check and probably had a ton of papers he’d need me to sign, to officially take ownership of the house and cottage from the trust and settle what to do with the money in the fund. We’d been in touch over the past few months, and we’d arranged to move it all into an investment portfolio that would continue to pay me a monthly stipend indefinitely. It was nice to be set up to not have to worry about money or how I’d feed and house myself after coming out of state care.

  I found out that Tom Shipmann and Auntie Jean were close once. He never told me how close, but I could tell by the way that he looked after my interests that this was personal to him. He would talk about Auntie Jean being special, and I knew that she was, and so did everyone who knew her. They called her that “special.”

  I hugged the girls and all of the staff after we had dinner and cake. I was still helping clean up, even though I was being scolded again for working on my birthday, when Tom came to get me. I promised that I’d come by to visit Terry and Melissa and a few of the others as often as I could arrange transportation out to Springfield.

  The drive to my old family home seemed to take forever because of it. I wanted to ask him more about Auntie Jean, but then I was afraid to do so. Talking about her, for some reason just made me miss her even more. I was relieved when we arrived, and we took a few minutes to handle the paperwork. He asked if I needed any help at the house or anything. I had him walk me from room to room and tell me where everything was. I had developed a good memory for spaces, so after one tour, I was good except for a second review of the kitchen.

  “There's no food in the house. Don’t worry. I’ll be here for a few days. I’m staying at the local hotel. But for now, would you like me to call for a delivery?” he asked.

  That was how I found out that Motier’s had been doing grocery delivery for more than a century. In the meanwhile, I had him order a pizza that he went to pick up, along with some soda and a few other groceries he paid for out of a portion of my monthly trust stipend the firm withdrew for me in cash. Within the next few days, an adaptive laptop arrived, along with some other items to set the house up for a functionally blind resident. He’d al
so arranged a contractor to come in and do any additional work I need.

  Tom went to great lengths to find out what I’d need and arranged to make it happen.

  “On Saturday, a Mrs. Van Remortel will be coming by with puppies for you to meet. She says she can come out twice a week to work with the one you select to train the two of you to work together. Now remember this isn’t a service animal certification, so you won’t be able to take the dog everywhere.”

  “Yes, I understand. Thank you.”

  He left after a few days. I remembered the first time he was here, he’d had pizza and really enjoyed it. As he left, I decided to order a new one, so he could have a couple slices of pizza for the road. I cleaned up from dinner and walked upstairs to what was once my old bedroom. I didn’t know yet what I’d do with my parents’ room. I really had no desire to sleep in the room Dad slept in. One of the things coming soon was an electronic book reader. I thought maybe I’d make the master bedroom into a grand library for myself. Either way, until Tom left, and I had nothing to do apart from focus on being back home, I wondered if I’d done the right thing.

  Until now, I’d had the girls and the home. Being blind and alone hadn’t been something that I thought about, but seeing Tom leave and being alone, it was all I could think about. It made me nervous and want to go back to Birch Hills, the only place that had ever really felt like home.

  Chapter Eight

  Noah

  The Past

  March 2015

  I sat at my desk, frowning at the stack of papers in front of me. I was missing the file on the Conway case, with all of the extensive notes I’d taken on it. Like all files, except those for extremely sensitive cases, all the documents were available on the firm’s servers. But my notes, which the paralegal team needed to focus their research on for me while I was on vacation, were handwritten on a paper copy I’d made. Conway was another chance for me to shine. One of the senior associates recalled a similar case about fifteen years earlier that hinged on some obscure precedents in New York state real estate laws. The other lawyer had recommended it as a good one for me to use to sharpen my skills on really digging deep into case histories.