Silent Words

by Lisa Fenwick

  I could tell that he was sad. He sounded as if she’d only told him yesterday. It was clearly still deep in his mind.

  “You know, I don’t have much experience in the relationship department. None, actually. But I don’t buy that excuse. I don’t think you do, either.”

  “You’re right. I don’t,” he said. “I never used to think of her as vain or shallow, but I couldn’t help but wonder if she just didn’t want to have to adapt to the new normal of me not being able to hear anything. She wasn’t the woman that I thought she was if that was all it took to make her walk away and that was the part that hurt the most. She wasn’t even honest about the reason that she was leaving.”

  Noah sighed deeply, and we sat in silence again.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to burden you with that.” He laughed nervously.

  “I’m the one who’s sorry. I was sure that you had a wife. I mean, you’re too good a catch to be single.” I was so embarrassed that I’d said it out loud. Confused that I found everything about him intriguing and wished that I could do the one thing I’d craved since we first, touch his face to see what he looked like.

  I decided it was time for me to share my secret with him. I had to. It only seemed fair. Besides, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been with someone and just talked. Noah made me do that so easily. My silence was broken with him. I wanted to share everything with him, and I didn’t know why, but he made me want to something that no man had ever done.

  “I was four,” I said, and I told him about the day Auntie Jean came over to the house and got Mom and me out. What I was able to piece together over the years was that they must have put together a bug-out plan to get Mom and me out of the house, right out of Berwick completely, and set us up somewhere else far from him. Money had been scrimped and saved and set aside, to pay first and last months’ rent and a security deposit on an apartment, a retainer for a divorce lawyer set aside, living expenses until Mom could get a job, all of that. The lawyer that had handled Jean’s estate told me about finding the money and the lease during the probate process and from there going to the apartment she’d rented and finding correspondence with a couple of potential employers. They found other odds and ends that the firm had documented, like when they had Mom’s car appraised to sell it, the mechanic discovered it had been cleverly sabotaged to make it inoperable. Dad must have done that, to keep her from using it, keep her trapped in the house when he was gone.

  I didn’t know how much of this was me trying to build a story off of a child’s memories and how much was a correct recall of actual events, but it seems like Dad’s abuse really ramped up right before the accident, and he spent less time away from the house. The sudden hurry that I remembered from the day of the accident must have been Jean coming over during one of those brief periods when my dad was gone and swooping Mom and me up as fast as she could to get away before he got back.

  I told Noah about what I remembered of the chase, when Dad must have spotted Jean’s car in the neighborhood and then followed us, me unbuckling my seatbelt while everybody shouted at me, Dad ramming Jean’s car. I didn’t remember anything after that.

  "According to the accident report the lawyer described to me, Dad forced Jean’s car across the centerline, and we hit an oncoming truck from the worst possible angle, which sheared the engine off the frame and rammed it through the front seat. I must have flown into Mom’s body initially, which had saved me. The impact was severe enough to shatter the safety glass of the car’s windows, which caught in my eye as we went through the window.

  "They said it appeared that I had regained consciousness at some point before medical help arrived. Maybe I was in a state of shock and wasn’t feeling any pain and I rubbed my eyes with tiny particles of glass all over my face and hands. Somehow, enough glass ended up ground into my eyes to cause some pretty bad damage that I might have recovered from eventually if an infection hadn’t set in while I had my face bandaged up.

  "The end result was that the lenses in my eyes were completely shot. I've gone through life as if I am looking at everything through frosted glass. I can make out shapes if they are close. In the summer when lawns are green, I can pick out the white concrete and stay on the sidewalks and can tell when I'm coming up to a street. In winter, it becomes harder to navigate without the color contrast between pavement and sidewalk with all the snow.

  “I was lucky that I didn’t end up with bad facial scarring from the accident. Mom saved me, that was for sure. Somehow she protected me during the accident. She was thinking of me and not herself,” I told Noah.

  “You seem to hide it very well,” he said. “It took me a bit to figure out what was off about you. I realized after a while that you were using Smokey as a stealth seeing-eye dog.”

  “He’s trained much closer to a service dog but isn’t one. It was a custom regimen a trainer developed for us. Tom, the lawyer, has always made sure that I’m okay financially and everything else. I’m sure that he was my aunt’s boyfriend, but we’ve never discussed it.”

  “From the interactions we’ve had, it seems like you actively hide your blindness. It’s got to be a ton of work to do that.”

  “It is. I pass a lot of my adaptations off as weird personality quirks and eccentricities. Most of the people in town think I am utterly nuts, and that gets them to generally leave me alone. Nobody ever really gets close enough to notice these days. A few other people have figured it out, but they’re the ones who have gotten to know me well enough to know that I hide it for a reason.”

  “So essentially, you’re a recluse with a really big dog who oftentimes doesn’t recognize people immediately in public and may not respond or react if they wave at you.”

  “You summed me up in a nutshell,” I said.

  “But why? Part of the reason I’m here was because of Ashley. Being in that apartment, passing the same restaurants, places we would go together, it was driving me insane. Being with people who knew me both before and after the incident. I got to the point where I couldn’t stand it anymore, how everything changed after I lost my hearing. And it felt like everybody had to adapt to the new me, and every relationship had to redefine itself. Going through that process with everybody I knew and it being different now wore me out, and I decided I had to just get out of town. I wanted to be somewhere, where nobody knew Noah and Ashley or me before he lost his hearing. But it seems like nobody knows Amy now or even before. Why is that? What was the point of coming back?”

  “I was too much to handle for foster families, but it wasn’t just the blindness. I was a very angry, resentful, and sometimes hostile child. It took me a long time to figure out how to grieve the loss of Mom and Auntie Jean,” I told him.

  “I knew that everybody thought of me as the blind girl, not as Amy. I was just the blind girl. It was one more thing Dad took from me, my very identity, my right and ability to be known as a person, by a name. Every time somebody noticed I couldn’t see and mentally recategorized me as just ‘the blind girl’, it brought back everything about that last day, the shouting and screaming and the accident. Everything I remember about living with that useless, abusive man-shaped trash heap. What he did to me became me.”

  “Sorry?” Noah asked, because I didn’t explain myself well.

  “Being that weird lady with the huge dog is an identity I created for myself. Sure, it was a reaction to people thinking of me as the blind girl, but it was my choice to hide my blindness under a veil of weirdness. That was how I chose to show myself to the world, and that was what people saw. That’s why I go through such pains to hide my blindness, even if it costs me a lot of connections with others.”

  Noah sat there in silence for a while before he said, “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You don’t need to say anything. Just make sure I always know that you see Amy when you look at me, not the blind girl.”

  “Of course, Amy,” he said.

  “I’m feeling really vulnerable right now.
Is it okay if I grab Smokey and go home?”

  “Sure, if that’s what you want. I could cook us up something. I’ve been experimenting more and more in the kitchen. It keeps me busy.”

  An open invitation to stay. I thought that by talking to him I would feel closer to him, but for some reason I felt humiliated and wanted to leave. Right then.

  “Tuesday. I’ll bring Smokey by again on Tuesday if that’s all right with you?” I asked quickly with only thing in mind, to get as far away from here as possible so I could hide, the thing that I’d been doing for so long and craved more than anything right then.

  “Yes. Boy and I would like it very much.”

  ◆◆◆

  I spent the entire walk home beating myself up for telling Noah so much about myself and then just bailing on him, leaving him hanging like that.

  “Just advertise your weird daddy issues!” I snarled at myself. “Drive him away.”

  I felt Smokey’s pace change. I looked over and could barely make out his head, aimed toward me.

  “It’s okay,” I told him, scratching the back of his neck. “Come on. Smokey, home.”

  By the time I got back to the house, I wasn’t feeling any calmer. The last thing I said to myself kept on echoing in my ears. “Drive him away.”

  Why was I worried about driving him away? He was just a guy that was renting my cottage. I’d known him for just a few weeks. I’d only been over to the cottage a handful of times, maybe spent four or five hours total with him. What feelings could I possibly have for him, or could he have for me?

  It wasn’t like we had some sort of budding romance going on. He was just in Berwick for six months to sort his life out before going back into the big city. I had a home and a life here, albeit a somewhat solitary and isolated one.

  The thing was, it coincidentally worked out very well for me to hide the fact that I could barely see here. I had learned to navigate the routes that I needed most, usually just to the cottage but sometimes other places. With Motier’s having such a good grocery delivery, I didn’t have to navigate my way through a grocery store. Anything else I needed was located within a couple of blocks.

  Even if something absurd happened and Noah had a thing for me, he would be leaving in a few months. I adored my small town and its quiet life and the way that everybody just thought I was a weirdo and left me alone.

  So why was I worried about driving him away? I unharnessed Smokey and took him to the kitchen to feed him and freshen up his water. He chomped his food and lapped up his water noisily. There was nothing at all subtle about an Irish wolfhound.

  After Smokey finished and I cleaned up the kitchen floor a bit, I started my own lunch. I reached into my refrigerator, and by touch and general size and color, I could differentiate fruits and vegetables. The trust fund that Auntie Jean set me up with and the rent I made on the cottage freed me up from having to work, so I had all the time I needed to cook for myself.

  My floors were all in dark colors. My furniture, the countertops, tabletops—any flat surfaces, really—were white or otherwise pale. My dishes, utensils, cookware, anything that I had to use in my hands, were all black or very dark. My whole “décor scheme” was built around high contrast between things, surfaces, and floors.

  “Smokey, kennel,” I said. He dutifully tromped off to his big cage in the living room, so he wasn’t underfoot while I cooked. Normally, I kept my lunch pretty simple. I often had something left over from the night before, but today, I just felt like stretching out a little bit. I did well enough at cooking for myself. I had learned to be extremely precise in my prep work, in measuring quantities of things, using a chatty little digital thermometer to let me know when I was at the exact temperature I wanted to be at. I could tell by the sound and smell when something was done simmering or sautéing. I had learned to gauge the doneness of a steak by touch. I learned to trust my nose on when things were seasoned just right in the spice cabinet.

  Where I sometimes fell short was on the texture of things. Being able to look at something while it cooked seemed to be important to getting the right feel in the mouth, apparently. I’d never once cooked for someone else, so I had gotten very good at flavoring things for my palate. I had no idea if other people would enjoy what I made.

  As I started to peel a carrot, I shook my head at how I was suddenly wondering if my cooking would be up to the standards for Noah. Just another silly little notion in my head that I was quick to toss aside. Maybe I was just wondering if I’d be living his life if I weren’t blind. Maybe I was feeling the itch to experience something bigger than my stark black-and-white kitchen in Berwick.

  I went back to the refrigerator for some mushrooms after the carrots were peeled and diced them into perfect little cubes. Everything I’d ever read about cooking said that solid knife skills were a key foundation to good food, so I had practiced being consistent. Sometimes I felt like a professional chef for how fast and clean I could cut things. They didn’t use their eyes. They went by feel, and I felt as if I were a professional.

  Maybe Noah was feeling like someone cooking for him for a change. Once or twice he’d mentioned the cook that his family had when he was growing up and how much he missed those meals. He’d also talked about how busy he’d been in the city, how little personal time he had anymore, between his job and all of the extra work he’d put in to adapt to the loss of his hearing. I wondered how long it had been since he’d had a meal that was made from scratch by somebody that cared about him.

  What was I thinking?

  Noah was a decent guy, but he was my tenant. There was no point in getting attached or thinking about him this much.

  Still, I thought as I rinsed off the knife and drizzled some olive oil into a pan. No harm in striking up a good friendship while he’s here and having good company. Something that I’ve heard about but never experienced.

  Chapter Eleven

  Noah

  The Present

  I felt bad for Amy as she harnessed up Smokey and the two of them left the yard. I didn’t think she was planning on telling me as much as she had that day. Maybe not ever. She went to such great pains to hide her blindness, which made no sense to me. She should be proud of all she'd achieved and continued to do with her disability and alone too. She made me feel silly about my complaints about my deafness. At least I had Mom, and I'd had a good relationship with my dad. The idea of a life without them wasn’t worth thinking about.

  Before that morning, I thought about the experimental surgery and implants, the sneaky phone apps that buzzed me in patterns like an arcane code, the voice lessons to hide the flatness that my voice would have developed, the way I threw myself so hard into learning to lip read. I used to think I’d taken measures to not let my injury affect my job or the way anybody else dealt with me.

  But only a few people knew about Amy’s sight. She owned a house and cottage, walked between them, appeared healthy, dressed well, and managed her affairs. Sure, she had inherited the property and had a trust fund, but she had a lot of pain too. The loss of loved ones? No amount of money could compensate for them. The first fourteen years she was blind, she was just shuffled between foster homes and institutional settings, no fancy doctors or high-end clinics. Amy experienced her life, decided what she wanted and didn’t want out of it, and made the changes herself.

  She was an amazing woman.

  When Boy came back to the stoop, after watching his newest, bestest buddy tromp away, I realized that I was worn out. Part of it was my empathy and sympathy for Amy. The other was realizing the quiet energy she had, the resolve and determination she had to have to make everything work. It must have required constant vigilance on her part to keep the illusion up, to walk among people and not let them know she couldn’t see them, to take the constant hits to her self-worth at being considered a strange and aloof social outsider.

  I could never do it. I was so weak compared to her. I lost my hearing, and all my walls came tumbling down. Before the in
cident, I knew things about myself but not all of them. The doc said that because of the severity of damage to my ears, I could have lost some memory, but it would come back in time. I was still waiting.

  “Boy. Come on. Let’s get you some water.” I took him inside and set up to brew another cup of espresso. I needed the caffeine fix.

  My plan for the day was a walk down to Hyde Garage to spend a little more time there. I’d made the first Sunday informal car show after getting into town. I’d missed the second, because I was catching up on some work for the firm that I was still doing remotely. That day seemed like it would be a great day to get down there again and look around. Brent Hyde had done the Porsche’s interior and was offering rides around town.

  Timmy Chesbro was doing some great work on a Bradley GT kit car. Our driver when I was growing up had a kit car that he’d bring by the house sometimes. Dad would let him work on it in our garage, since it was a lot more spacious than his own. There was something endlessly fascinating to me about taking one car, throwing half of it away, and replacing it with something completely different. In the case of our driver, it was a Kelmark Tornado, which dropped a big Oldsmobile engine into the body of a sports car. Chesbro’s Bradley started with one of the old VW Beetles and put the body of a late-’40s MG sportster onto it. The body kit was stunning, with its classy styling that drew its inspiration from the luxury cars of the ’20s and ’30s.

  The problem was the dearth of reliable old Beetle engines and chassis that were available up in New England anymore. He was able to cobble one together from parts of four different vehicles, plus a few good swap meet trades. The amount of tweaking and adjustment he had to do to keep the engine running smoothly was pretty large, though. Just talking to him two weeks earlier, I knew he was getting discouraged at just the amount of time it took to systematically go through the diagnosis of different potential problems and work them out.

  We’d talked a little bit about me helping him out, and I thought it would be a great day to rekindle the conversation. After I’d had my second espresso and Boy had gotten some kibble, water, and a bit of rest, I leashed him up, and we took a walk down to the garage. One thing for sure, I wasn’t used to being alone. I needed some sort of company, and going to the garage and being with people who had similar interests was good enough for me.