The Language of Silence

by Tiffany Truitt

  I have to face it sooner or later. “Yes, I’m awake,” I whisper back.

  We both fall silent. It’s a little unbearable, to be honest. I reluctantly open my eyes and shift so I’m looking at him. I can’t help but cringe. He looks horrible. His face is covered in bruises and cuts.

  “That bad, eh?”

  “That bad,” I confirm. The last thing I am going to do after last night is lie to him. For better or worse, it’s the truth from here on out.

  The truth will set you free.

  Hopefully.

  Ed clears his throat. “So…last night was interesting.”

  I nod.

  “Thoughts?”

  “On last night?”

  “Seems a good place to start,” he replies.

  “Thanks for getting your butt kicked for me,” I offer. Why is it so hard to say the things I want to say?

  “No problem,” he replies, laughing slightly. I can hear the nervousness behind the laugh.

  He is going to make me do everything. I lay my head back down on his chest. I have found the courage to speak the words, but I can’t look at him while I do. My cheeks heat up as I think back to the events in the shower. I clear my throat, and he moves under me.

  “Do you regret it?” I wish my voice wasn’t so shaky.

  “The truth?”

  “Always.”

  “No. I don’t regret it. I just fear I will later.”

  I take a deep breath. Not the answer I dreamed of, but one I can accept.

  “Can I kiss you again?”

  The hesitation in his voice catches me off guard. I look up at him and he is actually blushing too. Am I the cause of this? I can’t fight the smile that spreads across my lips. I nod.

  He cups my cheeks in his hands and brings my face to his. His lips gently touch mine. The kiss is much different from the one the night before. Last night, everything was filled with such tension and anxiety. There is something subtler about this kiss.

  His lips move slowly against mine, and the kiss deepens into something I am experiencing for the first time. It feels like he is pulling my whole soul into his.

  Something in me knots up, but it’s an enjoyable pressure. We break away to catch our breath. He pulls me closer to him again, and I welcome him. We continue to move at the same pace. I briefly wonder if he wants to do more than this. Last night, his hands had wandered across my body, and it was almost suffocating how much I wanted more.

  His hands stay placed halfway on my cheeks and neck. He seems content with this. “Want me to make us something to eat?” I ask, finding my voice a little breathy.

  “Doesn’t that go against your rules or something?”

  “My rules?”

  “Remember last spring? Tristan and I came home from the movies, and he joked around telling you to get into the kitchen and make him some damn dinner. You just rolled your eyes. The next day, he bought you that ridiculous apron that said ‘World’s Best Wife and Mother.’ He taped it to your door, put a post-it under it, and wrote, ‘something to aspire to.’”

  I groan.

  Ed laughs. “And then you sat me and Tristan down and lectured us for like an hour on the women’s rights movement, and how women could be whatever they wanted to be. They didn’t have to be wives or mothers, or they could be wives and mothers…”

  I put my hand over his mouth to stop him from talking. “You remember that?”

  He pulls my hand away. “Kind of hard to forget.”

  I move to sit up. “I don’t think the entirety of feminism will crumble if I go downstairs and make us a Pop Tart.”

  Ed chuckles. “If you say so.”

  I playfully hit him in the chest before getting out of the bed. Before I can get too far, Ed grabs me by the wrist. “Are we going to be alright?” he asks, suddenly serious.

  “I sure hope so.” They are the only words that come to me. They aren’t poetry, but they are my heart’s dearest wish. I stop at the door before leaving. “And about last night… I may have enjoyed myself,” I admit sheepishly.

  Ed grins. “Good to know.”

  I giggle. The tiniest giggle. Darn that boy and his ability to make me giggle. “You are an idiot,” I yell at him over my shoulder.

  ****

  I’m actually whistling. I’m actually happy. For the first time since Tristan died, I can say I feel good. It’s not just because I finally got somewhere with Ed, though that in itself is some kind of miracle. It’s more about speaking for myself.

  I speak out for everything. I find so many causes to rally behind. But it’s weird. I found it difficult to say those things to Ed. Maybe because they were the things I was most afraid to say.

  I was kind of a badass last night.

  I’m grinning as I rummage through the pantry for our breakfast of champions. I don’t hear Ed’s mom come into the kitchen. Between her long hours at the factory and her own social life, she’s hardly around, which is kind of sad because Ed’s mom is awesome.

  I would often wander away from Ed and Tristan while over at the house to talk to her. We would talk about everything. She would always sneak me her old copies of Cosmo. It was sort of our thing. My mom wouldn’t be caught dead reading the magazines, and I didn’t want to open myself up to ridicule from Tristan and Ed.

  But now, sitting in nothing but Ed’s silly Clash t-shirt, I find it utterly impossible to speak at all. I think about what happened in her bathroom, in her house, and I’m mortified. I’m sure she can read every smutty detail on my face. Ed’s mom nods quickly and moves past me to the refrigerator. I’m going to die from embarrassment. Literally.

  I try to silently will the darn Pop Tarts to hurry up.

  Come on.

  Come on.

  Come on.

  This woman has been gracious enough to let me stay here while my mom is going crazy. What do I do? I take advantage of her son. Well, maybe not exactly. Still.

  The Pop Tarts appear and I feel like screaming with joy. I grab a paper towel and throw them on it. My fingers burn. I’m almost out of the kitchen before her voice halts me.

  “Brett? Can we talk for a moment?”

  “Of course,” I reply, walking back into the room. I set the Pop Tarts on the counter, and try to discreetly pull down on the t-shirt that suddenly seems much smaller than it was before. She hands me a glass of orange juice, and I offer a pathetic thanks.

  “You know I love Ed, right?”

  I clear my throat. “Yeah. Of course.”

  “I just want you to understand that. I love my son. I know we don’t have the most traditional of relationships, but he’s everything to me.”

  “Oh. I know that.”

  “So, please keep that in mind when I tell you this. You need to be careful, Brett.”

  “Careful?” Oh, God. Is she talking about condoms and stuff? I know she’s the cool mom and all, but this is too much. My first anything was only last night.

  “He’s got some stuff to figure out...”

  I take a sip of my orange juice. For some reason, I don’t like where this conversation is going. I look up at her and she is silent. How aware of silence I have become. It seems to be a living thing. It fills the space between me and the woman who gave life to the boy I love. We should have tons to talk about, but neither of us can speak.

  Ed’s mom reaches out and grabs my hand in hers. “He’s not in a good place, Brett. I see the way he looks at you, and the way you look at him. I know you two care about each other, but maybe now isn’t the best time for a relationship.”

  “We’re…I mean…we are both young. We’re just having fun. I mean. Not that kind of fun. If we were…we would be safe. But we’re not. I know it looks different. I mean…”

  “Brett.”

  I take a step away. I don’t want to hear this. Am I supposed to lose everything? Can I save nothing?

  “I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

  I manage to nod. When I get back upstairs, Ed is sitting up and f
lipping through the channels. “Bon appetite,” I say as I throw him a Pop Tart. I sit on the edge of the bed, my back toward him.

  “You alright?”

  I turn to him with the biggest smile I can fake. “I’m great.”

  And I start to lie.

  Lying is easier than speaking.

  I’ll have to remember this when I speak to Donnie Wallace.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Ed:

  About a year and a half ago, my father invited me to visit him. It wasn’t really anything to brag about. I had started getting holiday greetings of shame and guilt a few years back. When they arrived, my mom handed them to me with a shaky hand, her smile tight, a mixture of worry and hope. I knew it gutted her that I didn’t have a father. Part of me thought it was the reason behind her many men—she was hoping to find me one on the clearance rack of divorcees and men who realized too late that life had passed them by. I should have told her that she was all I needed, but in the darkest moments of the night, I knew telling her that would have been a lie. And she was the one person I would never lie to.

  My father’s cards usually contained nothing more than a short, generic blah-blah-wish-you-the-best-sorry-I-won’t-ever-be-there message, but last year’s was different. In the card, he included his address, a hundred dollar bill, and printed directions to his house. He wrote that he wanted to see me. Anytime that was good for me, he scribbled.

  Hey, Dad! How about when I was a kid and all I wanted in the world was one second where I felt like you cared?

  I didn’t tell Mom or even Tristan about what my father wrote in the card. I stashed the directions and money in a sock drawer, the same drawer my mother assumed I hid porn in, so I knew she wouldn’t find it. And I tried to forget about it.

  But I couldn’t. It haunted me like Casper the Friendly Ghost of Repressed Childhood Angst. For a week straight, I took the directions out of my drawer and sat on my bed staring at them, calculating in my head how long it would take me to get there, how I would do so without telling my mom, and how much of the hundred dollars I would have to spend on the trip.

  A hundred dollars was a lot of money in our household. Despite my mom’s best attempts at hiding the envelopes with giant red marks of doom proclaiming our delinquent payments, I knew we were in trouble. So after each staring contest with Ben Franklin, I would shove the money back in my drawer and promise myself that I would hand it over to my mom the next morning.

  But I never did.

  One night when my mom was out, I paced back and forth in my room. I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about what I would say to my father if I saw him. Growing up, I used to space out in class a lot. I wasn’t dreaming about escaping school or even girls. I was dreaming about my dad. When I was young, too young to know how much anger existed in the world or in myself, I would daydream about my father walking through the door and whisking me off to the zoo or to a baseball game. I would miss whole lessons, and when my teachers tried to get me to focus, I became disgruntled and defiant, desperate to hold onto my fantasies.

  As I got older, the daydreaming turned less pleasant. My dreams of great adventures with Pops turned into irate and irrational bouts of curses and accusations. But as I held the money and directions in my hand, I was ashamed to admit that I hoped for a mixture of both.

  Could it be possible to want to hate someone while hoping to love them as well?

  With a grunt, I grabbed a hoodie and threw it over my head. I didn’t bother changing out of my pajama pants or even brushing my teeth. If I thought about it for a second longer, I wouldn’t go. And I knew I had to. I took the steps two at a time, adrenaline coursing through me better than any drug kids tried to buy from me because they assumed I was a dealer.

  My hand reached the doorknob when my cell phone went off. I froze, letting the damn thing vibrate against my leg. It was only then that I realized my hand was shaking. I closed my eyes and tried to steady my uneven breath. I should have ignored the call, but there was only one person who called me this late—Tristan.

  I pulled the phone from the pocket of my cotton K-mart sweats and pressed it against my ear. “What’s up?” I managed to say without sounding like I was on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

  “I’m really messed up, man. I did something tonight. God, I’m fucked up,” Tristan half-mumbled, half-sobbed into the phone.

  My stomach tightened. Tristan had always had his sullen, introspective moments, but this was the first time I had heard him like this. The first time. Not the last. “Are you drunk?” I asked, hoping to write his behavior off as merely the effects of one too many sips of moonshine.

  “No…please…just come get me,” he stammered.

  I thought of the directions and money in the pockets of my hoodie. I thought of the open road calling to me with a million different possibilities, a million different answers to questions that had plagued me all my life, leading me to a man that seemed finally ready to answer them.

  “Please, Ed,” Tristan begged.

  I swallowed and nodded my head. “Yeah. Okay. Just tell me where you are, and I will come get you.”

  “Thanks. And, um, Ed, do you have any money?”

  I felt for the hundred dollars in my pocket, knowing that without it I wouldn’t be able to pay for the gas to see my father. But as I listened to my best friend sniffle on the other end of the line, I had no choice. “Yeah, I got some money.”

  ****

  I found Tristan thirty minutes outside of town. Huddled under a streetlight in the parking lot of a deserted grocery store, the boy I thought I knew everything about offered a weak, lazy wave as I pulled into a spot. As my headlights cut across his face, I saw that he wasn’t alone. Standing behind him were two men. One was a lanky punk with longish, greasy blond hair covering his eyes and tickling his ears. The man next to him, on the other hand, looked like he stepped off of the football team or maybe an assembly line in a prison. Covered in muscles I didn’t even know were possible to have, the man tightened his hand around something as he saw me approach. As I narrowed my eyes, I saw that he was carrying a gun.

  I slammed my car door with as much force as I could muster, stupidly hoping I could intimidate the gun-wielding hulk with my door-slamming abilities. I stalked over to where the trio stood and tried, rather unsuccessfully, to scowl.

  “You got the money?” the huge ass monster spat.

  “You alright?” I asked Tristan. I wasn’t going to give anyone anything until I knew he was okay. Tristan’s eyes only met mine for the quickest of moments before he looked down at the ground, managing a quick nod. His face was pale and his brow was covered in sweat.

  “The money, asshole.”

  I shoved the hundred dollars into the beast’s face. “That’s all I got,” I growled. It was the oddest thing, but suddenly, I wasn’t scared anymore. I was pissed. I wanted a fight. I don’t know why, but I was praying for it. The adrenaline I felt rushing down the stairs to see my dad returned, and all I wanted was to hit something. Even if that thing hit back.

  The man snatched the money from my hand and gave it to the skinny Magoo slouching next to him. He reached out and grabbed Tristan by the collar. “I don’t ever want to see you around here again. Do you hear me?” he sneered.

  Tristan was no weakling. He played varsity football and his father made him work out every single day. But my best friend just sat there trembling. Scared out of his mind. I balled my hands into fists. “Get your hands off of him,” I yelled.

  Hulk Jr. looked me up and down, shoving Tristan away from him with so much force that he fell straight back on his ass. “Don’t be pissed at me your boyfriend came out to play. I’m just getting what’s mine.”

  Boyfriend came out to play? I had no idea what the hell the guy was talking about. I leaned down and grabbed Tristan by the wrist, pulling him off the ground. I gently pushed him toward the car, turning my back on the hoodlums who now had my father’s hundred dollar bill in their hands.

 
; It wasn’t till we were near town that Tristan decided to speak. “Aren’t you going to ask me what happened?” he said quietly, his voice almost lost in the lulling rhythm of wind blowing through the window and tires slapping against the payment.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me?” I countered. He was the one to call me for help, and now that I had lost my father’s money, I was ashamed to admit I was feeling a bit bitter.

  Tristan let free a sigh. The kind of sigh that shakes your whole body. The kind of sigh that alerts the world you know that its days are numbered. Existence itself would have to be redefined. “I paid him for…stuff.”

  “Stuff? Drugs?” I asked, my voice hitching at the end with disbelief. “I thought we were doing everything in our power not to turn into a fucking high school cliché. Isn’t that you and Brett’s personal mantra?”

  Tristan fell silent, turning his head away to stare out the window.

  I reached over and flicked him in the ear. “What stuff?” I asked.

  “You know that annoys the shit out of me, right? Who flicks someone in the ear?” he mumbled without looking at me.

  “That’s sort of why I do it, Tristan. The whole annoyance factor plays a big role,” I joked. But Tristan wasn’t in a joking mood. He wrapped his arms around himself and curled as much as he could into the passenger door. “Look, we don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, man. It’s looks like any second you’re going to open that door and jump.”

  “That’s our problem. That’s always been our problem. We don’t talk about it.”

  It was bad. Very bad. I turned on my blinker and pulled off to the side of the road. “Alright. I guess we want to talk about it. So, this stuff, what was it?”

  Tristan ran a trembling hand over his face, then reached up and pulled on his seatbelt. Pulled it tight and let it go. Pulled it tight and let it go. “It wasn’t so much a thing as an action,” he said after the longest silence I have ever sat through in my whole life. Longer than the silence they use on American Idol when announcing who was eliminated.