Child of Silence

by Abigail Padgett

  Behind the hill the moon had passed its zenith and begun its slide down the back of the sky. A warning. The approach of the nightly down time, a dead zone hidden like an egg inside every cycle of darkness. A time when even things of the night cease their howling, their swift, padded movement across a million paths lacing the desert. The hours of terror in which nothing moves.

  Except in certain little-known places, Bo thought. Well-lit nurses' stations like beacons in silent psychiatric corridors. Oases of light where one disheveled sufferer in pajamas after another will congregate briefly, chat about last night's movie or tomorrow's breakfast menu as if it were perfectly ordinary to exchange pleasantries at 3:00 a.m. The hunger for the sound of a human voice. A need for reassurance. Never so great as in those who cannot sleep through those hollow hours.

  But there would be no friendly psychiatric aide here. No night nurse willing to put aside the charts and prattle about an article in Time or where to get the best deal on radial tires. Here there were only boulders, rocks, stones of every imaginable composition—an exhalation of matter older than breath itself. And the dead weight of a sleeping child.

  You will do precisely what the Indian said, Bradley. You will hide.

  The climb up the spill of rubble to the mine tunnel was treacherous. Every foothold created a dusty avalanche of rock that sounded like a shooting gallery in the desert silence. Bo wondered if it mattered. There could be no one else in this wasteland, surely. Even the killers could not come here. And yet there was a sense of something, someone, watching. A watcher in the dead hours? Impossible. But it was there. And no more inexplicable, Bo realized, than the fact that she was there. Some conscious thing, sharing this barren realm.

  Bo controlled a whole-body tremor of fear. Held it tightly inside the muscles of her back, her stomach.

  No panic. Absolutely none!

  Hauling Weppo and the backpack over the rim of the tunnel, she collapsed inside. Silence. No dripping limestone cavern this, with milky stalactites hanging from its ceilings. Just a hollow tube snaked into the hill for access to its veins, its gold, iron, lead. Metallic veins, sluiced through depths of earth before pterodactyls swooped in steaming skies. Before the earth cooled and wrinkled, throwing up these mountains like creases in a blanket. Just a mining tunnel. Quiet and safe.

  Bo took a measure of her surroundings. The tunnel was oval, with a flat floor. About six feet high. No supporting timbers. Rocks, some rounded and some jagged, protruded at every conceivable angle from the reamed interior of the hill. Most bore a yellowish cast, orangey brown striations. A scent of iron.

  Unfastening the blanket tied beneath the pack, Bo lay it on the tunnel's floor and carefully placed Weppo on it. Wakened somewhat by the jerky climb, he regarded her blearily. Bo pointed to a mottled yellow-brown rock at his head.

  “Rock,” she signed with the right-fist-banging-back-of-left-fist gesture every child learned in the Scissors, Paper, Rock game. “We—are—in—a—rock—house.”

  Weppo nodded.

  “Na-na,” he crooned against the rough blanket. “Na-na.”

  In sleep he pronounced the traditional grandmotherly endearment comfortably. So he'd had a nana who'd taught him to call her that, to pronounce two inaudible syllables out loud. Probably so he could call to her. So she could hear him. But who?

  If Gretchen Tally were right, Tia Rowe was Weppo's grandmother. Bo could not, even in manic reaches of imagination, picture the reptile-eyed senatorial candidate as a nana. Some things could not be, period. This was one of them.

  Then like a remembered bar of a Bach concerto, a deep voice sang, “... I know about the baby, the little boy. . .” Delilah Brasseur! That voice was nana's. Bo would have bet on it. The fondness there. The love.

  Resting beside the sleeping child, her back against an outcropping of fool's gold, Bo made an effort to relax. Stretched. Shrugged the knotted muscles in her shoulders.

  Scratched her head. It didn't work. Inactivity would produce its own entertainment. The manic brain detests boredom.

  On the tunnel's bouldery walls Bo saw flickers. Dull, smudgy pinlights that vanished when she moved her head, only to reveal others. Mostly near the tunnel's opening, where the moon's light still drifted. Fool's gold again. Traces of iron pyrite feebly reflecting the light. The tunnel was actually fascinating.

  With a cigarette lighter found in the leather jacket she created a bubble of gold haze that caught and shined on a million surfaces. Gritrock, porphyry, gneiss. Mentally she recited forgotten terms from a geology class. Was there pumice here? She could do her nails. And ironstone. There would be ironstone. The place smelled like a foundry. And the tiny yellow sparkles? Not pyrite but cairngorm. The yellow quartz of which her grandmother had a bracelet, each stone etched in a Celtic design. Each stone in the bracelet a story. Like a rosary.

  In the undulating shadows beyond the bubble of light Bo thought she saw a photograph, embedded somehow in granite. A photograph of Laurie before she died. Laurie signing something, trying to tell her something. Laurie before the gray dress and the lace collar, so still. Laurie in herringbone corduroys and a baggy Irish sweater, signing. But wait. Those were her clothes, the ones she'd worn when it all started. When she saw Weppo and knew he was deaf.

  Her thumb jerked away from the overheated lighter, and darkness swallowed the apparition. Sucking the burn, she tried to read the signs in her mind. But they made no sense. Was it Laurie's spirit? How would Laurie's spirit find her here? Weppo shifted his weight on the rocky floor, stretching the Indian blanket like a moth in a cocoon. Of course! Laurie could find her through Weppo. Two deaf children, connected in silence. Except that one of them wasn't a child, wasn't even alive. But would that matter? Laurie had been a child when Bo left for college, and never went back. Only ten. Laurie's spirit had come to tell Bo it was okay. Okay to have walked away in shame from a little sister your friends called “retard.” Okay to have forgotten birthdays. Okay even not to have asked a shy, awkward fifteen-year-old to be in your wedding.

  Bo flipped the lighter on again and saw only rocks where Laurie had been. No moving photograph. Just the sameness of rocks, any hundred of which might replace another hundred, and change nothing.

  “There is nothing but reality,” Lois Bittner pronounced as clearly as if she'd been sitting there.

  So this was reality. Rocks.

  You're sitting in a tunnel near Lone Pine. You're hiding here with Weppo until it's safe, and Annie's grandson comes. Laurie is dead. Weppo isn't. Move around. Keep your grip.

  Bo stood and walked carefully into the tunnel's depth, turning to check on the sleeping child at every other step. A fresh breeze alerted her to the presence of another corridor a hundred and fifty yards inside the hill, even before she came to it. A shorter, rougher cloister than the one in which Weppo slept soundly, it angled down through the hill's north face and afforded a view of the dirt road on which, Bo assumed, they'd come here. Through the noose of light at the shorter tunnel's end Bo saw something odd on the road. Something darker than rock, with unrocklike angles. A car.

  Hurrying soundlessly to the opening, Bo lay flat and peered out. It was a car, just sitting there. No one in it. No one around.

  Then she saw, emerging from within another tunnel in the hill across the road, the bright yellow-blue glare of a butane lantern. It signaled to someone nearby. Someone on the hillside beneath her. Someone in a Stetson hat, searching her hill for openings.

  Bo's heart shrank to a whine in her chest.

  Don't scream. Whatever you do, don't scream. And don't light the lighter. Don't make any noise. Get Weppo and run into the hill. It's honeycombed with tunnels. They won't find you. They cant!

  Panicked, Bo stumbled over a rock and fell hard on both hands. A searing pain shot through her right wrist. Her hand grew wet. Blood. But her fingers still moved. She'd torn her hand open, but the wrist wasn't broken.

  Great! Now you'll bleed to death. Tie it up with something but keep moving. T
his is it. The last chance.

  Bo tugged violently at her sweatshirt and found that it wouldn't rip. The leather jacket then. Its lining tore out easily, and she knotted it about her hand while running. But the nylon did little to stop the dripping blood.

  You might as well leave a trail of breadcrumbs. They'll see the damn blood.

  Weppo, wakened roughly by the scoop of Bo's arms, kicked and thrashed.

  “Shhh,” she whispered against the wiry head.

  Pointless. He couldn't hear. And he began to scream. A croaking scream, ululant and loonlike. Bo had heard it all her life.

  There was nothing to do but run. Run in the darkness through ragged stone that clutched and tore. Holding the writhing child with her left arm, she felt the tunnel wall with her right. A huge, directionless Braille that gave no instructions. Her hand was still bleeding. Behind her she heard a male voice—“In here!” And something else.

  Footsteps behind, closer than the voice. That sense of another presence. Laurie. It had to be Laurie, tagging after her as usual. The croaking shriek.

  The tunnel angled uphill, grew smaller. Bo hunched to avoid granite shrapnel lurking above her head, invisible in the dark. The footsteps, Laurie's footsteps, followed.

  “Go away!” Bo yelled as she'd done a thousand times. “You're a pest. Leave me alone!”

  Her right hand, she realized with a curl of pain, was signing the words as she said them.

  A dim light ahead signaled another tunnel, running down to the right, to the hill's south face. Partially collapsed, it allowed no way out. Above four feet of rubble in its center Bo could see a claw of sky, and hear a sound like a giant, slow-moving jackhammer. The sound seemed to be coming down from the sky. Were they drilling into the hill? Planting dynamite? Were they going to blow up the hill, blast all the tunnels shut, leave them inside to die? What else could they be doing with a jackhammer? The sound died as she listened.

  Then the male voice, closer.

  “She's goin' this way. Piece a cake!”

  Scrabbling up the narrowing main passageway, now a stifling trough, Bo realized her mistake. The tunnel was ending! She should have tried to get over the pile of slag in the collapsed tunnel. At least stufíed Weppo over it, given him one last chance for life.

  Edging the final inches to the tunnel's jagged end, Bo crammed Weppo behind her and blocked him with her body. Then, kicking and clawing at the walls, she tried to bring the little chamber down on them. Bury them in granite rubbish that might deflect the poison bullets, buy enough time for Charlie Garcia to come. For someone to come. But the hill, undisturbed beyond this point, held firm, packed by aeons of pressure. A few rocks broke loose and fell, but too few to bury them.

  Scraping the debris before her into a pile, she heard Weppo's scream, felt the presence of the other. Of Laurie, who wouldn't go away. Who was going to have to die twice.

  This isn't what was supposed to happen. Not this.

  Cowering behind the little rock pile, Weppo screaming, hysterical at her back, Bo saw yellow-blue light fill the space she had traversed in darkness. A man behind the light. Skinny. Short. Bent in the narrow space. In his right hand a gun with a black cylinder at the end. Grinning.

  “Up here!” he yelled over his shoulder. “Ya can hear the dummy!”

  With her bloody hand Bo found a jagged stone and wrapped her fingers around it. He hadn't seen her yet. She still had one nearly hopeless chance. Moving from behind the pile of rubble to give her arm enough room to throw, she placed herself squarely in his view.

  But Laurie thought of it first.

  Leaping from the bend of the south-facing tunnel, the ghost of her sister threw an arc of grit and pebbles into the man's face. Then a blast rang out in circles, shaking dirt, dust, rock from the walls.

  Bo saw the crumpled figure on the tunnel floor. Familiar. Wearing a skirt she might have worn in junior high. But it wasn't Laurie. The hair was white and wild. The skull wide. The skin darker than any Irish girl's, and weathered like old wood. In the chest was a gaping crater from which Annie Garcia’ s life drained in silent streams.

  “N00000!” a scream ripped from Bo's throat as she threw the rock in her hand. It hit the man in the neck. He snarled, lifted the gun, and then fell as half his head flew in shreds to splatter the primordial walls. Something, a sound, reverberated like a whirlwind through the space, pulling dirt and rock loose in showers. It had been another shot. More massive than the last. Deadly to the man with the gun.

  Bo could not close her eyes, could not stop a palsy that turned her legs to sand. Shaking, she leaned against Weppo and merely breathed as Rudy Palachek stumbled through the murky, dust-filled tunnel, a rifle in his hand.

  “Ms. Bradley?” he said with irrational courtesy, “It's okay. We got the other one, right back there.” He gestured with the rifle. “With a knife. Cut him up a little, while Andy broke his wrist to get the gun. But he'll live to talk. Don't worry. You can come out now. Bring the boy on out. It's okay. Charlie Garcia brought us here in time.”

  Bo tried to move and could not. Every muscle was locked. Her whole body a soundless scream that could not move. Behind her Weppo's shrieks faded hoarsely.

  “I scream because I am a bird.” The Paiute chant filled her ears as she stared at the old woman on the stony floor.

  “The boy will rise up.”

  As tears blurred her vision, Bo began to rock. Just slightly, but enough to break the paralysis. Weppo crept under her arm and then clung to her, rocking softly at her side.

  “Uhhhh,” Bo tried to speak, but the sound emerged in a croak.

  From behind Rudy, Andrew LaMarche emerged, breathless in a rattle of pebbles.

  “Oh, God,” he whispered. “Bo. It's all right. You saved him. Look. He's right there next to you. He's alive. And so are you.”

  Bo felt the warm, small body beside her, felt it rise and run to Rudy Palachek, who grabbed the boy in huge arms and hugged him. In the boy's face she saw Laurie smile briefly, and then vanish.

  Andrew LaMarche was holding her, pulling her gently from the jagged crevice she'd thought would be her grave. And Weppo's.

  “Come on,” he urged quietly. “Let's get you outside. It will be better outside.”

  On her feet now, Bo stopped to touch Annie Garcia's face. Even in death the old eyes showed no fear, only that mysterious ferocity, now visibly waning, which was in Bo's experience the signature of those who live fully. Closing the bronze eyelids with her own pale, freckled hand, Bo thought she felt the spirit of the Indian envelop her one last time before the eclipse of death. In the tunnel's chill air Bo sensed a retreating notion her people called Cally Berry— Caillech Bera, the irrefutable truth of death. Somberly Bo stood and allowed herself to be led out the long tunnel. From inside the ancient walls she thought she heard the voice of a little girl who had never talked saying, “Bye, Bo. It's okay now. I know you loved me. Bye.”

  35 - Holy Innocents

  Tia Rowe woke somewhat earlier than her usual 6:00 a.m. and rose to open embroidered drapes, refreshed by a sound, untroubled sleep. The girl she hired after Deely left had vanished as well, but no matter. Skiltia Marievski knew how to make her own coffee. And her own future.

  Striding to the kitchen in an ecru silk dressing gown that deepened the butterscotch color of her eyes, she glanced at her answering machine. The retarded child had inherited her eyes, the Marievski eyes she remembered flashing from her aging father's face when he told her what he'd done.

  “You hated us from the day you were born,” he raged. “You broke your mother's heart with your hate. I pity you because you can feel no love, but I will not place the fruit of my life's work in your hands. You will inherit nothing from me! The paintings, my entire estate will be held in trust for my grandchildren, Kep and Julie, and for their children. Nothing for you, Skiltia, because you have given us nothing!”

  The old man died three weeks later.

  What a fool, to think she wouldn't get what she wante
d in the end.

  But the answering machine wasn't blinking. No one had called during the night. They should have called, left the coded message that would tell her it was over. Tell her the monstrous child, the mistake standing between her and twenty-six million dollars, was dead.

  Well, they'd call eventually. No point in wasting time worrying about it. Tia Rowe warmed a croissant in the toaster oven and assessed the best possible use of the morning.

  Sunday. Hard to accomplish much on a Sunday. People were at church. . . church! Perfect.

  Tia drank her coffee and set the Quimper cup back in its saucer briskly. An early mass. The widow alone, seeking solace and strength in prayer. She'd wear black, of course, but not the Givenchy. That would be for the funeral home this afternoon. Something tailored, then? No. Something blousy, feminine. Something to suggest a heart broken with grief.