Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See

by Juliann Garey

  She has always preferred to sleep naked. Ellen wrangles her into a Pull-Up at bedtime but it’s pointless. In the morning, wet or dry, we always find her bare-assed. Now her small body is soft and warm. I curl myself around her and think sleeping with her is like sleeping with a puppy.

  But now I am awake. The soft-glow numbers on the titanium Hammacher Schlemmer clock that sits on my dresser tells me it’s 2:37 A.M. Willa has been climbing into bed with me more and more frequently lately. Ellen, who’s been known to sleep through earthquakes, never realizes it until morning. Then she gets mad at me—says I am encouraging bad sleep habits.

  But I like it. It is my favorite time to spend time with her. I can give her what she wants—be the daddy she wants. No phone calls to return or meetings to go to. No reasons to tell her to be quiet or leave me alone. At 2:37 A.M. I am Willa’s hero. So I run my hand lightly over her impossibly soft skin—her back and perfectly round butt—and I hold both of her tiny feet in one hand. And I wonder how much longer I’ll be able to do this before it isn’t okay anymore. I assume Ellen will tell me. I assume she knows these things.

  Willa. Ellen. A world in two words.

  “Show me more,” is all I can manage.

  She turns the page. My stomach seizes but I don’t know why. There is a broad expanse of green lawn, a big oak tree, and a tire swing. I am pushing Willa on the tire swing. Her head is thrown back, her long blonde hair falls almost to the ground. She is six, maybe seven.

  “That’s the house on—”

  “Sand Dune Road.”

  “You remember the name of the street, but three weeks ago you didn’t know who I was?” she asks.

  “Things come back in bits and pieces.”

  I look at the picture again and can’t help associating that house with the beginning of the end. Even though I know I’m probably telling myself another lie. But it felt that way. Every time I turned onto our new street, I felt mocked.

  The house we bought was a block north of Sunset in a very nice but not overly ostentatious part of Brentwood. It had a swimming pool and a huge backyard. The school district was excellent. The drive into the office was fifteen minutes instead of forty-five. It made perfect sense. And I hated Ellen for making me buy it. For making me give up our little place in Malibu where we went to sleep every night with the waves breaking outside our bedroom window.

  I knew it wasn’t really her fault. If we’d stayed, Willa would have turned into just another beautiful surfer girl who hardly ever went to school, spent most of the day getting stoned, and ended up working at the Fred Segal in the Malibu Cross Creek Mall. No, there was really no other way. But the street name. I couldn’t help experiencing it as a not-so-subtle “Fuck you.”

  “What’s wrong with it?” Ellen screeched, exhausted from finally getting me to admit what it was I was pissed off about.

  “Sand Dune Road?” I yelled back.

  We were standing in the street in front of the house, watching Willa play on the picture-perfect tire swing. I looked up and down the perfectly manicured, perfectly flat, perfectly green street. “Why don’t they just call it Constant Painful Reminder?”

  “Oh grow the fuck up, Greyson,” Ellen said. “Not everything is about you. We’re doing this for her.”

  She was right. But I never stopped missing the beach. And then Willa started having nightmares. There’d been a robbery on our block. So I installed an alarm system. But still, Willa didn’t sleep through the night. She missed Shadow, the enormous German shepherd technically our neighbor’s dog but really the unofficial mayor and the only security system we ever needed on Beechwood Shore Drive, the little cul-de-sac we lived on in Malibu.

  Willa was sure there were men hiding in the bushes outside her bedroom windows. I wasn’t sleeping much then—couldn’t sleep—and so I’d stay up watching old movies. Willa would wake up from a nightmare at two or three in the morning and come find me and climb up into my lap and watch with me.

  “Remember when I was scared of the robbers?” she asks. I remember. After four or five nights without sleep, I would be seeing shadows, hearing noises. I would be convinced our house was being cased. I kept thinking there were men outside coming to get me.

  “We went to the lumberyard and bought planks,” I say, wishing this was not coming back to me so clearly.

  “And you boarded up all the windows in my room,” she says wistfully.

  And now I remember. That was also around the same time I had my office swept for bugs. And when I started buying the guns.

  “You made me feel safe.” Willa is lost in her completely bogus memory. “Really safe. Mom thought you were nuts, but I thought I had the perfect dad.”

  I look up at Willa and try to smile. “Sweetheart, I was nuts.”

  “But I don’t—you were fine when I was little. I remember. Everything. Vacations and holidays and—” She turns the pages of the photo album and points to a picture. Ellen, Willa, and me smiling, tan, vacationing on St. Barts. Less than a year before I left.

  “Look,” she says. Her voice is beginning to shake. “I remember you like this. Before.”

  My throat tightens.

  “What?” she asks.

  But I don’t know what to say or how to say it.

  “What?” she asks again, anxiously, impatiently.

  I point a shaky finger at the man who looks like me. “That is not before. It just looks like it.” Willa examines the photo, searching for clues.

  “But you were so—I mean, I would have known. I would have noticed. Something. You read to me and took me to the pony rides they used to have in the parking lot at—”

  She stops midsentence. Her eyes drift past my shoulder and settle on a group of patients who are engaged in some kind of art therapy. One young man has done an excellent job capturing the anguish of a woman who, for the last three days, has done nothing but push herself—forward and back, heel to toe—in a rocking chair, and sob. It appears the boy may have found his true calling.

  Willa turns back to me. Confused. And sad. Like I’ve taken her memories apart and reassembled them in a way that makes no sense.

  “When did it start?”

  I want to give her an answer that will help. I want there to be an answer. But there isn’t one.

  “I don’t know. I suppose there was a beginning. But I don’t remember there being a before anymore. I only remember trying to pretend. I remember the trying.”

  Willa thinks about this. Her elbows rest on her knees, which she’s let fall wide apart.

  She stares down at the freshly waxed wood floor. It starts small. Just a tiny rhythmic bobbing of her head. She is nodding. Little by little, it becomes a nod of true understanding and grief. I watch helplessly as it becomes a committed nod that engages her shoulders and upper torso. Her tears hit the floor—one, then two. And then they are falling too quickly for me to count.

  When she looks up, I can’t read the expression on her face.

  “I used to have these dreams about you when I was little,” she says quietly. “I still have them—sometimes. They’re all basically the same—they just come in different flavors. In one the police come to the door in the middle of the night to tell Mom and me you’ve been killed in a car accident. And then there’s a version where you die really heroically saving a little kid from being hit by a bus. And one where you’re the victim of a random act of violence. In my favorite one, I find out that you’re dying of cancer. I go to the hospital and sit by your bed and read to you and I’m there holding your hand when you die. The cancer one is the best because I get to say good-bye.”

  The tears are careening down her cheeks and she wipes at her nose with the back of her hand.

  “Those dreams always feel so fucking real, you know? And … every time … every goddamn time, I dream you died—that you’re dead, no matter how it happens. Daddy, I’m—I … always feel so … I feel so relieved. But then I wake up. And I know it’s not true. I know you didn’t die. That really,
you left me. And every time is like finding out for the first time. Over and over and over again.” She is gasping, choking on her sobs. “But that—that doesn’t mean I’m angry. I’m not angry. I’m not.”

  I want to die. Again. I could have died then. Way back then. It’s not like I didn’t think about it. I don’t know, would that have been better than leaving? Or just a messier form of the same thing? But it doesn’t matter. Because suicide is not one of the flavors her dream comes in.

  Maybe it’s not too late to die heroically. I could loiter near a school crosswalk and wait for some asshole to run a red.

  Miriam comes by and quietly deposits a box of tissues next to Willa. She pulls several from the box but is crying too hard to do anything but wad them up in her fist. No one in the lounge so much as glances over. If it ain’t psychosis, it ain’t worth the effort.

  I feel useless. I pull another tissue from the box, lean forward in my chair, and hold it up to her drippy nose.

  “Blow.”

  She stops crying and looks at me wide-eyed. Then she bursts into stuffy-nosed laughter. “Blow? What am I, three?”

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  She is standing in line with the other visitors, waiting to be frisked and sent out one by one through the glass cage with the double-locking doors. Her face is pale, her eyes are red-rimmed and swollen.

  “Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?” she says.

  I stand next to her until it is her turn to enter the cage. I want desperately to ask when she’s coming back, to hear that it will be soon—a few days, not more than a week. But I can’t. Who am I to ask her to come back?

  I am shocked when she reaches up and gives me a hug. I hold on, trying to memorize the way her hair feels against my cheek, the smell of her shampoo. Then she pulls away. I am sure that after today she won’t come again.

  I am convinced our last visit was more than Willa could handle. I give up and commit myself to wallowing. But as with most things, I am wrong.

  “Just because you leave doesn’t mean everybody else does,” Willa says when she shows up and finds that I haven’t shaved, slept, or eaten in almost a week. I showered only because Milton threatened to bathe me if I didn’t.

  She sits down on the couch. But when I make a move to sit next to her, she stops me. “No no no,” she says, shaking a finger at me. “I am going to wait here. You are going to go back to your room and you are going to lose the Wolfman look and the skanky sweatpants. When you come back looking like the father who inflicted irreparable trauma on me, I will be here. I promise.”

  And she is. I have no idea why. Or why she comes back the following week. But she does. And that weekend she shows up for an unscheduled Sunday visit because, she says, her roommates are driving her crazy and she can’t concentrate on her work.

  “Right,” I say, taking her backpack from her, “because an insane asylum is so much like a library.”

  “Well, there’s a book I need to pick up at Columbia anyway,” she says. “I need it for a paper and it was assigned for a whole course, so they’re totally out of it at our campus bookstore.”

  I nod, thinking I’ve never enjoyed being lied to more.

  An hour later, Willa kicks me under the table in the dining room where we are playing Scrabble. “Um, I think your girlfriend wants in on our game.”

  I look up and see Glenda dash into the activities room and duck below the big glass window. “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  Willa raises her eyebrows. “Whatever.”

  “Glenda!” I yell over my shoulder. “We’ve had this conversation. Many times.”

  Willa giggles. I shoot her a narrow-eyed look. “It’s not funny.”

  “Oh it is very funny.” She is enjoying this way too much.

  “Glenda!” I yell again. “Would you please come out?”

  Taking tiny steps and with her hands folded demurely in front of her, Glenda comes out of the activities room and over to the table.

  “Oh, why hello, Willa, what a pleasant surprise. I didn’t know you were visiting today. How nice. You know, your father is always so much more cheerful after one of your visits.”

  Willa smiles and nods. The effort of trying not to laugh is causing a sweat to break out on her forehead and upper lip.

  “Glenda. Stop,” I say. “I thought we had an agreement.”

  “Yes, Greyson, yes, we did.”

  “Oh really? What’s your agreement?” Willa asks.

  “Don’t! That’s—” But before I can stop her …

  “I leave you two alone during your visits or no sex for me.”

  “Glenda!” I yell and she flinches.

  Willa swallows hard and then whispers to Glenda. “I think you just violated the terms of your agreement. Big time.”

  Glenda turns and with a shriek runs toward the dayroom.

  “You realize your girlfriend’s a psycho.”

  “I know. And she’s not my girlfriend.”

  “Whatever. You gotta get out more.”

  “More?”

  Willa puts her letters on the board. “P-R-O-V-O-K-E. Triple word score.” She leans back in her chair and grins, smugly. “Ha.”

  And before I can even attempt to recover my dignity, Milton is walking around with his bullhorn calling an end to visiting hours.

  After nearly two months in this place, I have procured a coveted two-hour pass. I am out in the world. Sort of. Willa and I are sitting on the upper level of the hospital lobby. That’s as far as I’m allowed to go. Willa has brought Chinese food and chocolate cake. I am fascinated just watching the people below us walk in and out the front door. Anytime they want. No restrictions. In and out, back and forth, coming and going. Or just going. We have not talked about the going and I have to ask.

  “What do you remember about the night I left?”

  Willa looks up from her cake. “What?”

  “What do you remember about it?”

  “Um, pretty much every detail,” she says.

  “Tell me,” I say.

  “It was a warm night in September. I know because I had just started third grade.” She begins to tell me the story and then the story tells itself.

  It is a warm September night when I leave my wife and eight-year-old daughter.

  “I’d made you a present in school that day—a key chain with my school picture glued in the middle of it. You acted like you couldn’t give two shits when I gave it to you, but I really wanted you to use it for your keys. Your jacket was hanging on the back of your chair and I slipped it into the—”

  “You were wearing a blue dress with pink and green flowers on it,” I say without thinking. “And a headband.”

  Willa puts her fork down. “How do you—?”

  “I don’t know.” I am as mystified as she is. “I just do.”

  Her eyes wander to the people around us, to a group of doctors standing by the elevator bank, to the cashier at the coffee stand. As if maybe one of them has the answer.

  Her hand lies limply on the table. I put mine on top of it and she looks back over at me. “Go on,” I say. She pulls her hand away.

  “That night after dinner you promised to read me a story. Right after you finished cleaning up the backyard. I waited and waited but you never came.”

  I tell my wife I’m going out to the backyard to clean up the dog shit.

  “So I went outside in my nightgown—the purple one with the giraffes. The garage door was open and the light was on and all your dog crap equipment was lined up against the wall.”

  She stops. “None of this sounds familiar?”

  “Vaguely. I don’t know. Go on.”

  “Your car was gone. You were gone. I ran to the end of the driveway. I yelled for you. I remember the feel of the gravel on my bare feet. I opened the big gates at the end of the driveway and ran into the middle of the street in front of our house looking for you.”

  “Where did you think I’d gone?”

  “I knew you hadn’t gone to
the market or the video store or back to the office. I don’t know how, but I knew you’d left. Period. That’s when Mom came out. And told me to calm down. To stop crying. That you’d just gone to the market or the video store or back to the office. But Greyson, it’s not like it was the first time you’d taken off. I mean, I didn’t know that until much later. Do you remember that? Those other times?”

  I shake my head. No idea.

  “Mom was pissed as hell when you didn’t come back the next day, but she wasn’t scared. She didn’t get scared until, like, day five. And then she called Aunt Hannah and Victor. And after that there were people from the studio. And then the police. Lots of police. And random people I didn’t know bringing platters from Nate ’n Al’s and giving Mom Valium. Lots of Valium. And everyone kept telling me not to worry. That you’d be home soon. But I knew they were lying.” She looks at me, crosses her arms over her chest, and sits back in her chair. “That’s what I remember. What do you remember?” she asks pointedly.

  “It’s kind of a blur. A haze.”

  The story tells itself.

  It is a warm September night.

  Willa nods.

  I leave my wife and eight year-old daughter. I promised to read her a bedtime story. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

  I attempt a smile.

  But I leave before I can make good on the promise. Doesn’t matter. It’s only one of many I’ve broken. One of many times I’ve disappointed her. She’ll fall asleep before she realizes I’ve failed her again.

  Neither one of us says anything. Willa goes back to her cake. I go back to the ward before my two hours are up. But Willa has to take me. Because I am not allowed to go anywhere unaccompanied. I walk a few feet behind my angry, silent escort. Just in case I don’t feel small enough, humiliated enough, powerless enough already.

  Just in case I wasn’t sure where I stood.