“Just sit still, oh my God, there’s no one else in, they didn’t tell us what to do in these situations, it doesn’t look too deep, but there’s a lot of blood, just keep breathing, all right? I have to—”
And then there’s quiet. Quiet in the store, I don’t know where she is but she’s gone, and quiet in my head. The scissors that she had cut me with are in my hands, although I don’t remember taking them. I reach out slowly and wrap my bloody finger in a pristine white towel on the desk next to me. I stand up and place my gift certificate and a five-dollar bill carefully to the side of the puddle of blood, then drop the scissors into the bowl of lukewarm water, watching the red feathers spiral through the liquid for a moment before I turn to leave. I find the switch on the top of the sign and slide it so that OPEN turns as dark as the pavement outside. The bell laughs again as I exit.
The Comforting Voice
Norman Prentiss
“She misses her grandfather.”
Josh could barely hear his wife over their daughter’s wailing. As usual, no discernible trigger prompted Lydia’s shrill cries. They’d searched for physical causes: a rash or some undetected illness that X-rays and reflex tests and specialists might uncover. The doctors insisted she was perfectly healthy.
A happy baby, most of the time.
But any time of day or night, at home or during their increasingly rare stroller walks in the neighborhood, she’d fall into a full-throated fit of screaming. In public, heads would turn, neighbors or strangers offering help or sympathy. Some of them clucked their tongues, wondering what kind of parents would allow their baby girl to suffer such agony.
As if there was anything to do. When Lydia got like this, nothing would calm her.
Not even bedtime exhaustion. Twelve pounds now, lungs each the size of a plum, yet she could last for a full hour. Then finally the tease of calm, her parents sliding quietly under covers, heads hitting the pillows, almost drifting off, a sudden gurgle, an infant intake of breath, and then the shrieking began anew.
The same pattern several nights in a row, and Josh could barely function. Without sufficient sleep he was irritable at work, and even with his wife. He feared he’d fall asleep behind the wheel of his car. One morning he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten to his office building. The wall decorations looked different, and the eyes in the owner’s portrait blinked a greeting at him. At his cubicle, entry boxes pulsed on his computer screen; their labels changed as he clicked the cursor into them.
Josh couldn’t take much more of this.
A loving father would do anything for his daughter.
He would do anything to make the noise stop.
—
They’d had one solution.
He put up with it, for a while.
—
“Do the voice,” Michael prompted from the next table.
The request offered Josh another odd spotlight of lunchtime popularity. In a workplace where management forced staff to compete for largely nonexistent bonuses, people typically kept to themselves. Lunch was a strict noon-to-twelve-thirty routine, their office too far from Route 21’s drive-thrus, so they brown-bagged in near silence or waited to zap a Lean Cuisine. One day last month, in the tedious line at the building’s only microwave, Josh made an offhand comment about his father-in-law. He stared at the instructions for his baked chicken with string beans and said, “Jesus, this is ridiculous. Pull back film over vegetables and rotate meat one quarter turn. What am I, a chef?”
Not much amusement from the captive audience, so Josh did the worst thing you can do after a joke: He explained it. “Cheryl’s dad. He’s, uh, staying with us awhile. The old guy had surgery to remove his vocal cords, so he speaks with one of those electronic voice boxes.” Josh set his entrée on the counter, then rubbed his right hand over his Adam’s apple. “Holds the amplifier here and pushes a button.”
Did he dare? Josh wasn’t necessarily a gifted mimic, but a few times in his life he’d stumbled into near-perfect vocal impressions: his high-school soccer coach with the faint lisp; an undergraduate history professor with a thick southern drawl. And his father-in-law—not as he’s known him all these years, but the way he sounds now, after the laryngectomy.
“Oh, God, it’s too cruel,” Josh had protested. “I really shouldn’t do it.” Yet such protest, even among barely civil colleagues, couldn’t help but prompt a few voicings of encouragement, “You brought it up” and “Well, now you have to.”
He was a musician begged into an off-duty performance. Oh, it won’t be as good without the orchestra; I apologize in advance; usually I like to warm up my voice, practice a few quick scales…
Josh pressed his hand to his throat, miming each syllabic push of the button, and he found the guttural monotone at the back of his throat as he reenacted his father-in-law’s complaint about microwave cooking.
Again no response, at first, but the comical irony of it grew—at the idea of an older man’s verbose phrasings pushed through an electronic device, at his struggle to convey resentment without variation in pitch or volume—and by the time Josh hit “rotate meat,” Patti in accounts, Patti who never laughed or even listened since other lives didn’t interest her, Patti had covered her mouth, too late, because she’d done an actual spit-take of her Diet Coke. His coworkers laughed at that and at Josh, too, as he finished out the mimicked phrases.
“Poor old guy,” Josh said. “Can’t help the way he sounds. But he makes the strangest comments, in that voice. I swear.” Josh crossed himself to affirm he spoke the truth but also to hint at solemnity. He walked a fine line. Even though most listeners identified with jokes about difficult in-laws, it might seem cruel to mock someone who was recovering from a serious illness.
“Cheryl’s father is staying with us a lot, while he’s getting better. Also, he’s really happy to spend time with his new grandkid.”
Hank, one spot ahead in the microwave line, asked the obvious question. “Your little girl. How does she react to…?”
“Yeah, I was worried about that myself,” Josh admitted. “Turns out, Lydia doesn’t mind it at all.”
An understatement, really, but he didn’t feel the need to share everything with his coworkers.
He lifted one corner of the plastic film over his frozen entrée, collected a napkin and fork from the countertop. Performance over, head down, just getting through lunch again and then back to work. On impulse, and without looking up, he deadpan monotoned the start to a lullaby.
Hush little baby, don’t say a word.
Pappy’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.
The lunchroom echoed with rare, uncontrollable laughter.
—
Truth was, Josh didn’t much like his father-in-law and had initially fought with Cheryl over the decision to allow his visits.
It should have been easy to talk her out of the idea. By Cheryl’s own account, he’d been an indifferent father at best. At worst, he had the personality of a mean drunk—without needing any alcohol or Hyde’s potion to prompt the meanness. He’d slipped into rages at his wife and daughters when they failed to meet his impossible, old-fashioned expectations, and sometimes young Cheryl had hidden from him until the latest arbitrary tantrum subsided. He never apologized afterward. “I speak what I feel. Not good to keep things bottled up.”
Some of his tirades insisted that his family was “bringing him down”—trapping him in a drab home and in a small-town job with no prospect of promotion. “I wish I could be rid of you,” he sometimes said, adding an unfortunate, colorful turn of phrase: “Weren’t for you worthless ladies, I’d be farting through silk.”
And yet, when Cheryl attracted boyfriends, he deemed none of them worthy. As her relationship with Josh grew serious, her father bristled at the idea. “Get her back here in an hour,” he’d say, if they were headed to a movie. “She has house chores to finish.” After a flawlessly prepared holiday meal, Mr. Hampton pulled Josh aside for a private discussion. It was like a moment
from the fifties, a father-to-suitor exchange on the family porch. Mr. Hampton lit a cigar, puffed, then exhaled a slow series of smoke rings. “Cheryl gets bored easily,” he said. “She’s ready to break up with you.”
To Josh, the spiteful phrasings were well aimed. The words would never leave him. But what bothered him more was the man’s dismissive treatment of his own family, particularly (of course) Cheryl. He couldn’t go back in time and comfort the girl who’d hid beneath the bed while her father raged; he wasn’t the neighboring schoolmate who sometimes offered shelter to a frightened teenager. Instead, he could be there for her now, moving forward. He promised he’d stand up to her father, make him treat her properly. But no, Cheryl had begged, that will only make him worse, and Josh had said (getting on one knee), Then let me take you away from him.
Surprised by news of their engagement, Mr. Hampton responded in a flat monotone that presaged the mechanical voice he’d use late in life. “That’s not going to happen.”
—
Josh found himself repeating those same words years later, when Cheryl first mentioned her father might visit. Not going to happen. There was no point in discussing it. Cheryl didn’t need reminders of her unhappy childhood and who was responsible. She knew why her mother passed early from their lives and why her sister moved to the opposite coast and never contacted anyone.
“Hear me out,” Cheryl said. She stood in the doorway; Josh sat in the den, the television muted, some client folders balanced on the arm of the couch. “The guest room’s all fixed up,” his wife continued, “but we never have company. It’s going to waste.”
His wife stood separate from him, like a punished child in the corner offering illogical excuses. Her request was dishonest, Josh thought at the time: An empty room doesn’t necessarily cry out for a visitor, especially a troublesome relative.
And then he recalled how distant she’d seemed of late. Secretive.
“I’ve been speaking to Dad,” she said.
Josh didn’t respond.
She stepped closer to him now, the secret out. “He’s apologized to me. For everything.”
“He hasn’t apologized to me.” Even as he spoke, Josh realized the discussion shouldn’t be about his own feelings; it should be about Cheryl, what she suffered in the past, what her husband rescued her from—and how he wouldn’t expose her to that threat again.
“Oh, he does apologize to you, Josh. He’s already said as much.”
He wondered how often his wife had spoken to her father. Wondered if she’d already offered their guest room to him.
“Think about what this would mean to me,” she said. “To be reconciled to my father after all these years. At peace with my past.”
“People like him don’t change.”
“He’s different now,” she said. “He really is.”
“I’m glad you believe that.” Such a dismissive, condescending thing to say, but Josh still couldn’t think his wife was serious. He’d experienced Lewis Hampton’s cruelty firsthand, heard countless unforgivable stories from the same woman who now posed as her father’s advocate. “I can’t talk with you about this now.” Out of guilt, Josh added, “Maybe some other time.”
“We don’t have time,” she said. “He doesn’t, at least. Dad’s ill.”
Throat cancer. The man’s archaic ritual of an after-dinner cigar had finally taken its toll. Or karma finally caught him, Josh was tempted to say.
And then his wife’s hand dropped to her stomach, her palm curved slightly instead of flat.
She’d been secretive, yes. But not only about phone calls with her father.
Josh nearly jumped from his seat, so clumsy that he brushed the stack of folders on the couch arm and they went flying, papers spreading out, and he didn’t care as he rushed to his wife, almost afraid to hug her, the idea of it so fresh and fragile, because she was glowing, really glowing, as she smiled and said: “A child should have a grandfather, don’t you think?”
—
“Call me Lewis.”
Josh barely recognized the man Cheryl led through the front door of their home. Seven years since he’d laid eyes on his father-in-law, yet now he looked decades older. The weight loss made an immediate impression, but more striking was the stoop to his shoulders, the frail uncertainty of his gait as if he’d lost all confidence in his body.
The biggest alteration was in his voice.
Lewis Hampton released the speaker device he’d pressed against his throat, and it dangled at the end of a plastic lanyard. The old man held out an unsteady hand.
Josh hesitated a moment, then accepted it. A handshake is a gentleman’s gesture, easy to perform without considering the implications. Mechanical, like his father-in-law’s new voice.
That evening, their guest sat at the kitchen table while Josh chopped vegetables for a stir-fry. Lewis wore an odd smile, his outdated prejudices no doubt dumbfounded to see a man of the house preparing dinner.
They spoke infrequently during the meal. The device swung loose on its lanyard as Lewis chewed his food. A flesh-colored bandage over his throat incision flapped open on one side as occasional gusts sputtered through the opening. Josh mentioned a few projects at work—the same job his father-in-law previously complained hadn’t been good enough to support a family. Cheryl explained how far along she was in her pregnancy and admitted she hadn’t yet learned the child’s sex.
“I’m not sure we want to know in advance. What do you think, Dad? Should it be a surprise?”
He shrugged and gave a thumbs-up sign—as if to indicate she’d be happy either way, that whatever his daughter decided would be fine.
Maybe the old guy really had changed.
Not enough to help with the after-dinner cleanup, though. He stayed seated at the table while Josh and Cheryl collected the plates and silverware, then rinsed them in the sink.
After a bit, Lewis stood and walked toward his daughter. He seemed like he was working himself up to offer a hug or kiss of reconciliation. Instead, he put a gentle hand on Cheryl’s stomach.
She let him. She didn’t flinch.
Lewis fumbled for the device with his other hand as he leaned closer to her belly. “Hello, little girl,” the mechanical voice said, determining the child’s sex.
Cheryl excused herself for a moment, saying she needed to fix up the guest room. She’d already prepared the room the night before; Josh knew it was a pretext to give him and her father a chance to talk.
He’d found himself puzzling over the man’s behavior the whole evening. This was the same person who, the week before his and Cheryl’s wedding, announced to the whole family, “I won’t be there.” Then added, “Maybe I’ll go to her next one.” Josh squinted for traces of that old spitefulness. Previously, he’d have sworn it was a deeply ingrained personality trait. Could Lewis Hampton really have changed?
They stood in the living room, a handshake’s distance apart. Lewis lifted the device to his throat, pressed his thumb against a side button with each rhythmic syllable. “It can’t be easy having me here.”
Josh nodded. “Cheryl seems glad about it.”
“[You are] good for her.” Lewis misjudged the button presses and the first two syllables didn’t amplify. “Good for her,” the other Lewis might have said, but the artificial voice couldn’t convey any hint of sarcasm.
“I was [wrong] about so many things.” An understandable flub. Many people choke on the word when they admit they’d been wrong.
Josh nodded again, civil. “Cheryl’s going to be a terrific mother,” he said.
“Father, too.”
“Yeah,” Josh said. “I’ll work hard at it. I won’t let Cheryl be disappointed.”
Lewis struggled with the speaker device. A difficult conversation on an emotional level, made even more awkward by illness and technology. “So much. I know. You [can’t] forget. But maybe you can [for]give?”
The man’s eyes sold it. They brimmed with sincerity and barely repressed tear
s. But he was asking a lot.
“I’ll work hard at it. For Cheryl.”
Lewis seemed pleased by the answer. “I see clear now.” He leaned forward as if he wished to whisper, but there was no volume adjustment on his amplifier. His words echoed through the house, and Josh knew his wife could hear everything as easily as if she’d been in the room with them. “Cancer [is] the best thing. That ever hap[pened] to me.”
And Josh wanted to feel generous, then. Not just to please Cheryl but for his own sake. Anger is poison. If his wife could make peace with the past, he could, too.
Yet he couldn’t shake the sense that, with this unexpected reunion, Lewis had stolen something from him: that long-ago act of heroism seven years ago, when Josh played the knight in shining armor who rescued his wife from a fierce dragon. Now the dragon was age-stricken and feeble; he no longer blew bluster and smoke and fire but sputtered sad phrases from a hole beneath his chin.
—
At first, Lewis visited once a month. He’d drive out on a Saturday, then leave Sunday afternoon.
As Cheryl’s due date loomed, she raised the possibility of an extended visit. “He might be a bit of help once the baby’s born.”
Yes, Josh thought. Your father’s parenting skills were so noteworthy in the past. Out loud, he said, “Lewis would have you waiting on him hand and foot.”
“I don’t think so.” Cheryl had recently taken over Josh’s traditional end of the sofa, with her legs propped on the coffee table. “He’s made more of an effort to pitch in. Haven’t you noticed?”
Dark Screams, Volume 6 Page 5