Speak Softly, She Can Hear

by Pam Lewis

  Her father started going through the pictures again for Pepper, sliding them around on the table like a shell game. When he finished showing the photographs, Gloria put them back into the envelope and slid it into her purse. There was a long silence.

  “What’s Naomi up to?” her father asked at last. “I haven’t heard from her in a while.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  She spotted Will behind the bar, talking to a customer, and waved him over. She wanted him there while she told the story, because she was still shaky telling it.

  “This is Will,” she said to her father and Gloria. “Will, my dad and Gloria.” She touched Will’s arm. She’d learned to do this, to get it over with, so people wouldn’t spend time guessing: Were they or weren’t they? At the gesture, her father gave Will a hard, appraising look. Years ago that look would have undone her. Now she saw how little his judgment mattered.

  “They don’t know about Naomi,” she said to Will, and then she began. She described finding them at the stream that evening, Naomi’s hypothermia, her broken ankle, and Eddie’s departure using Carole’s snowshoes. She spoke of trying to make Naomi stand up, then going for help and collapsing on the path, that if it hadn’t been for Will getting worried about her and coming to look, she’d have died too.

  “What about the husband?” her father asked.

  “They found him a day later way off the trail,” Will said. “He died of exposure too. He must have gotten lost on the way out.”

  “Poor guy tried,” her father said. Whenever she told the story of that night, the effect was always the same. People went away with the belief that Eddie had struggled off to get help for her and Naomi and then died cruelly from the effort. They always reacted as her father had. Poor guy. In the weeks right after it had happened, this had galled her. Now, however, the impression of Eddie as heroic was always and easily erased by the true one that belonged to her alone. Her memory of the dark gash in the snow into which Eddie had sunk. That and knowing that the last words he had ever heard were Rita Marie Boudreau.

  Her father cleared his throat and settled back in the chair. He took a breath and held forth, the paterfamilias reminiscing for this little circle of his daughter’s friends, as if she was still his little girl, as if he was the adult, the person of wisdom. He cast Naomi’s legacy for them as if only he had ever known her, as if they all needed his great wisdom to give shape to the tragedy of Naomi. He said she was a striking girl, intelligent but troubled, given over to urges. It was a shame, a blow for Carole to lose a longtime friend. He said, after a moment’s thought, that Carole’s mother had actually been quite fond of Naomi, but she would have liked the friendship better if Naomi hadn’t wielded so much influence. “Our Carole was an impressionable girl.”

  Hearing about Naomi, seeing her again cast as the troubled but irrepressible girl she remembered, before alcohol, before Eddie, before everything, Carole wished with a sudden and overwhelming urgency that Naomi could hear all this. Whoever thought her parents had ever liked anything about Naomi? It was as though Naomi’s death were suddenly brand new, as if it had just happened, and Carole missed her sharply. She wanted Naomi to walk in with her red nails and her high heels and stolen jewelry. She wished she could tell Naomi about that night, about how she’d tried to save her life and how she had tracked Eddie down and heard him die.

  That day in Chacha’s, Naomi had been trying to say out loud to everyone there that she knew who had killed Rita Boudreau, who had really done it. Not Carole, but Eddie. Eddie Lindbaeck, her own husband. Naomi had learned the truth and must have been ready to reveal Eddie to everybody. Naomi had married him, but in their ancient triangle, she had finally opted for Carole after all, the way Carole, in the end, had tried to save Naomi’s life.

  Her father always picked out one person to direct his remarks to. In fact, he’d told her about that once when she had to give a report at Spence during assembly. Find a friendly face, he’d said. And speak to it. And now he found Pepper to speak to. “My Carole skipped the fourth grade. She was a precocious girl, always one’s best friend, interested in everything back then.” He glanced at her and then said to Pepper, “A bit like you, I suspect.”

  Carole was awash in the warm familiarity of his voice when he checked his watch, a signal to Gloria. She waited a few moments and then started to collect things, making it clear that they would have to be leaving. Headed back home, she explained. Something about a birthday party for one of the grandchildren. Otherwise, of course, they would have stayed longer, but they hadn’t known for sure if Carole would be here. They’d taken a chance to find her here, and wonderful to meet her after all this time, and the next time, of course, they wouldn’t rush off. “And wonderful to meet your friends,” her father was saying, winding down. “How much this means to me. To us.”

  She rose and walked with them to the top of the stairs, Will and the Weaver-Lears following. Her father gave her the same stiff hug he’d given her when he came in. They’d be in touch, he said. She’d have to come visit them. Gloria leaned in and kissed her once on each cheek. Carole watched her father and Gloria go downstairs and pause before opening the door to the street, where her father turned and raised a hand. “Sweetie,” he said, and smiled up at her. It was the name he’d had for her all those years ago, when it used to annoy her, when she’d taken her parents’ affection for granted.

  Will put a hand on her shoulder, and they walked back to the sofas by the window, where she stood for a moment, looking at them all, at Rachel and Morgan and Pepper. Coming back here with them, back to Vermont, had been no accident, she now understood. She recalled her shock in that dark candlelit room on the night they’d had the conference, when Morgan suggested they move to Vermont. She could have refused. She could have easily split off from them and gone anywhere in the country, in the world for that matter. Anywhere but here. Anywhere but Vermont. Instead she recalled the slight frisson at the very idea of it. She remembered taking the map to the bathroom, greedy to see how close the place they were going to would be to Stowe. At the time she’d said to herself that it was to make sure there was enough distance, but that hadn’t been it. No. She’d been hungry to come back here. And for the whole long drive back across the country, her heart had often beat faster at the thought of where she was going. From fear, oh, yes, fear. But anticipation too, because a part of her had always needed to face what she had done.

  For a very long time, she had marked the start of her life from one single terrible night in a motel room in Stowe. What went before had been lost, or lied about, or muddied, and what came after had become her life. What she did that terrible night had driven her from her family and her past, across the country and back again. In the new life she had made for herself she’d kept her distance. She’d kept her silence. Now her mother was dead. Naomi was dead. Eddie too.

  Carole sat on the sofa before the tall windows of Chacha’s, safely among her friends. These people, this place, they were now her life. She shuddered to think that she’d almost lost them. At sixteen, with her whole life ahead of her, she’d had no way to see Eddie for what he was, to understand his cruelty. Neither had she understood the power of the secret she was keeping. She’d had no idea that a secret could grow with such speed and intensity, coloring all her decisions, governing her life.

  And what did she know now? Something simple and powerful. There can be no love when people are divided by a secret. To be loved is to be known fully. To be known and still to be loved.

  Acknowledgments

  For their many readings and consistently helpful critiques, I offer grateful acknowledgment to Bruce Cohen, Leslie Johnson, Terese Karmel, Wally Lamb, and Ellen Zahl; also to Jane Christensen and Gene Young. Thanks also to my agent, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, for the speed and enthusiasm with which she responded to this book, and to my editor, Rob Weisbach, who knew just how to help me make the book better, and then better again. Most of all, to Robert Haskin
s Funk, whose knowledge of survival in the outdoors informs this book and whose patience, love, and support helped me to complete it.

  Reading Group Guide for

  Speak Softly, She Can Hear

  Author’s Note

  I once read that a child’s first successful lie is an important and necessary developmental step. It’s the moment—at about age three or four, I believe—when it dawns on us we are separate individuals. Until then, our parents have seemed to us omniscient. I loved this bit of information. It was both shocking and reassuring. It meant to me that we’ve all lied, which means we all know that uneasy mix of victory and remorse that comes with fibbing.

  So, knowing this, I wanted to write a story that would exaggerate certain elements. I wanted a secret (and its network of supporting lies) to be horrendous, immense, and nearly unbearable. I wanted the protagonist to be someone untested by life. A girl, I thought, who is young and academically bright, but also naïve, shy, unsure of herself. On top of this, I wanted her not to be alone with her secret. I wanted to ramp up the stakes by having two other people—both of them unpredictable and unstable—know her secret. I wanted them poised to come back into her life at any time and expose her.

  The theme apparently struck a chord with readers. “I’m galloping through it,” one reader told me. Another said she’d kept the book open on the passenger seat, “so I could read at red lights.” The urgency to find out whether Carole kept her secret, when she told, who she told. “I wanted to drag that girl to therapy,” one woman wrote. “But then I remembered we didn’t do that in 1965.”

  At a reading, a hand went up. “How could Carole not have told her parents?” The woman thumped her chest for emphasis. “I would have told my mother no matter what!” she shouted. It touched off a fierce discussion. Hands shot up defending Carole’s decision; she was protecting her parents. She was scared. But mostly, she was only sixteen.

  “I was exactly like Carole,” a woman told me later. “Lots of us were like that. Sheltered, afraid. It could have happened to me. I know it could have.”

  My favorite question of all came from a man at a reading in California. “I don’t want to offend you,” he said. “But is it possible the life Carole ultimately makes for herself in the novel—with Will, her work, her friends—is a better life than the one she’d have had had she gone ahead with what her parents planned for her?” I was thrilled by that question because yes, I believe that absolutely. Her own poor judgment compounded by lies she felt it was necessary to tell put an end to life as she knew it. But stripped of everything that was familiar and comfortable, she had to rebuild her life. She paid a huge price for it, but in the end, she succeeded.

  Questions for Discussion

  1. Describe the various settings in which the story takes place. What does Vermont in particular symbolize for Carole? The story takes place during the 1960s and 1970s. How does this unique period in history figure into the story?

  2. From the very beginning of their encounter, Carole defers all power to Eddie both sexually and psychologically, instantly believing his version of the events in Stowe. Why do you think she does this? Discuss Carole’s personality. Are there other instances with other characters in which Carole surrenders power? Do you think of Carole as weak or strong? Why? Do you feel her personality changes by the end of the story?

  3. At the end of the novel, Carole is visited by her estranged father and the theme of family relationships comes full circle. How is this theme of family explored throughout the novel? How does Carole’s relationship with her parents change after the events in Stowe? What is the nature of Naomi’s family life? How do the familial relationships in the novel define and shape the characters and their actions?

  4. What is the nature of Naomi and Carole’s friendship at the beginning of the novel? Why do you think Naomi befriended Carole? What motivates Naomi to continue seeing Eddie, even after the events in Vermont? What is your overall opinion of Naomi? Do you consider her a product of her own design or a tragic character, the victim of unfortunate circumstances?

  5. What is the symbolic significance of snow throughout the novel? Use examples from both the opening chapter and the final chapters of the novel. What does the method in which Eddie and Naomi die symbolize?

  6. Describe Will and Carole’s relationship. Why do you think Carole decides to finally tell the truth to Will? How does he react to the story, and what does that reveal about his character? What is the significance of Will’s profession as a survival expert?

  7. Though Rita’s character is never explored in depth, she is ever present in the novel. How do you think she came to the motel room that fateful night? Why do you think there were very few articles and no in-depth murder investigation after the body was found? Is she a sympathetic character or merely mysterious? What do Rita’s presence and subsequent death symbolize to Carole?

  8. Morality is a major theme in the novel. Discuss the significance of morality in Carole’s situation. Do you think morality played a part in her decision to keep quiet for so many years, or was it only fear? Who are the characters in the novel who represent morality? Are there peripheral characters that have questionable morality? Discuss these characters and their situations.

  9. Do you agree with Carole’s decision to perpetrate the myth of the events leading to both Naomi’s and Eddie’s deaths? Why do you think she withholds the truth from the public at large? Do you feel Carole achieves vindication for everything that Eddie did to her? If so, how?

  10. What does the title of the novel mean? Who might the “she” in the title refer to?