Whisper Hollow

by Chris Cander

  “Push, Lidia. You can do it. I can see the head. I can see the hair!”

  And then, from within that torn cocoon, her child’s head crowning between her legs, came nothing but:

  Light.

  Silence.

  Wonder.

  Lidia unhinged her neck, let herself fall back, and landed as though on a bed of clouds. She closed her eyes against the blinding white. Only pressure, no pain. The pain was gone. Completely.

  And then, laughing.

  It sounded far away at first, laughing amid such torture. She wondered if perhaps she’d died. From behind closed eyes, she sought her mother’s face among the clouds. But then her arms were filled with something thrust gently against her. She opened her eyes and saw not the face of her mother, but that of a different kind of angel.

  “You have a son,” Geraldine whispered.

  Lidia swallowed.

  “A son! He’s bigger than I expected. But then Danny was a big boy, too. He takes after his father already.”

  Lidia looked down at the tiny face. He didn’t cry, but he was breathing, soft and even. His eyes were open, squinting at her. Lidia yanked back the towel that Geraldine had wrapped around him. How many arms and legs? How many fingers and toes? They exchanged a long look, this child-tick and its mother. Without his swaddling, she could see him for what he was.

  He was perfect. Two arms. Two legs. Ten each fingers and toes. Eyes as dark and calm as bedrock.

  As they lay, staring at each other, Danny burst into the room ahead of the doctor. Geraldine spread her arm across her son’s chest to stop his approach. They stood, astonished and reverent, in the doorway.

  October 21, 1965

  Lidia was standing at Gabriel’s crib, her chin resting on crossed arms, watching him sleep, when she heard a knock at the door. She pulled on her robe and checked the clock on the bedside table. She wasn’t used to receiving visitors.

  “I brought you this,” Stanley said when Lidia opened the door. He stood on her mother-in-law’s porch like a peasant begging for something, carrying a ragged yellow blanket rolled up like a loaf of bread.

  “Come in, Daddy.”

  He wiped his feet more than was necessary on the welcome mat before he stepped hesitantly in, then glanced around the living room, a reverse carbon copy of his own. The fireplace was on the left here. The staircase on the right. How did Lidia negotiate this backward life?

  “I’ll get you some coffee.”

  “I had some already.”

  “Cake then. Or kołacz. We had apricots. Your favorite.”

  He waved her off. “No, nothing. Don’t trouble yourself.”

  “It’s okay, Daddy.”

  “All right then, a little of the kołacz.”

  She cut him a slice and put it on one of Geraldine’s dessert plates, then set it down on the round kitchen table with a fork and a folded paper napkin.

  Stanley hunched over it with a forearm flanking each side, a gesture leftover from his childhood. He was the youngest of five hungry, greedy brothers, always protective of what was his, even if he didn’t really want it.

  He took a bite and nodded. “Good.” Then he licked the fork and set it on the edge of the plate and pushed the plate away. Reaching down for the blanket, he placed it on the table and put his hand over it, briefly, like a blessing.

  “I don’t remember if it was yours or your brother’s. Your mother made it, I know that.” He took a deep breath and bent his head. “She loved you. Both of you.”

  When Eagan was almost four, he’d come down with a fever. A week later, Eagan lay stiff and confused and wetting the bed, and they were told it was bacterial meningitis, that the extra white blood cells trying to fight it had flooded his brain, which swelled and pushed against his skull and damaged his frontal lobe. The effects revealed themselves more slowly in the weeks and months that followed: hearing loss, headaches, mood swings, temper tantrums. When he was six and had started school, he lagged behind the other children. He couldn’t remember his letters, even though their mother, Anna, sang the alphabet to him over and over again, the upbeat swing of her voice not quite hiding her growing concern.

  Then he began to grow. His height and brawn seemed inversely proportional to his slow speech, his poor memory, his undeveloped intellect. When he became frustrated at the other second-graders for taunting him — “Retard! Retard! Eagan is a retard!” — his occasional violent outbursts against them were unlike anything any of them knew.

  The school superintendent spoke to Stanley directly. Both of them were company men, higher up than most. Something like this had to be handled, see, or else it was going to create problems all around. Can’t have an eight-year-old who looks like he’s twelve and acts like he’s three going around roughing up the other miners’ sons. Couldn’t Stanley beat some sense into him?

  When Anna heard that, she was outraged. “He’ll never step foot in that school again!” she said. And he did not. She kept him home and did her best to teach him herself.

  But Eagan couldn’t stay focused when Anna wrote sentences on the chalkboard she set up in the kitchen, even though he tried. When she asked him how to spell “cat,” he would answer “six” or “z” or “I can’t remember.” She was patient, though, and gentle, and it soothed him to be with her. He rarely threw a fit when his mother was around.

  The following September it came time for Lidia to go to school, but Anna was hesitant. She would have liked to keep her little girl home as well, would have enjoyed the continued happiness of having both her babies with her in the kitchen, doing lessons after breakfast and making cookies after lunch. The three of them were always together and almost always alone. Ever since Stanley had been promoted to foreman after the big mine explosion — not long after Lidia’s second birthday — he spent little time at home. He was busy working to earn their living and staying clear of his damaged son, who had been so smart before the illness took hold. He couldn’t bear to be reminded of his own failure.

  Lidia looked at the tattered blanket in front of her father, and then at him. The pouches under his eyes seemed to sag more than the last time she saw him, a few weeks ago. His cheeks looked sunken, making his stubbled chin jut even more prominently forward.

  “Your mother had a way with your brother,” Stanley said. He kept his hands folded in his lap, his eyes downcast.

  Your brother. She hadn’t seen him since Gabriel was born. She pointed to Stanley’s plate, wanting to change the subject. “You didn’t like the kołacz?”

  Stanley pulled the delicate wedding china plate back toward himself a few inches with the half forefinger left over from an accident involving a horse-drawn hay mower in 1939. He picked his fork back up and poked at an apricot. “Where’s Danny’s mother?”

  “She went downtown.”

  “Oh.”

  “You sure you don’t want some coffee?”

  Stanley shook his head.

  “The baby’ll be up soon. You wanted to see him?”

  Stanley stabbed a bit of pastry and put it into his mouth. Moments later, when he finished chewing, he said, “I wanted to talk to you about your brother.” He took a slow breath and said, “He hasn’t been the same since January.”

  Lidia swallowed.

  “He told me what happened that night.”

  Lidia sucked in a breath of air and stood up, abruptly, and moved to the sink. She filled the kettle and set it on the stove, then lit the fire, fingers trembling. “What … what did he say?” she asked, without looking at him.

  “He told me what the guys said to him. About him wanting to enlist. About him being retarded …” Stanley shook his head. “He still won’t go back into the pit.”

  She let out the breath she’d been holding. Stanley dragged the fraying yellow blanket across the ironed tablecloth and against his chest.

  “Since you been away … I been trying,” he said. “But he won’t go back.” He wrung his hands around the blanket. “I don’t know what to do wit
h him now you’ve moved on …”

  Stanley took a deep breath. “I can’t take care of him, Lid.”

  The clock on the wall ticked off the seconds. Eight thousand miles away, the United States special army was fighting North Vietnamese troops. Lidia wondered what Eagan would do if he were there. Eagan in jungle trousers and lace-up boots and helmet. Would he understand how to be part of a platoon? Would he know what to do with a grenade? With a submachine gun? Would he know how to fill his own canteen?

  “I was thinking … maybe you could …” In her life, Lidia had never heard her father sound so watered down. “You have a way with him.”

  She thought back to the days and weeks following the incident in the bathroom. How she’d fed him his dinner that night, and every night for the next six months, up until the day she moved into Danny’s grandfather’s house. How she’d cooked his breakfast and packed his lunch, which he ate in his room because he refused to go to work. How she’d washed and mended his clothes. How she’d cut his hair and cleaned his room. Although he’d hardly spoken at all since that night, whenever he began to rock and moan and glaze his eyes against whatever daylight demons stalked him, she would rub small circles onto his broad back between his shoulder blades and hum one of the two lullabies she could remember her mother singing before she died.

  Although she didn’t treat him any differently, Eagan seemed to know that he had taken something from his sister. What he didn’t know was that he had given her something, too.

  The roundness that strained her clothes and plumped her face had kept her from becoming hard-edged or prematurely withered. And her fear kept her from telling anyone the truth about the secret that had grown inside her, even though it haunted her like a ghost. Thank God their father was ignorant of the begets of the seven-week-old baby sleeping in the other room. It would probably kill him if he knew.

  “Gabriel’s up,” she said, soft.

  “Okay.”

  “You want to see him?”

  Stanley pushed his plate away again and studied the imaginary crumbs in front of him. Then he dusted them off with a slow swipe of his hand and placed the blanket on the table. He closed his eyes and nodded slowly.

  “Sure,” he said.

  March 28, 1967

  He was forever moving. Even when he suckled at her breast, Gabriel pawed at the air like an animal. And he never crawled; he walked upright without assistance at nine months. Everything he did seemed rehearsed. Eating, walking, playing with blocks, the way he looked so seriously at everything.

  Lidia had been around kids all of her nearly nineteen years. Younger siblings of her friends, miners’ children. And every kid she’d ever known had made toys out of chunks of coal. It spilled off the train cars as they rumbled down the tracks. It came home in the pockets and cuffs of their fathers’ work clothes after they crawled out of the grave at the end of every shift. They threw it at one another in the streets and skipped it into the creek and kicked it along the endless stretch of rail that hauled the coal from the mines and out into the world beyond theirs. To anyone living in a coal-mining town like Verra, it was as common and necessary and plentiful and miraculous as mother’s milk. But the first time his daddy offered Gabriel a hunk of black diamond, when he was only fifteen months old, he snatched his fat baby hands away and made a face.

  “It’s coal, Gabe,” Danny said, holding it out again. “It’s all right. You can touch it.”

  Gabriel backed away and clutched his hands against his round bare belly.

  “It’s nothing,” Danny said, and then he laughed and tossed it up and down as easily as he would have a baseball just a couple of years before. “Well, I guess it’s more than nothing. It’s more like everything. Here, take a hold of it.”

  Gabriel looked him dead in the eye. “No,” he said. “Hurt you.”

  Occasionally, when he would lie in her arms as she rocked him to sleep, he would gaze off at indistinct points around the room. Lidia watched him narrow his eyes, and turned her own head to see what he was focused on. Nothing. A calendar. A curtain. A bare spot of wall where the paint had chipped. Once, she thought he might have been watching a mosquito. But his eyes moved the way they would if he were looking intently at someone’s face. Sometimes, he would let go of the yellow blanket that he called “Bobby” and lift a chubby hand and point.

  Other times, he smiled at the nothing in the distance.

  “You looking at angels again, baby boy?” she would whisper in the twilit room. She would tuck Bobby back under his chin and pat him on the back, then begin to chew on a hangnail to calm the panic that rose inside her. Danny boasted constantly that Gabriel was so smart, walking and talking so early. He pointed it out, proudly and with amazement, even to her, who was with him all day long.

  Was he smart? Was that all this was? Or was it something else? She peered into the sleepy hazel eyes blinking languorously back at her.

  He did look an awful lot like Eagan.

  September 13, 1967

  For the past six days, since receiving a fishing pole for his second birthday, Gabriel had refused to take a nap. Instead, he insisted that Lidia walk him across the tracks and up the mountain to the little stream that came down from Whisper Hollow and fed the big creek that ran through the town of Verra.

  On Gabriel’s birthday, Danny was working the hoot owl shift, so he had the day off. Lidia packed a picnic of baloney sandwiches and potato salad and an apple pie. She tucked in some napkins and a change of clothes and the long, thin gift she’d wrapped in brown paper and tied off with a blue bow. Then they took Gabriel up to the stream and spread out a blanket and ate their lunch. As they picnicked, they talked quietly to him about the leaves and birds and the random creaking buzz of cicadas in the oaks and maples. After a while, Lidia put three candles into the pie — two for his age and one to grow on — and they sang “Happy Birthday” and told him to make a wish and blow out the flames.

  As he did so, Lidia, with her eyes open, made one, too. Keep it secret. Keep him safe.

  Gabriel pulled at the bow and ripped off the paper, but there was no delight on his face when he saw the two halves of the pole. He reached out and touched the reel. “What is it?” he asked.

  Danny laughed. “It’s a fishing pole. Just your size,” he said. “I’m gonna teach you how to catch a fish just like my daddy taught me when I was little.” He opened the margarine container he’d filled with dirt and night crawlers dug from the dew-soaked garden that morning. Then he showed Gabriel how to thread a squirming worm onto a hook and how to cast his line into the stream in the quiet spots near the bank where the trout would likely be. And how to hold on to the little cork handle and bounce the worm and watch for the bobber to get tugged under the water’s surface.

  The first time he got a strike, Gabriel was so surprised he lost his balance and slipped into the stream before Danny could catch him. The trout got away, but Gabriel didn’t let go of the pole. “That’s my boy!” Danny said, and scooped him out of the water. Lidia used the picnic blanket to dry him off and changed his clothes for the spare set she’d brought.

  Raising her older brother had taught her about being prepared for accidents.

  Once he was dry and the stun had faded, Gabriel walked back to the bank and picked up his pole. He handed it to his father and said, “Again.”

  And every morning since, he’d told Lidia, “I no need a nap. Take me fishing.” After a couple of days of resisting and insisting that he lie down, that they could go later after they’d both had a rest, Lidia finally gave up. She helped him dig up the night crawlers and bait his hook, and helped him cast his line, and stood behind him so she could take over when he got a strike to keep him from falling in.

  They’d had rainbow trout for dinner three times that week already.

  “Gabriel, baby,” Lidia said on Wednesday. “Let’s please not go fishing today.”

  “I no need a nap.”

  “Well, you might not, but I do.”

&n
bsp; “Take me fishing. Please?”

  It melted her, the way he looked up with those saucer eyes so full of hope. The way he used the word “please” correctly and, if she was being honest, manipulatively.

  She sighed, balling the dishtowel, and tossed it onto the counter. “Fine,” she said, shaking her head and smiling with her tired eyes. “Go get your worms.”

  They repeated their adventure identically. Picnic, worms, casting, waiting. The only difference was that today was Wednesday and the sun remained hidden beyond a blanket of clouds. A cool breeze blew off the mountain, whipping a few early-turned leaves off their stems. Lidia could smell the ascent of fall.

  “Gabe, come lie down here with me a minute.” She lay back on a bed of leaves and patted her shoulder. Gabriel, who wasn’t tired, complied. He put down his pole and snuggled his overalled little body and Johnson & Johnson–scented head against her, and she wrapped her arm around him. For a moment, the sun poked from the clouds and radiated heat at them. Lidia closed her eyes.

  Minutes or hours later, when she woke, she felt no heat against her face. Or her shoulder. The clouds were thick again; the sky revealed no sense of time.

  She sat up quickly, smacking the stale taste off her lips. She looked around. The gagging sound of stream on rocks. The belly-up float of fallen leaves. A wavering V of geese against a pewter sky. How long had she slept? Where was Gabriel? She stood up, leaves sticking to her hand-knit sweater.

  Lidia ran toward the stream, scanned the bank for any sign of him.

  “Gabriel?”

  Without hesitation she picked her way straight out into the middle, hoping to see his pole sticking out from somewhere along the bank nearby.

  “Gabriel?” Louder now.

  She sprinted from the stream and back to where they’d last been lying. His pole and worms were gone.

  Standing, frantic and paralyzed, Lidia wanted to run but was unsure which way to go. Upstream? Down? Into the wood? How far would he go? What if he’d fallen in the stream and been carried away?