The Sound of Us

by Sarah Willis

  “You need to get married, sister of mine,” he said in that last phone call. “There’s got to be someone out there for you besides me.”

  The last thing I said to him on the phone was, “Oh, just shut up and leave me alone.”

  But he still talks to me even though he’s thirty miles away and only ashes in the bottom of a pond.

  I start digging a plot for my perennials, not bothering to water the backyard first. The ground beneath the first two inches of earth is all clay, but this is exactly what I need to be doing; I think less when my hands are occupied this way. Blisters begin to form even beneath the gloves, but I don’t stop until my stomach growls. It’s seven-thirty. Reheated pasta from the night before takes less than ten minutes to eat, and I’m digging again until it’s too dark to see. After taking a shower, I go to bed with the book for my book club.

  Long after I fall asleep, in the middle of the night, my phone rings.

  Chapter Two

  I wake with a start, the phone ringing less than a foot from my head. Before I even say hello, I imagine my mother’s sobbing voice telling me that my father’s dead.

  “Hello?” I say.

  “Auntie Teya?” A soft, timid voice. A child. I can hear the waver of tears behind those two words. It takes me a few seconds to clear my thoughts.

  “I’m not your Auntie Teya, honey,” I say. Even awakened abruptly from sleep, my left hand tries to figure out how to spell Teya.

  “Where’s Auntie Teya?”

  It’s a girl’s voice. She’s crying now with little hiccup breaths. “You have the wrong number, honey. What number are you calling?”

  There’s a short silence, then the child says, “371-4569,” as if she’s reading it off a piece of paper.

  “I’m 4566,” I say, thinking, Oh, I shouldn’t give her my number . “Isn’t there an adult there who can dial the phone for you?”

  “No.” A hesitant no. A scared no.

  “Are you all by yourself?”

  She doesn’t answer. She’s probably been trained to never say she’s alone, just as I was trained to never give out my number to someone who called the wrong number.

  “Sweetie, isn’t your mother home? It’s pretty late at night.”

  I hear her sniffle, then a sound like a moan. Goose bumps rise on my arms.

  “Is there something scaring you? You should call 911. Can you do that?” In her upset state, she might keep dialing her auntie’s number wrong. Dialing 911 should be easier. “Is there a fire or anything like that?” I shake my head. What is like a fire? My brain’s waking up, rebuking me for word choices.

  “Un-unh.”

  “But no one’s there?”

  She hangs up. Shit.

  In the dark, lying in my bed, I pretend I’ll go back to sleep. A minute later I sit up, dial star 69. A calm, machine-made voice gives me a phone number, and I write it down on the notepad I keep on the table by my bed.

  What now? I should call the police, but maybe the girl has reached her auntie by now. I should stay out of this.

  I dial her number.

  She answers on the first ring. “Mommy?”

  “It’s me,” I say. “The woman you just called. Did you reach your auntie?”

  I can hear her breathing, but she doesn’t say anything.

  “Honey, I’m worried about you. It’s . . .” I look at the clock. “Two-thirty at night. Someone should be home with you. Do you know where your mommy is?”

  “No.”

  I’m using a calm, gentle voice, trying hard not to show how nervous I am, trying to keep her talking. I don’t know how talking to me will help, but I’m apparently all she has at the moment.

  I have to think about what to say. Has your mother ever done this before, left you all alone? seems too personal. “Is there anyone I can call for you?”

  “My auntie.” Then, with a plea, “I want my mommy.”

  “Okay. I remember the number. It was a nine at the end, not a six, like mine. Should I try calling her for you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Okay. I’ll do that. Someone will call you right back. Maybe me, maybe your Auntie Teya, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Okay, I’ll call her.”

  I hear the phone click.

  I can’t remember the last time I was so completely awake at two-thirty in the morning. I pick up the phone and dial her aunt. A deep-voiced woman tells me she can’t get to the phone right now and to please leave a message. I hang up, call again, then hang up when I hear the recording again. If she were there, wouldn’t she answer the phone with it ringing so many times in the middle of the night?

  I call the girl back. She picks up the phone, but doesn’t say anything. Once again, I can hear her breathing.

  “It’s me. I’m sorry. Your auntie didn’t answer the phone. It’s just me. My name is Alice Marlowe. I think maybe I might live near your auntie, since our numbers are so close. I live in Cleveland Heights. Do you know where that is?”

  “Uh-huh. Auntie Teya lives there.”

  Oh, it feels so good to get a full sentence. It’s as if I’m interpreting for someone who won’t talk to me. “Oh, good. It’s a very nice place. I live by Severance Town Center. I go grocery shopping at Tops.” Actually I hardly go there at all, since I get most of my food at the Food Co-op, but instinct tells me to mention someplace common.

  She doesn’t say anything for a few seconds, but before I can figure out what to say next, she speaks up. “We go there. Mommy and me, and Auntie Teya.” She pauses. “I want my mommy.” She’s on the edge of tears again. I don’t want her to cry.

  “I’m sure you do. When was she supposed to be home?”

  Nothing. I probably shouldn’t have asked her that. Still, something has to be done. I press my luck. “Sweetie, I just want to help. Do you know when she was supposed to come home?”

  “Yesterday.”

  Something is terribly wrong. “Honey, do you mean the day that just ended? Thursday? Or Wednesday?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Sweetie, how old are you?” Jesus, I’ve never said sweetie or honey so many times in my whole life. I didn’t even know those words were in my vocabulary.

  “Six.”

  I’m sitting on the edge of my bed, but now I begin to pace around my bedroom, touching things; the smooth top of my bureau, the windowsill. “Is there anyone else you can call besides your Auntie Teya?” Auntie isn’t my word either—I always say Aunt—but I’m using her terminology, trying not to sound too white. As if being white might frighten her off.

  “Uh-unh.”

  “No one? A neighbor, a teacher?”

  “We just moved here, be with my Auntie Teya.”

  “Does your auntie live near you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  So this girl doesn’t live that far from me. “Honey, we should call the police.”

  She hangs up, the click like a slap.

  I feel so completely alone. I should call the police, but I don’t want to. I want to help her myself. I imagine telling Polly tomorrow how I talked to this little girl until her mother came home, a voice in the dark. But maybe her mother isn’t coming home.

  I call her back. “Don’t hang up,” I say. “I promise I won’t call the police or even mention them again. Just stay on the phone. We’ll talk until your mommy comes home. That way, if something scares you, you can tell me. I’ll be right here? Okay?”

  A long pause, then, “Okay.”

  I try to think of something to say. “What’s your favorite food that you and your mommy get at Tops? Mine’s raspberry sorbet. What’s yours?”

  She doesn’t answer right away, but this time, when she speaks, her voice sounds less frightened. “Snowballs. Pink ones.”

  I laugh. I’m not someone who laughs out loud often, and the sound is strange in my empty bedroom. “I haven’t had those in a long time. I used to like them a lot. And elephant ears. Those were my favorite. Do you like elephant ears
?”

  “Un-unh.”

  “They’re big and funny-looking, flat, with cinnamon and lots of sugar. I don’t think they sell them at Tops anyway. But I liked them.” I can’t believe I’m talking about snowballs and elephant ears to a six-year-old girl whom I don’t know at almost three in the morning. “Do you have food? Are you hungry?”

  “Un-unh.”

  “You sure? Have you eaten today?” Today seems like the wrong word. The darkness outside and the situation make it seem as if I’m occupying a lost time, neither day or night; a time held separate except for our voices on the phone.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Okay. Good.”

  My cat, Sampson, wanders into the room to see what all the commotion is about. He looks up at me standing by the window, talking in a dark room. He jumps up on the bed, waiting for me to get some sense and lie down. “Do you have a cat?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “I have a cat. Sampson. He’s a tiger cat, but really he’s just a big, fat, lazy lap cat. Do you like cats?” What I really want to say is, What is your name? How long will it take before she won’t hang up if I ask her that?

  “Uh-huh.”

  We talk for over half an hour. A harmless question, then a no or a yes, or more specifically, un-unh and uh-huh. Holding the phone, I begin to wander around the house, moving things around: a magazine into the garbage, a cup into the dishwasher. Finally I sit on my couch.

  “Honey, it’s almost four in the morning,” I say after she answers uh-huh to my question about Barney. “Your mother hasn’t been home for almost two days. We have to do something about it. Now don’t hang up on me, just listen to my whole sentence first, okay?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Either I have to come there and see how I can help you, or we have to call the police. Me, or the police. What should we do? Who should come help you?”

  A pause. “You.”

  I manipulated that, but if I had said I was going to call the police, she’d have hung up. And then I would have to call the police. But it would be all over, just a story to tell Polly.

  “Okay. I’ll come there and we’ll keep talking, okay? So someone can be with you until your mommy comes home. But you have to tell me where you live. Can you do that?”

  “Uh-huh.” She recites her address. It’s on a wide busy street with a division down the center. It traverses three cities.

  “Is it near any stores? Something I might know?”

  “Burger King.” And that does it, I know how close she is, only a few miles away in East Cleveland. Not the best neighborhood, but not too bad. By now, there’s a false dawn in the sky, a barely perceptible lightening that will go away, then come back as morning. The false dawn makes it easier to imagine leaving my house, driving to a stranger’s. I ask her apartment number, tell her I’ll be there in ten minutes.

  “Okay?” I ask.

  “Uh-huh.”

  I never even asked her name.

  The entire drive there, my hands sweat and I have to keep wiping them on my pants. What if her mother does come home while I’m sitting in her apartment? What if her mother’s dead? How long should I wait? What if I get to the apartment building, but am too afraid to get out of my car?

  You need to rescue this kid, Vince says.

  Oh, you think so, huh? Easy for you to say.

  Just do it, he says. Don’t wimp out on this, Alice.

  If we were on the phone, I’d hang up now. He’s right, fuck him. There are too many things I’ve said I was going to do and never did. My fear of failure drives me on.

  Chapter Three

  When we were ten, Vince created a detective agency, making business cards by drawing an eye over the picture of a pie on my mother’s recipe cards. He assigned lookout stations to the neighborhood kids, placing us near the homes of people on our street who had left on vacation. “Burglars know these things,” Vince said. “They’ll be here in droves.” Vince assigned me to the backyard of the McHughs, who had gone to Nags Head for two weeks. The McHughs lived next to the deaf boy.

  The first day of my assignment, I sat behind the McHughs’ house between the back porch and a bush. That my brother thought burglars might come in the middle of the day made me question his intelligence, which, in turn, made me question mine. We liked the same foods, could talk in unison, and thought the same things were stupid, but now I thought he was stupid.

  After sitting next to the bush for a while, I began to get edgy. What if the McHughs had already been robbed, and here I was leaving my footprints in the dirt? As stupid as this whole thing was, I was determined to be the best detective in the agency, so I got out of my hiding place and circled the house, keeping my eyes open for signs of a break-in.

  The back door was still locked. No broken basement windows. Cupping my hands around my face, I peered through the large oval window on the front door and jumped a foot when I saw a face peering back at me. It was me, reflected in the mirror on the McHughs’ closet door. Feeling pretty stupid, I came around the other side of the house just in time to see the deaf kid watching me through a window. Henry. We all knew his name, that he talked with his hands, and that his parents sent him to a special school. When his family had moved onto our street a few years before, my parents took us over and introduced us. Henry, a toddler with curly hair, stood behind his mother. Vince and I didn’t believe he couldn’t hear. We couldn’t imagine that at all.

  Seeing Henry at the window staring out at me, I was so startled that I automatically waved to him. He jerked backward as if I had shouted at him, and I wondered if I had said something wrong with my wave. But then he leaned forward again, a big, goofy smile growing on his face. He waved back.

  I ran back to my spot between the bush and the porch. I wasn’t supposed to be seen snooping around the McHughs’. What if he told his mother? Could he say that with his hands? But what really scared me, what made me run, was that I had waved to Henry, and he waved back. Now I would be expected to do so every time I saw him. That smile on his face: I knew now what it meant to him to have someone wave to him. I promised myself I would. I would even go out of my way to make friends with him.

  Sitting on the hard ground, my face hot, I took out my notepad and pencil and began to sketch pictures of dresses that would someday make me famous. In less than a minute, a door slammed. It was Henry’s door. Through a border of tall, staked marigolds, I watched Henry come out into his backyard. He looked around. Was he looking for me? Ducking down, I kept my eyes on him through an opening in the bush.

  How would he play all by himself? When I was by myself, I always had a conversation going on in my head, as if I were talking to someone. Even reading, I heard the words. How did a deaf kid think without words? Did he see hand movements in his head? Was it like watching ballet without the music?

  Henry got on the swing that hung from a big tree and swung back and forth, staring up at the sky. There was this look on his face, a distant look, as if he weren’t really on the swing at all, but someplace else, and that felt familiar to me; that was how I felt on a swing. Finally he jumped off and went over to a sandbox with trucks and old pots and pans. He stood there, looking down at the box, then started moving his hands in sharp, quick motions. His back was to me, but it was obvious he was angry. Then I got it. He was yelling at his sandbox and his trucks. A deaf person could yell his guts out with his hands and no one would hear.

  Was he mad at me? That I had waved then run away? I couldn’t watch his silent, painful anger, and I looked back down at my drawing, the same skirt I always drew. But a minute later, I heard a loud, high-pitched cry. I lurched forward from my hiding spot to see what had happened, landing on my hands and knees. Henry stood where I could see him perfectly, right between the end of the flower bed and the garage. He looked right at me. We both froze, but even holding his body still, so much was on his face. I saw surprise and questions and worry. He must use his face as much as his hands, and when he thought, his face just went int
o action. What would it be like to have your thoughts exposed like that? How would you tell a deaf boy to be careful what his face showed? Then suddenly he hooted like an owl. I swear he said who, but really he was just letting his breath out and shouting at the same time. Then he ran across the backyard to his house, and the door slammed.

  My heart was beating a hundred miles an hour, just as if I had seen a burglar. But he was only a deaf boy.

  I never made friends with him. I never even tried. He’s not even why I became an interpreter. I got the book on Helen Keller because it was assigned in school, learning the manual alphabet because it was cool and I could talk in secret with my friends. I became an interpreter because it was something I could do well.

  Not doing anything for Henry is one of the things that comes to me whenever I begin the list of my regrets—a long list I will now end by saving this little girl.

  Chapter Four

  The apartment building is an old four-story brick on the corner of Superior and Hanson. There’s a center doorway set back deep in between the two sections of the building, and the street lamp casts shadows of trees against the brick walls. Only the archway is lighted, and one set of windows on the third floor. I think about those movies with abandoned castles and the strange men who always open the front door. What the hell am I doing? I park right in front under that street lamp. A sign reads NO PARKING, 7:30 A.M.-9:00 A.M. Seven-thirty is hours away.

  I reach for my purse and it’s not there. I spell shit with my hand, and say it out loud. If I go home for it, I’ll never come back.

  Looking around first to make sure no one is lurking in the bushes, I get out of the car, making sure all the doors are locked. The false dawn is gone. It’s dark as hell.

  With a tight fist, I hold my keys so the car key sticks out between my fingers, ready to jab someone. Good thinking, Vince says.