The Weight of Silence

by Heather Gudenkauf

  “There are some slight similarities to the disappearances of Petra and Calli to the little McIntire girl,” Louis says. “Nothing concrete, but…but like Agent Fitzgerald says, we need to look at everything, no matter how hard.”

  “Oh my God. Oh my God!” Fielda slowly slides off the slippery chintz sofa to her knees and then curls into a tight ball. “Oh my God!” she wails.

  I drop to the floor next to her and glare at Louis and Fitzgerald. “Get out,” I say enraged, surprising even myself. Then more calmly add, “Please leave us for a moment, and then we will talk more. Please go.” I watch the two men as they stand and unhurriedly walk out the front door into the scorching heat. As the front screen closes and latches with a soft click, I lie down next to Fielda, molding myself to her, pressing my chest to her back, tucking my knees into the soft groove behind hers, sliding my arms around her middle and hiding my face in her hair. She smells sweetly of perfume and talcum powder, which to me will forever on be the odor of deep, deep grief. Her cries do not soften, but become more fraught and my own body rises and falls with each of her shudders.

  DEPUTY SHERIFF LOUIS

  Fitzgerald and I step out into the Gregorys’ front yard, the sun nearly directly above us, hidden slightly behind an enormous maple tree—a perfect climbing tree, Toni would say.

  “Jesus,” Fitzgerald says in an exasperated voice, and I steel myself for criticism of the way I just handled the last three minutes in the Gregory home.

  “How can you stand this sound?” Fitzgerald says disgustedly.

  “What sound?”

  “Those bugs. It sounds like millions of insects chewing on something. It makes my skin crawl.” Fitzgerald pulls out a pack of cigarettes and taps one out, holding it between his slender fingers.

  “They’re cicadas,” I explain. “It’s vibrations. The noise they make. It’s their skin pulled tight over their bodies.”

  “It’s annoying. How can you stand it?”

  “I suppose the same way that you get used to the noises in a big city. It’s just there—you don’t really notice it after a while.”

  Fitzgerald nods and lights his cigarette. “Do you mind?” he asks after the fact.

  “Naw, go ahead,” I reply and we both stand there, listening to the cicadas’ anxious song.

  “You feel bad,” Fitzgerald observes.

  “Yeah, I do,” I respond blandly.

  “It needed to be said, the thing about the McIntire girl. They need to know it’s a possibility. Give them a few minutes to let it settle in their minds and they’ll be ready to go forward. There’s no way they will accept that their little girl could have been lured from her home, raped and murdered, but the possibility will be there, and they will be out here in a moment ready to fight like hell to find her, to prove that’s not what happened.”

  “We need to bring in search dogs, organize a formal search,” I tell him, knowing this is already on his mind.

  “I agree. We can get a trained hound and handler from Madison or even Des Moines down here by late this afternoon,” Fitzgerald responds, taking a deep pull on his cigarette.

  “The families are not going to want to hear about a search dog. Sounds too much like we’ll be looking for bodies,” I say, not relishing the thought of being the one to relay the information to the Gregorys and Toni.

  “What’s your gut feeling on this one, Louis?” Fitzgerald asks me, leaning against an old oak tree.

  I shrug. “Not sure, but between you and me, I would look at Toni’s husband a little more closely. He’s a shady character, a drinker. Rumor has it he can be violent.”

  “Violent in what way?”

  “Like I said, just rumor. Toni doesn’t talk about it, there’s never been a domestic call. Several drunk and disorderlies on Griff, and one DUI. Just something to keep in mind as this all unfolds,” I say wearily.

  “Good to know,” Fitzgerald says looking off toward Toni’s house.

  “Days like this, I wished I smoked,” I say, eyeing his cigarette.

  “Days like this, I wished I didn’t,” Fitzgerald replies, as Martin Gregory steps outside his home.

  “I’m sorry,” Martin apologizes. “We are ready to go on, tell us what you need to know. Please…come in.”

  CALLI

  Calli had traveled deeper into the forest, beyond any spot she had been before. She was lost, the fawn had long since left to join its mother. Calli wandered around, trying to get her bearings. The trees here were thick and shielded the sun’s rays from her, though the air around remained steamy, heavy with moisture. The trail in front of her led upward, a winding, rocky path that disappeared into a stand of hemlocks. Another trail led downward, she thought to the creek. Her tongue felt oversize and dry; she was so thirsty. She considered going back the way she had come, but dismissed the idea, knowing that Griff was still there somewhere. The muscles in her legs were shaky and tired from running and a dull hunger had settled in her stomach. Calli scanned the forest around her; she saw the plump red-and-yellow berries that the cardinals flocked around, but knew she should not eat them. She tried to remember what her mother and Ben had told her about the berries of the forest, what she could eat and what was poisonous. She knew about mulberries, the fat purplish-red berries filled with sweet juice that hung heavily on branches. She could eat those, but she knew not to eat the reddish-brown berries of the toothache tree, because they would cause your mouth to go numb. She trudged upward, eyes inspecting every bush and vine.

  Her eyes settled upon a thorny tangled thicket holding blackish berries hanging from a white stem. Black raspberries. Calli hungrily plucked them from the twig, their juice bursting out of their skin with her touch, staining her fingers. The sweetness filled her mouth and she continued picking, fanning mosquitoes away from her find. Her mother had taught her where to find the wild black raspberries and she and Ben would collect as many as they could in old ice cream buckets, trying not to eat too many. When their buckets were full, they would carry them home to their mother, who would carefully wash them and bake them into pies that she served with homemade ice cream. Calli loved homemade ice cream and everything that went into making the concoction. She would tromp down the basement stairs where they stored the old hand-crank ice cream maker. It awed her how just adding the eggs, vanilla, milk and rock salt would create something so delicious. She didn’t even mind the ache in her arm from turning the crank, and Ben would take over when she couldn’t turn it anymore. The first thing she would do, she decided, when she got home was to haul that old ice cream maker up the steps so they could make a batch.

  When she finished eating all the raspberries she could reach, she wiped her blackened fingers on her nightgown and rubbed the back of her hand across her mouth, the imprint of her lips left behind like lipstick. Her hunger sated for the moment, Calli decided to continue her climb upward, to the highest point on the bluff. From there, perhaps she could see exactly where she was at and which direction would lead her home. But it was so hot and she was so sleepy. Just to lie down for a few moments, just to rest. She found a shady cluster of evergreens, well off the trail, cleared away the sharp branches that lay at its base, and, using her arms as a pillow, shut her eyes and slept.

  BEN

  We’ve been waiting for eons for Deputy Sheriff Louis and the other guy to get here. Mom made me put on a nice pair of shorts and a shirt with a collar for when they come over to talk to us. I’m starving, but feel weird making a sandwich or something when you’re out all by yourself with maybe nothing to eat. I grab a box of crackers and take ’em upstairs to eat in my room. When I walk by the door to your room, there’s this little stretch of crime scene tape stretched across the door frame. Stupid, I think, people rifling through your stuff in your room when we should all be out looking for you in the woods.

  I see Mom sitting on the floor of her bedroom, pulling things out of your treasure box. It’s really an old hat box filled with junk. I got one, too. Mom calls it our treasure box b
ecause she wants us to put all the important stuff from our life in it. Then when we’re old and gray, as she says, we can dig through all the things that at one time were so valuable to us. Actually, I’m already on my second treasure box because my first one got all filled up. She doesn’t notice me standing there so I just watch all quiet. She’s surrounded by a bunch of your school papers and art projects and she’s touching each one, gentlelike, as if one wrong move will cause them all to turn to dust. She reaches into the box again and brings out something that I can’t quite figure what it is. Neither can she, because she just stares at it for a long time, turning it around in her fingers; it’s whitish-gray and about three inches long. Mom hears me behind her, turns and holds it out to me.

  “What do you think it is?” she asks me as I take it.

  I shrug and pick at some of the gray bits that look like fur sticking out of it. “I think it’s an owl pellet,” I say. “Look, you can see little bits of bone sticking out.”

  Mom looks and takes it back from me. I love that about her. Most mothers would freak out at the sight of something like owl throw-up, but she doesn’t.

  “Yeah, I think you’re right. Why would Calli have this in her treasure box?” she asks.

  I shrug again. “I guess for the same reason that I have a box of periodical cicada shells in my room.” This causes her to laugh and I’m glad, she hasn’t laughed much lately. She carefully sets the pellet back in the box and pulls out a pile of something that looks like cotton.

  “I know what this is!” Mom exclaims, smiling. “It’s dandelion fluff all bunched together!”

  “Okay,” I say, “I can kinda understand the owl pellet, but I don’t get the dandelion fluff.”

  “Don’t you remember?” she asks me. “‘When fairies dance upon the air, reach out gently and catch one, fair. Make a wish and hold it tight, then softly toss your pixie back to summer’s night.’”

  “I wonder what she wished for,” I say.

  “I wonder why she didn’t let them go,” Mom adds.

  “Maybe she was saving the wishes up for something real big, then she was going to let them all go at once.”

  It’s Mom’s turn to shrug and she lays the fluff back into your treasure box on top of all the other stuff, puts the lid back on and slides it under her bed.

  “Come on, Ben,” she says. “Let me make you a sandwich. Louis will be here soon.”

  I have an idea of what you might have wished for, because they’re the same wishes as mine. Number one—for you to talk again. Number two—get a dog. Number three—that Dad would just go on back to Alaska and not come back. God knows you’d never admit it and neither would I, but those would be your wishes. I know.

  ANTONIA

  As I make Ben and me a ham sandwich and slice an apple in half, I think of Calli’s treasure box. The dandelion fluff reminds me of Louis, of when we were kids.

  The summer after Louis moved here, we’d go out to the meadow behind my house, the very house I live in now. Our field would be filled with happy yellow dandelions, and my mom would pay us a penny a weed to dig them out by the roots. No easy feat. We’d get old spoons to dig down as deep as we could, under the roots, and then toss them into an old plastic bucket. We could wrench out about one hundred in a day. My mother would give us a dollar, one shiny quarter for each of our grimy hands, and we’d hop on our bikes, ride downtown to the Mourning Glory Café and pool our earnings. I’d buy us a cherry Coke, not the kind that comes in a can like today, but the kind straight out of a soda fountain, with the cherry juice squirted in. Mrs. Mourning would always put in two straws and two cherries, one for Louis and one for me. Louis would buy us a basket of French fries, piping hot and salty. He would write my name out on top of the fries in ketchup from the squirt bottle and then script his own directly below it. The fries with my name on them were mine, the fries with his name, his to eat. Some days, we’d each buy a candy bar. I always picked Marathon bars, and he would choose a Baby Ruth. Petra’s mother, Fielda, was often at the café helping her mother. Friendly and sweet, Fielda would stand behind the counter watching us carefully, refilling our sodas. Looking back, I can see that Fielda wanted to be my friend, but I had Louis, and, well, he was all I needed, all I wanted. Years later, when we became neighbors and were eventually pregnant with our girls at the same time, Fielda tried again, invited me over for coffee, for walks, but once again, I was aloof, this time for completely different reasons. I was afraid she’d get an inkling of my sad marriage, catch my husband and me in a bad moment, see the bruises. Eventually she gave up and left me alone, just as she had eventually done when we were young.

  Our dandelion weeding would last approximately ten days. By then we were bored with the job and had our fill of cherry Cokes and fries. We hadn’t even made a dent in removing all the dandelions. They were beginning to seed and white puffs were whirling in the air above us, undoing all that we’d accomplished.

  “You know,” Louis told me, “these really are fairies.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said, unconvinced.

  “They are. My dad told me. He said that dandelion fluffs are magical fairies. If you grab one before it hits the ground, the fairy will be so grateful she will give you a wish once you set her free.”

  I sat up, setting down my dirt-crusted spoon. This interested me. Louis never spoke of his father, ever. “I didn’t know they had flowers in Chicago.”

  “Yeah, they have flowers and weeds and grass in Chicago,” he said indignantly. “Just not so much of it.

  “My dad would say, ‘When fairies dance upon the air, reach out gently and catch one, fair. Make a wish and hold it tight, then softly toss your pixie back to summer’s night.’ My dad said his granny from Ireland told him that and that the wishes really come true. Every summer when we’d see dandelion fluff we tried to catch one, make a wish, and then blow it back into the air.”

  “What’d you wish for?” I asked.

  “Stuff.” Louis, all of a sudden bashful, dropped his spoon and ran toward the woods, grasping at fluff as he went.

  “What kind of stuff?” I called as I chased him.

  “For the Cubs to win the pennant, things like that.” He wasn’t looking at me.

  “What about your dad? Do you ever wish for your dad?” I asked softly. His shoulders sagged and I thought he would take off running again.

  “Naw, dead is dead. It doesn’t work for stuff like that. You gotta wish for money or to be a movie star or something.” He handed me a soft white wish. “What are you going to wish for?”

  I thought for a moment, and then blew it gently from my hand, the cottony wisp floating away.

  “What did you wish for?” he asked again.

  “For the Cubs to win the pennant, of course,” I responded. He laughed and we ran off to play in the creek.

  That wasn’t my wish though. I wished for him to have his dad back, just in case.

  Eight years later, when we were sixteen, we were back at the creek. We had just made love for the first time and I was tearful. I couldn’t put into words what I was feeling. I knew I loved him, I knew that what we had done wasn’t a mistake, but still I wept. Louis was trying to make me smile, tickling me and pulling funny faces, but tears just kept rolling down my face no matter what he tried. Finally, in an act of desperation, I suppose, he ran from the creek. I sat there, devastated, pulling my clothes on, mucus dropping from my nose. I had lost Louis, my best friend. He came back moments later, though. He held his two hands in front of him clenched tightly.

  “Pick a hand,” he said, and I chose his left. He opened his palm and inside were three frail white tufts of a dandelion. “Three wishes,” he said and then opened his other fist to reveal three more dandelion fairies, “for each of us.”

  “You first,” I said through my tears, finally, a smile on my face.

  “That the Cubs win the pennant.” He grinned and I laughed. “That I become a policeman.” Then his young man’s face became serious. “And th
at you will love me forever. Your turn,” he said quickly.

  I thought for a moment. “To live in a yellow house.” I looked carefully at Louis’s face to see if he was laughing at me. He wasn’t. “To visit the ocean,” I continued. “And…” the tears resumed, great sloppy tears “…that you’ll love me forever.”

  Three years later, Louis had gone away to college and I married Griff. Damn fairies, I thought to myself now. I don’t live in a yellow house, I’ve never been to the ocean, and Louis didn’t love me forever. And my Calli, my dear heart, is missing. All that I touch gets damaged or lost.

  DEPUTY SHERIFF LOUIS

  Once again I am sitting at Toni’s kitchen table, a sweating glass of iced tea in front of me. This time Agent Fitzgerald is sitting next to me instead of Martin. I worry, when this is over, Martin will never speak to me again. And I fear that Toni won’t, either. I can tell Toni doesn’t know what to make of Fitzgerald, his precise, unemotional questions. She wonders if he is judging her and her mothering. I see her turning over each of his questions, searching for any hidden meaning, any tricks, I suppose because she is so used to Griff’s manipulative ways.

  Finding Toni curled up on her couch, delivering a dead baby girl four years ago, I’d hoped that she would wise up and get rid of Griff for good. Granted, I don’t know exactly what happened that winter night, just that Ben had come home and found his mother covered in a blanket on the sofa with Calli sitting by, patting her shoulder. I couldn’t get Calli to talk to me. She just looked up at me with her big, brown eyes and sat there as the ambulance carried her mother away.

  I asked Ben where his father was, and he couldn’t say for sure, but guessed that he was probably at Behnke’s, a bar downtown. I debated just phoning over there and talking to Griff, but decided a face-to-face conversation would be more effective. I asked a neighbor to come over and watch the kids and I went over to Behnke’s.