The Weight of Silence

by Heather Gudenkauf

  “I should be coming to see you,” I say apologetically. “How are Calli and Ben doing?” I ask.

  “They’re going to be fine,” she tells me. “How is Petra?”

  “She is out of surgery. She’s still asleep, but it appears the surgeon was able to relieve some of the pressure on her brain from the injury.”

  We sit in silence for some time until I am finally able to choke out the words that need to be said. “I’m sorry, Antonia. I am so sorry I came to your home with a gun. I truly believed that Griff had something to do with what happened to Petra. That is no excuse, I know, but I am sorry. It is because of me that he is dead.”

  “Martin, look at what Griff did to your head. Look what he did to Calli. Drunk, he took her from her home at four in the morning without shoes and dragged her through the woods so he could take her to who he thought was her real father. He ended up getting them lost, beat up his son and held a gun to my head. Griff wasn’t all that great of a guy, Martin.”

  “No,” I say cautiously. “But I’m sorry that he died. I’m sorry your family has to go through another bad thing.”

  “We’ll be okay. We’ve got each other and that’s what’s important, right?”

  I nod.

  “Do you have a ride to Iowa City? You’re not going to drive, are you? Your head must still be hurting.”

  “Louis said he would drive me to the hospital,” I tell her.

  “He told me they caught the man who did this,” Antonia says.

  “Yes. I believe he is somewhere in this hospital,” I reply.

  “You’re not going to go after him, are you?”

  “No. I learned my lesson the first time. And besides, it sounds like Lucky managed to hurt himself all on his own by falling down the bluff.”

  “I remember him. I met him at your house that one time, with his dog,” Antonia says gently.

  “Yes. I thought I knew him well,” I respond. She reaches out and touches my arm.

  “It’s not your fault,” she says kindly.

  “That will be the question that I ask myself for a very long time. If a father cannot keep his child safe, who can?”

  “You’re a wonderful father, Martin. I’ve seen the way you are with Petra. Fielda chose you well. I wish I would have made such a wise choice myself.”

  “If you had chosen differently, you would not have the children you have,” I remind her.

  She smiles. “I do have great kids. We both do. Now go to Petra. When she wakes up, she’ll want to see her father standing there. You two can compare stitches.”

  I laugh. I have not done that in such a long time. It feels good. It feels like things one day could go back to normal. I stand, shakily, my head still aching, and go off in search of my doctor. I am leaving. I need to get to my daughter and my wife.

  EPILOGUE

  Calli

  Six Years Later

  I often look back upon that day, so long ago, and wonder how it was we all survived. For each one of us it was a dark, sad day. Especially for my mother, I think, though she always says, “It was good in some ways. You found your voice that day, Calli. That made it a good day.”

  I have never thought of it as “finding” my voice because it wasn’t really lost. It was more like a bottle with a cork pushed deeply into the opening. I picture it that way often, my voice like some sweet-smelling perfume, sitting in some expensive-looking bottle with a beautifully curved handle, tall and slender, made of glass as blue as the bodies of the dragonflies I see down in Willow Creek Woods. My voice was just waiting for the right moment to be let go from that bottle. No, it was never lost; I just needed permission to use it again. It took me such a long time to figure out that I was the only one who could grant that permission, no one else. I wish my mother would understand this. She still blames herself for everything, and isn’t that a heavy weight to carry around?

  This I know firsthand. I, for a long time, had thought it was my fault that my baby sister, Poppy, died when I was four. Silly, you think. How could a four-year-old be responsible for a baby’s death? Now imagine this: that same four-year-old watching her mother and father arguing at the top of the stairs and that four-year-old seeing her pregnant mother tumble down the steps backward, reaching out for her with her outstretched hands. Now picture that four-year-old crying and crying, not being able to stop. Understandable. Now see the four-year-old’s daddy trying to get her to quiet down, not with hugs or soft kisses, but other whispered words. “Shut up, Calli. If you don’t be quiet the baby will die. Do you want that to happen? Do you want the baby to die? If you don’t shut up your mother will die.” Over and over and over, whispered in that four-year-old’s ear. And the baby died, my little sister who had hair as red as poppies, whose skin was as soft as a flower’s petals. I ate my words that day. Actually bit down, chewed them, swallowed them and felt them slide down my throat like glass until they were so broken and damaged that there was no possible way that the words could rearrange and repair themselves enough to be spoken. So I know what it feels like to feel responsible for something I really had no control over. That’s how it is for my mother.

  Petra never did return to school the year after this happened. She was in the hospital for a very long time. She had several surgeries and spent nearly two months in Iowa City, then another month at our local hospital. My mother would take me to the hospital to see Petra once a week, when she was well enough to have visitors. It’s funny, we didn’t talk much during those visits even though I was able to talk then. We just didn’t need to, to talk, that is. We could just be.

  Petra and her family moved away about a year and a half after she was hurt. She was never quite the same after it all. She walked differently and school was a lot harder for her because of her head injury. I don’t think anyone made fun of her; they didn’t when I was around, anyway. I think that everyone, kids and adults, just felt so bad for her that no matter what, they couldn’t let her be the same girl she was before. Kids our age didn’t know what to say to her, and adults would get this sad, concerned look on their faces. All Petra really wanted was to be like everyone else.

  I think, though, that it was the trial and all that went with it that really made the Gregory family want to leave. Her father felt the worst. He was the one who had welcomed Lucky into his home, hired him to do odd jobs around the house and who had got him a job at the Mourning Glory. The morning that Petra disappeared it was Lucky and his dog Sergeant who she saw through her bedroom window. She went after them to say hello and he grabbed her when they were well into the woods. I found out later that Lucky worked really hard trying to get Petra to trust and like him. He would give her little presents when he came over to their home or when Petra went to the Mourning Glory. He even told her that he went walking through the woods in her backyard all the time with Sergeant and that he would love if she came with them sometime. Lucky killed his dog, too. It seems Sergeant actually tried to protect Petra when Lucky was hurting her. Sergeant bit Lucky and he ended up strangling the poor dog with his own leash.

  The entire Gregory family had to testify and so did my whole family. It was a long, tiring, confusing ordeal, what with lawyers asking questions, reporters asking questions, and friends and neighbors asking questions. I think the prosecuting attorney was terrified that I would stop talking again; he would call our house every night during the trial to talk with me, just to make sure. Lucky was found guilty on all counts—kidnapping, attempted murder and sexual abuse. The only halfway funny thing about the whole ordeal was that old black crow who brushed by Lucky right when he was going to grab me, too, knocked him right over the bluff. He fell about fifty feet. Broke his leg and his collarbone. They didn’t find him until late that next afternoon. As far as I know he is still in prison and will be forever. It was never proven that Lucky had anything to do with Jenna McIntire’s death.

  Petra and I still write letters back and forth to each other. She lives in another state; her father has retired from teaching.
They live on a farm now, renting their land for the actual farming part, but they have a few animals, lambs, chickens, a pig, some dogs. Petra has invited me to visit a time or two but it’s never quite worked out. She never wants to come back to Willow Creek, which I can understand.

  My brother turned eighteen this year and has been working, saving up for college. He’s leaving in the fall and my mother and I are already crying about it. He is big and tall and looks just like my dad, but softer, if you get what I mean. He wants to be a police officer and he will be very good at it, I think. I don’t know what I will do without him when he goes away. I know many of my friends cannot wait for their brothers or sisters to leave, but it’s different with Ben and me. It makes me just so sad to think of him leaving that I can’t.

  Louis is still a deputy sheriff, but my mom and Ben think he should run for sheriff next year, when the old sheriff finally retires. Louis comes over for dinner a lot and went to all of Ben’s football games throughout high school. Ben and Louis are very close and I am sure this is why Ben is going to become a police officer. I wonder at times if my mother and Louis will end up together. I know he got divorced a while back and I think it’s about time my mom had some fun for herself. I asked her the other day why she and Louis didn’t just get married, it is so obvious that they love one another. Her face went all sad and she said it was complicated, so I let it go. At least for now. She still has these horrible nightmares, my mother does. I can hear her yelling from her bedroom and more than once I’ve seen her peeking into our rooms, checking on me, checking on Ben.

  Louis’s ten-year-old son, Tanner, comes to Willow Creek most weekends and on some holidays. His ex-wife ended up moving to Cedar Rapids, about an hour from here. Tanner is a funny little guy, quiet with serious eyes. Louis is crazy about the kid and gets all sad and depressed when he has to take him back to Cedar Rapids.

  I still don’t talk much, and that scares my mother. I can go for days and not say anything. I won’t ignore anyone or refuse to answer, but I just go quiet. Sometimes my mom will get this very worried look on her face that lets me know she’s afraid I’ve gone mute again. When I see that, I make a point to talk to her. It makes her feel better anyway. My mom got herself a job at the hospital as an aide, working on the skilled care floor. She works with old people, changing their sheets, helping them eat, giving them baths, helping the nurses. Not the most glamorous of jobs, she says. But she’s always coming home telling us stories about who did what and who said what. She complains about the grouchy, persnickety ones, but actually, I think those are her favorites.

  I have a picture of my dad that I keep in my treasure box. It’s faded and curled around the edges, but it is my favorite picture of him ever. It was taken before I was born, before Ben was even born. My dad is sitting in his favorite chair and he has the biggest smile on his face. His face looks young and it’s as pale as milk, except for the freckles that are on his nose. He looks healthy and his eyes are a bright green. They don’t have that yellowish color to them that he had later. He is wearing a faded pair of jeans and a Willow Creek Wolverines football jersey. But best of all, the very best of all, is what he is holding in his hand. It isn’t a beer bottle, but a can of pop and he’s holding it out toward the camera like he is toasting whoever is snapping the picture. Cheers, he seems to be saying, cheers.

  I don’t hate my dad. I think I did for a while, but not anymore. I don’t hate him, but I certainly don’t miss him, either. After the funeral my mother took us into town and we bought as many gallons of yellow paint that we could put in our car. We painted the house, the three of us. Now it’s a happy soft-yellow color. Warm and cozy. And anyway, that whole entire week was just incredibly hard for all of us. We needed something to look forward to, some hope, and having a yellow house was a start anyway. That’s what Mom said. I told her that if my father hadn’t been drinking that morning and dragged me out into the woods, I never would have come across Petra and she would have died. So in a way, he actually saved the day. She just looked at me for a long time, not sure of what to say. Finally she said, “Don’t go making your father into a hero. He wasn’t a hero. He was a lonely man with a bad disease.”

  We do go to my father’s grave once a year, on his birthday. Ben grumbles about it, but Mom insists. She says we don’t have to like the things he did but he was still a part of our family and wouldn’t he be sad knowing that not one of his children came to visit him once in a while? Last year Ben laughed when Mom said this and answered her all sassy, “The only way Dad would be glad to see us was if we brought a six-pack with us.” He did, too. Ben brought a six-pack of beer with him to the cemetery last year. Set it right next to his gravestone. Mom made him take it away, but Ben and I laughed over it later. It was kind of funny, in a sick sort of way.

  As for me, I’m pretty much a regular kid. I go to school and do okay. I have friends and even run track and cross-country for my school. I like to run, I always have. I feel like I could run forever some days. And I like that I don’t have to talk when I’m out for a run. No one expects you to chat while you’re running five miles.

  I don’t go into the woods anymore very often, and definitely not alone. That makes me about as sad as anything. I loved the woods once. It was my special spot. But when I’m in there, surrounded by trees, I am always looking behind me to see if anything is creeping up on me. Silly, I guess. Mom asked Ben and me if we wanted to move, to go into town, away from the woods. We both said no. Our home was our home, and there are a lot more good memories there than bad. Mom smiled at this, and I was glad that we could make her feel better. The woods are still Mom’s favorite place and she and Louis go walking there quite a bit. I asked her if she ever got scared while walking, afraid. She said no, that the forest was in her blood, that she couldn’t be scared of something that had actually been so good to her. “It sent you back to me, didn’t it?” she asked. I nodded. Maybe one day I would feel the same way about the woods, but not now, not for a long time.

  I still see Dr. Kelsing, the psychiatrist that I met that night I went to the hospital; it’s nice to have someone to talk to who wasn’t in the middle of the whole mess. She lets me know that I’m not crazy. She says I was very brave and very strong to do what I did on that day. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’d like to think so.

  I even kept on seeing my guidance counselor, Mr. Wilson, all the way through elementary school. I learned about a year ago that Mr. Wilson was actually brought in for questioning while Petra and I were missing. I bet that was totally embarrassing for him, but not once did he mention it to me. I would meet with him once a week and I’d still write in the beautiful journals that he gave me. On our last meeting together, during my last week of being a sixth grader at Willow Creek Elementary School, we sat at the round table and he asked what I would like to talk about on that day. I shrugged my shoulders and he stood. He was still incredibly tall even though I had grown several inches since first grade. He dug into his old gray file cabinet and pulled out five journals, all with black covers and all decorated with my artwork. I told him, then, about the dream I had when I fell asleep out in the woods the day my dad had taken me. The one where I was flying through the air and everyone was grabbing at me, trying to get me to come down. I told him that he was in my dream holding my journal in his hands, pointing at something. I told him I wondered what he was pointing at. He pulled the very first journal I had written in from the bottom of the pile and handed it to me.

  “Let’s look for it and see if we can find out what it was,” he said. For the next half hour I looked through that journal, the one that said Calli’s Talking Journal on the front and was decorated with a dragonfly. I flipped through pages, laughing about my terrible spelling and my stick figure pictures. But then I found it, the entry I was sure Mr. Wilson was pointing to in my dream. There were no words on the page, just a picture that I had drawn of my family. My mom was drawn really big right in the center of the page. She had on a dress and high
heels, which was kind of funny because my mom never wore dresses or high heels. Her hair was drawn in a huge bouffant style and she had a smile on her face. My brother was standing right next to my mom, drawn just as big. His hair was colored fire engine–red and his freckles were red dots across his circle-shaped nose. He held a football in his hands. At first glance one might think that the picture of Ben was actually my father, but it wasn’t. My father was in the picture drawn a little smaller and set back from the rest of us. He was smiling, just like everyone else in my picture, but in his hand was a can of what was clearly beer. The brand name of the beer was written in fancy blue letters, just like it is on the real can. But the drawings of those three weren’t what caught my eye that day in Mr. Wilson’s office. It wasn’t even the drawing of me, dressed in pink, my hair pulled back in a ponytail. No, it was what I drew sitting on a table next to me in the picture. A beautiful blue perfume bottle with its lid set on the ground right next to it. And rising out of the bottle were these tiny musical notes, whole notes, quarter notes and half notes flying right up into the air around my stick figure head.

  “This is the picture,” I told Mr. Wilson, jabbing my finger at the page. “This is what you were showing me in my dream. My voice.”

  “Of course it was, Calli,” he said. “Of course it was. You had it with you the entire time.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am deeply grateful to my family: Milton and Patricia Schmida, Greg Schmida and Kimbra Valenti, Jane and Kip Augspurger, Milt and Jackie Schmida, Molly and Steve Lugar and Patrick Schmida. Their unwavering confidence in me and their constant encouragement have meant the world to me. Thanks also to Lloyd, Lois, Cheryl, Mark, Carie, Steve, Tami, Dan and Robin.

  A heartfelt thanks to Marianne Merola, my world-class agent, who saw a glimmer of possibility in The Weight of Silence. The gifts of her expertise, guidance, diligence and time are valued beyond words.