Silent to the Bone

by E. L. Konigsburg

  “Well, let’s hope that won’t happen.”

  “Of course, we all pray that won’t happen. The Zamborskas were pleasant enough, and I enjoyed being here, but this whole assignment has certainly mucked up my plans.” Brits must say mucked up instead of messed up.

  “What plans are those?” Margaret asked.

  “All of them, actually. I am truly anxious to get on with my life.”

  Margaret said, “I think I’ve heard everyone from the Masssachusetts Nanny to the Long Island Lolita say that. What exactly does ‘getting on with your life’ mean?”

  “In my case, it means going to university.”

  “And study what?”

  “The law. I hope to become a barrister.”

  “That would be nice. I think you will look darling in a peruke.”

  “Do you really?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I understand they’re quite expensive.”

  “Let me make this promise, Vivian. If you become a barrister, I shall buy you your peruke.”

  I didn’t know what a peruke was, and I didn’t want to ask. If it was spelled anything like it sounded, I could look it up or ask Branwell. (That was about the gazillionth time I had to remind myself that he had gone silent. But maybe peruke would be the icebreaker that would get him to talk.)

  Vivian had another cigarette with her coffee. I volunteered to light it for her. She held my wrist again. Same wrist. Same place. And then before I pulled my wrist away, she smiled shyly and lip-synced, “Thank you, Connor.”

  Thursday has always been my lucky day.

  * * *

  Margaret dropped Vivian back at the hotel before she drove me home.

  I asked her, “Why did you tell Vivian that you had changed your silverware drawers around? It’s been in the same place ever since you’ve lived here.”

  “I lied.”

  “Why?”

  Margaret shrugged. “I felt like it.”

  “Is that all you’re going to say?”

  “For the time being.”

  “What is a peruke?” I asked.

  “One of those white wigs that British barristers plop on top of their heads when they are trying a case.”

  “Is that named after Mr. Peruke who invented it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why did you promise Vivian that you would buy her one?”

  “I stand about as much chance of having to keep that promise as you have of waking up tomorrow speaking Farsi.”

  “Why don’t you like her?”

  “I don’t have to. You like her enough for both of us.”

  “Why did you invite her over for dinner if you don’t like her.”

  “I felt like it.”

  “Well, I think she’s nice.”

  “I noticed.”

  * * *

  The first time I saw Branwell at the Behavioral Center, I had said to myself that even before I knew all the details, I believed in him. And I still did. But after having had supper with Vivian, and having learned more of the details, I had some new thoughts about Branwell, and I wondered if the Branwell I thought I knew was the Branwell I knew.

  My mind was as mixed-up as that sentence.

  I also had some new thoughts about Vivian. And about Branwell with Vivian.

  And when I awakened the next morning my thoughts were not about Branwell and Vivian but about Vivian and me. Vivian with me. She had invaded my dreams that night, and those dreams were different from any of the other dreams I had ever dreamed up until I lit that first cigarette and felt Vivian’s hand holding my wrist. And she held my wrist in the same place each time and thanked me.

  10.

  Margaret came to school and brought me a copy of the 911 tape.

  I called her Wonder Woman not because she had managed to get the tape in less time than it would take an ordinary human being but because she had managed to enter the cleverly guarded halls of Knightsbridge Middle School without a diplomatic passport or bulletproof vest. “Do you have any other miracles to share with me?”

  “This,” she said, reaching into her shoulder bag and bringing forth a tape player. “A miracle of miniaturization and efficiency.”

  I always liked to start my visits with Branwell by telling him the good news—when there was good news—so I asked her how Nikki was, and she told me that they were still weaning her off the respirator.

  * * *

  When I entered the Behavioral Center, the guard at the reception desk who kept the sign-in book and who inspected my backpack held up the packet of flash cards and asked if I was making any progress with them. I told her that it was too soon to tell. She examined the tape and player and asked, “Trying something new?”

  “Anything to help.”

  When everything was back inside my backpack, she handed it over across her desk. “Good luck,” she said, smiling.

  * * *

  I didn’t exactly know what still weaning someone off a respirator meant. I guessed that that news was in the category of medium-good. Not as good as having Nikki breathing on her own or tracking, which would mean that she was interacting with her environment and was what everyone was waiting for. Not as bad as not being weaned. I should have asked Margaret for more details, but I wasn’t that interested. I had other things on my mind.

  So once Branwell was brought out and seated across the table from me, I got the Nikki-news over with as quickly as possible. I wanted to get to the real stuff. Stuff that had been on my mind since last night.

  I wanted to talk to him about Vivian. I wanted to talk to him about her so badly that I was glad the conversation would be one way. To be perfectly honest—I’ve really tried to be—I wanted Bran to know that I had spent practically a whole night with this person that he had been keeping from me.

  I didn’t tell him about the rehearsal for the deposition. I didn’t even mention the deposition. I wasn’t even thinking about the details she had rehearsed with Margaret. I was thinking about the blue jumper and the hair grip. And that’s what I told him about. Jumpers and hair grips. He had to understand that I, too, knew her language.

  I don’t know how much of my fascination with her crept into what I was saying, but I guess a lot of it did. I didn’t care. He had to understand that he, Branwell, was not the only one that she paid attention to.

  Bran had always been a good listener, but now he sat slouched in his chair and stared at his hands in his lap. When I mentioned that Vivian had let me light her cigarettes, he finally looked up at me and shook his head slowly, slightly, sadly. As if I was to be pitied.

  I was not to be pitied. I had lit her cigarettes. And she had held my wrist and said thank you each time, and one time she had not even bothered saying it out loud but had just lip-synced.

  Maybe it was the look he gave me, or maybe it was because I had been thinking about it a lot—a whole lot—or maybe if I try to be as perfectly-perfectly honest with myself as I have tried to be about everything else, I would have to admit that I took the “conversation” to the next level because it was the one that had invaded my dreams.

  “How about walking in on her in the bathtub?” I said.

  Branwell stopped looking sad the minute I mentioned bathtub. Instead he blushed. (Branwell blushes easily.)

  Then I said, “How about walking in on her in the bathtub the second time?” Branwell lowered his head so fast and so far, I thought it would separate from his neck. And he was blushing so much, I thought I could feel the heat of it across the table.

  I should have stopped then and there, but I couldn’t. I had to go on, and I said, “And the third time?” But now Branwell jerked his head up as hard as he had jerked it down. “Way to go, man,” I said, trying to tease. And maybe if my mouth had not been so dry, that would have come out the way it should have. But it didn’t. Branwell’s jaw dropped, and he glared at me. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but nothing came. He sucked in his breath and tried again, and then he bolted up, overtur
ning his chair, turned his back to me, and started to walk out.

  “Bran!” I called. “Bran. Our time isn’t up. Don’t leave. Please,” I said. “Please don’t leave.” He stood still, his back to me. “I brought a copy of the tape with me,” I said. He turned his head and looked at me out of the corner of his eye. He looked like a frightened puppy. And I was frightened, too. What had I triggered? “The 911 tape,” I said. He turned about three quarters of the way around, and I hurriedly took it from my backpack and put it on the table. “Here it is.”

  The guard came over and set his chair upright.

  “Let’s listen to the tape, Bran.” He was facing me now, and so was the guard. “Please sit down. Let’s listen to it together.”

  Bran sat down, and, nervous as I was, I managed to start the tape. As soon as the first words came on, he cocked his head and held his hand behind his ear to gather in the sound. Then when the tape got to the part where the operator said that she was transferring the call to Fire and Rescue—the same part where he had reacted when Big Beacham had played it—he leaned his head down on the desk, the way we had been taught Native Americans kept their ears to the ground to hear a buffalo herd.

  When the tape finished playing, he sat up and made a whirling motion with his finger. He wanted me to play it again. And I did. This time he kept his ear low the whole time it played, and at that same point in the tape, he pounded with his fist—only once and not real hard—on the table. I knew there was something there that needed to be heard. I rewound the tape and asked him if he wanted me to play it again. He shook his head no.

  I took the pack of flash cards from my pocket and put it on the table. The one marked TAPE was on top, faceup. Branwell’s eyes fell on that card immediately, and he blinked twice very rapidly. Still nervous, still upset by his reaction to my mentioning the bathroom invasions, I asked, “The tape?” He blinked twice. “You want me to investigate the tape?” He blinked twice again, very rapidly. You could say he blinked in anger. “Good,” I said, but didn’t mean it.

  Trying to put the best face I could on a very bad session, I said, “The tape it will be. I’ll check on the tape.” I tumbled everything—cards, cassette, cassette player—back into my backpack and waved good-bye. Which Bran didn’t see, since he was already heading back to his quarters.

  I left the Behavioral Center with the tape and with a very bad feeling. I should have found out if it was God or the Devil who was in the details of Vivian’s deposition. But I had blown it. I couldn’t go back to that topic. Not yet. Maybe never.

  I had to do something with the tape. I knew that there were ways to improve the sound by bringing up the volume on the good parts and cutting out the static in other parts. I suspected that it was done on a computer, and if it was, Margaret would either know how to do it or where to get it done.

  * * *

  As I was leaving, the guard at the front desk asked me if I had made any progress. If you consider that I had gotten a violent response out of Branwell, you could say yes. But if you consider that he was still not speaking, and I still didn’t know why, you would have to say no.

  “Too soon to tell,” I replied. I was becoming an expert at saying nothing by saying something: excellent training for politicians or talk-show hosts.

  * * *

  As soon as I got home, I called Margaret and told her about the tape. She explained that there is a way to enhance a tape, but it has to be sent away to a lab to do it. Then she thought a minute more. “There’s a sound studio in the music department at the university. Maybe they have the equipment to do it. I’ll call you back.”

  Margaret called me back to tell me that there was good news and bad news. The good news was that the school did have the equipment. The bad news was that the head of the sound lab said that he couldn’t get to it until after Christmas. There was a long pause on the phone before she added, “You could ask your father if he could use his influence.”

  “He’s your father, too.”

  “Remind him when you ask,” she said, and hung up.

  I guess Margaret and I will always disagree about our father. When I told him what I needed and why I needed it, he was not only willing to help, he was eager to. When I gave him the tape, he asked if it was a first generation copy—meaning if this was a copy from the original tape or a copy of a copy. I didn’t know. I told him to call Margaret to find out.

  I heard only his end of the call. He did not sound like a father calling his daughter. He sounded like his other self—the university registrar calling for information. I imagined Margaret’s end of the conversation, and I could guess that she sounded like a telemarketer giving details of the carpet-cleaning special of the week.

  The good news was that it was first generation and good enough for the music department to digitize (or whatever they had to do). I only heard Dad’s end of the conversation when he called the head of the student sound studio. He said, “I understand,” three times. And then he said that he wouldn’t be asking if these were ordinary circumstances. He said, “I understand,” twice more. He also said that he would be willing to take the tape to a commercial lab, but he knew that the work done at the university was much better. And then he said, “I’ll drop it by first thing in the morning.” One more “I understand,” and then, “I’ll pick it up Monday afternoon.”

  I thanked him and told him that I would tell Margaret how helpful he had been. “That won’t be necessary,” he said.

  11.

  It was the first Saturday in December, the day that Margaret asked me to go to the mall with her so that we could buy Christmas presents for the family. I had never had this kind of date with her before. Margaret is half-Jewish and doesn’t do much about Christmas, but Hanukkah was only a week away, and she liked to give out her presents then.

  Margaret didn’t see clients on Saturday, but usually spent a half day in the office catching up on the paperwork. She had started out as a one-woman business, but now she has three others working for her. She favors hiring women. Most of her clients are doctors and dentists. She develops software that helps them manage patient care and accounting. Last year she developed a system for the Clarion County Hospital. That was the hospital where I was born and where I had had my tonsils removed when I was in fourth grade and where Nikki was now.

  I decided to walk from my house to hers. I could have taken the city bus, which circles the campus, but it was a clear, crisp day, not too cold, and since I had been going to the Behavioral Center after school, I had not spent much time out-of-doors.

  Halfway across campus, I was over The Ditch and, out of habit, I stopped on the bridge and began looking for lovers. I spotted a couple in bright quilted jackets with their arms around each other’s waists weaving their way down to the bottom of the gorge. When Branwell and I were little, we would run to another place on the bridge and try to find them again. If we did, we would yell, “Spot.”

  They wound in and out of view, then around a bend and out of sight. I didn’t move.

  Since the night before last, for the first time in all the years I had been going to the gorge, I was not interested in watching. For the first time in all these years, I wondered how it would feel to be part of a couple. How it would feel to have someone other than Branwell to take a walk with.

  The lovers came into view again. They still had their arms around each other. They could hardly feel as much of each other as I had felt when Vivian had touched my bare wrist. Without trying too hard, if I closed my eyes and concentrated, I could still feel her fingers on my wrist (she had held the same one in the same place each time) and see her face as she thanked me for lighting her cigarette.

  I remembered that day in September, the last time Bran and I had met over The Ditch, that day he had said, “She calls a motorcycle a motorbike and a truck, a lorry,” and then had looked at me with that loony smile, and I had gotten sarcastic. Here was my lifelong friend changing before my very eyes. Here he was interested in taking a walk with s
omeone other than me, someone who was female, an older woman, someone who had shown a lot of interest in him.

  I have to admit that I had been jealous.

  Yesterday had been payback time. I had wanted to make him jealous of me, and my secret feelings must have crept into my voice, just as his had crept into that loony smile.

  How he must have hated hearing me talk about her blue jumper and her flaxen hair. So he had turned over his chair to shut me up just as my sarcasm had shut him up.

  I guess the only way to keep secret thoughts secret is not to say anything. Even to your lifelong best friend. If you don’t speak at all, you don’t have to worry about saying the wrong thing or having the right thing interpreted wrong. And that is what Bran had done. He had stopped talking about Vivian. She became the unspoken.

  I wondered if my sarcasm is what started it all. Maybe my sarcasm led to his silence about Vivian, and that led to more things unspoken, and the unspoken just deepened and darkened from that day in September to Columbus Day until the great wall of silence that was now.

  Maybe.

  But I don’t think so.

  Following that 911 call, his silence was not just a different size of the unspoken. It was a whole different species. Before, he could talk but would not. Now he would if he could, but he can’t. Something had caused a serious disconnect.

  After learning the details of Vivian’s deposition, I had begun to have doubts about my friend. How much of that had crept into my voice yesterday when I began asking him about the Jack-and-Jill bathroom? Was that what had angered him?

  Vivian had once again come between us.

  I looked down into the empty gorge and was suddenly terrified. Being Branwell’s only bridge to the outside world, I was in a position of power. I realized that I could destroy my friend.

  If I had let Bran walk out when he had turned over the chair, I would have broken the last connection between him and me. If I was to continue as Branwell’s friend and as his bridge to the outside world, I had to believe in him as I had the day of my first visit to the Behavioral Center before I learned the first detail. I was now the one who had to leave my thoughts and dreams of Vivian unspoken and let the information take me where it would.