Guilt by Silence

by Taylor Smith

  Still, as she had listened to him wax enthusiastic about physics and hockey—his other driving passion—her longstanding defenses against emotional involvement crumbled. Within three months, they were living together in a tiny Berkeley apartment, making plans for the future. But then things changed—that was the first time she lost David.

  The University of California ran a top-secret nuclear weapons research facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, on behalf of the federal government, and Berkeley’s physics department supplied many of the lab’s research staff. It came as no real surprise, then, when six months after they moved in together, David was offered a job at the Los Alamos weapons lab.

  Mariah followed him into the desert to work in earnest on her graduate thesis. But if New Mexico provided a good working environment for the thesis, it was no place to nurture their relationship. The split finally came the day Mariah watched a military truck towing a canvas-draped missile through the center of town. She confronted David late that night when he came in from the lab.

  “David, this isn’t the place for us.”

  He was nuzzling her neck and missed the point. “How about the dining-room table?” he asked, wrapping his arms around her more tightly. “Don’t you just love all this space? So many options!”

  Mariah poked him in the ribs with her elbow, laughing in spite of herself. “That’s not what I’m talking about! ” Her smile faded. “I mean Los Alamos.”

  He held her at arm’s length, his twinkling dark eyes betraying the clever comeback he was formulating—but her own expression must have squelched the urge. “What’s wrong with it? You’ve got teaching prospects here. And it’s a clean, safe place to make babies and raise a family,” he added, pulling her close again.

  “Safe? It’s a nuclear bomb factory! Don’t you ever think about what it is you do over at that lab?”

  “We do science—good science, with equipment that any university researcher would kill to get his hands on.”

  “Yeah, well, kill is definitely the operative word here. You guys design nuclear weapons.”

  “We unlock the secrets of the atom. Come on, Mariah, lighten up. The lab does nonmilitary work, too, you know that. And this work is exciting. The atom holds the key to unlimited energy—not to mention incredible biomedical and industrial advances. Weapons are the least interesting part of it.”

  “That’s just a cop-out. If there’s one thing this lab stands for, it’s the creation of the bomb.”

  “You can’t blame scientists if the government perverts our work,” he said, a stubborn frown forming on his forehead. “We can’t be responsible for the ethics of the whole nation. The weapons work could be stopped, if people had the guts to say ‘no more.”’

  “Oh, dammit, David,” Mariah said sadly. “I’m not stupid—or naïve. I know we won’t get rid of nuclear weapons tomorrow, now that the genie’s out of the bottle. But we design a new bomb, and then the Russians build one bigger than ours, and then we make ours even more deadly, and on and on and on. I just can’t watch you waste your talents by helping these guys develop the ultimate doomsday machine. Because that’s the real reason you’re all here, and you know it.”

  They’d had the same argument a dozen times since David had accepted the Los Alamos job. The silence between them as they pulled away from each other that night had simply concluded the debate once and for all with a permanent agreement to disagree. In the end, she had left David and New Mexico and taken a job as an analyst at CIA headquarters in Virginia—telling herself that whatever she might do to help restrain the Soviet nuclear threat could also make the work of David and his Los Alamos colleagues superfluous.

  For two years, their only contact was a diminishing trickle of letters and phone calls. Then one day, out of the blue, David had shown up on her doorstep, gaunt and distraught after an accident in the lab had claimed the life of one of his colleagues—a young technician who had died a gruesome, lingering death after accidental exposure to radioactive materials. David had become thoroughly disillusioned with weapons work and said he wanted only to build a career in teaching and to marry her.

  They were never separated again. Lindsay was born nine months later and their lives had seemed charmed—until a careening truck in Vienna had brought it all crashing down.

  As he watched her approach along the long hallway, David’s mouth lifted lopsidedly, the paralyzed left side drooping while the right struggled upward. Mariah smiled back at this man she had loved for so long—still loved, she reminded herself. Still loved but missed horribly even as she sat beside him during the few short hours she managed to snatch with him each week.

  “Hi,” she said warmly, putting a hand around his neck and touching her forehead to his. She closed her eyes briefly, trying not to notice that faint aroma of decay that clung to his atrophied body, despite all the toiletries she brought in for him.

  “How are you, lover?” She kissed his forehead and ran her fingers through his hair, giving the curls an encouraging nudge toward the frothy chaos that had once been their preferred arrangement. “Sorry I’m a little late. Traffic.”

  He blinked. She dropped in his lap the paper sack she had brought in from the car, then moved behind the chair. “Let’s go sit. I’m beat.” She wheeled him into his room, where she kicked off her shoes and shrugged out of her trench coat, tossing it on the bed and pushing up the sleeves of her suit jacket. Then she moved him over to the computer table in the corner.

  “Headstick?” she asked. One brown eye closed, opened, then closed—the signal for no. He seemed alert and Mariah berated herself again for having made him wait.

  She put aside the headband with the attached stick that he used to tap the keyboard when his faltering right hand became exhausted. The left hand was useless, drawn into itself and held tightly against his chest by the constricted arm, perpetually reverted to a fetal position except when he was deeply asleep and his muscles finally relaxed.

  Mariah removed the paper bag from his lap and pulled a rolling table over his thin legs. She lifted his right hand, bringing it to rest on the computer keyboard. His bony index finger reached out shakily and landed on a key. Mariah looked at the screen and saw the letter L—Lindsay.

  “She’s at the swimming pool,” she said. “I’m picking her up on the way home.” Mariah leaned back against the windowsill and smiled. “She’s doing great in the water. The coach says she may even make the team next year. She’s such a fighter, David.”

  His eyes regarded her intently.

  “And the doctor says it’s doing wonders for her leg,” she went on. “It’s definitely growing and he thinks there’s a chance it might eventually catch up to the other one.” Mariah reached into the paper bag she had brought. “Lindsay couldn’t come, but she did bake cookies for you—chocolate chip.”

  Slow, lopsided grin.

  “She does this to irritate me, you know, just because I’m allergic to chocolate. I hope it gives you both zits.”

  David watched her pull out one of the cookies. She put it in his hand and wrapped his fingers around it. The tendons on the back of his hand stretched taut like puppet strings as he lifted the cookie to his mouth with agonizing slowness. Mariah took some shirts out of the bag and walked over to the small wardrobe next to the bed. David’s eyes followed her every step as his jaw slowly worked on the cookie.

  “I washed your flannel shirts for you. It’s getting frosty out there.” He didn’t go out much, of course, except when she and Lindsay took him for walks on the weekend or, once a month or so, home overnight. But it was a recognition that he was alive and the seasons were still turning.

  Mariah came back and pulled up a chair next to him, wiping a line of chocolate drool that ran down from the corner of his mouth, then stroking his arm absently as she spoke to him. She talked about Lindsay and her new school, their evenings, office gossip, inconsequential stories of people, some of them old friends, some people he didn’t know. It didn’t matter, as long as she cou
ld make him feel that he was still part of their world.

  As she rambled on, David’s eyes watched her and smiled. It was the only part of him that was recognizable anymore, Mariah thought. The orderlies always managed to do something peculiar with his curly black hair. Not their fault, really—they hadn’t spent years watching him step from the shower and give his head a distracted shake until each curl found its own equilibrium, had they? Now, the way they combed it, the curls were straightened and flattened, parted at the side, giving him a strangely organized air that he had never possessed when he was in charge of his own grooming. And he was getting grayer. In the ten months since the accident, he seemed to have aged a decade or more beyond his forty-one years. His frame, slight to begin with, had withered to a wispy frailty.

  Only the eyes held the essence of the man David had once been. They were also the only part of him capable anymore of reflecting a familiar emotion. The emotions she saw there these days were fleeting and elemental—pleasure at her coming, sadness at her leaving, frustration during his rare attempts to communicate.

  Once though, in Vienna, when he had fully emerged from the coma into which he had been plunged for several weeks after the accident, Mariah had seen in those eyes the terror of realization.

  For several days previous, there had been times when he seemed to recognize her. In those moments of brief lucidity, he had struggled to reach out to her, but his body had become permanently contorted, twisted into an unnatural stiffness by the misfiring synapses in his brain. The effort exhausted him and he would lapse again into catatonia. One morning, however, Mariah had stepped off the hospital elevator to the sound of unearthly shrieks coming from the direction of his room. Heart pounding, she had raced down the corridor, the cries growing louder as she approached his door.

  It was what she had most dreaded—the one thing she had prayed would never come. Multiple skull fractures from the accident had left irreversible brain damage. She had seen the X-rays and CAT scans herself, had had the damage explained in detail, and she knew that his life was over, even if his heart still beat and his lungs still drew breath. The only thing the Viennese doctors hadn’t been able to tell Mariah with any degree of certainty was what portion of his cognitive abilities would be left when—and if—he ever regained consciousness. She had found herself, incredibly, beginning to pray that he would die rather than understand what he had become.

  But when she stepped into the room that morning, she knew that her worst fear had come true. David was screaming in inarticulate anguish, having awakened to discover that his body had become a tomb—and that he was buried alive.

  Mariah shuddered now at the memory of his cries, guttural and incoherent, and of the terror in his eyes as he searched hers for a sign of hope that this was only a passing nightmare. She had sat next to him for hours, rubbing his back and stroking his hair and holding his twisted body until his screams had subsided to choking sobs and then faded altogether.

  In that time, she had watched a light in those newly conscious eyes flicker and die. She never knew whether the calm that finally settled on him was madness or some kind of divinely inspired state of grace. It didn’t matter, she thought, as long as it gave him peace.

  It gave her none, however. Most of what was left of her husband—Dr. David Tardiff, nuclear physicist and ex-boy wonder, harmonica player and Wayne Gretzky wannabe, love of her life and father of her only child—had died that day. All that remained now was this sad shell of a man—that, and a hard angry fist in the pit of her being that was perpetually raised in defiance of the God or the fates that had allowed such a thing to happen.

  Mariah glanced at her watch. “I have to go soon, David. Lins will be almost done with her practice.”

  His head lolled on the headrest as he turned his eyes to her, their expression sad, wistful as always. But he held her gaze fixedly and then his right hand reached out to hers, resting on the arm of his chair. He grappled for her wrist. Her hand followed his as he moved it shakily into his lap.

  “Oh, David,” she said softly. She rested her head against his shoulder for a moment, then lifted it. “Just a minute,” she whispered. She rose and went to the door, closing it firmly, regretting the absence of a lock. The room was a private one, but institutional privacy was a contradiction in terms.

  The first time this had happened was one Saturday when she and Lindsay had taken him home to their condo overnight. It had been late in the evening. Lindsay had gone up to bed after helping her get David settled on the sofa bed in the living room and Mariah had been lying beside him, outside the covers, reading to him while soft music played in the background. She wasn’t sure whether or not he followed the words, but her voice and the music seemed to relax him, and he’d looked almost like a gaunt version of his old self, lying there under the quilt.

  Suddenly, Mariah had glanced up and seen him watching her with an expression of acute longing in his eyes and she had known what he was thinking about. It had taken her breath away. No one had ever mentioned it during his long hospital stays, even though she had discussed with the doctors every other conceivable aspect of the prognosis for his physical and mental recovery. But she had understood all at once that whatever else was to be denied him for the rest of his life, some basic needs had not disappeared.

  That night, she had done what she had to do to give him the comfort that only a wife or lover can offer—she had made love to him as gently and delicately as she knew how. And although he was unable to reciprocate, she had comforted herself with the memory of the hundreds of times he had held her and loved her. Then she had crawled under the covers beside him, rocking him and crying silent tears, feeling in her arms the familiar and yet awkwardly unfamiliar outlines of his body.

  Now, sitting close beside him in his nursing-home room, she gave him comfort again and then held him for a while before she had to go. His eyes were closed when she left him.

  Mariah stood at the top of the steps outside the front door, inhaling deeply to clear her lungs of institutional air, forcing her mind to make the transition back to life beyond David’s world. She closed her eyes briefly, then opened them again and started down the steps.

  Preoccupied, she failed to notice the figure waiting under a tree next to the sidewalk. It was only when he said her name that she glanced up, startled out of her reverie. She narrowed her eyes to make him out in the shadows, then recoiled in surprise.

  “Paul? Paul Chaney—what on earth are you doing here?” she asked, moving quickly from astonishment to instinctive wariness.

  He came forward and they met at the bottom step. “Waiting for you.” He bent down and they exchanged busses on both cheeks, the European-style that transplanted Americans adopt awkwardly at first, then maintain as a lifelong habit as they come to appreciate the comfort of the ritual.

  He pulled back and she studied him under the lamplight. He was tall, his lankiness emphasized by the soft, brown leather bomber jacket he habitually wore and was wearing now, the collar turned up. He had a full head of blond hair, graying at the temples, clear blue eyes and a photogenic face that could be earnest, penetrating or morally indignant as required in front of the television cameras. On air he dominated the screen, his presence imposing. Off camera, he also had what Mariah thought of as his helpless-but-comic puppy-dog shtick that he cultivated especially for the attractive and—preferably—rich and well-connected women that he seemed to attract like a magnet, all of whom seemed intent on nurturing him.

  Based in Vienna, Chaney was senior foreign correspondent for CBN, the Cable Broadcast News network. In the three years she and David had known him there, Mariah had watched—appalled, amazed and ultimately amused—the succession of women he had trailed on his arm who had tried to sink their hooks into him. He had been too slippery for all of them, although an aggressive blonde who called herself Princess Elsa von Schleimann had looked for a while as if she might actually reel him in.

  “What are you up to?” Mariah said. “I didn�
�t know you were back in the States.”

  “Just got in yesterday. I’m working on a story.”

  “What happened to the princess?” Mariah, anxious to mask her unease, hoped the question came across as mischievous.

  Chaney seemed startled, then frowned. “Found herself a real prince, I guess.” They shuffled awkwardly, the old tension rising between them like a sudden fog. Finally, Chaney broke the silence. “How have you been, Mariah?”

  She glanced away into the trees, her lips pressed tight. Then she sighed and turned back to him. “All right. My daughter’s doing better. She’s settled into a new school now, here in McLean, and she’s making a good recovery.”

  “I’m glad.” Chaney glanced up at the front door of the nursing home. “And David? Is there any hope?”

  Mariah shook her head slowly, watching the sidewalk as she crushed a dried leaf under the toe of her shoe. “If anything, he’s losing ground. He’s been having seizures from the scar tissue on his brain. For a while, he’d been able to type a few words on the computer, but now he seems to have lost even that.” She looked up as a sudden thought occurred to her. “Are you going in to see him, Paul? He’d like that—someone from the old days, from the team.”

  Chaney smiled. He had been an honorary member of the Vienna Diplomats, the haphazard team of amateur foreign hockey players that played pickup games whenever they could find an opponent and get ice time on one of Vienna’s rinks.

  “I already have. That’s how I knew you were coming—a nurse told me.” He moved closer, so close, she could smell the leather of his jacket. “Can we talk?”

  How was it that Paul Chaney always managed to do this to her? Mariah wondered. Make her feel vulnerable and uneasy. On alert, her defenses aroused—against what, she was never quite sure. Something.

  She mustered up an apologetic grimace. “Sorry, I can’t. I have to pick up Lindsay.” She glanced at her watch, half turning away already. “I’m late. She’s waiting for me. It’s been nice seeing you, and I’m grateful to you for visiting David, but—”