The Price of Silence

by Camilla Trinchieri

  “How was Jean difficult?” Fishkin repeats softly.

  “She broke things all the time and then she’d go hide in a closet like she expected me to hit her. The Lord knows I never did that. Bill neither. I mean, sometimes I lost my patience, but I never laid a hand on her. And she wet her bed until she was twelve years old. Can you believe that?

  “She never had any friends. A couple of times I invited some of her schoolmates home, but she would go into her room and refuse to come out.”

  “Do you know why she didn’t want any friends?”

  “Once she said she didn’t deserve them. Poppycock! Is what I said. She was a silly girl sometimes.”

  “What happened when Jean was eight years old?”

  Mrs. Owens’s face lights up. “I had my own kid. My son, Michael John.”

  “How did Jean react to Michael’s birth?”

  “She seemed fine until one day I got the scare of my life. She was choking him. I told her, ‘If you ever pick up my baby again, Bill’s going to whip your behind so you won’t sit down for a week!’”

  “How did she respond to that?”

  “She said she was only hugging him.”

  “You didn’t believe her?”

  “Well, no. Michael was crying. Now you’re going to think we should have taken Jean to one of those head doctors. Bill and I didn’t believe in those people. The social worker at Jean’s school wanted to pry into our family life. Shamed me to my bones, she did. We’d done nothing wrong. Our minister offered to see what he could do—we’re Lutheran—but Bill told him he’d handle her.

  I kept a close watch on Michael John and kept on going.”

  “Were there any other times, before or after the incident with your son, when you were worried about Jean?”

  “Oh, yes. After. On a school outing to the lake—she was in seventh grade then—she tried to drown herself. Thank the Lord one of the kids saw her disappear underwater and started hol-lerin’ for help.”

  “What makes you think Jean did it on purpose, that it wasn’t an accident?”

  “I asked her, that’s what. ‘Did you want to die, Jean Marie?’ I asked her. ‘Is that what you were up to?’ She looked up at me real hard, like she was concentrating, fishing for a lie. Then she said, ‘Yes. It’s nice underwater.’

  “ ‘After all we’ve done for you, why would you want to do that?’ I asked her and I got nothing for an answer.” Mrs. Owens clasps her chest with both hands. “That girl broke our hearts.”

  Subj: Fairytales and fantasies

  Date: 04-14-05 11:36 EST

  From: Chinesecanary@BetterLateThanNever.com

  To: EPerotti@aol.com

  I stuffed some clothes and the money I had saved from my allowance into a bag and off I went on a Greyhound toward the setting sun.

  San Francisco was supposed to be a rest stop, a place to earn passage money to China to find my real mother. I’d read the Chinese outnumbered the whites and that in some streets I’d be able to pretend I was in mainland China. Except that I was lost. Cantonese, Mandarin and all their variations sounded like strange bird sounds to me.

  Despite my half-moon eyes and the color of my skin, I was very far from being a real Chinese. I got a job with Madame Chai who owned three successful restaurants. Because I was fluent in English she hired me to wear a tight red silk dress with slits up my thighs and greet the white men who came to eat in her best restaurant, The White Crane. If the patrons cupped my behind, I was to bow my head in modesty but not step aside.

  I slept on a futon in the storage room. It was for my own good, Madame Chai reminded me each time she deducted my twenty-five-dollar rent from my weekly pay. If I rented a room from a family I’d end up with a “crack in your vase.” I kept my shame to myself.

  I earned $3.50 an hour for my twelve-hour day, fifty cents more than the other workers because I had the talent of speaking the language of the “white ghosts.”

  Madame Chai was as fat as a Buddha, with acrylic nails long enough to belong to an empress. After I’d been working for her a few months, she called me up to her bedroom above the restaurant after the lunch service to practice her English on me. She told me it was useless to go to back to China because if my mother saw me on the street she would walk right by me.

  “You mean she wouldn’t recognize me?”

  “A mama always know her baby, no care how old. It is baby who not know mama. Your mama turn away because she no want her shame on you.”

  “She gave me up because she didn’t have the money to feed me.

  There’s no shame in poverty.”

  “Maybe no money. Maybe your baba married to woman not your mother. Maybe baba crack her vase and run far. Maybe many things. What is not maybe is you here, in gold mountain. A gift a good spirit give you. Stay. Not anger spirit.”

  I could have gone to work in an office in the white world and gotten better pay, but Madame Chia was as close as I was going to get to a real Chinese mama. I stayed with her for three years, sleeping on the futon in the storage room, where no one came to visit me. From her I learned how to stiffen my sentences, use simple words, how to sound Chinese. By the time she died I was earning seven dollars an hour and not paying rent, but there was nothing to keep me there. I had saved enough money to come to New York with dreams of becoming an artist. At first I rented a room in Chinatown. Everyone spoke Chinese to me and made me feel like the orphan I was, made me want to be a real Chinese immigrant. I saw a sign from your school on the door of Joe’s Dumplings shop on Mott Street. That is why I came to your class. To play make believe. But you were kind and I was not who I said I was and I never came back. I moved out to Long Island City and every day I’d take the subway to Manhattan. I’d wander the city and when I saw Columbia University I liked it. Sitting around the campus I could pretend I was an Ivy League student with parents rich enough to pay the tuition or that I was smart enough to have gotten a scholarship there. I could pretend and not have to answer any questions.

  From Madame Chai I also learned that the success of a crop depends on three harmonies: the season, the ground, the effort humans make. For a while you and I had a nice crop—many peonies, the flowers of love, affection, feminine beauty, good fortune. It was the human part that failed in the end. Both our efforts. My neediness. Your anger. I’m not the only one to blame.

  Your friend, An-ling

  Tom

  A few days after Emma came home a package arrived in my office with no return address. Inside the jiffy envelope was a small painting of a boy’s naked torso, a St. Christopher medal dangling from his fingers. I reached for the scissors, carefully cut the canvas from its frame, and then proceeded to reduce that disgusting painting to small squares no larger than my thumbnail. The poem that had accompanied it I flushed down the toilet.

  After I was done I called Emma and told her I wanted to take her and Josh out to dinner.The Terrace, I suggested. “I want to celebrate us.You, Josh, me. Our family.Why not, the bad weather too.”We both managed a laugh.

  I walked home that afternoon, from 68th Street and Lexington to 112th Street and Riverside Drive.A long leisurely walk on an unseasonably cold day, the first dry day in weeks.

  Along the way I came across many useful garbage cans.

  Subj: Fairytales and fantasies

  Date: 04-17-05 19:11.29 EST

  From: Chinesecanary@BetterLateThanNever.com

  To: EPerotti@aol.com

  I sent Josh away in a bad way so he will hate me. Hate builds strong walls. That’s my one good deed. My goodbye present.

  I read in a Chinese book that a mother will sew her absent daughter a coat and wander the countryside to try and catch her spirit. I like to think my mother did that, but I was too far away for her to find me.

  My spirit made a home in your heart for a few months. It was the first time my spirit rested. Thank you for that. Don’t be too angry with me. I am not your real family. I am not Amy. I am me. Just me. You weren’t going to stay. I co
uldn’t keep you

  P.S. Thank you for the can of insulation foam. I will make art with it.

  Tom

  “Did you go see An-ling?” Josh asked this morning.

  “Why would I have done that?”

  “Weren’t you curious?”

  There was a sharpness to his voice. I turned to assess his expression—we were eating breakfast side by side, ready for another day in court, waiting for Emma to finish dressing. I perceived his expression as one of fear. It could be nothing else under the circumstances.The trial is winding down. It’s Emma’s turn to testify today, the defense’s last witness.

  “Mom will do just fine,” I said.

  “Did you go see An-ling?” The sharpness turned into a whine.

  “Is curiosity what took you there the first time?” I asked.

  Josh looked suddenly abashed. I regretted my unfairness, but couldn’t bring myself to show it.

  “You can tell me,Dad.You went over there, didn’t you?”

  I took time to answer. His suspicion caught me off guard.

  “No, Josh, I did not.”

  “I don’t believe you.”A rash of anger spread over his face.

  “What makes you think I went? Is it something your mother said?”What was he after?

  Josh shook his head, his jaw at an unbecoming stubborn angle.

  “An-ling?”

  “I just know,” he said.“You went that last day, didn’t you?

  Didn’t you, Dad?” His eyes brimmed with tears and my irritation turned to pity. But how much do you tell a son who is not yet sixteen and whose mother is on trial for murder of the girl who seduced him, the girl whom he probably thinks will be his only great love?

  “I didn’t go,” I told him. “But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t miss Mom every day. That I didn’t want her back. It doesn’t mean—”

  “I know.” Josh knuckled his eyes dry. “It doesn’t mean you don’t love Mom.”

  “That’s right.”

  Josh tugged at my arm. “Tell them, Dad.Tell them you went over there that afternoon.” His voice was filled with a little boy’s passion. “You didn’t mean to hurt her, but you were really angry and it just happened. Tell them, Dad.

  Please.”

  I shook him hard. “What are you saying?” He just stared, eyes wide. I’d never hurt him before.“What are you thinking?”

  He squirmed out of my hands.“They won’t believe you.

  There’s no evidence against you, and you’re her husband.

  You’re lying to save Mom, that’s what they’ll think, but they’ll have to let her go. It’s reasonable doubt.You won’t go to jail. Dad, get her off!”

  I took my son in my arms and held him tight. “What a good son you are.We’re so lucky to have you.” My beautiful son. I love him so much. “Everything is going to be fine, Josh. I promise. Fishkin is confident. So am I.” I let go but left my arm around his shoulder. My son, the ballast of my life.

  “You know what I kept remembering during the months your mother was away? I kept remembering the moment I decided I wanted her to be my wife. We were on the Observation Deck at the World Trade Center, our first time up there.The sky was clear and the view was neverending. Your mother was rapt. I watched her face reflected in the window. She looked so tender, so small, like a little girl, and then she turned to me and she was this beautiful woman and then for a minute there I saw the lovely old woman she would become.That’s when I knew I wasn’t going to let her go. She was going to be part of my life for as long as there was breath in me.”

  “The towers are gone; the world’s flipped out and nothing is ever going to be good again.” Josh stepped out of my reach.“Tell them you were there, Dad.”

  After everything that had happened, I wasn’t going to lose him now. “All right, I’ll talk to Fishkin. If he thinks it’s a good idea, I’ll do it.”

  “What’s a good idea?” Emma asked as she walked into the kitchen, offering us a nervous, subdued smile.

  My beautiful wife. She has never blamed me for Amy’s death. I knew Amy could open the front door. I’d seen her do it just days before she died. I’d even complimented her. “What a clever little girl you are,” I’d said. Penn State football was on TV when Amy ran out to the street. My alma mater, my team.That’s what was on my mind when it happened. I never told Emma.Amy’s death is my fault.

  “It’s a good idea to get going,” I said.“We’ve got a big day ahead of us.”

  “I’m ready,” she said. Josh linked his arm in hers, walked her down the corridor to the front door, mother and son together.

  Guilt is a weight that should grow lighter with the years.

  I expected it to become a memory, its edges softening with time, the middle blurring until it thinned to a slim disk, conveniently movable out of sight. I never imagined it would finally tear through me.

  “Hey, wait up you two.”

  NINETEEN

  THE DEFENDANT, EMMA Perotti, is on the stand. She is a tall, soft-bodied fifty-two-year-old, with short graying hair, an oval unmade-up face and wide heavy-lidded brown eyes. A writer for an upscale women’s magazine has described her as having the flat look of an Alex Katz portrait. The sketch artists in the courtroom find her likeness hard to capture.

  Emma

  My lawyer walks to the podium, gives me a small nod of encouragement.“Good morning, Ms. Perotti.” He has convinced me to tell the truth, not to be afraid to bare my soul to these strangers. They sit in judgment of every breath I take. How can they possibly understand?

  I will keep my eyes on Fishkin’s face, a kind one. I take a deep breath.“Good morning,” I say.

  “Please tell the court in your own words what happened on April nineteenth of last year, the day the woman you knew as An-ling Huang died.”

  “She called me at school in the afternoon. Inez, Ms.

  Serrano, called me away from the class. I hadn’t talked to An-ling since I’d left the loft. Almost three weeks, I think it was. She said, ‘I need to see you.’ ”

  Her voice was high-pitched, splintered by sobs.

  “Are you all right?” I said.

  “Yes, I’m happy, awesomely happy, totally happy. Your check’s in my pocket,my bags are packed and I’m going so far from you; you’ll never catch my spirit. But first I want to say goodbye, leave you the key, show you that I haven’t painted FUCK OFF all over the walls. I’ve even vacuumed.I want you to be proud of me. I’m leaving you all my paintings, the screen too.Maybe you can get some money for them for the rent.”

  “That isn’t necessary.”

  “That was our deal, remember?”

  “I would have preferred loyalty,” I told her.

  I tell the jury,“She asked me to come over. She said she was going away and wanted to say goodbye in person.”

  “Did she sound upset?”

  “Yes. She was crying.”

  “Why didn’t you go right away?” Fishkin asks.

  “I had classes to teach.And then I was still angry with her because of my son. I didn’t realize how desperate she was.”

  “You have to come over.” Her tone was that of the child who wants, who can only envision the now.

  I wasn’t going to let her maneuver me like that. “Leave the keys on the table then and thank you for cleaning up.

  That was sweet and I appreciate it. I do. Please send me a note when you get to China and let me know you’re well.”

  If I could sell her paintings I’d send her the money.“Be well, An-ling, and be safe.”

  “Please come,” she repeated.

  “What did you tell her?” Fishkin asks.

  “I told her I’d be there after my classes, around five o’clock, but then I got worried. She had sounded so unhappy. I asked Ms. Serrano to take over and went to the loft.

  When I got there, I rang the doorbell for the longest time.”

  “Didn’t you still have keys to the loft?”

  “Yes, that’s how I let myself
in downstairs, after ringing the bell to let her know I was on the way up. I didn’t want to barge into the loft. I no longer lived there. After ringing the doorbell for maybe three to five minutes, I assumed she’d left and I used my key.”

  “What did you find when you walked in?”

  “She was dead.”Her body twisted on the floor, her mouth wide with hardened foam. I lifted her up against my chest.

  From the floor underneath her, Josh’s medal and broken chain glimmered at me. I snatched them up, stuffed them in my pocket, and then I rocked her, sang to her, recited poems we had read together. In the hospital they had taken Amy away from me.

  “I held her for a long time.” It was dark when I heard a burst of trumpets. Tod Curtis, the upstairs tenant, blasting his classical music for the entire neighborhood to hear. I became aware of the outside world again. After him, maybe others would come. I removed the robe An-ling was wearing and eased her back on the floor. I got up and went to strip the sheet from her futon.The sheet and the cover, the towels in the bathroom, the sponge in the sink, anything that my son could have touched, I threw in the washing machine.Then I kneeled down next to An-ling and washed her face with soap to remove her makeup, to make her look like the young sweet girl she really was. I dragged the futon next to her, put a clean sheet on it and, lifting up first her torso, then her legs, slipped her onto the futon.

  “I held An-ling until my arms hurt.When she started to stiffen I lay her back on a clean sheet on her futon. I crossed her arms over her chest and kissed the top of her head, covered her with another sheet.” The same ritual I had performed after discovering Nonna dead on her bed.“I pulled the screen in front of the bed and opened it fully. It was my burial ceremony.”

  “When you found your son’s medal and chain under An-ling’s body, did you think he had killed her?”

  “I panicked and forgot he was safe in Albany. Forgot his gentleness, his goodness. He would never have killed herNever. I just lost my mind.”Tears come unexpectedly, pour down my face, drip from my chin. I shake my head to gain control. Fishkin hands me a handkerchief. “What did you do after your burial ceremony?”

  “I tried to remove all traces of my son’s relationship with An-ling.” I looked for the portrait of Josh’s naked body. I didn’t find it. Either Josh had it or she had done me a favor, destroyed it. Then I did what even a bad mother would do.