by Tina Amiri
But now he had a bigger problem. Lila had paid for the item that he’d stupidly destroyed and he found himself scrambling for a way to erase the whole incident. Perhaps he could hide some of his tip money and pay her back—but what if she shared the story with his father first, or at any point in the future? In any case, Andrew would learn of this trip.
Lila clutched his arm reassuringly. Some young girls smiled and giggled as they passed by. They were no more than fourteen years old but Night smiled back and it encouraged the girls to keep turning around to stare at him.
“They’ve taken a fancy to you,” Lila remarked. “You are very attractive after all…and also very mysterious.” She strode along in silence until she decided they had to go inside another store.
The store turned out to be a café-restaurant. Lila had cleverly found a way to get him to stay face-to-face with her for more than a few seconds. When their food was delivered, she asked him about his smoked fish.
“Is it as good as the Emerald Shore’s?”
He produced a trace grin as his eyes roved around the quaint, pastel-colored restaurant. “I don’t think so,” he answered with rare decisiveness.
“You know, you really play the piano beautifully…and you speak very well, too. Tell me…do you have any hearing at all?”
With his fork hanging over the dish, he turned his eyes up at Lila. Nobody had ever probed into the matter of his make-believe deafness the way she did.
He shook his head. “I can feel the sound inside it when I play.” He hoped she’d be satisfied with his now-standard answer.
Lila’s mouth shifted with suspicion. “Well, you certainly are a fine pianist,” she reiterated. “So you can paint, play music. What else? Do you like to read?”
Now self-conscious about his speech, he wanted this experience to end. He had pressed Andrew about how to speak if his speech was to be imperfect, but Andrew would snap back that he should simply refrain from speaking at all, and so he continued to blunder through his act. “Read? You mean words?”
Lila’s fork now dangled as well. “Yes, of course, words.” After a moment she blurted, “Can you not read?”
Now they shared the same wary expression and his silence apparently answered her question.
“That’s why you went with the lunch special that the waitress told us about… Night, for God’s sake, why can’t you read? Didn’t your father teach you?”
He shook his head.
“What exactly did he teach you, then?” She rifled through her purse and pulled out a notepad and pen. She scribbled on the page and then slid it across the table. “That’s your name. Let’s begin with these letters.”
Concentrating as though it were a riddle, Night sized up each character before the point of his pen came down and his hand scrolled across the page. Lila’s head twitched when she saw it. His effort was identical to her sample in every way.
“Okay, genius…” She took back the paper and produced his name in cursive writing. “You should at least know how to sign your name.”
Night examined the artwork before his eyes brightened and the words practically boiled from his lips. “I want to learn this. Show me how to write ‘Daphne’?”
Again her eyes flashed at his well-articulated words. “We’ll work on this later, all right? I’ll visit you when you’re alone. Each week you can give me your work schedule or tell me when you want me to come and, when you’re ready, we’ll surprise your father.”
Lila led Night through a shortcut back to her car. An old building along the way distracted him with its elaborate architecture and then he noticed a disheveled character sitting in a doorway. Night stopped when the man mumbled something and answered Night’s stare by rattling his tin cup.
When Night didn’t react, he rattled his cup again.
“Night, come on.” Lila tugged at his coat, but he pulled his arm away.
The man snarled, “That’s right, Mommy. Take the little freak out of my sight…maybe teach him that staring is rude?”
“I don’t understand what you want,” Night answered boldly, clearly, recklessly.
Night glared at Lila when she tugged on his arm again, but this time she gave him an answer. “Money, Night. He wants money.”
“I don’t have any money!”
A crude laugh, then a cough, escaped the man’s throat. “Really? You, with your little shopping bags and fancy clothes…how about that watch? Do you know what that glorified piece of metal could do for me, you tight-assed son of a bitch. Why don’t you just go run along home with Mommy now? She doesn’t want you talking to my kind. Go on now.”
Feeling more annoyed than offended, Night opened the clasp of his platinum watch and flung it at the stranger’s chest. The cup skipped free and rolled down the sidewalk, spilling all its coins.
The man’s features transformed as he clutched the watch in one palm and stared at Night. “You’re joking?”
Night had no trouble recognizing the familiar look of bewilderment.
Lila began walking away and Night felt compelled to run after her.
“Sorry man,” the stranger called after him. “Really… You know, I wasn’t always like this…”
Night turned back one more time as Lila clutched his arm.
“That was very nice of you,” she acknowledged. “But what on earth were you thinking? I’m sure your father meant for you to wear that expensive thing, not whoever found it in the pawnshop.”
Night knew Lila had it right, whatever she meant.
“Well, if nothing else, I suppose you’ve made a stranger’s year.”
In the earliest hour of the morning, Night waited for the front door to open. He sat in an armchair in his sapphire-blue robe, tensely gripping the armrests. Andrew strode in, but stopped abruptly at the border of the living room where one small brass lamp lit the room.
“What happened?”
Night sighed. “I went…I went somewhere today…in town.”
There was no response.
“Lila came to the house, and she just walked in, and she asked me to go with her. She wanted me to go. I had to go. …She made me go.”
“I see.” Andrew plunked himself down and leaned back in the second armchair before crossing his legs and throwing his eyes upward at Night. “So,” he continued, “what did you think?”
“What do you mean?”
“It always shows when you have a reason to stall, Night. Did you talk to anyone?”
“No.”
“You spoke with Lila, did you not?”
“Not very much.”
“But you did talk to her. Who else did you talk to?”
Night paused. “Just some man…”
Andrew’s impatience finally combusted. “Who?”
“There was this man on one street… Lila said he wanted money, but I didn’t have any so I gave him my watch because he said it would help him.”
Andrew pressed his forehead into his hands. “It’s not your fault. What could I expect?” Then he reached for the sky like a half-crazed man. “But you shouldn’t have been there…especially since you’ve come up with this new theory that you can chat with anybody at all—as long as they talk to you first!”
“Nothing bad happened.” Then he remembered the glass ball. “Oh…except I broke something…and Lila paid for it. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”
“Perfect. Thank you for that. So, you gave away your watch to some charlatan on the street, you broke some damn inanimate thing—everything seems so much more important to you than the fact that you keep putting our lives in jeopardy! How do you know that nothing bad will happen? I suppose I’m just stupid—you’re the one who knows everything now.”
“No.”
“Why won’t you just listen? The world is falling out from under our feet so fast these days. I try to bring back one piece while another is already crumbling away.” His blue eyes had turned to dead steel. “I don’t need to be dealing with this, worrying about you all the t
ime. If I hadn’t taken this on, you could have been the man on the street.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t appreciate what I’ve done for you, Night. You think nothing of what I give to you and do for you every single day and, for once, I want you to think about it! Sit right here and tell me, out loud. Let’s see if you can remember even one thing!”
He followed Andrew’s outstretched arm straight to the point of his finger and his gaze ended up on the floor. He looked up startled. Why would he sit on the floor? An old clock ticking nearby counted the passing seconds out loud for him and, still, Andrew did not waive his request. Night rose from the armchair and hesitated, but Andrew’s eyes didn’t even blink. Night came closer, then awkwardly knelt before the self-appointed overlord of the emerald coastline.
“Now…what is the only thing I have always asked of you?”
“Not to talk to anyone.”
“No! That you trust me!”
He nodded.
“And tell me… Just try to use your imagination. What should you be grateful for?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Try love, prestige, everything you know, a future, your life—everything.”
Not everything.
Andrew stood up from his chair and Night’s shoulders lifted so he could follow suit. “No! You need to start remembering things, Night. Stay there and put your head to the floor.”
Night glanced in the direction of his bed where his head should have been at this hour; then, gradually, his head sank to the floorboards. The sole of Andrew’s shoe clamped down on the collar of the blue robe and Night’s cheek abruptly met the wood. He heard a belt slithering out to freedom as Andrew stepped around him and he felt the bathrobe’s velvet lift from the back of his thighs. He closed his eyes and tried to remind himself why this was worth it, but all he could conjure in the blackness were images from his nightmares.
Chapter Five
After two weeks and four visits to the house as Night’s English teacher, Lila stepped through the front door in her original capacity, as Andrew’s lover…and perhaps as a bit of a sleuth.
Following an extended late shift at the hospital, she didn’t feel hurried to announce her presence. She snapped on the table lamp in the living room and let her eyes glide up the banister of the curved staircase, along the minstrels’ gallery, and then drop to the door below.
The room turned out to be a small den…a den without any books. She had expected to at least find a Bible in the house, after hearing about Andrew’s undiluted Catholic ancestry, but despite the presence of a massive antique cabinet, its compartments turned up nothing but business documents. The last shelf she checked proved her wrong—at least until she realized she’d only found an outdated signing textbook. This implied that Night really did have profound hearing loss, but now she needed an explanation for his flawless speech, or if she dared think it…for the sign language.
She no longer made any attempt at stealth as she climbed to the second floor. Water ran in the bathroom and lamplight spilled into the hallway through Andrew’s open bedroom door. In his absence, she sat down on the edge of his bed and, still in snoop-mode, couldn’t help but pull on the night table drawer.
Her hand slipped inside to lift out a picture frame loosely wrapped in a woman’s silk scarf. It slid off as she turned the oval framed photograph around. Andrew’s summer-sky eyes peered back at her in shades of gray, like the rest of the picture. Andrew with a youthful face, stood like a soldier posing for his portrait, while the woman sitting next to him tipped an open smile down at her tiny infant. Andrew’s wife had delicate features, penciled eyebrows, and teeth worthy of showing off between her darkly painted lips. Also in contrast with her light skin, she had chin-length, heavily waved dark hair. Andrew’s hair appeared light in comparison. He had already admitted to her that it had once been as copper as a penny. Lila could see why their son was so attractive.
“Yes, my family…” Andrew interrupted, sullenly, from the doorway. He came in, stopped beside Lila, and also gazed down at the picture.
“You’ve never answered me about this. What happened to her?”
“Car accident.”
Lila shifted on the bed to peer up at him. “Didn’t you say she’d been ill?”
“I say a lot of things. I don’t like to talk about it.”
She felt she was playing chess. Her next move would have to be less aggressive or her opponent might be tempted to throw the board. “Andrew, I couldn’t help notice that you don’t have any books in the house.” She decided to forget about subtle. “I mean, other than the ones right there, under your night table.”
“Lila, why would I leave books all over the house when my son can’t read?”
“Incentive? Okay, maybe you want to tell me about that, Andrew. Why is it that Night can’t read?”
He finally eased himself down on the bed beside her. “It was a priority for me to teach him how to sign, how to communicate with me. Reading didn’t come easy to him, and after a while, it didn’t seem important anymore. I know, I should have pushed him, but he never really showed any interest.”
“Well, he’s showing an interest now.” Lila appreciated that she was probably about to stalemate this game. “I have to ask you one more thing, Andrew. Does Night even know when his birthday is or did he, again, never really show an interest in presents and cake?”
“What are you getting at, Lila? We just don’t celebrate birthdays, and I’ll admit, that’s for my benefit.”
She sensed that Andrew was just as aware of the need to sacrifice a pawn or two in order to survive.
“His birthday happens to clash with my feelings about that time and since I can’t acknowledge his, I won’t acknowledge my own.” Andrew’s eyes turned up as though they were heavy. “It might be selfish of me, but I’ve honestly tried to make very little of birthdays in this house.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Lila sniped, dropping the picture on the bed as she stood up. “I don’t understand why you’ve designed this life for yourself, and for Night, that doesn’t offer either of you any advantages. He’s never been to school—”
“I told you…”
“Andrew, should I really believe that you yielded to a six-year-old because he showed some aversion to the idea of going away for school? He would have made friends. And assuming that you made the right decision, did it make sense to never teach Night how to read? It’s strange. You don’t have a television, or even one of those devices for the telephone so he could use it…not that he could, being illiterate of course!”
“Lila—”
“He’s completely isolated out here.”
“And we both like it that way.”
“And after the experience I had with Night the other week, I wonder if he’s ever been out of his backyard.”
“Why are you saying these ridiculous things, Lila? Why would I disadvantage him? How could you question that I love my kid?”
“I’m not saying that.” She crossed her arms and dropped a sultry blink over her shoulder. “Maybe I just think it’s a…strange love.”
The corners of Andrew’s mouth lifted and his eyes looked playful. “Well, you seem to quite like my strange love,” he purred, setting his hands on her shoulders from behind before pulling her against his chest.
She fought not to smile but lost. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what all you’ve been through and I’m not a parent. I shouldn’t have said those things.”
“I understand how it may seem, Lila. I never expected to do it all myself, and I know I’ve made mistakes, as you’ve so plainly outlined for me, but Night is also a very private and stubborn person. Sometimes I even have difficulty understanding him.”
“I don’t understand either of you.” She sighed and turned around to accept his embrace, but he barely hesitated before he pressed his body to hers, all the way down to the bed sheets.
****
Night thought little of
the frantic breaths that reached him from his father’s room as he neared the bathroom door. It pleased him to think someone else might be experiencing a nightmare for a change. Just then, his father called out as though he sensed him in the hallway and had something urgent to confess or report, so Night cracked open his father’s door and pushed past the threshold.
Lila gasped and Night shot backward and hit his head as two naked bodies scrambled for decency, conspicuously united, the bed covers hopelessly trapped underneath hands and knees.
His father certainly didn’t feel the least bit shamed in his state—in front of Lila. He boosted himself up to free the covers, revealing all before hunkering down between her legs as much as he could.
Night managed to clear the doorway on his second attempt to flee. He locked the door to the bathroom where a thought hit him, even before the whole incident finished playing back in his mind. If his father had lied to him about a man’s spontaneous growth being an indignity, how many other dubious lessons could he finally dispense with?
****
That morning, his father looked a bit sheepish when he came into Night’s room, but he only stopped in to report that he and Lila were leaving to drive up the coast, so they wouldn’t be back for several hours.
Night could hardly wait for them to leave. When they drove off, he slipped into the den. Unlike Lila, he was familiar with the contents of the wooden cabinet.
He studied the alphabet signs inside the front cover of the book he knew only too well, but for the first time in his life, these symbols meant something to him. He identified the print letters that Lila had taught him and he formed each letter with his fingers. He’d never even realized that his father had skipped this very basic lesson. Half way through finger spelling his name, he thought he heard the car return. He scrambled to get the book back in its place and vacate the room, but the living room window revealed that it wasn’t his father’s Mercedes that nestled in beside Lila’s car… He couldn’t get his shoes on fast enough before he calmly opened the front door.
“You’re not easy to find!” Daphne called out, emerging from his muted dreams into brilliant reality. “I went to the restaurant a few times, but you’re like never there, so I asked that waiter where you lived. He said about twenty minutes south—a beachfront house—but he didn’t know the number. I can’t believe I finally found you.”