Her father had discovered a new countdown radio show, something called American Top 40, which was broadcast on Sunday mornings, and he put it on every week. Maybe some part of her was hearing it, he thought, absorbing it, archiving it in her brain for later recall. The host was a friendly, if slightly smarmy, guy called Casey Kasem. And Roy would write down the songs every week for Sib to cross-check with the local lists at Rose’s store, and so that Sib could have a record of what to catch up on when her hearing did return. Except he left the slots blank that were occupied by the act that Sib hated. She couldn’t even bear to see their name, much less in her father’s handwriting.
About a month after Sib turned 13, a couple of Sundays before Christmas, the show was on the radio. Sib and her father had been to Mass that morning — Sib knew the liturgy by heart and so never had trouble following it; she never really asked her dad about the homilies — and now he was making lunch in the kitchen while Sib sat in the front room, lazily dragging her fingers over the piano keys, out of habit now more than hope, Sunday-afternoon adolescent ennui for the unhearing. She planned on turning off the radio near the end of the show because she knew that that hateful duo’s latest smash hit would be played. It had been No. 1 the week before. She wanted to actively choose not to “hear” it.
Such a feeling came over her.
With about five minutes left in the program, she got up from the piano bench to turn off the radio, and suddenly felt unsteady, tingling, a little flush. She felt something warm on her leg — she’d changed out of her church clothes and into her sweats, and rolled them up to see a trickle of blood, then a steadier stream. First she thought she’d bumped her leg on something, maybe on the edge of the piano bench.
But then she realized what was happening. Her first period. She knew it would be coming soon — her breasts were filling out, her body hair was filling in — but didn’t make the connection between that and the mild cramps she’d been having the past few days. (The aunts tried to prepare her. Maddy: “You’ll feel so grown-up, like a young woman.” Bern: “Midol and Chanel No. 5 will get you through it.” Constance: “God’s way of making sure you bathe.”)
“Dad!” she yelled out.
“What is it?” Roy said, reflexively, craning his head around the doorway of the kitchen, pancake batter dripping from the spatula in his hand.
“I’m bleeding down my leg. I think my period started.”
Roy grabbed the paper towels and some hydrogen peroxide they kept in a kitchen cabinet and started to head to the front room. Then he suddenly realized what had really occurred.
So had Sib. Their faces met across the dining room. He’d been too far away for her to read his lips, and anyway she was looking at her leg when she replied to him. She’d heard him. She screamed. He yelled. They ran to each other and Roy picked her up, his 13-year-old daughter, and kissed her ears. Then she ran around the dining room, the kitchen, the living room, still dripping a little blood, banging on everything, pinging, dropping things on the floor. Shouting. Whispering. She could hear it all. She forgot about the period. The countdown show was over. She flipped off the radio, because she didn’t want it to decide what the first music she heard would be, especially any residue from that duo’s group’s current hit.
After an hour, which also included running outside with her basketball just to hear the bounce-thump of it on the asphalt, and after showering and changing her clothes, she went down to the basement, stopping short in front of the phonograph. She was almost afraid to try it. She wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t all an auditory illusion. And what record should she pick? It had to be the perfect one. The first song she’d play after more than three years. Her dad stood at the top of the stairs. “Are you O.K., Siobhan? Sure you want to do that now? Maybe you should wait a little while.”
“No, Dad. I’ve waited long enough.” She looked over at Kieran’s collection on the shelf under the window well, those records still in near-mint condition since that horrible day. She started to pull a few out, but every time she’d look at a title, her eyes would go to the stenciled KK on the label. The first one she saw was “He’s So Fine.” God, how they loved that one. She put it back. Too obvious, and so was the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love.” Then the Beatles’ “Yesterday.” Too sad. She took out the Jackson Five’s “The Love You Save,” the last record that all three of them had danced to in the basement. Too painful. Marvin and Tammi’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” Getting closer. Finally she found one of those Reparata singles, “Captain of Your Ship.” It was so joyous, and because it wasn’t much of a hit beyond Queens, Brooklyn and Long Island, it was a song that really seemed to belong just to them. She put the record on. She’d never heard anything sweeter than the sound of the ship’s horn and bells at the beginning of the song. By the end of it she was singing and jigging and punching her hands in the air with joy, snapping, clapping, intentionally bumping into anything that made noise.
“Say what you will,” Timmy intoned, drawing Sib back. “They had quite a streak with those first 12 or 15 singles. They were bulletproof.”
Sib looked through those first 12 again — they were back in chronological order — and when she got to the last one, its almost sickeningly cheery sound came flooding back, just as it did the first time she heard it. But the song was soon drowned out by her recollection of the joy she felt in those couple of weeks before Christmas in 1973, when everything sounded like music, when everything sounded like Christmas: cars screeching, pots clanging, teeth chattering, chalk on a blackboard, even the sound of her own breath. She’d wake up in the middle of the night and rustle the covers or snap her fingers just to make sure her ears still worked. She’d listen for her own heartbeat. She’d bang the trash-can lids. She played practically every record in her and Kieran’s collection, in the basement late so many nights that her dad had to keep reminding her to go to bed. Once he found her asleep on the floor in front of the stereo, wrapped in a blanket, 45s piled around like vinyl parapets.
Sib waited a few days before she went to Rose’s store. She’d wanted to surprise Rose, pretend she still couldn’t hear, then have Rose lay hands on her and tap 18 times and then Sib would spring the news. But Rose, even with her attention on a holiday-shopping Saturday crowd, the syrup from her tall stack of waffles dribbling down her chin, knew the minute Sib appeared behind the counter.
“Chipper!” Rose said, at the top of her lungs. Sib tried to hold it in but caved within seconds, and soon was running and screaming into the folds of Rose’s dress. Rose kissed Sib’s ears; Rose’s lips were sticky and gooey, but Sib cared less about how they felt than how they sounded, which was chiming and melodious, as if the sound were coming from one of Kieran’s 45s. She almost wished a customer would try to steal something so that Rose would wield the whip and Sib could hear its glorious crack all the way out to Liberty Avenue. Over Rose’s shoulders she shuddered as she looked toward the back and the listening booths, but they were gone, replaced by more albums and a room for blacklight posters. It was almost as if Rose knew, too, just like her dad.
“We need to celebrate, Chipper,” Rose said. “You go and pick out any album you want.”
Sib’s face lit up, until her dad said from not far behind, “Uh, Siobhan, Christmas is in a couple of weeks. Maybe you should wait to see what’s under the tree.”
Sib somewhat glumly agreed and settled for a 45, Todd Rundgren’s “Hello, It’s Me,” which she’d heard for the first time on the radio that morning and seemed a good choice for the first record she’d buy with her ears open again. The next few weeks she went up to everybody she knew, friends, neighbors, teachers and said, “Hello, It’s Me,” to all of them. As if she were a piece of art that had been restored and was worthy of another look. Another listen. A reconsideration.
On Christmas Day, after early Mass — even the wheezing organ at I-Mac sounded sweet — Sib and her father visited the cemetery to lay wreaths on the grave. Sib had never wanted to go, and
her father never forced the issue. But now she told him she was ready. “Let’s go wish them a Merry Christmas,” Sib said.
The silence came roaring back when they entered the gates of St. John’s in Woodside. The place was vast, a rolling plain of gravestones poking up among denuded trees and dead grass, with visitors holding bouquets of flowers or pine sprigs or Christmas ornaments, live people floating around like ghosts, a city unto itself, a city of the dead. Sib couldn’t even hear the car now as it wound its way around to the row where Kieran and her mother were buried.
She walked ahead of her father to the grave, with their last name, KELLY, loud across the top, in big capital letters, and, underneath, Eugenia M., 1932-1970, and Kieran J., 1956-1970. Sib had worried that all she’d be able to think of would be the loss of them, the silence, that horrible day of the accident. The grief and the guilt and the anger she felt. That she’d start screaming or wailing. Instead she thought of the dance parties in the basement, when Genie would sing and twirl them around. She said an Our Father and a Hail Mary, and then opened her coat and pulled out Kieran’s copy of “He’s So Fine,” which she’d wrapped in plastic. She leaned down and started to dig out a narrow trench in front of the gravestone, then stuck the 45 in the ground where she’d dug the groove.
When her dad saw what she was doing, he touched her shoulder. “Don’t leave that here, Siobhan. It will just get ruined.”
“But other people leave stuff,” Sib said. “This was one of his favorites. I wanted him to have it.”
“Why don’t you sing it instead?” her father said.
Sib picked up the record and stood next to her father. After a few seconds, she took a deep breath and tried to find the right pitch of those opening words, that refrain she’d known almost as long as she’d been alive. She squeaked out the first word a couple of times, then took another breath and started over, barely above a tree whisper. Then again, strong, hard consonants and pitch-perfect vowels.
The people visiting the graves in the next row turned around and stared at Sib. She stopped singing.
“That was nice, why don’t you go on?” her father said.
“That’s enough, Dad. Mom would just laugh at me, anyway. She always had the better voice.” Sib put the record back inside her coat. “Merry Christmas, you two,” she said.
Back at the house, after breakfast, Sib attacked the presents under the tree.
There was a pile of record albums: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (a gift from Rose). Band on the Run. Innervisions. A tall box from Aunt Maddy, who was supposed to host them that year but hadn’t been feeling well. Sib figured it was a bunch of dresses she’d never wear, but when she opened the box, she found a guitar. Nothing fancy, basic Sears acoustic, but it didn’t matter. She took it out of the felt-lined case and strummed. Kieran, she knew, would have been able to pick out some kind of simple tune or chord progression right away. She just made noise. But it didn’t matter. It was something that she could hear. Then she gave her dad his present, a framed picture of the 1973 Mets, who had won the pennant that year and got within a game of winning the World Series, their motto, “Ya Gotta Believe!” across the top.
Roy smiled when he opened the picture. “Ah, if only Yogi had started George Stone in Game 6,” he said. But Sib knew that the motto, and the team, who had come from last place with a month left in the season, now meant something more to the two of them personally than the fact that they almost won the Series.
Sib thought she had saved the big box for last, but her father said, “Looks like there’s one more under the tree.” Sib looked toward the back and noticed what looked like another record album, with her name in the “To” field but no name in the “From.” “Do you know who it’s from, Dad?” she said.
“No idea,” Roy said. The house had been filled the past few days with neighbors and friends and family members dropping by with trays of cookies and small gifts when they got the news that Sib’s hearing had returned. “Could have been any number of people.”
Sib ripped open the wrapping and stared down at the chocolate-brown cover. She was suddenly silent, everything was suddenly silent again. Her energy was sucked out, along with all the air in the room. Then she scanned the titles on the back cover. She felt some of her breakfast repeat on her.
It was the hateful duo’s greatest-hits album. A couple of days earlier at Rose’s store, Sib couldn’t help noticing that it was No. 1 on the charts.
When her dad noticed her silence, he looked over and said: “Oh, boy. Whoever gave you that must not have known. I’m sure you can take it back to Rose’s and exchange it for something else.”
“No,” Sib said. “I’ll keep it.” She was going to be tough, even if it meant keeping this godforsaken record. She put the album on the bottom of the pile, and Christmas resumed.
That night, Sib played all her new albums back to back, with her guitar slung over her shoulder. All except that one on the bottom of the pile. She put it away and forgot about it. She never even punctured the shrink-wrap.
Now, almost 10 years later, there was the word “bulletproof” again. “Yeah, whatever,” Sib said to Timmy. “Where’s Larry?”
“Right here,” he said, walking over with a copy of Kid Creole and the Coconuts’ “I’m a Wonderful Thing, Baby.” “So, did we ever find out Rose’s cause of death?”
“Cardiac arrest,” Timmy said. “Probably from all those shakes and pizzas and tubs of takeout Chinese.”
“That’s not quite what it was,” Sib said.
“Huh? She didn’t die of cardiac arrest?” Timmy asked.
“Her heart was just too big,” Sib said. “She had too much love for everyone. It just burst from being too full.”
“Hey,” Larry said, “there’s a title for a song.”
“What?” Timmy said.
“Too Much Love.”
“Ha,” Sib said, “maybe. Except who’s going to write it these days?”
“Well, why don’t we?”
Sib thought about it for a minute. She was always complaining that no one was writing great songs anymore, and so there were no great voices, or vice versa. She’d never written a song before, but Larry knew his basic music theory, and even though Timmy had no formal musical training, he had a good ear.
“Sure, why the hell not?” Sib said. If nothing else, it would be a tribute to Rose.
21. New York City, Summer 1982
The girl and her friends hadn’t seen her. She’d heard the word “drafting” somewhere, meaning using someone in front of you in a race, on the street, as a human windbreaker. So she found customers in the store to do just that; she’d paint or sluice herself behind some biker type or some big suit who was close enough for her to hear what the girl and her friends were saying without letting them see her. She was practically slotting herself in behind her drafters.
They were standing in front of her section again, and one of the girl’s friends called their big hits “bulletproof,” and then they were all talking about some song called “Too Much Love.” Great title, she thought. She’d make a note of it and tell the brother to track it down when they got back into the studio. After a few more minutes she realized it wasn’t really a song, just a title they’d thought of. “Who would write it?” the girl asked, and then one of the others replied: “Why don’t we?”
So they were thinking of writing a song. She’d been thinking about that, too. The brother was so good at it, the composing part anyway. She’d told her hairdresser that she was going to start writing her own material. Why couldn’t she? Why did she have to be just a singer?
That night in the hotel, thoughts of the song title made her forget about dinner. She’d have to fudge her food log in the morning. She fell asleep watching a Dallas videotape. And she dreamed about the girl. She was wearing the same outfit from the first day she’d seen her: the denim skirt and the stockings with the sneakers, the backpack shed to reveal the muscled lats popping through her bra straps and top. Straight, light
brown hair, in a bouncy ponytail. The girl was sitting in a parlor, with a wide bay window and sheer curtains that looked out onto a sloping bed of ivy. She was in front of something like a phonograph, a big box that she was looking down into. She still couldn’t see the girl’s face, only the same smudged rouge from the side.
Behind the girl there was a man, older, trim, in some kind of uniform, maybe a military guy or a groundskeeper. He unhooked the carabiner of keys from his belt and suddenly threw them to the floor. The girl didn’t react. Then he picked up the keys and threw them hard up into the air. Still the girl didn’t flinch, either when they hit the ceiling or when they crashed to the floor an inch away from her. The man moved away, while the girl kept staring into the phonograph. She grabbed the volume knob and turned it all the way up. She didn’t recoil or even move when it got all the way to 10. Then she got up and stood next to the floor speakers, almost as tall as she was, and put her ear right up to the netting in front of the tweeter. The thing was pumping like a hydraulic piston, but the girl stayed still in front of it. She moved over to the next speaker and did the same. No visible physical reaction. She leaned so far into the cloth of the speaker cover, practically body-checked it, that it took on the shape of her. Finally she sidestepped from station to station — phonograph, speaker, the dusty upright piano in the corner — turned knobs, pounded her fists down from one length of the keys to the other, clawed at the strings on the guitar that was in another corner until one of them broke, banged on everything within arm’s length. Nothing. She ran back to the phonograph and yanked the album from the spindle and flung it into the wall, where it smashed and then scattered. Finally the girl crumpled to the ground on the thick, fraying rug, raised her head up and from behind seemed to be screaming. The older man put a hand on her shoulder, and finally, after a mild flinch she uncoiled into his touch.
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