The Melody of Silence: Crescendo

by LP Tvorik

  Grinding my teeth, I wrapped my fist around the little gold cross and jerked my hand, snapping the chain. Fresh tears rose in my eyes as I tossed the broken necklace into the small trash can by the toilet.

  No more pretending. I vowed not to punish my father, nor to curse my mother’s memory, but I was done conforming to their view of the world and their plans for my future. There comes a moment in every child’s life when he or she finally realizes that adults aren’t omniscient and omnipotent. Then, much later, there comes a moment when he or she realizes that adults aren’t just flawed. They’re broken and weak, and none of them are in a position to blaze another’s trails or protect another’s interests. Not even parents.

  It was time to grow up.

  ‥ ‥ ‥

  My father must have still been in bed when I left for work, because his car was in the drive but the house was silent.

  It was just past eight when I closed and locked the door behind me. The sun was still working its way into the sky so, although the air was sticky and damp, it wasn’t yet obscenely hot. The sunlight was clear and cheerful, flickering through the trees that lined the sidewalk and dancing on the emerald-green grass. Birds sang, playful and free, in the branches over my head as I walked to work.

  Gemma’s face went white when I knocked on the glass door of the ice cream shop. Eyes wide, she scrambled around the counter and hurried to unlock the door, pulling me into her arms as soon as I stepped over the threshold.

  “Aly I’m so sorry,” she said into my shoulder, squeezing me so hard I could barely breathe. “Are you okay? Oh my god, that’s a stupid question. Of course you’re not okay. What are you doing here? We covered all your shifts. Bob says you’ve got your job when you feel okay to come back but you don’t have to anytime soon. Why are you here? Oh my God, Aly, I’m so so sorry.”

  Tears hovered in her eyes when she pulled back, holding onto my shoulders with her hands as she peered into my face as if she could ascertain my welfare by eye contact alone.

  “I’m fine,” I said, pulling out of her grip and fixing my best fake smile on my face.

  Gemma frowned, crossing her arms over her chest. “You can’t be, Aly. You really don’t have to be here, you know.”

  “I’m tired of lying in my bed,” I said truthfully, leaving her by the door and skirting the counter, pulling my apron off its hook and slipping it over my head. “I just want to pretend like things are normal for a few hours, okay?”

  My friend frowned, and I could tell she wanted to argue but I won by virtue of pity.

  ‥ ‥ ‥

  My father was at the kitchen table when I returned home, and for once there was no Bible or theological text in site. Instead, the maroon tablecloth was littered with papers. Bills, I imagined. Death ought to be cheap. It ought to be free. Nobody should have to pay for the privilege of bidding a loved one farewell.

  It’s not cheap, though. It’s damned expensive. You know a decent casket runs for around $1000? Did you know the average burial plot costs $2-5,000? Ambulance rides are expensive too, regardless of whether the patient is alive on arrival. Then there’s the fee to have the body all dressed up and beautified. Hearse and funerary services charge by the hour.

  It’s a racket. I figured when it was time for me to die, I’d just go into the woods and crawl into a hole so nobody would have to pay for my passing.

  “Aly,” my father greeted hoarsely as I entered the room and set my bag down, pulling out a kitchen chair and sinking into it. “I saw your note. You know you don’t have to go to work, sweetheart. I called the shop.”

  “I know,” I said woodenly. “I wanted to go.”

  He nodded as if he understood, and for a moment there passed between us a flicker of comradery.

  I sat in my chair and picked at the ruffled edge of the tablecloth. My father sat in his and stared absently at a piece of paper, tapping his pen against the tabletop. I wished he would try to apologize again. I wanted to forgive him. My outburst was weighing heavily on my soul and I needed absolution. He was a preacher. He should have understood that.

  “I haven’t told Tom, yet,” he said, instead.

  “He comes home on Friday.” Tension crawled up my spine as I felt us settle into our new roles. My father sank into guilt and silent contrition and I into new responsibility. He would wallow in remorse and I would hold the remains of our family together.

  “I know,” my father said. “He needs us there. He can’t find out over the phone or from a stranger. He needs to hear it in a controlled environment.”

  “We’ll tell him on Friday,” I said numbly, standing up. “I’m going to go to bed.”

  ‥ ‥ ‥

  According to my morbid research, my mother probably took about thirty minutes to die. I have to assume she botched the job a little like most such suicides do. She probably didn’t slice clean through the veins, so it would have taken a little while for her blood loss to become critical.

  She’d have laid there for a while in the tub as the warm water grew colder and darker with swirls of crimson. She’d have had time to think of us. If her life had really flashed before her eyes, surely ours did too. Surely she remembered the days Tom and I were born. Our first steps. Our first words. Surely she closed her eyes and remembered happy Christmas mornings and chasing us with the hose during long, hot summer afternoons. She’d have remembered reading to us at bedtime, our heads tucked against her chest as her voice soothed us into sleep.

  It took my mother thirty minutes to die, but me? I died over the course of months.

  I died at an agonizing pace, moment by moment, as my mother’s decision grew smaller in my rearview and the festering wound it left behind grew larger and more necrotic.

  I died a little bit when we picked up Tom from camp and drove him home. He chatted away in the back seat and my father and I sat in tense silent up front. I tried to engage, to give him a few more minutes of joy, but my soul wasn’t in it. When we got home, we sat him down on the couch. My dad said that mom was in heaven, but Tom looked at me with watery eyes and I couldn’t hide the truth from him fast enough. He saw the scorn on my face before I could wipe it away, and he knew what I knew— that heaven was a lie and our mother was gone.

  I died a little bit when we buried her. My father preached the service, and the crowd was standing-room-only. Nobody had ever cared much for my mother in life, but my father was revered.

  Tom and I sat in the front pew and I hugged my brother as he wept noisily into my chest. Everyone had something to say to me, afterwards. Old ladies offered unwanted hugs and cried for my motherless soul, as if their tears might somehow help me. Young women frowned and cooed and patted my shoulder. Men, young and old, offered empty condolences and gripped my shoulder to convey their manly strength and wisdom into me by touch.

  I tried— really tried— to cry. I dug deep, calling upon grotesque images and fleeting memories of fear from the day I found her, but my soul had retreated behind a wall of bulletproof glass. I saw the world around me, but it couldn’t touch me. I was isolated, both from comfort and from pain. I was dying a slow, cold death and I didn’t care.

  Summer wore into fall. Momma’s body decomposed beneath the earth in a cemetery called “Hope’s Fall Memorial Garden” out on the edge of town. Her headstone was a gray-black marble monstrosity with blocky lettering.

  Marissa Winger

  August 17, 1964 - July 26, 2001

  Beloved Mother and Wife

  Once a week, Tom and I took fresh roses to her grave and sat for a while in the shade of a towering oak, visiting with her absence. Tom cried into his knees and begged her to come back. I patted his back and stared, dry-eyed, at the inscription on the headstone. It was odd that my holy, poetic father couldn’t come up with something less generic to commemorate the mother of his children and the supposed love of his life.

  Every
evening, I snuck out of the house and visited the spot. I didn’t use the window, anymore. I saw no reason to hide my actions because my father’s opinions of right and wrong no longer held any sway with me. I knew that I didn’t care what he thought, and I knew if he caught me sneaking out or in, I’d have only to level a stare at him and he would let me do as I pleased. Daddy’s guilt was like a noose around his neck. All I had to do was kick the chair out from beneath him and he was loath to give me opportunity to do so.

  Even Nate and the magic of our spot failed to stall my slow slide into living death. It wasn’t Nate’s fault. He tried. He coaxed me into games that used to make me laugh. He talked for hours into the warm, dark air, trying to lure me into conversation. He held me close and endured my silence. I felt like I was watching his efforts through a television screen. All of my emotional responses were lukewarm and tangential. I experienced dull remorse that I was so unresponsive, and listless gratitude for the fact that he cared enough to try. Beyond that, though… nothing. No real, gut response.

  Nate couldn’t fix me. Nobody could. I was cold and dead, and I liked it that way. Cold and dead were far safer and more comfortable than the harsh, blinding sensations of life. Maybe there was a lesson about Momma in that, but at the time I was too numb to see it.

  When school started, things got worse. My grades were fine. I poured myself into classwork with the monotonous discipline of the walking dead. With no pleasure, or desire therefore, it wasn’t hard to devote my time and energy to work.

  My classmates largely avoided me, and I knew they were whispering behind my back. The gossip machine is bad enough for the average joe. It’s twice as vicious when your father is the preacher at a prominent church, your brother is mentally handicapped, and your mother took her own life.

  Of all my friends, only Gemma stuck by my side, but even she began to drift away when her best efforts at friendship were met with apathy on good days and sharp rebuke on bad ones.

  That just left Nate and, gradually, that relationship turned sour as well. He was just too steady. Too patient. Too understanding. The more reliable he was, the more frustrated I became. The angrier I got, the worse I acted, and the greater my confusion grew. I didn’t understand what compelled him to stand by my side. The question started as a nagging itch in the back of my mind, growing over time into a suppurating sore. Every nice thing he did made me sick. “Just stop!” I yelled one night at the spot, when he reached out to pull me to him. “Can’t you leave me alone for five goddamn minutes?” I knew as I said it that I was wrong. I wanted him to call me a bitch and leave. Instead, he just scooted away, tucking his hands beneath his legs.

  “If you don’t want me to touch you I won’t,” he said quietly. “But I’m not leaving. If you really wanted to be alone you wouldn’t have come here.”

  “I came here alone all the time before you showed up.”

  “That was five years ago, Al. Just talk to me.”

  “No,” I snapped, seething. “You talk. I’m sick to death of talking about my parents. Tell me about yours.”

  Even in the moonlight I could see the blood leave his face.

  “What?”

  I sneered. “Tell me about your parents, Nate. You want me to talk about my dead mom and my asshole dad, why don’t you tell me about yours? All I know is that they’re not around. You won’t tell me anything more.” I’d veered wildly off course, but now that I had started there was no stopping. I was so angry, and even in the heat of the rage I know I wasn’t angry at Nate. But there he was, right in front of me…

  “What’s your secret?” I asked, leaping off the rock and whirling to face him. “What are you hiding? You go digging for every secret I’ve got, but you refuse to give me any of yours. You call that a relationship?”

  “Al,” he sighed, shoulders hunching. Damn him, for making me feel so guilty when all I wanted to feel was rage. “This isn’t about me, angel.”

  “Yes it is! It’s about both of us! We’re a couple, you asshole! We’re supposed to talk to each other. Why am I the only one who has to spill her guts?”

  The funny thing is that I was right. Right for all the wrong reasons, and maybe if I’d been right for the right reasons I could have helped us avoid a lot of heartbreak.

  Unfortunately, I was right for the wrong reasons, so his defeated silence didn’t move me to gentle my touch and cajole him into talking to me.

  It made me cruel.

  “That’s what I thought,” I snapped, crossing my arms over my chest and lifting my chin. “Tell you what. You want to talk about my mom? Let’s talk about yours. My mom left me because she was so depressed she couldn’t bear to be alive any longer. What was your mom’s excuse? Was she depressed too, or did she just realize you’re an annoying asshole and she’d be better off without you?”

  I didn’t mean it. Of course I didn’t mean it. I wouldn’t have said it if I thought it was true. I was just trying to rile him up.

  My words had the opposite effect than intended. He didn’t yell at me. He went deathly quiet, utterly still, fingers wrapped around the edge of the rock as he studied the dark woods.

  “You’re lashing out,” he said eventually, dropping his gaze to his dangling feet. “You’re being a jerk, Al, but if you’re trying to piss me off it isn’t gonna work. You’re just sad. I’m not gonna be mad at you when you’re sad.”

  “Fuck you.” Jerking around, I stalked into the woods without a backwards glance. I thought I heard him following me, but I didn’t look back. I didn’t go back. Not that night or the next. I stayed in my room, nursing my anger and telling myself he deserved to be alone out there the way I had been all those nights he bailed without any explanation.

  A week later, he cornered me in the hallway at school.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I hissed, looking both ways down the empty hallway to make sure nobody could see us. I don’t know why I still cared. Instinct more than anything, I suppose. Or maybe I was just trying to hurt him enough to drive him away.

  “You haven’t been to the spot in six days,” Nate whispered, bracing his hands on the wall beside my head and leaning in close. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “What, so you can disappear for days on end but I can’t?” I challenged him, placing my hands against his chest and pushing him away. I tried to leave, but he pulled me up short with a hand on my arm.

  “No, you can’t,” he growled. “You never have before. Can you please just talk to me, Alex? Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “You are what’s wrong,” I snarled at him, ripping my arm out of his grip. “Just leave me the fuck alone.”

  With that, I stalked off down the hallway. My cold, dead heart pulsed once as I walked away, sending a spear of regret through my chest. It was gone as suddenly as it appeared, but it was enough to force me to look over my shoulder before I turned the corner.

  Nate stood in the center of the hallway, watching me leave. His face and body were a mess of conflicting emotions. His shoulders were slumped in defeat, his hands clenched in anger, his brow furrowed with concern, and his mouth turned down in a thoughtful frown.

  It was his eyes, though, which told the true story. They were fixed on my retreating form, shining with blatant need. A few months prior, I’d have called that look love. Sweet, hopeful Alex would have succumbed to the draw of his affection, sucked in by her own reciprocal adoration.

  I wasn’t that Alex anymore. I was cynical Alex with a cold, still heart and the taste of death on the back of my tongue and I didn’t see love in Nate’s eyes. I saw lust. Everyone I cared about was pulling away, driven back by my gnashing teeth and cruel tongue. Only Nate stuck around, and in that moment I realized why…

  He wanted me. More specifically, he wanted my body. I turned the corner, striding down the hallway with a refreshing energy. I had a mission. My chest burned warm with excitement and I felt alm
ost dizzy as plans turned over in my head.

  All Nate wanted was sex. Once he’d had it, he would leave. I would be alone with the gray-toned peace of my apathy. No more guilt. No more shadows of love or echoes of hope and the fierce pain that always accompanied them. Just safe, frigid nothing.

  Pre-calc was my last class of the day. Nate was in there with me. Our seats were assigned based on last name, so I sat in the back row and he sat two rows ahead and one column to the left of me. I stared at the back of his head for the entire, fifty-minute stretch of class, hatching my plan.

  It was a simple plan, built on a foundation of truths I thought to be immutable: that Nate was a horny teenage boy and wanted nothing more than sex, and that I was a dead-inside girl who wanted nothing more than solitude.

  We all know what happens to plans that are built on faulty foundations. Sooner or later, the whole thing crumbles.

  Chapter eleven

  nate

  “Dude, where the fuck is your head at?” my buddy Kyle asked, shoving me in the shoulder so hard I nearly spilled the carton of milk I was absently raising for a sip.

  I use the term ‘buddy’ loosely. Kyle lived in a trailer park out on the edge of town and he and his old man made a living pushing drugs. Prescription drugs, specifically. Oxy, hydrocodone, that kind of shit. Opioids were the driving force that had torn my life to shreds, and deep down I hated Kyle almost as much as I hated Tim.

  Why, then, did I sit with him every day at lunch, smoke cigarettes with him between classes, and refer to him as a ‘buddy?’ If you have to ask that, you’ve probably never had the privilege of knowing that you’re human trash. Kyle was a loser, sure, but so was I. We weren’t friends so much as we were colleagues. Fellow lowlifes.

  The only exception to my keep-to-your-own-wretched-kind rule was the source of my distraction.

  Alex sat in a corner across the cafeteria, picking at a brown-bag lunch and scribbling notes while she read from a textbook. Our conversation from the hallway had scared me more than it hurt me. She was spiraling hard, and I felt like the only person in the world who was trying to save her. From what little she’d shared with me, her father had retreated to his bubble of guilt and work, her friends had largely moved on without her, and Tom had become little more than a source of stress. She was all alone in the world, bearing up beneath her grief and her anger with her father and responsibility for Tom.