I did this without thinking, with no sense of how much pressure was required.
If you do it right, you’ll cloud your hearing for about an hour, maybe longer, LeBov had said.
He didn’t elaborate. I didn’t ask. An hour earlier, sitting with LeBov in the hut, I didn’t think I’d drive a needle into my head so that I could deafly handle the vocal cloud of a child.
The pain was deep. For a moment I heard distant crying. A person, a bird, a siren. Warm liquid filled my ear, poured down my face.
I touched it, expecting to draw back bloody fingers, but the liquid was clear. Clear and warm.
LeBov’s needle didn’t work. I could hear perfectly from the punctured ear. I only hollowly contemplated approaching the other ear with the needle, ramming it in to balance the pain.
Esther had stopped speaking by then anyway. My activities with the needle had rendered her mute. She stood watching me, a mostly convincing look of fear on her face. An effective display of crying, soft crying that she seemed to want to suppress, came next. She performed her grief for my benefit, but I had other things to do. The house was calm now. The only sounds were from our Claire, who mumbled something from the bed, rolled deeper into her covers.
These were such reassuring sounds to me, the sounds of Claire not yet gone.
Esther crouched next to me, her finger crossing her lips to show she would not speak. A sign I once might have trusted. She brought her shirttail up to dab at my ear, to wipe free some of the discharge, and it seemed for a moment that she was intent on hugging me, but I pulled her hand away. I pulled it away, stood up myself, and walked strongly with my daughter out of her room, dragging her with me, through our house and out the front door, where I left her alone in the yard.
I would like to say that love shows itself in strange ways, but that would not be true in this case. Sometimes love refuses to show itself at all. It remains perfectly hidden. One spends a lifetime concealing it. There is an art to this. To conceal love is, in its way, the most sophisticated kind of smallwork there is.
Esther stood outside our house with her head down, shoulders small.
I rushed her again, moved my daughter yet farther into the yard, and she slumped over me, let herself be carried. At the sidewalk I dropped her and with my hands I made the most terrible gesture I could.
It was the most fluent I’d ever been without speech.
Stay, stay there. Do not come in this house again. You are forbidden from here. We do not know you.
Esther looked up at me and nodded. With her little finger she crossed her heart.
I would not be fooled by her ministrations, such conspicuous acts of tenderness designed to fool us into letting down our guard. She should have known better. Maybe now she would.
Tonight I needed to protect my home and that meant keeping people like her—blood relation or not—well clear of it. If Esther tried to return I would be ready for her. I would meet her with everything I had.
21
We drove out the next morning. Our breath was scarce and we were bruising in dark pools beneath the skin. A small wound on my leg failed to bleed. It opened like the mouth of a baby. From the gash came the faintest wheeze of sound. I flinched when I heard it, braced for it to sicken me, too.
People swarmed the street. I could not see their faces. Our evacuation was orderly and our denial so final, we were spared overt displays of grief. The day was hot, there was weeping down the hill, some other person’s weeping, and in our own yard, under the fractured shade of the oldest tree on our block, such a clutter of moths bothered the air. These were the slow, bird-size moths, so awkward they may as well have been tagged and numbered.
My face felt so heavy, I thought I could remove it, step on it until it composted. I coupled my hip bag of adrenaline with boiled-down Semantiril to queer any speech sounds I might hear. I needed speech estranged into grunts and huffs. Even these could command people into action. I required speech submerged in fluid, warbled, buried in the ground. The Semantiril got me close. It brought foam into the holes, filling in whatever silence was left inside a word. What I heard were solid blocks of tone, like the test sounds from an emergency broadcast.
Throughout the day I paused while loading the car to huff these vapors from an oily lunch bag.
The last signs of life flickered inside Claire. That much and no more. When she looked at me I felt the high disgrace of being known for what I am.
Outside the house was a whiteout of silence, the sound of a whole neighborhood holding its breath. I kept my head down, vowed not to see. If I did not regard others in their shame, their haste, perhaps they would spare me from seeing mine.
Once I had Claire in the car, I noticed she was clutching the letter she’d written to Esther. Somehow she’d found the strength to sit down and write a final message. It was sealed and I was not to read it or ask about it. Fairly simple parameters to follow. The envelope was wrinkled with sweat, with whatever leaked freely from Claire.
I wrote no such letter myself. There was something blackening to the act of writing words, like carving into flesh. My hand felt foreign. It would not cooperate. And if I did write anything, it looked like a drawing dismantled into too many pieces. I could make the parts but I could not put the parts together.
Decipherment of words on a page was too difficult. When I managed it, I was never sure what had happened, who’d been killed by whom. It was becoming clear to me that reading would be something I would avoid. The very thought of it sent a wave of fear through my chest.
When I finally sat down with a voice recorder the night before, I produced only excuses. The rhetoric of a whitewasher. Nothing passed for tender in what I said, which meant that I had already communicated all I could on the topic. Everything else, like most of my parenting to Esther, would have to go without saying, without doing. But when I listened back to the recording, to check the quality of the sound, I heard the sounds of a man with cloth stuffed in his mouth. In the end this was what I left for Esther. There was no larger wisdom I could impart.
Here, my final words to you, just nothing. It is all that I know.
In the car I pulled Claire’s nightgown from where it was bunched under her legs. I straightened her coat. Beneath the seat I clicked the lever and shifted her back. Her legs released into the freed-up space and she relaxed.
I did not want to hurt her so I did not speak. I held her face and mouthed, “How’s that?”
She stared straight through me.
I looked at this stoic, long-suffering woman, who really should have died weeks ago. What an insult this all was to her. She did not want me breathing in her space, leaning my weight against her. She did not want me getting close. In Shippington, in Lobe Arbor, in one of the fields that ran flush to West Hollows, Claire could be alone all she liked.
If there was a plan, it was that we’d head down Route 4, but take the splinter trail that cuts beneath the Monastery, following the tracks until the trail dovetails with 41. In Shippington or Lobe Arbor we’d book a motel, monitor the situation from there.
I’d called ahead this morning, gotten nothing, not even an unanswered ring.
When I thought of Esther alone in the house, without us, I pictured her being waited on by… us. Facsimiles of us. Robot usses. Father and mother us, hovering over Esther with bowls of berries, with the special dinner of steamed greens, the de-meated slab of protein and sautéed bread she liked. Her own baby bowl of salt, hooked onto her dinner plate like a sidecar. I couldn’t see her, Esther didn’t exist, without a satellite of us orbiting by, although I’m sure Esther had no problem imagining her solitude. We’d always cooked and cleaned for her, served her food, done her laundry, put away her things. Standard-issue caretaking. There was no way to distill these tasks into words and leave her with any clear sense of how to take care of things herself. But I flattered myself when I thought that what Esther needed was instructions regarding the house, a set of operational strategies to keep her afloat inside the family home. That is not what Esther needed.