The Price of Silence Read online

  “Who was she?”

  “A friend’s child.”Amy’s death stayed inside me, as deep as the bones in her grave.“She was killed in a car accident, many years ago.”

  An-ling’s cheek touched mine. “I’ve always wanted a sister. A little girl to play with.”

  I fumbled to my feet. “What about the studio? Do you want it? I have to give an answer today.”

  An-ling nodded.

  “Wonderful!” I kissed the top of her head.

  She caught my hands. “But wait! I must pay you back. I have no money now, but later when I am a better painter you can choose the best ones. It’s a deal?”

  “A deal.” She let go of me. “You’re a tough woman to convince.What should we do to celebrate?”

  “No celebration. It will bring bad luck.”

  “Come on,An-ling.You’re in the United States now.Your evil spirits have no power here.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” She walked over to the wall in shadow and flattened her back against it. “Portrait of the artist as a young woman.”

  Looking at her, at the happiness she now let play on her face, I understood that it wasn’t Amy that she brought back into my life. It was the memory of maternal love, all-enveloping, never-ending, which I had assumed was going to carry me across the countries of my life as lightly as a balloon.A love free of loss.A love I had vowed to keep hidden from my son.

  “An-ling, I want to celebrate.”

  “This new home is enough for me.” Her expression turned serious, concentrated, as though she were taking the measure of me. “I will pay you back with a secret.” She held up her wrists, quickly unhooked the beaded bracelets.They fell to the floor with a soft swish. An-ling turned her palms upward, offered me the view of two clean scars on her wrists.

  “A stupid moment. I’m happy now I did not go deep.”

  Her confession moved me. “I’m happy too. Promise me you will never try it again. Please!”

  She buttoned the bracelets back on.“You will stay with me sometimes here? We’ll cook together and eat and then you will sit in the corner in a big chair, reading while I paint. Say you will. Please!”

  “I have a family, An-ling.”

  She turned slowly, taking in the expanse of the room.

  “Sometimes at night I think I’m underwater and no one can see me or hear me and I’ll drown.”

  “I’m here.” I held her.“We’ll buy a guest futon.”

  At the sight of An-ling’s scarred wrists, my mind spiraled back to a mid-June morning, eight months after Amy died. Tom was back at work. Lucy, the woman he had hired to help me, was in the basement doing a load of laundry. She was supposed to watch me, but she preferred dealing with the housework.

  After the laundry, Lucy ironed, and I had given her enough shirts to keep her in the basement for a long time. While the water was running in the bathtub, I opened the medicine chest where Tom kept a box of old-fashioned razorblades to pare down his corns. I unwrapped a new blade and thought of all the blood I was going to lose, how Tom was going to hate the mess, how Lucy might be proud of her clean-up job. I undressed and lowered myself into the bathtub.Turning my left wrist, I followed the meanderings of my veins until they disappeared in the cushion of my palm. I ran the razor across the white skin, just below the hand.A shallow cut, a trial run. Blood beaded in a line, started to drip.The last time I had taken a bath—Amy had been dead only a few days—Tom had lowered me into the tub, washed me with great care. I had lain there wishing he’d let go of me, let me slip down underwater. A rivulet of menstrual blood twisted out from between my legs. I watched it float, fade into the water and vowed to myself I would never get pregnant again.Tom plugged me up with a sponge while I howled.

  Now I looked at my bloodied wrist. My period.A wave of panic overwhelmed me.When was the last time? Not last month.Two months? Three? How long had it been? God, how long? I wrapped my wrist in a towel, scrambled out of the bathtub, showered it down to remove any trace of blood.Tom’s blade, cleaned, dried,went into its box. My suicide? Postponed.

  Five drugstore pregnancy tests later, I accepted the truth.

  I was pregnant.

  I had only three clear thoughts: I do not deserve the joy of another baby. I will suffer her death. Then I will kill myself. Such is the solipsism of grief.

  Three days before my appointment with the abortion clinic, I dreamed of Amy as she was the morning she died, dressed in a yellow T-shirt,blue shorts, a pink barrette clipped in her hair. She curled inside me, a two-year-old fetus.Then she was gone, replaced by a baby whose face and sex I couldn’t make out. I woke up feeling the baby’s weight pushing against the wall of my uterus. Only a two-month fetus, not more than a cluster of cells,and yet her weight stayed with me throughout the day and when night came again I lay in bed, imagining this new baby pushing itself out of me, crawling, still attached to me, up the hill of my stomach, to reach my breast.The baby sucks while I clean her, cover her with my nightgown, hold her.With that image I fell asleep.

  The next morning I took the train to Grand Central Station and walked the eleven blocks to the best of God’s NewYork mansions—St.Patrick’s Cathedral,my grandmother’s favorite. I knelt in the front pew and listened to the silence,waited for the comfort of belief to envelop me like the blanket Nonna used to fold over me when we went to sleep at night.

  I could feel Nonna’s presence in that church,watching me, waiting to see if I measured up, if I would disappoint her. She never got over the trauma of being dragged to America, away from her village, her parents and friends. She never overcame the shame of not giving birth to a son, of having a rebellious, bawdy woman for her only child.Nonna was stern,unforgiving, and yet she opened her home to her renegade daughter and a bastard grandchild.She took me into her bed,scolded me,fed me, made sure I went out into the world scrubbed to a sheen and wearing clean, pressed clothes. She was, in her words, the whalebones of my life’s corset.

  I hated sleeping in the double bed Nonna had shared with her husband, dead years before I was born. Nonna snored. As she got older she smelled acrid. But my only other choice was the sofabed in the living room with my mother. I stayed with Nonna. As I grew older, I began to love the room, its quiet, the darkness of it—Nonna never pulled up the shade, too proud to let prying neighbors see how plain, how poor her bedroom was.That room was my retreat from my mother, from the neighborhood kids who called her a whore and me a bastard.The scent of the candle Nonna kept burning on a makeshift altar next to the bed started to smell as good as the fried dough she made on holidays. When she woke up and before going to sleep, Nonna would kneel in front of the candle, cross herself with her rosary and pray to the pictures of her parents and the Madonna propped on the altar. Even now, if I try to picture God, I see my great-grandfather’s mustached face, his eyebrows so thick and long the ends curl up.

  It was the serene, stilled expression on Nonna’s face as she prayed that mesmerized me, that made me want to believe as she did. She was overjoyed when I asked her to make me into a good Catholic. She led me to believe that my submission to God would bring not happiness, because that was not our lot in life, but a sense of security, a feeling of being loved back by Jesus, the Virgin Mary and all the saints. God and his vast family,Nonna promised,would take care of me and mine.

  Sitting in the front pew of St. Patrick’s, pregnant, I tried to rekindle my belief in God with the spark of memory. How comfortable I had once felt sitting in church, surrounded by the damp smell of wet winter coats, the shuffling feet, intermittent coughs, the creaks of the pew as we knelt, the unfurling veil of incense.

  Nonna’s voice slid into my ears, speaking the words she repeated at every sight of a crucified Christ.“When you feel sorry for yourself, think of the pain He must have gone through to sacrifice His only son.”

  I crossed myself, a gesture I had foresworn after Amy’s death, and spoke to God.

  “Watch over this baby. Keep her safe from me and whoever and whatever else could harm
her. I will live to take care of her, but I will love her in silence. Silence is my penance for Amy.”

  I wasn’t foolish enough to wait for a sign of His agreement. On the train back to Mapleton, watching the rain dash against the window, I began to doubt the sincerity of my sudden, convenient reconversion. God as an excuse for wanting to live, wanting to have this baby, an excuse to relieve my guilt. I wondered if it was God I had worshiped all those years or Nonna, rigid with certainties, self-righteous, constant, with her stringent rules, what she called “the rungs on the ladder to heaven.”Nonna, even with her cruelties, the whalebones in my corset. A woman I loved deeply.

  Many hours later, I opened the front door.Tom’s shoulders were covered with sparkles where the porch light fell on the raindrops of his slicker. His face held only hurt and incomprehension.The sight of him filled me with a tenderness I had forgotten. I wrapped my arms around him, pulled him inside the house.

  “We’re still together,” I said. “A threesome. A family.

  Forgive me.”We began crying with relief, with love.

  In the dark, with Tom spooned against me, his hand protective, possessive, on my belly, I said, “Promise me you’ll keep our baby safe.”

  I accepted my new pregnancy, but I still shunned company— everyone acting cheerful, crowding my days with brain-numbing activities, stuffing me with suggestions on how to go on with my life, take it in stride, make peace with it, look for solace in God, in the gym, in work, in the mall.Telling me to consider myself blessed because I was pregnant again. Their intrusions, delivered without looking at me, their eyes safe from my killer face, made me angry.They never mentioned their own children and I imagined them, as soon as I was gone, chanting a litany of their names to ward off the evil eye I’d become.

  I was relieved that our baby was a boy, that our new child would not compete with the memory of Amy, but I couldn’t bear to put him in her room. It was still filled with her soft snore, her waking gurgles, sounds I heard in the night, amplified, as though her monitor were still on. Josh slept in the den.

  My love for Josh was instantly there, lodged in my bones, but in St. Patick’s I had renounced the joy of rocking him in my arms, feeling his warmth, smelling his softness. I became an efficient mother. I kept him fed, clean, warm.At times I stole a quick hug, skated my hand over his cheek, let his hair brush my lips. As he grew so did my love until it pounded against my chest, but I was too scared to release it, to show it openly, to break my pact. What if I should lose him too?

  Guilt had made me so self-absorbed I never stopped to think what I was doing to my son, how I was depriving him of what was his right. Filled with envy, I watched Tom as he stepped in to fill the gaps.Tom, who slowly edged me out of the parenting game until I was rendered useless.

  I would squint at Josh and try to remember what Amy had looked like.Tom had destroyed the photos, the videos. Sleeping on the first day of her life, her first birthday, first steps, first ball thrown—actions repeated by every healthy child. Remarkable only because it is your child. Now lost. Josh looked nothing like her.

  Tom

  At the end of July, I was finishing teaching a summer-school course.An-ling came into my office one afternoon without knocking.

  “You had a daughter,” she said immediately, “and you let her run out of the house and Emma ran over her.Then what? A couple of months later you two made another one, like babies are interchangeable, supermarket products? A can of coffee runs out; buy another one!” She started to cry.

  “It was an accident and a long time ago.” I did not invite her to sit down. It was none of her business and I mistrusted her tears.There was no reason for them that I could understand, not from what I knew of her at the time.“I’m expecting a student any minute.”

  She turned her back to me before I had even finished, which surprised me as I didn’t expect to be rid of her so easily. From the way she had planted herself in our kitchen almost every afternoon until I had put a stop to it, she’d struck me as a single-minded girl, not easily discouraged.

  “Wait a minute,” I said.

  She stopped, not turning around, wanting me to admire how good her ass looked in those tight slacks, how smooth and inviting her bare back was.

  “How did you find out?”

  She turned then, pulled at the straw that was her hair. She wiped her face with the back of her hand.I asked her to sit down.

  She poured herself into the chair in one fluid motion, wrapping one tightly bound leg over the other. I have seen female students in my classes make similar moves when they are sitting next to a male they want to entice.

  “How did you find out?” I asked again, making a show of looking at my watch.

  “Emma and I tell each other everything.”

  I would have liked to slap her.“You’re lying.”

  When Emma and I left Westchester for the city—Josh was two at the time—we shed our old life, my job, our friends.New York was to be a fresh start for us. I insisted that we shouldn’t tell people about Amy. For the outside world, Josh included, she had never existed. I wanted to give Emma a chance to fully turn to Josh. I wanted, above all, for Josh to be free and clear of the weight of Amy’s death. For all of us to be free of it.

  Among other things,I teach game theory, the study of how rational individuals make decisions when they’re interdependent. It’s a way of calculating risk.There’s a game I teach my first-year students called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The police have arrested two thieves who are both guilty,but there isn’t sufficient proof to convict them. Each prisoner, separated from the other, with no contact possible, is offered a choice. If he pleads guilty, he’ll go to jail for a month on a misdemeanor charge. If he pleads innocent and is found guilty,he can go to jail for six months, but if his colleague pleads innocent and is also found guilty, they will both go to jail for three months.All three choices carry a cost.The point is to calculate which choice will have the least cost.

  Emma and I chose what we thought, what I was convinced, was the least costly of solutions, and I was satisfied that silence had paid off. In my mind we had become a sound, viable family, with Amy’s death in the past, its rightful place.

  “Why did you come here and tell me what I already know? What’s your point? Let me make it perfectly clear to you that what goes on in my family, past, present and future, is none of your business and never will be if I can help it.” I stood up and walked to the door.As I passed her I picked up her scent—something cheap, flowery, mixed in with the smell of smoke.

  “Please go.”

  She stayed right where she was, simply pivoting her bare shoulders so that she could keep her half-masked eyes on me. Her expression was stolid. “You don’t like me and I think maybe you’re scared of me. I don’t know why. I like Emma and I like you and Josh.You’re a nice family.Why can’t you be nice to me? That’s all I want, people to be nice.” She reached down to pick up her bag, a pink plastic thing. Her top drooped open; I could see clear to her navel. She had no breasts to speak of.

  I left her sitting in my office.When I came back, maybe fifteen minutes later, she had left a note.

  “I’m sorry about your daughter. That is what I came to tell you.”

  It was another one of her lies.

  I turned the air-conditioner on high to remove any trace of her smell, locked the door and, sitting at my desk,waited for my anger to subside.

  What Emma had done was unforgivable. She had broken our pact of silence, shared our tragedy with a conniving young girl who should never have been allowed to walk into our lives. Now this girl knew. My biggest fear was that she would tell Josh.

  My son found out about his sister from the tabloids. He says it’s all right, that he understands why I never told him. It’s hard to believe him and my heart cries for him, for how I’ve disappointed him. I keep wishing like a child: Why doesn’t life furnish us with a playback button?

  Subj: Fairytales and fantasies

  Date: 04-09-05 2
0:21:55 EST

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  “A translation remains a substitute, lacking the wholeness of the original.” The painter Fairfield Porter wrote that.

  I am not a translation. That’s what I wanted to say, sitting on the floor in the loft that first day. I’m not a reflection, a shadow, a substitute. I have my own heart, bones, meat, skin. I am me. An original.

  Amy is dead, in a coffin, underground. If you want her, go to the Mapleton Catholic Cemetery. She’s in row nine by the hydrangea plant. She’s probably still waiting for you. Daughters hang on a long time after they’ve been abandoned.

  If you want to do things for me, I appreciate it, but do them for me, not in her memory. That’s what I wanted to say, but I didn’t because I wanted you and your family and the loft.

  Do you want to see your daughter again? On a swing, kicking up dead leaves, smearing chocolate birthday cake over her face, sitting on your lap with the devil’s eyes from the camera flash?

  If you call me I’ll tell you where she is. I can give Amy back to you. Her image at least.

  Call me please.

  NINE

  TRACY GORMAN IS a thin, short-haired blonde woman in her early-thirties, wearing a navy suit and red-framed glasses. She has been a police lab technician for four years. In her hands she holds Emma Perotti’s silk embroidered blouse.

  “Did you examine that blouse under a microscope?” asks Guzman.

  “I did.”

  “Please tell the jury what you found.”

  “The first thing I found was traces of eyeliner and blush high on the left sleeve of the blouse and also on the left shoulder. I ran a test comparing the eyeliner and blush with the ones found in Miss Huang’s bathroom. They matched. That led me back to the body. Someone had carefully cleaned Miss Huang’s face with soap, Dove soap in fact, but I was able to find traces of the same make-up.”

  “Is that all you found?”

  “No.” Gorman holds up the blouse against her chest with one hand and loops her other hand over the embroidery pattern. “In the silk threads of the flowers, I found particles of a white substance that I was later able to identify as insulation foam.”