The Second Silence (2 page)

Charlie, seeming to sense this, straightened and held out his arms. ‘Why don’t you let me take her? I could look after her for a while, until you …’ He let the sentence trail off.

A bolt of anger sizzled through her. ‘Until I
what?
Get a grip?’ It wasn’t fair, she knew, lashing out at Charlie, but she couldn’t seem to help it. He wasn’t just an easy target. He was the
only
target.

‘Mr Newcombe gave me the rest of the afternoon off.’ He went on calmly, as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘I could make a run to the Laundromat, pick up some groceries on my way back. We’re out of milk, I noticed.’ He spoke softly so as not to wake the baby, stirring fretfully in her arms.

‘We’re out of
everything.’
She had in her wallet exactly nine dollars and thirty-eight cents, which was supposed to last until Charlie’s next paycheck a week from Friday.

Noelle began to squirm, making small, whimpering noises. Mary hoisted her over one shoulder and began to rock furiously back and forth. She buried her face in the sweet-smelling crook of her baby’s neck to keep from drowning.

Once, at an eighth-grade swim party, one of the rowdier boys had pushed her off a dock into the lake with all her clothes on. She would never forget that panicky sense of being dragged under no matter how hard she kicked, which was exactly how she felt now. It had been months since she’d read a book or watched a TV show all the way to the end. Other than forays to the Laundromat and supermarket and helping feed and water the horses, she rarely went out. When she took a bath in the big claw-footed tub with its pipes that ran down a hole in the floor, through which a patch of the weed-choked dirt was visible below, she didn’t always have time to shampoo her hair. It trailed in tangled auburn waves down her shoulders and back like something spilled that she hadn’t had a chance to clean up.

It wasn’t Charlie’s fault, she knew. He was barely keeping his own head above water. He’d taken the first job he could find, as office boy at the
Burns Lake Register.
He swept floors and emptied wastebaskets; he jumped when fat old Mr Newcombe barked. All for the princely sum of sixty dollars a week.

She watched him unfold to his feet, joints crackling, and for a fleeting instant felt as if she were being swept up in his wake. She yearned then for Charlie to hold her as he once had, unhindered by baby or by swollen belly. To feel once more that sense of teetering on the brink not of disaster but of something deliciously reckless. It had been more than a week since they’d even made love.

‘I’ll feed the horses before I go.’ His voice was dull and defeated.

‘I could—’ she started to say.

‘No.’ He headed for the door. ‘You have enough of your own to handle right now.’

Mary felt her panic swell until it was nearly choking her. Was Corinne’s death going to sink without a trace in this fathomless lake she was treading with her shoes on?

‘Wait!’ she called after him in desperation. ‘What about Robert?
He
must have some idea why Corinne would—why she would do such a thing.’

Corinne’s boyfriend was the other reason she and her friend had drifted apart. In Mary’s opinion, Robert van Doren was the worst kind of trouble, the kind that doesn’t advertise itself. A straight A student and the football team’s star running back, he was the proverbial boy next door. Fathers, even those as strict as Corinne’s dad, trusted their daughters with him. The Ivy League was courting him. Yet no parent or admissions officer knew about the time he and his buddies had gotten drunk and taken turns with poor, dim-witted, desperate-to-please Margie Rittenhouse.

She could see him in her mind now, boasting of the incident at Doug Eastman’s barbecue out at the lake the summer after their junior year. She saw him perched on the nose of Doug’s sleek new Sunfish—as tall as Charlie but built like a young bull with the looks of an Olympian god. Naked except for a pair of faded cutoffs and glowing in the way of rich boys doted on by their mothers, all buttery shimmer and blue ice. Robert was belting down a Rolling Rock with one hand while cupping an imaginary breast with the other. Corrine had gone off in search of more beer and Robert was reenacting Margie’s rape (for that’s what it was) for the benefit of his leering audience.

‘Man, you should’ve seen the look on her face when Toomey walked off,’ he recalled with a sniggering laugh. Clearly, he hadn’t spied Mary, standing just within earshot. ‘She was begging for more, man,
begging
for it. But he told her he wasn’t into fucking cows.’

‘Beggin’ for mercy is more like it,’ hooted fat, pimply Wade Jewett, the most worshipful of Robert’s toadies. ‘I heard she was pretty wasted.’

The smile dropped from Robert’s face as abruptly as a sudden cold front moving in off the lake. With stunning casualness, he turned to Wade, sneering, ‘Like
you
would know. Christ, Jewett, if you weren’t so busy jerking off at home you’d have seen for yourself.’

That was Robert. Hot one moment, cold the next. Like ice that could as easily cause you to slip and break a bone as send you twirling deliriously in circles.

Mary shook free of the memory and looked up at Charlie.

He’d turned away from the door and was frowning at her in a thoughtful way. ‘Robert, yeah. Newcombe phoned him for a statement.’ Charlie’s jaw was clenched and a look of disgust had deepened the buried stitch between his brows. ‘You know what that creep said? “Jesus, the crazy bitch actually went through with it.”’

Mary must have jerked in surprise because Noelle’s eyes flew open, and she immediately resumed the crying jag she’d been on since five this morning. Mary began to weep as well. Loose sobs that billowed up from her depths like the drowned creatures, squirrels and raccoons mostly, found floating in the lake after the heavy rains that descended on Burns Lake each spring like a biblical plague. Even Charlie was at a loss to console her. He stood awkwardly by the door, his fists stuffed so deep into the pockets of his jacket she could see a white knuckle poking from its torn seam like a bone from a shattered limb.

Mary struggled to her feet, a hand cupped about the baby’s head. Noelle had worked herself into a state, her shrieks coming in short, sharp bursts punctuated by strangled gasps. As Mary paced the floor, she felt weak with despair.

‘Hush, it’s okay, everything’s going to be okay,’ she crooned as hot tears slid down her cheeks.

When her husband strode over to pry the baby gently from her arms, Mary was too tired to protest. Watching them, she was pierced to the core by the picture they made against the backdrop of the spartan living room furnished like a playhouse in castoffs: Noelle with her small red face bunched into a fist and her black hair standing up like an exclamation point … and Charlie, with a look of tender consternation on his old-young face, not unlike the expression he wore helping his mother upstairs to bed when Pauline was too drunk to manage it on her own. After several minutes of pacing, he stopped to put a hand to her forehead.

‘She feels hot,’ he said.

‘That’s because she’s running a fever.’ Mary marched over to show Charlie that at least one of them had a handle on the situation, however tenuously. An hour ago the baby’s temperature had been only a little over a hundred. Yet when she felt Noelle’s cheek, it was immediately evident things had taken a drastic turn for the worse.

Mary dashed into the bathroom for the thermometer. The bathroom had been tacked on in the early thirties, back when the bunkhouse was converted into living quarters. Consequently, the floor slanted at an angle where the supports on which it rested had sunk into the dirt below. As she fumbled with the drop latch on the old-fashioned medicine chest, Mary caught a glimpse of her reflection, canted at an angle in the speckled mirror: enormous eyes staring out of a stricken white face, like those on the evening news of people who’d survived some terrible devastation.

Awkwardly Charlie positioned their howling daughter facedown across his lap while Mary undid the snaps on her terry sleeper and removed her plastic pants and diaper. They both held their breaths as the silver line in the thermometer began to creep up. After several minutes Mary held it to the light. The mercury had topped off at 104.

‘My God, she’s burning up! Charlie, we’ve got to do something. We’ve got to get her to a doctor.’ Mary dashed to the corner by the stove, where Noelle’s crib was tucked alongside the lumpy foldout sofa on which they slept. She grabbed the crocheted afghan given to them by their landlord’s kindhearted wife and frantically bundled the baby in it.

Yet Charlie remained motionless by the door. Slashes of color stood out on his cheekbones. ‘The heater in the truck’s not working. She could—Christ, we could
all
freeze.’

He didn’t have to remind her that the nearest doctor was in Schenectady, twenty minutes away. But what other choice did they have? ‘If we stay here, she could go into convulsions and
die,
’ Mary shrieked in a high, nearly breathless voice.

Charlie thought for a moment, raking a hand over his head, front to back, as he’d been in the habit of doing when his hair was long. Its spiky ends bristled like the sleek pelt of some lithe, long-bodied animal. His face was as ghostly white as the naked lightbulb that dangled overhead. Then, as if coming to some sort of decision, he abruptly wrenched open the door. ‘There’s only one thing to do,’ he said.

Mary followed him outside, the baby clutched tightly in her arms and a corner of the afghan dragging on the snowy ground. Her panic receded a bit. She told herself,
He’ll borrow a car … or find someone to take us. Of course, why didn’t I think of it?

The light flurries that had been falling all day spun and drifted overhead. In the part of her mind that was still functioning, she dimly recalled the weatherman’s reporting several more inches by nightfall. The trouble was they were still digging out from under the storm of two days ago. Ice-crusted drifts were piled up against the fence, and slushy ruts in the driveway had frozen over. Across the way horses with shaggy winter pelts nosed at clumps of frozen snow cake-frosting the rails of their corral. The truck, a ’59 Ford pickup, once green but now the indeterminate shade of a moss-grown boulder, stood nosed up against the tractor plow in front of the barn.

He helped her into the frigid cab, then trotted around to the other side. ‘We’re taking her to your mother,’ he announced, scooting in behind the wheel. His breath bloomed in the chill air as he started the engine.

Mary felt something lurch inside her. She grabbed his arm. ‘We can’t,’ she said through clenched, chattering teeth.

Charlie shook her hand away and twisted around to look out the back window. ‘Your mother’s a nurse, isn’t she?’ He ground the gear into reverse and the truck jerked backward.

‘Retired
nurse. She hasn’t worked in years, not since Dad got sick.’ Which they both knew was neither here nor there. But the truth was simply too awful to face. ‘She won’t help. She doesn’t want anything to do with me or—or the baby. Charlie, please. We can go to
your
mom. She’ll know what to do.’

‘Maybe. If she’s sober.’ The knotted muscles in Charlie’s jaw flickered with everything best left unsaid on that subject. Moments later they were jouncing over the deep pothole that marked the end of the driveway. Her jaws clacked together, catching the tip of her tongue between her teeth. She felt a bright burst of pain.

Mary sucked her cheeks in, tasting blood. ‘This is crazy. Have you forgotten what happened the last time?’

Christmas morning, with Noelle just a week old, Mary had phoned home in a flush of holiday spirit and optimism. Her parents were aware of the baby’s existence, she knew, because a nurse at the hospital had mentioned something about a Mrs Quinn’s stopping by to peek into the nursery. Yet over the phone, Mama had been nothing more than civil. The furnace was acting up, she reported, but Mr Wilson had promised to be out first thing tomorrow to fix it. And no, they weren’t driving all the way to Binghamton for turkey dinner at Aunt Stella’s. Daddy simply wasn’t up to it; he’d been laid up all week with a bad cough. Trish couldn’t come to the phone either, she said; wild horses couldn’t separate her from her new transistor radio.

After a strained minute or two Mama excused herself to go look in on Daddy. Not once had she asked about her grandchild or how Mary was getting along. It was as if Noelle hadn’t existed, and she herself were little more than a distant memory. It was worse, Mary concluded miserably, than if her mother had simply hung up.

‘She can’t ignore us this time.’ Charlie gripped the steering wheel, leaning close to swipe a clear patch in the foggy windshield.

Mary cast an anxious glance at her baby’s flushed face peeking from the folds of the afghan. Miraculously Noelle had been lulled to sleep by the rattle of the pickup as it lurched its way down the hilly, twisting road to town.
Charlie’s right,
she thought. This was the only sane choice. And Mama wasn’t completely heartless. Hadn’t she at least cared enough to sneak a look at her granddaughter?

Five miles down the road, where Route 30A joined up with Route 30, the houses began to appear: large, square clapboard houses built in the thirties, with well-kept lawns and neatly trimmed boxwood hedges. The house Mary had grown up in occupied the corner of Larkspur and Cardinal. Nearly indistinguishable from the houses on either side, it was shaded by large spreading elms and maples and had a deep porch that wrapped around three sides.

As Charlie pulled up on front, Mary was stricken by a wave of nostalgia. It was all so blessedly, innocently familiar: the hand-painted sign over the mailbox, the nuthatches fluttering about the bird feeder, the porch glider with its memories of lazy summer afternoons spent with a book in hand and her feet tucked under her. She noted with a dull throb that the drainpipe was still loose, leaning away from the side of the house like a sentry nodding off at his post—one of the projects her father hadn’t gotten around to before he fell ill.