The Story of Beautiful Girl (26 page)

Kate lifted the matches. “Which should I do? Light the candles? Or practice?”

Lynnie knew what Kate wanted. Kate had told her, “You’ve been silent for so long that your brain and your mouth don’t know how to work together anymore. But if you practice, even just a little every day, I think you’ll be able to speak again.” Lynnie could not bring herself to practice where others would know—speaking was so difficult, her mouth barely felt it belonged to her. The one exception was the laundry, where she would practice sometimes when all the washers and dryers were on, sloshing and thrumming, so Cheryl and Lourdes, loading laundry across the room, wouldn’t know.

Still, she needed to feel more ready than she felt at the moment. So Lynnie pointed toward the matches.

The tiny flames came up one by one, and as they did, Kate counted: “One, two, three, four, five.” She paused and added, “Do you want to try to say ‘five’?”

Lynnie knew she’d make Kate happy if she tried. And truth be told, cake was tasty, but it made her think about Buddy’s sugar
cubes. Practicing was a better way to take her mind off her sadness. So she shrugged and launched into the routine she’d learned would help get up her courage. She lowered her gaze and squeezed her fists together. Then she put one finger straight against her mouth, opened her lips, and pushed out her voice. “Uhhh,” she said. It felt as weak as lint.

Kate, moving her lips and mouth slowly, overenunciated. “Five.”

“Uhhh-iiii,” Lynnie said back.

“Close!” Kate said. “Very good.”

“Uhhh-iiii,” Lynnie repeated, this time louder.

“Good!” Kate said, turning up the radio. “You know what comes in fives, right?”

Lynnie held up her hand, spreading her fingers.

“That’s right,” Kate said.

Lynnie pointed to the number of plants on the windowsill.

“Good,” Kate said. “And you know what Scott just taught me?” She drew her fingers together and motioned for Lynnie to do the same. “This is something the kids do when they score.” She leaned forward and slapped her palm against Lynnie’s.

What a funny thing to do! Lynnie laughed. Then she hit her palm back against Kate’s. “Ennn!” she said.

“Again?” Kate clarified.

Lynnie nodded. “Ennn!”

They did it once more, and Lynnie felt so great, knowing she was speaking something close to a word. Practicing was difficult, but it was fun with the right person.

Still laughing, they lowered their hands. “I know,” Kate said, “I jumped the gun on the practice. Let’s have your cake.”

She brought the vanilla-frosted confection down from the window and pushed it across the desk. The flowers were all the colors Lynnie liked—blues and greens and reds and oranges. She inhaled
the scent of the frosting, the wax on the candles, the chocolate hidden inside.

Kate said, “To celebrate Lynnie!”

Lynnie blew, counting the numbers in her head as each flame went out.

Then she tore the wrapping paper. The book fell out of the paper and landed on the desk.

She sat down. The drawing of a house smiled at her from the cover.

“It’s called
The Little House
,” Kate said.

The house looked like the face of a child, with full cheeks and big eyes. Lynnie touched the cover with her fingers, and then Kate sat down across the desk and opened the book. Lynnie, feeling a smile take over her face, strained to say a word she used to say with Nah-nah, “Wow-wee,” though the best she could manage was, “Eeee!”

“You’re in a talky mood today,” Kate said. “I think I better turn up the radio.”

Lynnie kept her eyes on the cover as Kate went to the window and turned the knob. The song had changed, and now she heard:
You are the sunshine of my life. That’s why I’ll always stay around….

Lynnie knew this song, too, and hummed along as she looked at the sweet little house, so she didn’t realize Kate was taking her time returning to the desk.

“Well, that’s interesting,” Kate finally said.

Lynnie looked up.

Kate was still standing at the window, facing out. When she didn’t turn around or say anything more, Lynnie rose and joined her.

Three men were walking slowly along the pathway. Lynnie recognized gray-haired Dr. Hagenbuch, who was pointing to
buildings and talking. But she didn’t know the others: a young man with a Burt Reynolds mustache and handsome looks who was listening and nodding, hands in his blazer, and a chunky man with a ponytail who wore a loose coat.

“This is strange,” Kate said. “What’s going on?”

The men paused in their stroll, looked across the grounds toward the hospital cottage, turned, and looked up at the tower clock.

Lynnie, remembering a practice from last month, did her best. “Ooo?”

Kate turned to her. Lynnie pointed. “Ooo?”

“Who?”

Lynnie nodded.

Kate looked at her with a smile of pride, then turned back. “You know that older one. He’s Dr. Hagenbuch, the dentist they brought in from Wilkes-Barre. I thought he’d resigned.”

Lynnie nodded. She’d thought that, too.

“It’s the others I’m wondering about. The big guy I’ve never seen before. But the young one, I know. He’s a reporter for a Philadelphia station. John-Michael Malone.”

As the men stood looking at the clock, the heavy one reached into his coat and withdrew something Lynnie had never seen before. He held it up to his eyes and pointed it at the tower.

“Whoa,” Kate said. “They have a camera.” She looked at Lynnie, her face moving into a stunned smile. “A camera! Do you know what that might mean?”

The men headed down the hill toward the residential cottages.

“Come on,” Kate said, hurrying toward the door.

Kate and Lynnie moved across the grounds as swiftly as they could without attracting attention. Something about the men’s presence violated all the rules, yet Kate kept muttering, “It’s about
time,” with a big grin on her face. The men turned toward Lynnie’s cottage, and when they mounted the steps for A-3, Kate said, “He has more guts than me.”

She and Lynnie hurried up to A-3.

As the door closed behind them, they saw the three men heading toward the dayroom, where Consuella and Hockey, the attendants on the day shift, were sitting in front of
General Hospital
as they played cards, with the A-3 residents staring at the television with bored eyes. Hockey glanced over as the men entered the dayroom, and when Dr. Hagenbuch went over to him, Lynnie heard him say,… dentist… show these dental students around…” Hockey never liked missing his stories, as he called soap operas, so he waved them away.

“I can’t believe it,” Kate said.

They stood at the edge of the dayroom, watching. Without a second look from Consuella and Hockey, the men moved hastily into the bathroom, then the sleeping room.

“I hope they get as far as Z-1,” Kate said. “I hope they get to the cemetery.”

Before Lynnie knew it, the men were coming back through the dayroom. Now that they were walking toward Lynnie, she realized that John-Michael Malone’s young face was set in a grimace, the same as her own face had been when she’d first confronted the smell. Like Uncle Luke, John-Michael Malone had an air of seriousness about him and walked with deep steps. But he wasn’t looking around with smugness, nor was he gliding his eyes over the filth on the walls, the hole in the ceiling, the residents. He looked at every detail, quickly though with close attention, and in his face was distress.

Then, suddenly, John-Michael Malone strode toward Lynnie. Lynnie glanced at Kate, who, observing his approach, wore a worried expression. Then Kate touched the cross on her necklace
and made her face regular, and Lynnie cast her gaze back to John-Michael Malone.

He had stopped right in front of her and was looking directly into her face. He said, “Do you live here in this building?”

“Cottage,” Dr. Hagenbuch corrected him.

“Cottage,” John-Michael said without removing his eyes from Lynnie.

Lynnie could feel Kate’s hand come to rest reassuringly on hers.

Lynnie, still facing John-Michael, nodded.

He said, “Randy, can you get her?”

The chunky man moved so he was turned to her, his camera in the folds of his jacket.

Lynnie could hear the camera making a whirring sound. She saw something—a microphone—appear in John-Michael’s hands. She heard him say, “Do you like living here?”

It was a ridiculous question; everyone hated it here. Besides, no one except Kate and Doreen thought Lynnie could speak. These men must be unaware of her muteness, and if they lacked that basic knowledge, maybe they truly didn’t know the answer.

“Do you?” John-Michael Malone said again. “Do you like living here?”

She didn’t need to squeeze her fists together for this word. “No.”

John-Michael gave her a sorrowful look and said, “If you could walk out that gate right now and never come back, would you?”

She shot her eyes toward Kate. Kate turned toward Lynnie, and her eyes said it was all right to respond.

Lynnie nodded.

And then John-Michael asked one more question. A simple question, one that Kate had tried to teach her to say months ago: “Why?”

There was so much Lynnie could have said in response that
even if her lips and tongue were fully accustomed to words, she would have had trouble saying them all. Yet she had only a moment, and as she struggled to narrow down her answer from a number larger than she knew to a mere five, or even four, she thought of the dogs. The dogs always with Smokes and Clarence, always the reminder of that night, of the breaking glass, the clattering bucket, the rag—that night, when it was done, and the door opened, Smokes said,
If you tell, this’ll happen
, and then he’d thrown something soft and furry at the dogs, and in seconds they’d torn it to pieces.

That, she knew, was what would happen to her baby. That was why she’d never told the truth to Buddy, or Doreen, or Kate.

That was why, no matter how many answers she had, she was not going to give any.

She looked down at her feet.

“She doesn’t say much,” Kate said to John-Michael.

“Who is she?” John-Michael asked.

“You can’t say her name on the air.”

“We won’t. My producer will want to know.”

“Lynnie,” Kate said. “Evelyn Goldberg.”

Then Lynnie stopped hearing the camera. By the time she glanced up, the men were leaving the front door.

Kate looked at Lynnie with her softest Kate smile. “You did good, sweet pea,” she said.

It was difficult to return to the laundry and pretend it was an ordinary day. This was, after all, Lynnie Day. She had practiced saying “five,” blown out candles, received a new book. She had even seen a camera—not a Brownie like Nah-nah’s or a Polaroid like Daddy’s. But a camera that would, Kate had explained, take a film, like they used for movies and TV.

As Lynnie removed the last load from the dryers and rolled it
to the steel tables for folding, she thought about what Kate had said as she’d returned Lynnie to the laundry:
I’ll stay late today. I want to be here in case it airs.
Then she’d explained what it meant for something to air, and Lynnie understood: It was like when you went out to the cornfield after the corn was gone and anyone could see you there, even though you were staring off into your memory, waiting for two people who would never return to your life, crumpling to your knees, and putting your hands to the soil, wishing you could pull those people from the dirt.

Lynnie didn’t know if she wanted to be aired.

Kate had said something else, too, just before she left Lynnie at the laundry. She’d said,
You know, people far away might see this, and then something big could happen
.

So as Lynnie folded the shirts and bottoms and socks, she tried to envision people far away, watching her. Would the old lady be one of them? Would the baby have her eyes on the television, too?
Turn the pages,
Lynnie reminded herself, and tried to see what the baby’s life was like now. She hadn’t done this for so long, but now she wondered. Was the baby with the old lady or someone else? Was the baby growing tall, like Lynnie? Did she resemble Lynnie from the photo when she was a child? Did she like smells and hugs the way Lynnie did? Did she speak like everyone—everyone except her and Buddy—so words came out of her lips?

And Buddy.
Buddy.
Would he see it? He would. He had to. He’d been gone so long, it couldn’t be his choice. Maybe he’d been locked in jail. Maybe a storm had stranded him on a desert island. Though if he could see a television tonight, that would change. He would break out of jail, like the good guys do when a bad sheriff locks them up on TV. He would build a raft and paddle across the water. He would come back at last and hold her.

She reached into the pile of warm laundry, pressed her face to the soft heat, and moved her arms deep inside. They had held
each other with the baby between them. They had placed their lips together. They had sung a perfect note into each other’s bodies.

Yet Lynnie still expected, when they returned from the dining hall just before six, that the night would go on as always. Suzette was tuning the TV to her favorite show,
Gilligan’s Island
. The residents of A-3 were settling into the same seats they’d claimed for years. Lynnie went to her usual bench, and Doreen lowered herself, as always, to Lynnie’s right.