Breaking the Silence

  Aunt Jane had wanted to be a nurse, but mental illness struck while she was in nursing school and she never got to complete the program. She took pleasure, though, in passing on all she’d learned to her niece. She taught Sarah to make beds with hospital corners, take a pulse and temperature, and give sponge baths. Sarah loved her lessons, and she grew to love the idea of being a nurse herself. She’d have to study hard in high school, Aunt Jane warned her, to be able to go to nursing school.

  It was good that Sarah had her studies to attend to because she had little in the way of a social life. She had plenty of girlfriends, but the boys were studious in their avoidance of her. She’d be walking down the street, and a boy walking toward her would seem interested in her, but as he’d get nearer, he would quickly avert his eyes. And if there were two boys, she’d see them talking and snickering about her. It wasn’t that she was disfigured in any way. She was simply, unequivocally, homely, with a long, pointed nose and too little chin. New hairstyles, new makeup—nothing seemed to make much of a difference.

  “You don’t need a man in your life to be happy,” Aunt Jane told her once. “But you do need work, and it should be work that involves you with people. Why, I’d go mad without you and your parents to look after.”

  That was the first time Sarah realized her aunt didn’t know that most people considered her quite mad already. But those people didn’t know her the way Sarah did. If Aunt Jane was crazy, then all the world should be crazy. Everyone would be much better off.

  So, Sarah decided she would be a nurse. She felt half trained as one, anyway, by her senior year of high school. Just before graduation, she learned that she’d earned the highest grades of anyone in her class and would be making the speech at the commencement ceremony.

  She begged Aunt Jane to come to her graduation. “You’ve helped me so much to get where I am,” she told her aunt one night when she was helping her iron the squares of fabric. “I want you to be there,” she said. “It would mean so much to me.”

  Aunt Jane put the iron down and studied her niece. “You’re closer to me than anyone in the world,” she said softly, “and yet even you don’t understand. I can’t do it, Sarah. I simply can’t.”

  “Please,” Sarah pleaded. “Please try, for me?”

  In the end, Aunt Jane agreed to try, but her effort turned out to be a terrible mistake. She, Sarah and Sarah’s parents had to take the trolley to a street a few blocks from the school. From there, they would walk the rest of the way. But by the time the four of them stepped off the streetcar, Aunt Jane was crying. She sat down on a bench and said, “Take me home, take me home,” over and over again. Her body trembled. There was no way to comfort her and no way to cajole her into continuing. Her panic frightened Sarah. She had never seen it before, because as long as she’d known her, Aunt Jane had stayed within the safe confines of the house.

  “I knew this was a mistake,” Sarah’s father muttered.

  Sarah finally gave up trying to persuade her aunt to walk the rest of the way to the school. She felt cruel that she had begged her to come to the ceremony at all. As Aunt Jane herself had said, Sarah had not understood the depth of her fear. But she understood it now.

  “We’ll take the next trolley home again,” Sarah said, sitting down on the bench, as close to her aunt as she could get.

  “No,” her mother said. “You go on to school, Sarah, or you’ll be late. Your father and I will take Jane home.”

  Sarah looked at her aunt’s pale face. She couldn’t leave her here, shivering and terrified, on the bench. “I’ll wait till you’re all safely on the trolley,” she said. “There should be another one in a few minutes.” She put her arm around her aunt’s shoulders. “You’ll have to go across the street to catch it, though.”

  Aunt Jane looked across the street, and it was as if her eyes registered a vast, deep ocean instead of a few yards of asphalt. She shook her head. “I can’t do it,” she said.

  “Jane,” Sarah’s father said, “act like a thirty-nine-year-old woman for once, will you?”

  Sarah shot her father an angry look. On an impulse, she ran into the street and waved down a passing car. “My aunt isn’t feeling well,” she told the driver, a man in a business suit. “Could you possibly give her and my parents a ride home? It’s over on Garrison Street.”

  The driver was agreeable, and somehow they managed to bodily lift Aunt Jane into the back seat. Sarah watched as the car containing her family disappeared around the corner before walking the few blocks to her school. By the time she took the stage for her commencement address, she was nearly too upset to speak. But she managed. Somehow, she managed.

  No one knew much about phobias in those days. And they knew less about depression. Two weeks after Sarah left home to attend nursing school in Trenton, Aunt Jane swallowed one hundred of her prescription nerve pills and died in her sleep at the age of forty. Sarah knew why she had done it. With her away at school, there was little holding her aunt to that cold house, and yet she was trapped there by her own tortured mind. Aunt Jane had held on long enough to help Sarah survive a difficult childhood, but now Sarah was on her own, a successful adult. And Jane was no longer needed.

  Sarah, deeply affected by her aunt’s death, decided to become a psychiatric nurse. She read all she could in psychology, trying to understand Aunt Jane, and in the process learning a great deal about other psychiatric illnesses as her interest in the subject grew.

  After getting her degree, she took a job in a psychiatric hospital in Haddonfield, New Jersey. At first, she was afraid that she would become too attached to the patients, that each of them would seem like Aunt Jane to her, and she would not be objective enough to help them. But she found she was able to separate her aunt from the others. Each patient was an individual. Each required a different sort of help from her. And each of them needed the sort of respect and compassion Sarah had learned from the aunt who would forever be a part of her life.

  8

  LAURA SAT PROPPED AGAINST THE HEADBOARD OF EMMA’S bed, reading one of the little girl’s oldest books to her. In the past, Emma would have been able to recognize some of the words in the familiar story. She’d point to them proudly, saying them out loud. But if she knew them now, she was not letting on. Her body was curled against Laura’s, her thumb in her mouth, and she was nearly asleep. Good. Every night it was a battle getting Emma to sleep. There were the nightmares, the wet bed, the fear of the dark, and the general wakefulness that had plagued her since Ray’s death. But she must have worn herself out playing with Cory that afternoon, because her eyes were closed by the time Laura turned the last page.

  When Laura had arrived home from visiting Sarah Tolley in Leesburg, she’d found Alison Becker and Emma sitting on the front porch of the lake house, the blue plastic Barbie doll case between them on the step. After Laura let Emma into the locked house, Alison explained that her husband had arrived for the weekend. When Jim walked into the Beckers’ house, Emma dropped the doll she was playing with and ran outside. Alison had to go after her. She’d been unable to persuade Emma to return to the house, and so she’d gathered up Emma’s Barbies and walked her home.

  “Her therapist says she’s having a problem with men,” Laura said, acknowledging to herself for the first time that Heather might be right. Jim was an unusual man, though. A kindhearted soul, but large and gruff. His voice vibrated in your toes.

  Laura set the book she’d been reading to Emma on the nightstand, then carefully extracted herself from beneath her daughter, tucking her and the ragged bunny under the covers.

  After making sure the small, fairy-shaped night-light was plugged into the wall near Emma’s bed, she turned out the light to the room, then walked down the hall to the spare bedroom. She’d been looking forward to this evening ever since her visit with Sarah Tolley that afternoon.

  In the closet of the spare bedroom was a large cardboard box filled with Carl Brandon’s old papers and memorabilia. Laura had filled the box whi
le cleaning out his apartment after he died, keeping those papers that looked important and discarding many others. Somewhere in that box there had to be a clue to his relationship with Sarah Tolley.

  She’d been surprised by the wealth of details Sarah could remember. After her visit, Laura had tracked down Carolyn, Sarah’s attendant.

  “She can remember so much,” Laura told her. “Are you sure about her diagnosis?”

  “She remembered things from way back when, right?” Carolyn asked.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s where her mind is still alive,” Carolyn said. “We showed The Philadelphia Story last Friday night, and she knew all the lines. She drove everyone else crazy reciting them. But the next day, she couldn’t even tell me what movie we’d seen.”

  Carolyn was right. After all, Sarah had not even remembered meeting Laura before.

  There was a handsomeness about Sarah Tolley. She was not beautiful, but her face radiated warmth and there was an undeniable grace in her demeanor. Laura could see the homely child behind the dignified woman, though, and knew that Sarah had not imagined those childhood taunts.

  Spreading her father’s papers out on the queen-size bed, she sorted through them, hunting for some reference to a Sarah Tolley or a Sarah Wilding. She found a copy of the contract he’d signed to move Sarah into Meadow Wood Village. His relationship to Sarah was listed merely as “friend.” There were mortgage papers for the house he’d owned before moving to the apartment, and maintenance records for the car he’d sold years ago. There were a few pictures of her father as a younger man, and she set them on the night table. She’d take them with her the next time she visited Sarah. If Sarah had known her father from some time in the distant past, the pictures might help her remember.

  There was a picture of her mother and father on their wedding day, but there were no pictures of anyone else, and Laura ruefully recalled having thrown out many photographs of strangers when she’d cleaned out her father’s apartment.

  She sat on the guest room bed for hours, and it was nearly midnight when she finally lay down on top of the papers and closed her eyes.

  “Why, Dad?” she said out loud. “I just don’t get it.”

  The phone awakened her early the next morning, when she was still lying fully dressed on the paper-strewn bed. Slowly, she got to her feet and stumbled toward her bedroom and the portable phone.

  It was Madeline Shires, Ray’s literary agent.

  “I have some wonderful news,” Madeline said. “We have an offer for No Room at the Inn from Lukens Press!”

  What was Lukens Press? Laura’s head was foggy from waking up so suddenly. Down the hall, she could hear Emma beginning to stir in her own bedroom. “You mean…an offer to publish it?”

  “Granted, they’re not one of the big players,” Madeline said, “but they’re behind Ray’s book one hundred and ten percent. And they’re ready and willing to back up their purchase with excellent promotion.”

  “I didn’t realize Ray’s book was still making the rounds,” Laura said.

  “Oh, sure. I never stopped submitting it. And are you sitting down?” Madeline didn’t wait for Laura’s reply. “The advance is fifty thousand dollars.”

  Laura had not been sitting down, but she did so now, perching on the edge of her bed. “But,” she said, feeling dense, “Ray’s dead.”

  “His work will live on, Laura. Isn’t that thrilling? Aren’t you thrilled?”

  “I don’t know what I am,” she said. Her primary emotion was anger. Why the hell couldn’t this have happened when Ray was alive?

  “Something we didn’t realize is that important legislation regarding the homeless is about to be introduced in Congress,” Madeline said, “so that makes Ray’s book timely. Lukens plans to push it into publication quickly to time its release to the legislation.”

  Laura could hardly speak. “It’s just not fair,” she said.

  “I know it’s not,” Madeline said, real sympathy in her voice. “But Ray would have wanted this. All his work won’t be in vain.”

  Laura’s stomach was churning by the time she got off the phone, and tears burned her eyes. She could see Ray at the desk in his office, working on his beloved book until late into the night, revising and revising, trying to find the right combination of words to make a publisher see the value in his work. She could see the crestfallen look each time Madeline sent him a new letter of rejection.

  She called Stuart.

  “They’re going to publish Ray’s book,” she said, explaining the situation to him. His reaction was the same as hers: joy tempered by anger that this had not happened sooner.

  “I can barely tolerate the injustice of it,” Laura said.

  “I know.” Stuart sighed. “But you know what, Laurie? Ray’s gone. Nothing will bring him back. And life goes on. So, would we rather have Ray dead and his work dead along with him? Or would we rather have his work live on?”

  Laura smiled and lay back on the bed. “That’s a no-brainer,” she said.

  “Okay,” Stuart said. “Then let’s break out the champagne tonight, you there and me here, and we’ll drink a toast to Ray.”

  “Okay.” She shut her eyes, still tired, and still nettled by the situation.

  “How’s my little niece?” Stuart changed the subject. “I hope she’s found her voice by now.”

  “I’m afraid not.” Laura rolled onto her side. She could fall asleep in an instant. “Although I have her with a new therapist now who’s given me some hope that she’ll one day be a chatterbox again.”

  “I sure hope so. I miss hearing that cute voice on the phone.” Stuart paused. “And how are you doing, Laurie?”

  “Oh, I’m hanging in there.” She heard the sigh in her voice.

  “You sound tired.”

  She laughed. “Working two part-time jobs and doing round-the-clock research was a snap compared to full-time motherhood,” she said.

  “Did you ever see that Sarah woman again?”

  Laura had only spoken to Stuart a few times since Ray’s death, but he’d asked this question each time.

  “I saw her yesterday, actually.”

  “How come, hon?” Stuart asked. “Why are you bothering with her?”

  “You know why. Because of my father, although I still don’t know what the connection is.”

  “But do you really need that extra burden in your life right now?”

  “You sound like Ray.” He did, actually. Not only did Stuart look like Ray, but his voice had that same deep intonation.

  “Well, maybe Ray was trying to protect you from overextending yourself. You have a way of doing that, you know. You just said you’re tired.”

  “Not tired, really,” she said. “Just stretched a bit. But I can afford one afternoon a week to go to Leesburg and check on Sarah. Talk to her and take her for a walk. Poor thing never gets out.”

  “Does she still have Alzheimer’s?”

  “Of course.” Stuart was beginning to irk her. “That doesn’t go away,” she said. “It only gets worse.”

  “Must not be much you can talk to her about, then.”

  “She still remembers a lot from the past.”

  “Well, I hate to see you putting your limited time and energy into visiting her just because your dad laid a guilt trip on you.”

  Laura rolled onto her back, truly irritated now. “It’s my life, Stu,” she said, an edge to her voice. “I know you’re upset about me seeing Sarah because it bothered Ray. But remember what you said. Ray’s gone. And life goes on.”

  Stuart was quiet, and she regretted how harshly she’d spoken. She did not even completely believe her own words. Her guilt about Ray’s death was still very much alive.

  “All right,” he said finally. “Sorry to hound you, Laurie. It’s your choice how you spend your time.”

  Laura stared at the paneled ceiling. “Stuart…do you blame me for Ray’s death?” Was Ray’s suicide note still etched on Stuart’s mind?
br />   “Oh, no, hon,” he said quickly. “Don’t ever think that. I’m just worried about you, that’s all.”

  “Well, I’m okay,” she said. “So you can stop worrying.”

  They spoke a few minutes longer, the conversation filled with niceties to ease the tension. When Laura hung up, she remained on the bed, listening to Emma’s footsteps in the hall. In a moment, Emma came into the room, bunny in her arms. She climbed onto the bed and snuggled next to Laura, and Laura put her arm around her, still frustrated by the conversation with Stuart. At least Emma wouldn’t question her choices. She peered down at her daughter’s face, at the unconditional love softening the little girl’s features. Emma was watching her, the whites of her eyes as milky as pearls.

  “What are you thinking, sweetie?” Laura asked her.

  There was no answer, of course, and Laura settled for pulling her mystery child closer.

  9

  “I’M SCARED,” LAURA SAID AS SHE TOOK A SEAT IN HEATHER’S office after participating in a play session with the therapist and Emma. “It seems like the longer she goes without speaking, the easier it is for her to stay mute. I’ve wondered if I should pretend not to understand what she wants when she communicates with gestures. Should I make her speak before she gets what she wants?”

  “That may be the way to go sometime in the future,” Heather said, “but what she needs right now is support and reassurance that you’ll be there for her, no matter what. You’ll accept her and love her whether she speaks or not.”

  Heather wore her blond hair down today, and it rested, thick and silky, on her shoulders. She had on a sundress and sandals. Compared to her usual outfits, this looked like formal wear.

  “They won’t take her in kindergarten in the fall if she’s not talking,” Laura said. “I spoke with the principal.”

  “If she’s not ready to start kindergarten, it won’t be the end of the earth. Lots of kids don’t start school right away. We can always find an appropriate school placement for her.”