A Sudden Silence (12 page)

"You saying I don't got eyes? You saying I was drunk? You insulting me, boy?"

I tried to get my head together.

"So the man was on the passenger side?"

"There weren't no man. That little lady was in the car all by herself."

I sat back, stunned. Someone
had
taken the car. Chloe's mother had taken it.

I
DIDN'T SLEEP
at all that night. At seven on Sunday morning I was out on my surfboard, still trying to put things together, and worse, trying to decide what to do. I found myself wishing I had Bry to talk with. Yeah, sure! Smart thinking, Jesse.

There was no doubt that I'd tell the police. But should I tell my mother and father first? I couldn't bear not to have them know before anyone else. But suppose I was wrong? I owed it to Chloe's mother to be sure. I
was
sure. I owed her nothing. Did I owe Chloe anything, Chloe who'd been Bry's girl, my girl? Chloe who was her mother's daughter? Should I break it to her before the cops did?

The wind was straight offshore and the waves were pumping. I caught a big, fast left, carving on the inside of my rail. The speed felt good. For a few seconds I was able to blank out everything except the green tube I was in. The blankout didn't last. I paddled back slowly into the lineup and bobbed for a long time, making my decision.

But Mom and Dad had left for early church when I got back. Mom's note said, "I'm sorry you aren't with us, Jess. Breakfast's in the oven."

I turned the oven off and called Chloe. It was her mother who answered and I had a hard time even speaking.

"We want to thank you again for staying with Chloe last night," she said.

"You're welcome." Cold, sarcastic voice. Couldn't she sense I knew? How could she have faced me these past days, spoken my brother's name? She'd passed the test, that's why. I'd been in her house and she'd probably been scared at first, but she'd passed the test and every day she'd felt safer. She hadn't wanted me to stay last night and she'd been right.
Well, you're not safe any longer, lady.

There was a long pause before she said, "I'll get Chloe." Had I imagined that pause?

"Jesse?" Chloe's voice came almost immediately. She sounded breathless, as if she'd hurried. "Oh, I'm so glad. I'd decided you wouldn't call, and then I thought maybe you would, just to ask about my foot...."

I'd forgotten about her foot. "How is it?"

"It doesn't hurt as much."

"Good." There was an edge of something pink showing under the coffee table and I bent and poked it out. It was a little plastic windup mouse that Bry had brought home one day. Wind it up and it turns endless somersaults. I held it, rubbing its silly pink head.

"Could I see you, Chloe? I want to talk to you now."

"Sure. I'd love it. Come on over. I'm stuck here, but..."

I didn't want to talk to her in that house, in her room with her mother downstairs.

"If I walked over could we take your car and go to the Point? I'd drive."

"Great." There was a flicker of worry in her voice, though. She was picking up on something. Last night I hadn't wanted to talk What had changed?

"I'll be there in fifteen minutes, Chloe."

I walked quickly, almost running past the place on the highway.

Soon now, Bry.

The dark green Volvo was still in the driveway, Chloe's Mustang beside it. Mr. Eichler opened the door when I rang and I wondered if he knew, if his wife had told him, if he was covering up, too.

"Come in, Jesse," he said.

"No, thanks, I'll just wait out here." And then, because I couldn't help it, I added, "Nice car."

"I like it. Well, if you're sure you won't come in I'll get Chloe."

It was a minute before she came. She wore a pale blue sweat suit and one grubby white Reebok. Her smile was enough to stop my heart in midbeat. She, or someone, had drawn a Snoopy face on the oversized white sock on her bandaged foot.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi."

She held my arm going down the steps. Behind us I sensed her mother in the hallway and I turned and let myself glance down at her ankle, at the chain glittering and sending off its hard little sparks.

"Jesse?" That was her voice.

I looked at that mask of a face with all expression enameled over.

"What?" My jaw was so tight that I could hardly get the word through it.

"Nothing," she said.

Chloe and I sat at Clambake Point looking over the gray toss of sea and I told her.

"No," she said.

"Yes. It was your dad's car. I'm certain the tire tracks will match. I'm certain we'll find your mom's prints on Bry's shoe."

"My God. What shoe?" I will never forget the horror in her eyes, the way she covered her mouth with her hand when I told her.

"But it couldn't have been Mom." Her chin trembled. "I was so relieved that it couldn't have been her. She and Dad drove home together that night, and the next day when we heard about Bry, I went to Dad and I was scared and..." She was crying soundlessly, her face wet with tears. "He said for me not to go imagining things, just because ... he knew for sure it wasn't Mom."

She stared out of the window, whispering words that I couldn't hear. One fist pounded her knee.

I waited. She sighed, closed her eyes. "It
was
my mother. I can see that now. She had a headache when she came home. I remember, she took aspirin. I asked Dad if she'd been drinking and he said only one. He keeps an eye on her. She hates it but he always does. He said she'd had a headache all night. She'd lain down on Mrs. Levins bed for a while." Chloe turned so all I could see was the back of her head, her hunched, hopeless shoulders. "She'd have had a bottle hidden somewhere, of course. Dad checks her purse but she must have got it past him."

"She'd take a bottle to the party?"

"Probably it was a half pint. Nice and flat. Slipped down inside her bra."

I couldn't figure if it was anger or despair I was hearing in Chloe's voice. "I'll bet she drank it, lying there on Mrs. Levin's bed, and it wasn't enough, so she thought she'd just slip out and drive home. We find bottles hidden in the weirdest places."

"She'd drink half a pint of whiskey and still try...?"

"Probably vodka. My mother likes vodka best, if it's available. If not, anything will do."

"She'd drink that much and still get in a car and...?"

"When we lived in Palo Alto she rammed her Toyota right through the back garage wall, thinking it was in reverse, and she was drunk at my eleventh birthday party and..."

"Don't, Chloe," I said. "What's the use?"

"And when we were little, nobody would car pool with us because they knew, and Dad would make all kinds of excuses when she was too bombed to go places. He'd say she had flu. And we moved a lot."

Chloe wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. "It's our fault, too, of course. Mine and Wilson's and Dad's. Mom hides her drinking the way she hides everything else about herself. We help her hide it. I'm so sorry, Jesse. But sorry isn't enough, is it?"

"Couldn't you see she was a death waiting to happen, Chloe? Like Plum? Couldn't you see? Why didn't you
make
her get help?" I moved away as far as possible, till my back was against the door. She was right. They
were
all to blame.

"You think we don't try? There's no way to make her go. Dad even fooled her once, introducing her to a counselor, hoping they'd get friendly. It didn't work. Mom says she doesn't have a problem. She says alcoholics are sickies and have no self-control."

My leg jerked, my knee bumping the dash, and Chloe quickly moved her Snoopy foot out of the way.

"What's she going to say now?" I asked bitterly. "Is she going to say sorry, too? Just don't ask me not to go to the police, Chloe. Just don't ask."

Chloe shivered. "No, I couldn't. Not after what happened. But please! Let me tell my dad first. OK?"

Three kids in a van with Idaho plates pulled in next to us. A bunch of surfboards were piled in the back "Hey, man," the driver called. "Where's the best waves around here?"

"Try down the highway," I said. "Tresdes."

"Thanks." They were gone.

Chloe and I sat silently. A fog was drifting in, blotting out the horizon.

"I don't think they'll find any surf," she said tonelessly. "It's glassing over. Oh, Jesse! I wish we could rim and run. Just the two of us..."

"There's no place to run." I started the car. It was eleven o'clock and my parents would be home.

I'm working now at Taco Bell, and Debbie Green and I are dating, but nothing serious. We were in Penguin's Frozen Yogurt one night when Chloe came in with some guy. I'd imagined seeing her again and I'd tried to prepare for it but I wasn't prepared.

"Hi, Jesse," she said.

"Hi." The word scratched my throat. "How are you?"

She shrugged. "Did you know that my brother has joined the navy?"

"I didn't know that."

She nodded. "He figured out how to run away. Wilson always does."

That was all, except that my palms were sweating and there was an empty hurting ache in my chest.

"Isn't that the daughter...?" Debbie whispered.

"Yes." There would always be whispers about Chloe now, whispers about all of us. Everybody knows about Mrs. Eichler. The papers are full of it. How she'd left the party when she was supposed to be resting. How she'd driven home and found her house filled with kids. How she'd turned the car around and killed Bry. It's hard for people to accept that a hit-and-run driver can be rich and respectable. And that an alcoholic isn't always a bum drinking wine out of a bottle in a paper bag.

The Captain says the Eichlers will be ruined financially and that Mrs. Eichler will go to jail. She should. She killed Bry. But I don't want to think of her in jail. I know they'll be ruined more than financially, and I don't want to think about that either.

It's strange. I'd been so sure that finding that driver would make me feel better. If anything I feel worse. I'd thought all my own "if only's" would disappear. It doesn't work that way. The pain doesn't stop or the emptiness fill that easily.

Mrs. Eichler wrote us a letter begging our forgiveness. "I've had trouble looking in your eyes, Jesse," she said. "I've had trouble looking in my own. I am screaming inside."

We are all screaming inside, Mrs. Eichler. Mom and Dad, and I.

My dad doesn't talk about what has happened. He goes fishing a lot.

I went with him, one hazy, early morning. There was a heavy swell and we sat out there with our lines dropped into the gray bulge of water.

There were things I needed to say to him.

"Dad?" I began. "I keep thinking that maybe I could have saved Bry somehow. I can't get away from that. If I'd jumped forward. If I'd..." I reeled in my line, keeping my eyes on its tight shine. "I saved myself, Dad."

He was quiet for so long that I thought he wasn't going to answer. Then he said, "I don't know what to tell you, Jesse. No use saying you'll get over it. You probably never will. You'll live with it, and your mother and I'll live with our guilts, too, and if we're lucky they'll dim a bit as the years go on."

"
Your
guilts? What do you mean your guilts? You weren't even there."

"We were there for all of Bry's life. I don't know if we did the best for him. We never encouraged him to be different or to think of himself as different and we thought we were handling things well. But was that right or wrong, Jess? Was it for Bryan, or for us?"

"You mean because he talked instead of signing? That was right, Dad. Shoot, Bry talked so well nobody would have guessed, or not for a while, anyway." I fumbled around in my head, looking for words to help. "And that time the Hearing Center people sent you and Mom to Denver to that big meeting to tell how..."

Dad interrupted. "And those deaf kids were there, carrying placards about deaf pride and signing how we hadn't let Bry have any. I remember all right. He didn't sign. He never learned and we didn't either. Bry wasn't a part of that world—or of the hearing world. Where was he, Jesse?"

The float bobbed below the surface and Dad stood and yanked so hard on the line that the rod arched like a bow. I saw the strain in his arms and face. He freed a clump of monster seaweed, tossed it back in the ocean, and sat again, staring across the dreary water. "Everybody's left with something to regret, Jesse. We just have to go on the best we can."

"I guess." I hadn't told Dad how I'd been thinking about Bry's girl just before that car hit him, ten seconds before that awful, sudden silence, and that I had that guilt to live with, too.

Mom has become ultrareligious, and not only on Sundays. Mrs. Daniloff brought up another of her good casseroles and a leaflet about a support group called Together.

"They've all lost a child to violent crime," she told Mom. "They help each other come to terms with it."

But Mom just shook her head.

"I don't think she's ready yet," Mrs. Daniloff whispered to me. "I'll try again in a couple of months."

I
'm not sure if Mom will ever be ready for that. Maybe religion is her support group. Maybe she and Dad have each found their own kind of amazing grace.

We gave part of the reward money to Mothers Against Drunk Drivers and part to a ranch that works with handicapped children. There will be a new Bryan Harmon bunkhouse. The Newport businessman donated his part of the money to a job project for homeless alcoholic men. I told Sowbug about that, but I don't think he wants to go. He likes the beach.

Officer Valle says there's nothing she can do about Plum.

"You can't take away a license without proof of a crime, Jesse, and you can't help someone who doesn't want help."

Chloe had been right about that. But I guess her mom will get help now whether she wants it or not.

In two weeks I go back to school.

Sometimes at night I go into Bry's room. I sit and I stare at his trophies, his books, the surfboard in the corner that's as dead as he is, and I promise myself that I'll never let go of his memory.

It seems impossible that there'll ever be anything between Chloe and me. How could there be? Her mother, my brother. I've started work on her clock, though. Grandpa and I discuss clock problems on the phone, but he hasn't asked me what I'm going to do with it when it's finished. I don't know myself. Finishing it is going to take a long, long time. I just have to hope that by then, I'll know.