A Sudden Silence (3 page)

"Hey! You!" A guy in a security guard uniform was heading toward me. "Are you waiting for someone, young man?"

"Yeah. Well, I'm waiting for my mom. She's inside."

He pushed back his cap and squinted down at me. "Is your car in this lot?"

"No. Actually, we found a spot right at the front and..."

"I suggest you go inside then and wait with your mother. You've been walking around out here for quite a while now. Long enough, I'd say."

His eyes were the toughest I'd ever looked into. "OK. Well, sure. I'll just go on inside."

I backed away, feeling guilty for no reason whatsoever. Guilty and hopeless.

It was bad, bad, bad all over again when Gran and Grandpa and Aunt Lila came. "Fred's so sorry he couldn't get away," Aunt Lila told Mom. "He's devastated."

"It's all right, Lila. It doesn't matter."

Grandma hugged me tight and said my name over and over. Grandpa shook my hand. He had cut his face shaving and there was a smear of dried blood on his chin. He looked very old.

Grandpa and Bry have always been close. Ever since Bry was little Grandpa has sent him stuff to make—plane models, and ship models when he was in elementary school, and more complicated things when he got older. Grandpa would get a model for himself at the same time, and they'd make them together, thousands of miles apart. Little notes came and went in the mail: discussions of their problems, the relative merits of glues, how B118 would not fit into C118, no way, not unless you trimmed it first, and Grandpa would definitely write to the manufacturer. They'd probably been working simultaneously on whatever that was on Bry's desk. I wished I'd swept all those bits and pieces of paper into the drawer before Grandpa could see them.

When we got home I did that fast. Then, while they were picking at the salad Mom and I'd fixed for lunch, I slipped away to get the shoe.

The beach swarmed with people and there were lots of cars parked along both sides of the road, the way it always is on Sundays. I studied them. White cars, silver, blue, most of them small. There was one big old dark green surfer wagon that looked homemade. I decided I'd probably be checking out the rear ends of cars as long as I lived, or till the day I found the right one, whichever came first.

Three kids on the beach side pointed across the highway. They'd be saying, "Over there's where it happened. It threw the guy right up in the air." Something like that. Kids are gruesome. Bry and I were. The mothers of those kids would have told them, "See? See what happened to that poor boy? Now maybe you'll know I'm not being paranoid when I tell you to stay off the road and use the tunnel. Don't ever, ever, ever again try running across the highway."

I swung around and that was when I saw the guy in the black Windbreaker. He was standing behind the ranch wire, looking at the spot where Bry had been hit, and the anger fizzed up inside me again. Not
his
brother. Not someone he loved. Just another geek.

"Hey!" I yelled. "What are you staring at?"

His hands jerked off the wire as if he'd been electrocuted.

"Why don't you step over and get a closer look?"

The guy turned quickly and began half running. Maybe I sounded like a madman. I felt like one, all right. There was some kind of emblem on the back of his black Windbreaker, a circle with airplane propellers or something inside. That's what I aimed for as I picked up a handful of pebbles and flung them at his retreating back. They missed by a mile.

"Have a good day!" I yelled. He was falling all over himself trying to get into his beige Honda, and I flung another handful of pebbles as it hurtled past me. It took a lot of deep breathing before my shaking stopped, before I could make myself move toward the back of the guard's office.

Chris Sanchez, who works the gates, was out checking the ID of someone coming into the park. I dropped the shoe into the brown paper sack I'd tucked inside my shirt. Already I'd decided not to put it with Bry's things. What if Mom saw it? Nobody that I knew of had questioned the missing shoe. There had been too many other things to worry about. Back home I put it on the shelf at the back of my closet, out of sight, and then I went to the phone in Mom and Dad's room and called the police. I held for Officer Valle, and when she came to the phone I told her in a low voice about the shoe, and about how I thought it had gotten onto ranch property.

"That's not a conclusion we can definitely make, Jesse," she said. "Not unless you saw it being thrown."

"I didn't see. I just know, that's all."

"We'd better get it over here right away in any case," she said. There was silence on the phone. "It's too bad you moved it," she added.

"If you ask
me,
it's too bad you missed it." I was angry again. "What did you expect me to do, leave it lying there?"

"That would probably have been best," she said mildly.

"I handled it carefully, don't worry. I hardly touched it at all. Do you think you can get prints off it?"

"It's possible."

"Well, look, I don't want you coming up here. I'll bring it over," I said and hung up before she could object. It wasn't till then that it hit me. What if the guy in the black Windbreaker had been in there behind the wire looking for that shoe? What if he'd thrown it and realized afterward that there could be fingerprints there? I almost picked up the phone again to call Officer Valle back. But I just about knew what she'd say: "That's not a conclusion we can definitely make, Jesse." And she'd be right. I was grasping at straws.

Still, I wished I'd chased after him when he loped away toward his car. If there was anything I should have known, he'd have told me. Maybe I'd never lay eyes on him again.

But I did. Two days later at Bry's funeral. He was there.

M
Y FRIEND
Alexander came down from Pasadena, where he's a student at Art Center. He'd signed up for summer school, and I'd known June, July, and August were going to be a bummer without him. Lonely, too. I hadn't known how lonely because I hadn't known I wouldn't have Bry either.

The funeral was to be at 12:00 noon on Tuesday. The days till then ran together in a blur of pain ... of forgetting for a few minutes and then remembering, of sad conversations, of sympathy calls, of tears. There were a lot of "if only's." The "if only's" were almost the worst.

Monday night the family was in the living room, worn with suffering, talking quietly about the last details for tomorrow. Grandpa wasn't there, and I figured he might be outside on the deck in the sad, lonely dark. I thought about going out to see but decided not to. There were times now when each of us needed to be alone.

But when I went along the hallway to the bathroom, I saw a light from Bry's half-open door. Grandpa was sitting at Bry's desk. He'd found all the pieces of paper that I'd swept into the drawer and he was intently sticking one square of white cardboard to another.

"This is a tough sucker," he said to me, turning around and shaking his head. "But it won't beat us. Bry and I have licked things this tough before."

"Yeah." Someone had made the bed. I sat on the blue chenille cover Bry's had for ever and ever, and Grandpa turned back to the model. Tacked on the bulletin board above the desk was the cover of the model box with its picture of the finished product,
CONSTRUCT YOUR OWN WORKING PAPER CLOCK,
I read. 160
PIECES. HAVE A PRECISION ENGINEERED TIMEPIECE THAT ACTUALLY WORKS
. So that's what it was. Pinned beside it was a cardboard sign,
TIME HEALS
. Underneath, in red marker, Bry had scribbled, "But not 100%." Right, Bryan. Sixteen years hadn't healed what those German measles had done to his ears. Not any percent.

"I like this stage," Grandpa said. "You can't believe you can ever take this kind of mess and turn it into something recognizable." He'd laid the pieces out in some kind of mixed-up order. There were paper cogwheels, ladderlike strips, circles with stars in them. That irritating memory flitted suddenly into my mind again. I picked up one of the circles and turned it between my fingers. Had there been a circle of some sort on the back of that car? But when I squeezed my eyes tight shut, trying and trying to bring it back, it turned into the circle on the back of that black Windbreaker the guy had worn. No good. No good at all.

"Do you know this girl?" Grandpa asked.

"Which girl?" I knew which girl.

"The one Bry was making the clock for."

"No. I mean, yes. It must have been for Chloe Eichler. I didn't know he was making a clock for her."

"She's a hearing girl, he told me. Bry was pleased about that. He said they were walking through Laguna one day, and she saw a beautiful old handmade clock in an antique store window that she wished she had for her room, and Bry decided he couldn't afford that, but he could sure make her a hand-tooled one." Grandpa turned, holding the two rectangular ladder pieces, one in each hand. "Do you want to finish it for him? For her? I'm doing one at the same time at home. We could check up on each other."

I stood and smoothed the chenille cover, not looking at him.

"Well, I don't know. I don't have that much time. I've signed up for a really heavy load...."

Grandpa raised his eyebrows. "You have the summer."

"I have a job lined up for Taco Bell, but now I'm not sure. I'll think about the clock. But it doesn't seem right, Grandpa. This was his. For her."

"Of course it would be right. Who else is there?"

But Grandpa didn't know how I'd seen Chloe for the first time that night, how I'd been thinking about her right at the minute Bry was killed. How I'd been wishing she was my girl and not his. Those were the things that made it seem not right for me to be taking over where Bry left off. Those, and other things. "I think I'll go to bed," I said.

Grandpa sighed. "Yes. Tomorrow will be hard. But Jesse..."

I stopped.

"Take that job, Jesse. It's going to be harder for you if you don't keep busy these next months. You get to just lying around thinking, and that can be bad."

I nodded. "Good night, Grandpa."

I'd decided to stay alert during Bry's funeral, to check who was there and who wasn't. You never could tell. But it wasn't easy to stay alert. In the first place, this was my brother's funeral. That was
his
coffin placed in front of the pulpit, candles at either end, flowers piled high on the polished wood.

This was Bry's favorite hymn we were singing. In church he'd sing it with us, no tone and too loud most of the time, the way he'd talk too loud, not knowing he was doing it.

"'Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,'" we sang. I was having trouble getting the words out. Why hadn't amazing grace saved him? Why hadn't he sensed that car, felt the vibrations the way he could so often? For the same reason I hadn't heard it. It had been on us too fast.

I gave up trying to sing, standing still, letting the sound of the hymn wash over me, and I knew that my father wasn't singing either. My mother was, though, and when I looked up at her face I saw a sort of healing there. Maybe what I saw was amazing grace.

The church overflowed. All the park people had come. Just one of the Strathdee sisters, though. Even for a funeral Fluffy couldn't be left alone.

There was Chloe with her brother, and a man and a woman who were her parents, I guess, and Bry's shop teacher and Ms. Diprolini, who is the principal at the high school. A red glow from the good shepherd stained-glass window slanted across Chloe's face. She was wearing a dark blue shirt and skirt, and I thought,
Bry's girl.
His hearing girl. I hated myself for even looking at her.

Mr. Lichen, Bry's speech therapy teacher, my father, my grandfather, and I carried the coffin along the aisle after the service was over. Bry didn't feel heavy at all. When he used to jump on my back he'd felt heavy, all right, but not today. The aisle seemed awfully long, though, and the smell of the flowers sickening. I was glad to get outside into the air.

I don't think all the people who'd been in the church came to graveside. I would have liked to skip this one myself.

I looked at the clusters of people standing on the grass, a safe distance from the fresh mound of earth. There were faces I recognized and others I didn't. Most of the kids who'd been at the party that night were there, serious and pale now, not looking at each other or at me. Jim Lugar had come up to me outside the church as I waited to get into the limo, and he'd mumbled something about being sorry and he'd shaken my hand.

"Sure," I'd said, wanting to pull my hand away but not doing it. Senseless to blame him. Senseless to think that if he hadn't passed out on the couch he'd have driven us home and Bry would still be alive.

Alexander was there, of course, with his mother and her boyfriend. I saw Officer Valle, too, and that surprised me because I didn't think a cop would get personally involved enough to go to a funeral. But then, what did I know?

She'd called back Sunday morning and said she was sending a cop car for the shoe, and I'd met it at the park gates and handed over the brown paper bag. "Don't go losing that," I'd told the driver. He looked about my age and his uniform seemed brand-new.

"I know what it is," he'd said in a bored, superior way.

I wondered if I should try to ask Officer Valle today about prints, but it didn't seem quite the time.

And that was when I saw the guy with the black Windbreaker again. He was standing at the back of the crowd, his hands in his pockets, his eyes fixed steadily on the Reverend Orville as he spoke the final words. Maybe the guy was just one of Bry's teachers that I didn't know? Or even a cop? But would a cop or a teacher have rushed away like that when I'd yelled and thrown that gravel? Maybe. I'd probably looked pretty spaced-out and hostile, no question.

I guess I was staring at him too intently because his head jerked suddenly in my direction and he took a step backward over a bump in the grass.

The Reverend Orville lifted his arms for the benediction and my mother and father and I held hands as we bent our heads. When it was over and I looked up, the guy had gone. Somewhere in the hushed silence a car motor started.