The Language of Silence (2 page)

Chapter Three

E
d
:

I can’t help it. I have to see her. It’s not something I can control. My meltdown in the car has left me exposed, and I’m pretty sure that even though it will kill me in the end, seeing her is the only thing that will make the pain go away. Temporarily. She sits across from me as the preacher goes on and on and on about eternal salvation or maybe damnation. Who knows? It all sounds the same to me. 

Brett.

I envy her ability to remain stoic as the choir sings a craptastic rendition of “Amazing Grace.” We both know Tristan would have hated this. He would have mocked just the sight of them.

Have you ever truly looked at the members of a church choir? In a town like Wendall, a church choir can tell you more than a damn census. The first two rows of the choir are filled with some of the town’s  finest
—our school guidance counselor, daughter of our town sheriff; Wendall Memorial Hospital’s Chief of Staff, fourth generation son of Wendall; Georgina, Evelyn, and Mary Ann, Impure/Purity triplets who make up Wendall High’s royal court; Officer Daniels, black sheep of one of the town’s founding families who tried to move away, but was sucked back in; and Mrs. Jensen, mother of town-celebrated Tristan and Brett Jensen, and president of the DAR.

Funniest part? None of them can actually sing. The real singers are nobodies comprised of the sons and daughters of blue-collar workers who stand in the back singing their poor sucker hearts out. I remember when I visited my uncle in Farmville, Virginia. Their choir looked liked the spawns of a Country Music Television
/NASCAR race/Cops orgy. But damn, they could sing. Our choir? It looks damn good, but it only has half a heart. 

Brett sits and stares forward as member after member of Wendall step up to talk of Tristan as if they knew him. They didn’t. I’m not sure I even knew him. Not completely. I never would have guessed that he would have left her alone. At least not in such a final way. 

Drinking and driving? That’s the story that is being passed around. I can’t believe any of them are buying it. It doesn’t even sound like Tristan. Why would he risk it? Why be so careless when you knew there were people who needed you? Tristan was a guy who thought about consequences all the time. Surely, the thought must have crossed his mind when he reached for his keys. He would have thought of his sister and me. He didn’t even seem that drunk the last time I saw him.

Don’t. Think. About. It.

Brett. She’s the only safe place for me right now.  I’m not good for her, and if I ever destroyed her, which I would if I ever really sought her out, I’d want to join Tristan six feet under. So, basically, I’m fucked.

I stare at her, letting my eyes unfocus so she becomes a blur. If I really let myself stare at her, the shrill noise of the choir in my ears, I’m afraid I’d have to go to her. There are too many eyes here. Watching. Waiting. I won’t give them the satisfaction of seeing me frazzled.

That moment in the car was all Tristan Jensen will ever get from me.

*
***

             
As they begin to lower Tristan’s body into the ground, I notice Brett isn’t among the spectators. She’s disappeared. So quickly. So effortlessly. With a small sigh, I move away from the crowd. But my shield is not as strong as I’d like it to be. The words of the townsfolk reach me. Consume me. Like a damn bout of the Super Flu that there’s just no escaping from, and I feel like I’m right back in that car losing my shit.

Except this time
, I’m alone.

“Such a waste. It just makes you want to go home and hug your children every night.”

“They really need to beef up the education at that school. We can’t just ignore the problem and pretend it will go away. Just last week, I caught Bill drinking a beer in the garage.”

“Poor thing. She looks terrible. I heard there were problems in their marriage before. I can’t imagine this will help.”

It doesn’t matter who owns these words. The thoughts belong to all of them. One giant fucking machine with one big ass mouthpiece, no matter how different the voice coming from it can sound.

Anything would be better than this.

Anything.

I find Brett sitting underneath the Lee Memorial Bridge. Like all small, southern towns, Wendall has a variety of dilapidated houses, bridges, and monuments. They stand as reminders of the town’s glorious past.

It was here the three of us formed some sort of dysfunctional therapy group—a means to surviving this hell. It has always been a place of solace for us, but it’s a place for hand jobs and necking to all the other teen scumbags in this pathetic town. I wonder if there is anything not corrupted in this town. As I approach the bridge, it no longer brings me comfort. I see it for what the others made it—a place to get off.

I certainly have no intention of doing the latter with Brett Jensen.

Even if I want to.

I want to.

She pulls her knees to her chest as she sees me approach. I notice how her knees announce themselves from underneath her dress as her legs move closer to her. She has a small tear in the knee of her black stockings.

I’m fascinated by it. The Brett Jensen I know would never leave the house with such a glaring imperfection. I briefly wonder if my eyes are still red from my meltdown in the car. I reach inside my coat pocket and pull out a pair of sunglasses, placing them over my eyes before Brett has a chance to look into them.

She clears her throat. She’s beautiful. Truly. I’ve always thought she stepped right out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. Long neck. High cheek bones. Slightly too long of a nose, but it sits perfectly on her face. Large, dark chocolate eyes. Perfectly shaped eyebrows that, if raised the right way, will drive any boy wild. Chaotic, curly black hair.

I move to sit next to her. She looks up at me. Despite the darkness of my shades, I can’t miss the way her eyes light up momentarily. I look away from her. I need to see her, but I also need to remember our relationship is covered in caution tape.

I’m not sure how long we sit there without talking. “I threw up,” she remarks, breaking the silence.

“You threw up?”

“Yes. When she came in to tell me. I threw up all over her feet. Then I threw up in the sink.”

“Were you hung over?” I ask.

“Maybe. And maybe…”

“How’d your mom tell you?”
Brett offers a short, bitter laugh in response. I scratch my chin and shake my head. “That good, eh?”

“You would think she was auditioning for a
Lifetime movie or something.”

For some reason
, I laugh. Brett smiles. An actual smile. The kind of smile that transforms a face. If she was beautiful before, she’s luminescent now. These sorts of moments are so rare, so precious, I feel both a need to forever stay in this place and flee it as soon as possible.

I’ve always had a crush on Brett Jensen. I’ve just been smart enough to know that I’m too messed up to ever be with her. And now, with Tristan gone, I’m pretty sure I’m damn near done. Ruined. And maybe that’s what I deserve for not convincing him to stay with us.

“Maybe she thinks Julia Roberts will play her,” she continues, pulling at the grass growing up between the cement base of the bridge. “I mean, this has movie written all over it. All-American boy dies under mysterious conditions.”

Oh, Brett. There is no mystery about it. He left us.

“More likely some has-been from one of those medical shows,” I say instead.

Brett nods. Suddenly, her hand is on mine. I feel the tension she is holding within herself by the pressure she exerts onto my skin. My cheeks burn
, and I am ashamed by my body’s quick reaction to this small movement.

“You can be whatever you want now, Ed,” she whispers.

I try to pull my hand from her grasp, but she merely holds on tighter. “What are you talking about?” I manage.

“You have a get out of jail free card thanks to Tristan. You could skip school for a week or flunk the whole year, and no one could say anything. You are…
were
the best friend of the dead kid. Who would give you grief? You could become anyone.”

She’s holding on so tightly to my hand that I begin to lose feeling. I let her words sink in. Settle. And the funny thing is
—they make sense. Perfect sense. I know how I am going to deal with all of this.

My life hasn’t been easy. And there are a lot of people to blame for that. My dad
, for starters, is a real shit. Not that I’ve ever had the chance to tell him. But if I could, I’d let him know he screwed me up.

People who mess up others’ lives should know it.

If Tristan really got drunk and drove his car into a tree, then the people of this town put him behind the wheel. They are to blame as much as he is. This damn, suffocating place. Maybe it doesn’t matter how and why he died. He died. He left. And since I can’t yell and hit him, I can get back at the place that created him, the place that created the first friend I’d ever had only to take him from me years later. The same place that allowed him to think he was invincible and could go around faking his way through life. 

I yank my hand away from Brett so forcefully that her elbow juts into her stomach. I move away from her because she can’t go on this journey with me. Partly because there is something still so innocent about her that wouldn’t be able to survive where I am going. The other reason is it will take me from her, take me where I can’t hurt her.

Brett stands up. She moves toward the river that flows under the bridge. I don’t stop her as she wades into the water. It moves toward her, attempting to consume her. But she isn’t willing to go all the way in. It reaches her knees, covering the tear that so hypnotized me before.

“There’s this road in Virginia named Witch Duck. They used to drown witches near there. If they drowned
, they were innocent, and if they survived, they were witches. Then they were hanged,” she calls out to me over her shoulder.

“Why are you telling me this?” I ask, stuffing my hands into my pockets, controlling my need to pull her from the water.

“Just thought you needed to know.” Brett inhales deeply and lifts her head to the sky. After a moment, she moves back to the grass. She’s a mess, and I wonder how her mother will react when she shows up to the wake. “Who are you going to become, Ed? This is your chance. You could make your life better. They’d have to let you in. So, who do you want to be?”

I shouldn’t be surprised by the directness of her question. It’s one of the things I’ve always loved about Brett. But something about the way she asks it makes me feel like she finally understands we can never be.

And I feel loss all over again.

Finality is a bitch.

“I’m going to become one of them. I’m going to show them how easy it is. They’ll let me now.”

“You hate them.”

I nod. I do. I won’t be able to explain to Brett that, like them, I deserve to be punished. I want to see this world that Tristan was so desperate to stay in, so scared they would shut him out of if they knew the truth.  I want to get them to accept me, and then show them just how easily I can reject them.

She nods. She reaches out her hand and rests it against my arm. “Then you learned nothing from him dying.”

And then, she’s gone.

Chapter Four

Brett
:

My brother wasn’t drunk the night he died. He told me he wasn’t drunk. He never lied. Not to me. Well, he usually didn’t lie. Did he lie? He didn’t seem drunk. If he wasn’t drunk then his death was no accident.

He was murdered. It’s the only explanation. Somebody must have found out. He was too darn special to be taken away by some unforgiving act of fate. I don’t believe in that sort of thing. Everything has an answer.
Everything
. One moment I had a brother, and one moment I didn’t.  I just can’t wrap my mind around it. It’s a math problem, an equation. There’s an answer to it.

I turn over in bed and stare into my bathroom. My room is starting to smell like puke. I throw the covers over my head and wonder how long I can breathe just through my mouth.

The police ensured us that it was a drunk-driving accident. My mother didn’t ask for an autopsy. If they conducted one anyway, my parents never bothered to tell me. My mother just wanted the mess cleaned up. My dad…did my dad have an opinion?

Maybe I am reaching, longing for some excuse for this to make sense.

Did the police know Tristan had enemies? Should I have told them? Wouldn’t that be betraying my brother? The things I could tell were secrets. They are secrets. Still.

If my brother was murdered
, then it involves all of Wendall. Maybe I shouldn’t have turned down Ed and my brother’s suggestion to watch
Veronica Mars
with them last month. It seemed like a silly show about a cute, blonde teenage private eye. Who knew it could have helped me?

I wonder if it’s on Netflix?

With a heavy sigh, I throw the covers off me. There is no hope of finding sleep. I know that. I haven’t heard any noise from downstairs, so I figure it’s probably safe to venture down. Dad hasn’t shown his face much, and Mom was passed out the last time I checked.

*
***

I
’ve never understood why people bring food over after someone dies. I mean, I get the logic behind it—they don’t want you to have to worry about cooking. But as I stare at the hodgepodge of homemade goods in my fridge, all I can wonder about is hand washing and stray strands of hair. I shudder and close the door.

The pantry holds nothing but stale chips. Football watching season is over, so no one has bothered to restock in weeks. I grab a bag and plop down on the couch. I turn on the television, quickly muting it so I don’t wake my mother up. Besides, it was a game Tristan and I used to play. We’d make up our own stories and dialogue to whatever images were flashing across the screen.

Tonight, I can’t come up with a single scenario. I just let the colors entrance me, making it painless to exist.

“What are you doing?”

Her voice snaps me from my hypnosis. I drop the chip I’ve been holding in my hand for God knows how long. I scramble to pick it up before my mother can yell at me for getting chip grease on her couch. But then I remember she hasn’t done much of anything lately, and I leave the chip where it lies.

I watch as her eyes move to it. And I realize I want her to yell. I’m begging for it.

“You have school tomorrow.”

That’s all she gives me. No reprimand. It didn’t even sound like a warning, more like a statement of fact. I take a deep breath and stand up. I leave the bag of chips where they lay.

“Have you heard from your father?” my mother asks me. That’s when I hear it. The tiniest bit of emotion.

I shake my head. “Have you?” I ask.

She goes rigid, her hand frozen in mid-air like she’s reaching for something that’s not there. I know what she wants. I trudge into the kitchen and pour her a glass. I know it’s not right, but nothing feels right anymore.

And maybe tonight we can both misbehave.

I place the glass of vodka in her hands, and she comes alive like some mechanical toy your parents put a few quarters in to stop you from crying while they argue over what wine goes best with lamb at the grocery store. She throws the glass back and turns to go upstairs.

I walk back over to the bag of chips and dump the contents out onto the crisp white sofa. I press my fist against the pile of waste and smash and smash until I’m sure it’s ruined.

Tomorrow, I will have to behave. Tomorrow, we all will.