What the Waves Know (3 page)

Word of what had happened reached Tuckertown before we did, and the year that followed is less a memory than a residual feeling of walking through the world with that same sensation I'd felt at Potter's Creek—alone and off balance without my father's hand.

If there were whispers or rumors, I was too young to realize. Periodically, sympathetic neighbors would stop by with a pie or fresh-cut flowers from their garden and tilt a curious glance in my direction with a wave as though my being mute meant they were, too. Not a single word had crept through my lips since my sixth birthday and my mother devoted much of her time trying to wriggle them free.

“Just say something, anything,” she pleaded. Every tinge of hope and panic in her voice said she didn't want to believe I couldn't, didn't understand that the secrets buried in my memory had me by the throat so tightly that
the words were strangled. That I could never ever give them wings. “You know the bad words you aren't allowed to use? You can even say those. Go ahead, let one fly.”

There was no way for her to know that I'd already said the worst words in the whole world. I'd breathed life into them, let them loose into the universe, and they had destroyed us all. I was the only one who understood . . . who knew Yemaya and listened to the Nikommo, who had spent a whole lifetime clinging to my father so he wouldn't go and, in a fit of anger, had wished him into nothingness, a nothingness so pure and powerful he never came back. I walked through the days with the Yemaya Stone in my pocket, silently wishing him back, not saying a word for fear the magic would spill out and I would accidentally wish her away, too.

I'm sure we ate, because neither my mother nor I starved to death during that time, even if my mother had shrunk to the width of a withered-up strand of linguini. And we must have shopped and left our house for necessities, because I do not remember being without toilet paper or Kleenex. What I do recall being fresh out of were answers. Had he found God's country? It always seemed to be moving from one place to another. When was he coming home? Did he still wake up in the middle of the night to dance with the moon?

Still, I cannot pull any one moment into clear view. The closest I ever get are the times when Grandma Jo came to stay, and even those are blurry snapshots of my mother
switching from diet cola to Canadian whiskey and the soft pressure of my grandmother's hand stroking my back to get me to sleep.

Although I didn't see it then, I was coming to understand the true nature of my parents' quarrels, that they were all the same fight—the money, the candles, the toilet tissue. My father had turned the roll of Charmin around so that my mother could no longer reach into thin air with confidence and know it was there, know he was there. He had shifted the direction of our lives with it, in ways that we could not turn back.

My father was
gone, but the truth of the matter is a person never really leaves you all at once. He slips away from you inch by inch until he has left you a thousand times. First, he marches right out of your life, leaving you only with memories. Then, one by one, those memories march out on you, too, and they take pieces of you with them as they go.

When I started kindergarten in the fall of 1966, I began to appreciate the bits of myself that had gone missing. I spent the morning slunk low in a corner desk at the back of the class wishing myself invisible in a room thick with the smell of pencil shavings and Elmer's glue. It hadn't taken long for the other children to figure out I couldn't speak.

“What's wrong with her?” a blond-haired boy with a face oval as a peach pit whispered.

“I think she's a retard,” sniggered the squat redhead beside him.

“Robert!” The pretty young teacher, Miss Weatherall, visibly paled. “We do not use that word.” I noted the fact that she had not added,
“No, she isn't.”

“Yeah, you big stupid goober head.” A small girl in a tattered pink shirt leaned forward from the back row, pushing back a tangle of mousy brown curls. “She's just quiet.”

“And we do not call our friends ‘big stupid goober heads.'” Miss Weatherall flicked her eyes from the red-haired boy to the girl.

“I didn't call my friend a big stupid goober head; I called Robert one.” Her name was Libby Frederickson, and I found out later that her mother had died of leukemia when she was three, which explained the array of mismatched outfits she wore to school and the explosion of curls left untamed by a mother's hand. She became the first and only friend I would know before leaving school for good.

The next month passed with all the speed of honey in a hive in February until one afternoon when Libby and I were crouched low catching ants beside a puddle, placing them one by one beside the moat we had carved along the edge. I set my ant, a big fat black creature with long front legs, down on the edge just as a pudgy black boot stomped up beside me.

“Hey, look, everyone! Silent Sam plays with
ants
because nobody else
w-ants
to play with her!” The words
crooned down around me in a little jingle, crunching up my stomach until I could barely breathe.

“Shut up, goober head!” Libby pounced to her feet.

“Silent Sam, Silent Sam, mouth stuck shut with a jar of jam!”

I stared down at the ant chewing my lip, a habit I'd acquired to remind myself my mouth was there, even if for no other reason than to chew my own skin off.

“I said, shut up!” Libby stepped forward just as Robert brought his boot squarely down on the ant I'd been playing with. Its front legs began pedaling pathetically in the air while it died and I mopped mud from the corner of one eye.

“Ooooohhhh,” sang Robert. “Look, Silent Sam's a crybaby!”

I had just cleared the dirt from my eyeball when I saw Libby go airborne. “She is not!” she screamed, shoving Robert back.

“Is, too!” Robert snapped, shoving Libby so hard she sailed backward into the middle of the moat with a loud
splat
.

I am not at all sure where the anger inside of me came from; it seemed to bubble through a tiny opening in my gut and exploded out of me with volcanic force. For one singular moment I was Electra, grabbing two fistfuls of mud, chucking one after the other at Robert until there was nothing left standing before me but a muddy brown blob, which did indeed make him look every bit like a big
fat goober head. In my altered state, there was no way of knowing a small rock had been embedded in the last mud bomb. It had hit Robert flatly on the cheek with sufficient force to draw a trickle of blood below his eye.

Sitting in a plastic chair in the principal's office later, I tried to stitch together the lopped-off sentences slithering through the crack at the bottom of the door.

“Specialized programming . . . children with unique needs . . . If she could learn sign language, even . . .”

Digging the sharp corners of my nails into the pads of my fingers, I squeezed my eyes closed, willing the world away. A faint tickle shivered at the bottom of my throat. I pressed my lips together and swallowed three times until the urge to scream had passed.

“You are sorely mistaken if you think for one minute I'm going to let you place my daughter in a classroom full of retarded children!”

“We do not use that word, Mrs. Haywood,” I heard Miss Weatherall say softly. The funny thing is, it would have stung less if she'd said it with force rather than pity.

“I'm sorry, but this whole conversation is
retarded
. Iz is not delayed.” My mother stormed through the door, latching on to my hand, and dragged me bouncing like a tin can on a string beside her to the car.

“Izabella Rae. You do not need specialized education and we both damn well know it. You're too smart for your own fucking good. I'm not going to let them stick you in a class full of . . .”
Retards
. She didn't say it, but the
word slipped into the car between us like a letter whisked through the crack of a locked door. “. . . people who need it.” She sighed, looking at me sidelong. “Although maybe I should after that shenanigan today.” I could see her weighing her options and coming up a fistful short. “What am I going to do with you? You know Daddy wouldn't want this.”

I shrugged, staring hard at the trees flipping past my window. Why she thought I cared what my father wanted was a mystery to me. In the time since my father left, my sadness had turned to guilt, and my guilt had landed flatly on anger. I didn't give two soft hoots what either of them wanted. They could both pack all their wants and ship them to Timbuktu for all I cared.

“Look at me.” Turning my head further toward the window, I started counting the trees. “I said, look at me!” She grabbed my chin, wrenching it toward her so hard I bit the inside of my lip. “Goddamn it, Iz. What is going on inside that head of yours?”

What would I have said if I could have answered? She could never know what it meant to hear the whispers of teachers who think you're stupid slipping through the one-inch gap beneath the door. Or to have to sit at a desk with an idiotic support teacher while all the other kids go off to play. What did she know about having only one measly friend in the whole wide world? One friend who doesn't care that you're a freak, because she is, too. Who doesn't care if you talk, because she can talk enough for
both of you. Who knows what it feels like to have a parent spin off the face of the world and leave you sitting there with your feet stuck to the ground. What did she know about being yanked out of school just when you were getting to be best friends?

I shrugged, turning back to the passenger window.
Five . . . six . . . seven
. . . A sharp sting settled in my throat, making it so hard to breathe, my eyes began to water. I swiped the corner of my lashes with my shoulder and counted harder until she gave up.

That night, I lay in bed for hours watching the shadows creep along my walls like spirits who'd wriggled free of their forests, wondering if this was the Nikommo. I had been trailing one for a good ten minutes, trying to find its source, when my mother pushed open my door, causing me to close my eyes and lose sight of it altogether. The bed barely shifted when she sat on it. I can't say how long she stared at me before I felt her fingers run across the scabs on my lips with a sigh that caught like a cobweb in the air between us.

“Jesus, Iz. Don't do it. Just once, don't follow him.” I clenched my eyes and rolled over with a sleepy snort, waiting for her to leave. “I miss him, too, you know.”

That, I knew, was a lie. She didn't love him, not like I did. I couldn't remember the last time she'd really acted like she cared. Then, when I was just on the shirttails of sleep, it came back to me.

I had been watching
The Flinstones,
fixated on Fred
sneaking into Barney's house wearing a burglar's mask, when there was a loud crash from the upstairs bathroom. On the television, Betty grabbed Fred by the wrist and judo chopped him from side to side with a
bam, bam, bam
. Then the banging of Fred's head against the stone floor turned to pounding at the top of the steps. Betty's voice melted into my mother's, yelling for my father to open the door. A moment later, she came tripping down the stairs and grabbed the phone, tugging the cord until she'd pulled the coil straight and it threatened to zing her into space like a slingshot. Balancing the receiver between her shoulder and ear, she dumped the junk drawer, fishing a key out of the mess before dropping the phone to the floor and disappearing back upstairs. I knew she'd gotten the door open by the squeal of the hinges my father had been forgetting to oil for the past three years. There was a sharp muffled scream. The pulsing screech of sirens. Men in blue uniforms with a gurney. When she came back downstairs, my mother was wrapped around my father like a cocoon, leading him down the steps. Two white towels looped around his wrists and I could just make out the blooms of crimson unfurling across the terry cloth like petals reaching for the sun. She laid him on the gurney and tucked the sheets around him, nuzzling his head. I could see she was crying. That's when it happened. When they tried to wheel my father out, she would not let go of his hand, had held on so tight one of the medics was forced to pry her fingers free.

“Come on, Iz.” She'd tugged me to the car so quickly I never did find out what happened to Fred and Betty.

“What's wrong with Daddy?”

“He got hurt.” She choked, swiping at her cheeks. “But it's okay now. He's going to be okay.” Even then, I'd known she didn't believe it, but she was wrong. He came home two weeks later, bandaged like a mummy and carting a bag of brown bottles. When he saw me, he scooped me into a bear hug.

“Are you better now?”

“All better.” He kissed my cheek, then walked to the garbage pail. “See? I don't even need medicine anymore.” And he threw the bottles away.

That was the last time. The last time I could recall my mother really acting like she cared.

Two weeks after
I crowned Robert with a loaded mud bomb, my mother delivered me to my first session with Dr. Miller, a young psychiatry graduate from the Rhode Island Mental Health Association, in an office painted in bright greens and purples with Winnie the Pooh sketched on the walls. A year later, there was Dr. Nichols, and then Miss Lincoln, a pediatric play therapist who spoke to me through puppets. There was an art therapist, a slew of medical doctors, audiologists, neurologists, and internists.

The first year of my silence was blamed on post-traumatic stress disorder. The second year on acquired
behavioral deficit. This went on until the seventh year, when it was blamed on sheer stubbornness and my mother plopped me into a chair in Dr. Boni's office. Dr. Boni was a fossil of a therapist—old enough to have met Sigmund Freud in person. The thing that set Dr. Boni apart was he never pretended to understand what it was like to have your voice box come up empty as a tin of cookies on Christmas Day.