Whisper (33 page)

“What happened?” I asked.

Eva's eyes became big, and her cheeks squeezed up. Large drops spilled onto the crackers in her hands. She sobbed once. I slid next to her, put my arm around her and looked at Jeremia.

“They came on Christmas. The middle of the day. Three men this time—your father and mine and your uncle. Your father only watched. The boys weren't there.” Ranita's hands stretched before her again, and she opened and closed her fists. Jeremia gave her a small piece of bread. Her fingers squeezed it, smashing it into pulp, and then she shoved it toward her mouth, open like a baby bird's.

Jeremia didn't look at me. He looked somewhere over my shoulder, his eyes examining the wall behind my bed. I watched the top of his left cheek twitch.

“They told us where you were, that you'd gone to the city and were working for them. They told us you had disappeared, that you hadn't held up your side of the deal and now they were coming to fulfill their promise.”

Eva watched Jeremia so hard, creases formed between her eyes.

“They poured gasoline on our huts, on our supplies, on our sitting logs, and when I tried to stop them, Nathanael told me to go, to run to the city and find you. Jun wasn't there to destroy the camp—he was there to get rid of the past. My father wanted me dead.”

Jeremia focused on my face now. The scared look was gone, the haunted look had disappeared, and what I saw now were liquid-filled eyes so brown and disturbed that I felt my own eyes filling with tears in response. He lifted his chin, where a gash just under his jaw snaked red and inflamed against the brown skin of his neck.

“So I left with the little ones,” he whispered. “We hid from Jun and slipped silently through the forest. I left Nathanael. He's dead, and they'll come for us here.”

His voice cracked when he said this. I slipped off the bed, took three steps and enclosed both him and Ranita in my arms. He lowered his head to my shoulder, and with my hands on his back, I could feel the rasping of his breath.

“But you saved the little ones, Jeremia. Look how far you've come,” I said.

As I held Jeremia, I was not sure what to feel. Nathanael had died in a fire at the hands of Celso and Jun. I felt the horror of it, but I also felt the heat of anger, seeping from my chest to all the parts of my body, and the determination I had felt in the jail cell. My biological family had done this—my own uncle. While my father watched. This was my fault. If I had paid them the money I owed them in mid-December, none of this would have happened. And now they would certainly come for me.

Jeremia's breathing calmed, and he sat down on the chair by the desk. I crouched on the floor beside him, my right arm around Eva, my left hand on Jeremia's arm, his muscles tight with tension.

“We've been looking for you for a long time,” Eva said. “We walked through the forest, we walked through the smell, we freed the animals, we came to the city, we asked a boy with no legs where to find you, he told us to go to that hotel, and we asked there about you. This lady who was my size”—Eva stood when she said this and held her hand up to her head—“told us you were up here.”

Jeremia leaned his head back. The twitch was gone from his cheek. His arm drooped, and I took Ranita from him. She cooed and babbled. I touched her nose against mine.

“Sleep,” I said to Jeremia. He didn't resist.

He was seventeen and the head of the family. He lay down on the bed, rolled toward the wall and within seconds was asleep. Eva curled up against his back and smiled at me as her eyes drooped. Ranita's thumb made its way into her mouth and then she too began to close her eyes.

The camp was gone. I could never return there. I felt no surprise about this nor did I feel fear. I'd already lost that camp, but now that my family was here, I didn't care where I lived. Somehow, together, we would make it work.

Twenty-Two

I woke up and glanced around the room, feeling lost and disoriented. The winter evening held no light, and only a small crack under the door allowed a yellow beam into the room. Eva snored slowly on the bed, Ranita breathed sweet baby breath into the room, and I couldn't hear Jeremia's breathing at all. A tickle, a feeling of unrest, told me I needed to be somewhere.

Standing quickly, I moved to the bathroom with Ranita still in my arms. I gathered three towels, shaped them into a nest, placed them on the floor near the bed where Jeremia and Eva would see her when they awoke, and tucked Ranita into the cozy nest. Then I shut myself in the bathroom and splashed water on my face.

The recital was soon. The reflection of my face in the mirror didn't calm the twitching nerves in my stomach. I considered waking Jeremia, Eva and Ranita, taking them with me, but I knew that walking them into the huge auditorium would only terrify them. They didn't cross between societies. They didn't wear the veil. This was a moment I must face on my own. I considered not showing up, disappearing like the sound of a whisper, but I couldn't do that to Solomon after all he'd done for me.

I dried my cheeks, brushed my hair, straightened my sweater and felt something crinkle beneath my hand. I removed the slip of paper from my pocket. I placed the card on the counter next to the sink and looked at it. It was a plain card, white with blue ink. Dr. Susan Ruiz's name was small and unassuming, but the possibilities behind the card were as weighty as oak.

I opened the door a crack, collected my violin, strapped it to my back and tucked the broken pieces of Jeremia's violin into my sweater pocket. I clipped a note on the mirror and was about to leave when I glanced again at my reflection. My finger moved up to my mouth, pushed at the slit and gaps in my lip, watching as my gums and teeth showed through the gap, revealing the inner workings of the body that were supposed to remain concealed. This was who I was and what I looked like and what I'd always been, but that could change with surgery. And it could change for Ranita.

I loosened the black veil from around my neck and, with it in hand, walked out the door of the dormitory.

The other musicians already stood backstage in crisp white shirts, elegant black dresses and polished shoes. The first to play—Ben, Tomas, Carla and Michelle—were already onstage. When Solomon saw me, he strode toward me and placed an arm around my shoulders.

“Thank God,” he said. “You came.”

I pushed my face into his tweed coat. He smelled of mint. Solomon held me away, leaned down so our faces were level and looked into my eyes.

“You will be magnificent.”

“I won't,” I said. “I can't do this.”

“Of course you can. If you can do this on a street corner with raw, stiff hands, you can do this here, where everyone came to hear you.”

“They didn't come to hear me, they came to hear them.” I glanced at Tomas and Carla onstage.

“But you are the one worth listening to.”

I slipped the veil over my head. Solomon patted my shoulder, but he didn't smile. His great cheeks sagged, became jowly and heavy.

As the other students played, I listened, the notes like butterflies flitting around the room. I heard the nervousness in Ben's bow—the cello voice fluttering with his hands. I heard the tension in Tomas's violin—the emotion flat. I heard the anxiety in Carla's viola—the notes rushed, ahead of the beat. I breathed deeply and thought of Eva's arm wrapped around my neck. I thought of how it felt to hold Ranita against my chest, and the way Jeremia's body felt when his breathing rasped in him. There was beauty in my life, and that part mattered more than standing on this stage ever would.

When it was my turn, Solomon placed his arm around my shoulders. Together we walked out to the stage, and I felt for a moment as though I had a father. We walked past the grand piano and around the quartet of set-up chairs. We stood at the front of the stage, only a metal music stand in front of us. I watched my feet as Solomon moved the stand to one side. The shuffling, the soft whispers, the brushing of feet against the floor echoed sporadically through the space like cricket chirps in the night. Solomon spoke loudly.

“Whisper Gane is the newest member of our string section here at the university. She is also our youngest member. She says very little but allows the music she has composed to speak for her. Please welcome her with me.”

Solomon stepped away from me. I heard him walk across the stage toward the piano. He stopped there, in the crook of the grand piano, and crossed his arms over his chest.

I stared down at my feet, at my new black boots that clicked when I walked. I looked at the brown skirt from Randall and Burns that reminded me of a lost mother and trees in the forest. I listened to the sound of my breath.

I raised my head and looked out into the auditorium. The lights, brilliant orbs too white for sunlight, were blinding, but the gauzy black veil dampened the effect. I raised my violin to my shoulder, rested my chin against it, fitted my bow to the strings and closed my eyes.

No longer was I standing in front of hundreds of people who wondered why I wore a veil. I was in the woods, under the trees, by the creek and with my family, but the huts were no longer there, the smell of smoke burned through the air, the birds so silent the emptiness hurt. This was my song. The music carried me away once again, and I lived in my head even while I stood on the stage.

The song ended, my eyes opened, and I lowered the violin and bow, my arms trembling. Solomon's arm settled around my shoulder, and my knees shook beneath that weight. Now was when I would faint. Now, when my song was done.

Solomon whispered against my head, spoke into my ear. “Beautiful. Perfect.”

But he was all I heard. No longer did I hear shuffling. No longer did I hear echoing coughs. We stood alone.

And then I heard people shifting their weight, and a sound echoed about the room, bouncing off the walls. Applause. It was scattered and sparse but allowed me to relax my shoulders and control my dizziness. There were not nearly as many people as I had imagined—only a smattering of students, some adults who I assumed were parents, relatives and friends of the other students, and a few professors, sitting in clumps throughout the auditorium.

Solomon held me tightly, my shoulder wedged into his chest, and we stood still until the clapping slowed and the people sat. Then we walked off the stage together, and when I stood with the other musicians, I almost felt like one of them. They smiled slightly, inclining their heads. There was an excitement in the air, a giddiness, and I fluttered on the periphery. I hung there for just a minute, and then I remembered what waited for me back at the dorm. I slipped my violin into its case, squeezed Solomon's hand and walked out the side door.

Before going home, I stopped at the little shop on campus and bought bread, cheese, milk, apples, carrots and cloth diapers. Beside the diapers were plastic pants, little pull-up pants that went over the diaper. I'd never seen these before. I bought two and laughed when they crinkled in my hand like dried leaves.

At the dorm, I gathered a bucket of ice from the machine in the hallway, dumped it into the bathroom sink and cooled the milk and cheese there. I threw my veil on the floor by the door. I snuggled Ranita against my chest, positioned the towels under my head and lay on the floor. They couldn't stay here in this dorm room, even though I wanted them to. Jeremia, with his need for space, would twitch into the corner, become furtive as an animal. Ranita needed care—how would I take her with me to my classes, to my lessons with Solomon? And Eva. Eva was six now. She could do many things on her own but needed education, someone to teach her now that Nathanael was no longer an option.

I wasn't sure what to do, but tonight I had played my song in front of many people and I had survived.

Just as my breathing and heartbeat began to slow, a knock on the door startled me awake. My first thought was that Celso had found us and would jab his sharp knife into Jeremia's throat and sell the rest of us. But I reasoned with myself that it couldn't be him—not now, not in this place. He'd look for us at Purgatory Palace. It must be Tomas, I thought, or Carla or Max. I couldn't decide if I should open the door and stop the pounding, so it wouldn't wake Jeremia, Eva and Ranita, or if I should ignore it and hope whoever it was went away.

“Whisper, it's me, Solomon. I've got to talk to you.”

I tiptoed to the door, Ranita still snoring softly against my chest. I shifted the bolt and opened the door just a crack. Solomon stood in the muted light of the hallway. His face was split in a wide grin, a grin that stretched his mustache toward his ears.

“Come, come,” he said, gesturing to me.

I opened the door wider and stepped out into the hall. Solomon stretched his hands toward me but then pulled them back when he saw Ranita.

“You have a visitor. Who is this?”

“Ranita,” I said.

“I didn't know you had family. Your sister, then? She looks just like you. Do you have a parent here as well? They will all want to hear my news.”