Child of Silence (5 page)

“What will you do with the boy?” LaMarche asked.

A weak autumn sun was trying to burn off the remaining fog, but a damp chill still hung in the morning air. Bo exhaled the pungent smoke of the French cigarettes she loved and watched it hover in the damp. She wished she knew what she'd do with the boy. She also wished she'd stayed in bed. A deaf child. And a bright one. It would be hard to walk away, like she'd walked away from Laurie.

The memory was painful. She'd been happy to leave her gawky ten-year-old sister behind to go off to college unencumbered by the odious need for sign language. In the little college town of Amherst Bo reveled in the freedom to be normal, to do ordinary things without attracting the attention of strangers. She didn't miss the adoring kid sister with stringy brown hair who wrote strange poetry and signed it with such intensity that perishable objects had to be placed out of reach of her flying hands.

It was Laurie's intensity, Bo realized later in therapy, that was scary. Not Laurie's deafness. The same intensity that Bo fought within herself as if it were one of the
Cwn Annwn
, a hound of hell deep inside her. Years later she would know its name—a neurobiological disorder shared with her sister and called simply manic-depressive illness. But by the time Bo fully understood what she had only sensed in childhood, Laurie was dead.

And now there was another deaf child.

Her sudden attachment to the little boy was inappropriate. Personal. Unprofessional. She was aware of the sense of mission lurking in the air. Delusional. Dangerous.

“I don't know,” she answered the doctor's question thoughtfully. “He's deaf. That'll turn up on the tests, won't it? And his name's Weppo or something that sounds like Weppo when you say it without hearing it.” Bo ran a hand through her hair. “It's desperately important that he get the right training
now
. . .”

LaMarche cocked a shaggy eyebrow. “Training? I thought your job was to secure the county's custody of these kids and then stuff them in foster homes until they're beyond hope or else send them back to sadistic killers. Or am I wrong?”

Eat snail trails
,
Dr
.
LaMarche
.

“You're not wrong. I'm not here to defend the agency I work for. It's a bureaucracy and therefore plagued with bureaucrats. I'm not one of them.” Bo felt her green eyes flash and focused pointedly on the limb of a jacaranda drooping over the cement wall of the patio.

“Nobody's happy about what happened to Jennifer Martinelli,” she told its fernlike leaves. “But people,” she turned to the man across the slab table, are much less predictable in real life than they are in medical workups. In real life people lie. They conceal things, sometimes even from themselves. And a good act can fool anybody once. That's what happened to Angela Reavey in the Martinelli case. It happens all the time.” She exhaled from the side of her mouth with a hiss and stubbed out the cigarette. “But of course you wouldn't know that. You have no contact with people in the real world, only here”—she gestured toward the hospital's five stories—“where you're in control.”

LaMarche studied the jacaranda tree as if it were about to speak. Casually he draped both hands around his coffee and assumed the air of someone patiently waiting.

Bo ran a hand through her tousled curls again.

Calm down
,
Bradley
.

“I'd like to talk about this boy, about Weppo,” she pronounced deliberately. “I want him to have a chance. I want him to learn ASL before it's too late. This is my case and I may be able to set that up. How old do you think he is, exactly?”

LaMarche shot his cuffs. The woman was unnerving. And unusual. She'd thrown his own anger back in his face with a zest he recognized as practical and intuitive at once. He wondered why she came to work dressed like Paul Bunyan.

“We did a full skeletal X ray,” he conceded. “It's hard to say for sure, but from the long-bone maturation I'd guess about four. Why?”

“Four,” Bo wrote in the case file and dated the quote. “There's almost no time left.”

LaMarche leaned into the conversation, puzzled. “Time for
what
?”

“The imprinting stage for language is birth to five,” Bo began, unable to restrain her enthusiasm. “ASL, American Sign Language, is a language, just like English or Spanish or French. And kids learn languages best between birth and five. It goes really sour after puberty too. And Weppo's a boy. Boys are worse for some reason. God knows why. It may have something to do with brain lateralization, which, as you know—”

LaMarche felt his hackles rising. “Wait a minute,” he interrupted. “What makes you think you know so much about it? Do you realize you're
diagnosing?”

Bo's enthusiasm drained away like water through sand. The man was impossible.

“Dr. LaMarche, why do you affect that accent?” she inquired through clenched teeth. “It does detract just a soupçon from your Hitleresque image, you know.”

Bo bit her tongue. Irish temper or manic irritability, it wasn't going to help the deaf boy in the hospital bed.

“I'm sorry, doctor.” She shifted clumsily to a manipulative simper as LaMarche glanced angrily at his watch.

Doctors
!

“I didn't mean to lose it completely. It's just that the little guy needs so much help, and right away, if he's going to have a chance. It would sure speed things up if you'd write a medical recommendation for ASL training. . .” She batted her eyes and stifled a grin. She sounded like Blanche Dubois in
Streetcar
, which wasn't surprising. Her enactment of the role twenty years ago in a college production had been her last occasion to simper.

Unfortunately, Andrew LaMarche's education had included drama.

“It was wise of you to choose social work over acting as a career,” he mentioned, stretching tanned fingers in apparent boredom. “Your soothing inanities have failed to impress me. I'm a hopeless elitist
cochon
, I'm afraid. I prefer that diagnoses be performed by
doctors
.”

Bo closed the case file with a snap. Who did this posturing, arrogant creep think he was, Descartes?

“
Cochon
means pig, doesn't it, doctor?” She allowed her eyes to widen and pinion his maniacally. Everybody with a history of psychiatric admissions knew how to do “the look.” A guaranteed conversation-stopper. “More pompous
boar
than pig. You haven't heard a word I've said. And you never will due to the little-known tragedy of ego-deafness! I'll have the D.A. subpoena you if we need your testimony on Weppo's case. But I doubt that'll be necessary, since you don't want to know anything about him.”

LaMarche watched her storm through the glass doors and across the cafeteria. “Pompous boar?” he remarked to his coffee cup. “
Mon Dieu
!
”
He decided he liked her.

In her car Bo crammed a cassette of Bach's third Brandenburg Concerto into the tape deck. Then she breathed deeply. It helped.

But she was going to have to slow down. Nothing could be worth the risk she was taking. The risk of delusional overinvolvment with a case. A risk that could quickly acquaint her with unemployment, professional and personal ruin. Nothing could be worth that. Not even a deaf boy whose wide eyes reminded her so much of Laurie's.

Bo had forgotten Andrew LaMarche by the time she left the convenience store near St. Mary's at 11:45. A pint of chocolate milk and an unusually fresh cinnamon bagel gave a whole new cast to the day. She'd take a run out to the reservation, interview the woman who found the boy, and then transfer the case. Period. No heroics. No craziness.

The rush of affection she felt for the child, the messianic conviction that she alone had been chosen to save him— these were just typical manic delusions. Delusions so compelling and insistent they could not be ignored. But delusions nonetheless.

Coaxing the rickety BMW east on I-8 toward the mountains that shielded San Diego from the murderous desert heat beyond, Bo pondered the human condition. How much of life's drama would ultimately be understood as the product of brain chemistry? The notion was taboo and probably always would be. The notion that all human behavior, inspired or bestial, had its origins in electrical brain impulses and not in realms of myth. A humbling notion, accepted at last only by those for whom all other options have failed. And a comforting notion, once accepted. Still, Bo reflected, it was odd that this particular case had fallen to her.

The car, overheating in its long climb from San Diego's coastal environs to the higher, drier suburb of El Cajon, relaxed as Bo turned northward off the freeway. El Cajon— “the coffin” in Spanish. Bo shuddered, wishing Estrella hadn't told her what the town's name meant. It was never wise to think about coffins. Bo had seen too many.

First her grandmother's, with the scent of good Irish whiskey wafting over the wake. Then Laurie's, too unthinkable even now. And finally her parents' together, after a faulty wall furnace in a Yucatan resort hotel filled their sleeping lungs with carbon monoxide. Bo's mother had planned the trip for months. She wanted to research Mayan folk music. At the funeral at least twenty-three people had mentioned the unfortunate similarity of their deaths to Laurie's. To curb the disquieting train of thought Bo drew measured breaths of faintly pine-scented air, and exhaled slowly.

Beyond the last suburb of chain-linked subdivisions separated by older mountain homesteads, the road curled gently into another time. From its appearance, Wildcat Canyon Road might still boast actual wildcats, stagecoaches, maybe a Spanish friar harvesting pine nuts in dusty brown robes.

The pignola pines, clustered in the chaparral between live oaks, cottonwoods, and manzanita, had provided tasty nutmeats to mix with leached acorn meal in Native American cuisine. Now the tiny morsels went for ten dollars a pound in trendy San Diego culinary boutiques.

At the Barona Reservation Bo discovered a collection of unnumbered dwellings. A cement-block government-issue house here, a trailer there. Winding roads leading off into the dry autumn hills with no clue as to who lived where.

Stopping at a gas station, Bo asked a bronze little girl with a yellow popsicle where Maria and Joe Bigger Fox lived.

“Two houses up. Around the bend on the right,” the child answered easily.

Weppo couldn't do that, couldn't name things and their relation to each other. And he never would if somebody didn't teach him.

Bo considered the little girl's black eyes, her lips and clean white teeth forming words. The complexity of it! The unimaginable network of reactions involved in a child understanding a question and framing in a microsecond a picture of the answer. But this child could hear. She'd heard her mother's voice while still in the womb. She'd learned to speak naturally by reproducing human voices around her. And that facility gave her access to reality. But like Laurie, Weppo lacked that facility. Like Laurie, he was locked behind a glass wall watching things that could make no sense because the things had no names. Bo shivered. Nobody should have to live without language. Things were hard enough
with
it.

“You okay, lady?” the little girl inquired.

“Yeah, I'm fine.”

Right
.
I've been sent here by mysterious forces to rescue a child that is not mine from a silence that was my sister's
.
I’m nuts
!

The last of the morning haze burned off as Bo parked in the driveway of Maria and Joe Bigger Fox, who were not inclined to chat.

Maria, tall and rugged in a baggy white T-shirt and jeans, walked with a dancer's gliding movement to her husband's side and remained standing as Bo sank into a cracked Naugahyde recliner. The woman's feet, Bo noted with ill-disguised interest, were clad in lacy high-heeled mules for which Carole Lombard might have traded her eyeteeth. The ensemble, complemented by a thick braid of graying hair over Maria's shoulder, seemed ingenuous. Even chic. Like the costume of a mature, diamond-hard rock singer.

“Mama came down from that old house at about a quarter to six,” Maria Bigger Fox confirmed without emotion. “Said she found a kid up there and had to use the phone. She called 911.”

The narrative was neither hostile nor discernibly interested. Merely fact. Bo allowed her own awareness to range over the wide, dark faces, the whole atmosphere of the plain little house, seeking some clue or nuance. Something unsaid or hidden. There was nothing. The husband regarded her from a lopsided green couch in front of a TV, his face as blank as its gray screen.

“Did you notice anything unusual in the neighborhood during the night before Mrs. Garcia found the boy?” Bo asked. The imposition of the term “neighborhood” seemed culturally intrusive. This rugged, silent terrain was a community, but nothing as confining as what “neighborhood” implied. Bo felt a blush of chagrin creeping up her freckled cheeks.

Joe Bigger Fox was as big as a wrestler and looked for all the world like Jay Silverheels doing Tonto, except that his hair was pure white.