The Opposite of Music (14 page)

Why does Dad refuse to discuss the voice? Is he protecting the voice by not talking to me?

My best hope is to go in, way in, into what you might call enemy territory, and see if I can hear the voice myself.

“You have to tell us,” Linda says.

“Yes, tell us, Billy.”

“You're not supposed to go off in your own direction and make up your own treatments. We're supposed to be a team, remember?” Linda insists.

I take Linda and Jodie into Linda's room and tell them what I've been working on. When Linda hears that I think Dad might have a voice in his head that could make him hurt himself, she doesn't start to blubber the way she did that first night, when we talked about the suicide movie. Instead, she looks completely calm.

“Okay, well, the most important thing,” Linda says, “is that we not tell Mom about it. We have to take care of it ourselves, and not worry Mom with it, because she has too much going on and she couldn't handle it.”

“Should we tell my mom?” Jodie asks. “She always knows what to do.”

“Could she keep it to herself?” I ask.

“Probably not,” Linda says.

“Then no.”

“Then it's just us,” Jodie says in a small voice.

The next afternoon, while Dad's watching TV, Linda tells me that she had a bad dream, just as bad as Dad's with the metal box. In the dream, all of us were dead except for Dad, who was walking around outside. The rest of us had been lying for weeks inside the house with the door and windows sealed up, but Dad couldn't get to us and so there was no one to help him. Linda takes this as a sign that he is about to hurt himself soon, just like I said when describing the article. She says she needs to do something about it, she just doesn't know what. And we both agree not to tell Mom about the dream.