The Price of Silence (3 page)

“What caused those scars, in your opinion?”

“They appeared to be the result of cuts inflicted either with a very sharp knife or a razorblade.”

“How long ago were those scars inflicted?”

“At least three years. Maybe as long as five years.”

“Could the scars be the result of an attempted suicide?”

“The scars could be.”

“Can you think of any other way Miss Huang could have gotten those scars?”

Patashi looks up at Fishkin with a self-congratulatory smile.

“Someone could have tried to kill her and make it look like a suicide.”

Fishkin lets out a short laugh of disbelief. “Thank you. No further questions.”

TWO

Tom

I HAVE,AS a teacher, as a father and husband, always preached that what we, as human beings, must strive for is the truth, that the knowledge of the truth—of cultures, religions, relationships, even mundane events—would shape us, would make up the essence of each of us.

Before I opened the door of our apartment to An-ling Huang that one evening two years ago,before that day,I went about the business of living convinced that I knew my wife after twenty-four years of marriage,that I knew my then thirteen-year-old son, that I knew myself. I have lived an illusion.

I want to say this: evidence, however damning, doesn’t necessarily represent the truth.

Emma thinks we met on a movie line for
Raging Bull,
twenty-six years ago. She started talking to me because I was twirling my keys around my finger. She heard some kind of music in it. I do that when I’m mulling something over; it’s an unconscious gesture. I was deciding what to do, because I’d noticed Emma looking at me—straight through me, to be more accurate. She obviously didn’t recognize me.We’d met maybe a year before, at a party where we happened to be sitting next to each other on the floor, eating pasta salad. Emma had raised her fork to show me a green sliver of something.

“Pasta with pickles, can you believe?” She laughed so hard she began to choke. I slapped her back, offered her a handkerchief to wipe her eyes and we started talking.She’d just gotten a job teaching third grade at a Manhattan private school, which she was happy about, although she didn’t think there was enough diversity among the students and the pay was too low. I went on too long about my dissertation,how it had become the most important concern of my life. She didn’t seem to be bored.

“I admire how focused you are,” she said. “I’d be scared to be that intent about anything. What if it doesn’t work out? What if you lose it?”

“Then I’ll rewrite.”

“The only time I’m that intent is in church. God isn’t going anywhere.”

“Religion was the earliest mental therapy,” I said, which I could see didn’t win me any points.

Emma shrugged. “God is my best friend. It’s what my grandmother left me, my inheritance: a love for God and her St. Christopher medal on a chain.” She stood up, handed back my handkerchief.“Thanks,” she said and wove herself into the crowd in the other room.

Before leaving the party I went looking for her. I wanted to apologize for being patronizing, but she’d already gone.

In the movie line I was trying to decide whether to say hello and remind her we’d met or simply ignore her.Then she spoke to me, something about the jingling keys making her think of her parents singing. We ended up sitting together during the movie and afterward we went out for coffee. I didn’t tell her we’d met before. I didn’t want her to remember our discussion and walk away.

We started dating, cautiously in the beginning. Emma was quiet, guarded, a woman who didn’t seem comfortable in her skin.There were times when she would aim her dark Italian eyes at me with an expectant expression that made me feel that I had the answer, that I could solve the world’s problems. It made me preen like a peacock, and sometimes made me doubt that I’d measure up. She unsettled me, which kept me hooked.

Once I challenged her interest in me. “I want you to know I’m an atheist,” I told her, “although I do believe in maintaining a standard of morality, behaving generously toward others,” etc., etc.

“Generosity is the most important trait in a person,” she said.“That’s what a belief in God leads to, and if generosity comes without the belief, that’s your choice. I’m not trying to convert you.”

She stroked my cheek with a smile, and I felt I’d caught the golden ring from the merry-go-round.

Sometimes, in the middle of a date, Emma would shut down. I could say anything I wanted and she’d barely respond.“Am I boring you to numbness?” I asked her once after we’d been sitting in Central Park for half an hour without saying a word.

She took my hand, held it to her face. “I’m sorry. Sometimes my emotions are so strong, they zap all my energy and I have to shut down for awhile.”

“You’ve told me before that you only feel intensely in church.”

“That’s just a line. Strong emotions scare people away.

They scare me.”

I kissed her forehead, her nose, the hand that still held mine.“Don’t be scared. Not when you’re with me.”That was the moment when I knew she mattered to me.

As our relationship progressed, as we started to spend our weekends together, she stopped tuning out, and I came to realize that Emma craved steadiness, the security of a routine, which she hadn’t gotten growing up. Her shutdowns were dictated by fear that a change was about to take place in her life.They were her way of freezing a situation. I worked to take that fear away. I showed her that I was dependable, that life could be a steady accretion of emotional and material comforts. That is what we had in our marriage until the death of our daughter. I believe I’m not wrong in thinking that during those first years I made her happy.

While we were sitting in the coffee shop after the movie that first night, I wanted to run my fingers over her face, her hair. She had thick black hair that covered her shoulders and the most beautiful pale skin I’d ever seen. Clean like soap, smooth, sweet-smelling, reassuringly lovely.

Amy looked just like Emma.

Her death was the pivotal event. It became the hub of our lives. Our every action from that point on, even An-ling’s death, radiates from that one grisly truth.

Josh

Mom loved An-ling more than she ever loved anyone else. Maybe even more than Amy.

Amy was my sister. She died before I was born. I found that out from Grams—that’s my grandmother. She was Mom’s mom and the only grandparent I got to know. She died too.

My parents have never talked about my sister.There are no photos of her.When I used to try to picture what my sister looked like, I’d think of Mom shrunk to baby size.

My sister was two when she died. She got run over.

Grams only told me after she found out cancer was going to kill her in a year.

“Some stupid drunk asshole killed your beautiful little sister,” she said. It was the first time I’d heard that word— “asshole”—and I laughed and suddenly felt like a man. I was seven and it was easier to think about the word than to think my sister would still be alive if that “asshole” didn’t run over her.

Sometimes I got it into my head that my sister wasn’t dead because I could feel her with me, in the silence my parents kept about her. She was just there, following me.

Sometimes I’d look down at my shadow and think it was her and that any minute, she’d sink into the ground and become a deep hole at my feet. She was waiting for me to fall in and keep her company. She had to be lonely. She was dead and I was alive and I was sure she was also very angry about that. I used to think those things when I was little.

I didn’t find out what really happened to Amy until Mom got arrested. It’s been in all the newspapers and on TV too. Not in the trial, though.The two lawyers had a fight about it, and the judge sided with Mom’s lawyer. Bringing up Amy’s death in court would be “unduly prejudicial.”

A lot makes sense now:Why they never told me about her.Why they have no friends.Why they never took me back to Mapleton, to the house where we lived the first two years of my life. Why Mom was always in another room in her head, even when she was standing right in front of me.

I sit behind her in the courtroom, to the side so she can tell I’m here without having to turn all the way around. I watch her chest move as she breathes. It feels unreal, like I’m in an episode of
Law and Order
. I keep thinking that Sam Waterston is going to stand up and smash the prosecutor’s case to pieces.

I want out of here, back to my basement room, just hitting the drums, or playing with Max on the guitar and Ben on his electronic keyboard.We call ourselves the 3Strikes, our lame tribute to the Strokes.

Fishkin doesn’t look anything like Waterston, but he said he was going to get Mom off. He promised.

Jim Craig, fingerprint expert, readjusts the glasses on his nose.

He is a tall, skinny sixty-year-old man with deep dark pockets under his eyes. “Did you find any fingerprints on the murder weapon?”

Guzman asks.

“No, sir. The can was wiped clean.”

“Did you find fingerprints in the rest of the apartment?”

“We found only a few partials on the bathroom window and the cabinet below the sink in the kitchenette.”

“No other fingerprints?”

“No.”

“In your experience, is finding so few fingerprints unusual?”

“Very. It’s obvious the murderer tried to wipe the apartment clean, too.”

Fishkin stands up. “Objection!”

“Sustained,” Judge Sanders says. “Just answer the question, Officer, without offering opinions.”

“The fingerprints you did find, who did they belong to?”

“Some to An-ling Huang.”

“And the other fingerprints, were you able to establish who they belonged to?”

“Yes sir. They belonged to the defendant.”

Emma

I took walks around the Columbia campus after my classes. I was tired most days and told myself the walk was a way to lay aside thoughts of work, to catch my breath before going home. Amy had folded herself into my thoughts again. Morning was the worst time. I’d wake up with the feeling of her soft weight curling into me, her neck, hot with sleep, on my arm. Contentment would spread under my skin, and for a few moments, I’d breathe in unison with my daughter once again. Then a sound—the shower being turned on, a door being opened,Tom’s electric razor—and Amy would be gone. I’d turn to the bedroom window and see that it faced a wall. I was in Manhattan, not in Mapleton with Amy. I would close my eyes and pretend to be asleep, hoping my face betrayed nothing to Tom.

I held Amy in the ambulance, carried her into the hospital, embraced her until a nurse pried her from my arms.No one stopped my screams.

I would lie on the floor of Amy’s room at night, running the reel—hopelessly short—of Amy’s life in my head, sometimes ending up asleep, more often not. I can’t remember for how long this continued.

During Christmas break,my walks around the deserted campus grew longer.Everyone had gone home to family, friends, to Vermont, the Caribbean. I sat on the steps of the library and smoked a rare cigarette, yearning for what, I didn’t know.

Something out of reach, beyond the range of my vision.