The Price of Silence (5 page)

Up and then down.

I hit Sandy; Sandy is dead!

I cried out, yelled, as I tried to regain control of the car.

A dog barked.

From the sidewalk across from where I had first seen her, Sandy wagged her tail.The surprise lifted my hands off the steering wheel.

The car kept moving for another thirty-seven feet, according to the police report. It was stopped by the fifty-year-old maple, the tree that had made Tom and I fall in love with our property. The report stated that I walked away from the accident shaken, but unharmed.Amy died in the ambulance.

Tom

One night in March, six months after Amy’s death, with pellets of rain hitting the windows, I sat at my usual post in the hallway, on my fourth Scotch. Emma was lying in a tight curl on the floor of Amy’s room, her nightgown bunched up high, showing the whiteness of her thighs, her face covered by her thick, glorious hair.Watching her sleep, I felt rage surge in my blood faster than the Scotch and I heaved myself out of the armchair.

“Emma.” I stood in the doorway.“Emma, look at me.”

She didn’t respond.

“Emma, please.”

I walked into the room, knelt down. “Emma. Answer me.” I reached over and shook her shoulder. She cringed at my touch with a protesting whimper.

“Damn it, Emma, stop shutting me out.You’re going to sleep in your bed tonight, next to your husband, the father of our dead child.You hear me?
Our
child, Emma!” I pulled her to me to lift her up, carry her back to our room. She recoiled, grew rigid, rolled herself out of reach. Since Amy’s death she hadn’t let me hold her or touch her. Not in the hospital waiting for Amy’s body to be released. Not at the funeral. Not once in six months. I lay on the floor next to her, pulled her to me. She went limp.The sudden feel of her, soft and warm against my chest,my groin, started me crying.

“You’re not the only one suffering. I loved Amy just as much as you did. I love you. I need your help. I want to help you. Please Emma, let me in.”

Emma said nothing. Her only movement was a breath that tickled my arm. I could have cried, cajoled all night long. It would have made no difference. I was nothing to her.

“God damn it, I’m your husband.” I hiked up her nightgown. She kicked me and struggled against my chest. I cupped her breast;my arm pinned her down. My free hand rubbed between her thighs. She bucked, wriggled, kicked. Not a sound came out of her mouth.The more she fought me the greater my anger and my desire to have her became until I turned myself over on top of her and raped my wife.

It was the worst thing I could have done to Emma and I am still deeply ashamed.At first I deluded myself into thinking that all I had wanted from her was some kind of recognition that I was still in her life, that our marriage mattered, but the truth is not as kind. I wanted to hurt her because I blamed her for Amy’s death.

The coroner’s report said that Amy’s death was an accident. The police pressed no charges. A tragic accident, the neighbors, our friends, agreed. Blame is useless, Father Caputi said, but that didn’t stop me from blaming Emma.

I woke up on the floor of my daughter’s room, with the stink of Scotch and sweat all over me. Emma was standing above me, fully dressed for the first time since the funeral, with a cup of coffee in her hand. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“I envy you your anger,Tom. Anger is palpable.You can scream it, strike with it, feel it pulsing though you. Anger is alive. Grief is like death. It’s a fog slipping through you. It smothers your heart.”

She never considered that my anger was grief too.

We made love almost every night after that. Thrashing, noisy, desperate love.Animals is what we were;we came, and then we cried for Amy and for ourselves.

“We were in the Garden of Eden,” Emma said.“I ate the apple.”

Sitting in this courtroom, listening to the prosecution build a case against my wife, I realize I still blame her.That is my coward’s truth.

FOUR

AFTER GEORGE WAGMAN states his credentials as a crime scene investigator, Guzman asks him if he examined the sheets and pillowcase found on the victim’s futon.

“I did.” Wagman, a tall, wide-shouldered African American in his mid-thirties slouches over the railing of the witness box.

“What did you find?”

“Seven strands of the victim’s hair.”

“Is that all you found?”

“I found soap powder.”

“Nothing else?”

“Traces of body oil, makeup on the pillowcase. The sheets and pillowcases were washed that day.”

“How can you tell?”

“I could smell the softener. And the inside of the dryer was still warm.”

“Did you examine the towels?”

“I sure did. Same soap powder, same softener smell.” Wagman turns and smiles at the jury. “My wife uses that stuff.”

“Did you find soap powder or smell the softener on any other items in the loft? Her clothing, for instance.”

“No, just the towels in the bathroom and the sheets and pillowcase on the futon.”

“Is that behavior, washing the sheets and the towels, consistent with someone trying to cover her tracks?”

Fishkin stands up, waving his arms in exasperation.

“Objection!”

“Overruled. You may answer the question.”

“Sure is consistent,” Wagman says, “if the ‘someone’ has any sense. Not all of them do, you know.”

“In your extensive search of Miss Huang’s loft, did you find a laptop?”

“No.”

“Did you find a gold St. Christopher medal on a chain?”

Wagman shakes his head. “No medal and no chain.”

Emma

Scrunched between bodies in the KGB Bar in the East Village, I listened to a colleague reading his poems, just published by a small press. Lenny, a thick-set man in his forties, rocked back and forth in the far corner of the bar, his words sharp rhythmic jabs at the microphone. His expression was ferocious, and I was caught, unaware, by a memory of one of my mother’s lovers, standing on the coffee table in the living room, spitting out Allen Ginsberg.That reading had led to loud lovemaking on the other side of her bedroom wall. Ginsberg followed by rowdy sex.At the KGB it seemed a natural sequence.When I was six years old, it turned my stomach.

During a break in the reading, a young woman urged us to order more drinks. I elbowed my way to the bar and asked for a Pellegrino.

Next to me, a man said, “I find poetry incomprehensible.” He was tanned, silver-haired, somewhere in his fifties and arrogantly handsome. I was ready to ignore him, but he introduced himself.

“Doctor Robert Feldman, plastic surgeon.” As he spoke he studied the map of wrinkles on my face. I didn’t need him to tell me I was the oldest woman in this crowd of fans and literary hopefuls.

“Why did you come then?” I asked, without giving my name.

“I was coerced by a friend of yours.” He turned and wrapped an arm around An-ling’s waist, bringing her forward.

“Hello, An-ling.”My voice betrayed my surprise.

She wore a jade-green silk Chinese dress with a high collar and slits running up her thighs. Her hair fell loose over her shoulders and her face was gaudy with makeup. The beaded bracelets were back on her wrists.

“I am happy I find you.” An-ling slid out of the doctor’s grasp and walked over to the door, where there was more breathing space. I followed.

“How did you know I’d be here?” I asked.

“I go to the school this afternoon to find you.You are not there, but a big paper hangs on your door.You want students to come to KGB tonight. I am almost your student and I come.”

“I’m glad you did,” I whispered, “but the poster was Lenny’s doing, not mine.” I nodded toward the corner where Lenny had started reading again. “He’s also a teacher.”We moved into the stairwell so that we could keep talking. “Are you thinking of coming back to the school?”

“No.”An-ling handed me her glass. I took it with a sense of dejà vu, of being the recipient of repeated gestures, small in content but large in the language of trust.

“You look different,” I said. An inane statement. I held the glass to my chest and watched An-ling lift her hair, knot it in a tight bun at the nape of her neck.The crown of her head moved into the beam of the overhead light, smooth as a scrap of black satin.Why was she looking for me? “You look older.”

Apart from the makeup, all the lines of her face were stronger, her expression richer. She reminded me of a Matisse woman, outlined in black. How long had it been since I’d last seen her? October to February. Four months.

“You remember me different, you know why?” She took her glass back.

Because of sex, I thought. An-ling had had a lot of sex since October. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”

“Tonight I am happy.That is why I look different.”

“What are you happy about?”

“I am here.” An-ling finished her drink, sucked on the ice.“My ancestors lived in North China, noble China.Then the Mongols come and killed many of us.We run away to the South. I was born in Su-kai, small village in district of Xin-Hui. Not a happy place.”

“Where did you learn to speak English so quickly and so well?”

“Feldy says best way to learn language is to find boyfriend.” “The best way to learn
a
language is to find
a
boyfriend.

You mustn’t forget the articles.” I adopted my clipped teacher’s voice to hide my anger at the thought of her having sex with “Feldy,” so much older than she was, so obviously taking advantage of her.“How old are you?”

“To be Chinese is to be old always.” She giggled.“Twenty in Chinese years, nineteen in yours.You how old?”

I stroked my neck, which, I joke to Tom, looks like an unmade bed.“Hormone-replacement old.”

“No need for facelift yet.”An-ling’s face was mock serious.

“Well, that’s a relief.”

“Feldy” appeared in the doorway.“There you are.”

An-ling wiggled fingers at him.

I looked at my watch. “I have to go now.”Tomorrow, at school, Lenny would get my apologies.

“Where?” An-ling asked, following me downstairs to the bulging coat rack.

“Westside. Uptown.”

“Are you taking taxi? I go with you?”

I’d planned on the subway. “What about Doctor Feldman?”

“He do not own me.”

Outside, the temperature was in the teens, the subway four blocks away.A cab would be expensive, but warm.

“I’ll drop you off,” I said.

An-ling said she lived near me.I didn’t stop to think how she knew where I lived.“Where exactly? The cab will drop you off first. It’s much too cold to walk even a couple of blocks.”

She shook her head. I wondered if it was the doctor’s home she was going back to, if she didn’t want me to know.

The cab swung onto the West Side Highway. Light from the streetlamps flashed across An-ling’s face, animating it. In the semi-darkness of the cab she had turned from a Matisse woman to a kid trying to look sexy in her mother’s clothes and makeup. How could she look so different in the space of a few minutes?

“What is your husband’s name?” she asked. “Your children, you have many?” She was filled with curiosity.Where did Josh go to school? Did we have uncles and aunts, parents, grandparents? Where did I come from?

“I was born in Boston.Then my mother and I moved to the Bronx to live with my grandmother.”

An-ling moved closer, eager for more.“Your mama, what is she like?” She must have caught my hesitation. “Family important to know a person.You tell me, please.”

“She was a good woman.” An unhappy mother who never forgave me for being born.

“And your baba?”

“My father? He died when I was little.”The truth is that I have no idea who he was or whether he is still alive. I used to picture his absence as a parched field surrounding me, where nothing grew, not even weeds.When we still lived in Boston, each time my mother brought home a man, I would examine his face for a familiar curve of the jaw, length of the nose, shape of a lip that might tell me: this is the guy; this is my father.“Mine is a reduced family. Everyone else is gone.

Three people: Josh,Tom and me.”

“That is reason ghost of sadness sits on your face?”

She smelled of lavender. A yoga teacher once told me that the smell of lavender alters the brain cells, relaxes you. In the cab, the smell was too sweet, cloying. I wished I’d taken the subway. The ride was going to cost more than twenty dollars.

“Why did you come looking for me, An-ling?”

She tossed her head, like a restless filly. A lock of hair came loose.“You answer me first, Lady Teacher.” She tucked the loose hair behind her ear.

“I’m very tired, An-ling.”

She thudded back into the dark corner of the seat. Josh used to do that, throw his body against the back of whatever he was sitting on when I refused him another helping of ice cream, a toy, the TV.

“I taught three beginner classes today.”

We didn’t speak until the cab turned off the highway at 96th Street.“Leave me here, please,”An-ling told the driver.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

Before the cab came to a complete stop,An-ling jumped out and ran across the street against the traffic light. I paid the driver, got out and chased after her.Two blocks later I caught up with her and offered to walk her home. It was only ten o’clock, but because of the cold, there were few people on the street.“Where do you live?”

“I’ll walk
you
home.” Her voice was firm.

I was too out of breath to argue, so we headed uptown, shoulders tight, hands in pockets for warmth.

In front of my apartment building, An-ling dug into her backpack and pressed something soft and white into my hand. I spread it open under the entrance light: an embroidered silk blouse. “It’s beautiful.”

“It come from China. Made with hands, not machine.” Before I could thank her she threw her arms around me.“I am sorry.Very sorry. Please do not be angry with me.”

I swayed in the middle of the sidewalk, with the too-sweet smell of lavender in my nose, and this strange girl’s warmth pressed against me. Inside me, a knot came untied.

The next morning I riffled through the borough phonebooks at school. She wasn’t in any of them. Information had no listing either. I tried to picture where she lived: a small bare room in Chinatown that she rented from a family. She had a cot, a chair. Her easel was set up in front of the single window overlooking a shaft. I envisioned her painting on scrolls, gray frogs on lotus leaves, cranes, sparrows on bamboo shoots. Paintings called
guohua
, the traditional Chinese ink media, which I have seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At night, before going to sleep, she would burn incense sticks and paper money for her ancestors at the altar in the corner—a custom not that different from my grandmother’s nightly ritual: lighting candles to the statue of the Virgin Mary and to the pictures of her husband and parents propped on a shelf in her bedroom.