The Silent History: A Novel (4 page)

He liked being around other kids. He liked games, but he had trouble with the rules, which were always changing, sometimes midgame, and the kids stopped including him. He continued going outside, but he never interacted with the others. He sort of moved along the edges of whatever was going on. Pretty soon, they started teasing him—put stuff in his desk, ran away screaming “Zombie!” whenever he came near them outside. Pack animals.

Still Colin would try to follow along with what was going on, imitating his classmates. Watching him do that broke my heart. I guess it sort of soured me permanently on the other kids, as well. It made me want to have class for just Colin. We could both hang out and do our work, him with his circles and squares, and me with this series of soft-core Viking-romance novels I’d been eyeing at the public library.

A few months later he stopped sitting at his desk after the bell. He’d stand by the window, studying the trees. He lay on the floor during morning announcements. I blamed his classmates, of course.

In front of the parents we put on an enlightened face, but in the teachers’ lounge it was less gentle. Mrs. Moten, who had the other kindergarten class, was always complaining. “Might as well put a jar of pennies in a chair and pretend it’s a student,” she said. “Or a long piece of rope.”

“I feel sorry for them,” one of the secretaries said. “Being deaf and mute and who knows what else. It’s like when the Kennedys forced that daughter to do a lobotomy.”

“They’re not deaf,” Mrs. Moten said. “Or mute. Just, there’s a big part of their brain that’s not working. And if you’re going to feel sorry for someone, feel sorry for us. And the other kids.”

I want to make clear: I’m not one of these reformers who takes a special interest in needy kids and makes it my duty to improve them. Who secretly dreams of the kid one day winning an Academy Award and saying, “This is dedicated to my teacher Ms. Francine, who believed when no one else did.” No, give me a class of miniature adults and let us quietly learn about the solar system together. Let us eat lunch in respectful disregard.

Still, Moten was including me in this. I told her that I actually liked my silent. Ugh. “My silent.” As if he were a dog or a skin condition. And
liked
wasn’t the right word. I found myself irrationally sympathetic to him. In a way that I never felt toward the other kids.

He was becoming a disturbance, yes. He didn’t learn anything the entire time he was in my class, as far as I could tell. But, you know, if I go down my rule board, he adhered to all but one of them. He was kind, or, he wasn’t unkind. He was interested—in birds, in the tiles, in the texture of Melodeigh Carlson’s hair. He was quiet when others were talking. He tried his hardest. He just didn’t complete all work before going outside. But then again, I didn’t assign him any work.

“Well, try having three in your class,” Mrs. Moten said. “You’re new still. You’ll see that this isn’t a race, it’s a marathon.”

Okay, I thought. Just kill me right now and slap that on my tombstone. I ate my lunch in my classroom for the rest of the year.

I’ve never been able to remember my dreams. That year, though, I began dreaming about Colin. Nothing too memorable, except once I gave the class a riddle,
A plane crashes on the border of Canada and the United States. Where are the survivors buried?
, and the other students go through the usual answers: Canada, the United States, the countries where the people come from.

And I turn to Colin, who’s standing at the window watching for the robin that’s nesting in the oak tree, and he looks at me and says, without moving his lips, he says, “You don’t bury survivors.”

Yeah, not too subtle. But that first year, my head was such a jangled mess—the dream was probably the closest thing I had to a clear thought.

He left my class over Christmas break. The principal took me to lunch before class started back, and he told me about it. He gave me a gift certificate for a one-hour mani-pedi, as a reward, I guess. I threw it in the trash of the women’s bathroom.

Two months later I quit, right in the middle of the school year. When I saw parents of my students around town, I averted my eyes. I wonder how they explained it to their children. I bet they told them I’d gone to a better place, like what you say with dead hamsters and grandmothers.

EMILY ROARK

YORK, PA

2016

I didn’t notice anything wrong for a while, and I think Mom and Dad liked it that way. So did I. I just thought Becca was a silly, smart, weird kid. Good weird. I mean, she is, she still is. Sorry. I’m nervous. Becca’s two years older. I don’t remember much from my first years, but lately I’ve been going through pictures, helping Mom organize them in albums. So it’s like I remember.

A big thing I notice is that there’s not a picture where her hands aren’t somehow on me. Our mom or whoever only took pictures when Becca wasn’t looking at the camera, or Becca looked away when she saw the camera come out, but she always has hands on me. Through the bars of my crib. Next to me at dinner. And in some I can’t tell if she’s smiling or just focusing really, really hard.

We shared toys and baths, and I wore passed-down clothes that smelled like her. Like scratch-and-sniff pumpkin. We shared a room. Two single beds with a pink nightstand between us. I remember that a lot of nights I’d wake up in Becca’s bed with her. I used to dream about black mambas coming in the window, slithering over the ledge and falling into my covers.

I felt safe next to her. I knew no mambas would even dare try to come into her bed.

We played everything. I followed along, did whatever she did. Becca went through phases. The obstacle course phase, where she’d set up pinecones and other things and run through our yard touching trees and skipping in certain places, and I had to follow her. Then mythology, when all she wanted to do was go through picture books of monsters and gods. I’d sit beside her and look at the books, too. She could draw, like, anything. The minotaur. Hercules killing the lion. They were so good I thought she was tracing, but when I held the drawing over the picture it was a different size. Then cats. We’d come back from the library with all these how-to-raise-your-cat books. I guess she wasn’t reading, but she would stare forever at their pictures. Then draw all the cats. Perfect cats, and each looked a little different from the one before, just like real cats. We still have the drawings.

I’m not sure what all else to say. I remember one time Becca and I were at the store, both trailing Mom. Becca was ignoring me, keeping her head down. Becca at the grocery store wasn’t the same Becca. I’d heard Mom talking to Dad earlier about how she was having a hard time in her class at school and how she’d started to, in general, withdraw—I had to ask what
withdraw
meant. They said take away. Each time we went to the grocery store, more people had started to notice Becca and comment to our mom about her. Maybe they were more aware of silent kids, or maybe Becca was more noticeable.

The time I’m remembering, just as we were going into the store, an elderly woman said, “I’m so sorry,” when she saw Becca.

“For what?” our mom asked.

“Oh, I shouldn’t have said anything,” she said before scooting off.

“I’m starting to hate people who mean well,” our mom said.

After we were done shopping the woman behind us in the checkout line started talking to my mom, telling her how pretty both her daughters were, and so on.

The woman looked at Becca and said, “Wouldn’t it be incredible if she just snapped out of it one day?”

“What do you mean, snapped out of it?” my mom asked.

“Like, what if a doctor figured out a word or a method that would unhypnotize them? Wouldn’t that be amazing?”

“You should stop thinking out loud,” my mother said. Yelled. Everything sort of stopped. The cashier clenched a bunch of trembling grapes. It was the first time I’d ever heard my mom yell.

Becca had her chin tight to her chest. She clutched my arm. I wanted her to speak right then, so the woman could see she was normal. Or draw one of her cat pictures. I wished a camera could record us when we were at home. So the woman could see what I saw—a girl who liked pretzels and mustard and superhot baths and kept her bed made. I still have those photos, but the longer I look at them, the more it looks like something’s not right. Like the woman at the store was seeing something I missed.

In the car Becca gazed at her hands, which she kept folded in her lap. When we got home, I brought out the drawing pad and markers, but Becca just wanted to lie on the couch with her eyes closed. When she was like this, nobody could reach her, not even me. It scared me how easily she could detach. Mom brought her soup, and she ate it. I climbed up next to her. I wriggled around and talked like Solomon Grundy, but no matter how much I tried to force her to look at me she wouldn’t.

I couldn’t sleep that night. The reason was, Becca and I used to have this flashlight in our bedroom. Our dad bought it because of my nightmares. It was a small Christmas flashlight with different-colored lenses you could change out and rotate. Snowflakes and snowmen, reindeer, Christmas trees. Things like that. Becca was in charge of it. After Dad had read us a story and kissed us good night and turned out the light, Becca would shine the flashlight onto the ceiling and swivel the lens around. Green snowman, red snowman, blue. And then the next lens and the next. Always in the same order. Becca’d do it until I was totally asleep. And I never had to remind her to do it, and she never complained about it, and no one but us knew.

That night I waited for the flashlight, but it didn’t come. I started crying. I was sad and scared and a bunch of other things. I felt awful. If we just stayed at home, the two of us, nothing bad would ever happen. I knew this. Becca wasn’t the problem, other people were the problem. Just as I was almost all cried out, I heard a click, and then I saw the green snowman on the ceiling, then the next one, and so on. She went through all the lenses. I don’t remember whether or not I slept that night, but the flashlight never turned off.

If that woman from the checkout line was watching this, she would see two girls under their covers, one with a flashlight, the other clutching a plush turtle and watching, and she wouldn’t stare. Kids being kids, she’d say. She wouldn’t give it another thought.

DAVID DIETRICH

DECATUR, GA

2017

Every book I read I always found some character I wanted to be. The donkey and the magic pebble: he sees a lion and accidentally wishes to be a rock, so now he’s a rock. His mom and dad come once a year and eat their lunch on him. I wanted to be that donkey and that rock. I really wanted to be that rock.

In second grade all I did while everyone else filled out their math packets was draw seating charts and then lines attaching people together. The lines were for people who hung out together. Groups of friends. I wanted to figure out how they were connected. How these four made a cluster, and these three did, and so on. I had no one. Even the teacher rolled her eyes when I asked stuff like, Can you give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a dog? I made my seating-chart maps because I wanted to know who went with who, and why.

I first saw the silents on
60 Minutes
. That show always has the best commercials. The turkey-on-the-airplane one. Also the one with the thirsty dolphins. This episode was an exposé of this new breed of mentally damaged kid. Some thought it was one thing and others thought it was another. The doctors seemed more worried about categorizing the kids than about what to do with the kids themselves. They couldn’t talk. They didn’t know their names. They looked … I liked how they looked. They didn’t care about anything. They weren’t suck-ups or brownnosers. What I thought was, a few years ago these kids didn’t even exist, and now tons of people were rushing in to help name their problem. Everyone knows, you give something a name and then it has power.

You’re asking if I identified with the silents? I don’t even know what that means. Probably. People talk too much anyway. A life of talking and you say probably three good things. Accidentally. I used to go to the library to take security stickers off of books and stick them to people’s backpacks, and once I found a book called
Famous Last Words
. It was people’s last words. Some of them planned for years what they would say and ended up with something completely different. “No, don’t open the drapes,” and crap like that. I spent a while thinking about what mine would be and came up with the best one ever. Picture me lying under hospital covers, all bony and gray, and I’m telling the doctor to come closer, closer, and then I whisper in his ear: “Blood fart.”

I wanted to see what would happen if I stopped talking. At first I had to keep my hand over my mouth, but it got easier. I didn’t talk in class or at home—my mom was too painkillered to even notice—and then the next day at school. Work, lunch alone, recess, walk home again. I did it four straight days. It was amazing. Barely anyone even noticed. By the end I had superhearing—like how blind people get—every tick and creak in my house, every noise in school. Our teacher, Ms. Cardiff, I could hear all her nasty stomach gurgles as she walked the rows to make sure we were being good little robots.

Then on the fifth day my mom woke me up early. “We need to talk,” she said. I guess Ms. Cardiff was having me put in a class for defect kids. That’s not what my mom said, but that’s what it was. Did I have anything to say to that? I thought about it, then said, “Okay.” It came out all crooked. My first word in four days.
Okay
. It sucked. It should’ve been an eagle terror-screech.

I finished the year with seven other rejects. A kid with Down syndrome who pulled his penis out through a hole in his pants when the teacher wasn’t looking. Another in a wheelchair with cerebral palsy who talked about how happy he was, how much he liked stuff. I guess he was trying to be inspirational or something. I’d found my group.

Then we moved to Decatur. My mom didn’t tell me why, I didn’t ask. Temporarily we stayed in this run-down apartment complex, Lakebridge Estates, just us and a bunch of decrepits and an outdoor pool no one used. I swam there, and I got really good at being underwater. I let myself sink to the bottom and would stare up at the sky through the water. I could feel myself … changing. I wouldn’t talk, and I’d sort of shuffle around underwater like I’d seen silents do on TV. I started to think, Maybe I’m becoming one. It felt natural to me, and what if it wasn’t something you were born with always? No one knew anything about it. What if I was the first known person who had the ability to turn himself into one?