The Color of Silence Page 3

  “I’ll work with Joanie.” If I could swivel my head to see the owner of the voice, I would. But I don’t need to. It’s him.

  “Hey. How’re you doing? What’s Blaine want you to do today?” He bends down so we’re eye to eye. His eyes always make me think of the sky, bright blue and going on forever.

  I smile at him, and he smiles back. Ms. Blaine puts a pretend stern look on her face.

  “That would be Ms. Blaine, young Michael. And in answer to your question, Joanie’s finished all of her regular work so you can choose an alternate activity for this period.”

  “Cool. So, the question is, what do you want to do? Read? Computer? Lame crafts?” He pauses after each possibility and looks at me. Really looks at me. He knows where to find my answers even if no one has figured out a way to help me make them clear to the rest of the world.

  “Reading. You just picked that one so that I’d have to work for it.” I laugh and my hands start to flail, hitting him in the face. I’m mortified and would run and hide if I could. But I have to sit here, strapped into my chair, my head held tightly in place so

  I can’t do anything but face him.

  “Ow! All right, I’m reading. You don’t have to get violent on me!” He’s laughing and reaches over to pretend to punch me on the chin. His knuckles barely graze my skin, but I can feel them like a burn. My face feels hot, and I am afraid I’m getting another fever. Fevers mean sickness, and sickness means missing school. And missing school means missing…well, all kinds of things.

  Thinking about being sick pulls me out of the memory with a sudden jerk. Spencerville High School has disappeared with everyone I once knew there still inside.

  I close my eyes for a second, hoping to get back there, but it’s too late. When I open them again, all I can see is the white of my room. The bubble in my chest has grown into something else, harsh and tight, like someone or something is pressing down on me so I can’t breathe. I want to cough to relieve the pressure. I’m good at coughing. Most of the time I do it too much. But now that I need to, nothing will come. My breath is trapped in my chest, and my chest is trapped by the pressure pushing me down into my bed. I have to try to relax so I don’t panic.

  Come on, Joanie! Calm down.

  It isn’t working! My body won’t listen, and it tenses up instead. I can feel my neck tightening up, and now my head is moving even though I’m telling it to stop. I tell my throat to make some noise so someone will realize that I need help.

  Isn’t anyone there? I can’t breathe. I need to sit up or make a noise or something. I feel like I might explode. I don’t want to explode. Am I invisible just because I can’t make enough noise?

  My head starts to feel light, as if it is filled with air and might actually lift me up off of the bed. Maybe I’ll get lucky and fly up and disappear back into my blue stone so that Mike can read to me and this horrible feeling will disappear too.

  “It’s all right, I’ve got you!”

  A pair of hands reaches in behind me, and I feel Kathleen lifting me up and cradling me against her body. She reaches for the oxygen mask, but changing my position has already done the trick, and a cough bursts out of me.

  “There you are. It’s OK now. You’re all right. Slow it down if you can. Just breathe, sweetheart. You can do it.”

  I cough and gasp a few more times but I manage to get breathing on my own.

  “Is she all right? Do you need help?” Patrick has entered the room. The sound of his voice makes me feel better. I’m so glad he’s here today!

  “It’s fine. She just got a cough stuck in there somewhere. Right, Joanie? Scary stuff, but I think she’s OK for now.”

  I’m glad. I hate the mask. I know it gives me oxygen and keeps me alive and everything, but it makes me feel trapped. Patrick tries to tell me it’s just like scuba diving and I should pretend I’m down under the sea looking at whales. Sometimes that works, but not always.

  “OK. Buzz if you need me. Don’t do that again, OK, kid?” He bends over me and looks into my eyes, which is easier than usual because Kathleen has my head held tightly against her chest. He reaches out for a second and strokes my hair. It feels nice, and I start to relax.

  Kathleen stays with me for a while, until she’s sure I’m really as all right as she told Patrick I am. I think she was waiting to make sure that my lungs hadn’t given up on me. They do that sometimes and then they need artificial assistance. I know that the people here are worried that someday my lungs will give up forever and nothing will be able to help me to breathe again. No one says that to me, of course. They tell me I will be fine or OK or all right. Lots of different words that mean the same thing, that actually mean nothing at all. No one here really thinks that I will be any of those words. They just say those things because they think that I don’t understand what everyone is really thinking and worrying about. Expecting.

  Everyone talks about it in whispers, as if it’s a secret that no one is allowed to know about. I wish people would just talk to me about this stuff. They seem to think that I don’t have thoughts because I can’t share them out loud. That I can’t understand all of the words I hear because I can’t use them.

  I actually use words very well. I have listened to stories and movies and plays and people talking around me and to me for seventeen years. I am so full of words and thoughts and images that if I ever could figure out a way to let them loose, they would come swirling out of me in a torrent of syllables, sweeping aside anyone unlucky enough to be standing in their path. I would fill every room with the colors of my dreams until the whole world became a rainbow of my making.

  If I could figure out a way.

  They used to try to help me find ways to talk when I was in school, but I haven’t been there for over a year now. Even when I was living at the group home, I had to miss a lot of days because my lungs weren’t cooperating. Eventually I got too sick to go to school at all, and then I got too sick even to stay in the group home. Now I’m just here.

  Except when I’m not.

  Chapter 5

  “Where are you going?” Cali is carefully brushing her hair and looking at me in her locker mirror.

  “Homework.”

  “Already? School just ended and you’re going to work again? You need a break. Specifically, you need a shopping break. I need to look for a recital dress.” She runs her fingers through her carefully brushed hair, messing it up so it doesn’t look carefully brushed.

  “I don’t have my essay done. Do you?”

  “Essay? We have an essay? What in?” Cali actually looks confused. She’s unbelievable. How could anyone just forget that there’s an assignment due?

  “Music History. Remember?”

  “Obviously not or I wouldn’t ask. Music History? Really? Damn. When did she tell us that?”

  “At the beginning of the term. On that list of important dates we were supposed to write down so we don’t fail the course. It’s due tomorrow, and I still have to proofread and do the bibliography.” I want to get it done so I have time to practice too.

  “Hmm. I haven’t even started. Which means I probably should start it instead of shopping. Right?” She looks at me with her eyes all hopeful, as if she somehow expects me to tell her to go shopping instead of doing homework.

  As if! She knows me better than that.

  “Right. I can help you get started if you want.”

  “I thought you had too much to do. If you don’t have time for shopping, how do you have time to help me with an essay?”

  “Priorities, I guess.”

  “All right, all right, Miss Prissy Pants. We’ll go get started on our really exciting essays.”

  “Good. We’ll go to my place because it’s quieter. I like to work in silence.”

  “Then you better not bring me along because I like to work in noise!
” She yells the last word in my ear.

  “Please don’t break my eardrum. I need it. I have headphones. You can have as much noise as you want. OK?”

  “Not really, but I obviously I don’t have a choice. Oh, Lexi?”

  “Yes?” I’m walking in the direction of my house, and I keep facing forward in case she tries to change my direction.

  “So, have you decided or shouldn’t I ask?” She’s walking backward, hands clasped as if she’s praying. She’s using her angel eyes on me. I think about pretending I don’t know what she’s talking about, but those angel eyes are also lie detectors.

  “I’m still worried about my voice.”

  “A night of rest and relaxation will do wonders for it. Especially that close to the recital date. Consider it a prescription for perfection.”

  “Thanks. I’ll check with my doctor and see if he agrees.”

  “Come on, Lexi. Admit it. The problem here isn’t really your voice. The problem is that it’s an actual party with actual guys at it, which means you might actually have to, like, talk to one of them or something horrible like that.” She laughs at me as I shake my head and roll my eyes.

  “I thought so.”

  “I didn’t agree with you!”

  “You didn’t not agree either.”

  “That’s a double negative.”

  “You’re a double negative.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense!”

  “Yes it does. You’re negative about your voice and negative about the party. Double negative.” She smiles proudly at herself.

  “I’m just…I don’t know…scared, I guess, that I’ll try to talk to a guy and throw up on his shoes.” Cali bursts out laughing and grabs me in a hug that temporarily crushes my diaphragm.

  “I love you, Lexi. You know that? Come on. It’ll be fun. I’m the only thing keeping you from hiding in your room and you know it.”

  I think about telling her she’s wrong, but she knows me too well.

  “All right—I’ll go! Just stop talking about it!” I laugh at her and push her away at the same time.

  “I knew I’d talk you into it. Perfect! Anyway, I seriously need caffeine if I’m going to be doing homework this soon after school. I’m going to grab a coffee and then I’ll meet you at your place. And maybe after we’ve finished being nerds, you can come to my place and we’ll see what we can do about finding you something relatively normal to wear. See ya!” She spins off down the street, waving at me over her shoulder.

  I stand alone watching her for a moment and then close my eyes for just a second, shaking my head at myself. A party. Two days before my recital. Why do I let her talk me into this stuff?

  “Alex?”

  I jump at the sound of the voice. She’s back. Probably wants to talk me into dyeing my hair and getting a face-lift before the party. Maybe a breast implant while I’m at it.

  “Alex, what are you doing? I’ve been calling you for ten minutes.” The voice pounds into me, forcing me to look around and remember where I am.

  I’m not standing outside at all.

  I’m standing in the middle of my bedroom floor staring at the wallpaper, watching yesterday’s patterns fade away.

  “What?” I answer my father loudly enough to hopefully keep him out of my room. I force my legs to uncross and pull myself off the bed, trying to intersect him out in the hall. I’ve never liked having anyone in my room, but my dad’s always had a little trouble with that idea. He figures that it’s his house because he pays for it, so that every room is technically his. He does usually knock, though, so I’ll give him credit for that.

  At the moment, I give him credit for keeping me around at all.

  “Nelle is on the phone.”

  Nelle? I have to think for a moment. Oh. Nelle Parkins. Probation lady. Yesterday, when we met her at her office, she was Ms. Parkins. Now we’re on a first name basis—keeping life friendly while it disintegrates around me.

  “I don’t do phones.”

  He knows that. I haven’t talked to anyone on the phone for almost a year. I stumble out into the hallway, and he hands me the cordless, shaking his head.

  “You don’t have a choice this time, Alex. Just do it. Please.” His voice is a monotone of exhaustion, and it slips into me and grabs my heart in a vice grip. He doesn’t deserve this. He didn’t do anything wrong. I take a deep breath, trying to suck in some decency, and nod my head as I reach for the phone.

  “Hi.” A rusty sound creaking out of my throat.

  “Hi, Alex. It’s Nelle.” As if I didn’t already know that. I don’t answer. I can hear her breathing for a few seconds. It turns into a sigh, probably of frustration.

  I do that to people.

  “I’m just calling to let you know that we’ve secured a community service project for you.” There’s another pause while she waits for me to respond. She clears her throat and takes another turn.

  “It’s at the hospital, which is walking distance from where you live. There’s a young girl living there, I’m not sure of her age. Anyway, she has serious physical challenges and has been forced to live in hospital for quite a while now. The hospital has agreed to allow you to come in and work with her as a companion.”

  “What?” The word startles me into speaking.

  “It means that you’ll spend time with her, reading or talking or whatever the hospital staff feels is appropriate. You’ll give her a break from what I imagine is a pretty tough and boring life.”

  Read to her?

  Talk to her?

  Is she kidding me? Seriously, this has to be a joke.

  There’s another long pause while I wait for the punch line.

  It takes her longer this time to realize that I’m not talking.

  “So, here’s the phone number of the nursing station on her ward. You need to contact them directly and set up a time to meet and find out about her. I’ll expect that done by week’s end.” She gives me the number, and I realize that she’s serious. The phone number creeps its way into my mind even though I don’t want it, and she says good-bye without waiting for a response from me. I hang up. My dad is hovering around at the end of the hall, watching me. His eyes remind me of a St. Bernard dog’s eyes that I saw in a movie once, all red rimmed and drooping.

  I made them that way, and it hurts my stomach to look at him. I make myself do it, though, because I deserve the pain.

  “She wants me to babysit a sick kid,” I tell him. He nods and holds out his hand for the phone. I have to walk over to him to reach his outstretched palm. He looks like he could use a hug, but I can’t make myself do it. My arms are too tired.

  “I have to read to her. Talk to her.” I hold my hands out like I’m waiting for the rain to come and wash me away. He looks at me and shrugs shoulders that seem lower than they used to be.

  “Then I guess that’s what you’ll have to do.”

  A sigh escapes as he turns away, deflating him even further. My eyes sting for a second but no tears fall. I haven’t cried for a while now.

  For a long time, all I did was cry. But it didn’t make the pain go away.

  It just made it wet.

  At some point I ran out of tears. Now I’m nothing but a hollow tree, empty and dry, just waiting for someone to come and chop me down.

  Chapter 6

  When I first stopped going to school, I spent most of my time at the group home. Debbie told me I was lucky that I didn’t have to go to school anymore, but I wasn’t so sure about that. It was a little boring during the day when the other kids were all gone, even though the workers talked to me and read to me and tried to help me keep up with some of my school work.

  When the kids came home at night, things got exciting again. Debbie would tell me every tiny detail about her day, whether I wanted to
hear it or not. Everyone would watch movies, or listen to music, or go out for walks if the weather was nice.

  I missed school, but life was still interesting and full

  of people.

  But the problem with my lungs finally got to be too much for the group-home staff to deal with, and I ended up coming here.

  Life here has not been very interesting. It’s mostly filled with silence, broken every once in a while by someone checking to see if I’m still breathing.

  I haven’t seen Brenda or Mike or Debbie in a really long time.

  Now that I’m here, I don’t do any of the things I used to do.

  But at least now I know I can find my way back sometimes through my rainbow.

  I don’t always get to hold on to the people in my life when I move from place to place, but my necklace has always been with me. For a long time, I didn’t know who gave me the necklace or why it followed me from place to place. Brenda was the one who finally told me the story.

  I was at the children’s hospital with my mother. I was a baby, so new that I was barely there. The day that my mother said good-bye to me, she was wearing a beautiful necklace of polished stones. She took the necklace off and gave it to a nurse and told her that she wanted it kept for me so that I would always have a little piece of her.

  Or maybe it’s lots of little pieces of her all strung together.

  I don’t think my mother knew that the stones would become a rainbow, but somehow I guess she knew that I would need them.

  I think I would rather have her than the necklace, though.

  I don’t remember her. I don’t know why she said good-bye to me instead of taking me home.

  Patrick took me to the baby ward once on a rare day when he had some extra time. It must be the happiest place in the whole hospital. Maybe the whole world. I remember looking at the babies through the glass, both of us staring at them like we were at a baby store. I wondered how their mothers felt, knowing that a whole new person was going to be coming home with them.