House of the Deaf

by Lamar Herrin

  The Spanish eyes of a song.

  IV

  There was a song Annie had played for her father. No, that wasn’t exactly how it had happened. She’d been driving his car and had left a tape in the tape deck. Between the bank and his house, or between the club and his house, or simply driving around the block, he’d listened to one song on the tape. He’d asked her about it, and on the tape deck in his kitchen she’d played it for him again.

  “Give me one reason to stay here and I’ll turn right back around.”

  He wondered if you had to sit down and reason things out point by point nowadays. His reasons, hers, then you looked not for a preacher but for an arbiter. Could you outargue your opposite number? On the strength of that, would she fall into your arms? He wondered. He asked her if her generation still believed in Romance. He tried to make his voice sound incidental. But to her it seemed to come out of a puzzling hush.

  She really didn’t know what he meant by the word. It wasn’t love everlasting; it wasn’t youthful love fading into a long pastoral twilight that never ended. As a little girl, she could remember watching her father and her grandmother sitting side by side on the piano bench singing their “gushing oldies,” she called them. But what she remembered best was the way her father turned the pages of the songbook once Grandmother Louise’s hands were no longer so quick. He turned them on the beat, with a poise and precision that were uncharacteristic of him.

  Her father had turned the pages with devotion.

  Romance?

  As a substitute for what? she’d asked He’d nodded his head as if he’d understood her question exactly, then he’d shaken his head, sadly, as if no answer were available. He’d given himself a kind of rousing and rueful grin and played the song over, moving to the beat.

  “Give me one reason to stay here and I’ll turn right back around.”

  With no reason not to, he’d left, and she didn’t know where he’d gone.

  She’d finished her exams. There’d been a moment when she’d stood in her apartment, with Valerie waiting for an answer, and added up her options. She could stay there—the apartment was paid through the summer—and do advance reading for her fall classes. She could take the research assistantship her psych professor had arranged for her. There was a job in New York as an intern in a human rights organization that suited her major perfectly. She could go to New York City and do that. She could go to Boston, then Cape Cod, then Mount Desert Island in Maine with Jonathan, free of charge. Chad the Volunteer wanted her to visit his Tennessee town.

  Or she could go home, to Lexington, which was finally what she decided to do. Jonathan insisted on driving her there, seven hundred miles south. In passing he’d see a horse farm or two and they’d swill good Kentucky white lightning from a moonshiner. She’d let him take her. Jonathan had seen to it that they’d gotten a late start, and they’d had to stop in an Ohio motel. She had let him make love to her. He had a carefree insouciance about everything he did, and he was nimble for such a tall man, masterful, really, when it came to the things of the world—she’d give him that. But once he was inside her it was as if he sank to her bottom with an adoring groan. Was that Romance? She’d seen the best of him and there really wasn’t a worst, so the next morning she claimed he’d gone far enough out of his way. She insisted he drop her at the Greyhound station in Columbus.

  She had keys to the front and back and side doors of her father’s house, the basement door, the garage, which stood apart, and the car inside it. The house was empty. It smelled of a mustiness so keen she knew it had been empty for some time. The few plants in the sunporch looked dead, but she watered them just in case. She carried her suitcases upstairs, where she had a room. The bed was too small; her feet hung over. It had been their joke—that her father, when he’d bought the bed, was thinking of his little girl. Or—no joke and never spoken—he’d been thinking of Michelle, who was considerably shorter than her sister. Annie said she didn’t mind and slept with her feet hanging over the end.

  But she had minded—so much had changed, ended or never been.

  She took her father’s room, where the mustiness included him. The smell of his hair on the pillow, the distant trace of his soap, cologne and shaving cream. Out of his closet, caught in the fabric of his clothes, a woodsy, nutty smell that had begun to go stale. Pictures of Michelle and Annie were scattered around the room. She turned them all over. There was one of the four of them—her mother included—that, as chance would have it, had caught them all with expectant expressions on their faces, all to varying degrees pleased. The picture had been taken at the start of a family vacation. She remembered them singing and her father remarking that this was a rare occasion in a family like theirs and he wanted to make a record. He had set up the camera on a tripod, set the timing device, then jumped into the picture himself. She was not yet ten—could she trust her memory? Her mother should have been fidgeting, and her twelve-year-old sister glowering off at the horizon. Why weren’t they? Remarkably, the picture singled no one out. She was beside her father, but beside her sister too. Her father looked proud and relieved—he looked at peace. There was something dreamy in her mother’s expression, as though she were already basking in the sun. Her sister looked almost demure, no hint of the single-minded ambition that would take control of her and get her killed. And she, Annie, was happy to be one of them, happy to be included, a child of good fortune, the smallest in line to inherit the greatest good.

  At first she let the picture stand.

  Unpacking, five minutes later, she turned it over with the rest.

  Annie stayed there three days without contacting anybody, her cell phone still turned off, inserted into a dresser drawer. One morning while she was still in her father’s bed, a lawn boy came to cut the small lawn and to pull some weeds, but he was done in less than an hour. The phone rang a number of times, but the message machine picked it up. Not one of those calls was from her mother. No recording that said, “Just checking, Ben, to see how you are. A friend to a friend. Stay in touch.”

  No one came to the door.

  When the tape on the message machine ran out, she disconnected the phone. Apparently her father had had mail and newspaper delivery discontinued. Nothing was left to sour in the refrigerator, although she’d found pasta and vegetables in the freezer. He had not rushed off on the spur of the moment, expecting to be right back.

  She felt no urgent need to find out where he’d gone.

  On the fourth day she went out herself. She got into his car and drove around town. She had to drive a while to get to where they used to live, and partway there she gave up. Last thing she wanted to see. The city had expanded rapidly the past few years, and she drove through mall-centered neighborhoods she wasn’t sure had been there the year before. The state university, which had been a forbidden—and forbidding—place for her when she was growing up, seemed institutional to her now, more like the grounds of a state hospital than a campus. She drove downtown, where color-coded signs had been erected so tourists could stay on the right trail. There was a historical trail that would take you from the old slave market to the Henry Clay house. There was a funkier bluegrass trail. A trail led you from horse farm to horse farm. The city had been smartly packaged, and these trails were like its bows. She could understand why her mother sold so many houses here. Annie drove out to an amusement park and a dance pavilion where she’d hung out during her senior year in high school. Closed. Open on the weekends. She realized then that she didn’t know what day it was.

  Her mother worked out of an office in a converted Victorian mansion with a wraparound veranda that said, We take care, we’re grounded, we sell houses that last. Her mother was not often there. Real business was being done in gated communities out beyond the belt. These communities had names with the words “crossing,” “ford” or “pond” in them, as if only when you’d crossed a creek or brought your stock to water could you consider yourself home. Annie had to laugh. If she were alive
and sitting at her side, Michelle would have said, Why do you let it get to you? That’s the difference between us, Annie. Don’t you see it’s not worth your time? Thinking there was always a difference between them, Annie might have answered, I let it get to me because I like to laugh.

  Her mother was visible from the shaded street that Annie drove down. Her office had a big bay window that gave onto the veranda, and there she sat at her desk, filling the window; unless there were some funhouse imperfections in the glass, in the four months since Annie had seen her, her mother had put on weight. Her blond hair looked wildly thatched, as if in the rush to do business she hadn’t combed it that morning, or as if she were trying for some middle-aged spiky look. The side of her face, her cheek, had lengthened like a chop. Annie decided it was the glass. Or it was her own uneasy motion down the street.

  Her mother was busy on the phone. Dealing, Annie thought. Or talking to a daughter who wasn’t talking back.

  It occurred to her that she was doing to her mother what her father was doing to her. Disappearing, but hovering within conjuring range.

  Annie sped up and drove out of town. Tacking around the horse farms, she turned off the air conditioner and let in the broad, heavy, overripe Kentucky heat, which always seemed to be carrying a trace of river mud. She drove along twisting country roads until she got to crossroad stores doing a side business in night crawlers, minnows and crawdads. The gas pumps were relics. On the way she kept an eye out for Rennick Road, where for one fabulous day fleecy white kids had popped like popcorn over a pasture. She didn’t believe it for a minute.

  Good, she heard Michelle say. It’s time to get serious.

  Annie told her sister to shut up.

  She drove past her old high school, like a small desolate city now with its once imposing four-story main building and its array of fire-coded out-buildings angling in. She thought of Patty Hendricks, her running mate in their junior and senior years and, with the voice of her sister still in her ear, thought, That’s exactly who I want to see.

  She drove back to her father’s house and plugged in the phone. While she was at it she retrieved her cell phone from its dresser drawer. If they wanted to call her, now was their chance.

  No sooner had she graduated from high school than Patty had married a boy named Brian Paul. She was four months pregnant. Patty’s mother had wanted her to have an abortion. Brian Paul had wanted the same thing. His parents had wanted the grandchild. Patty’s father, who might have cast the deciding vote, had abandoned the family long before. Patty had come to Annie, and Annie had told her to do what she wanted to do, remembering that from all reports bringing up a child at their age was a bitch. Patty had narrowed oval eyes, gray-green. A flattened nose, a thin mouth. She looked a little Asian. She was short, shorter even than Michelle, so short that when she and Annie went out together they formed a vaguely disquieting team. Boys didn’t know where to look; it was as if the two girls were out to catch them off balance.

  Patty had had the child, a girl, Elizabeth—Brian’s family had begged for the name. Her husband had turned out to be a spoiled shit, which Annie had known all along. He’d thrown a childish fit and hit Patty, who had hit back. When she divorced him she took back her old name, Patty Paul being more than she could stomach for another day. She was trying to get her daughter’s name changed to Hendricks too. But that had turned her former allies, Brian’s family, against her. Some time ago, Annie had written Patty a letter but had never had a reply.

  In the phone book, in small, unflinching bold print, she found “Hendricks, Patty and Elizabeth.” That was Patty.

  Annie did not call. During the half-hour that she had been back in the house, no one had tried to call her. She copied down the address, a street she didn’t recognize. Out of his glove compartment she fished her father’s map of the city. It lay beneath a glossy, oversized envelope. She laid her cell phone on top of the envelope, still turned on, and closed the glove compartment. Its ring might or might not be audible above the motor noise.

  The address was a walk-up second-story apartment in an area of town out beyond the cheapest student housing. She had almost reached the top of the exposed stairs when the door opened and Patty appeared with her daughter in her arms. Patty was still small. Her shoulders were bony, she looked haggard around the eyes and mouth, her teeth were yellowed. She’d chopped at her dull blond hair, which had once had a silky wave she’d practiced drawing over her face, and it had grown out unevenly. Elizabeth was big; the baby was going to dwarf her mother. She was squinched up in the sun, already beginning to cry.

  Patty said, “Legs.”

  It was her nickname for her friend, and she said it as if Annie was one of ten people she might expect to see climbing her stairs, not high on the list but no surprise either.

  Patty’s nickname was “the Pistol,” which her father had given her when he was still around. “She’s hot as a pistol, that girl.” Annie couldn’t stand it, but Patty didn’t seem to mind.

  Annie called her by her name. She was hoping to be invited inside, where Patty with her irreverence and her zealous partisanship would talk Annie out of her funk. It wasn’t going to happen.

  “You got a car, right?”

  Annie nodded. “My dad’s.”

  “Come on, then. Brian will be looking for mine.”

  There was no baby seat, of course, in her father’s car. They tried to strap Elizabeth in the back, and she let out a ripping wail. So she rode up front with her mother, a pacifier in her mouth. Annie heard the baby’s breathy suck, and then, before she had a chance to start the motor, she heard the muffled admonishing ring of the cell phone in the glove compartment. With the motor on and idling, the ring was like a subterranean vibration.

  “Leave it,” she told Patty, who was curious. Maybe Patty thought Brian had her number wherever she went.

  “Where to?” Annie asked her. “You mind telling me what’s going on?”

  Patty motioned them forward, then, once Annie had started picking up speed, she squared around in her seat, the baby for the moment deadweight in her arms.

  “Brian claims I’m denying him visitation rights. He claims he has a right to see his daughter even if he can’t take her out alone. He was going to take me back to court. Now he says he’s going to take the law into his own hands. I know Brian,” she added with a bitter, wise flattening to her tone. “Brian doesn’t give a shit. He doesn’t give a shit about Lizzie. It’s his family’s making him do it. Brian would grab her and hand her over to them.”

  “That’d be kidnapping.”

  “Since they talked me into having the kid, they think it’s theirs. They think that gives them some kind of rights.” She pressed her mouth shut.

  “‘Proprietary’ rights. If that’s what they’re claiming they’re full of shit, legally and—”

  “‘Proprietary,’” Patty repeated, letting the word slide professionally off the tongue. She looked down at her baby and said it again. “‘Proprietary.’” She removed the pacifier from Lizzie’s mouth and said, “Now, let’s hear you say it.”

  The baby took a couple of questioning gulps of air, whimpered once, then screamed.

  Patty plugged her mouth and said, “Stop for some orange juice. That’s what she likes. That’s what she needs.”

  Annie pulled into the first convenience store she came to. When she returned with the orange juice, Patty informed her, “Your mother called. She said to stop playing hide ’n’ seek. She said, ‘You sound like Patty Hendricks,’ and I said I was. She asked me how I was and where I was living. I think she wanted to sell me a house. She asked about the baby, and I said Lizzie’d be all right once she had her OJ. She asked if it was safe to assume that since she was talking to me on her daughter’s cell phone that her daughter was back in town, and I told her it was safe. That’s when she said to stop playing hide ’n’ seek.”

  “I wish you hadn’t answered,” Annie said.

  “I always liked your mom.” Patt
y was pouring the orange juice into a plastic cup she’d taken from a bag containing Pampers and other baby accessories. The baby was drinking from the lip of the cup, not from a nipple. She had to be coaxed to it, but once she’d started she drank the half-cup Patty had poured her and demanded more. Lizzie had strawberry-blond hair. It was Brian’s hair color, except Brian’s hair just looked rusty. She had Brian’s suspicious cold blue eyes, too, and a tight little dimple. Anything of Patty there? Patty had small, perfectly shaped ears, with lobes she’d never had pierced. Crazy, she’d never had her ears pieced. Both she and Annie had gotten tattoos, Annie’s a small, bruise-colored rose on her right hip, Patty a “he loves me, he loves me not” daisy on her left. But she’d never had her ears pierced. From the looks of it, that was all she and her daughter had in common, the perfectly shaped, unpierced ears.

  Annie didn’t need this. Patty didn’t either. Annie wanted to say, Turn the kid over to them for Christ’s sake.

  Instead she said, “Mom’s all right. I’m just not ready to deal with her now.”

  Patty said, “Wanna take a trip?”

  The baby let her weight settle in Patty’s arms and then went to sleep. When Patty stretched her out in the back seat she didn’t wake up.

  “A road trip. Whaddaya say?”

  “Is Brian really after you?”

  “He says he’s on the way. He says when I least expect it.”

  “If you’re scared you should go to the police.”

  “Do I look scared?”

  “You looked pissed.”

  “Let’s let him chase us for a while. Why not?”