Child of Silence

by Abigail Padgett

  Annie gazed abstractedly at the painting of daisies in Day-Glo orange on black velvet on the wall. “You care about this child?” she asked.

  The question caught Bo off guard.

  “Well, yeah. I mean, he's deaf. At the hospital they thought he was retarded. But he's not. In fact, I think he's very bright. . .”

  She stood to leave and realized her left leg had fallen asleep. Annie continued to stare at the wall and finally spoke.

  “A little child who can't hear,” Annie said. “What will happen to him?”

  “He'll be in foster homes,” Bo explained. “Unless I can find out who he is and where he belongs and then pull a few strings to get him sign language training.”

  She flexed her left foot and bit her lip at the discomfort. The investigation was going nowhere.

  “Do you have children?” Annie asked.

  The Indian was getting more information than she was!

  “No,” Bo answered.

  “Why not?”

  The old woman remained motionless, a statue in a tableau nobody would ever see. And Bo had not answered that question in ten years. Not since that last bitter discussion with the man who had been her husband, and whom she tried to put out of her thoughts.

  Mark David Bradley, both of whose brothers had chosen to be priests, had said simply, “I want to have kids, Bo. We can have our marriage annulled.”

  “I have a mental disorder,” Bo pronounced in the trailer's quiet gloom. “So did my deaf sister. It's called manic-depression. It runs in families. I just couldn't. . .”—she ran a hand through her hair impatiently—“. . . run the risk.”

  Mark hadn't understood. Why did she expect this stranger would? The hell she would not put another person through. The hell that had killed Laurie.

  “My sister died when she was twenty,” Bo finished the story. “She killed herself.”

  The ancient figure at the table didn't speak, but Bo felt something envelop her like a shawl. A warmth. An acceptance. She also experienced a near-certainty that she'd see Annie Garcia again. And soon.

  8 - Like a Dog

  Outside the trailer again, Bo blinked in the sunlight and checked her watch. One o'clock. Amazingly, the world had not turned to dust at the words she'd spoken to the old woman. Everything remained intact. It felt good to have said it. Even though it didn't change anything.

  Heartened, Bo decided to take a look around before heading back down to San Diego. Take a few pictures to beef up the court report. From her car she grabbed the county-issue Polaroid camera all the investigators carried to photograph injuries. Then she headed for the trail a quarter mile from the Bigger Fox home.

  The climb was invigorating. The house was as she'd expected. A shell of a place like others moldering in unexpected mountain niches where some long-ago settler built a dwelling on a trail long since buried in creosote bushes, scrub oak, and deerweed. A gray squirrel scuttled across the tattered roof as Bo entered and prepared the Polaroid camera for flash.

  The mattress was there, all right. And the length of white plastic clothesline that had tied Weppo to it. Bo snapped three pictures of the scene from various angles and squeamishly tugged at the white cord. It came loose easily, but provided no clue as to its origin. Clothesline, Bo admitted, was on a level with aluminum foil, plastic bags, and cheap typewriter paper. Without the packaging, there was no way to identify it.

  Something rustled across a boulder outside, and then was silent. She considered briefly how well her Topsiders might stand up to the fangs of a rattler, and smiled. She'd get workmen's comp, anyway.

  The mattress was near a stone fireplace that would have been the only source of heat when the house was in use. Idly Bo stirred the ashes with a stick and was surprised to notice the faint orange glow of coals beneath the gray powder. There was a fire here last night.

  Suddenly alert, Bo scanned the area more closely. A SpaghettiOs can, raggedly opened with a knife, appeared newer than the other trash littering the floor. Had somebody fed Weppo SpaghettiOs and built a fire before tying him to the mattress and leaving him to die?

  She scooped up the ant-infested can and took it outside. She needed to think.

  Climbing on a sun-warmed granite boulder, she lay on her back and stared at the sky. A weird day, really.

  “So,” she yelled at a hawk suspended on a thermal high above, “what's going on? Am I crazy, or is there a pattern to all this?” The hawk broke and swooped lazily toward one of the Laguna Mountains. Bo followed its flight until it vanished. As a bearer of symbolic messages, she decided, this hawk was in the basement.

  The warmth of the granite soothed her almost as much as the feel of a paintbrush in her hand. Madge would spit memos, Bo chuckled. County employees were, she was sure, not allowed to lie around on rocks during working hours. If there was no directive to that effect in the procedures manual, Madge Aldenhoven would write one. Fortunately, Madge wasn't here. In fact, nobody was here. And nobody would be likely to be here. So who would leave a deaf four-year-old here, tied up like a dog?

  Like a dog.

  Bo had heard that phrase before, years ago from the lips of her own pubescent friends.

  “Why does your mom keep your sister on a leash? I mean, she looks like a dog!”

  Laurie had been wild before their mother gave up trying to teach the toddler to talk, and instead announced that the whole family would learn Sign. Wild, frustrated, angry. In desperation their mother had bought a harness and leash to keep the little girl from running into the street, demolishing grocery store displays or vanishing into parking lots. At eleven, Bo was humiliated. Everybody thought her three-year-old sister was creepy, and so did Bo.

  But now she understood why somebody might have to tie down a deaf child who couldn't sign in order to ensure that he'd stay there. Cruel, but perhaps necessary. There would be no way to say “Stay here. I'll be back.”

  Had whoever it was meant to come back?

  Sometimes parents—usually mothers—of abandoned children showed up in a few days, guilty and embarrassed because they'd panicked. Because they'd been unable to cope. Usually they were anxious to get their kids back and just needed a little help. But something about this case felt different to Bo. Desperate parents abandoned children in places where somebody else was likely to pick up the responsibility. Shopping centers, churches, bus stations. And yet the terrain around the crumbling adobe house was devoid of human commerce. Empty. No sense of comings and goings. No sense, in particular, that anyone would ever return. Bo would have bet her last paycheck that whoever left Weppo here was gone, for good. Whoever it was wouldn't be coming back.

  The realization made her shiver as she drop-kicked the SpaghettiOs can into the woods and clambered back down the trail. She paused at the dusty Fremont cottonwood where somebody, sometime, had parked a car the color of squash that might or might not have contained a deaf child. A lot of people had parked on the dry shoulder of Wildcat Canyon Road. The ground wore the usual mantle of beer cans, cigarette butts, empty potato chip bags. Bo scuffed the toe of her Topsider through the junk and dislodged a spent shotgun shell. A faded local newspaper, unread. A sandwich bag full of dirt. She turned toward her car parked down the road at the Bigger Foxes'.

  But something shimmered at the edge of her field of vision. A scrap of white. Some shred of paper newer, whiter than the others littering the ground. Without knowing why, she retraced her steps and picked it up. A grocery receipt. From someplace called Jamail's. Among the items it enumerated were three cans of SpaghettiOs.

  Bo knew of no Jamail's in San Diego, but that meant nothing. The sprawling city had numerous outlying communities. Jamail's could be a convenience store in Lakeside or an independently owned supermarket in Rancho Bernardo. And it probably had nothing to do with Weppo anyway. Still, Bo stuffed the receipt in the pocket of her corduroys and then vowed to go home and get some sleep. The hoped-for flu having failed to materialize, she knew what was coming if she didn't take every precauti
on. And there was nothing else she could do for Weppo today.

  At the reservation gas station pay phone she called Madge Aldenhoven.

  “Madge? Bo. I'm just leaving the reservation, and—”

  The answering voice bore an uncharacteristic lilt. “Dr. LaMarche phoned me earlier. . .”

  Oh, God. Dr. Kildare and his elephant ego. What's he done? Filed another complaint?

  Mentally Bo calculated how long she could live on severance pay and her county retirement refund. About a month and a half.

  Madge went on gleefully. “He called to commend you for your handling of the Johnny Doe. He said—”

  “He what?”

  “He said you accurately identified the boy as profoundly deaf and made some helpful suggestions. He also thought you'd want to know the boy's blood and urine workup came back showing he's been on Thorazine. A special attendant will stay with the boy all night while the drug wears off.”

  Bo eyed the ice machine outside the station and considered buying a bag to put on her head.

  Thorazine? The powerful neuroleptic routinely administered in emergency rooms to calm the most disturbed psychiatric patients? Why would anybody give Thorazine to a kid?

  “Madge, I'm really feeling rotten. . .”

  And that's not a lie.

  “Feverish. Dying, perhaps. There's nothing else I can do on this case today. I need to go home.”

  Andrew LaMarche's call had saved the day. “That's just fine. You go ahead and take care of yourself,” Madge said. “Have you called to arrange foster care yet?”

  “No, he's not ready for discharge. I'll do it on Monday, okay?” Bo ended her conversation with the unusually agreeable supervisor and decided to head home.

  She chose a Coke instead of the ice and edged onto Highway 67 toward the interstate. In the rear-view mirror she saw a blue Subaru with “Surf 'n' Sun Rent-a-Car" on the plate frames. The car pulled slowly from behind the station.

  Of the entire wonderland available to tourists in San Diego County, this particular location would rank last, if it ranked at all. Bo couldn't imagine why the two men in the rented car would possibly be up here in the dusty chaparral on an Indian reservation that did absolutely nothing to encourage visitors.

  Thirty-five minutes later, at home in Ocean Beach, she turned right on Narragansett from Sunset Cliffs Boulevard. Her street, she remembered pointlessly, was named for an extinct tribe of East Coast Indians. She wished she would stop remembering things like that. Her mind was weaving garish tapestries. Tying things together, creating meaning where there was none.

  In the corner of the rear-view mirror a small blue car containing two men continued on in the boulevard traffic toward Sunset Cliffs and the end of the continent.

  “Not possible,” she told her gaunt reflection in the mirror. “Don't imagine things!”

  But a part of her mind refused to quiet. “Those were the same two men,” it insisted. “You're being followed!”

  9 - The Graveyard Shift

  St. Mary's Hospital was quiet as special-duty attendant Rudy Palachek lowered himself and the blanket-wrapped child into the defective rocker. Carefully Rudy jammed his right foot under the mattress of Weppo's bed to compensate. Without the precaution, the chair would tip over backward under their combined weight. Rudy made a mental note to call maintenance first thing in the morning.

  The boy, tense at first, relaxed and snuggled against Rudys broad chest. Some kids weren't comfortable being held by a man, but this one seemed used to it. Rudy wondered if there were a father somewhere who'd ever rocked his deaf son in the dark. And if so, where was he?

  Weppo's breathing slowed to the cadence of deep sleep as Rudy matched the pace of the rocker to his own heartbeat. He'd learned that training for the neonatal unit. It always worked, but Rudy hadn't been sure this time—not with an active deaf four-year-old coming off Thorazine.

  Rudy knew a little about the world of the deaf, learned from an aunt who'd lived with his family years ago. And he knew a lot about psychiatric medications, learned from a stint as a psych tech in a Tucson hospital right after he retired from the Marines. He knew there could be no conscionable reason for drugging this pale, sturdy little boy who'd quickly learned to catch a Nerf football Rudy had grabbed from the toy room when he came on at 6:00.

  Weppo, as Andy LaMarche had explained the boy was to be called, did not lack energy, even after his ordeal in some mountain shack. Rudy tried to remember if there'd ever been a famous deaf quarterback. The way the kid handled the little Nerf ball was something to see. Good manual dexterity. A good eye. And the big grin he'd given Rudy the first time he caught the ball was worth a hundred times the special-duty pay Rudy would get for monitoring vital signs all night.

  By 11:30 p.m. all was silent except for the faint buzz of the PA system and occasional hushed voices from the nurses' station. The night shift would be charting, recording the day's vital signs, medications, and reactions on the proper forms. Each shift was supposed to do its own charting, but during the day there was never time. Between rounds and the administering of medications, the night staff would chart all night unless there was an emergency. Rudy flexed his right foot wedged under the mattress and decided to rock his patient until after 12:00 meds when the nurse would come again. If the vital signs remained stable, he'd put the boy back in bed for the night.

  Leaning his head against the back of the rocker, Rudy breathed easily and stared at the rectangle of light marking the placement of the door in the wall. Everything was quiet. But he wouldn't fall asleep. He'd never let himself fall asleep even on the easiest night duty. And the discomfort of his foot helped. It was a good start on a quiet night.

  Almost.

  Something was going on in the hall—an anomalous collection of shadows blurring the outline of the door frame. Somebody standing there. Or two people standing there. But why? There was no family to visit this nameless child.

  After twenty-five years as a corpsman and then a civilian medical attendant, Rudy was used to hospital routine, hospital normalcy. A bamboo hut or high-tech teaching hospital in a big city, it was all the same. Staff who had reason to come into a room in the middle of the night did so quickly. The medications, injections, vital signs, turnings, and linen changes all done quickly. Nobody would just stand outside a door.

  Probably a late-night confab between relatives of some other kid on the floor, Rudy decided. So why didn't they go up the hall to the visitors' lounge?

  Rudy felt a tingling in the large muscles of his legs. A slightly faster heartbeat. He was throwing a little adrenaline in response to the whispering shadows outside Weppo's door. Ridiculous, but the brain will do that, especially at night when it responds to memories of threats long extinct. Rudy knew that, but watched the door closely anyway. The threads of light widened as it opened.

  Later Rudy would describe two men standing there, momentarily confused by the darkness and the empty bed. The figures were backlit from the hall, mere silhouettes. One appeared stocky, the other shorter, and thin. They turned toward Rudy and the boy. Rudy remained silent, watching. Whoever they were, they didn't seem to know what the hell they were doing.

  “Aw, fuck!” the shorter one drawled, and pushed the thick one aside. He seemed nervous, in a hurry. Then he pulled something from under his jacket. Something dully silver reflecting the hall light, with a black cylinder attached to it.

  In less than a second, thirty years of experience, countless nights in jungle muck trusting nothing beyond his field of vision, registered in Rudy Palachek. With his right foot he pushed hard against the empty hospital bed. It was a gun, he realized just before the chair went over. It was pointed at the sleeping child in his arms!

  A muffled pop, like a truck tire blowing out under water.

  The chair splintered under his back as it fell. The child began to scream his peculiar scream as running footsteps filled the hall outside.

  “Hey! What's going on?”

  It was the orde
rly, running past the door of 323 toward the stairs. His voice, Rudy noticed, was shrill with fear, but it hadn't stopped him from doing his job.

  Then another shot.

  Children crying. A woman screaming “Oh, my God!” over and over in the hall.

  A nurse appeared at the door of 323 and switched on the lights, followed closely by a bewildered security guard. The nurse went pale and then regained her color as Rudy rolled out of the splintered rocker and got to his feet. He still held the screaming child, petting the wiry hair, humming so the boy could feel the sound.

  Rudy clenched his teeth over mute rage.

  “Call LaMarche,” he told the nurse. “And seal this room until the police get here.”