Talk Talk

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “He may sound different. That is, he may not have the full vocal range he had before the accident—or the injury, I mean. But maybe not. Maybe he’ll recover fully. Many do.” She paused to let Terri catch up with her, though Dana was reading her and leaping ahead. The nurse was middle-aged, with sorrowful eyes and a pair of semicircular lines bracketing her mouth—which vanished when she smiled, as she did now. “He’s not a singer, is he?”

  “No,” Dana said, shaking her head even as the image of him in the car rose up before her, his lips puckered round the unknowable ecstasy of the tune generated by the radio, sweet melisma, the owl song: who who, who who.

  Earlier, with Terri’s help, she’d put in a phone call to his parents, people she’d never met. They lived in San Diego. His father had something to do with the military there, that was all she knew. She’d watched Terri’s face as she’d translated, watched as she listened and the emotional content of what she was hearing transferred itself to her lips and eyes and the musculature beneath her skin. The parents hadn’t heard from Bridger in a month. They were unhappy. The mother was flying out on the next plane. Was there blame attached? Was there ill will, rancor, animosity? A deaf girl? He’d never mentioned he was seeing a deaf girl.

  And maddeningly, no matter how many times she punched in the number, her own mother wasn’t picking up the phone—or she had it off. Terri kept getting her voice mail and each time she left a message to call back. Nothing yet. Dana had tucked her phone deep in the side pocket of her shorts where she’d be sure to feel the vibrator, and now she felt for it, just to reassure herself, and it was still there, still inert, still made of plastic, metal, silicon. A cold thing. All but useless. Maybe she should have brought a couple of carrier pigeons with her.

  Terri saw her hand go to her pocket. She smiled, thanked the nurse, who was already shifting her weight to start back toward the swinging doors, and lifted her eyes to Dana’s. “Still no luck?”

  She shook her head. “I think she was going to go see a show some night this week, but I don’t know—”

  The moment hung there between them, and then Terri, signing beneath her words, said, “My place is small—and it’s nothing really, nothing much—but there’s a fold-out couch in the living room. You’re welcome to stay. Really.”

  She woke at first light, sweating, to an apprehension of movement just beyond the thin grid of the window screen. The atmosphere was heavy, tropical. There was a smell of dampness and mold, the fertile rejuvenate scent of things working in the earth, flowers unfolding, the insect armies stirring in their nests and dens and beneath the leaves of the trees crowded against the house. It smelled like rain, like ozone. For a moment she lay motionless, her eyes on the ceiling—she was getting her bearings, tracing backward through the rosary of events to the hospital and Terri, Bridger, Peck Wilson climbing out of his car and the fear that had exploded in her brain and chased her down the street—and then her eyes went to the screen. There was something there, a shadow, movement. Her heart was pounding. She sat up. And when she felt the door swing open behind her she nearly let out a scream—or maybe she did, maybe she did shout out—until she saw that it was only Terri, her shoulders slumped beneath the quilted fabric of a pale blue robe and her face dull and empty, half-asleep still, on her way to the bathroom. Are you okay? Terri signed reflexively.

  “Sorry, I must have been dreaming,” Dana lied, each word an abstraction nobody could possibly understand, words lifted from the page and an ancient repository of memory in a hopeful way, in the way Bridger must have dredged up his high school Spanish at the taco stand or the car wash. He always felt relieved, he told her—or no, not just relieved, but amazed—when people understood him, as if they were communicating in a code that was indecipherable except in that one serendipitous moment.

  The bathroom door opened and then closed on Terri and it was as if she’d never been there, an apparition faded away into insubstantiality, and there was the movement at the screen again, the movement that had woken her, but it wasn’t Peck Wilson, at large still and come to sniff her out and finish what he’d begun, and it wasn’t the afterimage of a dream either—it was just a squirrel, bloated with the easy pickings of high summer, dipping its head and manipulating its paws against the dark sheen of the wet and silken grass.

  It was still overcast when she woke again. Terri was standing over her with a cup of coffee, a soft muted smile pressed to her lips. She was dressed and made-up, her hair brushed, jade earrings catching what there was of the dull light from beyond the window. “I didn’t want to wake you,” she said, handing her the coffee. “There’s cream and sugar if you want—I didn’t know how you took it.”

  “What time is it?” Dana asked, sitting up to cradle the cup in both hands.

  “Ten-thirty.”

  “Ten-thirty? I can’t believe we slept so late—”

  “All that running—you were tired.” Her teeth flashed. It was a joke. “But not to worry, it’s Sunday, the one day of the week when people can sleep in.”

  “What about the hospital? What about Bridger?”

  Terri’s face—her pretty, mobile, animated face—showed nothing. “I called fifteen minutes ago. No word. He’s resting, that’s what they said. We can visit anytime.”

  The coffee was too hot, bitter—she preferred tea and when she did have coffee she drowned it in cream—but Dana lifted the cup to her lips, blew the steam away and drank, thanking Terri with her eyes. She felt overwhelmed suddenly. This girl, this young sweet-faced confiding girl, a stranger to her twenty-four hours ago, was her best friend in the world, a good person, genuine, caring, compassionate—mother father deaf—and for that she was grateful, infinitely grateful, grateful to the point of tears. But Terri was a crutch too, and her own mother would have been the first to point it out to her. “You don’t have to babysit me,” she said.

  Terri was drinking from a souvenir mug with the words Fort Ticonderoga superimposed in red over a wraparound stockade. “It’s not a problem. And I’m not babysitting you, don’t think that. I want to help, that’s all.”

  Dana couldn’t resist a smile. “Above and beyond the call of duty?”

  Terri shrugged. “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

  “Nothing better to do?”

  “I don’t know—you want breakfast? Eggs? Cereal?”

  Dana swung her legs away from the mattress, fished her shorts off the floor and slid them on. She needed a shower, her skin prickling with the residue of her sweat—she felt as if she’d been rolled in sugar like a doughnut—but the shower could wait. “No,” she said, looking up from lacing her shoes, “don’t go to any trouble”—and she held up a hand to forestall the reply—“but I do need to call my mother. Just to let her know—”

  Terri lifted her eyebrows and all the deaf expression flooded back into her features. “You want me to interpret—or are you going to text?”

  “If you just tell me when she picks up, that would be great—I can talk and she can text. It’s better that way, anyway—I wouldn’t want to subject you to all that, because I’m sure you know the way mothers are. And my mother’s a hundred times worse.”

  Her mother picked up on the first ring. “Hi, Mom,” Dana said into the void.

  Where are you? I was worried.

  “Peterskill. Still. And don’t worry, the car’s fine, but we had to stay overnight because”—and she stalled a moment, feeling the emotion rise in her—“because Bridger, I mean, Peck Wilson. Peck Wilson came and beat him up and he’s in the hospital.”

  Hospital?

  “He’s all right. It’s his throat. He got hit in the throat.”

  There was nothing for a moment, then the LCD flashed across the miniature screen: Didn’t I tell you? You’re always—

  “He’s okay. Everything’s okay. We’re going to the hospital in a minute and they said they would release him this afternoon so I guess you’ll see us tonight.”

  Who’s we?

  “Me and
Terri. She’s the interpreter from the police.”

  Did they catch him?

  Again the hesitation. It was as if she were the one who’d been kicked in the throat. “No. He—he got away.”

  I’m coming up there.

  “No, no—you don’t have to. I can handle it, don’t worry.”

  What hospital?

  She gave a little speech then, about independence—how her mother had always preached independence and here she was treating her like a child. How she was thirty-three years old and could handle herself. How anybody could have been the victim of a thief like this and it had nothing to do with her difference or her capability or the way she handled her finances and planned for the future or anything else. “Mom, listen,” she said finally, “I’m going to repeat this so you understand: I don’t want you to come. Okay?”

  What hospital?

  The first thing she saw when she walked into the room, Terri at her side, was the flowers. A jungle of flowers, dahlias, tulips, lilies, gladiolus, roses—so many flowers it was as if they’d taken the wrong door off the corridor and wound up back outside again. The next thing was the snaking wiry form of a woman she’d never seen before rising up out of the floral riot to throw her a challenging look, and then she saw the bed, the monitors, the IV apparatus, and finally Bridger, reduced there against the null white field of the sheets. There was a bandage at his throat, whiter yet, folds of pristine gauze wrapped to his chin so that his head seemed separated from his body. His right eye was swollen shut. In fact—and she had to catch her breath as she came closer—she saw that the whole right side of his face was damaged, a dark striated cloud of scab scudding across the jaundiced bruise that sustained it. She felt stricken: he was hurt, badly hurt, and he wasn’t going anywhere.

  The woman—his mother, she knew this was his mother even before she looked in her face and saw his features replicated there, the nose, the eyes, the retreating bone structure and the pale orbicular expanse of the flesh—tried to stand in her way, tried to question her right, assert authority, but she shoved past her and went to him, her hand finding his and her lips pressed to the side of his beautiful ravaged face. “Oh, God,” she said, “oh, God, I’m so sorry,” and the tears were there, burning like acid, while things went on behind her, peripheral movement, gestures, his mother and Terri Alfano, her deliverer, working through the niceties. She lifted her head to look him in the eye, the good eye, the one that was dilated and clear. “Are you okay?” she asked from deep inside her, and the words didn’t feel right, too pinched, in the wrong register, but she didn’t care.

  It was only then—only when he lifted his right hand to reply—that she noticed the cast on his forearm, and the sight of it was like an accusation, a pointed finger, a curse. The closed hand, up and down: Yes. And then: Are you okay?

  She nodded.

  Did they get him?

  She watched his face darken, the color seeping out of the bruise to mottle his jaw, his cheek, the orbit of his open eye. He already knew the answer. Already knew that the pain, the frustration, the anger and hate and obsession—and the fractured ulna and the crushed larynx too—were in vain. He could see it in her eyes.

  “He got away,” she said, signing under it. “But they got his car—”

  His car? Is that all? Shit! He pounded his fist against the cast in a quick violent jerk of the arm and then he tried to say something, his eye glaring and his jaws grabbing at the air, but he wasn’t saying anything, she could see that, she could feel it. Bridger. The gauze at his throat, the cast on his arm. He was furious, angry, angrier than she’d ever seen him, and before she had a chance to question it—was he blaming her, was that it?—his mother was there, sweeping her roughly aside to hammer at the nurse’s buzzer and then the nurse was propelling herself into the room and doing something to Bridger, to his mouth, his throat, his oral cavity, that Dana didn’t want to see. Even as she turned her head, Bridger’s mother took hold of the bed curtains and pulled them shut.

  For a long while she just sat there beside Terri and stared at the pleated white folds of the curtains on their aluminum track. She felt as if she’d been slapped in the face. She’d felt bad enough as it was—her fault, everything her fault—and now she just wanted to sink through the floor. Don’t worry, Terri signed. He’ll be all right.

  She didn’t respond. She was feeling too low. And tired. As tired as if she hadn’t slept in a week. The light drew down suddenly—a cloud passing over the sun beyond the window at the end of the room—and she glanced up and for the first time noticed the second bed there. It was nearly walled off by the masses of flowers Bridger’s mother had marshaled round the room, and those flowers represented another level of accusation—she hadn’t thought to bring so much as a daisy herself, but then how could she? She was going through this too—she could have been murdered, didn’t they know that?

  The curtains on this second bed were drawn too, but she could see through a gap at the near end that there was someone there, visible only as a pair of crossed ankles and two bare feet with their canted yellowish soles and ten yellowed toes hanging from their joints like decayed fruit. Those toes fascinated her, those anonymous feet, and her eyes passed over the easy attraction of the flowers to fixate on them—who was back there, she wondered? Some auditory voyeur, silently attuned to the drama playing out round Bridger’s bed, the cries of the mother, the gagging of the patient, the wet fleshy wheeze of the nurse’s ministrations. Nothing wrong with him at all—you could tell that by the way he’d crossed his ankles. He’d just come here and hidden behind the curtains in witness. That was what she was thinking, watching those feet and letting her thoughts pull her down, when she felt the familiar tactile squirming of the cell in her pocket.

  It was her mother. Peterskill Station, she messaged, 3:45, and cut the connection.

  Terri was watching her. “Your mother?”

  “Yeah. She’s coming in at three forty-five.” She shrugged, dropped her eyes. “I guess I’m going to have to pick her up.”

  There was a suspended moment, and then Terri tapped her wrist with a single finger to get her attention. “I can drive you to your car if you want. You remember where you parked it?”

  She saw the street suddenly, the shade trees, the cracked sidewalk and the kids on their bicycles and it was like the mise-en-scène of a play she’d seen somewhere a long time ago. “Yes,” she said, and she nodded her head for emphasis.

  The nurse emerged from behind the curtains then and reached up to draw them open with a brisk snap of her wrists. The mother was there too, rising to her feet from the chair beside the bed, her face strained and eyes leaping out at them as if to say, What do you want here? And Bridger—the crisis had apparently passed, and he was watching her, his face flushed beneath the mask Peck Wilson had crafted for him, his scalp so red she could see the individual hairs in relief against the skin. He’d been coughing. Coughing or gagging. The man with the feet would have known as much, Terri and the mother and anybody passing by the door would have known, but not Dana. Because the curtains had been closed.

  “Is he all right?” she said now, coming up out of the chair and taking a step toward the bed. The nurse gave her an odd look, ducked her head and left the room on her quick padded feet. Bridger’s mother wore her face as if it weighed a thousand pounds, as if it had been hammered out of concrete. She angled away from the bed, moving ever so subtly—perhaps even unconsciously—to interpose herself between Dana and her son. Her mouth was in motion: “What? What did she say?”

  She was asking a question, but she wasn’t asking it of Dana. She wasn’t even looking at her. She was looking at Terri.

  Terri said something then, and Bridger’s mother said something back. Bridger was flushed. His hands were still, his good eye open and staring.

  She felt Terri’s hand on her arm and turned to her. “Mrs. Martin says he’s having trouble breathing,” she said. “They think maybe it’s just an adjustment to the surgery, but i
t’s possible maybe a suture”—she finger-spelled it—“came loose, inside, and they might have to reinsert the breathing tube, but it’s probably not that and it’s nothing abnormal, really—”

  “Tell her,” Bridger’s mother said, waving her arms as if she were flagging a cab, “that they’re going to have to run some tests and he’ll be here overnight, one more night at least—”

  Dana reached for the woman’s arm, a simple gesture, to take hold of her if only for an instant and tell her that she understood, that she could talk directly to her, that they were both involved in the same struggle, the same hope, the same love, but Bridger’s mother shrugged her off and gave her a look she knew only too well. Dana watched the pale blue eyes, Bridger’s eyes, focus on Terri. “Tell her he needs to rest now,” she said, and Dana read her perfectly.

  And Bridger? He never raised his hand—no, he didn’t so much as lift a finger.

  Then they were out on the pulsing streets with the heat in their faces and the too-green trees closing in overhead, the hateful oppressive trees and denunciatory shrubs and the screaming lawns, and she was back in the conduit of the nightmare, hurting all over again. There was the intersection, the first one—“No,” she said to Terri, directing her, “turn right here. Yes, that’s right, and at the end of the block hang a left”—and the sidewalk scrolled by and the cars parked along the street announced themselves one by one until she saw the Jetta, right where she’d left it, front wheels turned into the curb, the windshield black with the shade of the trees.

  Three

  HE WAS IN HIGH GEAR NOW, pedal to the metal, any last vestige of cool blown right out the tailpipe when he took that moron down in the bar, and he might as well have sent up one of those balloons they float over the used-car lots with a big inverted arrow pointing to the bull’s-eye on the back of his head. Another mistake in a day full of them. But he had no choice except to back down and he never backed down, no matter what the cost. And he was angry, he’d admit that. Angry at himself, at Natalia, at Bridger Martin and Dana Halter and the whole sad scary circus he’d somehow got himself involved in. He’d gone low on the guy, for the knee, because the big blowhards with the flabby tits and bowling-ball heads were always top-heavy and they went down fast. The only problem was the guy was swinging as his knee buckled and he’d grazed the side of Peck’s face with the plane of his fist and his assortment of biker rings, the silver swastika and the death’s head and the like, and now there was blood there.