Head cases

by Scott Nicholson

"…died in that car wreck…"

  "…don't blame you for running away…"

  "…real lonely in here…"

  The voices crowded each other, babbling in Charlie's mind, murmured lullabies of pain that carried him special delivery into a secret land where words bled and paper wept and postmen only rang once. He drove back to the office, making a stop along the way.

  Charlie nodded to Susan at the back door of the post office. The Virginia Slim in her right hand had cherry lipstick stains on the butt. Her other hand was on her round hip.

  "Hey, Mr. Sunshine," she said. "Why don't you come back and join me at break time?"

  "Maybe later. Can I borrow your lighter?" Charlie wasn't sure if he had thought the words, or spoken out loud.

  "You don't smoke," she said, handing him the lighter.

  He entered the storage area. Bob stood just inside the door, grinning and fanning himself with an L.L. Bean catalog. Bob asked about the five bucks he had lent Charlie the Thursday before.

  "Check's in the mail, pal," Charlie said, making his way to the sorting area. The mountain of mail called to him, a cast of thousands clamoring for attention. Scraps of sorrow, broken phrases, and poisoned lines swirled in his mind like a siren song.

  "…sorry to have to tell you…"

  "…death of…"

  "…never did love you…"

  "…a question about your tax return…"

  "…kill you, you bastard…"

  "…what about the kids…"

  "…just couldn't face…"

  "…thank you for submitting your manuscript, but…"

  "…come to the funeral…"

  Charlie bent to the pile and thumbed the lighter, holding the flame to one corner of a drug store flyer. The flame flickered for a second, sending a thread of greasy black smoke to the ceiling, then burst brightly to life. Red stepped around the corner and dropped his coffee mug in amazement. A brown puddle spread around his spotlessly buffed boots.

  "What's going on, soldier?" Red bellowed.

  Charlie pulled the. 38 from under his jacket. Red's military training failed him when it mattered most, because all he could do was stand there with his jaw hanging down. Charlie fired twice, hitting Red in the stomach and knocking him backward. Red tumbled into a letter cart, his life leaking out to stain the snowy whiteness of the mail.

  The fire kicked up into a roaring blaze. Bob ran up, having heard the shots but unable to reconcile those sounds with the everyday hum of postal business. He looked into the eyes of Charlie, but his friend had been replaced by a scowling specter whose eyes shone like sun-bleached skulls.

  "Can't you hear them?" Charlie yelled. "The hurt…people and words…it's all our fault. We have to stop the hurt."

  Bob backed away, sweat popping up on his beefy face. "Uh, sure, buddy, whatever you say." After a hot, heavy pause, as if waiting for the cavalry to arrive, Bob added, "And you can just forget about the five bucks."

  "But the voices…we're to blame…letters and lies."

  Bob's eyes flitted to the now-raging fire and then settled on the gun pointed toward his face. He licked his lips. "Easy, now, Charlie…yeah, I can hear them."

  He tried to turn and run, but damned if Charlie wasn't another corn-fed country boy gone crazy and Bob's feet may as well have been freight scales. The bullet whistled into his throat. He fell like a sack of junk mail, without bouncing.

  Charlie grinned into the bonfire, adding a few armfuls of mail to the immolation, a burnt offering to some great Postmaster in the Sky. The voices in the letters screamed in pain and supplication. Out of the corner of his sepulchral eyes, Charlie saw Susan trying to crawl away from the loading dock. If he didn't stop her, she might rescue the letters in the drop box out front.

  Susan fell face-first as two bullets slammed into her back. Her half-finished cigarette rolled away from her slack hand and down the ramp, coming to a stop in the shadow of Charlie's jeep.

  He wheeled the remaining carts of letters to the fire and tipped them in, including the cart that contained the late Red, who stoically rode shotgun on his final mission. Charlie saluted him and crouched to avoid the black layer of smoke that clouded the office. He reloaded his gun.

  The voices in his head faded, leaving an echo as bitter as ash. Charlie could think his own thoughts again, but they made no more sense than the voices he had stilled, because he could only think in words, and words told lies.

  He went out the back door, the heat from the fire curling his hair. Sirens wailed in the distance, reaching Charlie as if from across a void, from another zip code. He ignored them as if they were fourth-class letters.

  Charlie climbed into the jeep. It was time to make the rounds.

  THE WEIGHT OF SILENCE

  By Scott Nicholson

  Silence wasn't golden, Katie thought. If silence were any metal, it would be lead: gray, heavy, toxic after prolonged exposure.

  Silence weighed upon her in the house, even with the television in the living room blasting a Dakota-Madison-Dirk love triangle, even with the radio upstairs tuned to New York's big-block classic rock, even with the windows open to invite the hum and roar from the street outside. Even with all that noise, Katie heard only the silence. Especially in the one room.

  The room she had painted sky blue and world green. The one where tiny clothes, blankets, and oversized books lined the shelves. Wooden blocks had stood stacked in the corner, bought because Katie herself had wooden blocks as a child. She'd placed a special order for them. Most of the toys were plastic these days. Cheaper, more disposable.

  Safer.

  For the third time that morning, she switched on the monitor system that Peter had installed. A little bit of static leaked from the speaker. She turned her head so that her ear would be closer. Too much silence.

  Stop it, Katie. You know you shouldn't be doing this to yourself.

  Of course she should know it. That's all she heard lately. The only voices that broke through the silence were those saying, "You shouldn't be doing this to yourself." Or else the flip side of that particular little greatest hit, a remake of an old standard, "Just put it behind you and move on."

  Peter said those things. Katie's mom chimed in as well. So did the doctors, the first one with a droopy mustache who looked as if he were into self-medication, the next an anorexic analyst who was much too desperate to find a crack in Katie's armor.

  But the loudest voice of all was her own. That unspoken voice that led the Shouldn't-Be chorus. The voice that could never scream away the silence. The voice that bled and cried and sang sad, tuneless songs.

  She clicked the monitor off. She hadn't really expected to hear anything. She knew better. She was only testing herself, making sure that it was true, that she was utterly and forever destroyed.

  I feel FAIRLY destroyed. Perhaps I'm as far as QUITE. But UTTERLY, hmm, I think I have miles to go before I reach an adverb of such extremity and finality.

  No. “Utterly” wasn't an adverb. It was a noun, a state of existence, a land of bleak cliffs and dark waters. And she knew how to enter that land.

  She headed for the stairs. One step up at a time. Slowly. Her legs knew the routine. How many trips over the past three weeks? A hundred? More?

  She reached the hall, then the first door on the left. Peter had closed it tightly this morning on his way to work. Peter kept telling her to stop leaving the door open at night. But Katie had never left the door open, not since-

  Leaving the door open would fall under the category of utterly. And Katie wasn't utterly. At least not yet. She touched the door handle.

  It was cold. Ice cold, grave cold, as cold as a cheek when-

  You shouldn't be doing this to yourself.

  But she already was. She turned the knob, the sound of the latch like an avalanche in the hush of a snowstorm. The door swung inward. Peter had oiled the hinges, because he said nothing woke a sleeping baby faster than squeaky hinges.

  The room was still too blue, stil
l far too verdant. Maybe she should slap on another coat, something suitably dismal and drab. This wasn't a room of air and life. This was a room of silence.

  Because silence crowded this room like death crowded a coffin. Even though Led Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven" jittered forth from the bedroom radio across the hall, even though the soap opera's music director was sustaining a tense organ chord, even though Katie's heart was rivaling John Bonham's bass beat, this room was owned by silence. The absence of sound hit Katie like a tidal wave, slapped her about the face, crushed the wind from her lungs. It smothered her.

  It accused her.

  She could still see the impressions that the four crib legs had made in the carpet. Peter had taken apart the crib while she was still in the hospital, trundled it off to some charity. He'd wanted to remove as many reminders as possible, so she could more quickly forget. But the one thing he couldn't remove was the memory that was burned into her eyes.

  And any time, like now, that she cared to try for utterly, all she had to do was pull the vision from somewhere behind her eyelids, rummage in that dark mental closet with its too-flimsy lock. All those nights of coming in this room, bending over, smiling in anticipation of that sinless face with its red cheeks, sniffing to see if the diaper were a one or a two, reaching to feel the small warmth.

  And then the rest of it.

  Amanda pale. Amanda's skin far too cool. Amanda not waking, ever.

  Katie blinked away the memory and left the room, so blinded by tears that she nearly ran into the doorjamb. She closed the door behind her, softly, because silence was golden and sleeping babies didn't cry. Her tears hadn't dried by the time Peter came home.

  He took one look at her, then set his briefcase by the door as if it were fireman's gear and he might have to douse the flames of a stock run. "You were in there again, weren't you?"

  She stared ahead, thanking God for television. The greatest invention ever for avoiding people's eyes. Now if only the couch would swallow her.

  "I'm going to buy a damned deadbolt for that room," he said, going straight to the kitchen for the martini waiting in the freezer. Mixed in the morning to brace himself for the effort of balancing vermouth and gin all evening. He made his usual trek from the refrigerator to the computer, sat down, and was booted up before he spoke again.

  "You shouldn't be doing this to yourself," he said.

  Julia debated thumbing up the volume on the television remote. No. That would only make him yell louder. Let him lose himself in his online trading.

  "How was your day?" she asked.

  "Somewhere between suicide and murder," he said. "The tech stocks fell off this afternoon. Had clients reaming out my ear over the phone."

  "They can't blame you for things that are out of your control," she said. She didn't understand how the whole system worked, people trading bits of paper and hope, all of it seeming remote from the real world and money.

  "Yeah, but they pay me to know," Peter said, the martini already two-thirds vanished, his fingers going from keyboard to mouse and back again. "Any idiot can guess or play a hunch. But I'm supposed to outperform the market."

  "I'm going to paint the nursery."

  "Damn. SofTech dropped another three points."

  Peter used to bring Amanda down in the mornings, have her at his feet while he caught up on the overnight trading in Japan. He would let Katie have an extra half-hour's sleep. But the moment Amanda started crying, Peter would hustle her up the stairs, drop her between Katie's breasts, and head back to the computer. "Can't concentrate with her making that racket," was one of his favorite sayings.

  Katie suddenly pictured one of those "dial-and-say" toys, where you pulled the string and the little arrow spun around. If Peter had made the toy, it would stop on a square and give one of his half-dozen patented lines: "You shouldn't be doing this to yourself" or "Just put it behind you and move on" or "We can always try again later, when you're over it."

  "I was reading an article today," she said. "It said SIDS could be caused by-"

  "I told you to stop with those damned parenting magazines."

  SIDS could be caused by several things. Linked to smoking, bottle feeding, stomach-sleeping, overheating. Or nothing at all. There were reports of mothers whose babies had simply stopped breathing while being held.

  Sometimes babies died for no apparent reason, through nobody's fault. The doctors had told her so a dozen times.

  Then why couldn't she put it behind her?

  Because Amanda had Katie's eyes. Even dead, even swaddled under six feet of dirt, even with eyelids butterfly-stitched in eternal slumber, those eyes stared through the earth and sky and walls to pierce Katie. They peeked in dreams and they blinked in those long black stretches of insomnia and they peered in from the windows of the house.

  Those begging, silent eyes.

  The eyes that, on dark nights when Peter was sound asleep, watched from the nursery.

  No, Katie, that's no way to think. Babies don't come back, not when they're gone. Just think of her as SLEEPING.

  Katie changed channels. Wheel of Fortune. Suitably vapid. Peter's fingers clicked over some keys, another fast-breaking deal.

  She glanced at him, his face bright from the glow of the computer screen. He didn't look like a millionaire. Neither did she. But they were, or soon would be. As soon as the insurance money came in.

  She almost hated Peter for that. Always insuring everything to the max. House, cars, people. They each had million-dollar life policies, and he'd insisted on taking one out for Amanda.

  "It's not morbid," he'd said. "Think of it as life's little lottery tickets."

  And even with the million due any day now, since the medical examiner had determined that the death was natural, Peter still had to toy with those stocks. As addicted as any slot-machine junkie. He'd scarcely had time for sorrow. He hadn't even cried since the funeral.

  But then, Peter knew how to get over it, how to put it behind him.

  "I'm going up," she said. "I'm tired."

  "Good, honey. You should get some rest." Not looking away from the screen.

  Katie went past him, not stooping for a kiss. He'd hardly even mentioned the million.

  She went up the stairs, looked at the door to the nursery. She shuddered, went into the bedroom, and turned off the radio. A faint hissing filled the sonic void, like air leaking from a tire. The monitor.

  She could have sworn she'd turned it off. Peter would be angry if he knew she'd been listening in on the nursery again. But Peter was downstairs. The silence from the empty room couldn't bother him.

  Only her. She sat on the bed and listened for the cries that didn't come, for the tiny coos that melted a mother's heart, for the squeals that could mean either delight or hunger. Amanda. A month old. So innocent.

  And Katie, so guilty. The doctors said it wasn't her fault, but what did they know? All they saw were blood tests, autopsy reports, charts, the evidence after the fact. They'd never held the living, breathing Amanda in their arms.

  The medical examiner had admitted that crib death was a "diagnosis of exclusion." A label they stuck on the corpse of a baby when no other cause was found. She tried not to think of the ME in the autopsy room, running his scalpel down the line of Amanda's tiny chest.

  Katie stood, her heart pounding. Had that been a cry? She strained to hear, but the monitor only vomited its soft static. Its accusing silence.

  She switched off the monitor, fingers trembling.

  If she started hearing sounds now, little baby squeaks, the rustle of small blankets, then she might start screaming and never stop. She might go utterly, beyond the reach of those brightly colored pills the doctors had prescribed. She got under the blankets and buried her head beneath the pillows.

  Peter came up after an hour or so. He undressed without speaking, slid in next to her, his body cold. He put an arm around her.

  "Honey?" he whispered. "You awake?"

  She nodded in the darkne
ss.

  "SofTech closed with a gain." His breath reeked of alcohol, though his speech wasn't slurred.

  "Good for you, honey," she whispered.

  "I know you've been putting off talking about it, but we really need to."

  Could she? Could she finally describe the dead hollow in her heart, the horror of a blue-skinned baby, the monstrous memory of watching emergency responders trying to resuscitate Amanda?

  "Do we have to?" she asked. She choked on tears that wouldn't seep from her eyes.

  "Nothing will bring her back." He paused, the wait made larger by the silence. "But we still need to do something about the money."

  Money. A million dollars against the life of her child.

  He hurried on before she could get mad or break down. "We really should invest it, you know. Tech stocks are a little uneven right now, but I think they're going to skyrocket in the next six months. We might be able to afford to move out of the city."

  She stiffened and turned away from him.

  "Christ, Katie. You really should put it behind you."

  "That article on SIDS," she said. "There's a link between smog levels and sudden infant death."

  "You're going to make yourself crazy if you keep reading that stuff," he said. "Sometimes, things just happen." He caressed her shoulder. "We can always try again later, you know."

  She responded with silence, a ten-ton nothingness that could crush even the strongest flutters of hope. Peter eventually gave up, his hand sliding from her shoulder, and was soon snoring.

  Katie awoke at three, in the dead stillness of night. A mother couldn't sleep through the crying of her baby. As she had so many nights after the birth, she dragged herself out of bed and went to the nursery. They should have put the crib in their bedroom, but Peter said they'd be okay with the monitor on.

  Katie's breasts had quit leaking over a week ago, but now they ached with longing. She closed her robe over them and went into the hall, quietly so that Peter could get his sleep. She opened the door and saw the eyes. The small eyes burned bright with hunger, need, love, loss. Questions.

  Katie went to them in the dark, and leaned over the crib. The small mouth opened, wanting air. The light flared on, stealing her own breath.