What the Waves Know

by Tamara Valentine

  “Robert!” The pretty young teacher, Miss Weatherall, visibly paled. “We do not use that word.” I noted the fact that she had not added, “No, she isn’t.”

  “Yeah, you big stupid goober head.” A small girl in a tattered pink shirt leaned forward from the back row, pushing back a tangle of mousy brown curls. “She’s just quiet.”

  “And we do not call our friends ‘big stupid goober heads.’” Miss Weatherall flicked her eyes from the red-haired boy to the girl.

  “I didn’t call my friend a big stupid goober head; I called Robert one.” Her name was Libby Frederickson, and I found out later that her mother had died of leukemia when she was three, which explained the array of mismatched outfits she wore to school and the explosion of curls left untamed by a mother’s hand. She became the first and only friend I would know before leaving school for good.

  The next month passed with all the speed of honey in a hive in February until one afternoon when Libby and I were crouched low catching ants beside a puddle, placing them one by one beside the moat we had carved along the edge. I set my ant, a big fat black creature with long front legs, down on the edge just as a pudgy black boot stomped up beside me.

  “Hey, look, everyone! Silent Sam plays with ants because nobody else w-ants to play with her!” The words crooned down around me in a little jingle, crunching up my stomach until I could barely breathe.

  “Shut up, goober head!” Libby pounced to her feet.

  “Silent Sam, Silent Sam, mouth stuck shut with a jar of jam!”

  I stared down at the ant chewing my lip, a habit I’d acquired to remind myself my mouth was there, even if for no other reason than to chew my own skin off.

  “I said, shut up!” Libby stepped forward just as Robert brought his boot squarely down on the ant I’d been playing with. Its front legs began pedaling pathetically in the air while it died and I mopped mud from the corner of one eye.

  “Ooooohhhh,” sang Robert. “Look, Silent Sam’s a crybaby!”

  I had just cleared the dirt from my eyeball when I saw Libby go airborne. “She is not!” she screamed, shoving Robert back.

  “Is, too!” Robert snapped, shoving Libby so hard she sailed backward into the middle of the moat with a loud splat.

  I am not at all sure where the anger inside of me came from; it seemed to bubble through a tiny opening in my gut and exploded out of me with volcanic force. For one singular moment I was Electra, grabbing two fistfuls of mud, chucking one after the other at Robert until there was nothing left standing before me but a muddy brown blob, which did indeed make him look every bit like a big fat goober head. In my altered state, there was no way of knowing a small rock had been embedded in the last mud bomb. It had hit Robert flatly on the cheek with sufficient force to draw a trickle of blood below his eye.

  Sitting in a plastic chair in the principal’s office later, I tried to stitch together the lopped-off sentences slithering through the crack at the bottom of the door.

  “Specialized programming . . . children with unique needs . . . If she could learn sign language, even . . .”

  Digging the sharp corners of my nails into the pads of my fingers, I squeezed my eyes closed, willing the world away. A faint tickle shivered at the bottom of my throat. I pressed my lips together and swallowed three times until the urge to scream had passed.

  “You are sorely mistaken if you think for one minute I’m going to let you place my daughter in a classroom full of retarded children!”

  “We do not use that word, Mrs. Haywood,” I heard Miss Weatherall say softly. The funny thing is, it would have stung less if she’d said it with force rather than pity.

  “I’m sorry, but this whole conversation is retarded. Iz is not delayed.” My mother stormed through the door, latching on to my hand, and dragged me bouncing like a tin can on a string beside her to the car.

  “Izabella Rae. You do not need specialized education and we both damn well know it. You’re too smart for your own fucking good. I’m not going to let them stick you in a class full of . . .” Retards. She didn’t say it, but the word slipped into the car between us like a letter whisked through the crack of a locked door. “. . . people who need it.” She sighed, looking at me sidelong. “Although maybe I should after that shenanigan today.” I could see her weighing her options and coming up a fistful short. “What am I going to do with you? You know Daddy wouldn’t want this.”

  I shrugged, staring hard at the trees flipping past my window. Why she thought I cared what my father wanted was a mystery to me. In the time since my father left, my sadness had turned to guilt, and my guilt had landed flatly on anger. I didn’t give two soft hoots what either of them wanted. They could both pack all their wants and ship them to Timbuktu for all I cared.

  “Look at me.” Turning my head further toward the window, I started counting the trees. “I said, look at me!” She grabbed my chin, wrenching it toward her so hard I bit the inside of my lip. “Goddamn it, Iz. What is going on inside that head of yours?”

  What would I have said if I could have answered? She could never know what it meant to hear the whispers of teachers who think you’re stupid slipping through the one-inch gap beneath the door. Or to have to sit at a desk with an idiotic support teacher while all the other kids go off to play. What did she know about having only one measly friend in the whole wide world? One friend who doesn’t care that you’re a freak, because she is, too. Who doesn’t care if you talk, because she can talk enough for both of you. Who knows what it feels like to have a parent spin off the face of the world and leave you sitting there with your feet stuck to the ground. What did she know about being yanked out of school just when you were getting to be best friends?

  I shrugged, turning back to the passenger window. Five . . . six . . . seven . . . A sharp sting settled in my throat, making it so hard to breathe, my eyes began to water. I swiped the corner of my lashes with my shoulder and counted harder until she gave up.

  That night, I lay in bed for hours watching the shadows creep along my walls like spirits who’d wriggled free of their forests, wondering if this was the Nikommo. I had been trailing one for a good ten minutes, trying to find its source, when my mother pushed open my door, causing me to close my eyes and lose sight of it altogether. The bed barely shifted when she sat on it. I can’t say how long she stared at me before I felt her fingers run across the scabs on my lips with a sigh that caught like a cobweb in the air between us.

  “Jesus, Iz. Don’t do it. Just once, don’t follow him.” I clenched my eyes and rolled over with a sleepy snort, waiting for her to leave. “I miss him, too, you know.”

  That, I knew, was a lie. She didn’t love him, not like I did. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d really acted like she cared. Then, when I was just on the shirttails of sleep, it came back to me.

  I had been watching The Flinstones, fixated on Fred sneaking into Barney’s house wearing a burglar’s mask, when there was a loud crash from the upstairs bathroom. On the television, Betty grabbed Fred by the wrist and judo chopped him from side to side with a bam, bam, bam. Then the banging of Fred’s head against the stone floor turned to pounding at the top of the steps. Betty’s voice melted into my mother’s, yelling for my father to open the door. A moment later, she came tripping down the stairs and grabbed the phone, tugging the cord until she’d pulled the coil straight and it threatened to zing her into space like a slingshot. Balancing the receiver between her shoulder and ear, she dumped the junk drawer, fishing a key out of the mess before dropping the phone to the floor and disappearing back upstairs. I knew she’d gotten the door open by the squeal of the hinges my father had been forgetting to oil for the past three years. There was a sharp muffled scream. The pulsing screech of sirens. Men in blue uniforms with a gurney. When she came back downstairs, my mother was wrapped around my father like a cocoon, leading him down the steps. Two white towels looped around his wrists and I could just make out the blooms of crimson unfurling across the ter
ry cloth like petals reaching for the sun. She laid him on the gurney and tucked the sheets around him, nuzzling his head. I could see she was crying. That’s when it happened. When they tried to wheel my father out, she would not let go of his hand, had held on so tight one of the medics was forced to pry her fingers free.

  “Come on, Iz.” She’d tugged me to the car so quickly I never did find out what happened to Fred and Betty.

  “What’s wrong with Daddy?”

  “He got hurt.” She choked, swiping at her cheeks. “But it’s okay now. He’s going to be okay.” Even then, I’d known she didn’t believe it, but she was wrong. He came home two weeks later, bandaged like a mummy and carting a bag of brown bottles. When he saw me, he scooped me into a bear hug.

  “Are you better now?”

  “All better.” He kissed my cheek, then walked to the garbage pail. “See? I don’t even need medicine anymore.” And he threw the bottles away.

  That was the last time. The last time I could recall my mother really acting like she cared.

  Two weeks after I crowned Robert with a loaded mud bomb, my mother delivered me to my first session with Dr. Miller, a young psychiatry graduate from the Rhode Island Mental Health Association, in an office painted in bright greens and purples with Winnie the Pooh sketched on the walls. A year later, there was Dr. Nichols, and then Miss Lincoln, a pediatric play therapist who spoke to me through puppets. There was an art therapist, a slew of medical doctors, audiologists, neurologists, and internists.

  The first year of my silence was blamed on post-traumatic stress disorder. The second year on acquired behavioral deficit. This went on until the seventh year, when it was blamed on sheer stubbornness and my mother plopped me into a chair in Dr. Boni’s office. Dr. Boni was a fossil of a therapist—old enough to have met Sigmund Freud in person. The thing that set Dr. Boni apart was he never pretended to understand what it was like to have your voice box come up empty as a tin of cookies on Christmas Day.

  “What is it like to never speak?”

  It may sound strange, but I was thrown by the question. Nobody had ever had the balls to ask me that before, and the look on his face said he really wanted to know.

  Even if I had agreed to answer the question for him, I could not. You don’t really know what it’s like until you are six years old on Santa’s lap at JCPenney’s and all you ever wanted was a cotton-candy-pink dollhouse with green shutters, but you have no words to ask, so you get another stupid paint by numbers. Seven years old and shaken awake by a nightmare you are left holding in your heart because you have no voice to give it wings. Eight years old and folded neatly in your Sunday best, unable to save your soul by confessing that you chased your father straight out of existence. Nine years old and pelted with snowballs by strangers screaming, “Silent Sam,” until you are sure you have breathed your last because you cannot yell for help. Ten years old when a girl tells the whole world you were born without a tongue and with no way to call her a bitch. Eleven years old and you know every single chapter of Treasure Island, but can’t talk about it with anyone. Twelve years old when the cutest boy in the world says “hi” at the ice cream shop, but you can’t answer, so he walks away. Thirteen years old and given a child’s menu because you can’t explain you’re a grown-up now.

  Then, three weeks before your fourteenth birthday, you look down at the bright red slash on your clean white panties unable to tell anyone, and even if you could speak, it doesn’t matter because there is nobody to tell anyway. Only then does the situation really start to take shape in a way Dr. Boni would never understand.

  To exist without a voice is to forever live in your weakest form. You are forced to boil a universe of feelings, fears, and dreams down to a half-inch margin in a tiny flip-top notebook.

  Quiet, I scribbled, which was an outright lie because when you don’t speak you are stuck inside yourself with a gazillion unspoken thoughts clamoring inside their cage rattling to be freed. You can hear a duck crinkle to the grass across four fields during hunting season, hear your mother sigh a thousand dead dreams two rooms away.

  Dr. Boni looked deflated.

  The monologues commenced each Wednesday at four o’clock, when Dr. Boni pinched the crease of his trousers between his fingers, hiking them over two twiggy ankles, and sat down. The session ended when he punched his arm clear of his jacket cuff to glance at his watch. He would ask me questions I hadn’t one spit of an inkling how to answer: Why won’t you speak? What are you afraid of? What did your mother do to make you so angry with her?

  Nothing, I scribbled. Out the window, a pear tree bowled over in the wind. For a full minute, I watched to see if it would snap in two, trying to sort out how anything fragile survives under the weight of the world.

  At first I refused to tell him anything. I’d just sit in the chair and doodle while he asked questions. Sometimes he just talked. Then I started writing him things I knew he couldn’t tell my mother just to see if it would drive him crazy holding on to my secrets for me, or if he’d tell her when I was out of the room. I told him that I snuck my mother’s cigarettes every now and then and that Libby and I had tried drinking once. I even told him that sometimes I snuck out after my mother fell asleep and slipped down to the docks to watch the moon dance in the ocean.

  I knew the rules and my mother had agreed to them: he would not disclose anything that did not put my life in danger or hurt anyone else. Anything else was fair game. To his credit, he never did tell and after a while he kind of grew on me because of it. Once, he asked me why I felt I couldn’t tell my mother my secrets, what was I afraid would happen? I grabbed a piece of paper from his desk and gave him an honest answer.

  They would lose their magic.

  The questions continued for six months until on my final visit it was laid clear there would be no going forward without first going back.

  “Listen, you’re paying for my professional opinion, so here it is.”

  I was spinning myself dizzy in Dr. Boni’s desk chair—which let out a high-pitched squeal on every turn while he spoke with my mother—staring at a fly somebody had seen fit to smash, but not remove, from the ceiling fan.

  “Izabella is not trying to hurt herself by doing this, and she certainly isn’t trying to hurt you.”

  The chair spun faster, squealed louder.

  “She’s trying to protect herself the only way she knows how. She has blocked everything about the incident with her father out of her conscious mind: the police, the night, all of it.”

  Faster, faster, faster. Louder, louder, louder . . . until I thought I might throw up right there from spinning his words away. Vaguely, I felt his eyes flick in my direction, heard him pause, and veer away from the details of that night.

  “She has shut the door on the whole affair so tightly,” he continued cautiously, “her voice is caught on the other side. She’s scared—scared of what she’ll find if she opens it. Ultimately, the only way to get beyond a fear that overpowering is to show her the monsters in the closet are not going to destroy her. She has to stand face-to-face with that day and survive the moment.”

  “You want me to take her back?” A tinge of panic laced my mother’s question.

  “That’s my recommendation.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can’t protect her from her own memory.”

  “What if . . .” She glanced at me and let the question die in the air.

  “She is not like her father.” Dr. Boni looked squarely at my mother. “It isn’t the same thing. This is not,” he paused, glancing my way, “organic in nature.”

  I had no idea what the statement meant, unless he was implying I was free of pesticides, but my stomach knotted into a ball just the same. Besides, I was like my father, just like him. I had his dimples, and his nose, and his freckles. I danced with the moon and understood the tides, and even if I could not hear the Nikommo, I knew that they were real.

  My mother stared at him quietly for a drawn-out moment
then grabbed her bag and held the door for me before following me out to the parking lot.

  “Iz.” My mother shook her head, marching over to the car. “I swear to God you are determined to find my last breaking point.”

  My mother’s last breaking point arrived on the morning of October 3, 1974. All worn out with doctors and tests, she decided Dr. Boni was right: my voice was not a thing gone, but missing. So, on my fourteenth birthday, we set sail to find it. She never said this was the case, exactly, but I could read the truth in the deep weariness casting webs of wrinkles around her eyes.

  The morning arrived not to the mountain of brightly beribboned gifts every girl wishes for, but to three mismatched steamer trunks propped beside our front door and my mother’s rear end peeping into the room over a small crate. Halfway down the stairs, a small whimper caused me to stop and try to make sense of the scene while my mother wriggled herself free.

  “Happy birthday, Iz!” Lifting a handful of wrinkles, she popped the small animal into the crook of my elbow. “He’s a shar-pei.”

  The puppy studied the room with watery bronze eyes, laying one tiny paw flatly against my jaw as if searching for some piece of familiarity, a paper-strewn corner, a brother or sister to nip his tail, the warm teat of his mother. A small shiver moved over the animal’s body, causing my fingers to quiver right along with him, and I realized at the same moment he did that he was alone. Some small corner of the fabric of me snagged, threatening to unravel. With another whine, the puppy snuggled into me, tucking his nose under the fold of my robe and licking my wrist.

  “He’s yours.”

  Squiggling my pinky between the puppy’s ribs and my neck, I rubbed his soft fur as he chewed my finger softly then sucked at it, the shiver subsiding. A moment later, the quiet sniffing deepened and the puppy’s head tottered into my curls with a sleepy weight tumbling right into an empty hole inside of me. In one flat half second, I knew I would never let him go, never let him be scared or alone again.

  I rubbed the puppy’s ear, eyeing the trunks at the front door.