A River of Silence

by Susan Clayton-Goldner

  At the very least he would record the facts of his relationship with the boy, offer them as candidly as possible, and allow them to divulge whatever they could. But he didn’t allow himself a lot of hope they’d change anything. Bryce had recently discovered facts don’t always tell the truth.

  In spite of the pain of remembering, Bryce scrawled long into the night, recognizing that no matter how worthless the words might appear, they stood between him and the old silence that now terrorized him.

  When, in the early hours, he finally collapsed on his bunk again, Bryce lay awake, his eyes open in the semi-darkness. With the impossibility of sleep, hour after hour, he tried to imagine the remainder of his life. To see himself free and back in his little house next door to Tilly.

  He was glad they’d taken his wristwatch away. It would make him all too aware of the passage of time.

  The sound of a guard pushing a breakfast tray through the slot in the door signaled the timeless onslaught of another day. When Bryce lifted himself from his bunk, the routine was always the same. Standing in front of the stained sink, he splashed cold water on his face, neck and arms. After brushing his teeth, he ran the Bic razor over his beard, then handed it to the waiting guard.

  Finally, seated at the concrete table, Bryce jostled his food around the plastic tray and spooned up a bite or two of soggy pancakes and scrambled eggs made from powder.

  He burned few calories and was seldom hungry. Since placed in isolation, he rarely visited the yard or exercise rooms. Once in a while he worked out on the cell floor, a few sit ups and pushups, but for the most part he spent his day hunched over the concrete table writing a psychological profile of a little boy he knew for just over a year.

  When the guard announced his visitor, Bryce was surprised. It was too early for Kendra. And she wouldn’t have him called to the visitor room. They held their meetings in the cell Kendra jokingly referred to as the board room. “I’m bored all right,” Bryce had laughed.

  As he spotted Tilly seated on the other side of the Plexiglas, he couldn’t help his grin. But realizing the front guard had searched the old woman, asked her to remove her watch, turn over her pens and keys, leave her purse and other belongings with the guards in the reception area, his smile faded. He hated to imagine his proud friend shoved with all the others through a series of doors and corridors that finally opened into this awful room.

  His imprisonment didn’t make sense to him and there was no way to interpret it for Tilly. He had tried to break through the confusion and shame of his lost childhood, find respect and control as an adult. But it was hard to make it happen in this place, with his best friend and neighbor sitting across the wall from him. It was as if his imprisonment stained not only his life, but hers as well.

  Bryce slipped into the cubicle, then picked up the phone, turned on the amplification, and, in spite of himself, smiled again. “Tilly, it’s so damn good to see you. You look downright beautiful.” He nodded admiringly.

  She was dressed up for her visit, in a flowing, bright, flowered skirt and a purple blouse, with a matching hat perched on her gray curls. From her ears hung a pair of purple beaded earrings with feathers on the end.

  “How’s Mister Pickles?”

  “I swear that cat is an eatin’ machine. He’s done finished off a whole bag of Purina Cat Chow. Pickles would eat till his belly exploded.”

  “Thanks for taking care of him.” Bryce, unable to meet her gaze, stared at the graffiti scribbled on the booth wall. Why the fuck am I here? I used to be human.

  He finally looked into her eyes. “I don’t know what I’d do without you. Do you need any money for cat food or anything?”

  “No. That lawyer lady of yours, that Kendra Palmer, dropped by a couple times now. She said you told her it was okay if I let her into your place. When she finished pokin’ around, she slipped a little roll of cash with the key. Said for me to put it in my pickle jar for takin’ care of that cat and anything else I notice needs doing around your place.”

  “Kendra did that?”

  “Yeah, and she asked me millions of questions about you. I came here because I wanted to tell you myself about answering them. I even told her things you’d told me about your family back in Utah. She’s a good person and she wants to help you, I’m sure of it. So, I want to help her, too.” Her dark eyes were big and round behind her glasses.

  “I don’t know what to think, Tilly. The world isn’t making a lot of sense to me these days. You’re right, Kendra seems to care, but I sure as hell don’t know what’s in it for her.”

  “Maybe she just believes you’re innocent. Give that idea a try.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “I also wanted to give you this.” She slipped a photograph through the small drawer in the Plexiglas. “The guard said it was okay.”

  Bryce stared at the photograph of a man with a camera around his neck, entering Bryce’s front door. At first, he thought it might be Monty Taylor, the man who wanted to photograph Skyler at Lithia Park, but the size and hair color were all wrong. “Who is this?”

  “I don’t know for sure. But I think it was one of those newspaper reporters who been writing that trash about you.”

  “Are you saying he broke into my house?”

  She gave him a half smile, a sheepish look on her face. “I’m sure I locked the front door after I fed Pickles. I mean, I’m almost sure.”

  Tilly was getting old and didn’t always remember everything. “Don’t worry about it. When someone wants to get in, they usually find a way.”

  “Maybe he picked the lock like you see on television. But I figured he was the one found that poem you wrote about your baby girl. I want you to give this photograph to Kendra. Maybe that cowboy detective can find him and arrest his good-for-nothing ass. Isn’t breaking and entering a crime?”

  He smiled at her to protect her feelings, but inside he was furious. And he would ask Radhauser to look into it. With any luck, the man who did this would be held accountable.

  They made small talk about what was going on in the neighborhood.

  “Been all kinds of activity around your place since you been in here. Dana and Reggie packed up all the kids’ stuff. That Andrew Marshall DA guy was poking around. I told him I didn’t have a key. But when the cops came by with another search warrant, I let them in. Kendra said I was right to do that.”

  Bryce stared at his fingernails. “There’s no such thing as privacy once they get you into this place.”

  “I’m sorry for you,” Tilly said loud enough to raise his eyes again. “You be needing anything, boy?”

  “I could use a sunset.” He shook his head and smiled. “But you wouldn’t be able to get it past the guards.”

  “What’s it like here in this jailhouse? Is it awful?”

  Bryce struggled for a response, but couldn’t find one.

  “You be out soon, Bryce. That Kendra is one smart cookie and she won’t let you stay in this place for something you didn’t do no how.”

  “It feels good to know you believe in me, Tilly. You’ve been a great neighbor and friend, much better than I deserve.” He bowed his head.

  “What you mean by that? You been downright wonderful to me and my grandbabies. You patched my roof during that bad rainy spell. And hauled in three wheelbarrows of top soil for my vegetable garden. What kind of man does something like that for a fat ole colored woman like me?”

  She paused and waited, expected an answer, but his gaze remained averted, his head down. “Look at me, boy. I want you to answer.”

  Her demand raised Bryce’s head and he stared directly into her eyes.

  “You are very good,” she said again, dropping her hands into her lap and jutting her chin toward the ceiling. “You are one fine man and I oughta know. Now tell me what it’s like here.”

  He still had no answer, so he chatted with Tilly about her family and Mr. Grumpalump’s latest fiasco. When the buzzer sounded and she stood to leave, Bryce hated to see
her go. She reminded him of the other life, the world he used to live in, where people struggled to survive and helped each other cope with day-to-day problems.

  As the guard escorted him back, he sealed himself off from the jeers of the other prisoners and didn’t allow their words into his consciousness. Once inside his own cell, the place he came in some strange way to welcome, Bryce crouched at his little table and pondered Tilly’s question. “What’s it like in this jailhouse?”

  Staring at the blank yellow tablet in front of him, he thought about an answer, wished he’d been able to form the words for her, then flipped to a clean page and drafted a poem.

  A Prison Letter to Tilly

  When you asked what it’s like here

  No words rose to describe it.

  Without answer,

  I hung my shameful head.

  Now, I can tell you that prison

  Is a cubicle where a man lingers

  With his guts stretched like barbed wire.

  Early mornings that roll

  Out into months that rise

  Like a tide around your throat,

  Until you are demented

  And believe the morning is an ocean,

  Green water, white crests, an island

  Where you lie under bright sunlight,

  And orange bird of paradise

  Blossoming from your palm.

  But there are no flowers in these cells,

  No sea, and you hold nothing

  In your hands except fear

  That survives the absence of sunlight,

  Something that vacates

  The mind to expand the darkness

  Rising like an ocean against your thighs.

  It rises and there are no words for it,

  Though you search for them,

  Flip on the dim imprisoned light and watch it

  Float down your yellow blanket

  Over black water, the light arresting

  The dark for just an instant

  Opposing what coils inside your throat.

  It is a type of dread,

  A foreboding for which

  Your world, Tilly, has no words.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  When, less than twenty-four hours after Tilly left, Bryce was called out for another visit, it mystified him.

  “Number three, Bryce.” The guard nodded toward the third booth where a tall man, casually dressed in pressed blue jeans and a gray, chambray short-sleeved shirt, stood on the other side of the Plexiglas wall. His graying, teak-colored hair was combed back from his high forehead and hung just over the collar of his shirt. A trimmed reddish beard, laced with gray, gave him the look of a country western singer.

  For an instant, Bryce panicked, feared Kendra Palmer had been removed from his case and someone else assigned. But this man didn’t look like an attorney—his tanned skin was weathered like a man who worked in the sun. Their eyes met and held as Bryce took his seat, picked up the receiver, and turned on the amplifier. The man, following Bryce’s lead, pressed the phone against his ear, his pale blue eyes never leaving Bryce’s face.

  “You don’t know who I am, do you, Cale?” The man swallowed as if he were nervous. The muscles in his throat tightened above his shirt collar.

  No one had called him Cale since he left Wheatley, Utah. He started calling himself Bryce at the Institute—an attempt to forget the life that seemed to have forgotten him. Was this someone who knew him in Wheatley? As he stared into the face on the other side of the glass, Bryce rummaged through his memory for a name, but came up with none. Still, there was something vaguely familiar about the way his blue eyes caught the light and twinkled. “Should I know you?”

  The man smiled, a sad closed-mouth grin. “Yes. Indeed you should. But if you suddenly appeared in front of me after all these years, I wouldn’t have the faintest notion who you were, either.”

  “So, are you going to tell me?”

  “I’m Jason,” he said. “Your big brother.”

  For a moment, Bryce was too shocked to speak and kept shaking his head. “Holy shit,” he finally choked out. “Jason. I was six years old and you weren’t more than eighteen the last time I saw you. I don’t believe it. I just don’t believe it.”

  Flooded with emotions and old memories, Bryce struggled to find the words to talk to this brother he hadn’t seen since childhood. With such an expanse of time between them, a kind of mourning rose inside him. It was something as tender and terrible as grief over the lost years and broken dreams. Jason had always been so kind to his little brother. But then, like everything else, Jason disappeared.

  Bryce trembled, blinked away tears. “What in the hell are you doing here? How long has it been? How did you find me?” All the questions he’d saved up for years ran together in that first blush of fever at seeing Jason again.

  “Whoa, Cale, one question at a time. I’m here to see you. Best I can remember, the last time I saw you was the day before you and Mom disappeared with her boyfriend. Dad shot himself the next morning—less than a week before I left for basic training. ”

  “I begged the social worker to let me come home, but she told me Dad was dead and you’d joined the army.” Again, Bryce locked eyes with Jason. “Of course, he wasn’t really my father, was he?”

  It was strange, but ever since he started talking to that psychiatrist and writing out things for Kendra, his entire life seemed like one enormous boil. And the pressure had finally reached the point where the only relief was to lance it, to drain away his own spiritual abscess through facing the truth.

  “No, I don’t think he was...” Jason hesitated, stared at his brother as if seeking permission to go on, and to Bryce’s relief, he found it. “He told me the last time we went hunting together that Mom had an affair with some big shot from Kennecott Copper she met waitressing at Robertson’s Inn. She was a real looker then. Every man she met was a little bit in love with her. But especially Dad. Her leaving ate him alive. I figure that’s why he did it.”

  “I was so young,” Bryce said. “I didn’t know what was going on half the time.”

  Jason leaned forward. “I still miss him. Can you believe that? He’s been dead more than half my life. For years, I thought I was going crazy. When I was stationed in Germany, I’d see him walking down a street in Munich, kind of bent over like he was. Then when I believed I’d gotten over it, there he was again on a shopping mall escalator in Salt Lake.” Jason shook his head. “My wife, Katja, says it’s because I never saw him dead. It all happened so fast, there’s nothing for me to remember except that closed box sitting over a big hole in the ground.”

  Bryce wanted to put his arm around Jason’s shoulder, tell him what a good son he’d been and how much Isaiah Bryce had cared about him. “He sure as hell hated my guts.” The hardness of his own words jolted Bryce, but shock didn’t silence him. “I couldn’t figure it out and I tried and tried to get him to love me.”

  Jason was quiet for a few seconds, and then, his voice low, said, “Yeah, I know it must have seemed that way. You were a constant reminder, I guess, but I think it had more to do with his loving her than his really hating you. God knows why, but he did. Love’s a strange bird, little brother. No telling where it’s gonna fly.”

  Bryce laughed. “I finally figured it out.”

  “Figured love out?”

  “No. I figured out the man who took Mom and me to that fancy hotel in Salt Lake was my birth father. I think I caught on that night, he was so nice to me. It’s just that I didn’t know what to do about it.”

  Jason nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I think, too, and I’m pretty sure he’s the one who flew off with Mom’s heart, but she never admitted it, at least not to me. After Dad died, I didn’t hear from her for years. Of course, I didn’t try to get in touch with her either. I blamed her for Dad’s suicide. Actually, I thought I hated her. Then one day I got a letter.”

  Jason gestured with his right hand, turned the palm toward the ceiling. �
�The army’s pretty good about keeping track of its soldiers. Her letter found me. She wrote that she went to Alcoholics Anonymous because she wanted to make amends. I guess she stopped drinking, cold turkey, then got herself a job in a hospice.”

  “Is she...I...I...mean...do you know if she’s still alive?”

  “Yes, very much so,” Jason said. “She lives in Salt Lake.”

  Bryce closed his eyes for a second, trying to imagine their mother now, then opened them again. “Do you ever see her?”

  “Yeah, pretty often. She’s not more than five miles away from Katja and me. We have her over for dinner almost every week. Always on holidays. What she lacked in being a mother to us, she’s found with her grandkids. They adore her.”

  Unlike Bryce, Jason had managed to move forward and forgive their mother. And that forgiveness somehow weaved itself around his brother and held the past in its place behind him.

  “She got married again,” Jason said. “To a nice guy whose wife died of cancer. She met him in the hospice. Regrets have nearly eaten her up, especially about you. When I told her what happened, that I was flying to Oregon, she hid her face in her hands and sobbed.”

  “How did you know where to find me?”

  “I didn’t.” Jason's eyes widened. “Not really. I read about the case in the paper, saw a few news clips on television, but I thought it was just a coincidence, a man with the same name. I couldn’t imagine you in Oregon, and the mug shot, well, it didn’t exactly look like the six-year-old I remembered. And then a private investigator found me. He said he was working with Detective Radhauser and was hired by your attorney.”

  “You’re kidding.” How could he repay Kendra Palmer for everything she’d done for him?

  Jason continued. “The PI said you were in trouble and needed all the support you could get from family and friends. He’s a hell of a nice guy, even offered to send me the ticket. So here I am. It’s about time, don’t you think?”