Just Listen

by Sarah Dessen

  The station was quiet, a voice murmuring about ginkgo biloba as I made my way across the lobby. To my right, at the end of a hallway, I could see the booth, enclosed in glass. As I approached, the first thing I saw was Rolly at the controls in the little room adjacent to it; he had on a bright green T-shirt and a baseball hat turned backwards, his headphones over it. Clarke was beside him, drinking from a to-go coffee cup, the Sunday paper crossword puzzle in front of her. They were talking, and neither of them noticed my arrival. When I turned to the main booth, though, Owen was looking right at me.

  He was sitting at the microphone, a stack of CDs spread out in front of him. Judging by the look on his face, he was not happy to see me. It was worse than the day in the parking lot. Which made it that much more important that I push the door open and go inside. So I did.

  “Hi,” I said.

  He just looked at me for a second. “Hey,” he said finally, his voice flat.

  There was a buzz, and then Rolly’s voice came from over my head. “Annabel!” he said, his sunny tone a distinct contrast to Owen’s barely tolerant one. “Hey! What’s going on?”

  I looked over him, lifting a hand to wave. He waved back, as did Clarke. He was leaning in to say something else to me when he glanced at Owen—who was glaring at him—and slowly drew back, deciding against it. There was a click, and the microphone went off again.

  “What are you doing here?” Owen asked me.

  Of course he would come right out with it. “I need to talk to you,” I said.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I was aware of some sudden movement in the other room. I looked over to see Clarke hurriedly stuffing her newspaper into a bag, while Rolly took off his headphones, standing up. Who’s conflict-adverse now, I thought as they exited the room at a breakneck pace, Rolly slapping the light off as he went.

  “We’re, um, going to go ahead to the bacon,” he said to Owen as they passed behind me. “See you there?”

  Owen nodded, and Rolly smiled at me again before turning away. Clarke lingered for a moment, her hand on the open door. “You okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  She pulled her bag over her shoulder, giving Owen a look I couldn’t make out. Then she was running to catch up with Rolly, linking her hand with his, and they disappeared around the corner into the lobby.

  When I looked back at Owen, he was packing up as well, coiling the cord around his headphones. “I don’t have much time,” he said, not looking at me. “So if you’ve got something to say, go ahead and say it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s—” My heart was beating fast, and I felt sick. Normally this was where I stopped, chickened out, and turned back. “It’s about this,” I said, holding up the CD in my hand. My voice sounded shaky, so I cleared my throat. “It was supposed to blow my mind? Remember?”

  He glanced at it again, his expression wary. “Vaguely,” he said.

  “I listened to it last night,” I said. “But I wanted to be, um, sure that I got it. Your intention, I mean.”

  “My intention,” he repeated.

  “Well, you know,” I said, “there’s a lot left up to interpretation.” My voice sounded more solid now, finally. The power of music, indeed. “So I just wanted to make sure I really, you know, got it.”

  We just stared at each other, and it was all I could do not to look away. But I managed. And then, after a moment, he stuck out his hand for the CD.

  He looked at the case, then turned it over. “There’s no track listing on here,” he said.

  “Don’t you remember what you put on it?”

  “It was a long time ago.” He shot me a look. “And I made you a lot of CDs.”

  “Ten,” I told him. “I listened to them all.”

  “Really.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. You told me you wanted me to before I put that one on.”

  “Ah,” he said. “So now you care about what I want.”

  Outside, I could see Rolly and Clarke in his car, backing out of their parking space. He was saying something, and she was laughing, shaking her head.

  “I always cared about that,” I said to Owen.

  “Really? It’s been kind of hard to tell, by the way you’ve been avoiding me for the last two months.” He reached out to the console in front of him, hitting a button. The drawer slid open, and he put the disc in.

  “I figured that was what you wanted,” I said.

  “Why?” he said. He reached down, nudging up a knob beneath the player.

  I swallowed, hard. “You were the one who got out of the car in the parking lot that day and walked away,” I told him. “You’d had it with me.”

  “You ditched me at a club and wouldn’t even tell me why,” he shot back, his voice rising. He turned the knob a bit more. “I was pissed, Annabel.”

  “Exactly,” I said, and now I could hear static over our heads. “You were pissed. I’d let you down. I was not what you wanted me to be—”

  “—and so you just bolted,” he finished, hitting the knob again. The static grew louder. “Disappeared. One argument, and you’re out of there.”

  “What did you want me to do?” I said.

  “Tell me what was going on, for one,” he said. “God, tell me something. It’s like I said, I could have handled it.”

  “Like you were handling my not saying anything? You were furious with me.”

  “So what? I was entitled,” he said. He glanced at the console again. “People get mad, Annabel. It’s not the end of the world.”

  “So I was supposed to just explain myself, and let you be mad at me, and then maybe you might have gotten over it—”

  “I would have gotten over it.”

  “—or not,” I said, glaring at him. “Maybe it would have changed everything.”

  “That happened anyway!” he said. “I mean, look at us now. At least if you’d told me what was going on, we could have dealt with it. As it was, you just left everything hanging, no resolution, nothing. Is that what you wanted? That I be gone for good, rather than just mad for a little while?”

  I just stood there as he said this, the words sinking in. “I didn’t,” I said. “I didn’t realize that was an option.”

  “Of course it was,” he said, looking up at the speaker overhead; the static was even louder now. “Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been that bad. All you had to do was be honest. Tell me what really happened.”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “Is this? Ignoring and avoiding each other, acting like we were never friends? Maybe for you. It’s sucked for me. I don’t like playing games.”

  As he said this, I felt something in my stomach. It wasn’t the clenching sickness I was used to, though. More of a slow simmer. “I don’t like that, either,” I said. “But—”

  “If it’s so big that it’s worth all this,” he said, waving his hand to include the studio, the static, and us in the midst of it all, “all this crap and weirdness that’s happened since then, it’s too big to keep inside. You know that.”

  “No,” I said, “you know that, Owen. Because you don’t have problems with anger—yours or anyone else’s. You just use all your little phrases, and everything you’ve learned, and you’re always honest and you never regret a thing you say or how you act—”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “—and I’m not like that,” I finished. “I’m just not.”

  “Then what are you like, Annabel?” he shot back. “A liar, like you told me that first day? Come on. That was the biggest lie of all.”

  I just looked at him. My hands were shaking.

  “If you were a liar, you would have just lied to me,” he said, glancing at the monitor again as the static grew louder. “You would have just acted like everything was fine. But you didn’t.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head.

  “And don’t tell me this is easy for me, because it’s not. These last couple of months have sucked, not knowing what’s go
ing on with you. What is it, Annabel? What’s so bad you can’t even tell me?”

  I could feel my heart beating, my blood pulsing. Owen turned back to the console, raising the volume of the CD even higher, and as the sound filled my ears it hit me, all at once, what this feeling was. I was angry.

  Really angry. At him, for attacking me. At myself, for waiting until now to fight back. At every other chance I hadn’t taken. All these months, I’d been having this same reaction, but I’d blamed it on nerves, or fear. It wasn’t.

  “You don’t understand,” I said to him now.

  “Then tell me, and maybe I will,” he shot back, pushing the empty chair in front of him toward me. “And what,” he said, his voice loud, “is going on with this CD? Where’s the music? Why can’t we hear anything?”

  “What?” I said.

  He pushed a few buttons, swearing under his breath. “There’s nothing on this,” he said. “It’s blank.”

  “Isn’t that the point?”

  “What?” he said. “What point?”

  Oh my God, I thought. I reached forward for the chair he’d pushed toward me, then eased myself down into it. Here I’d thought this gesture was so deep, so profound, and it was just…a mistake. A malfunction. I was wrong, all wrong.

  Or not.

  It was all so loud, suddenly. His voice, my heart, the static, filling the room. I closed my eyes, willing myself back to the night before, when I’d been able to hear the things I’d kept silent for so long.

  Shhh, Annabel, I heard a voice say, but it sounded different this time. Familiar. It’s just me.

  Owen began to turn down the volume, and the static above us receded bit by bit. There comes a time in every life when the world gets quiet and the only thing left is your own heart. So you’d better learn to know the sound of it. Otherwise you’ll never understand what it’s saying.

  “Annabel?” Owen said. His voice was lower now. Closer. He sounded worried. “What is it?”

  He had already given me so much, but now I leaned toward him, asking him for one last thing. Something I knew he did better than anyone. “Don’t think or judge,” I said. “Just listen.”

  “Annabel? We’re just about to start the movie….” My mother’s voice was soft; she thought I’d been sleeping. “You about ready?”

  “Almost,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said. “We’ll be downstairs.”

  The day before, I hadn’t just told Owen about what happened to me at the party. I told him everything. The stuff with Sophie at school, Whitney’s recovery, Kirsten’s movie. Agreeing to do another commercial, talking with my dad about history, and listening to his blank CD the night before. He just sat there, listening to every single word. And when I was finally done, he said the two words that usually don’t mean anything, but this time, said it all.

  “I’m sorry, Annabel,” he told me. “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

  Maybe this was what I’d wanted, all along. Not an apology—and certainly not one from Owen—but an acknowledgment. What mattered most, though, was that I’d gotten through it, finally—beginning, middle, and end. Which did not, of course, mean it was over.

  “So what are you going to do?” he asked me later, when we were standing by the Land Cruiser, having had to leave the booth to make room for the next show, which was hosted by two cheery local realtors. “Are you going to call that woman? About the trial?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I knew that in any other circumstance he’d be telling me exactly how he felt about this, but this time he held back. For about a minute.

  “The thing is,” he said, “there aren’t a whole lot of opportunities in life to really make a difference. This is one of them.”

  “Easy for you to say,” I said. “You always do the right thing.”

  “No, I don’t,” he replied, shaking his head. “I just do the best I can—”

  “—under the circumstances, I know,” I finished for him. “But I’m scared. I don’t know if I can do it.”

  “Of course you can,” he said.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because you just did,” he said. “Coming here, and telling me that? That’s huge. Most people couldn’t do it. But you did.”

  “I had to,” I said. “I wanted to explain.”

  “And you can do it again,” he replied. “Just call that woman and tell her what you told me.”

  I reached up, running a hand through my hair. “There’s more to it than that,” I said. “What if she wants me to come testify or something? I’d have to tell my parents, my mom…. I don’t know if she can take it.”

  “She can.”

  “You don’t even know her,” I said.

  “I don’t have to,” he replied. “Look, this is important. You know that. So do what you have to do, and then go from there. Your mom just might surprise you.”

  I felt a lump rise in my throat. I wanted to believe this was true, and maybe it was.

  Owen dropped his bag to the ground, then crouched down beside it, rummaging around. I had a flash of him that day behind the school, doing this same thing, and how I’d had no idea in the world what he would come up with, what on earth Owen Armstrong had to offer me. After a moment, he pulled out a picture.

  “Here,” he said, handing it to me. “For inspiration.”

  It was the one he’d taken of me the night of Mallory’s photo shoot. I was standing in the powder-room doorway, no makeup, my face relaxed, the yellow glow of the light behind me. See, he’d said then, that’s what you look like, and as I stared down at it, it seemed like proof, finally, that I was not the girl from Mallory’s wall or the Kopf’s commercial or even the party that night in May. That something in me had changed that fall, because of Owen, even if I only now could really see it.

  “Mallory told me to give it to you,” he said. “But…”

  “But?” I said.

  “…I didn’t,” he finished.

  I knew maybe I shouldn’t ask. But I did anyway. “Why not?”

  “I liked it,” he said with a shrug. “I wanted to hang on to it.”

  It was the picture I was holding that afternoon when I finally got up the nerve to call Andrea Thomlinson, the woman whose card Emily had given me. I left a message on her voice mail, and she called back within ten minutes. Emily was right: She was nice. We talked for forty-five minutes. And when she asked if I’d come to the courthouse the next day, in case they needed me, even though I knew what it meant to do so, I agreed. As soon as we hung up, I called Owen.

  “Good for you,” he said when I told him what I’d done. His voice was warm, pleased, and I pressed the receiver closer, letting it fill my ear. “You did the right thing.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know. But now I have to get up in front of people….”

  “You can do it,” he said, and when I sighed, not at all sure of this, he said, “You can. Look, if you’re nervous about tomorrow—”

  “If?” I said.

  “—then I’ll go with you. If you want.”

  “You’d do that,” I said.

  “Sure,” he replied. So easily, no question. “Just tell me where and when.”

  We arranged to meet at the fountain in front of the courthouse, just before nine. I knew that even without him, I still wouldn’t be alone. But it was nice to have options.

  Now, I took one last look at the picture, then slid it into my bedside-table drawer.

  On my way to the living room, where my family was gathered, I stopped to look at the photo in the foyer. As always, my eyes were drawn to my own face first, then those of my sisters, and finally my mother, looking so small between us. But I saw it differently now.

  When that picture was taken, we were all gathered around my mother, sheltering her. But that was just one day, one shot. In the time since, we had arranged and rearranged ourselves so many times. We’d all gathered around Whitney, even when she didn’t want us to, and Kirsten and I had
gotten closer when she pushed us both away. We were still in flux, as had been clear at the table that night as I watched my mother and sisters come together again. Then, I’d been convinced I was on the outside, but really, I’d always been within arm’s reach. All I had to do was ask, and I, too, would be easily brought back, surrounded and immersed, finding myself safe, somewhere in between.

  I walked across the living room to where my family was gathered around the TV. No one saw me at first, and I just stood there for a second, looking at them all together. Finally, my mom turned her head, and I took in a breath, knowing that whatever I saw in her face, I could do this. I had to.

  “Annabel,” she said. Then she smiled before moving over to make a place for me beside her. “Come join us.”

  For a moment I hesitated, but then I looked at Whitney. She was watching me, her expression serious, and I thought of that night a year ago, when I’d pushed open a door and flipped a switch, exposing her to the light. What had happened to her had scared me to death, but she’d survived it. So I kept my eyes on her as I crossed the space between and took my seat.

  My mother smiled at me again, and I felt a wave of sadness and fear come over me, knowing what I was about to do. You about ready? she’d asked me earlier, and then, I hadn’t been. Maybe I never would be. But there was no way around it now. So as I got ready to tell my story again, I did what Owen had done for me so many times: I reached out a hand, to my mother and my family. And this time, I pulled them through with me.

  Chapter NINETEEN

  When I first got into the courtroom, I could only see Will Cash in glimpses. The back of his head here, the arm of his suit there, a profile, fleeting. At first this was frustrating and made me even more nervous, but as the time grew closer to when I’d be called, I began to think this was a good thing. Pieces and parts were always easier to process. The full picture, the entire story, was another thing entirely. But you just never knew. Sometimes, people could surprise you.