Dead Silence

by Norah McClintock

  “He came here this morning,” Sal’s mother said.

  “Vin?” I said, like I couldn’t believe he would do something like that. Well, I couldn’t.

  “The three of you were friends for such a long time,” she said. “So I asked him. I think Salvatore would like to know his old friends were there for him. Old friends are the most important kind, no?”

  “Sure,” I said. But my insides felt all twisted up. Boy, I wished things were different.

  Riel was quiet for a few minutes after we got to the car, but I was pretty sure I knew what he was thinking about. Finally he said, “When was the last time you saw Vin?”

  Yeah, I was right.

  “A couple of months ago, I guess. Why?” As if I didn’t already know the answer. Riel didn’t approve of Vin. Vin got into too much trouble, and lately most of it was serious.

  “Just wondering,” he said. “Do you know if Sal had seen him lately?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. It didn’t seem likely to me, given how Sal felt about Vin. “Why?” As if I didn’t already know the answer to that one, either.

  “Just wondering,” Riel said again.

  Right. He would probably wonder his way over to the telephone later to call Dave, who, if he hadn’t already done it, would knock on Vin’s door and ask him some questions.

  I had to work the next day, and I was glad. It gave me something to do. I wouldn’t have to think about Sal. The store I worked at was one of those big ones that’s open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I usually worked a couple of four-hour shifts, five to nine, during the week and one or two longer shifts on either Saturday or Sunday or, every once in a while, on both days. Today I was working eight to four thirty. My job was stocking the shelves. It was easy work. Well, it was easy for most people. I was pushing a skid of canned and creamed corn to the canned vegetable aisle when I heard the floor manager chewing someone out.

  “No, no, no,” he was saying. “Look at the pictures, for Pete’s sake. Carrots. Peas. Beans. They’re vegetables. And what are you putting on the shelf? Cans of pineapple. Pineapple is a fruit.”

  The guy he was yelling at, a beefy guy with washed-out blond hair and a twitchy left leg that never seemed to stop moving, was standing in the middle of the aisle with his shoulders hunched over and his head down, like he was afraid the floor manager was going to start lobbing those cans of pineapple at him. It was Alex Farmington, one of the kids from school.

  “Do you understand what I’m telling you, Alex?” the floor manager, Mr. Geordi, said.

  “Barry told me to take these cans and fill the hole in aisle six,” Alex said. He glanced up at the big sign that hung over the middle of the aisle. It had the aisle number on it—six—plus what was in the aisle: canned fruit, canned vegetables, soups, crackers, and cookies.

  “He meant the hole in the fruit section,” Mr. Geordi said, sounding even more exasperated, although he was trying to keep his voice down. I couldn’t tell if that was because he was trying to stay calm so that Alex didn’t get even more rattled, or if he just didn’t want any of the customers to hear him yelling at one of the disabled employees. The company that owned the store made a big deal of its hiring policy. Every store in the whole chain had a couple of employees who were disabled in some way. Maybe the company did it because they were really nice, or maybe they did it because they wanted their customers to think they really cared. I don’t know. But right now it looked like Mr. Geordi couldn’t believe that he was standing there explaining the difference between pineapple and corn to one of his workers. “This is the vegetable section. Get these cans out of here and put them where they belong. You think you can do that, Alex?”

  Alex nodded.

  “Good,” Mr. Geordi said. It came out sounding kind of sarcastic, and he was muttering to himself when he went past me a few seconds later. Most people in the store were nice to Alex. Not Mr. Geordi. He was mostly impatient. But he was that way with everyone. I thought that maybe being impatient with Alex was his way of not treating him differently. Rebecca didn’t agree. When I told her about Mr. Geordi and Alex, she said, “I bet he wouldn’t talk to Alex like that if he was missing a leg or if he was blind. Some people are so backward about intellectual disabilities, they’re practically medieval.”

  Alex started taking the cans of pineapple off the shelf one by one and putting them back into the cartons he had just taken them out of. I pushed my skid down to him. When he was hired, he was paired with me for a couple of shifts so that I could show him what he was supposed to do and the right way to do it. He seemed really nervous, like he was afraid all the time that he was going to make a mistake. When I first met him, I didn’t want to ask him what was wrong with him—I thought it would be rude or he’d take it the wrong way. But he came right out and told me. He said he’d been in an accident, something to do with a tractor, and that he’d been unconscious for nearly a month. He said when he woke up, he had to learn to do everything all over again—walk, talk, feed himself. Everything. I couldn’t even imagine what that must have been like. He was kind of uncoordinated, he worked slowly, and his left leg was always twitching. But he sure tried hard.

  “Let me give you a hand, Alex,” I said.

  He brightened up when he saw me. “It’s okay, Mike,” he said. “I can do it.”

  “Yeah, but your pineapple is where my corn is supposed to be and my shift ends in fifteen minutes. I don’t want to have to work late if I don’t have to.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. His face turned red, like now he was afraid that I was going to get mad.

  “It’s no big deal,” I said. “It’ll just go faster if we do it together.”

  I grabbed the cans four at a time and dumped them into the cartons. Alex continued on doing things his way—slow and deliberate, one can at a time. While I worked, I said, “Did the cops talk to you, Alex?”

  “The cops?” he said. “What about?”

  “About what happened at school. You know, the kid who got killed.”

  “I didn’t see anything,” Alex said. “I was inside the school.”

  “But did they talk to you about something that happened earlier in the week, on Monday?”

  He looked confused. I wondered if he had seen Teddy jab Sal after all. Or, if he had, I wondered if he remembered.

  “No,” he said. “The cops didn’t talk to me. I didn’t see anything.”

  Finally the shelf space I needed was empty, and Alex pushed his cartons of pineapple down to the other end of the aisle. He had only got half of them unpacked and into the right place by the time I had finished unpacking my skid, which had twice as many cans on it. I called good-bye to him and headed back to the storeroom, where I swiped my employee card to sign out. I pushed open the door to the employee entrance, stepped out into the parking lot behind the store, and just about collided with Bailey Zackery. Kim had said that Bailey had been with Teddy when Teddy started hassling Staci. I wondered what he was doing here. I sure hoped the store hadn’t hired him, because I didn’t think I could stand to work side by side with someone who had been in on giving Sal a hard time, someone who might even have been involved in what happened or who might know something but wasn’t telling the cops.

  We looked at each other for a few seconds. Then I walked past him and didn’t look back.

  Riel was waiting for me in the parking lot. We drove to the funeral parlor where they had Sal’s coffin. Riel made me sign the visitors’ book, and we went in. People were coming and going. In between, they went up to Sal’s parents, who were sitting up near the coffin, and talked to them and hugged them. The whole time I was there, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I kept looking at the coffin and thinking about what was inside. I hate to say it, because I felt bad for Sal’s parents, but I was glad to get out of there.

  That night I went over to Rebecca’s. We watched a couple of movies. Rebecca didn’t press me to talk. She seemed to understand how I felt. Maybe she felt the same way. Rebecca ha
dn’t known Sal for anywhere near as long as I had, but she had liked him a lot.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  On Sunday Rebecca had to go with her parents to see her grandparents up in Muskoka. I tried to do some homework, but I couldn’t concentrate. I decided to take a walk, and you know where I ended up? At Vin’s house.

  “Mike,” his mother said when she answered the door. “What a surprise!” She looked surprised, too, like she had just opened the fridge to get a glass of milk and had found a live cow inside. “I was very sorry to hear about Sal. I know Vincent was, too.”

  “Is he here?” I said.

  She shook her head. “He went to the library.”

  “The library?” Vin went a lot of places. The library wasn’t one of them.

  His mother must have known it, too, because she smiled. “He actually seems to like the school he’s going to.”

  I had heard that he was going to a place called the Downtown Academy. It was an alternative school for kids who were having trouble in regular school.

  “He’s working on a project with some other kids,” she said. She told me which library he’d gone to. It was the big one right downtown.

  I didn’t plan to go there. Vin was busy. He was with other people. Besides, I hadn’t seen him since the spring. But once I started walking, I found myself headed across the viaduct, then over to Yonge Street, where I turned and walked up one block. The library was huge, with five different floors filled with bookshelves and computers and big tables where people could sit and work, and a big open space in the middle of each floor where the stairs and the elevator were and where you could look all the way down and all the way up. I wandered around floor after floor. It wasn’t until I was on the top floor, looking down, that I spotted Vin. He was on the main floor with three other guys. They all had backpacks, and it looked like they were getting ready to leave. I was trying to decide if I’d be able to catch him if I ran down all five flights of stairs. I was also trying to decide if I even wanted to—it had been a long time—when he looked up and spotted me. He smiled and waved, and it didn’t feel like any time had passed at all since we’d seen each other. He gestured for me to come down to where he was.

  The three other guys were still with him when I got back down to the main floor.

  “Hey, Mikey!” Vin said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I heard you were here,” I said. The three other guys didn’t say anything. They just looked at me like they were wondering who I was. One of them said something to Vin. Then Vin said, “I’ll catch up with you later,” and the three guys looked at me again and then turned and walked away.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I mean, if you’ve got plans—” I hadn’t seen him in months. I hadn’t even tried to see him. But it felt weird to know that he had a whole bunch of new friends.

  “Yeah, I got plans,” Vin said with a grin. “I plan to get something to eat and catch up with an old friend. Come on.”

  As we walked away from the library, his face got more serious.

  “I heard about Sal,” he said.

  I got that same feeling I’d had at the funeral home, like I couldn’t breathe.

  “Are you okay, Mikey?” Vin said.

  I nodded, even though my heart was pounding and I felt like I was sweating all over. Vin put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed it.

  We walked to a restaurant a couple of blocks from the library. It turned out that it was right near Vin’s school. As soon as we walked in, one of the waitresses smiled at Vin like she not only knew him but she was glad to see him. Vin smiled back. He led me to a booth in the back. The waitress followed us. She said, “Hey, Vincent. You want your regular, or are you going to be adventurous for a change?”

  “I’ll go for the tried and true,” Vin said. He nodded at me. “This is my friend Mike. Mike, this is Linzey.”

  Linzey glanced at me, but just barely. She seemed a lot more interested in Vin.

  “They do a great bacon cheeseburger here, Mike,” Vin said. “And an excellent chocolate milkshake.”

  For some reason, the thought of food made me feel queasy. “Just a Coke for me,” I said.

  Linzey nodded, smiled at Vin again, and went to get our order.

  “She’s great, huh?” Vin said. “She’s the same age as us.”

  “You know her from school?” I said.

  Vin shook his head. “She goes to an alternative school, but not the same one as me. She goes to a school where all the kids are these weird creative types. She’s really smart, Mike. Really interesting, too. Her dad owns this place. She works here part-time. It’s why I come here.” He grinned again. “So …” He looked across the table at me. “How are you doing, Mikey?”

  “Okay, I guess,” I said. “You?”

  “I went to see Sal’s parents.”

  “I know,” I said. “His mom told me.”

  “I felt pretty bad,” Vin said. “They were really busted up. Sal’s mom asked me to help at the funeral.”

  “It was nice of you to go over there,” I said. “You know, considering.”

  “Considering?” Vin said.

  “You know. Considering that you and Sal weren’t exactly friends anymore.”

  Vin shrugged. “We were getting along okay.”

  “What do you mean?” The way he’d said it, it sounded like he and Sal had been hanging out together. But that couldn’t be right.

  “He came over to my house a couple of months ago,” Vin said. He must have caught the surprise on my face because then he said, “I guess he didn’t tell you, huh?”

  “No.”

  Linzey came back with a Coke for me and a chocolate milkshake for Vin. He thanked her when she put it down in front of him, which told me how much he liked her. Vin usually didn’t waste his breath saying thank you—at least, the old Vin didn’t. After Linzey went to take an order from another table, Vin said, “He called me up, then he came over.”

  “But I thought—” I stopped. I couldn’t think of a way to put it that wouldn’t sound bad.

  “You thought he hated my guts after what happened at that convenience store,” Vin said. He grinned again. It took a lot to put Vin in a bad mood. “I thought so, too. But he called me and asked if he could come over. I said sure, if he wanted to. But don’t get the wrong idea, Mike. He didn’t apologize to me or anything. Not that he had anything to apologize for. He didn’t do anything wrong. He never did. He just came over, and we talked for a while.” He shook his head again. “I still can’t believe he’s dead.”

  Dead.

  The word shook me. Sal was dead.

  Gone.

  Forever.

  “Why did he want to see you?” I said.

  Vin sucked up some of his chocolate milkshake. “Old time’s sake, I guess.”

  “Yeah? What did you talk about?”

  Vin didn’t answer. It was like he hadn’t heard me. Instead, he was focused on something behind me. I turned and saw Linzey leaning into a booth to pick up dirty dishes. Her back was to us, and you could see how tight her jeans were.

  “Vin,” I said, louder now, like I was talking to someone with a hearing problem. “What did you and Sal talk about?”

  Vin’s eyes followed Linzey as she carried a tray-load of dirty dishes back into the kitchen. Then he shifted his attention back to me.

  “Stuff,” he said. “His job. What I was up to. Why?”

  “I’m just surprised, that’s all,” I said.

  Linzey came back to the table. This time she was carrying a plate with a bacon cheeseburger on it, a huge pile of skinny French fries, and a little paper cup of coleslaw. She set it down in front of Vin and said, “Bon appétit, Vincent.”

  “I think she likes me,” Vin said after she had gone.

  “She sounds like your mom,” I said. “The way she calls you Vincent.”

  “Everyone calls me Vincent now, Mike. I like it.” He reached for the ketchup and started to squirt it all over his fries.

&
nbsp; “You want me to call you Vincent?” I said.

  “It’s up to you. You’ve known me since kindergarten. You’re used to it being different. The people who call me Vincent, mostly they’re people who haven’t known me long. They’re new people in my life, people I get to start all over with, people who maybe so far don’t think I’m a jerk.”

  “I can call you Vincent if you want,” I said.

  He shrugged, like it didn’t make any difference to him one way or the other.

  “So Sal came over to your house and you guys talked, and that was it?” I said.

  Vin squeezed some mustard and ketchup onto his hamburger and some vinegar onto his fries.

  “I saw him a couple of times after that,” he said. He picked up the burger and took a huge bite. “I guess he didn’t tell you that either, huh?”

  “No,” I said. I didn’t get it. Sal had been so mad at Vin about what happened at the convenience store. He’d told me Vin wasn’t his friend anymore. And then he’d gone over to Vin’s house—more than once, from the sound of it—but he’d never mentioned it to me. I wondered why not.

  “Did the cops talk to you … Vincent?” I said, trying out the new, improved name. It sounded funny, and Vin laughed when I said it.

  “You know what?” he said. “Maybe you should stick to Vin—like always. You know me different from everyone else, Mike. You know everything.”

  I guess that was why I was there in the first place. We looked at each other for a moment. Boy, it had been a long time, but it didn’t feel like it.

  Then Vin said, “Yeah, the cops talked to me. They came to the house. It really scared my mom. She thought they were there for me. They asked me a million questions.” He shuddered. “Cops make me nervous, Mike. As soon as they find out about me, they look at me a certain way, you know?”

  “I told them that Sal hadn’t talked to you in over a year, ever since the thing with Robbie.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess they thought that after what happened at the convenience store, maybe I had some kind of grudge against Sal. I told them I didn’t. How could I be mad at him? But you know what? I’m glad I have an alibi for when it happened—a good one, too. One they can check out and believe. Cops don’t like me, Mikey.”