Silent Symphonies
Birdsong outside my window.
Bright midwestern morning. Fresh sun, clear air. Birdsong outside, and silence inside. Dust specks floating, settling, gathering on stuffed animals, crucifixes, Bibles, in the corners of the wooden built-ins my father designed. Paintings of Jesus, of Mary, in their wooden frames. Beige curtains, beige carpet. Silence in my room.
The window before me is sealed shut. Sealed because I opened it the night my brother was taken from our home. The night my world went silent. Five years ago today.
I can feel the season’s change is almost here, but I do not yet know it holds the beginning of the end. I do not yet know anything except the inside of this room and the screams of my brother that live in me forever.
Downstairs, bacon sizzles in a pan. My mother calls my name. I pull on my plaid pleated skirt, collared shirt, and sweater. The birds outside have flown away.
In the hall, I press my palm to Noah’s closed door, the framed painting of Jesus beside it, one of so many in the house.
I picture my brother, sitting on his bed in the low lamplight. The last good moments, ones that replay all the time.
Our birthday was coming, we were almost twelve, and I had snuck into his room, afraid, like I always was. I never could have known what my being there would do. That these precious moments would become our last together.
We were both homeschooled and took classes at church, but Noah was smart, years ahead in math and science, our mother perpetually embarrassed by it. She said it wasn’t godly to indulge in such vanity, said it was dangerous. But when we were much younger, a man in our congregation had seen Noah scribbling and asked him about it. A math teacher, he ran a summer camp at his farm where kids went to tend animals. Because he was in our church, our parents let Noah go. He went every summer, and they had no idea that while the other boys were baling hay and milking, he sat in the kitchen scribbling numbers and learning about the world. I was envious, so envious of it. While I was left at home.
Noah knew things that I didn’t, had experiences I didn’t have. But in every other way we were equals. We were everything to each other, always. And he always came back and shared with me all the things he’d learned.
Noah across the bed from me, a worksheet in front of him.
“What are you working on?” I said.
“This science project. There’s a contest, and the winner gets to go to the Dells.” He shrugged. “Maybe this could be our way in.”
We read about the Dells in a brochure that someone left at church and Noah stole for us, hid under his bed. The Dells were a place where everything was designed to be spectacular. Fun and colorful. Waterpark, a science museum, a bookstore. So many shops, so many adventures. We’d never been anywhere like it.
It was what we wanted for our birthday coming up, more than anything. To go to the Dells, together.
“Think Mom and Dad will ever take us?” I asked.
“Sophie! Breakfast!”
I stand in the hall, alone. I will turn seventeen in a few weeks, quietly and unassumingly beneath this roof as I have every birthday up to now. Noah will do the same in a loveless facility, away from me. Each of us a half person, a half self. There will certainly be no trip to the Dells.
Downstairs, my parents eat.
My father, thin, sweatered, in his signature round glasses, eyes me over the top of his newspaper and says, “You’re going to school like that?” The gentle architect, the meek father. He wasn’t gentle that night. His hands on Noah’s arms. On mine.
I look down at my clothes, the uniform I wear every day. “What else would I wear?”
He turns to my mother, and they share a look. My father says nothing more. His newspaper reads: PHILADELPHIA, NEW YORK CITY TO CLOSE ALL PUBLIC SCHOOLS TO COPE WITH FLU OUTBREAK.
My mother withholds the cereal and milk until I’ve prayed, and when I’m finished she releases the food to me.
The flu, from what I have gleaned reading the back of my father’s newspaper and overheard conversations, won’t affect us, even though it’s bad this year. It’s isolated in the Northeast, and they’ve quarantined that whole part of the country. The priests remind us that we don’t have to worry, we are protected by Christ’s blood. We invite and accept Him inside ourselves, again and again.
Our home, wood, stone, glass. Careful lines, beige carpet. My father, like every other Taliesin School–inspired architect in the region, designed it in Frank Lloyd Wright’s classic Prairie style, organic materials, clean lines to blend into the surrounding nature, a lower story for my parents, an upper story to tuck children away, that only I now inhabit. My father designed our church in the same way. An even larger, more spacious version of our home. Functional, harmonious. Built-ins, shadows across beige walls and beige carpet created by clever window casings and walkways, so many windows, natural light. Architecture that asks for silence, that muffles the world, encourages standing still. Dust specks, floating. My waking hours spent inside these rooms designed by my father, imitating the work of another. My mother likes to say that God is an architect, that we should all imitate Christ, every day. I never say anything.
We eat in silence as we have each morning since that night. I don’t want to exist inside this house. I barely want to exist at all. That in itself is a sin. God gifted us this life, these parents, and we are meant to be grateful. We are meant to repent on our knees and receive salvation ecstatically and somberly on our tongues.
One thousand eight hundred and twenty-six days.
So begins, through the taut film of unspeaking, the daily silent symphony that has lived in his place, ever since.
My father sips his coffee, sets it down. My mother sips her coffee, checks her watch. My father flips the page, sips the coffee. I chew.
Sip, place, sip, click, crinkle, sip, crunch, crunch.
The rage and ache in a spotless house. Long shadows over carpet.
Sip, place, sip, click, crinkle, sip, crunch, crunch.
The rhythm of it follows me out the door.
Sip, place, sip, click, crinkle, sip—
My mother shuts the driver’s side door behind her, and we are in the car.
Foreston’s population is in the single thousands. There are two schools, one for girls and one for boys, both Catholic, and kids come from all different farm towns nearby. My school, St. Mary’s, is five minutes from my house. I would walk if I were allowed. As it is, however, I am not allowed much of anything. Including any kind of device to alert my parents to my safety if I were to go anywhere without them. No phone, no unsupervised time with the computer. But the town of Foreston is basically the congregation of our church, so there’s not much danger anyway. Before this year, I was still homeschooled, but we got a monsignor who was blessed by the Pope, and he told my parents that I needed social interaction. So now I attend St. Mary’s. I felt a thrill at the idea at first, a new freedom, any kind of freedom. Until I got to school and realized it was all the same girls from church I had been with my entire life. Beige home, beige church, beige school, beige life.
Still, it gets me away from my mother.
She pulls the car to a stop. I sit up, and she holds out her arm to prevent my exit.
“Your father had a point today,” she says. Her sweater is the color of Sunday wine, and she smiles at me briefly, almost sadly.
“What point?” I ask.
“I’ve ordered you new uniforms,” she says.
“What’s wrong with the ones I have? We just got them.”
“We’ll go for a shopping trip, get you some new church clothes too. This weekend.”
I can’t spend a day with her alone, can’t imagine she would ever want to spend a day with me. We don’t do this. The other girls make their way into the building, the bell sounding, their overlapping voices, the school chapel’s incense wafting to us on the breeze. “Can we talk about this later?”
She turns that smile back on me. From here she will just return to the house, maybe go to the store, to the church events rooms, then home again. I can’t fathom what she does with her time, her thoughts. Her hair is like mine, dark and thick, but she wears hers pulled back tight, so that it must hurt, stretching at the skin of her scalp. This austere woman, that pure unflinching smile.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “We’ll get you sorted this weekend.”
With this, I am released.
Culver’s
Sister Margaret abhors tardiness above all else, as I have been told several thousand times over the course of the semester. “The word of God does not wait for dawdlers!” I do not understand what this means, but it’s as permanently etched in my mind as the sip, crinkle symphony or the Apostles’ Creed. Like the others, it replays itself so often I hardly know where one ends and the others begin.
ThewordofGoddoesnot. Sip. Waitfordawdlers. Crunch. Forgiveness of. Resurrection of.
The class’ eyes are on me as I take my seat. I reach in my bag for my Bible and realize I’ve brought the wrong book, my fingers brushing the copy of Brave New World I snuck out of the library instead. Sister Margaret would love to catch me with it. She’s staring, suspending the silence in the classroom until I’ve settled in. Two girls in front laugh. Dark wooden carved scenes of the Last Supper and Judas’s kiss hang behind her. Biblical paintings in every corner of this place.
“Sorry, I’ll have to share with Ji-Yun today,” I say. Ji-Yun next to me rolls her eyes and slides the book two inches toward me.
Sister Margaret levels me with her stare again.
“There is a special place in Heaven for Ji-Yun, and all those charitable souls who help their neighbors in need,” she says.
And so begins another day in paradise.
My free period falls between Theology and Math, and I spend it reading behind the broken A/C unit in a patch of grass by the back parking lot. Black asphalt surrounded by thick, dark woods, still nearly all green, though some faint yellow begins to peek through. The smell of dirt and maple trees combined with the exhaust venting out the side of the building, the incense still carrying through all of it.
A truck pulls into the lot, loud secular music blasting. I start to hide my book and stand, but it’s only some of my classmates. They won’t see me, even if they do.
The car slows to a stop in front of me, and I glance up again. A boy drives the green pickup, and Sarah Johnson sits in the passenger seat. In the bed of the truck are two other boys and Rachel Miller. The boys wear St. Augustine’s uniforms. One of them smokes a cigarette. I know from hallway gossip that some of the girls steal away with them during school, or after, to go to Culver’s, but I don’t usually see them. It seems they’re becoming more brazen. A breeze blows toward me, and it carries the fried cheese smell of their food.
I’d forgotten. The feel of fried breadcrumbs against my lips, the pull of cheese, grease dripping down my fingers that I bring to my tongue, sucking them clean. Fried food. Delicious food. My family hasn’t eaten foods like this since before Noah left, our home and life undergoing a strict and purifying transformation to the most ascetic, unpolluted environment possible.
And maybe it is the day and all its memories, maybe it is a rare moment of witnessing a brazen act. But I am struck, suddenly—profoundly— by them.
My classmates, the boys. The casual way the boy holds his arm around Rachel’s shoulder, how carelessly she rests her hand on his knee. The scent of the decadent, forbidden food on the wind.
Their contact, skin to skin.
It’s not that I haven’t learned, or surmised, what men and women do behind closed doors. I’m sheltered, I’m not an idiot. Even children who do not sin or read illicit books know these things here. Livestock is a daily part of life for nearly everyone at some point or other, and livestock copulate. And fornication is written all throughout the Bible.
But seeing girls my age, and boys, together … witnessing their carelessness, their want.
It’s real.
Suddenly this makes it real. Makes them seem realer than reality, as though they are hyperpigmented and I, like the rest of our world, am something dull and fading.
The boy jumps out of the truck and helps Rachel out after him. On the pavement, he pulls her body to his—one hand around her waist, his other in her hair. Their hands that have been smeared with grease, that have been licked clean.
She lifts her face and, as if it were the most inconsequential thing in the world, tilts herself forward to kiss him.
Kiss him.
If the Sisters see her, she’ll be suspended, and every family’s form of punishment is different. But she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care about the consequences. All Rachel seems to care about is the boy whose lips are crushed against her own, whose chest and stomach and hips meet hers. His fingers on the bare skin of her back where her shirt rides up.
Rachel and this boy. Here, in the morning, out in the open and against every rule, earthly and divine. Sharing more than their skin, more than their heat. I can’t look away. I don’t want to, even as my heart threatens to burst through my chest, adrenaline lighting every part of me.
Because in this singular moment in the parking lot at our school, in the middle of the day, I think maybe they have accomplished something I’ve never even dared to dream possible.
They might have miraculously, incredibly, solved the riddle of how to be not just living, but … alive.
The air stands still around me. A crackle, electricity.
Leaves shudder at the edge of the woods.
The driver says it’s time to go, and Sarah drags Rachel toward the school. The other boy in the back tosses his cigarette to the ground. Sunlight streams in through the passenger window so that I can’t see the driver, until his head lowers and his face blocks the sun.
He has the darkest eyes I’ve ever seen. And yet, somehow they glint golden-black in the light. His skin and hair too, darker than most in this town, smooth and perfect. His hand grips the steering wheel, assured and casual. I’ve never looked at the hands of a boy my age. Not like this. The curve of his fingers, the outline of tendons along the back. The sunlight as he flexes them, just so. A stirring of some kind, a … curiosity. Maybe …
“Hey!”
The voice brings me back. The kissing guy is looking at me. I am sitting on the grass staring open-mouthed at a stranger. At all these strangers.
“Maybe you should join us next time! You and me, baby, we could party!” He and his friend in the back laugh and gesture in ways I don’t understand. Rachel comes back and slaps him, calls him a pig. Then she kisses him again, long and deep, the front of his shirt fisted tight in her hand. My heart, still thudding, still—
She turns, gives me a pointed smile. “Aw, cute, she likes you! Todd likes them virginal, don’t you, Todd?”
My cheeks flush hot.
The cigarette guy, Todd, directs an upward thrust of the chin at me and says in a low voice, “Sup.”
The driver turns his head away, the sun streaming once again around his face so that I can’t make out his features anymore. If he saw me or noticed me at all, he already has forgotten. Not that I want to be seen. Noticed. I don’t. I really don’t. Leaves rustling.
The driver starts the truck. The girls disappear inside after another joke made at my expense.
The parking lot is empty once again.
I sit where I sat before, the same book in my lap and the same life at my disposal. And—
A huge gust of wind hits me from the side.
I gasp. Dirt and small bits of debris pelt my arms and legs. I shield my face and brace against it. A cold wind, violent and sudden.
And then it calms, the air returning to normal.
My heart is pounding, breath coming too quickly. That wind blowing from the woods. I turn to them. The hollow space between the trees dark and deep. Stretching, beckoning.
Nearly a whisper, something watching.
The hairs on the back of my neck lift. The now-gentle breeze against my skin.
As though the Devil is saying hello.
As though I can feel his touch.
HOW TO FAKE A FEVER:
Raise your body temperature naturally with movement, spicy foods, hot beverages.
Run the thermometer under hot water, if digital. Shake from side to side, if mercury.
Spritz your face with water to mimic perspiration.
Think forbidden thoughts.
The Talk
I spend Friday night teaching myself how to tie knots after a visit to the library, where I find a book on the subject. My father gives me rope and string to practice. Tasks can carry you through many hours of a life otherwise too empty to contemplate. And books, the right ones, can nearly make you forget what it is you’re trying to forget in the first place.
It is too difficult, I realized years ago, to borrow anything from the library I actually want to read that I will also be allowed to, as the books I am permitted are limited to select preapproved middle-grade books, how-tos, and, of course, religious texts.
I’ve read nearly all the how-to books the Foreston Public Library has to offer, and Mrs. Parson, the librarian, special orders more for me. I show them to my parents, and they are none the wiser to the fact that I am pulling others simultaneously. Meanwhile, I pick up a new skill or two every week. A real win-win kind of situation.
My room is now full of these Friday night experiments. Handsewn animals, refurbished furniture, homemade candles, Rube Goldberg machines, a little robot I built and programmed to walk. Sometimes I imagine they make their own symphony, each contributing its own sound, breathing life into the space around me.
I lean against my bed and reach underneath it for the small compartment Noah and I built there. We put one under his bed too. Our secret place where we left notes for each other, small items, sneaking into each other’s rooms and keeping our most precious treasures hidden from our parents. I never would have thought that anything kept there would take my brother away. That he might have secrets, even from me.
I open mine now, full of colorful origami with notes written on the folded paper. It makes a difference, even if it’s a small one, to know there is a part of Noah here that isn’t closed away behind his bedroom door, locked and left shut since he left.
It’s easy to shut people out, I’ve learned. You don’t even need a door.
* * *
I wake to my mother standing in my room, her low-heeled foot on the constrictor knot I made the night before. With a lurch, I pull my blanket over the book next to me in a way I hope looks nonchalant. It’s the Divine Comedy. If discovered, it might be more accepted than the others, but I still don’t want to find out.
I blink the world into focus. She never comes in here.
“Mom?”
“Sophie, good morning. I’ll see you downstairs,” she says, and she turns to leave.
I don’t understand, but then,
I remember. Our shopping day. I groan and fall back to my bed.
* * *
We arrive at the mall in the next town over, a place I’ve only been a handful of times, and not in many years. The echoes of my mom’s church organ music from the drive still cling to us crossing the parking lot. The wind brushes against our backs as we step through the sliding automatic doors that whoosh behind, seal us in.
We are in a department store. Scents of perfume and cleaning products and new plastic. Soft music, voices. My mother and I traverse the shiny white linoleum aisles between appliances and linens, the lights harsh against our skin. She has not told me what we’re doing here together, why I needed to come with her. Why it couldn’t wait.
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