Читать книгу The Voiceover Artist - Dave Reidy - Страница 9

3

May Davies

IN TWENTY-THREE years of motherhood, no moment frightened me more deeply than the moment I realized that Connor, still so young, was leaving his older brother behind.

Connor was not yet five when he began to dominate our family’s dinner conversation. He dominated because he could, and because Frank and Simon were content to let the people without stutters do the talking. Connor would ask me questions about my day and try to make Frank laugh with jokes about baseball. And when Simon got stuck on a word, as he often did, Connor would finish his sentence for him, even though I told Connor, every time, not to do that. Once in a while, Simon would keep at his thought until he had spoken every syllable, but by the time Simon was finished, I would be the only one still listening to him.

The year Simon entered first grade, money was tight. Frank’s hours at the plant had been cut to less than full-time, which hurt everything from our income to our deductibles. I got my mother to watch the kids and took a job at the dentist’s office in Leyton, answering phones and doing bookkeeping. We needed my paycheck to make our mortgage payment. Any money left over at the end of the month was on account of my job or my Sunday afternoon coupon cutting. I kept my breadwinning in mind when I stood in front of the television on a Sunday evening in June and announced to Frank that I’d enrolled six-year-old Simon in piano lessons.

After a long moment, Frank said, “H— how muh— much does that c— cost?”

“Forty-five dollars a week.”

“Ch— Christ, May! W— we don’t even h— h— have a piano.”

“He needs something structured to do this summer,” I said.

“Wh— why don’t w— we p— p— put him in tee-ball or s— something?”

“Why don’t I handle the piano lessons,” I said, “and you handle the tee-ball.”

Frank waved me out of the way—something had happened in the ballgame he was watching—and I immediately understood two things: Simon would not be playing tee-ball, and Frank would not fight my spending forty-five dollars a week on Simon’s piano lessons, which weren’t piano lessons at all.

That summer, three days each week, I’d leave the dental office during my lunch hour and pick up Simon from home. The speech pathologist at Simon’s school had agreed to work privately with him for what little we could pay. In every session, the speech teacher—her name was Janice—would draw Simon into conversation, patiently listening with her eyes until he’d said whatever he had intended to say. Then, gently, she’d ask him to repeat any words that had caused him to stutter. She’d give him a raw almond and ask a question, but insist he finish the almond before answering. And every night, I’d wrestle Simon’s clock radio out of his hands and do the same exercises with him behind his closed bedroom door. I told myself that Simon was making improvements so small that an untrained person like me could not really see them, and that these tiny improvements were building toward the breakthrough I’d been hoping for.

After a session in mid-July, with Simon waiting in her living room, Janice sat me down for what she called a “progress report.”

Sitting behind her oversized oak desk, Janice said, “I’m afraid I’m wasting your money.”

My breath caught in my throat. I had been expecting her to run down a list of improvements. “What do you mean?”

Janice winced and crossed her legs. I think she’d been hoping that I’d be grateful she’d voiced a concern I’d been too polite to mention myself.

“Simon’s speech is not improving,” Janice said. “It may be getting worse.”

Her pronunciation was so flawless—fussy, even—that I thought she might be rubbing it in.

“And when we reach the point at which it may be doing more harm than good,” she continued, “we have to discontinue therapy.”

I nodded and tried to smile, pretending too late that I agreed with her and was relieved that she’d spoken up. I kept pretending until I felt the tears running down my cheeks.

Janice picked up a white piece of paper, stood up, and walked around to my side of her desk. Handing me the paper, she said, “I’m referring you to an expert. His entire practice is children who stutter.”

I looked at the address. “In Rockford?”

“Yes.”

Rockford was three hours north. “Does he do weekend appointments?”

Janice shook her head. “No.”

That left me with the choice of getting Simon to the speech expert or staying in the job we needed to keep a roof over our heads, which wasn’t really a choice.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t more help,” Janice said.

She was still standing over me. I stood up to shake Janice’s hand. And as I walked out of her office, I thought, That’s it. Simon will either stop stuttering on his own, or he will stutter his entire life, like his father has. And his little brother will talk circles around him at home, at school, everywhere they go together, until one or both of them decide they will not go anywhere together anymore.

This stutter will cut Simon off from the whole world.

•••

THAT SAME SUMMER, I enrolled Simon in real music lessons. My hope was that music was a kind of communication he might still master.

Frank had been right about one thing: we didn’t have a piano, and we couldn’t afford one. At the supermarket, I saw a posted ad for guitar lessons. I imagined Simon playing the guitar and smiled, but my face fell when I envisioned him trying to sing along with his playing and gagging on a song’s first word. So I ruled out guitar. I wanted music to be Simon’s refuge from any expectation he would use his voice. I wanted an instrument he would have to put in his mouth.

Mr. Shaughnessy, the band director at Leyton High, offered private clarinet lessons. For the same forty-five dollars per week I’d spent on speech lessons, I secured a rental clarinet and lunch-hour lessons twice a week, on Monday and Wednesday. Thumbing through a magazine in Mr. Shaughnessy’s living room, I’d listen while Simon played airy, squeaky notes in the studio across the foyer. Every question Mr. Shaughnessy asked Simon could be answered with a nod or a headshake, and doing as the teacher instructed required no words, only music. Simon could not yet play the clarinet, but the lessons were achieving some of what I’d hoped they would.

At the end of every lesson, Mr. Shaughnessy would emerge from his studio smiling, but looking slightly exasperated. Simon was not a natural.

“He needs to practice every day,” Mr. Shaughnessy would say.

“I’ll make sure he does,” I’d answer. “Thank you.”

Then I’d take Simon home.

With the frame of our Ford four-door rattling as the engine idled in our side yard, I would remind Simon that he needed to practice his scales for at least an hour before I returned home from work.

“O— o— Okay,” he would say.

He would practice both Saturday and Sunday—I know, because I’d sit with him in his room while he did. Weekdays were a different story. My mother’s addiction to soap operas and game shows made it easy for her to watch television-obsessed Connor, but Simon was left to his own devices.

Upon arriving home, I’d go straight to Simon’s room. Seeing me at his bedroom door, Simon would turn the volume of his radio down just slightly—not a meaningless courtesy, coming from a six-year-old.

“Did you do your scales?” I would ask.

Yes, Simon would nod.

“For a full hour?”

Simon would nod again.

“Good. And how did it go?”

“F— f— fine,” he would say.

I believed him. What else could I do? Once, I asked my mother as she was leaving if Simon had practiced his clarinet.

“His what?”

“His clarinet.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m sure he did.”

That meant she had no idea if he had or not.

There was only one weekday I knew for certain that Simon had practiced. I had gone grocery shopping and had the oil changed in our car after work. By the time I got home, Frank was sitting at the kitchen table, watching Connor spoil his appetite with a plate of cookies.

“I th— th— thought S— Simon was t— taking p— p— piano lessons,” Frank said to me.

“He didn’t take to the piano,” I said.

“H— he’s not t— taking to th— this, either. S— s— sounds terrible.”

Connor, chewing another cookie, laughed. “You’re funny, Daddy.”

Frank smiled with the kind of pride a grown man should never take in a compliment from a four-year-old.

“He’s learning,” I said. “You should be proud of him. He’s trying to improve himself.”

I hoped Frank heard my suggestion that he’d stopped trying to get better at anything a long time ago. I was thinking only about myself—what I had hoped for and stopped hoping for in married life—when I said that to Frank. If I’d been thinking about Simon, I might not have said anything. Telling a man that he doesn’t stack up to his son does the son no favors.

It was after work on a Thursday in the middle of August, the day after one of Simon’s lessons, when I got into my car after work and saw Simon’s clarinet case sticking out from underneath the passenger seat. I pulled the case out from under the seat and opened it. Each piece of the instrument was nestled into the velveteen-lined mold that matched its shape.

When I got home, I knocked on Simon’s bedroom door and opened it, keeping the clarinet case behind the wall, out of his sight.

He was sitting on the bed with his clock radio tuned to some commercial or other. He turned the volume down and stared at me.

“Hi, Simon,” I said.

He waved.

“How are you?”

He nodded, which meant, Good.

I nodded back and raised my chin and eyebrows, asking him to say the word.

“G— g— good.”

“I’m glad,” I said. “Did you do your scales?”

Yes, he nodded.

“For a full hour?”

Simon nodded again.

I brought the clarinet case into the room. Simon only blinked. It seemed that lying to me about his practicing had become so routine that he had gotten used to the idea that he would be caught in the lie, eventually. And in that moment, I realized that all my suppositions about my son’s diligence and willingness to better himself were wishful thinking. All I knew for certain was that I’d been wasting my Monday and Wednesday lunch hours and forty-five dollars a week, and that Simon, right then, looked very much like his father.

I pulled the radio out of his hands and turned it off. The look on Simon’s face was one I might have expected to see if I strangled a rabbit before his eyes. He sat up on his knees and reached for the radio. I held it away from him, over the foot of the bed.

“You’ve been lying to me, Simon.”

“M— Mom—” he said.

But I wasn’t finished, and this time, I decided, Simon would wait for me to finish speaking.

“I’ve been driving you all over town on my lunch hour for weeks! Do you know how upsetting it is to find out you’re not practicing? So you can listen to commercials?”

I held up the radio in front of him. Simon eyed it. I think he thought I was going to take it away from him. I let him believe that I would.

“You could have music, Simon!” I said. “Music! You could make music speak for you if you would practice!”

Then, like a hungry cottonmouth, Simon lunged toward the radio with his entire body. I pulled the radio away from him, and Simon’s momentum carried him over the foot of the bed. I dropped the radio and grabbed for him, but only changed the angle of his fall for the worse. His shoulder and head hit the floor with a thud that made the room shudder, and his thin neck bent strangely to one side as it bore his weight for an agonizing instant. When he came to rest on his back, Simon looked up at the ceiling. By the time he let out his first cry, with his mouth and eyes wide open, I was on the floor, holding him in my arms. I stroked Simon’s head and rocked him back and forth while he waited for the pain and fear to go away.

“Is he okay?”

Connor’s question was barely audible over Simon’s moans and my softly spoken comforts. Connor stood in the doorway, nervously poking the corner of his closed mouth with his finger. The sight of his big brother crying on the ground had robbed my four-year-old boy of his bold tongue.

“Simon fell off the bed,” I said, reassuring the boys and myself. “He had a fright, but he’s fine now.”

Connor said nothing.

“Go back to the living room now and watch TV,” I said. “We’ll be out in a minute.”

When he had stopped crying, Simon sat up and scooted out of my arms. Sitting on the floor, he looked at me, waiting for me to hand down some punishment or leave. When I did neither thing, he picked up his radio and turned it on. The plug had been pulled out of the wall in the commotion, but the batteries I’d loaded into the black plastic underbelly months ago, at Simon’s request, powered the radio’s single speaker. Simon drew the tuner past music and static until he found a speaking voice, a woman’s. She told me how hard it is to be the working mother of an infant, and how much easier my life would be if I’d only use her same brand of formula. I pictured a woman shaking her head with a sympathy she didn’t really feel, and her face breaking into an empty smile.

“M— M— Mom,” Simon said.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Th— this is m— myoo— music.”

The commercial was not music. It was chattering nonsense. But I buried this opinion deep inside me, alongside the very next thought I’d had: If there is any music in this, Simon, it’s a kind of music you’ll never make.

•••

AFTER SIMON GAVE up on the clarinet, I focused my energy on something I could control. My boys would never be equal in every way that mattered, but I could do everything in my power to show them they were equal in my love.

For example: if, at dinner on Monday, I asked Simon about his day before asking Connor about his own, I made sure to ask Connor the same question first on Tuesday evening. If I read a book to Connor, I’d listen to the radio with Simon for the same number of minutes I’d spent reading. Chores were doled out in pairs—one for Simon, one for Connor—and if one boy’s chore proved easier than the other’s, he was made to help his brother finish his job.

“You start together,” I’d say, “and you end together.”

All of this came naturally because I loved my boys equally. But even my demonstrations of equal love would join speech therapy and clarinet lessons on my list of failures.

Connor’s fifth birthday was August 25th, two weeks after Simon’s seventh. That night, when the cake plates and empty milk glasses had been cleared away, I sat the boys down at the kitchen table to show them two receipts. The first was for the gift we’d just given to Connor, a year’s subscription to TV Guide. The second was for the Matchbox cars Simon had received as his present—what do you get the boy who already has all he wants in a radio older than he is?

I pointed to the total on each thin, wrinkled piece of paper.

“Do you see these numbers?”

Connor and Simon knelt in their chairs and leaned in for a closer look.

“Connor’s birthday gift cost fifteen dollars and thirty-two cents,” I said. “Simon’s birthday gift, including tax, cost fifteen dollars and thirty-four cents.”

The boys looked up at me, seeming confused about what to make of the numbers.

“I want you to see that, although your gifts are different, your father and I spent the same on each of you for your birthdays. Neither gift was more expensive than the other.”

That was good enough for Connor. “Okay!” he said, sliding off his chair. “Can I go watch TV now, Mommy?”

“Yes, you may,” I said.

Having made my point, I went back to the sink, picked up the gray sponge, and dipped my hands into the dishwater, which was now lukewarm. It was another minute or so before I saw that Simon was still at the table, staring at the receipts.

“What’s the matter, honey?” I asked.

Simon glanced in my direction without meeting my eye.

I dried my hands on the towel hanging over the oven-door handle and sat next to Simon, leaning forward until my head was on the same level as his. “Tell me.”

With his eyes still on the receipts, Simon licked his lips. “W— w— w— we’re n— not th— the same.”

“Who isn’t the same?”

“M— me and Connor.”

I tilted my head and smiled. “Honey,” I said over a laugh, “everyone is different from everyone else. And the ways that you and Connor are different don’t matter to me.”

It was this afterthought of a phrase—“to me”—that betrayed the truth about the differences between Simon and Connor, a truth that Simon seemed to confirm for himself as he stared right through me. The ways in which Simon and Connor were different would matter very much. They mattered already. And my attempt to minimize the truth had only proven to Simon that his mother’s love—impartial though it was—had no power to change it.

•••

Through it all, I tried to show Simon that he was loveable, even with his stutter. Part of the way I showed this was by trying to love Simon’s father.

Frank responded by refusing the little courtesies I paid him in front of Simon, from the cream I offered to pour in his coffee to the kisses I tried to plant on his cheek before he left for work. And when he and I were alone, he ignored me. In short, Frank proved to me that his gut feeling had been right all along: he didn’t deserve my love. Even so, I kept trying to love Frank. I refused to let Simon believe that inheriting his father’s stutter meant that Simon, too, was unworthy of love and incapable of loving as he should.

I might have been able to do without Frank’s love if he’d loved Simon as well as I wanted him to. But their shared stutter came between them. Frank saw too much of himself in Simon. When he stuttered, Simon could not help but hold up a mirror to his father. Because he had never really liked himself, Frank could not love Simon enough. He couldn’t even see Simon’s boyish adoration for the blessing it was.

Frank courted Connor’s love in a way he had never courted mine. Connor was still four when I first understood how Frank saw him: as his belated chance to win over the fast-talking boys who’d teased Frank when we were at Leyton Elementary and Leyton High, boys who were now the kings and court jesters of the union hall and the bar in town and the break room at the Caterpillar plant. While I plotted to find speech therapy for Simon, Frank refashioned himself from a quiet, hard-working loner into a sitcom stereotype. He made a throne of his easy chair and sat Connor alongside him, drinking beer and barking his disapproval at the televised mistakes of men who were ten times the ballplayer he’d ever been. Frank made himself worthy of Connor’s love, in his own mind, by ensuring that the man Connor loved was hardly recognizable, to himself or anyone else, as the Frank we knew. As his father transformed before his eyes, Simon was made to feel his love was not enough. And because I had known Frank as the wounded, vulnerable stutterer he was, my love was discounted even as it died.

•••

THE OCTOBER AFTER he turned seven, Simon went completely silent.

At first, I thought he might still have been recovering from a sore throat that had kept him out of school the past Friday. By Wednesday of the following week, I supposed that Simon was just tired of hearing his stuttered sentences finished by his little brother. But Wednesday night, at dinner, I noticed Simon staring across our Formica table at his father with wet, wide-open eyes. His food was untouched, but the muscles of Simon’s jaw were flexed in front of his ears. Frank fixed his eyes on his plate, which he guarded with his elbows as if someone might try to stab his half-eaten slice of meatloaf and run off with it. While asking Connor various questions about his day at school, I glanced at Frank several more times. He never met Simon’s glare.

I knew then that something had happened between Simon and his father, but I didn’t know what, and I didn’t believe that asking either Frank or Simon about it would do anyone any good. So I waited and listened. And Simon stayed silent.

On Thursday, I got a call from Simon’s teacher, Ms. Wells.

“I’m sorry to bother you at work,” she said, without sounding the least bit sorry.

Speaking to Ms. Wells, who was probably ten years older than me, I had to fight the feeling that I was seven again and speaking to my own teacher.

“Oh, not at all,” I said. “Is anything wrong?”

“I’m calling about Simon,” Ms. Wells said. “He hasn’t been speaking all week.”

“Well,” I said, sighing, “I appreciate you telling me. Simon hasn’t said a word at home, either.”

“He hasn’t,” she said.

“No.”

“Is he ill?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“Well, Mrs. Davies, as you surely know, dealing with Simon’s stutter requires patience from me and his classmates, and my patience is running out. This silence amounts to insubordination. It is disrupting my classroom.”

My mouth hung open until I felt the heat rising in my face. “I’m sure this has been very hard for you.”

“It has, yes,” Ms. Wells said. “And I’m concerned for Simon, of course.”

“Oh, your concern for Simon is coming through loud and clear.”

“Well,” she said, clipping the word. “I’ve said what I called to say.”

“All right, then.”

I wallowed in my irritation with that silly, self-important witch for the rest of the afternoon. By the time I arrived home, though, I worried only for Simon.

We sat down, the four of us, to a dinner of fish sticks and mashed potatoes. While Connor jabbered away about his playground adventures, Simon baited Frank with his eyes, and Frank ignored the baiting, looking only at Connor.

When the boys had gone to bed, I walked over to the television and turned the volume all the way down.

Reclining in his chair, the balls of his feet aimed up at me, Frank said, “W— w— w— what i— is it?”

His four attempts at “what” reminded me that Frank was smashed—his stutter got worse when he drank—but I couldn’t wait for him to sober up.

“Simon isn’t speaking,” I said.

I’d been wondering if Frank would pretend not to notice—he didn’t. But he tried dismissing my concern with a wave of his hand.

When he got uncomfortable with my standing there, staring at him, demanding an explanation, Frank said, “I— I— I— d— did the s— same th— th— thing w— when I was a kid. He— he— he’ll s— s— snap out of it.”

“The last time I remember hearing him speak was Friday night,” I said.

Frank shrugged and brought a beer can to his lips.

“What happened?”

He put his beer down and pulled the wooden handle on the right side of his recliner, bringing the footrest down. “W— w— what do you m— mean w— w— what happened?”

“What happened on Saturday? When I put him to bed Friday night, Simon was speaking. When I got home from taking Connor to the doctor, Simon wouldn’t say a word. And he’s staring daggers at you!”

“He bet— bet— better not be,” Frank said, shifting in his chair.

“What happened on Saturday, Francis?”

“N— nothing!” he said, leaning forward in his chair. “Nothing happened. N— now tur— turn up the v— v— volume and g— get out the way.”

He stared past me to whatever was happening on the part of the screen I’d failed to block. I stalked off to the bedroom, slamming the door behind me and leaving the television’s volume where it was. If he was content to let Simon stay silent, Frank could turn up the TV himself.

Clumsy with outrage, I struggled out of my clothes and caught my reflection in the mirror above my dresser. I pushed a strand of my thick, wavy hair out of my face. The bags beneath my eyes were dark, and deep wrinkles slashed across the skin of my long neck.

A ballerina’s neck, Frank used to call it.

To hell with Frank.

I didn’t need anyone to give me the particulars. It was enough to know that Simon remained silent because of something his father had done or failed to do.

•••

SIMON'S SILENCE WENT up like a wall between us. His nods, headshakes and gestures could not create the closeness I felt when Simon had risked speaking to me, and I’d made good on his risk by listening with my eyes and ears until he had finished. Even as Connor wowed me with his knack for the speed and rhythms of adult speech, I found myself wishing for a chance to sit next to Simon on his bed and show him, just by listening patiently as he started and restarted his words, that there was nothing he couldn’t tell me. But Simon would not say anything to me or anyone else.

Every day or two, I’d try to draw him out. Once, when he was listening to his radio in the early evening, I knocked on his door and said, “Dinner is ready.”

Simon nodded and gave me a flat, close-mouthed smile.

“Would you like something to drink?”

He nodded again.

“What would you like?”

I knew the answer was Sprite. Simon always picked Sprite if given a choice. But Simon wouldn’t say the word. So he shrugged.

“You don’t know what you want to drink?” I asked.

He raised his shoulders again, even higher, and let them fall.

“Why don’t you tell me what you want to drink, and I’ll pour it for you?”

I turned toward the kitchen, trying to suggest with body language that the Sprite was as good as poured if Simon would only say what he wanted.

Simon looked at me. He seemed to be asking me, with his eyes, to let him be. But I wouldn’t.

“It’s no trouble,” I said.

Simon turned off his radio. He hopped off his bed and scooted past me in his stocking feet. By the time I reached the kitchen, he was hoisting himself onto the counter to retrieve a tall, green plastic cup from the cupboard. He lowered himself to the floor, opened the refrigerator, and pulled out a two-liter bottle of Sprite. Then Simon poured himself half a glass—the same limit I would have set—carried his drink to the table, and took his seat without a word.

With his obedient refusal, Simon sent me the unspoken message that there was nothing, big or small, I could do to help him out of his silence, and that I should save myself the trouble of trying.

But I didn’t quit trying. I couldn’t.

I sat Simon down and told him how much we valued what he had to say, no matter how long it took him to say it, whether he stuttered or not. Driving home from the grocery store with him, I praised the strength of Simon’s will—his ability to make a decision and stick to it—in the hope that he might decide he had made his point. And when my birthday came, I asked Simon for only one gift.

I waited all evening for him to speak to me. After my birthday dinner—burgers from Wendy’s, the best meal Frank could serve up on his own—I sent Frank and Connor into the living room to watch the ballgame so that Simon might feel safe enough, or generous enough, to say something. But when he had finished his piece of the birthday cake I had baked—yellow cake with chocolate frosting—Simon wiped the crumbs from his lips, slid off of his chair, and set his plate and fork in the sink. Then he kissed me on the cheek and disappeared into his bedroom.

The day after my birthday, when Simon had brushed his teeth and changed into his pajamas, I went into his room, closed the door, and sat down on his bed.

“I’m worried about you, Simon,” I said, allowing myself to cry. “And I miss you.” Simon would not look at me. His radio, muffled by the leg under which he had stashed it when I came in, mumbled commercial messages.

“I want to hear you again,” I said. “Please. Say something to me.”

When he was certain I was finished speaking, Simon raised his glistening eyes to mine.

At last! I thought. He’ll speak!

Then Simon closed his eyes and shook his head. No.

My crying kept up for the rest of the evening. Frank must have heard me sniffling from the living room. I was folding a load of whites on our bed when he walked up behind me, laid his hand on the small of my back, and asked, “W— w— what’s wrong?”

It was Frank’s bad luck that this tender gesture—his first in months—hardened my sadness into something brittle.

“If you don’t know,” I said, “I’m not going to tell you.”

With that, Frank pulled his hand away and stormed out of the bedroom, stuttering and muttering his curses.

•••

IT WAS ONLY a few days later when, having spent the night chewing my nails down to the quick and nibbling my cuticles, I asked Frank for his help.

“Will you talk to him?” I asked.

Looking up from the game, he said, “W— w— what about?”

“Anything, Frank! He hasn’t said a word in almost six months! Were you ever silent for six months?”

Connor, sitting on the couch, said, “What are you guys talking about?”

“Please,” I said. “Just try to make him talk.”

With his shoulders slumped forward even as he sat back in his chair, Frank looked defeated already.

“F— fine,” he said. “Br— br— bring him in here.”

I leapt into action before Frank could change his mind. “All right, Connor,” I said. “Let’s get you in your pajamas and you can watch the little TV in your room.”

“Okay, Mommy!”

With Connor settled, I knocked on Simon’s bedroom door, opened it, and asked him to come with me. I led him into the living room and stood him in front of his father.

“Your father would like to speak to you.”

I stepped back to a spot just outside of Simon’s peripheral vision.

Frank sighed and shook his head, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was about to say. “Wh— what’s wrong w— with you, Simon?”

Simon said nothing.

“Wh— why d— don’t you s— speak up?”

Simon made no reply.

“S— s— say s— something!”

I leaned forward just in time to see Simon’s bottom lip slide over the top one. His eyes glowed with defiance. My heart leapt at the thought that Simon might scream.

But it was I who screamed when Frank stood up and raised his right hand to slap the scorn from his son’s face. I put myself between the two of them and carried Simon away, cowering against a blow that didn’t come.

When I had delivered him safely to his bedroom, Simon wriggled out of my arms. I had assumed he’d be visibly frightened, maybe even crying, but his expression, now directed at an empty corner of his room, was the same defiant one he’d shown his father. I understood then that Simon had become a mirror for more than his father’s broken speech. In Simon’s hateful gaze, Frank had glimpsed his own self-hatred.

I should never have left Simon unprotected in front of Frank. A man pretending he isn’t wounded can only look in a mirror for so long before he tries to break it.

•••

SIMON HAD BEEN silent for seven months when I got it in my head that I should try to scare a sound out of him.

I left work an hour early and parked my car down the road, off the route of the boys’ school bus. I hid my purse in my bedroom, lay down on the far side of Simon’s bed, and waited. The hiding itself was thrilling—I hadn’t hidden from anyone since I was a little girl—but what really excited me was the idea that I could break my son’s silence. I told myself that once it was broken, Simon would have no reason to start a new string of days and weeks and months without speaking. He’d outlasted the wishes of his mother and commands of his teacher and shown his father what he thought of him. What could possibly be left for him to prove? And to whom?

The airbrakes of the bus shrieked. The engine chugged as it idled and growled as the bus accelerated past the house. I put my feet under me and squatted in a crouch. Feeling a giggle rise, I buried my smiling face in the comforter hanging over the side of Simon’s bed.

When the back door opened into the kitchen, the house seemed to exhale, as if it had been holding its breath until the boys returned home. Connor called for me from the kitchen, and called my name again in the living room. When he got no answer, he said, “Yippee!” and turned on the television.

I listened to two game-show hosts—the one actually on TV and the much younger one in my living room—for what seemed like several minutes.

Then the door to Simon’s room opened.

Still smiling, I sprang into view. “Boo!” I screamed.

Simon jumped back and his mouth opened wide, but no sound came out. He stood with his back to the wall, clasping his windpipe between his thumb and his fingers. My first thought was that he’d inhaled a cookie. Then I heard the air coming in and out of his nose and understood: His stutter had seized him and would not let go.

Alarmed, I hurried around the foot of the bed. Before I could reach him, Simon ran at me and started pounding my hips with the heels of his open hands.

“Stop it!” I yelled, grabbing at him. “Simon! Stop!”

He hit me a few more times, and then ran out of the room.

I pushed my hair out of my eyes and let the tears come, crying not over the blows that my son had dealt me in his wordless rage, but at a possibility I hadn’t considered: Simon’s silence was not a matter of choice. His stutter, emboldened by his silence, had strangled his broken voice.

It was only in his withholding of them, in his unwillingness to meet my eye for the next thirteen days, that I came to understand just how much love my Simon had been showing me in his glances and gestures and heavy smiles.

•••

KNOWING THAT SIMON was unable to speak changed everything for me. I no longer took his silence as a slight. I stopped pleading for him to speak and trying to trick him into speaking. I began to treat the silence as something I couldn’t change, as if it were any other crippling injury a boy could suffer.

I signed us both up for a sign-language class, but Simon didn’t want to sign any more than he wanted to play an instrument. For two half-hour sessions, he refused to take his hands out of his lap. I agreed to stop taking him but believed we’d go back, eventually. In the meantime, though, I asked Simon questions that he could answer with a nod or a shake of his head, and we developed our own pidgin signs for the niceties I couldn’t let go: two open palms for please, palms together in prayer for thank you, and a fist to the breast, the same mea culpa I’d learned in church as a little girl, for I’m sorry. Simon never learned I’m hungry or I’m thirsty or anything else that would’ve helped me to meet his needs. He did things for himself. If he was hungry, he went to the kitchen and had a snack. If he was thirsty, he poured himself a Sprite. Soon, I was raising a highly independent little boy I was afraid to let out of my sight.

At the beginning of each school year, I informed Simon’s teachers that he could not speak, and made them promise me that they would never, under any circumstances, demand that he do what he could not. And I gave Connor an assignment.

“You stay close to your brother before and after school,” I told him. “And if you see anybody doing or saying anything mean to him, I want you to tell me.”

“Okay,” Connor said. Then, after a couple of nervous ums, he asked, “Do you want me to try and stop them?”

“No,” I said. “Just tell me. If it’s an emergency, go find a teacher and tell her.”

I assumed that Connor talking Simon’s way out of a schoolyard fight would only move the fight to my living room. The boys were fighting all the time, it seemed. If Connor spoke for Simon once too often, or hit a little too close to home with his teasing, or, God forbid, laid a hand on Simon’s radio, Simon would tackle Connor and pound him in the shoulders. I pulled Simon off of Connor a few times a week, at least, and made him say I’m sorry with the same fist he’d been using to hit his brother.

But if, when the fighting began, I was outside hanging the washing or deafened to Connor’s protests by my hair dryer, I would find Connor on top of Simon, giving the punches he’d been getting, and Simon under his smaller, younger brother, calmly taking blows he didn’t have to take. For months, I worried that Simon was taking pleasure in his own pain and humiliation, but I came to see the fights as something else entirely. Simon was acting out his longing to be Connor’s equal, if only in a game he rigged himself.

There was one adjustment to his silence, though, that Simon would not allow me to make. When he handed me a permission slip to join the Boy Scouts or Little League or become an altar server, I’d ask Simon a question: “Will you let me come with you every time you go?”

Simon would wince at me, stomp his feet and shake his head emphatically.

“I’m sorry,” I would say. “I can’t let you go alone.”

There would be more stomping then, until Frank had yelled for it to stop and Simon had shut himself in his room.

I understood that no boy wanted his mother watching over him, especially if his was the only mother around. But a boy who cannot speak is too tempting a target for a predatory coach or priest or scout leader—who is more likely than a mute child to keep a pedophile’s secrets? Somehow, I managed to convince myself that Simon would be safe at school. But after school and on the weekends, I’d only leave him in the care of Frank or my mother.

From the time they were babies, I’d tried to raise boys brave enough to be more than their mother’s sons, to be students and musicians and volunteers. To be themselves. But because of his silence, I couldn’t allow Simon to take his independence into the world. Until he was older, I wouldn’t let Simon go anywhere I couldn’t protect him.

•••

I KEPT OFFERING Simon music and sign-language lessons from any teacher who would let me sit outside an open door and listen, taking care not to suggest that Simon wasn’t good enough as he was, only that he might like to make music or communicate. But Simon wouldn’t take the lessons. I think they frightened him, actually, as if learning an instrument or sign language would guarantee he’d never, ever speak again. Whatever the reason, even after six years without speaking, Simon wouldn’t give up listening to the radio for a chance to make music or sign language.

When he was thirteen years old and in eighth grade, I pulled Simon away from his radio to see Connor perform as part of the choir in the junior high’s Happy Holidays Concert. Frank was still in front of the television in his undershirt fifteen minutes before the performance was to begin, so I left without him. He arrived late and spent the concert frowning and fidgeting uncomfortably in the folding chair I had saved for him. Simon endured the singing with his arms folded and his head down. He might have feared that I’d take his paying attention as some hint he finally wanted music lessons. But during “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” Simon looked up to watch Connor get the night’s only laughs by singing “five golden rings” eight different ways, each hammier than the one before.

After the concert, Connor rode home with Frank in his truck. Simon went with me. Whenever it was just the two of us in the car, Simon would sit in the front passenger seat and take control of the stereo, which must have had more powerful reception than his clock radio did, because Simon would bypass perfectly audible commercials to scan the AM dial for ads broadcast from far-off places. We were about a mile from home the night of the concert when a voice, calling out through a storm of static, told me to “come on down” to a restaurant in downtown Omaha for “eastern Nebraska’s finest steaks” and one-dollar draft beers. Even in the December darkness on an unlit two-lane highway, I could see the open-mouthed amazement on Simon’s face. At the beginning of a long day, I might have reminded myself that Simon didn’t feel, as I did, that the radio voices were taunting him in his silence, and I might have wondered aloud at the modern miracle of invisible waves carrying speech across the prairie to our ears. But at the end of a long day, after twenty minutes of irritating electronic hisses and squeals had paid off only in a commercial for a restaurant four-hundred miles away, I said, “I’ve got to hand it to you, Simon. You’ve found a way to make radio even more boring.”

Two days later, on Saturday, I was at the kitchen table reading the Peoria Journal Star when I came across a profile of Larry Sellers, a voiceover artist who was born and raised in Sampere, Illinois, not far from Leyton. According to the paper, Sellers had done national television commercials for Maalox, Hertz, and Wendy’s, and for the past ten years, he’d been the radio voice of Jewel Food Stores. In the words of his long-time agent, Larry Sellers was “one of the very few voiceover artists who can take a mediocre script and make a great radio commercial without changing a word.”

I read the entire profile, hoping to find the reason why my silent son listened to nothing but commercials. When I reached the end of the piece, though, I’d learned more than I wanted to know about Larry Sellers and nothing about Simon. Even so, I thought that Simon might find the article interesting. I hesitated to hand my silenced son a story about a man who had grown up nearby and made it on the radio, but I decided there was no more harm in Simon reading a profile of Larry Sellers than there was in a wheelchair-bound boy reading the sports page. So I folded the Lifestyle section into quarters, putting the Sellers profile in front, and walked to Simon’s room.

He was lying on his bed with his clock radio, tuned to a commercial for a Monster Truck rally, in his lap.

I held up the newspaper and pointed to Sellers’ photo. “This man is on the radio.”

As I handed it over, I made the profile, in my own mind, a kind of peace offering, a sign that I would let Simon enjoy his simplest pleasure without any more criticism from me.

Later that same day, when I stepped into his room, Simon shut me up with a wave before I could say anything.

“Hey!” I said, sharply.

Then Simon gestured toward the radio in his lap and, more politely but just as urgently—with his eyes, this time—insisted I be silent.

I listened, indignant at the idea that anything short of an emergency Presidential address could justify Simon’s shushing me this way. What I heard was a man telling me about a sale on bananas and a two-for-one deal on cans of Campbell’s Soup. It was a commercial for Jewel Food Stores. The voice belonged to Larry Sellers.

I stayed silent until the commercial was over. Then I said, “Dinner’s ready.”

Simon nodded, turned off his radio, and rolled off the bed onto his feet. As he passed me in the doorway, he put his arm around my back and leaned his head against my arm, a kind of half hug that offered more affection than I’d gotten from Simon since he entered junior high.

As he walked away, I smiled at the possibility that, by introducing Simon to Larry Sellers, I’d done what few mothers who’d so poorly chosen a husband ever did: given my son a hero.

I began to listen to Larry Sellers’ voice as closely as Simon did. I asked him questions about the voiceover artist’s style and technique, and Simon answered them as best he could with headshakes and nods. But my questions weren’t about Larry Sellers, really. They were about Simon. I came to treat the voice of Larry Sellers as a kind of surrogate for my son’s, as if the much older man’s speech—not what he said, but how he said it—could give me some idea of how Simon might sound if he could talk. The only voice I remembered as Simon’s was that of a little boy. And as Simon grew into a young man with acne on his shoulders and hair sprouting out of his Adam’s apple, my memory of that little voice faded until, when I lay awake in bed at night, with Frank snoring a few inches and a million miles away from me, I was no longer certain that the voice I heard so faintly in my mind’s ear had ever belonged to Simon.

•••

THE DAY AFTER Connor left for college, I left Frank.

I moved out of the house to a one-bedroom apartment on the town square in Sampere. I offered Simon, who was twenty by then, my pullout couch and some space for his clothes, but he declined. The reason he gave me when I finally asked the right yes-no question was that he wanted to stay close to the Tippecanoe restaurant, in Leyton, where he’d worked for four years as a busboy. It’s just as likely that Simon believed moving in with me would look too much like surrendering to his father, and more likely still that Simon had come to depend on having Frank around to hate. It gave him a kind of energy. I had seen Simon silently stoke his hatred to get himself out of the house and off to work on the coldest, wettest days. For my part, I was tired of spending my days and nights hating Frank. I hoped Simon would tire of it, too. If he didn’t, his life would be a poorer version of his father’s.

I sat in my Ford with the keys between my legs and my bulging suitcases in the back seats where my sons used to sit. As I steadied myself to leave Simon behind in the house where I’d raised him, I couldn’t reconcile these two ideas: 1) that I hadn’t failed Simon, and 2) that so many of my attempts to help Simon had failed.

•••

I’D BEEN LIVING on my own in Sampere for nearly three years when I came down with what my doctor suspected was a case of walking pneumonia. She drew some blood just to be sure and sent me on my way. A few days after that appointment, she asked me to come in for follow-up tests, which led to more tests and evidence that my walking pneumonia, which turned out to be cancer, had spread from my lungs to my lymph nodes, liver and bones. It was not long before I wasn’t walking at all anymore, but lying in a hospital bed in my apartment’s tiny living room.

The morphine haze made me feel like I was dead already. The hospice nurse had given me a beige plastic cylinder with a button I could press to dose myself. To stave off the cloudy-headedness, I would wait as long as I could, pushing the limits of my endurance, before plunging the button and releasing the morphine into my blood. The first time I watched the clock, I lasted an hour before the pain became too much. Then, fifty minutes. Two days later, I could manage only twenty minutes. Fighting the tide, I tried, in the middle of the night, to go from twenty minutes back up to twenty-five by dropping the device over the edge of the bed, but at eighteen minutes, I was wailing, begging the nurse to return the cylinder to my trembling, outstretched hand.

The day I awoke to what I guessed would be ten minutes of barely tolerable clarity, I asked for my boys. I had a vague awareness that Connor was home from school and that he and Simon had been sleeping at my apartment. I had no memory of Frank coming to visit me and no desire to see him.

Connor appeared at my bedside. He covered the back of my free hand with his and smiled down on me, trying to give me some of the confidence he had in surplus. Simon hung back behind Connor. I could not see his face.

“Simon,” I said. I’d tried to call him, but what came out was a hoarse whisper.

Connor turned his head to him and said, with some impatience, “Mom wants you over here.”

When they were standing side by side, I said, in a voice I knew they’d one day forget, just as I’d forgotten Simon’s, what I’d called them in to hear.

“It’s impossible—” I said. I took a shallow, wheezing breath. “How much I love you—” Another breath. “Both.”

“We love you, too, Mom,” Connor said, answering for himself and Simon. “We love you tons.”

A faulty wire crackled and a light flickered in the frosted light fixture above us. The heart-rate monitor beeped, counting up to some number I couldn’t guess before the many short beeps were answered by a single long one. I tried to focus on my sons, to drink them in, as if they could do what morphine did, only better.

“How’s your breathing, Mom?” Connor asked.

Something in my throat was clicking with each little inhalation.

“I’m going to go check in with the nurse, okay?” Connor said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

I nodded once, slowly. Connor leaned over and kissed me gently on the forehead. Then he glanced at Simon and walked out of the room.

Simon didn’t take Connor’s place at the head of my bed. He stayed where he was, near my right leg, its femur close to bursting with tumors. Since the day a doctor told me I had only a few months to live, I’d been picturing my last moments with Simon. I’d imagined him wanting to say goodbye and hating that he could not.

Simon kept his eyes on mine as tears pooled in their bottom lids. He gave me three deep, slow nods, a gesture I imagined spoke as clearly to me as any voice could have: I know you love me, it said. I love you, too.

Then Simon stooped to lay his head on my bony breast, and he held my head in his hand, leaving nothing worth saying unsaid.