Читать книгу The Healer - Greg Hollingshead - Страница 14

When Ross Troyer spoke in the kitchen his voice caused the heat duct that fed his daughter’s room overhead to resonate. Caroline would know her parents were arguing by the quality of the sound from the duct. Her father did not have to raise his voice, all he had to do was speak long enough each time for the duct to resonate. She would know he was not talking on the phone because the phone was directly below her bed, in the front sitting room, next to her mother’s hand. She would know her parents were arguing because it was only when they argued that her father addressed more than one or two words to her mother at one time. If Caroline were to crouch by the register, as she used to do when she was a child, she could hear what he was saying, and if she were to lie flat on the floor and press her ear to the register, as she used to do until the burden of knowing came to outweigh the secret strength of it, she could hear as well what her mother was saying, all the way from the front sitting room, which was separated from the kitchen by the dining area, less a room than a space between the kitchen and the front room. There her mother, the dog at her feet, would be watching TV or reading a magazine or doing a crossword puzzle, a tumbler of vermouth on the coffee table in front of her, while in the kitchen her father, who did not drink, would be cleaning his rifle or going through real estate listings, and Caroline would know that he was listening to her mother as he had always listened to her, now listening and now not listening, in a way that to judge from his intermittent responses had done nothing over three decades to diminish the irritating effect of her words. Sooner or later the duct would start to resonate.

It was resonating tonight, but Caroline did not get off her bed, where she had been writing (the small black notebook now slack in her hand, the ballpoint pen capped and fallen to the bedspread alongside her knee), but listened only to the pure sign of her parents’ arguing as she had listened to it not as a child crouched at the register who understood the words or most of them but earlier, as an infant on her back, her limbs waving in air to its inflections, her muscles drinking its rhythms, that she might be informed by, and so survive, and in surviving one day react against and in reacting echo and so recreate the world of her parents’ emotions. Now, twenty years later, loath, she was sitting upright on her bed, where she could hear echoing inside her the legacy of that infant thirst: the tone and rhythm and tenor of the old wrangle, of the voices that moved without ceasing. And all of it—not only her parents’ passion but the turmoil it caused at the depths of her own muscles, her own being—was no less physical and familiar than the traffic noise and the rest of the low constant din from the street or than the full moon visible through the window like a halogen floodlamp behind speeding clouds. And she continued to listen to the rasp of the curtains in the night breezes and to the sound of her own breathing deeper and slower. And the other, the interior and past, was contained within the ground of these immediate sights and sounds, soothed by them, slowed and quieted though not silenced, held by them in an embrace of perception that calmed and so enabled the discovery of grace even in that.