wise silence - a preview

Her phone vibrated several times a day.  As it buzzed against her hip in the front pocket of her jeans, Rosemary would move her hand slowly down and press the vibration into her thigh until it stopped.  Startling at first, the movement slid into a softening; there was never a message and Rosemary was relieved.  What could her father possibly say and in what language?  Just as there were only inadequate words for love, there were no sentiments that would console her now.  He knew, she knew, and somehow that thread was all that held them together. 

Jay walked around her, trying to make eye contact and sometimes she let him catch her.  He placed his hand in the small of her back and pressed gently.  His eyes begged for a word, but she had none.  He would stare into her, his eyes welling, and she would stare back.  A part of her longed for the message; yet locked in her silent cell, she could not reply.  She supposed he was lonely now, and scared.  She supposed people were speaking of her meanness and coldness.  So much for her previous pronouncements about forgiveness and letting go and blowing it all away.  But when you are drowning in the middle of the river and your head is under water, how do you scream?  When you are frozen in the middle of a bad dream, your jaw locked and panic and a vice around your heart, how do you wake up? 

She could see that she was awake.  She could see Jay’s eyes calling, but only the tiniest corner of her was moved, and it wasn’t enough. 

For weeks, she had fought the current of her rage, thrashing at any hand that reached out.  She flinched at any touch and rejected any kind word.  In her rawness, they all burned her flesh anew.  Each movement seared away the calm pain and sent her synapses into chaos.  To touch a burn, no matter how softly, was to ignite a new fire.  Nerve endings exposed do not differentiate intent.  They respond only to the threat, and shrivel hard against the terrible intrusion. 

Like a dog with a bone, she held on angrily, hungrily, as if these thoughts of anger and distrust, this silence, meant the difference between living and dying, between starvation and sated comfort.  Shane imagined letting go.  She was tired.  But her dog mind said no.  Instinct, guttural and mean, held on tightly with no pull of loyalty, with no inkling of forgiveness.  She wanted to bite the hands that had fed her life.  She wanted to protect the rotted, maggot filled thoughts with every muscle in her drained body.  In the Sophie’s choice between her father and her son, there was no contest.  She gave in easily to the seeming clarity of the decision.  It was the boy and always would be. 

They tried gently at first to ease her away from that bone thought.  Distracting her with shiny objects of food, stroking her hair from behind and softly whispering, “it’s okay.”  And there was only silent moaning from within her.  They tried stern words:  “Rosemary you’ve got to let it go, just for a minute.  Your father is suffering so.”  Rosemary could stop momentarily and listen, but her jaw never loosened its grip. 

If it had, the murky mess at the bottom of her mind would kill them all.  The gangrenous, vile words could never be taken back.  Didn’t they know that the bone in her mouth kept her from biting?  As long as she was occupied quietly with her gnawing, she would resist mauling them all.  Especially her father.  Especially that hand that had raised her, fed her, held her, taught her. 

She’d rather die than give up the bone.  She sat in autistic silence, no response on her lips or in her eyes, no contact with their faces.  Holding on. 
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Rosemary sat silently in the kitchen watching as the ham drippings congealed.  Time lapse, is that what they called it?  When minutes move by our eyes so slowly we can observe the molecular changes.  We can see the precise moment when a caterpillar breaks through to butterfly, when a rosebud unfolds into a dazzling, open, vulnerable flower, or when warm ham drippings chill just enough to form a congealed, disgusting mass that nauseates the onlooker. 

Time lapse, memory lapse, lapse in judgment.

Lapse- a slight error or termination of a right or privilege.  An interval.

            To slip, subside, cease.

Lapse- to cease to have validity, expire, run out.

Lapse- an erroneous action, error, blunder, miscue, misstep, mistake, a faux pas, false move

Lapse- failure to do a thing, an omission, an oversight.

As Rosemary glanced from object to object in that cool kitchen, it was all a lapse.  Everything- from three weeks ago today until now, and it would all be a lapse until the end of her own existence.  But if she had to watch it all in slow motion for much longer, she would have to engage in her own lapse and cut her eyes out. 

Her son’s life history moved past her mind’s eye slowly, not in a flash as told in trauma stories, but a slow video, looping end to beginning to end.  His fifth birthday party, bowling with friends.  His first girlfriend in stretch shorts and curled hair smiling at him as his gutter ball clangs and he sticks his tongue out in disgust.  A bike ride at seven, his legs unable to control the speed, his mind moving faster than the machine.  He crashes through obstacles, falling, but always getting up, surprised.  He never saw the fall coming, never. 

Rosemary imagined him in the moments before the end.  His eyes would have been full of innocence and joy, sparkling like the water around him.  He would have, perhaps, been singing aloud in the sun, dreaming he was a nomad sailor in that little raft, drifting on the ocean towards his next adventure.  As his grandfather’s trawler motored up the causeway, he would have believed that the rope would hold forever, that there was no danger, no threat, no event that could ever have separated them.  He could not have imagined, could he, that moments later he would be torn away, alone and dying?  The infinite beauty of the previous hours could not have prepared him for what was to come.  Rosemary had to stay in that shiny memory.  She too could not imagine the end, but for an entirely different reason.  Her son’s innocence could not yet create a picture of his own mortality.  Rosemary’s life had prepared her well, she had thought, for the image of destruction and she knew that if she allowed it, she could create a vivid, intricate picture filled with so much devastating detail that her head would explode from the vision.

She would stay in the pre moments then, the shiny moments of light and freedom and believing, ridiculously, that he had not suffered.