Silence is Just Another Word for Love, Chapter One

If you seek the root of suffering, look to a woman. She is filled to her sweet and cheery brim with it, and she'll never hesitate to fill your cup, too.

I don't remember much about our mother—only that there was something stupid and archaic about her. Nothing Tim or I ever did seemed to please her. There was a frown cast upon us in her cold bright blue eyes that neither smile nor sunshine could shake. Tim carried this Ma in his heart all of his life. He said he'd known a different version of her than I did. I said he's just succumbed to being satisfied.

Even when Emilie was born there was an odd distance about her. Certainly all mothers get frazzled from time to time. But not all mothers go out and sing Frankie Avalon in the gutter. Not all mothers leave the gas stove running all night because it's “too damn cold for icicles in here.” Not all mothers shoot down the alley cat that's howling in heat from a thirty-eight story high-rise window. Not all mothers, no. Only one named Amelia Renfield.

When I was younger, I discovered, eight seconds separated me and the street below our high-rise. It had been just another Saturday morning. The morning sky glowed that speckled Brooklyn fog—where the slums, dipped in blue mist, trembled with just a notion of sunlight—and from the clothesline ending at our flat window, a sea of white undershirts trembled against the breath of dawn. In my stupor, I didn't remember feeling the glass fall through, only the vague sense that I had leaned too far forward, and had pulled myself back. I saw the glass panel explode in a small puff in the alley between our two streets—but then I blinked, and it dissolved like the bag of rotting oranges I had tossed out the week before.

Eight seconds and the wind enveloped me. It didn't feel gentle this time, instead a blast of cold and bitter daggers; I'd forgotten it was also late January. But still, God damn. Youth was prison. Everything ached, and smarted, and locked up in odd and stiff ways. My mother's kisses had been kitchen knives running their flat, hungry sides along my waiting cheeks. The roses she had placed on our windowsill reeked of gasoline. I shivered in my bed at night, certain that the needles within the mattress craved the flesh of my spine. Eight seconds now promised to separate me and that crumbling little bug of a body. Eight seconds and I was rubbing noses with my release, the eternity of a broken Brooklyn street.

My blood sloshed in my veins, and I could feel the valves of my heart swing open and shut. The eight seconds had passed. Now, looking down, down, I was a vessel waiting to be shipwrecked. I became a bomb, waiting. I was the thrill of the spill, waiting. I played the rhapsody of a car overturning in my mind, twisting, bucking, waiting, breathing heavily in eager fucking anticipation of the crash. I didn't know it at the time, but leaning out that thirty-eight story window, bathed in the blue-speckled sun—there was something goddamned erotic about the wait.

The doorhinges clicked. Tim and Amelia had returned from their trip to the dentist...in other words, the OR. We had a certain code when it came to these kinds of things. At home we called it the bitch—at school, the meeting. I wouldn't learn till later on in life that I had a much milder form of the bitch than my brother did. In childhood and as an adult, it visited upon Tim very often and very severely, and was also one of the few things Amelia could practice her concerned countenances for.

When Tim entered the room, he made a silent gasp at me, backing up a little bit. His eyes pushed bullets into the base of my skull...and from that feeling a slow glow of heat began radiating from my chest.

But my mother was the one who screamed and made a fuss and pulled me away from the window. I still remember her nails—razor-sharp strips of hot pink Hansen lacquer; one of them slipped and scraped my rib. I still have the short fat burst of a scar just above the cup of my stomach.

My hypnosis burst at her shrill like a bubble landing on a pinhead. She yanked me back in—and before I knew it, she was at it again, yelling. She had warned me about that window. For God's fucking sake, I was twelve years old, and I couldn't even bother to watch my sister for an hour without trying to run away. Stop shrugging like that and stand goddamn straight. She had warned me, but did I listen? No. Did I listen the night before, when she had to open that window to iron all of my clothes, and the smoke of my cleanliness withered her, and made a cornflower dullness of her Austrian crystal eyes? No. Did I listen the night before that, when I said I had “accidentally” dropped that bag of rotting oranges out the window? No. Did I listen last Saturday, when she had downed another bottle of my father's absence—when she had leaned against the sill of gasoline roses and almost fallen out that window herself? No, no, no, no, no. Did I know why?

Because I dreaded taking out the trash, I thought, where I would run into the landlord who always smelled of something that curdled the acids in my stomach. Then I'd have to bend the corners that were crumbling with mice and mold and—nails. I'd stepped on so many nails I could have easily staked one right through my foot and it wouldn't have bothered me none. And not only that, oh, no, not only that, Ma—there were the tenants downstairs, the ones who you never bothered to meet. The ones you said you'd better be off rolling up your windows if you passed by 'em; you said they was a shark tank. But you sure had no problems throwing your son in the ocean to teach him how to swim, did you? No, no, no, no, no. There had been the tenants downstairs who shot curses at me in seven different languages, Spanish and Yiddish and Mandarin Chinese shouting I should just jump in that bag of trash all at once. As I passed by them, the landlord would grab me by the collar and whisper in my ear things about them that were enough to melt the cartilage from my ears. And if it was a rare day, and I could walk down the winding stairwell without fanfare and gunshots, I'd have to open the front door and greet the brokenness of an eternal Brooklyn street.

“No,” I said. And she, lit like a fuse, burned with loving maternal frustration. Suicidal piece of shit. I had everything. Why? Because she had given me everything. I had time, I had youth, I had money. But that apparently didn't appease me, so she made sure I had a home to live in, a school to attend, and shiny new things to keep me jumping hoops when I was wanting in her own absence. Sure, I lived with my single mother and her two children in a crumbling flat on this side of the lower West, but—a staccato of buts always punctuated one of my mother's performances—but, my little baby Leo, but what was wrong with that? I was rich. I could fix whatever ailments I had. Money—the world killed for that kind of cure. How could I ask for more than that?

I knew the answer, but not in my mind. It soaked me, permeated every possible port inside of me, where it could feed on itself and pulse and flame and burn, spreading like a heartless fire, at once nowhere and everywhere. It burned from the depths of my toes to that crown of snow that never lay quite right on my head. It pounded the walls of my lungs, rattled the chainlink of my ribcage. Yet I could never say it, never open my mouth and release it. The part of me still had some poor fragmented notion of pity and justice I called love thought that it would target her like a bullet. Another part of me, refined to the very death, thought that it was too grandiose a concept, too above her to mention. Still a deeper—wiser—part of me kept my silence...for silence's sake.

Her heels clicked the floor as her eyes flared upon me. Then she smiled. Right then I knew I must've looked like a dirty little demon in her eyes—I looked just like my father. I had limbs too small and too sharp, my elbows stout little daggers; a face that was too wrong, too pale; eyes too gray and too dark to match her brand of blue. I looked much different from my strawberry siblings. I didn't know if my breaking from the gene pool was cause for concern or a peculiar kind of pride—having broken another bond with my mother—because if they weren't bound by anything else, Tim and Emilie were always going to be bound to her by their looks. I was the odd one out. Maybe even the lucky one.

I matched her stare play by play. Her jaw was set in a straight line, her nostrils dark pulsing eggs. Her pupils were pinpricks of black embedded in two crystal glass casings. I couldn't help but notice that my reflection in her eyes distorted me—made me smaller somehow. And now I, too, was a speck, a flare of brilliant turquoise, drowning in the blue brightness of her anger. I was no longer Leo—I was an actor in her performance. Dramatis personae: that dirty thieving little brat. I knew it exactly. She had wanted someone else instead of me. She had wanted a boy who was more like one of those roses on the windowsill: big, fragrant, warm. Placed so she could see him and water him and curl his leaves to her liking. But she got me, and I got her. And there I was: small, pale, cold, silent, smirking; smoldering like the heart within a long candled flame.

I burst for the window again; and this time neither she nor Tim could catch me. I heard them before I saw them. Now I could see our salvation coming through the cold wind and the blue-speckled fog: it burned and it wailed and it called—

It had taken eight seconds for me to run to the window on the thirsty-eighth floor and wave the CPS in.

Judging by the bands of red flashing across her face and that bitter black flare in her pupils, I knew I must have looked like a goddamn Hamlet.

How now, Amelia? I thought. How now?