The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [62]
The air was clogged with speech and I fell from the bed. It was coming from everywhere, a wall of sound bearing down on my hips—the pressure seemed to be coming from inside me, something trying to force itself out—and I crumpled, started to retch.
I couldn’t block the sound with my hands, and I felt myself blacking out.
I remembered LeBov’s needle and grabbed it from my pocket. I jammed it into an ear, but missed the hole, piercing the cartilage on the outer ear. I tried again, slower, letting the tip of the needle fill the ear hole, then, when I was sure of my aim, jamming in the needle until it passed through the thinnest part of the inner ear, which presented no more resistance than a tissue.
I did this without thinking, with no sense of how much pressure was required.
If you do it right, you’ll cloud your hearing for about an hour, maybe longer, LeBov had said.
He didn’t elaborate. I didn’t ask. An hour earlier, sitting with LeBov in the hut, I didn’t think I’d drive a needle into my head so that I could deafly handle the vocal cloud of a child.
The pain was deep. For a moment I heard distant crying. A person, a bird, a siren. Warm liquid filled my ear, poured down my face.
I touched it, expecting to draw back bloody fingers, but the liquid was clear. Clear and warm.
LeBov’s needle didn’t work. I could hear perfectly from the punctured ear. I only hollowly contemplated approaching the other ear with the needle, ramming it in to balance the pain.
Esther had stopped speaking by then anyway. My activities with the needle had rendered her mute. She stood watching me, a mostly convincing look of fear on her face. An effective display of crying, soft crying that she seemed to want to suppress, came next. She performed her grief for my benefit, but I had other things to do. The house was calm now. The only sounds were from our Claire, who mumbled something from the bed, rolled deeper into her covers.
These were such reassuring sounds to me, the sounds of Claire not yet gone.
Esther crouched next to me, her finger crossing her lips to show she would not speak. A sign I once might have trusted. She brought her shirttail up to dab at my ear, to wipe free some of the discharge, and it seemed for a moment that she was intent on hugging me, but I pulled her hand away. I pulled it away, stood up myself, and walked strongly with my daughter out of her room, dragging her with me, through our house and out the front door, where I left her alone in the yard.
I would like to say that love shows itself in strange ways, but that would not be true in this case. Sometimes love refuses to show itself at all. It remains perfectly hidden. One spends a lifetime concealing it. There is an art to this. To conceal love is, in its way, the most sophisticated kind of smallwork there is.
Esther stood outside our house with her head down, shoulders small.
I rushed her again, moved my daughter yet farther into the yard, and she slumped over me, let herself be carried. At the sidewalk I dropped her and with my hands I made the most terrible gesture I could.
It was the most fluent I’d ever been without speech.
Stay, stay there. Do not come in this house again. You are forbidden from here. We do not know you.
Esther looked up at me and nodded. With her little finger she crossed her heart.
I would not be fooled by her ministrations, such conspicuous acts of tenderness designed to fool us into letting down our guard. She should have known better. Maybe now she would.
Tonight I needed to protect my home and that meant keeping people like her—blood relation or not—well clear of it. If Esther tried to return I would be ready for her. I would meet her with everything I had.
21
We drove out the next morning. Our breath was scarce and we were bruising in dark pools beneath the skin. A small wound on my leg failed to bleed. It opened like the mouth of a baby. From the gash came the faintest