Brian Freeman - Dark Screams - Volume Six

“Just sit still, oh my God, there’s no one else in, they didn’t tell us what to do in these situations, it doesn’t look too deep, but there’s a lot of blood, just keep breathing, all right? I have to—”

And then there’s quiet. Quiet in the store, I don’t know where she is but she’s gone, and quiet in my head. The scissors that she had cut me with are in my hands, although I don’t remember taking them. I reach out slowly and wrap my bloody finger in a pristine white towel on the desk next to me. I stand up and place my gift certificate and a five-dollar bill carefully to the side of the puddle of blood, then drop the scissors into the bowl of lukewarm water, watching the red feathers spiral through the liquid for a moment before I turn to leave. I find the switch on the top of the sign and slide it so that OPEN turns as dark as the pavement outside. The bell laughs again as I exit.

“She misses her grandfather.”

Josh could barely hear his wife over their daughter’s wailing. As usual, no discernible trigger prompted Lydia’s shrill cries. They’d searched for physical causes: a rash or some undetected illness that X-rays and reflex tests and specialists might uncover. The doctors insisted she was perfectly healthy.

A happy baby, most of the time.

But any time of day or night, at home or during their increasingly rare stroller walks in the neighborhood, she’d fall into a full-throated fit of screaming. In public, heads would turn, neighbors or strangers offering help or sympathy. Some of them clucked their tongues, wondering what kind of parents would allow their baby girl to suffer such agony.

As if there was anything to do. When Lydia got like this, nothing would calm her.

Not even bedtime exhaustion. Twelve pounds now, lungs each the size of a plum, yet she could last for a full hour. Then finally the tease of calm, her parents sliding quietly under covers, heads hitting the pillows, almost drifting off, a sudden gurgle, an infant intake of breath, and then the shrieking began anew.

The same pattern several nights in a row, and Josh could barely function. Without sufficient sleep he was irritable at work, and even with his wife. He feared he’d fall asleep behind the wheel of his car. One morning he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten to his office building. The wall decorations looked different, and the eyes in the owner’s portrait blinked a greeting at him. At his cubicle, entry boxes pulsed on his computer screen; their labels changed as he clicked the cursor into them.

Josh couldn’t take much more of this.

A loving father would do anything for his daughter.

He would do anything to make the noise stop.

They’d had one solution.

He put up with it, for a while.

“Do the voice,” Michael prompted from the next table.

The request offered Josh another odd spotlight of lunchtime popularity. In a workplace where management forced staff to compete for largely nonexistent bonuses, people typically kept to themselves. Lunch was a strict noon-to-twelve-thirty routine, their office too far from Route 21’s drive-thrus, so they brown-bagged in near silence or waited to zap a Lean Cuisine. One day last month, in the tedious line at the building’s only microwave, Josh made an offhand comment about his father-in-law. He stared at the instructions for his baked chicken with string beans and said, “Jesus, this is ridiculous. Pull back film over vegetables and rotate meat one quarter turn. What am I, a chef?”

Not much amusement from the captive audience, so Josh did the worst thing you can do after a joke: He explained it. “Cheryl’s dad. He’s, uh, staying with us awhile. The old guy had surgery to remove his vocal cords, so he speaks with one of those electronic voice boxes.” Josh set his entrée on the counter, then rubbed his right hand over his Adam’s apple. “Holds the amplifier here and pushes a button.”

Did he dare? Josh wasn’t necessarily a gifted mimic, but a few times in his life he’d stumbled into near-perfect vocal impressions: his high-school soccer coach with the faint lisp; an undergraduate history professor with a thick southern drawl. And his father-in-law—not as he’s known him all these years, but the way he sounds now, after the laryngectomy.

“Oh, God, it’s too cruel,” Josh had protested. “I really shouldn’t do it.” Yet such protest, even among barely civil colleagues, couldn’t help but prompt a few voicings of encouragement, “You brought it up” and “Well, now you have to.”

He was a musician begged into an off-duty performance. Oh, it won’t be as good without the orchestra; I apologize in advance; usually I like to warm up my voice, practice a few quick scales…

Josh pressed his hand to his throat, miming each syllabic push of the button, and he found the guttural monotone at the back of his throat as he reenacted his father-in-law’s complaint about microwave cooking.

Again no response, at first, but the comical irony of it grew—at the idea of an older man’s verbose phrasings pushed through an electronic device, at his struggle to convey resentment without variation in pitch or volume—and by the time Josh hit “rotate meat,” Patti in accounts, Patti who never laughed or even listened since other lives didn’t interest her, Patti had covered her mouth, too late, because she’d done an actual spit-take of her Diet Coke. His coworkers laughed at that and at Josh, too, as he finished out the mimicked phrases.

“Poor old guy,” Josh said. “Can’t help the way he sounds. But he makes the strangest comments, in that voice. I swear.” Josh crossed himself to affirm he spoke the truth but also to hint at solemnity. He walked a fine line. Even though most listeners identified with jokes about difficult in-laws, it might seem cruel to mock someone who was recovering from a serious illness.

“Cheryl’s father is staying with us a lot, while he’s getting better. Also, he’s really happy to spend time with his new grandkid.”

Hank, one spot ahead in the microwave line, asked the obvious question. “Your little girl. How does she react to…?”

“Yeah, I was worried about that myself,” Josh admitted. “Turns out, Lydia doesn’t mind it at all.”

An understatement, really, but he didn’t feel the need to share everything with his coworkers.

He lifted one corner of the plastic film over his frozen entrée, collected a napkin and fork from the countertop. Performance over, head down, just getting through lunch again and then back to work. On impulse, and without looking up, he deadpan monotoned the start to a lullaby.

The lunchroom echoed with rare, uncontrollable laughter.

Truth was, Josh didn’t much like his father-in-law and had initially fought with Cheryl over the decision to allow his visits.

It should have been easy to talk her out of the idea. By Cheryl’s own account, he’d been an indifferent father at best. At worst, he had the personality of a mean drunk—without needing any alcohol or Hyde’s potion to prompt the meanness. He’d slipped into rages at his wife and daughters when they failed to meet his impossible, old-fashioned expectations, and sometimes young Cheryl had hidden from him until the latest arbitrary tantrum subsided. He never apologized afterward. “I speak what I feel. Not good to keep things bottled up.”

Some of his tirades insisted that his family was “bringing him down”—trapping him in a drab home and in a small-town job with no prospect of promotion. “I wish I could be rid of you,” he sometimes said, adding an unfortunate, colorful turn of phrase: “Weren’t for you worthless ladies, I’d be farting through silk.”