Ellen Block: The Language of Sand

Abigail hastily took out her contacts and put on her glasses. After turning off the light switch, she held it down. The bulb dimmed, leaving her in total darkness. Crawling into bed, she nestled her head on the T-shirt she’d covered the pillow in, wrapped the towels around her, and trembled.

The wind was blowing stridently outside. While the brick house was impervious, the windows weren’t. Each gust set the glass to quivering in the casements, a noise akin to bursts of static on a radio, random and aggravating.

“So much for peace and quiet.”

dree(drē), adj., v. , dreed, dreeing.Scot. and North Eng.—adj.1.tedious; dreary. — v.t.2.to suffer; endure. Also, dreegh(drēKH), dreigh, driech, driegh.[bef. 1000; ME; OE drēogan to endure; c. Goth driugan to serve (in arms)]

Abigail awoke to the sensation of warmth on her face. She bolted up in bed and sniffed the air, seeking the source of the heat. A few heart-pounding seconds later, she realized it was the dawn light from the window that had roused her.

“Get a grip, Abby. ”

During the night, the towels she’d improvised into blankets became tangled, and she had to unlace them from her arms and legs. Since the fire, Abigail slept fitfully. She tossed and turned and writhed, twisting her bedding into knots. Often she woke to find wrinkles pressed into her skin, evidence of her late-night wrestling. Rarely did she remember what she’d dreamed. The marks on her body were battle scars from a war she’d waged in her sleep, so she was thankful not to recall the fight.

The floor was icy underfoot, piercing right through her socks. Abigail slipped her shoes on. The bedsprings whined when she stood.

“My feelings exactly.”

Her entire body cried out with soreness, and her eyes were dry from sleeping on the dusty bed. There were eyedrops in her toiletry bag. As soon as she opened the bedroom door, she could see that the bathroom light was on again.

“It’s definitely a short,” she insisted. “What you have to do is go see Lottie and tell her this is unacceptable. You can’t have lights popping on and off in the middle of the night. She needs to send an electrician here immediately. And a cleaning crew.”

Aside from the light, the bathroom was as Abigail had left it. Her toothbrush was on the edge of the sink, next to a travel-sized tube of toothpaste. Her contacts case rested on top of the toilet tank. Once she had her contacts in, she reinspected the switch. Nothing appeared amiss. Abigail snapped off the light.

Halfway down the hall, she turned back and flipped it on again.

“This way there won’t be any more surprises.”

Downstairs, Abigail found the brochure and the box of matches by the fireplace, evidence of her failure. Whenever she exhaled, she could see her breath. Starting a fire would have been smart. She wasn’t up for it.

Habit prompted her to go to the kitchen and make herself a cup of tea.

“Except you don’t have any tea. You may not have a teapot either.”

A search of the cabinets yielded a scuffed kettle bearing a dented belly.

“One out of two.”

Abigail wandered into the living room and checked her watch. It was a little before six a.m. She hadn’t been awake this early in ages, not since Justin was an infant. She would stir at the sound of his soft, insistent crying and pad into his room, the carpet muffling her footsteps, then scoop Justin into her arms, and his crying would cease. It was gratifying that her touch could quiet him, that it had so much power. She smiled, then trembled from the cold, shaking off the memory. Abigail rubbed her arms, wondering what to do.

“The lighthouse.”

Why Lottie kept the door locked was a mystery as well as a redundancy, given that the front door was as secure as a vault and practically impossible to open even with the appropriate key. Abigail didn’t get it, which was for the best. Grasping Lottie’s logic would have meant she’d relinquished her own.

A few steps up the spiral staircase, the iron risers began to growl ominously. Abigail froze, afraid the stairs might not hold. To assess their strength, she shook the railing and jumped on the lower landings. The wrought iron held fast, so she cautiously began to climb. Halfway to the top, Abigail made the mistake of glancing over the handrail. The staircase snaked around the walls vertiginously, bottoming onto a concrete slab.

“Note to self: Don’t look down.”

The tower acted as a giant megaphone, amplifying her words into an echo that swirled through the lighthouse like a coin in a drain. Abigail couldn’t resist trying it again.

“Oh, say, can you see,” she sang.

The bar of the song ricocheted off the walls, vibrating impressively.

“Watch out, Celine Dion.”

For as much as Abigail had been talking to herself, this was the first time her voice wasn’t being filtered through her own ears. The echo didn’t match what she was accustomed to hearing. There was a gap between how she thought she sounded and how she really sounded. That was why Abigail always made Paul leave the message on their voice mail.

His voice wasn’t especially deep or distinctive, yet there was a dignified quality to his speech. Each word was enunciated to perfection, which was what Abigail first noticed about him when they’d met in graduate school. They were in the library and she’d taken a seat at the same study table. When the girls at the next table began to talk too loudly, Paul noticed it was bothering Abigail.

“Could you lower your voices, please?” he asked.

His intonation said volumes. The girls promptly stopped, then Paul flashed Abigail a glance. She smiled to thank him and he smiled back. Though that wasn’t what hooked her. It was his voice as well as those six short words he’d spoken.

Abigail returned to the library every day for a week to see if he’d be there. He was, sitting at the same table, in the same spot. Neither had enough nerve to approach the other, until one rainy evening when Abigail bumped into him in the vestibule of the library and he struck up a conversation. She was so enthralled by the purposeful manner with which he talked that she couldn’t absorb a sentence he was saying. Meaning peeled apart from the nouns and verbs, stripping them to a chain of syllables, a pure resonance. Paul’s voice was like a snake charmer’s pipe, enchanting beyond reason. Abigail could have fallen for him with her eyes closed.

They began seeing each other, then continued to date as Abigail completed her linguistics thesis and Paul finished his doctorate in applied mathematics. Initially, the subject seemed dry and impenetrable to her. To hear Paul discuss it, she would have sworn he was describing a piece of art. His passion for numbers was rivaled by Abigail’s passion for words, his exuberance infectious. He would transform as he sketched a theorem for her, growing more animated with each sign he scribbled onto napkins or place mats or newspapers, whatever was handy. Abigail had been captivated by his descriptions of math and by his unparalleled respect for it. If he could love numbers with such ardor, she couldn’t imagine how it would be to have him love her.

After they’d earned their respective degrees, they moved into a three-room apartment together. They were both low on the totem poles at their new jobs, scrimping on food and essentials to get by. Abigail had been employed by an online research company. Paul worked at a think tank. Since their positions’ potential outweighed the starting pay, they were willing to make do. Plus, Abigail’s father slipped her cash when she would let him. He was so proud that she’d chosen to pursue a career in lexicography, he would tell people it was the equivalent of having the eldest son in a Catholic family enter the seminary. Flattered, Abigail made it clear to her father that she wanted to make it on her own. He acquiesced by sending smaller checks less frequently. She didn’t mind going without as long as she had Paul.