Silent to the Bone Read online

  Until Dr. Zamborska met and married Tina Nguyen and except for the month of July when Branwell was sent to Florida to spend time with his mother’s parents, father and son went everywhere together. When Branwell was a baby and if Dr. Z’s research required that he return to the lab in the evening, he took Branwell with him—even if it was midnight. If he was scheduled to give a paper at a conference of geneticists, he took Branwell along even if it meant that Branwell had to miss a day of school. Dr. Zamborska never missed a single teacher-parent conference, Disney movie, school play, or soccer game.

  My mother told me that even when Branwell was an infant, Dr. Z would bicycle over from his lab to feed him. He sat in the nursing room among the women who were nursing their babies—she herself was one—to give Branwell his bottle. Dr. Zamborska is tall like Branwell, and has red hair like him. He stands out in any crowd, but in that room of nursing mothers, he hardly seemed out of place because after only a few visits, the nursing mothers stopped being embarrassed and considered him one of them and exchanged information about Pampers and pacifiers.

  When Branwell rides his bike, he gets his pants leg caught in the chain of his bicycle. When he sits next to you in the bleachers, he sits too close. When he laughs at one of your jokes, he laughs too loud. When he eats a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, he ends up with a pound of peanut butter caught in his braces.

  When he sits too close, I tell him to back off. When he has peanut butter stuck in his braces, I tell him to clean it up. When he gets his pants leg caught in his bicycle chain, I stop and wait for him to get untangled.

  I figure that Branwell got his awkwardness from his father, and I guess I got my acceptance from my mother. And here’s the final thing I have to say about being friends with Branwell. He is different, but no one messes with him because everyone knows there is a lot to Branwell besides the sitting-too-close and the laughing-too-loud. They just don’t choose to be his friend. But I do. Who else would invite a guy over to hear his new CD of Mozart’s Prague Symphony and let him listen without having to pretend that he likes it or pretend that he doesn’t? Who else would ask a question like “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” the first thing in the morning?

  Branwell had always been fascinated with words and names. He liked to name things. When his dad and Tina found out that the baby would be a girl, they drew up a long list of possible names and studied it for a long time. They decided on Nicole, Nikki for short. Branwell liked the name. Liked it a lot, but when they asked him what he thought of it, he didn’t say much except, “Nice.” They thought Branwell was only lukewarm about it, but the exact opposite was true. Branwell liked the name Nicole—Nikki—very much, but his answer had little to do with the question. He was trying to tell them how disappointed he was that he had not been part of the decision. Dr. Z must have forgotten how much Branwell loved naming things, and Tina never got to know him well enough to find out.

  Branwell likes his own name because it was his mother’s before she got married. She was Linda Branwell, an only child. She was tall, and she also wore glasses at an early age. He calls his mother’s parents The Ancestors. They think that except for the red hair, which he got from his father and which they don’t mention, Branwell looks like her, and judging from the photos that I’ve seen, I would agree.

  Branwell spent every July with them at The Lovely Condominium, which is the name he has given to the place where they live. His grandfather Branwell retired to Naples, Florida after being an executive with General Motors. In addition to a beach, The Lovely Condominium complex has everything their Beautiful Home in Bloomfield Hills had. It has its own golf course, club house, tennis courts, and swimming pool. Dr. Zamborska says that the chemicals it takes to keep the pool, golf course, and grounds lovely would fertilize the wheat fields of a small nation. But Dr. Z does not say such things to The Ancestors, just as they don’t say anything about Branwell’s red hair. He is a gentle man, and he knows how much they love Branwell, and how much they miss Linda because he does, too. So he sends Branwell to them every July where Branwell is expected to do very grown-up things like playing golf and dressing for dinner. Branwell is no better at golf or tennis than he is at basketball, but for the entire month he spends with them, he never gives up trying to be what they want him to be.

  Every November—save the one with the infamous 911 call—Dr. Zamborska and Branwell traveled to Pittsburgh to spend Thanksgiving with his father’s parents. Dr. Zamborska is one of four children—all living—and Branwell is one of seven grandchildren on that side of the family. I have never met Branwell’s cousins, but I’ll bet he stands out in that crowd as much as he does in any other—even though I’ve heard they are all tall and have red hair.

  It’s strange that someone like Branwell who loves words so much would be silent. In the early days of Branwell’s silence, I wondered—in light of Nikki’s injury—if a new generation of survivor guilt had spilled over into him. Was he trying to make himself unconscious like Nikki? In the weeks that followed, I discovered that the reasons for his not speaking were layered. He could not speak until the last layer had been peeled away and laid aside.

  I am proud to say that the first words he spoke were to me, which does not help explain why we are friends but it says a lot about how deep the layers of our friendship go.

  DAY FOUR

  3.

  The next time I went to see Branwell, Dr. Zamborska was just leaving. He had rushed over to the Behavioral Center to tell Branwell the good news. The doctor had pinched Nikki below her collarbone, and her hand had reached toward the pinch. That showed a new level of consciousness. Even better, she was fluttering her eyes. Everyone hoped that this was a preview to her actually opening her eyes.

  Dr. Z told me that Branwell had been following instructions, going through the motions. Showered when told to. Ate—not much but enough—when food was put in front of him. He thought that Branwell was looking a little better, but the good news about Nikki didn’t do a thing to break his silence. He still had not uttered a sound.

  Dr. Z had hired a lawyer, Gretchen Silver, to defend Bran if the state brought charges against him. All that would depend on what happened to Nikki. I wondered how any lawyer—or anyone—could possibly defend Bran if he wouldn’t say anything?

  When the guard brought Branwell into the visitors’ room, he still looked pale, but his glasses were not smudged now, and I could see his eyes. I told him how glad I was that Nikki had fluttered her eyes. And that’s when the idea came to me.

  Branwell could speak to me with his eyes.

  There was a way we could communicate.

  My mother belongs to a book club and always reads the reviews in the Sunday New York Times so that she can make suggestions to her group. One Sunday, she told Dad and me about a book that had just been “written” by a Frenchman who was totally paralyzed, except for his left eye, which he was able to blink. I remember the name of the book because it was unusual. It was called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. This man—his last name was Bauby—wrote the whole book by having a friend recite the alphabet to him, and when she came to the letter he wanted, he would blink that left eye.

  The following Monday on the way to the bus stop, I had mentioned this to Branwell and asked him if he thought you could say the man actually wrote the book. Maybe this wasn’t as philosophical a question as “When a tree falls in a forest . . . ,” but it did make him think about what it meant to “write” a book. Bran decided that if someone dictates a letter that someone else writes or types, the writer is the one who puts the words together. Because of what he had said about a writer being the one who puts words together, I knew that he couldn’t write any more than he could speak.

  But the words were in him. I knew they were. All those words he loved and all those names he made up were in him, but it was as if they had gotten crushed in a Cuisinart. Their sounds—all their sounds—had blended together and become a mush that h
e could not sort into syllables. They had become sounds he could neither separate nor say.

  He was still robot-like, but his eyes had become more alive. I thought, What if I made a series of flash cards and spread them out on the table and watched which ones make Branwell’s eyes flutter?

  Anything I wrote to him or he wrote to me would be watched by the guard, but, I thought, who could he report to? And what would the person really know if he did? And, besides, guards are not snitches. Isn’t there some law that protects the privacy of people in public places?

  That evening, I cut up the cardboard backing of two yellow tablets. I measured them into thirds the long way and into halves the short way. That gave me six cards per tablet-back. Twelve cards in all. Two sides to a card. I had room for twenty-four things, but I decided to start with one side. Twelve things.

  I wrote names and phrases that I thought would jog him into speaking again. I wrote things as they came to me. Like those association tests given by my mother who is getting her doctorate in psychology. She shows or tells someone a word like butter or beach, and they are supposed to write or say all the words that come to mind when they see that word.

  I wrote BLUE PETER first. A blue peter is a blue flag with a white square in the center, and it is flown when a ship is ready to sail. That had become a code word between Branwell and me last summer when he had come back from a cruise of the Caribbean. Branwell lives at 198 Tower Hill Road, and I live at 184. His house is farther from the school bus stop than mine, so in the mornings when he left his house, he had taken to calling me and saying, “Blue peter”—nothing more—and hanging up. That’s how I would know that he was ready to leave for the bus stop. That gave me time to gather my books, put on my jacket, and walk to the end of our driveway where I would meet him.

  Blue Peter made me think of school. So the next card I wrote was DAY CARE, which is what Bran and I called school.

  On another, I wrote SIAS. That was what we called a game we played on the way to the bus stop. It means Summarize In A Sentence. For example, I would say to Branwell, “The movie Titanic. SIAS.” That movie was a big hit that summer. Bran came up with this: “Rich girl escapes while poor artist drowns when mega-ship sees only the tip of the iceberg and sinks as the crew rearranges the deck chairs while the band plays on.” Bran got four stars, our highest rating, for that SIAS because although we deduct for ands—he had used one—we also award extra points for clichés, and he had managed to work three into one SIAS.

  I stacked the cards and fastened them together with a rubber band and put them in my backpack. They were Connor Kane’s secret entry cards in the Break-the-Silence Sweepstakes Challenge. They would become my means of communicating with Branwell.

  DAY FIVE

  4.

  Nikki opened her eyes. She moved her feet and arms. Her brain was reestablishing cycles of sleeping and waking, which meant a new level of consciousness. The doctors were no longer concerned about the pressure inside her skull. (That tiny tube they had put inside her brain could also monitor the pressure.) Everyone celebrated, but the doctors warned that although she was technically no longer in a coma, she could not follow commands and still had a long, long way to go.

  The first thing I did on my next visit to the Behavioral Center was mention the good news about Nikki’s opening her eyes. But I’m sure that Branwell already knew, because I thought there was more spring and less shuffle in his step when the guard brought him out.

  I spread the flash cards out on the table between us. As I laid them out, I explained, “Remember the story of the paralyzed Frenchman who wrote a whole book with the blink of his left eye?” I no sooner had the sentence out of my mouth than Branwell blinked his eyes twice, very rapidly, and I knew he understood the rules of our communication.

  First, I let him look them all over. Even though he hardly shifted his head as he looked at them, I felt confident that I would get a signal. I didn’t know which card it would be, but I was sure it would be one. He lowered his head slightly, and I read that as a signal that he was ready. I pointed to the cards, one at a time.

  He blinked twice at one of the cards. His choice surprised me. I gathered them together, putting that one on top. It was MARGARET. I held the deck out with that one card facing him. He blinked twice again. I said, “Okay, we’ll start with Margaret.”

  I dropped the cards into my backpack and was out the door of the Behavioral Center when I realized that I didn’t quite know what to do with MARGARET. Just looking at the card sure didn’t make him speak. Was she possibly the person he wanted to speak to? Or was she the one who would tell me why he could not? Why MARGARET?

  Margaret is my half sister. She is fourteen years older than me. She runs her own computer consulting business out of an old house on Schuyler Place that she inherited from her two great-uncles. Schuyler Place is in Old Town, the oldest residential section of Epiphany across the campus from Tower Hill Road. The main buildings of Old Town line up around a small square park. This is where the townspeople shopped before they started building malls. The old city hall faces the square, and so does the original Carnegie Library.

  Margaret’s house, like all the others in Old Town, has a front porch, and the street itself has sidewalks on both sides of the road. In a strip of dirt between the sidewalk and the curb there are trees that were planted a hundred years ago when the university was just a college and people walked to classes and to the grocery store. In the summer when the trees are in full leaf, they make a canopy over the road—which, these days, is only wide enough for one-way traffic.

  Like a lot of doctors and lawyers who have bought these old houses, Margaret converted the living room and dining room into offices, rewired the whole house, remodeled the kitchen, and added on a room and a terrace in the back. There are three bedrooms—two small, one medium—and a bathroom upstairs. You can do whatever you want to the inside of the house, but you are not allowed to change the front that faces the street, and you even have to have the city approve of the colors you want to paint it. Some of the doctors and lawyers who opened offices in Old Town don’t live there, but Margaret does.

  The backs of the houses in Old Town face an alley, and that is where the people park their cars and put out their garbage on garbage-collection days. Despite not having enough parking space, Margaret loves the house, the location, the alley behind it, and every brick in the sidewalk in front. She says that Tower Hill Road is a nice place to visit, but she doesn’t want to live there.

  Margaret and I had always liked each other but it wasn’t until the first Thursday of Knightsbridge Middle School that we became good friends. Old Town and Knightsbridge, where I attend eighth grade, are both on the side of campus that is opposite our house. They are walking distance from each other and from the Behavioral Center.

  It was raining that first Thursday, and I had missed the school bus home. That was the first year my mother had gone back to the university to get her doctorate. She had a class on Thursday afternoons and was not scheduled to be home until four, the time the bus would normally drop me off. Unprepared for a two-and-a-half-mile trek across campus in the rain, I decided to walk the short distance to Schuyler Place, where I could call my mother and wait out of the rain.

  Margaret welcomed me as if I were a walk-in customer even though in her business there aren’t any walk-ins since everything is done by appointment. She told me to call my mother and tell her that she would drive me home as soon as she finished work. In the meantime, I should go on back and make myself at home. Which I did.

  I got into the habit of stopping at Schuyler Place every Thursday after school. In little ways Margaret let me know that she liked my company. She lay in a supply of after-school snacks, and she gave me a key to the back door, the one that opened the add-on living room. Even on the Thursdays when she was busy in the office, she would take time to come on back to say hi and to ask me how school was. And we both began to take it for granted that she would drive me home.
/>   After seeing Branwell at the Behavioral Center the day that he had chosen MARGARET, I decided to stop at her place and talk to her about him and tell her what I was trying to do.

  Margaret was tied up in the office, so I went to hang out in the add-on living room, as I usually did. I was glad to be left alone. If you’re a guy and not a girl, and you’re my age—just weeks past thirteen—you’re too old to have a baby-sitter but too young to be one. So to be left really alone is like a gift of civil rights.

  * * *

  I have mentioned that one of the things that Branwell and I have always had in common is that both of our fathers work at the university. My dad, Roderick Kane, is the registrar. He keeps the university records. He doesn’t teach. He is an administrator.

  Branwell’s dad, Dr. Stefan Zamborska, is a well-known geneticist. He is a doctor of philosophy, a Ph.D. He teaches one class a semester, but most of his time is spent in the Biotech Lab, working on the Genome Project. If you ask him what he does, Dr. Z will tell you that he is a map maker. And that is true. He is part of the team that is making a map of all the genes in the human body. Dr. Z is well-respected in his field. Which means that he is somewhat famous. Somewhat famous means that People magazine is not likely to write a story about him, but The Journal of Genetic Research will print anything he has to say.

  Dr. Zamborska is admired by the people he works with, not only for the work he does but also for the kind of parent he is. He arranged for baby-sitters only when absolutely necessary, and most often the baby-sitter he asked was my half sister, Margaret.

  Margaret’s mother is another Ph.D.—there are always a lot of them around a university. She is a professor in the psychology department, where she supervises students who are getting master’s degrees. When Margaret was twelve years old, my mother was one of her mother’s graduate students. It doesn’t take advanced math to figure out how my father met my mother and how Margaret wound up being my half sister.