Muffled Cries

The doorbell rang.
         
The moment had finally arrived. I stood up from the couch, the house devoid of sound, and smoothed my plain grey skirt. I straightened my matching grey jacket and glanced at the clock. In about an hour I would have to start leaving for the office.
         
Not even my sister’s death could interfere with my work.
         
Fixing the slight crookedness on my glasses, I smoothed down my hair before turning the door knob. Standing in the doorway was my mother—and my sister’s eight year old son.
         
“What’s he doing here?” I asked sharply.
         
My mother barreled her way in, pushing past me roughly. Jason followed in her wake, his eyes downcast and his messy hair catching my attention. I grimace, imagining all the lice that must be running rampant in there as I close the door firmly shut.
         
My mother drops her purse unceremoniously on the kitchen table, her eyes searching my small apartment for the flaws that only she could see. “I see you haven’t dusted in a while,” she admonishes. She spots a bright blue flower vase, which was in sharp contrast with the beige theme of my apartment. “What’s that doing here? I always told you to stick with beige and white. You’re starting to get like your sister, just crazy and all over the place.”
         
I didn’t bother to tell her that the vase was, in fact, a present from my deceased younger sister. Despite how different we had been, despite the fact that her life was full of debauchery and her philosophy was to live-for-the-moment, my sister and I had been relatively close. Amazing, really, considered that we disagreed on every possible topic—from family views to what should be our main priorities. 
         
Come to think of it, though, we both hated our mother.
         
“Do you want a glass of water?” I ask politely.
         
“No, let’s get this over with. I have somewhere to be,” my mother answers, sitting primly on my couch with perfect posture. She smoothes her gray skirt.
         
I briefly glace at Jason who is staring a hole into the carpet over in the corner. I sit on a couch opposite of my mother. “Okay, so let’s get down to business,” I say briskly. For the next half hour we talked about what my sister, Janie, had left us in her will. When the conversation was starting to dwindle to a close, I glance at my wrist watch. I’m making good time and hopefully I can get my mother and Jason out the door soon.
         
“Is that all?” I ask, signaling that this meeting is at an end. I prepare to get up from the couch to show the way to the door, but my mother’s voice stops me cold.
         
“There is still the matter of Jason,” she begins.
         
The kid. Turning my head, I look for him—I had completely forgotten about him for the last half hour. I don’t see him in the room and I panic. “Why did you bring him here?” I ask a bit harshly of my mother. “You know I don’t like kids.”
         
I practically run from the room, imagining that dirty kid somehow finding a pen and scribbling all over my walls. Or maybe he was picking boogers and putting them on my bedroom covers.
         
I find in the guest room, sitting on the floor watching TV. He holds the remote in his hand and he looks up with his green eyes—so much like Janie’s—to stare at me questioningly. I snatch the remote from his hand, turn the TV off, and point to the door. “Go out into the living room with Grandmother.”
         
The boy sniffs—is he about to cry?—and he leaves the room with his head down, scuffling his shoes. I close the guest room door and follow him to the living room. “Sit down over there, in the kitchen,” I tell him. He slumps in the chair and lays his head on the table.
         
“Sit straight,” my mother instructs. I don’t have to turn around to know that he sat straight.
         
I sit back on the couch again, smoothing my gray skirt. “Okay, so what about Jason?”
         
“He stays with you,” my mother says in a peremptory tone.
         
I say nothing for a few moments, my eyes searching my mother’s face for any hint of weakness. But her face is implacable, set in stone, and her cold eyes beg me to challenge her.
         
I lived too long under her roof and under her laws. For too long did I let her dictate my life, and I had always vowed to myself that once I went to college, then I would control my life.
         
Well, college has been over and done with long ago.
         
“Absolutely not,” I say, my tone every bit as peremptory.
         
“Janie left it in her will,” my mother adds.
         
I narrow my eyes behind my glasses, not wanting to believe her but knowing it was true. Our father, who had abandoned them after Janie had been born, had been an orphan. He didn’t have any family. As for my mother, she was an only child and didn’t bother to stay in contact with her cousins. So Jason really had only two options: me or my mother. Thinking back on how many times Janie had bitterly rebelled against our mother—and sometimes it seemed like that was the Janie’s purpose in life—I knew how much Janie would hate the thought of her son being raised by this stone cold woman sitting in front of me.
         
But was I really the better choice? Janie had always seen something in me that wasn’t there—she had always believed that I wasn’t at all like my mother. Now, looking at my mother’s gray business suit and mine that was close to identical, our cold eyes measuring each other, I seriously considered that Janie was wrong—and not for the first time.
         
“What if it doesn’t work out?” I begin. “What if I don’t want the kid?”
         
My mother shrugs delicately. “We’ll see from there. Maybe I’ll try him out, I don’t know. At least try.”

I turn my body on the couch to look at the boy sitting across the room. His back is to us, still ram-rod straight. He seemed to be…shaking a little bit. My heart gave a little twinge of pity.
         
A little.
         
I hear my mother stand from the couch. She gives her jacket a corrective shake and her high-heels tread softly across the carpeted floor. She grabs her purse and plucks her keys out. She looks at Jason and says, as if in afterthought, “I really am sorry about your mother.” Walking towards the front door, she calls behind her as she leaves, “Call me, Claire, if it doesn’t work out.”
         
The door shuts behind her, and the house is devoid of sound. After a few minutes of contemplation, I get up from the couch. As I grab my own purse and shuffle for my keys, I think about trying to find a school. Today was Wednesday…maybe he could be in school by tomorrow if I am lucky. I could get Shannon, my assistant at the office, to look at schools and get a hasty registration. And if there was a day-care there for after school, even better.
         
“Did you bring anything with you? Clothes, toothbrush, comb?” I ask the boy that sits like a statue, staring a hole into my kitchen table. I glance at my wrist watch: five minutes.
         
The boy shakes his shaggy head.
         
“You are going to get a haircut,” I say in a no-nonsense tone, “and I’m going to have them check for lice.”
         
“But all the boys wear their hair like this at school,” the boy says. It was the first time he had spoken, and his voice was quiet and a bit whiney. He still doesn’t make eye contact while he talks. He is so unlike Janie, who was always so full and lively and vibrant.
         
“Well, you won’t,” I tell him. “Back to the subject: Where are all your things?”
         
He points at the front door. Perplexed, I turn around, and see a little black suitcase. My mother, the sneaky devil, had probably instructed the boy to stealthily drop it there when I wasn’t looking. I hadn’t even noticed that he had carried that in with him. Apparently my mother was very confident about her success.
         
“Okay. Well I have to go to work. I’ll be getting back around five in the afternoon.” After a moment of hesitation, I decree, “The guest bedroom is yours. Put your clothes in the dressers and hang your things in the closet. But nothing else! I don’t want your things in my bathroom. We’ll figure out later where to put that. Watch TV all day or something. Don’t go in my bedroom, and if you break anything I swear I will be sending you straight to Grandmother’s.” Running a mental list in my head, I then add, “Oh, and for lunch—I don’t have anything for you that you could cook yourself without burning my apartment down. There’s apples in there; eat that today and tonight I’ll go to the store and get some lunch things. Alright, I have to go.”
         
Briskly I walk to the door, my mind already on work, pushing the boy and all the new troubles he represents to the back of my mind. I am just about to shut the door behind me when I hear, “Wait!”
         
Expectantly, a bit irritated, I turn back to see him standing, his eyes down cast. “Can I…” he starts, almost hesitantly. “Do you have a phone number?”
         
“Yes, a cell phone…”
         
“Can you write it down for me? Mom always did that so I could call her when she was away,” he adds in a small voice, his tone wistful and sad. My heart gives another tiny lurch, but I think about the fact that I am late.
         
“I can’t, I’m sorry—“ I begin, but then I see his bottom lip tremble. I imagine him wiping his nose on his shirt, or on his arm and touching the things in my apartment, like the refrigerator door… “Okay, okay, I’ll call the house and you pick up.” Nobody calls the house for business matters. In fact, nobody knows my house number except for my mother, so it would be okay if the boy answered it. “Then I’ll tell you my number, okay?” I don’t wait for an answer but shut the door and rush down the stairs as fast as my high heels would allow me.
-------------------          
Another satisfying day at work, I think as I jiggle the keys in my apartment door. A promotion is soon to come; it must be, after all the hard work I’ve been putting into that job. I just have to work harder, maybe longer hours, and make sure that the bosses notice what I am doing…
         
I close the door behind me and see that all the lights in my apartment are on.
         
It hit me: Janie’s son. I had completely forgotten about him all day.

Irritated, I started to flip some of the extraneous lights off, already thinking about my electric bill. Hearing the soft sound of the TV, I make my way to the guest room with words already crowding in my head about what to say to him about all the lights.
         
He was on his stomach on the floor, his head propped on his hands. He didn’t look away from the TV as he said tonelessly, “You didn’t call.”
         
The words that I was going to say are locked in my throat; that’s right, I was supposed to call. “Sorry, but I was thinking about work all day.” Not about you hung in the air, the words between the lines. Neither of us said anything and I watched the TV images reflected in his green eyes. “You’re going to school tomorrow. The bus comes around six o’clock. School ends around three and you should be dropped off here by four.”
         
“Why can’t you take me?” he asks quietly. His words are so soft, it’s like they are sorry to intrude the tranquility of the silent air.
         
“I have to go to work earlier now,” I explain impatiently. “Do you have supplies? Backpack, pencils, paper?”
         
He nods his head, still not looking at me. “I’m hungry,” he says.
         
I am, too. Cooking for two shouldn’t be much harder than cooking for one. “Okay.”

After a wordless dinner filled with the soft clanking of the forks against plates, I told the boy that it was time to go to sleep.
         
I sit at the kitchen table, my hands spreading out the papers I had brought from work, studying them. After a few moments I feel like someone is watching me, and I raise my gaze to see the boy standing in the hallway, his hands fidgeting with each other. “I…can we…mom always left a light on.”
         
“Your mom obviously didn’t care about the electric bill,” I comment dryly. “You should be fine without it.”
         
He stands there for a while longer in strained silence, as if expecting me to say something else. Then he turns on his heel and leaves, entering the guest bedroom.
         
I sigh and return to my work. After about two hours, I yawn and decide that it’s my time for bed, too. I turn off all the lights and shut my bedroom door behind me. I methodically brush my teeth and my hair, put on a night dress, set my glasses on the night dresser, and promptly fall asleep between the covers.
         
It was in the middle of the night, around three in the morning, that I could hear a soft sound that penetrated my sleep. My ears strain and then I identify it—sobbing. I think about the boy in the next room, crying in his pillow. I think about his reason for sorrow: the death of Janie. Quietly I feel my own grief over a dead sister, and I allow a tear to slip down my cheek. I hear the muffled sounds of the sobs and I tell myself that he wants to cry alone, that it’s better if he thinks that I can’t hear him.
         
I force myself to sleep again.
----------------------------------
The next few days went by quickly, or at least to me. I also noticed than in the next few days, the boy became quieter, more still. We hardly talked but rather we were in a routine: I come home and he is in the guest bedroom, watching TV; we don’t talk while we have dinner; I tell him to go to bed and he goes to bed. It’s like he’s a ghost that lives in the house.
         
Every night, the ghost cries.
         
Every night I wake up to hear the muffled crying. Every night I force myself to go back to sleep, to drown out the noises and pretend I don’t hear them. But it was disrupting my sleep, and I was starting to get groggy when waking up in the morning. I told myself that if he did that again tonight, I would have to do something about it.
         
It was two in the morning, and weeping invaded the stillness of the night. I toss in my covers and then swing my legs over the side. I open my bedroom door, padding on bare feet down the carpeted hallway. I try to peer inside the guest bedroom where the weeping is now considerably louder without a closed door between, but I can’t see since it is so dark. I turn on the hallway light and stand in the doorway, my eyes adjusting.
         
His little body is huddled, his knees to his chest, and his face is completely buried in his sodden pillow. Even with the pillow muffling the sound, it is still loud.
         
“Hey,” I call. Now that I am here, I am not quite sure what to say. “You can’t cry like this every night. I know you miss your mom, but this won’t bring her back.”
         
The little boy sniffles and then he lifts his face from the pillow. His cries are filled with so much pain, they are ripped from the core of his grieving heart; my eyes involuntarily soften.
         
“I—I know,” he hiccups. “It’s just that—it’s just that—“
         
I wait in the doorway as he rubs his swollen eyes, trying to control his voice. My feet move forward of their own will, and before I know it I am sitting next to this little boy who is so valiantly trying to hold his sorrow in.
         
After a few moments, he can control his voice. “I know why mom died.”
         
“She died in a car crash.”
         
He nodded his head. “I know but…” His mouth started to wobble again. “I just wanted to show her…my-my picture from school. But she kept saying she had to watch the road but I just wanted to show her my picture and then she looked…” He gave a little sob. “And then she crashed.”
         
I inhale sharply.
         
Suddenly his green eyes, so much like Janie’s, connect with mine. For the first time, he stares directly at me. He says in a small voice, barely a whisper, “I know that’s why Grandma hates me, and why you hate me. It’s because I killed her.” He shudders. “I think I hate me, too.”
         
It felt like something exploded in me and I grabbed him swiftly, crushing him in my arms as the floodgates are finally swung wide open. He cries uncontrollably, his throat sounding raw as he continues. I rock him, and I think I am crying, too. I cry over my sister, I cry over my cold mother and the possibility that I might become just like her; I cry because I had almost let my sister down by ignoring her son. I cry because the world is unfair and nothing is certain. I cry because sometimes I think my life is empty but I don’t know how to change it.
         
After a while I notice that Jason isn’t crying anymore. In fact, he had fallen asleep in my arms. I lay him carefully on the bed and I wipe my cheeks of the wetness. I try not to think about my soaked night gown.
         
I look at Jason, and I wonder if what had just taken place will change our relationship. Maybe it won’t; maybe we will go on tomorrow morning as if nothing has happened, as if this was all in our dreams. Maybe I will send him back to my mother because he gets in the way of my job, of my life. We’ll see in the morning.
         
I brush the hair from his forehead and leave the room.