The Silence That Speaks

Charlotte gazed at all the mouths moving around her and willed them to stop because the noise they produced was not just unpleasant but painful. Sitting silently, observing and not jumping in, she realized more every day the futility of their sounds.

The bell shrieked, and class began. At least it was down to only one voice now.

Charlotte was very happy about the letters her parents had given her new teachers, explaining her “special situation,” though she despised those familiar words. “Special” did not mean special; it meant different, weird, unwanted. Had it always felt this way? she wondered.

Unfortunately, just because her teachers got the message did not mean her fellow classmates did.

“How come you never talk?” the fifteen-year-old girls jabbed in strangely deep tones, trying to sound older than they were.

Charlotte glared at them with venom in her eyes that spoke for itself but still spit back, “Why do you talk so much?” It was not her vicious tone that scared them but that poison that leaked from her eyes and the fire that flamed her face. They slinked away.

Charlotte grinned wickedly at their response. She was learning the art of nonverbal communication, beyond writing notes or using sign language. (She had never been good at the latter anyway, though she should have been an expert by now. She was quick with the finger signs, however, and sometimes threw these out obnoxiously.) She pushed deeper, turning her face into a tapestry for emotion and her body, a stage for expression. She found it difficult to become better at reading other people, though, as they used their voices too much to care about becoming proficient with their rest of their bodies.

Case in point was when she would hear their whispers among each other. “. . . car accident, I think . . . over the summer . . . she changed . . .” They would glance back at her, but their faces were all so different and did not seemingly match their words or personalities. It was confusion to Charlotte.

Aside from teachers and students, strangers would regard her with puzzlement and pity. She wondered how she had never noticed these looks before. Ah, because she had always been so busy talking. At least they didn’t know any better and did not try to provoke her into speaking, like her peers at school. God, she could curse herself for giving in to those stupid, stupid girls.

Charlotte often shook her head in sadness. This world she had been missing, this world that was revealed, it was uglier than she ever could have imagined.

Her parents were pained, and she didn’t understand why. She did not know that as much as she needed the non-conversation dinners to soothe her soul, they needed speech to uplift theirs. They wanted to hear her wonderful voice. She thought they wanted silence. She had no idea that, for them, that side of the table had always been too quiet.

In the evenings, when she wandered upstairs, before shutting herself into her blue toned room, she would head into the yellow room on the left side of the hall. She would lie on the soft yellow quilt and listen. Listen to the silence she had ignored all her life. Even now, it was so loud. It amplified throughout the entire room, and Charlotte wondered why she had never really heard it before. Why had she always been talking so much? Why had she always been so focused on the sound of her own voice that she drowned out everything else?

This silence that spoke in the yellow room was not brash or dumb or ugly. It was soft and steady and kind. It was smiling. She could hear that it was smiling. That only made it worse. Charlotte was doing this idiotic experiment of removing her voice from the world to try to understand and make it better, but she was making everything worse and realizing that she didn’t understand a single thing.

She sighed in frustration and, like every night, began crying. She cried because she had never listened before. She cried because her will was about to shatter, which would mean the end of her silence, and it had been an utter failure. Her parents seemed to miss her voice, and she cried because whether she talked or not, Charlotte could never serve as a substitute for what they missed most of all . . . Sophie.

She appeared to Charlotte now, as she always did when Charlotte lay in her room. She was smiling. She was always smiling. Her hands gestured wildly. She, of course, was an expert at sign language. After all, what choice did she have? Yet it was her face, rapidly changing with the most minute movements and her body, stomping, shrugging, dancing, that so entranced Charlotte. Sophie had long ago mastered the art of nonverbal communication. Through everything except her voice, she was speaking.

It had always been so. In her own way, Sophie had always been talking to the world, though few had ever stopped to listen. Least of all, thought Charlotte disdainfully, her own sister. Sophie had always talked with the world. She didn’t care if anybody joined in the conversation.

That’s what made the fact that she was still speaking and still smiling so difficult. Charlotte wanted to hate everything and everyone, especially herself. Her parents kept reminding her that that wasn’t Sophie’s way. Sophie herself kept reminding her. Charlotte had two years on her, but in heart language, Sophie had always been a lifetime ahead.

Sometimes it just didn’t matter, though. It didn’t matter what the grief counselors told her. Or her mom and dad. Or even Sophie herself. She didn’t get it, wouldn’t get it, couldn’t get it because she was Charlotte, dark, cold, and moody, and Sophie was bright, always bright, and beautiful. And it wasn’t fair that she had always been speaking, but no one had been listening. And it wasn’t fair that she loved music but could never sing. And it wasn’t fair that Charlotte, who hated school, lived to enter high school, but Sophie, who adored learning, never made it to the seventh grade.

Charlotte could learn everything there was to know about nonverbal expression and envelop herself in silence completely, but, in the end, it would do her no good. No matter how much Sophie was speaking to her now from beyond the grave, it wasn’t enough. Charlotte had started listening too late.

She wiped the tears from her face and left her sister’s room to crawl under the big blue comforter in her own room. She wondered if she would ever heal. She did not believe she should. To speak or not to speak, to literally expel air, vibrate vocal folds, and articulate sound, had always been an option for Charlotte, but for Sophie even the choice to live had been taken away.