Clementine knew what would happen in the coming years as her daughter matured into a young lady.
I’ve seen them in the house—little Meriday and Constance, running together down the hallways, peeking into different rooms and scampering off again, giggling.
I do not believe I have the constitution to live in the swamp, but it draws me to it still, like it drew Constance. Elizabeth and I used to venture into the swamp when we were children, and I think how much more interesting a journey that would be than sitting here in the car, on the way to the doctor. The dull and daily journeys of adulthood feel so flat, so lifeless.
We’ve reached the perfect lull for me to tell her about Julian. Now, now I should tell her, with the sun warming us through the windows, with Elizabeth commenting blandly on the landscape, clearly looking for something to talk about. “Look at those cows, all in a circle around that other cow. You’d think they’re forming a cult,” she says with her chin in her hand. And then, a few miles later, “What do you suppose a cow cult would worship?”
Julian, I think. Julian. Instead, my mouth trips around the words, and I say, “Reminds me of that time we saw all those birds congregating together in the swamp. Just a huge cluster of them. Remember?”
Perhaps Elizabeth doesn’t remember those bygone days as fondly as I do, because she makes a face. “Those birds were clustered together because they were all trying to get at the dead deer. Scavengers.” She shudders. “Jesus, the thing was half eaten. I had nightmares about it. You don’t remember that part?”
I shrug.
The gloomy mystery of the swamp drew me into unchecked, uncharted exploration. Sometimes she came with me; sometimes I went in alone. So often back then I found myself exploring the secretive depths of the swamp. My travels took me gliding along canals, the murky greenish water reflecting me, replicating me, re-creating me. Remembering my face. I trod through perilous unstable muck threaded with cottonmouth snakes and laden with sinkholes waiting to suck me in.
On second thought, I can see why Elizabeth might not think so fondly on it.
“Mom should never have let us roam around in there on our own,” she says. “I would never let Julian do what we did.”
It does seem different, now, when I see little Sam and Liz creeping into the marsh. What had seemed like such freedom now tastes more of neglect. When you’re a child, all you want is freedom. Sometimes you don’t realize how much you need your parents.
After my father killed himself, Elizabeth and I took care of ourselves while Mother shut herself away with her grief and her solitude and her self-loathing. She was not there to tell us not to wander too far into the swamp, to warn us of the dangers that lay therein; and when I see her now watching this perverse version of old home movies, watching us as children, watching our memories and echoes flit by, she is always watching what she missed in the first place, when she was too busy with her sorrow to notice or care.
“You can’t protect your children from everything,” I say, an insufficient defense of Agnes Wakefield. “And, no matter what you do, you never really know how they’ll turn out.”
“It’s just lucky we turned out all right.” Elizabeth frowns out the window. “Is that school new?”
I glance to my right as we breeze by, catch the blur of the brick structure with its clean, modern lines. “They tore down the old one last year.”
“I guess it’s been a while since I’ve come this way.”
“You never visit.”
Elizabeth has always made excuses to avoid coming back home. I can’t remember the last time she visited. I wonder how long it’s been since she last went to the swamp.
I enjoyed the quiet of the swamp in a way that, I think, Elizabeth never did. When she came along on our adventures, it was always noisy—feet sloshing through muck, complaints of mosquitoes devouring her, attempted birdcalls to see if any would call back. Lots of talking. I don’t think she could ever really stand the quiet, so she had to fill it with something of herself so as not to feel even the vaguest hint of being alone. I was more like my father; I never minded the quiet, and sometimes I wanted to push her face into the muck just to shut her up.
My father was not born deaf, but he was deaf for as long as I knew him. I remember learning sign language very young, right alongside English, bred to be bilingual so I could communicate with him. I was precocious, as some children are. I appreciated the silence of our conversations, talks that could be quiet but at the same time filled with a world of words and ideas. The deft movements of his liquid hands, as if fingers could dance, communicated the tone of his voice as much as spoken word. I could pass a day without speaking if I was on bad terms with my mother and Elizabeth. You see more, you hear more, and you appreciate the quiet.
I do not know whether my father appreciated the quiet like I did, but then I hardly know if he even experienced it by then, he had been deaf so long. And what is silence to the deaf?
When you live with sound, going without must feel incredibly painful—a sense of absence, of missing some vital aspect of life, of withdrawal. But when you live without it, somehow it must seem natural—the silence comfortable rather than terrifying, so comfortable it ceases to exist. When silence exists, there is something awful in it, something awful in the emptiness and void of it, but when it is everywhere and it no longer exists, it can no longer do any harm.
We fall into another lull in the car. Up ahead, just there, is the doctor’s office, another clean modern building emerging from the wild landscape and its proselytizing cows. The road rumbles gently beneath us. The turn signal clicks as I slow to enter the parking lot. An advertisement murmurs from the radio. Even in the quiet, it isn’t really quiet after all.
And the swamp is never quiet either, not really. It is filled with a constant song of many voices, the voices of the birds and the trees and the insects and the wind culminating in a sighing, humming, buzzing, trilling soundscape, a music of the earth. Perhaps I can appreciate a certain kind of quiet, but when the swamp goes silent, that’s when I feel the most uneasy, as if someone is turning down the volume of the world.
Somehow the quiet is calming. Somehow the quiet is frightening.
I do not know why I am going on about this. Sight and sound.
Yes. I do know.
* * *
“There he is.”
A distinct gray shape appears from the pixelated darkness. There in the pulsing womb we see Julian’s emergent form appear as if sound made visible, like a spectral voice coming through radio static. His nascent self, almost complete.
I know we are not really seeing him. We are seeing the echoes of him, hearing with our eyes, and I wonder what my father would have thought of that, what he thought when he saw the ultrasounds of his own daughters before they were born. How it felt to him to hear with his eyes. Julian is still hidden, though. We cannot see him secreted away in Elizabeth’s womb, but we can hear his edges, his form, his shape.
Elizabeth cannot contain the smile that she shares with the monitor and then turns to me, to which I must respond in kind although I cannot shake the sick feeling that has come over me at the sight of him, making him real. I see him in that ashen gradient of the machine, not quite human, and I think of the boy dragging the knife down my door, calling me Auntie, marking me.