The Third Silence Read online

  She said,

  “And brood on hopes and fear no more.

  And no more turn aside and brood

  Upon love’s bitter mystery…”

  She let the words trail away.

  “Mystery,” I said. “The reason I called…” It wasn’t the whole reason, really, but I went on. “Would you tell me about Dario Fuentes?”

  “I already did,” she said, her voice the color of fog.

  “Okay, he loved poetry, right?”

  “We spent almost every evening at the coffeehouse. Candles, guitars, poetry, love.”

  “And he loved the sea?”

  “He loved the sea and he loved me.”

  “And you loved him.”

  “Western wind, when wilt thou blow? I am still in love with him.”

  “But he’s dead.” Thirty years ago, and she still felt for him? I wondered whether that made her insane. She didn’t seem crazy to me.

  “Yes. He’s dead. I want someone besides me to remember him.”

  “How did he die?”

  “What they did to him in jail,” she said. “He was never the same afterward. He hanged himself.”

  * * *

  My father didn’t come home till late, after Mom was asleep. I was sitting at the kitchen table when Dad came in looking as saggy as his gun belt, dead tired. “You should be in bed,” he said.

  I shook my head. “Can’t sleep.”

  He stood there and studied me. Looking up at him, I saw something sad in his eyes.

  Finally he asked, “How much do you know?”

  It was hard to keep looking up at him, so I watched my own hands lying like dead doves on the table. I said, “They were in college together, right? And it was the sixties, so everybody was protesting authority and everything. Dario Fuentes stopped his car in the middle of the square one day and locked it and painted flowers on it till the police hauled him off to jail.”

  My father said, “It was different back then. A lot of tension.”

  “You were, what, about ten years old?”

  “Snot-nosed kid eavesdropping.”

  I raised my eyes to him. “Was it Grandpa?”

  He sighed and sat down across the table from me. I waited awhile before he said, “If this gets in the news…for the first time I’m glad my father is dead.”

  I nodded, waiting some more.

  He said, “That woman today wouldn’t cooperate. She wouldn’t even state her name. Do you know her name?”

  I shook my head. “Was it Grandpa who took Dario Fuentes in?”

  Dad closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead with his fingers. He said, “It made him sick, what happened.” He shifted his hands back to massage his scalp. “Yes, he took the Fuentes kid in. Longhair pretty-boy hippie blocking the square, painting goddamn daisies on his Volkswagen. Dad roughed him up some. You know how your grandfather was, an old-style cop. He and the other officers smacked the Fuentes kid around, and then they put him in the holding cell with some guys they figured would teach him a lesson.”

  He stopped. Put his hands on the table like mine. I asked, “They beat him up?”

  Dad shook his head. “Worse than that,” he said, not looking at me.

  There was a moment like snowfall.

  I whispered, “Oh my God.” My whole body clenched like a fist.

  In a low voice Dad said, “My father never meant it to get so ugly. He tried to stop it, but nobody would back him up. He tried to get the kid out, drop the charges, but the captain wouldn’t let him.”

  “My God.”

  “They let the Fuentes kid go the next day, and everybody acted like nothing had happened.”

  “Even Grandpa?”

  Dad stared at the table top. “He had to, to keep his job.”

  “Would you—if it happened—”

  “No. I wouldn’t. But thank God, it’s not like that anymore, son.”

  God, I sure hoped not. “What’s going to happen to her?”

  “Your friend? Nothing much. They’ll let her go in a couple of days. The magistrate will probably fine her for being a nuisance. That’s all.”

  “Her car?”

  “It’s impounded. She can get it back.”

  “Dad…” I stood up, because I was all nerves. Had to put the day to rest somehow. “Dad, can we go see the car?”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “What for?”

  “You’ll see. Dad? Please?” I stretched out my hand to him.

  He rolled his eyes and let out one of his hurricane sighs, but he stood up and took me to the impounding lot.

  * * *

  Inside the chain-link fence, under the sodium vapor lamps, the painted-up car seemed pitiful, like an old lady who’s piled on way too much makeup. Someone had put the lids on the margarine tubs and wrapped the wet brushes in newspaper and piled everything into the back seat. Dad stood reading the car while I found the blue paint and the paintbrush she had handed me.

  “Penguin dust,” Dad murmured with a chuckle, and then he glanced over, saw me painting on the trunk of the car, and yipped, “What are you…” But he stopped himself. He just walked over to see what I was doing.

  Reading, he whispered, “These be/three silent things:”

  I’d remembered, finally, where I’d seen it: in my handbook of poetic forms. It was a poem called “Triad,” in the cinquain form, by the woman who’d created that form, who had the most unpoetic name I’d ever heard of: Adelaide Crapsey. I felt pretty sure Gray Braid’s name was not Adelaide. As I finished the poem, I tried at first to imitate her precise, quirky printing, but gave it up. I just let her writing be hers and mine be mine, and when I finished, the poem was still a poem:

  These be

  Three silent things:

  The falling snow…the hour

  Before the dawn…the mouth of one

  Just dead.

  I stood back, and we both read it over and over. Dad said nothing at all, just laid his hand warm and heavy on my shoulder.

  Acknowledgments

  “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” Wallace Stevens

  “Who Goes With Fergus?” William Butler Yeats

  “Western Wind,” anonymous early English lyric

  “First star to the right” from PETER PAN, James M. Barrie

  “The rain never gets wet,” and “Thank you for reading my car,” Mickie Singer

  “Fern Hill,” Dylan Thomas

  “Under Ben Bulben,” William Butler Yeats

  “Red Sky at Night,” anonymous verse

  “Dream of pear empanadas” and “Don’t cry over chihuahua pee,” Nancy Springer

  “Penguin dust” from “Marriage,” Gregory Corso

  “serpent-haunted sea” from GOLDEN JOURNEY TO SAMARKAND, James Elroy Flecker

  “Tom O’Bedlam’s Song,” anonymous 17th century ballad

  “Triad,” Adelaide Crapsey

  Edgar Award-winning author Nancy Springer,

  well known for her science fiction, fantasy, and young adult novels,

  has written a gripping psychological thriller—smart, chilling, and unrelenting...

  DARK LIE

  available in paperback and e-book in November 2012

  from New American Library

  Dorrie and Sam White are not the ordinary Midwestern couple they seem. For plain, hard-working Sam hides a deep passion for his wife. And Dorrie is secretly following the sixteen-year-old daughter, Juliet, she gave up for adoption long ago. Then one day at the mall, Dorrie watches horror-stricken as Juliet is forced into a van that drives away. Instinctively, Dorrie sends her own car speeding after it—an act of reckless courage that puts her on a collision course with a depraved killer...and draws Sam into a desperate search to save his wife. And as mother and daughter unite in a terrifying struggle to survive, Dorrie must confront her own dark, tormented past.

  “A darkly riveting read...compelling.”

  —Wendy Corsi Staub, national bestselling author of Ni
ghtwatcher and Sleepwalker

  “A fast-paced, edge-of-your-seat thriller that will have you reading late into the night and cheering for the novel's unlikely but steadfast heroine.”

  —Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times best-selling author of The Weight of Silence and These Things Hidden

  Learn more about all of Nancy’s titles at her website, www.nancyspringer.com.