The Color of Silence Read Online Free PDF Page B

week’s end.” She gives me the number, and I realize that she’s serious. The phone number creeps its way into my mind even though I don’t want it, and she says good-bye without waiting for a response from me. I hang up. My dad is hovering around at the end of the hall, watching me. His eyes remind me of a St. Bernard dog’s eyes that I saw in a movie once, all red rimmed and drooping.
I made them that way, and it hurts my stomach to look at him. I make myself do it, though, because I deserve the pain.
    â€œShe wants me to babysit a sick kid,” I tell him. He nods and holds out his hand for the phone. I have to walk over to him to reach his outstretched palm. He looks like he could use a hug, but I can’t make myself do it. My arms are too tired.
    â€œI have to read to her. Talk to her.” I hold my hands out like I’m waiting for the rain to come and wash me away. He looks at me and shrugs shoulders that seem lower than they used to be.
    â€œThen I guess that’s what you’ll have to do.”
    A sigh escapes as he turns away, deflating him even further. My eyes sting for a second but no tears fall. I haven’t cried for a while now.
    For a long time, all I did was cry. But it didn’t make the pain go away.
    It just made it wet.
    At some point I ran out of tears. Now I’m nothing but a hollow tree, empty and dry, just waiting for someone to come and chop me down.

Chapter 6
    When I first stopped going to school, I spent most of my time at the group home. Debbie told me I was lucky that I didn’t have to go to school anymore, but I wasn’t so sure about that. It was a little boring during the day when the other kids were all gone, even though the workers talked to me and read to me and tried to help me keep up with some of my school work.
    When the kids came home at night, things got exciting again. Debbie would tell me every tiny detail about her day, whether I wanted to hear it or not. Everyone would watch movies, or listen to music, or go out for walks if the weather was nice.
    I missed school, but life was still interesting and full
of people.
    But the problem with my lungs finally got to be too much for the group-home staff to deal with, and I ended up coming here.
    Life here has not been very interesting. It’s mostly filled with silence, broken every once in a while by someone checking to see if I’m still breathing.
    I haven’t seen Brenda or Mike or Debbie in a really long time.
    Now that I’m here, I don’t do any of the things I used to do.
    But at least now I know I can find my way back sometimes through my rainbow.
    I don’t always get to hold on to the people in my life when I move from place to place, but my necklace has always been with me. For a long time, I didn’t know who gave me the necklace or why it followed me from place to place. Brenda was the one who finally told me the story.
    I was at the children’s hospital with my mother. I was a baby, so new that I was barely there. The day that my mother said good-bye to me, she was wearing a beautiful necklace of polished stones. She took the necklace off and gave it to a nurse and told her that she wanted it kept for me so that I would always have a little piece of her.
    Or maybe it’s lots of little pieces of her all strung together.
    I don’t think my mother knew that the stones would become a rainbow, but somehow I guess she knew that I would need them.
    I think I would rather have her than the necklace, though.
    I don’t remember her. I don’t know why she said good-bye to me instead of taking me home.
    Patrick took me to the baby ward once on a rare day when he had some extra time. It must be the happiest place in the whole hospital. Maybe the whole world. I remember looking at the babies through the glass, both of us staring at them like we were at a baby store. I wondered how their mothers felt, knowing that a whole new person was going