The Price of Silence Read Online Free PDF

pregnant the second time, she began praying every night on her knees in front of the bed like a little kid, going to Mass in the morning before school, lighting candles to the Madonna and St. Francis. After she miscarried again I think Emma would have given up sex if she had thought God would send over the Archangel Gabriel to get her pregnant. I don’t mean to sound flippant. I was glad she had faith to comfort her. When she got pregnant with Amy she made vows. No movies for six months. She gave up restaurants, pasta and chocolate. She wanted me to abstain too, afraid her resolve would break down. On class days, at lunchtime sometimes I’d drive over to our favorite restaurant in Silver Lake, and gorge myself on spaghetti and meatballs. I brushed my teeth before going home.
    We held our breaths through the dreaded first trimester. It passed without incident and we spread the good news, bought too many toys and baby clothes. We turned the study into a baby room. I scraped the old paint off the walls, papered them with green stripes, added the rabbit border on which Emma had set her heart.
    While I shaved in the morning she’d sit on the lid of the toilet, an ecstatic expression on her face, and prattle on about the delicious visions her raging hormones had released during the night. Her eyes, her skin glowed. It is possible to shine with happiness. I saw it with my own eyes. The only dream of hers I remember was of her surrounded by baskets filled with babies as tiny as chicks. The babies kept multiplying and Emma kept turning the baskets over and spilling the babies over herself until she disappeared underneath them.
    Two months before the due date, Emma’s placenta started peeling from the wall of her uterus, a condition that confined her to bed, where she fought hard to keep calm, breathing in and out with a steady rhythm that tired her and kept her from hysteria.
    Luckily, I was only teaching two classes then and had plenty of time to take care of her.
    Emma asked me to go to Mass in her stead to pray that the baby would be safe, and I went, believing none of it. But when Amy was born, a healthy seven-pound baby, I filled the church with flowers.
    Becoming a father was a powerfully altering experience.
    Amy’s presence in our lives left us dazzled. In Emma’s view we’d been pulled out of a deep hole in the ground and radiated with sunlight.We were blinded by it.
    As Amy grew, as she touched, explored, learned to walk, talk—normal things that babies do, I suppose, but to us they were miraculous—she became a guiding light, a constant beam in our lives. Everything else—work, sex, our love for each other—diminished in importance, became background to Amy.We had almost lost her, but she had fought to be born, and when I held her in my arms or watched her suck from Emma’s breast, we assumed the battle was over, that she would be with us for the rest of our lives. That assumption made us cocky, made us careless.
    At her funeral, Emma’s priest said, “Thank God for giving you the joy of Amy, even if only for a short while.” I was filled with too much anger to respond, but with time I came to accept that Father Caputi was right. Not to have known Amy is inconceivable to me.
    There was no reaching Emma. After Amy’s death, she crawled into a mental room and locked herself inside. She refused to see Father Caputi or our friends and never, to my knowledge, did she set foot in a church again. I suggested that we go to a grief therapist, but she wouldn’t have it.
    The department allowed me to take the rest of the semester off. I hired a woman to come over a couple of hours a day and stay with Emma so that I could drive to other towns in Westchester, park the car in some cul-de-sac and run for ten, twelve miles, on roads where no one knew me, where my anger and grief could pour off my body with my sweat. Then it was back home to hours of never letting my guard down, listening for every sound in case she called