15 Shards
Six weeks ago, a man and his wife lived a somewhat happy life in a small stucco house on a cliff above the Pacific Ocean. Six weeks ago, they both experienced moments of happiness. They hadn’t since. Six weeks ago was the last time she spoke to him. Six weeks ago was the last time she spoke to anyone.
Now, continuing the afternoon ritual he had created for himself over the past month and a half, he raised the small crystal glass from the mahogany in front of him and pressed it to his lips. He thought he could almost feel his whole body catching fire as the last sip of whiskey trickled down his throat. Ten minutes ago he had thrown the torn twenty-dollar bill on the bar, but he couldn’t make himself leave. He knew he should be feeling with wet eyes rather than a clenched fist. He didn’t know why he wanted so badly to put that fist in motion, why he couldn’t go back home just yet. But he couldn’t. He looked into the crystalline cuts of the whiskey glass in front of him, its prism-like edges offering him images of the past six weeks of his life.
42 days ago, he had woken up early, panic striking him when he noticed that his wife’s space in the bed was vacant. She had gone to a party the night before, something she was not accustomed to doing, at least not in the twelve years since he brought her to California from her home in Italy. He thought maybe, though he had given up long ago, that she finally felt comfortable assimilating into his America, interacting with his people. He had been excited for her--excited, proudly and undoubtedly, that she might finally garner some close friends, might finally branch out beyond their home. But there was another hope within him. He wanted, shamefully, for the first time in twelve years, to be alone. In his home. Just for a moment. He had not yet experienced that in his life with her.
But waking up, the all-knowing rays of morning just beginning to peek through the spaces between their blinds, his solitude was far from what he wanted. Where was she? He knew from the untouched nature of her side of the bed that she had not returned at all.
Before he could purvey all the possibilities, he heard the piercing ring of the telephone beside his head. It was timed almost too perfectly to be real; he would come to wish it were not. The bold caller ID text on the receiver was all he needed to assess the situation: Marian Regional Medical Center. The phone was back in its original position and he was in full flight to the car, not bothering to change out of his tattered flannel lounge pants, before the voice on the other end could tell him what he already knew it would say: we cannot discuss your wife’s state over the phone; you need to head over as soon as--
He hadn’t waited for it to finish. On the eleven-mile drive from the coast to the hospital, he saw images of the past decade painted in the crevices of the passing mountains: the sweeping love he felt immediately upon seeing her in the tree in that village outside of Verona, the charming confusion on her face as she navigated an airport for the first time, the bulging excitement she expressed for America, for a new life, for anything to do with him--and how that excitement had lost its poignancy, how it had dimmed ever so slightly with each passing year.
But he couldn’t be concerned with that. He just wanted her to be okay--and a little less than half an hour later, he knew she would be. But that he never would. He sat, motionless and unresponsive, in a cold, gray chair across from her room in the hospital. He didn’t understand why the police hadn’t given up, why they wouldn’t let her leave and fall back into any normalcy she could find. The nurses insisted that his presence in the room was allowed and might even help her come back to reality. But he wasn’t sure if he could do it. Besides the incessant thumping of his fingers against the armchair and the drumming of his foot into the linoleum floor, he couldn’t move. He swallowed hard, wishing to replace the thick, sour saliva with whiskey, and imagined what going into the room, that exchange--and her subsequent reaction--might tell him. He didn’t want to know. So he remained immobile, a glass of water in hand and a lump growing in his abdomen like a big, acidic lemon.
He thought of what seemed like hours later when the door finally opened, how he noticed the tears streaming down her face like liquefied pieces of her dignity before he noticed her. She reached out, but not for him. She performed a circular hand motion representing an invisible, globe-like object, and the globe-like lump in his stomach swelled as he began to realize what she meant. She looked first at him, and he didn’t say anything. He waited for her to speak. But she didn’t. The tears kept flowing, but no sound came out. Not one vibration. Just the repetition of the hand movements he was eventually forced to acknowledge—that is, when a nurse, noticing her frantic state, brought her a pen and paper. She merely wrote: Vase. Thick, searing juice squirted out of the lemon and invaded his hope that he was wrong.
The sacred, round object to which she fled immediately upon arriving home was her mother’s hand-blown Venetian glass vase. It was the only thing she had left of her life in Italy, the only thing to remind her of her deceased mother. But to him, it was just an object, a nuisance. She seemed to worship it; he even thought he had caught her, on several occasions, praying to it.
And with that memory, he broke. He came back to the bar, back to reality, and with a quick tightening of his already-clenched fist and a swoop of his arm, his glass flew off the counter, the images of the past 42 days breaking along with it. He didn’t turn to glance at them one last time before rushing out the door.
As he sat in his car, nearly ten minutes after arriving home--like many days--he was unable to generate the courage to walk into the house just yet. He looked at the terra-cotta roof, the spaces between its tiles seemingly open wider than ever before, like mouths curved in cunning smiles that mocked him profusely. The doctors told him that rape often causes an internal shock, a sort of trauma that can elicit different, extreme reactions in victims, and that’s why his wife wasn’t speaking. But he didn’t believe it. He had at first tried to imagine a day when she would open her mouth, playing music with the voice he once thought was the most beautiful sound in the world, but after several weeks of no sound, that hope began to vanish. Everyone who knew the situation had told him she needed to go to a support group--a suggestion he had offered her time and time again, only to be met with a blank stare at the wall behind him.
Just four days after she came home from the hospital, he tried something rash--he tried to have sex with her. He hoped that bringing her around to him in intimacy would finally elicit a sound from her. And maybe that, in turn, would convince her to tell her side of the story, to convince him she still loved him, that she was sorry. That he should be, too. He wanted to be sorry.
At first, the glint in her eyes suggested thrill. She obediently removed her clothes with fervor and seemed to almost throw herself at him. Perhaps she, too, thought sex would release her from the grip of muteness. But less than five minutes in and not a sound to be heard, he felt them on his shoulder. Her hot, salty tears. She couldn’t force a sound more than what seemed to be incessant gagging, but the tears flowed with a steely silence out of her eyes. He didn’t bother finishing. That was the last time he attempted to sleep with her, the last time he really believed she would speak again. Thereafter he couldn’t be with her even if she wanted him to. The idea seemed dirty.
Though he descended into a muted hatred for her lack of speech, he began to think he knew why she wouldn’t. It wasn’t the rape itself, but her own teetering on the edge of infidelity. Perhaps she was afraid of a confession she might utter. A truth. A lie. A way out. It didn’t matter. To him, she was ashamed of her own stupidity.
“You know that’s what happened to Maya Angelou, right?,” his friend had urged. “She got raped and went mute. Couldn’t speak. No sound for five years.” But he didn’t care. His wife was not Maya Angelou.
He had tried to get her to write notes, but she just looked past the paper and writing utensils, not even bothering to touch them. The damn vase was the only thing she had cared about in the past six weeks. Being that she couldn’t (or wouldn’t) speak, her job as a stay-at-home telemarketer was useless. That 42nd day, when he opened the month’s electric bill, one he could not pay on his salary alone and could not fulfill with any job a mute woman could, his pieces broke and scattered even more.
When the whiskey glass fell from the bar earlier that day, the last parcel of his gentle touch crashed with it. With the excruciating, deafening silence emanating from his wife’s very presence and the thought of the bill swooping over his head like a vulture, he had had enough.
He barged into the bedroom, the one in which he no longer slept, impatiently screaming, “What have I done to deserve this? What do I have to do to get you to speak?” Of course, she didn’t respond, didn’t even bow her head to avoid his glance. And then he saw it. There was the vase, sitting silently on the mantle in their (her) room.
She looked at it and was reminded, painfully, of the land the self-proclaimed “rich” American and his rousing speech of opportunity had swept her away from. She felt its edges, even without staring directly at them, and thought of the last twelve years. The olive tree in the backyard of her family’s cottage in Italy, the one she had been sitting in when he rolled up in that ugly white sedan, stacks of books and a mediocre life for sale. The big smile on his face and the tight look of disappointment on hers when he carried her over the threshold. The tiny, impersonal wedding her family couldn’t afford to attend.
In that one moment, on the 42nd day since everything else broke, their eyes both met with the vase. He took a grand step forward, oblivious to how much more broken they really could become.
Her eyes perked up, welled with pain, but much like her mouth, released no concrete evidence of their existence. He resented the vase, resented her disappointment that everything in his life didn’t consist of fine glass and exquisite crystal. But he didn’t want to break it. He knew what it meant to her--though he didn’t know why--but he couldn’t take it any longer. She was going to speak, had to speak. Even if it had to be in a screaming fit of rage.
And with one quick swoop of his hand, the second of the day, the vase hit the ground. Before its shards could scatter on the floor he felt the weight of what he had just done yelling in his ear all the nasty things he knew she would have liked to say to him in the past six weeks--and especially now.
“Even for that? You won’t even talk for that?” he whispered, and walked out on the mess he had made.
A long, screaming pause circled the room. She didn’t reply.
She wanted to scream, wanted to tell him that she knew he thought she was a lost cause. And that maybe she was lost. She wanted to tell him she knew he was angry, that she knew he felt betrayed. That maybe she had stumbled off the road to his land of happiness and unwavering fidelity, but she hadn’t gone on her own. Someone had pulled her. Someone had yanked at her dress and ripped it at the seams along with her spirit, had thrown her into the ditch beside that very road and stripped her of her voice.
She wanted to tell him he was a coward, that she couldn’t help that she hated the world and it, in return, hated her so much that it didn’t allow her to speak. She wanted to run out of the house yelling in protest of everything that had happened to her, to denounce his exaggeration and his modest lifestyle and the cowardice to which she was married. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. So she simply got on her knees and began to collect the pieces of glass off the floor.
As she looked at them, each one offered her a different picture. The moments of her life danced in front of her like a horrible joke. It was like that supposed flash at the end of one’s life, that clichéd montage of moments, yet there was no bright light in the distance and she wasn’t dying. The vase already had, though, and she felt more broken than it--like a single shard of heavy, rigid glass that could never be understood even with its complete transparence. It was as if each piece were its own shiny tear on her mother’s face when she announced that she would be moving to America. Jagged, sharp, blood-drawing tears they were.
She gathered the shards, sweeping the smaller, indistinguishable pieces into the wastebasket along with the remaining slivers of her dignity, which were perhaps even smaller. She placed the last of the large shards, the fifteenth, into a basket.
In that moment, she decided to leave him. Not immediately, and not by throwing herself out the door like a vase off a mantle, but with time. And with precision. She would drain his life of everything it could offer her. The shards would be her liberators. They would tell her when to go.
Each day, when she went outside to water the plants, she would release one shard to the waves below her. Like the tiny grains of sand roaring up with those waves, the shards were her own grains--grains in an hourglass. She told herself that when she cast out the last one, she would leave. She was the great epoch-tosser, and she watched as she drowned the past in the omnipotent, ghastly present. She saw the olive tree, its branches saturated and disappearing below the surface of the water. The countryside, the safe little house in the quiet village, the love and the dream she thought she was bringing to America--she killed them one by one.
On the fifteenth day, she walked, basket of glass in hand, to the edge of the cliff behind their house. Only one shard remained at the base of the basket. She hadn’t expected it to, but it frightened her.
She had looked out at the same bleak landscape, the same dismal representation of her existence so many times--but this time she noticed something new. The cliffs, the waves had always been there--but now she was seeing them in a way she never imagined before. They had no mouths, no vocal chords; in all ways to the human world, they were mute. But maybe those cliffs were what really made the noise; maybe they laughed at the petty conversation of the fools that walked along their edges.
She kneeled down and touched the solemn green and brown earth below her. She felt the tiny pebbles like every other day, but this time she became filled with their noise, their song, their voice as she rose back to her upright position. She thought, Maybe you have to lose the ability to speak to know what you really want to say. And I’m going to say it.
As she stepped out onto the big brown rock, the one that signified the edge of the cliff, she saw the last thin semicircular glow of blood orange as it sunk below the horizon. She wanted to be like the sun--wanted to face the darkness, those realities she had long since discovered she couldn’t erase as nightmares. She wanted to greet that blackness head-on so that she could shed her cracked, beige skin, revealing a glow she knew once lay beneath her, a glow she had once been sure was gone.
She looked at the cliffs around her. She heard their screaming voices and almost felt like she, too, was yelling. She looked at the sultry pink glow that preceded the dying sun in front of her. She took a step closer to it. She thought, This is what it will mean to be free. I was never truly mute--he only thought I was. Even I did. She inched closer, almost reaching for the light that was running away from her towards the other side of the earth, just like all of the false love that had escaped her. She thought, This is what it means to be free. He thinks I don’t have a sound worthy of speaking, so I will make one. And she did.
Now, continuing the afternoon ritual he had created for himself over the past month and a half, he raised the small crystal glass from the mahogany in front of him and pressed it to his lips. He thought he could almost feel his whole body catching fire as the last sip of whiskey trickled down his throat. Ten minutes ago he had thrown the torn twenty-dollar bill on the bar, but he couldn’t make himself leave. He knew he should be feeling with wet eyes rather than a clenched fist. He didn’t know why he wanted so badly to put that fist in motion, why he couldn’t go back home just yet. But he couldn’t. He looked into the crystalline cuts of the whiskey glass in front of him, its prism-like edges offering him images of the past six weeks of his life.
42 days ago, he had woken up early, panic striking him when he noticed that his wife’s space in the bed was vacant. She had gone to a party the night before, something she was not accustomed to doing, at least not in the twelve years since he brought her to California from her home in Italy. He thought maybe, though he had given up long ago, that she finally felt comfortable assimilating into his America, interacting with his people. He had been excited for her--excited, proudly and undoubtedly, that she might finally garner some close friends, might finally branch out beyond their home. But there was another hope within him. He wanted, shamefully, for the first time in twelve years, to be alone. In his home. Just for a moment. He had not yet experienced that in his life with her.
But waking up, the all-knowing rays of morning just beginning to peek through the spaces between their blinds, his solitude was far from what he wanted. Where was she? He knew from the untouched nature of her side of the bed that she had not returned at all.
Before he could purvey all the possibilities, he heard the piercing ring of the telephone beside his head. It was timed almost too perfectly to be real; he would come to wish it were not. The bold caller ID text on the receiver was all he needed to assess the situation: Marian Regional Medical Center. The phone was back in its original position and he was in full flight to the car, not bothering to change out of his tattered flannel lounge pants, before the voice on the other end could tell him what he already knew it would say: we cannot discuss your wife’s state over the phone; you need to head over as soon as--
He hadn’t waited for it to finish. On the eleven-mile drive from the coast to the hospital, he saw images of the past decade painted in the crevices of the passing mountains: the sweeping love he felt immediately upon seeing her in the tree in that village outside of Verona, the charming confusion on her face as she navigated an airport for the first time, the bulging excitement she expressed for America, for a new life, for anything to do with him--and how that excitement had lost its poignancy, how it had dimmed ever so slightly with each passing year.
But he couldn’t be concerned with that. He just wanted her to be okay--and a little less than half an hour later, he knew she would be. But that he never would. He sat, motionless and unresponsive, in a cold, gray chair across from her room in the hospital. He didn’t understand why the police hadn’t given up, why they wouldn’t let her leave and fall back into any normalcy she could find. The nurses insisted that his presence in the room was allowed and might even help her come back to reality. But he wasn’t sure if he could do it. Besides the incessant thumping of his fingers against the armchair and the drumming of his foot into the linoleum floor, he couldn’t move. He swallowed hard, wishing to replace the thick, sour saliva with whiskey, and imagined what going into the room, that exchange--and her subsequent reaction--might tell him. He didn’t want to know. So he remained immobile, a glass of water in hand and a lump growing in his abdomen like a big, acidic lemon.
He thought of what seemed like hours later when the door finally opened, how he noticed the tears streaming down her face like liquefied pieces of her dignity before he noticed her. She reached out, but not for him. She performed a circular hand motion representing an invisible, globe-like object, and the globe-like lump in his stomach swelled as he began to realize what she meant. She looked first at him, and he didn’t say anything. He waited for her to speak. But she didn’t. The tears kept flowing, but no sound came out. Not one vibration. Just the repetition of the hand movements he was eventually forced to acknowledge—that is, when a nurse, noticing her frantic state, brought her a pen and paper. She merely wrote: Vase. Thick, searing juice squirted out of the lemon and invaded his hope that he was wrong.
The sacred, round object to which she fled immediately upon arriving home was her mother’s hand-blown Venetian glass vase. It was the only thing she had left of her life in Italy, the only thing to remind her of her deceased mother. But to him, it was just an object, a nuisance. She seemed to worship it; he even thought he had caught her, on several occasions, praying to it.
And with that memory, he broke. He came back to the bar, back to reality, and with a quick tightening of his already-clenched fist and a swoop of his arm, his glass flew off the counter, the images of the past 42 days breaking along with it. He didn’t turn to glance at them one last time before rushing out the door.
As he sat in his car, nearly ten minutes after arriving home--like many days--he was unable to generate the courage to walk into the house just yet. He looked at the terra-cotta roof, the spaces between its tiles seemingly open wider than ever before, like mouths curved in cunning smiles that mocked him profusely. The doctors told him that rape often causes an internal shock, a sort of trauma that can elicit different, extreme reactions in victims, and that’s why his wife wasn’t speaking. But he didn’t believe it. He had at first tried to imagine a day when she would open her mouth, playing music with the voice he once thought was the most beautiful sound in the world, but after several weeks of no sound, that hope began to vanish. Everyone who knew the situation had told him she needed to go to a support group--a suggestion he had offered her time and time again, only to be met with a blank stare at the wall behind him.
Just four days after she came home from the hospital, he tried something rash--he tried to have sex with her. He hoped that bringing her around to him in intimacy would finally elicit a sound from her. And maybe that, in turn, would convince her to tell her side of the story, to convince him she still loved him, that she was sorry. That he should be, too. He wanted to be sorry.
At first, the glint in her eyes suggested thrill. She obediently removed her clothes with fervor and seemed to almost throw herself at him. Perhaps she, too, thought sex would release her from the grip of muteness. But less than five minutes in and not a sound to be heard, he felt them on his shoulder. Her hot, salty tears. She couldn’t force a sound more than what seemed to be incessant gagging, but the tears flowed with a steely silence out of her eyes. He didn’t bother finishing. That was the last time he attempted to sleep with her, the last time he really believed she would speak again. Thereafter he couldn’t be with her even if she wanted him to. The idea seemed dirty.
Though he descended into a muted hatred for her lack of speech, he began to think he knew why she wouldn’t. It wasn’t the rape itself, but her own teetering on the edge of infidelity. Perhaps she was afraid of a confession she might utter. A truth. A lie. A way out. It didn’t matter. To him, she was ashamed of her own stupidity.
“You know that’s what happened to Maya Angelou, right?,” his friend had urged. “She got raped and went mute. Couldn’t speak. No sound for five years.” But he didn’t care. His wife was not Maya Angelou.
He had tried to get her to write notes, but she just looked past the paper and writing utensils, not even bothering to touch them. The damn vase was the only thing she had cared about in the past six weeks. Being that she couldn’t (or wouldn’t) speak, her job as a stay-at-home telemarketer was useless. That 42nd day, when he opened the month’s electric bill, one he could not pay on his salary alone and could not fulfill with any job a mute woman could, his pieces broke and scattered even more.
When the whiskey glass fell from the bar earlier that day, the last parcel of his gentle touch crashed with it. With the excruciating, deafening silence emanating from his wife’s very presence and the thought of the bill swooping over his head like a vulture, he had had enough.
He barged into the bedroom, the one in which he no longer slept, impatiently screaming, “What have I done to deserve this? What do I have to do to get you to speak?” Of course, she didn’t respond, didn’t even bow her head to avoid his glance. And then he saw it. There was the vase, sitting silently on the mantle in their (her) room.
She looked at it and was reminded, painfully, of the land the self-proclaimed “rich” American and his rousing speech of opportunity had swept her away from. She felt its edges, even without staring directly at them, and thought of the last twelve years. The olive tree in the backyard of her family’s cottage in Italy, the one she had been sitting in when he rolled up in that ugly white sedan, stacks of books and a mediocre life for sale. The big smile on his face and the tight look of disappointment on hers when he carried her over the threshold. The tiny, impersonal wedding her family couldn’t afford to attend.
In that one moment, on the 42nd day since everything else broke, their eyes both met with the vase. He took a grand step forward, oblivious to how much more broken they really could become.
Her eyes perked up, welled with pain, but much like her mouth, released no concrete evidence of their existence. He resented the vase, resented her disappointment that everything in his life didn’t consist of fine glass and exquisite crystal. But he didn’t want to break it. He knew what it meant to her--though he didn’t know why--but he couldn’t take it any longer. She was going to speak, had to speak. Even if it had to be in a screaming fit of rage.
And with one quick swoop of his hand, the second of the day, the vase hit the ground. Before its shards could scatter on the floor he felt the weight of what he had just done yelling in his ear all the nasty things he knew she would have liked to say to him in the past six weeks--and especially now.
“Even for that? You won’t even talk for that?” he whispered, and walked out on the mess he had made.
A long, screaming pause circled the room. She didn’t reply.
She wanted to scream, wanted to tell him that she knew he thought she was a lost cause. And that maybe she was lost. She wanted to tell him she knew he was angry, that she knew he felt betrayed. That maybe she had stumbled off the road to his land of happiness and unwavering fidelity, but she hadn’t gone on her own. Someone had pulled her. Someone had yanked at her dress and ripped it at the seams along with her spirit, had thrown her into the ditch beside that very road and stripped her of her voice.
She wanted to tell him he was a coward, that she couldn’t help that she hated the world and it, in return, hated her so much that it didn’t allow her to speak. She wanted to run out of the house yelling in protest of everything that had happened to her, to denounce his exaggeration and his modest lifestyle and the cowardice to which she was married. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. So she simply got on her knees and began to collect the pieces of glass off the floor.
As she looked at them, each one offered her a different picture. The moments of her life danced in front of her like a horrible joke. It was like that supposed flash at the end of one’s life, that clichéd montage of moments, yet there was no bright light in the distance and she wasn’t dying. The vase already had, though, and she felt more broken than it--like a single shard of heavy, rigid glass that could never be understood even with its complete transparence. It was as if each piece were its own shiny tear on her mother’s face when she announced that she would be moving to America. Jagged, sharp, blood-drawing tears they were.
She gathered the shards, sweeping the smaller, indistinguishable pieces into the wastebasket along with the remaining slivers of her dignity, which were perhaps even smaller. She placed the last of the large shards, the fifteenth, into a basket.
In that moment, she decided to leave him. Not immediately, and not by throwing herself out the door like a vase off a mantle, but with time. And with precision. She would drain his life of everything it could offer her. The shards would be her liberators. They would tell her when to go.
Each day, when she went outside to water the plants, she would release one shard to the waves below her. Like the tiny grains of sand roaring up with those waves, the shards were her own grains--grains in an hourglass. She told herself that when she cast out the last one, she would leave. She was the great epoch-tosser, and she watched as she drowned the past in the omnipotent, ghastly present. She saw the olive tree, its branches saturated and disappearing below the surface of the water. The countryside, the safe little house in the quiet village, the love and the dream she thought she was bringing to America--she killed them one by one.
On the fifteenth day, she walked, basket of glass in hand, to the edge of the cliff behind their house. Only one shard remained at the base of the basket. She hadn’t expected it to, but it frightened her.
She had looked out at the same bleak landscape, the same dismal representation of her existence so many times--but this time she noticed something new. The cliffs, the waves had always been there--but now she was seeing them in a way she never imagined before. They had no mouths, no vocal chords; in all ways to the human world, they were mute. But maybe those cliffs were what really made the noise; maybe they laughed at the petty conversation of the fools that walked along their edges.
She kneeled down and touched the solemn green and brown earth below her. She felt the tiny pebbles like every other day, but this time she became filled with their noise, their song, their voice as she rose back to her upright position. She thought, Maybe you have to lose the ability to speak to know what you really want to say. And I’m going to say it.
As she stepped out onto the big brown rock, the one that signified the edge of the cliff, she saw the last thin semicircular glow of blood orange as it sunk below the horizon. She wanted to be like the sun--wanted to face the darkness, those realities she had long since discovered she couldn’t erase as nightmares. She wanted to greet that blackness head-on so that she could shed her cracked, beige skin, revealing a glow she knew once lay beneath her, a glow she had once been sure was gone.
She looked at the cliffs around her. She heard their screaming voices and almost felt like she, too, was yelling. She looked at the sultry pink glow that preceded the dying sun in front of her. She took a step closer to it. She thought, This is what it will mean to be free. I was never truly mute--he only thought I was. Even I did. She inched closer, almost reaching for the light that was running away from her towards the other side of the earth, just like all of the false love that had escaped her. She thought, This is what it means to be free. He thinks I don’t have a sound worthy of speaking, so I will make one. And she did.