A Silence of Mockingbirds Read Online Free

I’d been through my own fair share of marital
struggles. I wasn’t about to let Sarah marginalize me in such a flippant
fashion. I knew how to get down and scrappy.
    “Listen, Sarah,” I seethed, “you are not always going to be able to
trade off your looks. One day you’re going to wake up old and ugly, then
what?”
    I’d never spoken so harshly to her before, but somehow I knew that
if Sarah left David, Karly would be neglected. I knew it as surely as I
knew my mother’s name.
    “I don’t care about your happiness!” I snapped. “You have a daughter
to think about. You’ve got to think of what’s best for Karly.”
    Sarah retreated. I waited for some reply, but none came and stone-cold
silence pushed us to separate corners. After a brusque goodbye, we
both clicked off our cell phones.
    I left the next week for Vietnam, and the following year my husband
and I moved from Pendleton to Hermiston, thirty miles west. That was
the year I began to have a disturbing, reoccurring dream. This dream
terrified me, because throughout life my dreams have served as a source
of warning.
    There was the dream I had the day we buried Daddy, where I saw
my brother standing before me bloodied from head to foot. The phone
call that startled Mama and me from our naps was a neighbor woman
calling to tell Mama her boy was in a bad accident. Then came the knock
at the door, and my brother was standing there awash in blood the way
he had been in my dream.
    There had been the dream I had of a girlfriend’s husband searching
room to room for his wife. I knew what he didn’t know: she had been
slaughtered. I woke with the urge to call and tell him to pray for his
wife, whom I figured was in some sort of danger. He did as I urged, and
three weeks later, she was diagnosed with the virulent breast cancer that
would eventually take her life.
    I seriously consider the dreams that haunt me. The one that came
after my fight with Sarah was deeply disturbing. In that dream, I bury
dead children. Not my children, but somebody’s children. Upon waking,
I have the awful sense these children are dead because I’ve murdered
them and hidden their bodies. The dream is so vivid it is hard to know
when I wake if I am really awake or still in the midst of a nightmare.
    One morning upon waking from the dream again, I rolled over to face Tim.
He was reading, one hand propped up behind his head, the pillow folded into
the crook of his arm. With his other hand, Tim held an aging paperback copy
of
The Problem of Pain
. Tim has read that book so many times over
the course of our marriage I wonder sometimes if it is his form of therapy.
The books pages are stiff and the color of smokers’ teeth; a few have begun
to loosen from the binding.
    “I had a bad dream,” I said, snuggling into him.
    “You did.” It wasn’t intended to be a question, only a half-hearted
acknowledgement that Tim had heard me.
    “How many children have we killed?” I asked.
    “What?” Tim dropped the book to his chest. “What are you talking
about?”
    “How many children have we killed?” I replied. “I dreamed we were
burying dead babies. It seems so real, not like a dream, but like we really
did kill them.”
    My dreams creep Tim out. Throwing back the covers, he hopped
out of bed, his book in hand. “You have the strangest dreams,” he said
as he walked out of the room. It was Tim’s way of letting me know he
wanted no part in the conversation. I rolled back over and watched
him leave. An outstretched hand of morning sun reached through the
window and across the duvet in an attempt to soothe me with warmth,
but I could not shrug off the chill that had woken me.
    Four years would pass before Sarah and I spoke to one another
again. By then, Karly would be dead.
    Chapter Five
    S arah asked us to adopt her baby. Not Karly, but Hillary, who as I write this
is a teenage girl herself, driving, dating, and dreaming of