At least they were strangers, though. There’s something horrible in facing, when you’re suffering, someone who really knows you. For a few moments a day, you might fool strangers and yourself that you’re feeling better than you are—maybe even doing well, considering the circumstances—until you speak with someone who knows you and you hear the truth of your condition in their voice or see it in their eyes: you are not doing well. Not at all. What I wanted that Sunday was the comfort of being around someone who really knew me, without the aching pain of seeing myself as I was. I wanted the impossible. So it was just as well that my brother Connor, younger than me by two years and more charming and self-assured than I would ever be, had not returned the voice message I’d left more than a week before to tell him that I had made the move to Chicago but Brittany had not. Nothing he could have said or done would have helped much, anyway.
“Lord have mercy,” Fr. Dunne said.
The order of the liturgy—somehow, I still knew it by heart from years of attending mass with my family—called for communal repetition of the invocation, but the people of St. Asella’s managed only an inarticulate murmur. I made no response at all.
“Christ have mercy,” said Fr. Dunne.
Without waiting for a reply he must have known would not come, Fr. Dunne finished the petition—“Lord have mercy,” he said—and moved on.
“Glory to God in the Highest.”
In response to the priest’s prompt, a few voices rose above the congregation’s murmuring, but each recited the Gloria at its own pace, creating the effect of a tuneless song performed in an arrhythmic round.
I, too, said the words of the Gloria, but I wasn’t praying. I was preparing—tightly controlling the rate of my exhalation, using just enough breath to power my voice at what I guessed was the ideal volume for amplified public speaking, making it halfway through the prayer before inhaling again and waggling as I did so. Left unchecked by my waggles, the tension creeping around my vocal folds would paralyze them. But the paralysis would not become a full-blown fit unless I acted on the powerful but self-defeating instinct to force the folds open. If I did, my eyelids would flutter, and my chin would nod as if I were emphatically agreeing with something. These histrionics would pull my vocal folds apart for just a moment—long enough to let out one gagging syllable—before the offending tension, fed by the stress and vigor of my effort, slammed them shut again.
Once a fit had started, no combination of mental and corporeal strength could budge the folds. They would remain fused together, despite my nodding and straining, until the tension receded of its own accord or the muscles of my esophagus were exhausted. Managing my stutter was a struggle not only with its symptoms, but against the fit-inducing quack cure I reflexively wanted to provide. The waggles, for their part, were merely an as-needed preventative regimen—generally efficacious, but unpredictably impotent. I lived with the awareness that every word I uttered had the potential to bring me to a sudden, humiliating halt.
At the conclusion of the Gloria, Fr. Dunne read a prayer with his palms turned up to a painted ceiling discolored by a century of incense and candle smoke, an image of Jesus being raised bodily to heaven while his disciples, emboldened by their awe, dared to look on. When the prayer was over, the focus of the mass would shift from the priest to me. I swallowed hard, a habit born of my childhood assumption that my stutter was triggered by mucus stuck in my windpipe.
“We ask this through Christ our Lord,” Fr. Dunne said.
“Amen.”
As everyone else sat down on the hard, lacquered pews, I stepped into the center aisle and approached the altar. I stopped in front of it and bowed my head, as the liturgical coordinator had instructed, then entered the sanctuary and climbed three steps to the ambo. I found the lectionary as I’d left it twenty minutes before: open to the first passage, a red ribbon draped across the page as a bulwark against the movement of machine-chilled air. Lifting the ribbon and laying it on the facing page, I tried once more to repel the encroaching tension with a waggle. Then, taking in a breath, I began.
•••
DURING THE EIGHTEEN years I was unable to speak, I was certain that I’d need a voice to make myself understood. My mother had tried to get me to learn sign language along with her, but I wasn’t having it. No one I knew spoke sign language. What good is it to speak a language that no one you know understands? I had gestures, of course—furrowed brows and puppy-dog eyes, headshakes and nods—but these were blunt instruments. I would need a voice, and the colors and tones my voiceover heroes gave to their words, to show the world who I really was and find my place in it.
My mother died one month after my twenty-third birthday, and Connor moved out of the house and three hours away to Chicago less than a year later. These events—and the horrifying prospect of a life that was little more than an unspeaking stalemate with my father—led to my enrollment in my hometown’s junior college, Leyton Community, and to my tortured daily attempts to revive the atrophied tissue of my vocal folds with stutter-induced spasms. Six months of provoking my stutter gave me the strength to gasp a few syllables, but it was seven more months of learning to tame the stutter before I could voice a complete sentence—“My name is Simon”—without shattering it into jagged shards.
With an associate’s degree and tenuous control of my stutter, I left the father I blamed for my long silence and moved four hours south to Carbondale to attend Southern Illinois University. That’s where I found Brittany. She was beautiful. She was smart. She wasn’t much for chitchat, and my quiet way appealed to her. She was also contrary by nature, and I knew that at least part of the reason she chose me was because I was the last guy on earth her born-rich, smooth-talking father would have chosen for her.
Brittany and I were walking back to my place from a coffee shop, having just broached, for the first time, the subject of life after graduation—where we might live, what we might do for a living. Just the idea of making plans like these with Brittany was making me heady, but some part of me must have sensed Brittany’s hesitation to envision a time when the credit hours we needed, the school calendar that dictated our time off, and the college-town boredom we’d endured were no longer pushing us together. Because, after all the forward-looking talk that had put such a charge into me, what I told her—what I really believed—was this: “Just because we graduate doesn’t mean we have to leave. We know we’re happy here. We can stay here and be happy.”
Brittany looked at me and, in the weak light thrown by a streetlamp half a block in front of us, she smirked and shook her head.
“What?” I asked.
“That’s bullshit,” she said.
“What is?”
“What you just said.”
It was as if Brittany had waved away a smokescreen of my own making. The truth was, I wanted things that Carbondale couldn’t give me. To become a voiceover artist, I’d have to live in some version of Radioland, the big city I’d imagined as a boy, home to the Great Voices and the powerful antennas—like birthday candles, their red flames pulsing atop skyscraper cakes—that beamed their sixty-second masterworks to my radio. My line about being happy in Carbondale revealed little more than a safe-seeming untruth I’d sold myself and wanted Brittany to buy, too.
Brittany had understood me beyond my power to make myself understood. My mother had, too. And Connor still did, whether he wanted to or not. Whether I wanted him to or not.
When we were together, Brittany discussed the details of her father’s crime only once. He had stolen from her and lied to her, she said. He’d looted a trust that Brittany’s grandfather, the last good son of an old Carolinian family, had funded for her. When Brittany came to him as a seventeen-year-old with statements in hand to ask about the plummeting balance, he assured her it was the stock market