And now at last, the day of the feast has come and it will be in the morning.
• • • •
Pea waits until her parents are gone. She sneaks silently up the stairs.
She sits in her tiny room like she sat under the table in the kitchen, with her knees clasped to her chest and her body trembling. A frail flower.
It’s past midnight, now. Just past. It’s very dark outside, no stars.
She has spent her whole life pretending, and at least that’s almost over.
She has learned to do the thing they do, tilt her head back and half-close her eyes, listening. Stop in the middle of a conversation and mouth silent words, as if in conversation with a ghost.
Now it’s all almost over.
They live in Building 170. It is called that because it was the 170th one built, of the original two-hundred, but there are only sixty-three left now.
Pea sits on her bed and looks out the window at the bleak black horizon, and her life is almost over.
Her parents are good parents—they love her despite her deafness—but she knows it is a source of pain and shame to them. She knows one literally deaf child; that girl’s name is Sharon. She is in the lower group, still, two years behind Pea. She literally cannot hear. Pea can hear but she can’t hear God.
Pea picks up her journal and then puts it down again. No point now—no sense. She has never written the truth in it. Too risky. She has hidden her secret her whole life, without her parents ever telling her to. Without needing to be told. Her whole life has been one ache, one absence.
She lies down on the bed. Tomorrow it will all be over. One way or another. Sleep flickers in and out of her eyes. Dream scraps, stitched together strangely: Her father riding on the Building 170 elevator, pointing the lever up; her mother carving something that is not meat.
She is awoken by a nervous plink-plink on the window. She sits upright and stares at the window. Her nightgown is gold-colored and old and ratty. There it is again:
Plink—plink
. Like fingertips gently rapping on the glass.
“At last,” she whispers. She slides off the bed—
plink, plink—
and walks on trembling legs toward the window. “At last!”
What will He look like? How will He
sound
? Maybe there are special instructions that have been held back until now, because it was necessary that they be given to someone special. To her. Just to her. It was all a long test of her faith, and now it is done. She presses the buttons to work the window screen.
She sees the puffy face distorted through the glass and her excitement whooshes out of her. It’s not God. It’s Robert, a fat boy from her class. He is standing there sweating on the ledge that runs around the building, clinging to her sill. Poorly dressed, glasses skewed, his face confused and almost apologetic, as if he’s not sure he’s in the right place. He is wearing his clothes from the academy, though it is long after hours. Though they will never need to be worn again.
Robert must see it through the glass, the disappointment in Pea’s face, and she immediately feels bad. She presses the buttons and opens the window and Robert tumbles himself in over the sill and lands splat on her floor. Pea crosses her arms. She is in her thin gold nightgown. She has never talked much to boys in private. It’s the middle of the night, the last night. She tucks her hair behind her ears and waits while he pulls his thick clumsy body up to standing.
“Hey,” says Robert, obviously nervous, breathing loudly through his nose.
“This is really strange,” Pea says, “you being here.”
“I know,” he says, nodding vigorously. “I know.”
And then he takes a deep breath and they peer at each other. His imperfections are striking. His eyes bulge behind thick-lensed glasses. He’s got odd hair, black tufts that go off in all directions like a scattered herd. Pea is afraid that he’s never going to break the silence. Is he waiting for
her
to say something? But then—
“Pea, you are different than other girls. D’you know? I mean—different.”
“Oh,” she says. “Oh, God.”
She feels a cold rush of fear.
How does he know? How did he find out? Does he know?
But then Robert suddenly starts talking again, a hundred miles an hour, wringing his hands together and looking everywhere in the room except at her. “I know this may seem crazy to bring this up to you now, but my heart has been with you since forever. I mean, not since
forever
but for a long, long time. Since pubescence, and probably sooner. Since Academy.”
The words at first are a confusing blur, but then at once Pea understands, and her fear dissolves into embarrassment—for herself. For him. What Robert means when he says that she is
different
is that she is
special
. He means that he
likes
her. She cups her face with her hands. She almost laughs but doesn’t. He doesn’t know her secret! He is confessing a crush. She looks up at him, holding her palm over her mouth. Of all the scenes to be playing out in her bedroom late at night, late on
this
night!
“I honestly Pea… I don’t even know what I would want you to do with this information…”
Robert has his hands in his hair, he looks wildly about her room, his confusion accelerating. He is sweating so much: his neck, his chin. His forehead. Pea resolves to put him out of his misery.
“I don’t really like you in that way,” she says suddenly, kind but firm, interrupting the heartsick monologue. “I’m sorry.”
Immediately, Robert nods. “That’s—I mean—sure. I knew that was coming, obviously. I guess I was expecting that. I mean, of course. Of course I knew you would say that.”
He laughs nervously. Pea smiles at him. She feels bad for him, but she doesn’t do anything like get up and take his hand or kiss him. She’s not the kind of person to do something like that just because of the weird circumstances. But there is something nice about this, right now. She has never had a boyfriend—never kissed a boy. These are pleasant things to be thinking about, even in the negative, instead of what is coming: the morning, the meal, the end.
And Robert, having unburdened himself, now seems almost relaxed. He takes the liberty of sitting down on Pea’s bed, and exhales, and even laughs.“I expected that, like I said. I mean, it’s funny, you know? It’s kind of a little hilarious. If I can’t get a girl to like me now, I guess it’s just not in the cards, right?” He laughs again. He has a snorting kind of laugh. “Now or never, right?”
“I guess so,” says Pea. “But, you know… pain will be a memory when we all go through. Pain will be a word in books.”
“Right,” he says. “Of course.”
This is something people have heard. Pea of course has never heard it. She feels cold inside. She looks past Robert, out the window. He gets up, paces back and forth a couple more times, with his hands locked behind his back like a politician.
“Robert?”
“I know, I know, I’m leaving,” he says. “It’s just — there’s one more thing.”
• • • •
BRING HER TO ME.
Annabel sits in the dark in the basement of the building with her hands wrapped around herself, her fingers laced together, clutching her knees against her chest.
For many years now this has been her private place, down here in the storeroom of Building 170, among the scattered trophies from when things were good. This is where she comes to think. Where she comes to wrestle with her burden. Not Pea—never Pea; Pea herself is not a burden. She is a joy. It is Pea’s difference that is the burden. Pea’s deafness. The question of what God wants for Pea, what Annabel wants for her. Those are the burdens, and now the hour has come, now it is almost here.