Cacophony

I wonder sometimes what rain sounds like.

I know what it looks like. I can describe every detail of how it traces window panes, and how the smallest spots of sunlight get caught in the dewdrops. The rain never travels in a straight line - drops sway this way and that, crashing into each other on their way down to collect into one perfect, peaceful form. I’ve always loved that about rain. It knows where it’s going, but it takes its own path to get there.

If only.

My name is Lars. It’s been a while since I’ve let my lips form that word. Lars. I like how it feels to say that. How it goes from a soft, round body into a sharp ending. I like my name. But these days, all I do is use the board… that stupid board. So I don’t feel it often. It’s all rough marker strokes and scratchy erasing, trying to keep up with a pair of deeply knit eyebrows and a disapproving charcoal sweater vest.

I spend most of my time here, on my back lying in bed, watching the ceiling fan go around over and over again, and wondering if it ever wants to speed up so fast that it flies off of the plaster and goes somewhere else. That’s all I’ve ever wanted, to be honest. To fly away from here and into the arms of…

Of my angel, I suppose.

My guardian angel.

But alas, that’s not the story that was written for me. The deaf boy doesn’t get the happy ending. He gets swallowed in the pages. Nobody knows what happens to him. You can assume all you want, but all you’ll really have to go on are the people that he leaves behind. And how can they help, if they never knew him at all?

Blink.

A light at the window pulls me out of my thoughts. Bright enough that I’d notice it from anywhere. Small enough that nobody else would. Two clicks, one short and one long. 

It’s him.

I sit up immediately. He’s not supposed to come until tomorrow. I know that because the last thing he texted me was from the hospital with his sister, telling me he had to stay. This means something is wrong. Or I’m just being paranoid, as I typically am. 

I’m at the window and opening it before I can take two breaths, and he comes tumbling down from the sill onto my plush blue rug. His dark hair is matted and tangled from the storm, and he clearly got his clothes stuck on the prickly branches while climbing up to my room. But were it not for the storm itself spraying into my room, scattered remains staining the walls a shade darker, I would have never noticed that he was a mess.

Because it’s him. He’s really here. 

My guardian angel.

He didn’t start off that way. He started as the boy next door. The boy two blocks down, one block over, and five orange doors to the right, to be more accurate. He started as the basketball star that I watched from the sidelines. Eventually, watching turned to words. He knows ASL. Not many people do. It’s a rare gift to be able to communicate with another human being in comfortable terms. Eventually, words turned to conversations, real ones, late into the night over text or sitting across from each other on his bed. Conversations turned to touch - the brush of a knee, the intertwining of fingers - and that eventually became more. 

He saw me. For the first time in my life, he saw me for more than the things that held me back. He gave me hope for something better than what I had. He made me feel free. 

Angel feels like the only accurate word to describe someone like that.

He stands up and attempts to brush himself off. I don’t dare touch him yet. I don’t know yet if he’s here under those pretenses. I just look at him, and when his eyes finally meet mine, I spell out his name, slowly, letting my hands linger over each letter. This is the ASL equivalent of letting a sentence trail off  into nothing - the gestural sister to an ellipses.

M O N T Y

He smiles softly, and a wave of feelings comes rushing back to me. His hands move faster than mine, more frantic, but still clear as day.

Hi, L A R S. I missed you. Couldn’t wait.

That’s enough to give me the ok and collapse into his arms. I feel tears stinging my eyes, but more importantly, I feel Monty’s cold hands on my back, his arms wrapped around my neck. I can’t speak to him when we’re like this, but for some reason the inability to communicate never scares me when it’s him.

We can’t stay here, I sign. Where?

The tree?

I smile, grabbing my phone from my nightstand and my wallet out of the drawer. I turn on my white noise to signal to the charcoal sweater vest that I am asleep, and then I follow Monty out of my bedroom window. I used to surprise even myself at how quickly I would get up and go with him. Now it just feels like us. Fast and furious. Taking every moment we have and not wasting a single one.

He brought his car, but it’s parked a block up. He didn’t want my dad to see the headlights. I slide into the passenger seat, and let my seatbelt click into place, feeling the gears snap and fit themselves together. I love seatbelts. I love anything that can be felt and not just heard, anything I can understand just by feeling how it moves.

His hands are tight on the steering wheel as he speeds through the night, driving into the moon like we’re heading for the edge of the world. In this town we might as well be - we’re a suburb surrounded by desert or forest on all sides. Getting rain this torrential is a miracle, and one that feels fitting for a night like this one. 

Monty parks the car on the side of the road and squints against the harsh light from the dash. He turns his whole body to me and signs. Lots of rain. Run for it?

I smile without responding and kick the door open, grabbing his hand and dragging him out behind me. We sprint through the rain hand in hand, completely blinded by the downpour, led only by our feet as they follow the familiar footprints of young love that we have long since let the grass grow over. I think I might be laughing, and I’m out of breath, and I’m cut off from words, but it doesn’t matter because here, the words are in the feeling. Feeling together, this exhilaration… it’s all more than enough.

The willow tree has such tall and thick foliage that it shields us from most of the rain. We curl up against the trunk, an indentation that we discovered as boys and continuously came back to. This was our special place, a secret only for us. It was probably the secret of a thousand others, but in these moments, it was simpler to pretend it was just ours. And it’s here, safely concealed under the moon and the swooping leaves and the angry storm clouds, that we finally begin to talk. 

We talk about everything. The way we’ve grown into using signs is hard to write down - it doesn’t translate well. Sign language is an amazing thing. The movements all retain their meanings, but there are millions of ways to combine them into sentences and convey different tones or speak more casually or enthusiastically. It’s just like speaking any other language. Everybody uses it differently. So when I say that Monty and I talk about everything and nothing until the sun is breaking through the leaves and reminding us that we have lives to get back to, I’m afraid all I can really ask for is trust.

Driving me home, he parks even farther away, and then he kisses me until I forget what breathing feels like. It’s not like this night is particularly special - we meet each other every three weeks, as we always have - but every time feels more desperate. As his sister gets worse, as my windows lock earlier each night, so, too, does our time together begin to feel more like sprinting than soaring. Like we’re running out of time. Like the clock is catching up with us. So I cherish the kisses for what they are, and when the moment ends, tears and rain mix on my skin as I walk the rest of the way back to my brownstone and climb the tree back up to my bedroom, the same way I always do. So yes, this night is nothing special.

At least, not until I climb through the window and see him. I see the deeply knit eyebrows first, and then my eyes start picking out sharp, harsh details - the suede of his shoes, the blood red of his tie, the too-crisp perfection of the button down shirt, right down to the stitching on that charcoal sweater vest. The storm outside my window feels almost like sunlight with those eyes bearing down on me - colorless, lifeless, loveless.

He knows.

I think he always knew, deep down. But now he really knows.

I start signing frantically, but one movement of his own hand, a simple palm to my chest, stops me. He stands, turns to face me, and holds out a whiteboard and a dry erase marker, the kinds that you get in kindergarten to help you with numbers.

I don’t even need to lipread to know what he’s going to say to me.

Use the board.

…

Two days later the rain would stop, and there would be a police report. Teen boy found broken in his backyard after falling from a high tree branch. They’d say there were bruises covering the body, bruises that couldn’t have come from the fall. They’d say it was likely a suicide, and that he was survived by a mother, a stepfather, and two first cousins who lived out of state. They’d get some of it right. In the hearings against my stepfather, no real charges would ever be pressed. And after a while, I would become another folder in a stack of cases that weren’t really worth solving.

I don’t think it’s relevant to this part of my story to say if I fell from the tree, or if I jumped by choice. What would it really change? How people view what happened isn’t going to change the aftermath. The deaf boy doesn’t get the happy ending. He gets swallowed in the pages. That’s how it works in real life. The bottom line is that I’m gone, and that not many people will notice the absence. I’ll just fade away like mist after a storm.

But there’s one person that noticed. And I hope that when he sits by his window, watching the rain travel in loose pathways down the cold and foggy glass, he’ll stop sometimes and think of me.