She pressed her hands over her ears. “It’s so loud, how can anyone not?”
I surveyed the pedestrians on this chill December morning, but none seemed bothered in the least as they bustled along on the sidewalk that bordered the park.
I felt a twinge of unease as I watched Ellie sit there holding her ears in such obvious distress. When I was a child my Aunt Tilda used to hear things—voices and such. Her doctor called them auditory hallucinations, but they were part of her diagnosis of schizophrenia. Did it run in the family? Was this the first sign that Ellie was losing her mind?
For years we’d playfully called Ellie “our little weirdo.” Not because she truly believed in flying saucers and alien abductions and Sasquatch and Nessie and all the rest. She didn’t. She was super rational, but she wanted those stories to be true. She studied TV and Internet accounts, looking for irrefutable evidence. She was the living, breathing embodiment of that X-Files line, I want to believe!
Were those quirks also aspects of some sort of mental illness that had now evolved into auditory hallucinations?
As we moved farther downtown, she removed her hands from her ears.
“It seems to be fading a bit.” She craned her neck to look at the park. “It’s a little behind us now. Definitely from the park.”
As we neared the end of the park, she tapped on the partition.
“Mister Taximan, can you turn right, please?”
“But Washington Square is straight ahead,” he said. “At the very end of Fifth Avenue.”
She turned to me. “Mom, can we? Can we? The noise is over that way.”
She seemed so anxious and I didn’t see how it could hurt.
“Go ahead, driver,” I said.
So we turned onto Central Park South, past the Plaza Hotel to our left and the line of handsome cabs with their huffing horses on our right. Even if they’d all been out with fares, their smell was unmistakable.
“See, it’s getting louder now,” she said, “but not as loud as before. Louder…louder…”
But as before, I heard nothing and, as far as I could tell, neither did anybody else on the crowded sidewalks. As we passed Seventh Avenue, she pointed straight uptown into the park.
“It’s right in there somewhere—right there!”
For a moment I was afraid she’d jump out of the cab, but then I realized hearing the noise disturbed her as much as not hearing it disturbed me.
And then, with a look of profound relief, she lowered her hands and looked around.
“It’s stopped! Whatever it was, it’s gone. Just like that.” She turned to me. “What was it, Mom? How come only I could hear it?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea, honey.”
I didn’t see how I could tell her my greatest fear. But I might as well have, because schizophrenia would have been a blessing compared to what was to come.
3
We spent a wonderful weekend around the city—including the Museum of Natural History, of course—topping it off with a Sunday matinee of The Lion King followed by dinner at Bond 45 in the theater district. Then, on Monday morning, Ellie announced that she wanted to visit the Balto statue. She’d heard the cab driver mention it, looked it up, and decided she wanted to see it in person.
At least that was what she told me.
Bess thought it a dumb idea, especially with a major snowstorm due the next day. But when I suggested we visit the zoo after Balto, then ride on the carousel before lunching at Tavern-on-the-Green, she agreed to meet us on Fifth Avenue.
We entered the park near Sixty-seventh Street and Ellie used a Central Park walking tour app on her phone to lead us to Balto. The bronze statue of the famous huskie stood high on a rock outcropping where a plaque told the story of how, back in 1925, he guided a sled team through an Alaskan blizzard to deliver diphtheria antitoxin to a group of sick children.
But despite the fact that this had been her idea, Ellie didn’t seem the least bit interested in Balto. In fact she kept her back to the statue while she stared at her phone. I had a feeling she wasn’t on Snapchat…
Bess said, “Okay, why don’t we head for the zoo now? It’s just—”
“I want to go this way,” Ellie said, pointing deeper into the park. “There’s someplace I need to see.”
“Are you kidding?” Bess said. “I’m f-f-freezing!”
Bess had a bit of drama queen in her. Being cold was her own fault. Despite the chilly temperatures, she’d arrived dressed in an NYU hoodie. She could have been comfy warm in the Patagonia Micro-Puff jacket I’d bought her but I’m sure she felt it lacked sufficient bo-ho cred.
I had a gut feeling about Ellie, though…
“Is this about—?”
“The sound,” she said, nodding, her look pleading. “I need to see where it came from. Please?”
We’d had such a nice trip so far, I figured I’d indulge her. We had no schedule, after all.
Of course Bess wanted to know “What sound?” and, as we followed Ellie, I explained the episode on Friday as best I could.
“That’s not normal, Mom,” Bess whispered.
“But it’s not necessarily bad. Maybe her ears are just…different.”
I wanted so very much to believe that.
Ellie led us this way and that way along intersecting paths and across the wide, bench-lined mall that seems to pop up in so many films set in Manhattan, past volleyball courts, and then into a wide-open field.
“This is called the Sheep Meadow,” Ellie announced, continuing to the center where she stopped and pointed downtown toward the apartment buildings and hotels that lined Central Park South. “And right down there is where Seventh Avenue stops.”
“So?” Bess said.
“So this is where I think the sound came from. At least it’s my best guess.”
Bess made a face. “That doesn’t make any sense. There’s nothing around but grass. Unless someone drove a speaker system into the middle here and started broadcasting a sound only weirdoes can hear—”
Ellie screamed then. A piercing, agonized sound ripped from her throat as
