to them that he had later. He is wearing a faded pair of jeans and a Willow Creek Wolverines football jersey. But best of all, the very best of all, is what he is holding in his hand. It isn’t a beer bottle, but a can of pop and he’s holding it out toward the camera like he is toasting whoever is snapping the picture. Cheers, he seems to be saying, cheers.
I don’t hate my dad. I think I did for a while, but not anymore. I don’t hate him, but I certainly don’t miss him, either. After the funeral my mother took us into town and we bought as many gallons of yellow paint that we could put in our car. We painted the house, the three of us. Now it’s a happy soft-yellow color. Warm and cozy. And anyway, that whole entire week was just incredibly hard for all of us. We needed something to look forward to, some hope, and having a yellow house was a start anyway. That’s what Mom said. I told her that if my father hadn’t been drinking that morning and dragged me out into the woods, I never would have come across Petra and she would have died. So in a way, he actually saved the day. She just looked at me for a long time, not sure of what to say. Finally she said, “Don’t go making your father into a hero. He wasn’t a hero. He was a lonely man with a bad disease.”
We do go to my father’s grave once a year, on his birthday. Ben grumbles about it, but Mom insists. She says we don’t have to like the things he did but he was still a part of our family and wouldn’t he be sad knowing that not one of his children came to visit him once in a while? Last year Ben laughed when Mom said this and answered her all sassy, “The only way Dad would be glad to see us was if we brought a six-pack with us.” He did, too. Ben brought a six-pack of beer with him to the cemetery last year. Set it right next to his gravestone. Mom made him take it away, but Ben and I laughed over it later. It was kind of funny, in a sick sort of way.
As for me, I’m pretty much a regular kid. I go to school and do okay. I have friends and even run track and cross-country for my school. I like to run, I always have. I feel like I could run forever some days. And I like that I don’t have to talk when I’m out for a run. No one expects you to chat while you’re running five miles.
I don’t go into the woods anymore very often, and definitely not alone. That makes me about as sad as anything. I loved the woods once. It was my special spot. But when I’m in there, surrounded by trees, I am always looking behind me to see if anything is creeping up on me. Silly, I guess. Mom asked Ben and me if we wanted to move, to go into town, away from the woods. We both said no. Our home was our home, and there are a lot more good memories there than bad. Mom smiled at this, and I was glad that we could make her feel better. The woods are still Mom’s favorite place and she and Louis go walking there quite a bit. I asked her if she ever got scared while walking, afraid. She said no, that the forest was in her blood, that she couldn’t be scared of something that had actually been so good to her. “It sent you back to me, didn’t it?” she asked. I nodded. Maybe one day I would feel the same way about the woods, but not now, not for a long time.
I still see Dr. Kelsing, the psychiatrist that I met that night I went to the hospital; it’s nice to have someone to talk to who wasn’t in the middle of the whole mess. She lets me know that I’m not crazy. She says I was very brave and very strong to do what I did on that day. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’d like to think so.
I even kept on seeing my guidance counselor, Mr. Wilson, all the way through elementary school. I learned about a year ago that Mr. Wilson was actually brought in for questioning while Petra and I were missing. I bet that was totally embarrassing for him, but not once did he mention it to me. I would meet with him once a week and I’d still write in the beautiful journals that he gave me. On our last meeting together, during my last week of being a sixth grader at Willow Creek Elementary School, we sat at the round table and he asked what I would like to talk about on that day. I shrugged my shoulders and he stood. He was still incredibly tall even though I had grown several inches since first grade. He dug into his old gray file cabinet and pulled out five journals, all with black covers and all decorated with my artwork. I told him, then, about the dream I had when I fell asleep out in the woods the day my dad had taken me. The one where I was flying through the air and everyone was grabbing at me, trying to get me to come down. I told him that he was in my dream holding my journal in his hands, pointing at something. I told him I wondered what he was pointing at. He pulled the very first journal I had written in from the bottom of the pile and handed it to me.
“Let’s look for it and see if we can find out what it was,” he said. For the next half hour I looked through that journal, the one that said Calli’s Talking Journal on the front and was decorated with a dragonfly. I flipped through pages, laughing about my terrible spelling and my stick figure pictures. But then I found it, the entry I was sure Mr. Wilson was pointing to in my dream. There were no words on the page, just a picture that I had drawn of my family. My mom was drawn really big right in the center of the page. She had on a dress and high heels, which was kind of funny because my mom never wore dresses or high heels. Her hair was drawn in a huge bouffant style and she had a smile on her face. My brother was standing right next to my mom, drawn just as big. His hair was colored fire engine–red and his freckles were red dots across his circle-shaped nose. He held a football in his hands. At first glance one might think that the picture of Ben was actually my father, but it wasn’t. My father was in the picture drawn a little smaller and set back from the rest of us. He was smiling, just like everyone else in my picture, but in his hand was a can of what was clearly beer. The brand name of the beer was written in fancy blue letters, just like it is on the real can. But the drawings of those three weren’t what caught my eye that day in Mr. Wilson’s office. It wasn’t even the drawing of me, dressed in pink, my hair pulled back in a ponytail. No, it was what I drew sitting on a table next to me in the picture. A beautiful blue perfume bottle with its lid set on the ground right next to it. And rising out of the bottle were these tiny musical notes, whole notes, quarter notes and half notes flying right up into the air around my stick figure head.
“This is the picture,” I told Mr. Wilson, jabbing my finger at the page. “This is what you were showing me in my dream. My voice.”
“Of course it was, Calli,” he said. “Of course it was. You had it with you the entire time.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am deeply grateful to my family: Milton and Patricia Schmida, Greg Schmida and Kimbra Valenti, Jane and Kip Augspurger, Milt and Jackie Schmida, Molly and Steve Lugar and Patrick Schmida. Their unwavering confidence in me and their constant encouragement have meant the world to me. Thanks also to Lloyd, Lois, Cheryl, Mark, Carie, Steve, Tami, Dan and Robin.
A heartfelt thanks to Marianne Merola, my world-class agent, who saw a glimmer of possibility in
Thank you to my talented and patient editor, Miranda Indrigo, whose insights and suggestions are greatly appreciated. And to Mike Rehder, thank you for the beautiful cover art. Thanks also to Mary-Margaret Scrimger, Margaret O’Neill Marbury, Valerie Gray and countless others who generously supported this book and warmly welcomed me to the MIRA family.
Much gratitude goes to Ann Schober and Mary Fink, two very dear friends who cheered me on every step of the way.
A special acknowledgment goes to Don Harstad, a wonderful writer who has been an inspiration to me.
Finally, to Scott, Alex, Anna and Grace, thank you for believing in me. I couldn’t have done it without you.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-3749-4
THE WEIGHT OF SILENCE
Copyright © 2009 by Heather Gudenkauf.
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, MIRA Books, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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