The Voiceover Artist (3 page)

“So why did your brother wait until a month before graduation to visit you?” she asked.

“He doesn't have many free nights,” I said. “He's always doing some kind of show.”

“He's not doing a show tomorrow night?”

I waggled. “I guess he's taking a night off.”

I understood that Brittany, in her way, had given me a chance to tell her something meaningful about my relationship with my brother. I could have confessed that our longstanding refusal to apologize to each other for anything made things between us difficult. I could have admitted that I hadn't invited Connor to visit me in Carbondale until a week before, that I'd withheld the invitation until I was certain that Brittany and I were moving to Chicago and that my brother's one-night stay would give me every occasion to unveil to him a life that was already better—and more promising—than either of us had imagined my life could ever be. I could have told Brittany I loved my brother but was plagued every day by my fear that his dazzling talent for improvisation and comedy, and the success his gifts stood to bring him, would put him beyond the reach of my ambition and my love. But I didn't say any of these things. I answered Brittany's question as if what she really wanted to understand were the scheduling challenges of the working comic actor, and she didn't push me for more.

“So what's he like?” Brittany asked, sliding her hand under the blanket and scratching her bare thigh with the crescent-moon whites of her fingernails.

At that question, my mind generated a cloud of adjectives that described my brother: talented, charismatic, dedicated, pained, ambitious, impatient, selfish, determined, unflappable, amazing. Getting a little uncomfortable with my silence, I waggled and picked one.

“He's amazing.”

Brittany laughed at me. “He's
amazing
?”

I shrugged again. “He is.”

“How is he amazing?”

“Well, for one thing, he creates characters and they're real. Like, believable.”

“What else?”

She was daring me to make her care about Connor's visit.

“He can make almost anyone laugh,” I said.

“Amazing!” Brittany said, mocking me with her smile, which was somehow made even sexier by her sarcasm. “What else?”

“He knows me better than anyone.”

The wide, brown eyes Brittany had inherited from her Laotian mother narrowed and darkened.

I waggled again and made a weak attempt to undo my mistake. “But not as well as you know me.”

Pulling her feet away, Brittany rolled onto her side and wrapped the blanket tightly around her. I recognized a pattern it had taken me months to identify and understand: when she was hurt even a little, Brittany became furious with herself, incredulous that after all she had been through and how little she expected of anyone, she could still be negatively affected by another person's words or actions. The pain surprised her every time. I'd stopped wondering why Brittany couldn't see that her vulnerability, like my stutter, could be chased away but never banished. This was another lesson about personal connections that I'd learned the hard way: that my seeing Brittany as she was—and loving her—could never guarantee that she'd see and accept herself.

I put my hand on the bump in the blanket that was her ankle.

“Don't,” she said, kicking me.

I sat in purposeful silence, letting her anger burn off. To scatter the tension surrounding my vocal folds, I took one waggle, and another, and then a third.

Then I said, “Connor knew me when I couldn't talk.”

This was where I should have started. Connor had seen me struggle and stew in my long silence. He had witnessed my constant, soundless screaming match with our father. No one, except our mother, had known the silent me—for eighteen years, the
only
me—better than Connor had.

“He knew me then, and you know me
now
,” I continued. “Now, nobody knows me better than you do.”

It was true. Insofar as my being able to speak had changed me, Connor hardly knew me anymore.

Brittany's body seemed to soften a little, but she said nothing. Her eyes were pointed somewhere beneath the dark television set, her lower jaw thrust out. There was no talking her out of her inward-aimed fury. She would take it to bed with her.

Because of my gaffe, the last reasonable moment I had to ask Brittany to change her plans for the following afternoon, so that we could make the most of Connor's brief visit, was also the least favorable. But I tried anyway.

“Connor gets here around four tomorrow,” I said, softly.

“I'm at the hospital then.”

I knew this, of course. Brittany volunteered every Tuesday afternoon in the neo-natal intensive care unit of the university hospital—in the two years I had known her, she had missed one shift, on account of stomach flu. Her job was to hold and feed incompatible-with-life newborns whose parents were gone, already mourning an imminent death that simply hadn't happened yet. It was an unlikely fit for a woman who sought daily refuge from human interaction in the windowless, climate-controlled rooms that housed the leather-bound books she studied. Brittany did not stop to coo over babies in strollers and, outside of my apartment, did not so much as stroke my head or hold my hand. I'd always wanted to watch Brittany cradling the infants, to see that soft part of her even through glass, but she would not allow it—the hospital would not allow it, she said—so I was left with imagined glimpses of her standing stiff-legged, holding other people's dying children, loving them as she loved me: as much and as little as she could.

“As it stands, we'll be asleep about half the time Connor is here.” Feeling my throat tighten, I waggled twice. “So could you find a substitute for your shift tomorrow?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“It's still almost a full day's notice. I can make the calls for you.”

Brittany met my eyes. “No.”

“We can say you're sick.”

“No, Simon!”

She stared at me, driving home her refusal with her cold gaze, then turned her face toward the television again. I said nothing more.

She had never admitted as much to me, but Brittany seemed to bear the burden of a responsibility to me that was similar to her sense of responsibility to them, as if she was certain that I—like the babies—would have no one if not for her. As I sat silently beside her, I reminded myself that even if Brittany were to leave me—and the thought of her leaving made me sick to my stomach—I would still have someone the other motherless children did not: I would have Connor.

 

•••

 

WHEN CONNOR CALLED
 from the road and said he'd be later than expected, I was relieved that Brittany hadn't missed her shift at the hospital just to wait around for my brother. My relief evaporated when she returned home crying.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

There were pouches beneath her eyes, and her cheeks were bright red. She stalked past me without a word and shut herself in the bedroom.

I walked slowly to the bedroom door and cracked it. Brittany was in bed, everything but the crown of her head buried under the covers.

“What is it?” I whispered.

Her only reply was a sniffle. But I couldn't bring myself to leave her alone—not without knowing why she was crying.

“What happened?”

Brittany made a guttural sound from beneath the blankets and rolled over to face the far wall.

Taking a waggle, I pushed the door and let the heavy brass handle hit the wall. “I'm trying to help!”

Brittany threw the covers down to her waist and yelled, “You can't help!”

She waited another minute for me to leave. I didn't.
I couldn't.
I still had no idea why she was crying.

With her back to me, Brittany wiped her eyes with her palms. Then she closed a nostril with her wrist and sniffed. “I was holding a baby girl today,” she said.

I waggled again and whispered, “Yeah.”

“And she died.”

So far as I knew, this was the first time, in the hundreds of hours Brittany had spent holding doomed infants, that a child had died in her arms.

I wanted to crawl into the bed and hold her but knew it was the wrong thing to do.

“I'm so sorry,” I said.

I watched her, trying to come up with some comfort apart from the loving words she would not accept. I waited another moment in the hopes that she would roll toward me and wave me into the bed beside her. But Brittany's only movements were the still irregular swelling and shrinking of her rib cage.

So I backed out of the bedroom and pulled the door closed, watching her for any last-second change of heart even as I admitted to myself that the most helpful thing I could do for Brittany was leave her alone.

 

•••

 

SHE WAS ASLEEP
—or still in bed, anyway—when Connor arrived that day.

I met my brother at the back door with an index finger over my lips, led him out the French doors that opened from the living room onto my unit's section of the wraparound porch and asked him to wait there. I returned to the kitchen to pour my brother his drink of choice, bourbon neat, and opened a bottle of light beer for myself. Drinking, like high emotion, hindered my management of my stutter, so I was determined to drink slowly that night. I wasn't about to risk having a fit in front of Connor.

I handed the glass of bourbon to Connor and closed the French doors.

“Should I come back later?” Connor whispered.

“No, you're fine,” I said. “Brittany is sleeping. She volunteers at the hospital in the neo-natal intensive care unit, and a baby died while she was holding it.”

“Today?”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus,” Connor said. “Is she in trouble?”

“No, no. None of the babies she works with have more than a few weeks to live.”

“Oh,” Connor said, seeming baffled. “Okay.”

“She'll be up soon,” I said. “If she isn't, you'll meet her in the morning.”

I unfolded an aluminum lawn chair for him, not so much hiding the little waggle I took as drawing attention away from it, like a magician showing an empty palm during a card trick.

“How was the drive?”

“Long,” Connor said. “Longer than it had to be. I got a late start.”

“Did you have an audition or something?”

Connor shook his head and swallowed a mouthful of my cheap bourbon without wincing. “I went on for a friend of mine in a late show last night. The pay was free drinks, and I was very well paid.”

I smiled and took a sip of my beer.

“Then I overslept and got caught in some rush-hour traffic south of Chicago,” he said.

“How long were you driving?”

“What is it? Ten?”

“Almost.”

“Six and a half hours.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah.”

I waggled. “If you want to stay another night to make it worth the drive, you're welcome to.”

Connor shook his head and sat up in his seat. “Nah. I want to be back onstage tomorrow night.”

He took a deep sip of his bourbon and swallowed, and I poured more beer between my lips.

“So you're moving to Chicago,” Connor said.

“Yeah.”

“And your girlfriend is coming with you?”

“Yes.”

“And you're living together?”

“Yes.”

Connor nodded, the edges of his lips curled downward and his eyes smiling.

“You think that's a bad idea.”

“No, no,” Connor said. “It sounds fantastic.”

By which he meant it sounded terrible. Though Brittany's agreeing to join me in Chicago was the signature success of my life to date, for Connor, sharing a small apartment with one woman, day after day, would have been unbearable. Onstage, he could make an audience believe he was a caring husband or an attentive boyfriend. Offstage, Connor wanted no part of intimacy. Even the questions he asked me were electrified prods he waved to keep me from getting too close.

“What'll you do for work?” Connor asked.

I settled into the fabric straps of my folding chair and waggled. “Voiceover.”

Connor laughed.

“What.”

“What do you mean, ‘what?' It's at least a little funny, Simon. If I played a character who spent eighteen years in a hospital bed and decided to try out for the Olympic team after a jog in the park, I'd get laughs. Even on an off night. Fuck, that's a good idea. I'd write it down except that improvisers don't write anything down.”