Chance
Authors: N.M. Lombardi
Mary said, "You remind me of someone."
Kai broke from his pensive stare out the train window, looking over the rows of drowsy, day-weary commuters before giving her his full attention.
"Do I?"
"Well, some-
thing
. Or some-
one
. I guess it depends on how you look at it." Knowing he would only sit there, silently waiting for her to continue, she went on, "Did I ever tell you about Scrappy?"
His eyes opened wider.
"I remind you of someone named
Scrappy
?"
"No, no.
Scrappy was my grandmother's cat. When her eyesight started to go, she moved in with my family, and took her cat with her. One afternoon it got out. My grandmother was in a panic, but you know how cats are, and eventually Scrappy came home again, and everything was fine."
Still he waited, guileless, so she continued.
"So anyway, some three months later Scrappy has a litter of kittens. Just two of them, little and perfect and sweet. It was like she knew she'd only ever have two of them, because she loved those kittens half to death. We'd always see her carrying them around here and there, taking them from one spot to another to suckle them. And then one day she only had the one kitten."
He
blinked, his eyes warm as melted chocolate, silently affected. Still he said nothing.
Mary continued, "We couldn't figure out what happened to the other, but late that night my mother heard crying, and noticed Scrappy pacing back
and forth in front of the dryer, absolutely beside herself."
"Oh no," he frowned.
"No, it's all right. She must have dropped the kitten – a little boy, all gray -- back behind the machines. We had a hard time getting him from back there. He was okay, maybe a little hungry, but once we got to him everything seemed to be fine. We got Scrappy fixed, and decided to keep both the kittens. The little boy we called Chance."
"Fitting.
I'm assuming something else happened to Chance, or this wouldn't be much of a story."
"Oh, he was okay.
My parents had to put him down a few years ago, he was all of 23 years old. But he never quite recovered from being back behind that dryer for all those hours, cold and alone and by himself. The other kitten, she grew up just fine; sweet, lovable. You couldn't ask for a nicer cat. Chance, though… he never got over it.
"He'd always slink out from under your hand.
If he was in a good mood he wouldn't run away when you came into a room, but that's the best you could hope for. I always wondered why he was like that, what his little brain was thinking all those hours by himself. He must have been afraid, lonely. Maybe he thought someone dropped him back there on purpose, I don't know. But like I say, he was just never the same. He was damaged."
Kai listened quietly to all this, never moving his eyes from her, though the train continued its tireless circuit from stop to stop.
Sensing she'd reached the end of the narrative, he asked, "And who am I in this story?"
"Chance," Mary said.
"You always remind of Chance."
He wasn't offended, exactly, although she sensed a suspicious change about him.
Expectation of a slight.
"Because I'm damaged?
", he asked bitterly.
"No," she said, and looked out over the seats.
"Because I can't get you out."
The train slowed again, coasting to the platform, and Mary gathered her purse and bag, readying her
keys in one hand. "My stop."
Kai's eyes followed her as she stood, but he stayed where he was, cached by the window of their small two-person seat, bundled in a black wool coat and a deeply wrapped scarf.
Before he could say goodbye she turned to him.
"You know, it's Valentine's Day on Thursday."
"Mm," he nodded. "I know."
"Are you and Crystal doing anything special?"
"I hadn't really thought about it."
"Kai,"
she withered, agonizing. "It's your
first
Valentine's Day."
"I'll think of something," he shrugged, one corner of his mouth puckering with the faintest of smiles.
"She's certainly given me enough hints."
"Are you going to do whit
e roses? Women love white roses."
"
You
love white roses."
"And I don't have a significant other, so I need to live vicariously through yours."
She reached out, squeezing his shoulder. Her touch was one of the few that wouldn't receive a guarded look in return. "Seriously. I know you're not the mushy, touchy-feely type, but please… on behalf of every desperate single woman who's going to want to throw herself off a bridge in two days, do it right. It's important."
"I
t's important," he echoed, as if in doing so he could reassure her of his depth of understanding. "Are you, by the way?"
"Am I what?
", she fixed her gloves as the train squealed to a slow stop at the platform.
"Going to throw
yourself off a bridge?"
"If the winds are right."
Kai turned suddenly to the window, catching a surprised breath as he held in a sneeze.
"Bless you.
You were sneezing this morning, too. I hope you're not catching a cold."
"Don't miss your stop."
Mary glanced quickly up the aisle, annoyed to find the line of egressing passengers already far ahead of her.
"Shoot.
Have a good night, Kai – see you tomorrow?"
"Will do."
She later regretted telling him about Chance, but there was perhaps no better analogy to describe Kai.
They'd met three years earlier, classmates in an adult education class on American Sign Language. Every so often the teacher paired them together to rehearse the frustrating pantomime, and Mary marveled at how quickly and fluidly he picked it up.
"You should have been born mute," she accused, and he smiled, at least as much as he ever did.
A 10:1 ratio of smirk to smile.
"I have a secret," he said.
"My parents were both deaf. I could sign before I could talk."
She was surprised at his gentle, quiet candor, even then.
Kai was not a man to whom confessions came easily or frequently.
"Then why are you here?"
He avoided her eyes, soaking in silence, then said, "I wanted to make friends."
Mary was the only friend he took away from the class, at least that she knew of.
She admitted to an emptiness she'd also been hoping to fill, and eventually they skipped class, exchanging it for weekly meetings for coffee.
Kai was sweet, but one friend was enough for him.
He was a research assistant for a pharmaceutical company in town, quiet and lonely work that suited his aversion to crowds. Shyness was a childhood affliction from which Mary herself had never fully recovered, and she was pleased to find that Kai's quiet company brought out her inner imp.
She could be playful with him, teasing and light and comical.
She had no fear of reprisal, their conversations thoughtful without being heavy, intimate without being romantic. He had the look of a sensitive bard, but there was no poetry to his words; he spoke awkwardly, uncertainly, as if the sound of his own voice jarred him. Mary frequently called him on it.
"It might have something
to do with how I was raised," he said.
"Because of your parents?"
"It wasn't just that. They ran a private school for the deaf. I was home-schooled most of my life, along with my parents' students, so I didn't have much… verbal interaction, I guess you'd say."
"None of them spoke to you?"
"It wasn't that some of them
couldn't
, but… imagine learning fluent Spanish, then going to Spain. The locals might recognize you as an American, they might have a rudimentary grasp of your language, but if they don't have to bother speaking English, they won't."
"But you could still talk to them.
Sign to them, I mean."
He grew quiet, a not-infrequent bridge of introspection.
He'd lived so long in a world of silence, the concept of
thinking out loud
was alien, and Mary had to adjust to these quiet periods between them, letting him work out his backlog of thoughts.
"Signing isn't… exactly the same.
You do it quickly, stream of consciousness. You cut small things out, words in-between. I can say anything I need to with my hands, but there are nuances to the spoken word. Subtleties that get lost."
Mary spent the better part of her adolescence avoiding the rush and clamor of h
er peers, and the idea of having silence imposed upon her seemed at once peaceful and desperately lonely.
"You didn't have friends at school?"
"Friends took work. I hate to keep making the analogy about speaking another language, but at some point in your fluency you stop mentally translating everything you want to say. That was my problem. I never learned to
think
in terms of sign, it was always a conscious, laborious act."
She looked down at his hands, privately in a
we of their pianist grace, the unconscious way his fingers twitched when someone asked him a question, as if defaulting to their native tongue.
"What happened in high school?"
"The school got bigger, more successful. My parents hired teachers from outside, to help with the students, and one of them could hear. She tried to engage me, and I suppose she realized something was wrong with me."
Even in the early months of their friendship, the subtle ways he slighted himself
bothered her.
"You weren't
broken,
Kai."
"It's not inaccurate.
There really was something wrong with me. You see the way I am now." He shook his head, "I couldn't relate to the hearing world. My parents unintentionally did to me what they'd had done to them: they thrust me into a social and sensory world for which I had no frame of reference."
The teacher eventually convinced Kai's parents that he'd outgrown home schooling, and desperately needed the interaction and s
timulation of the hearing world. Grudgingly they allowed it, releasing him to two years at a local public school. What was intended as a kindness only further handicapped him, however; hearing people spoke quickly, used slang and inflections and verbal shorthand that confounded him. Rather than accepting him into the fold they held him at the outskirts, an exile that hardened him and drove him deeper into himself. He was isolated between two worlds.
He got by, in his way. Kai was intelligent – brilliant, when Mary was allowed to weigh in – and came to a fumbling familiarity with his own voice. He still spoke softly, cautiously, and sometimes even asked her to repeat certain, unfamiliar words aloud, so he could understand and mimic their sound. He was hyper-aware of people's perception of him, self-possessed to the point of social exclusion. Mary alone was allowed within the sphere he'd built around himself, though even years later she could not wholly coax him out.
She persisted
in asking, "Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why did they do this to you? Why keep you there, instead of letting you live a normal life before it was too late. You could have had it both ways."
Once or twice he came close to explai
ning, hands twitching near his coffee cup like a half-spoken word, but it never did come out. He had as much knack for lying as he did public speaking, and in the end it was easier to shrug, or excuse it as any child excuses the failed foresight of a parent.
He usually said, "They had their reasons."
When Mary took a new job at a bridal shop in town, the divergence of their daily paths narrowed, and Kai offered to share the train ride in and out. He enjoyed these small journeys more than a little; they exchanged meaningful, humorous glances about the strangeness of their fellow commuters, shared the warmth of pressed bodies when the weather was cold, and best of all he didn't have to talk.
Six months ago, something chang
ed.
"I have news," he said suddenly on the trip home.
Kai was rarely the first to start any conversation, immediately impressing Mary as to its importance. "I've met someone."
"Tell me about her."
"Her name is Crystal."
"Pretty.
Where did you meet her?"
"In town.
She works in town."
"What does she look like?
What does she do? Is she nice?"
"You're suspiciously curious."