Soundtrack of Silence by Matt Hay

Author:Matt Hay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

NINE

YOUR CANDLE BLEW OUT LONG BEFORE

YOUR LEGEND EVER DID

—Elton John

Ten days later, life threw a sledgehammer at our heads. We had spent days researching surgical options for an auditory brainstem implant and reading the history and science of the process. The digital hearing aids that had been implanted during my junior year of college had, at the time, been temporarily miraculous, so good that they made me believe I could outrun the inevitable. Now that dream was over. Nora and I had spent a week looking through insurance policies and having meetings with the human resources department at my job. The night of August 28, we came in off the rooftop deck and were playing a game of Scrabble, one of our favorite pastimes, since it was a way to use words without speaking. Nora was about to rack up a huge score with the word “totality” when the phone rang. The only way I knew the phone rang was when Nora answered it. It was her mom, Sarah, and everything changed.

Sarah had called earlier to say that Tom had not come home yet, which was a little unusual, but not too concerning. Tom was a consummate tinkerer. He loved collecting gadgets and figuring out how they worked. For as long as I had known him, and, according to Nora, for most of her life, business suits were his everyday attire. He always carried an envelope in one of the breast pockets of his jacket and he would jot notes, trivia, and other tidbits of information and keep them there. He would pull them out and say things like, “Did you know that the expression ‘if the Good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise’ isn’t a bad-grammar allusion to a flood? It’s about the Creek Indians. ‘If the Good Lord’s willing and there isn’t a Native American uprising.’” He loved stuff like that, it didn’t matter much to him if it was true or not. When he didn’t have a nugget to share, he would play tic-tac-toe on the envelope. Nora had no idea how many games they had played over the years, but it was in the thousands.

He was also an early adopter of technology, a beta tester before many people knew what that meant. Tom had just bought a new nautical GPS device and wanted to give it a try, so that Saturday he rented a boat and went out on a small lake in northwestern Indiana, not to test his sailing skill but to give his new gizmo a run. When he didn’t come home at the prescribed time, Sarah began to worry.

It stormed around sundown. The people who rented Tom the boat became concerned. They could see it—the lake wasn’t that big—but they couldn’t see any movement. Not long afterward, a group near the shore saw what appeared to be a man in the water. They rushed out and pulled Tom ashore, attempting to revive him on the spot.

Late that night, as we were preparing for bed, Sarah called again.

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