I screwed the paper into a ball and kicked it into a corner.
I needed a lost language. One in which I could communicate with the lost. I used to write one special word over and over again. My sister’s name. A talisman. I folded the word into elaborate miniature origami, kept my pleat of paper always close to me. In winter it lived in my coat pocket; in summer it tickled my ankle inside the fold of mysock. At night, I fell asleep clutching it in my hand. For all my care, I did not always keep track of these bits of paper. I lost them, made new ones, then came across the old ones. When my mother tried to prize one from my fingers, I swallowed it to thwart her, even though she wouldn’t have been able to read it. But when I saw my father pick a grayed and fraying fold of paper out of the junk in the bottom of a drawer and unfold it, I did nothing to stop him. When he read the secret name, his face seemed to break, and his eyes, when they rose to me, were full of sorrow.
I wrote the secret name instead. The spell, the charm, the talisman.
After three or four goes, I sat on the bed and looked at my line of squiggles and symbols and signs. Was it accurate? Doubts began to assail me. Had I remembered the sounds accurately after my five-minute journey back into the house? Was my recollection of the phonetic alphabet itself adequate? What if my first failed attempts had contaminated my memory?
A great many yearshad passed since I learned the phonetic alphabet. It began with a chart in a linguistics book in father’s shop. There was no reason for my interest at first, other than that I had nothing to do one weekend and was enamored of the signs and symbols it contained. There were familiar letters and foreign ones. There were capital N’s that weren’t the same as little n’s and capital K’s that weren’t the same as little k’s. Other letters, n’s and d’s and s’s and z’s, had funny little tails and loops attached, and you could cross h’s and i’s and u’s as if they were t’s. I loved these wild and fanciful hybrids: I filled pages of paper with m’s that turned into j’s, and v’s that perched precariously on tiny o’s like performing dogs on balls at the circus. My father came across my pages of symbols and taught me the sounds that went with each. In the international phonetic alphabet, I discovered, you could write words that looked like math, words that looked like secret code, words that looked like lost languages.
I whispered what I had written on the paper. Whispered it again, urgently. Waited for the birth of some answering echo in my memory to tell me I had got it right. Nothing came. It was the travestied transcription of something misheard and then only half-remembered. It was useless.
I prized the paper from his fingers. Without a word I left the room. On the window seat on the second floor I put the morsel of paper in my mouth, tasted its dry, woody tang, and swallowed. For ten years my parents had buried her name in silence, trying to forget. Now I would protect it in a silence of my own. And remember.
He would have spoken. He opened his mouth to speak but, raising my finger to my lips, I commanded his silence. I would not have him speak her name. Had he not tried to shut her away, in the dark? Had he not wanted to forget her? Had he not tried to keep her from me? He had no right to her now.
Alongside my mispronunciation of hello, good-bye and sorry in seventeen languages, and my ability to recite the Greek alphabet forward and backward (I who have never learned a word of Greek in my life), the phonetic alphabet was one of those secret, random wells of useless knowledge left over from my bookish childhood. I learned it only to amuse myself; its purpose in those days was merely private, so as the years passed I made no particular effort to practice it. That is why, when I came in from the garden and put pencil to paper to capture the sibilants and fricatives, the plosives and trills of Emmeline’s urgent whisper, I had to make several attempts.
It had never worked. She never came. I was still alone.
