Between The Years of Silence

The summer Joshua turned six, the Dela Cruz family moved into the yellow house on the corner of Maple and Third. And nothing in the neighborhood was ever quite the same. He remembered it in fragments, the way children remember most things. Not as a story. Just a handful of bright, disconnected pictures. The moving truck idling at the curb. His mother waving at the woman unloading boxes. And a girl — maybe five or six herself — sitting cross-legged on the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street. Utterly unbothered by the chaos around her. Drawing something in the dirt with a stick. What he did not remember, because it happened before he was old enough to notice such things clearly, was the version of that day his mother told at dinner parties for years afterward — the version with the moving company that had shown up four hours late, the box of dishes that had cracked somewhere on the highway between their old apartment and this new street, and the particular exhaustion of a woman who had spent the better part of a decade in a two-bedroom rental two towns over, saving for exactly this: a house with a yard, on a quiet street, in a neighborhood good enough that her son could walk to school without her worrying the whole way there. His father had taken a job that spring managing the parts counter at a hardware store three miles from the new house, a modest step up from the warehouse work he'd done before, but enough of one that the family had finally been able to stop renting and start, as his mother liked to put it, "putting down roots instead of just packing boxes." The yellow house — chosen, in the end, mostly because it was the only one in their price range with a tree in the backyard big enough to hang a swing from — had needed new gutters, a paint job it wouldn't get for another two years, and, according to the home inspector, "character," which Joshua's father had translated, dryly, as "problems we can't afford to fix yet." The Reyes family, two lots down, had been on the street for three years already by then, long enough to be considered fixtures rather than newcomers, though Andrea's mother liked to say she still felt like the new family some mornings, depending on how the neighborhood gossip was running that week. Andrea's father worked nights at a distribution warehouse out past the highway, which meant the house often ran on a schedule built around his sleep — blinds drawn on the front bedroom well past noon, a general household hush observed, at least in theory, until early afternoon, though Andrea herself had never once, in her entire life, successfully observed a household hush of any kind. Her mother worked mornings at a dental office downtown and spent her afternoons, once she'd collected Andrea from whatever corner of the yard she'd wandered off to, running the kind of small, constant supervision that a child like Andrea required — not because Andrea got into serious trouble, exactly, but because ordinary trouble seemed to locate her with unusual efficiency. None of that mattered to Joshua at six years old, standing on the unfamiliar sidewalk in shorts still stiff with store creases, watching strangers carry his family's furniture into a house that did not yet smell like home. He was the sort of child who absorbed a room before he moved through it, and this street — the too-bright newness of the yellow paint, the neighbor's sprinkler ticking back and forth two yards over, the particular quiet undercut by the truck's idling engine — was, at that moment, entirely unfamiliar territory. He did not know yet that within the hour it would stop being unfamiliar for good. Joshua had been sent outside to "make friends," which was his mother's polite way of saying stop hovering in the kitchen. She'd said it while balancing a box labeled KITCHEN — FRAGILE against one hip, not unkindly, but with the particular weary patience of a woman who had already tripped over her son twice while unpacking glasses and did not intend to do so a third time. "Go on," she'd told him, nudging him toward the door with her free hand. "It's a nice day. Go see the street. We'll call you in for lunch." He didn't want to make friends. He wanted to go back inside and read, specifically a library book about deep-sea creatures that he'd been forbidden from packing in his own bag on the grounds that it would "just get lost in the move," and that he had been thinking about, on and off, for most of the drive over. Making friends had never struck him as a task with a clear beginning or a clear method, unlike reading, which had both. You opened the book. You started at the first word. There was no equivalent instruction for standing on a strange sidewalk and turning strangers into something else. But he wandered toward the yellow house anyway, hands shoved in his pockets, sandals scuffing against a sidewalk still warm from the afternoon sun, and stopped a few feet from the girl with the stick. He noted, in the careful, cataloguing way he noted most things, that she had not looked up once during his entire approach, despite the fact that a boy roughly her own size and a moving truck's worth of noise were both, by any reasonable measure, worth a glance. She simply kept drawing, brow furrowed in concentration, tongue caught slightly between her teeth, entirely absorbed in the dirt in front of her as though the rest of the street — the truck, the boxes, the shouting movers, the new boy standing three feet away — did not currently exist. "What are you drawing?" he asked, because it seemed like the sort of thing you were supposed to say. She didn't look up right away. "A dog. But it looks like a horse. I don't know why." He crouched down to see. It did, a little, look like a horse — the legs too long, the neck stretched out at an angle no real dog's neck would bend, the tail more of a flourish than an actual tail. He studied it for a moment with the same seriousness he gave to anthills and library books, tilting his head slightly, as though a different angle might resolve the animal's confusion about what species it belonged to. "Maybe it's a horse that wants to be a dog," he said. She considered this with the seriousness only a five-year-old can bring to a nonsense idea, setting the stick down flat against her knee and staring at her own drawing as though he'd just handed her the missing piece of a puzzle she hadn't realized was unsolved. Then she grinned — a wide, gap-toothed grin that seemed too big for her face, one front tooth missing entirely and the other only half grown in, giving the whole expression a lopsided, delighted quality that Joshua would spend years afterward trying, and failing, to adequately describe to anyone who hadn't seen it themselves. "Yeah. That's it exactly." She said it the way she said most things, he would come to learn — not as agreement, exactly, but as though she'd been waiting for someone to arrive at the correct answer, and was pleased, rather than surprised, that it had finally happened. That was Andrea. He didn't know her name yet. Wouldn't know it until her mother called her in for dinner an hour later — Andrea, sweetheart, come wash up — the voice carrying from a screen door two houses down with the particular volume of a woman used to being heard over her daughter's own considerable noise. But by then it didn't matter. Something had already happened. Something neither of them could name or explain. The way you can't explain why one stranger's face feels like home, and every other stranger's doesn't. In between the drawing and the dinner call, an hour unfolded that Joshua would only ever recall in pieces, the way a person recalls the best afternoons of a childhood summer — not as a sequence of events but as a single warm, undifferentiated block of time, humming with cicadas and the smell of cut grass, punctuated by a handful of moments sharp enough to survive intact. There was the moment the girl introduced the horse-dog by an actual name — Waffles, she decided, apropos of nothing, simply because the word had occurred to her and she liked the sound of it — and insisted that Joshua contribute a detail of his own before the portrait could be considered finished. He'd added, after some consideration, a pair of wings, sketched crudely into the dirt beside the horse-dog's back, on the theory that if the animal was already confused about what it was, it might as well be confused about whether it could fly, too. She'd studied this addition with her head tilted, exactly the way he'd studied her original drawing, and declared, with the total authority of a five-year-old rendering a final verdict, that Waffles was now a horse-dog-bird, and that this was, without question, an improvement. There was the moment a beetle — large, black, faintly iridescent — wandered directly across the middle of the drawing, obliterating one of Waffles's legs entirely, and the two of them had watched it go with equal fascination, neither one moving to shoo it away, both apparently more interested in where the beetle was headed than in the fate of the drawing it had just ruined. "He's fixing it," Andrea had announced, watching the beetle disappear into the grass. "He didn't like the leg either." There was the moment, harder to place exactly where it fell among the others, when one of the movers — a heavyset man with a clipboard, calling out box numbers to no one in particular — had dropped something inside the house with a crash loud enough that Joshua flinched, drawing his shoulders up toward his ears the way he did whenever a sound arrived without warning. Andrea, who startled at almost nothing, had simply glanced toward the house, unbothered, then looked back at him and said, matter-of-factly, "That happens. Nothing broke that mattered, probably," as though she had some special insight into which of his family's possessions were and were not important, and the confidence of the statement, nonsensical as it was, had somehow settled him more than any actual reassurance could have. They spent that first afternoon redrawing the horse-dog a dozen different ways. Arguing happily about whether it should have wings. The argument itself became, in later years, one of the small stories their families retold at holidays — not because it was especially funny, though it was, but because it was, as far as anyone could determine, the very first disagreement between two people who would go on to disagree about a great many things over a great many years, and it had ended, as most of their disagreements eventually would, not with either of them winning but with both of them simply deciding, by some wordless mutual agreement, that the wings should stay. "It doesn't make sense for a dog to fly," Joshua had said, at one point, with the flat certainty of a boy who liked things to make sense. "It's not just a dog anymore," Andrea had said back. "It's a dog and a horse and a bird. It doesn't have to make sense. It just has to be cool." He hadn't had an answer for that. He would spend a good portion of the next fifteen years discovering that he rarely did, when Andrea reasoned that way — not because her logic was sound, exactly, but because it operated on a set of rules he'd never been given, ones that seemed to work anyway, the way certain machines run perfectly well despite instructions that make no sense to anyone but the person who built them. Somewhere in that hour, other children from the street had drifted close and then away again — a pair of boys on bicycles who slowed to look at the moving truck before pedaling on, uninterested in whatever two younger kids were doing in the dirt, a girl a few years older who called something across the street that Andrea shouted back at without ever losing her place in the drawing. None of it registered with Joshua as anything other than background noise. He would realize only much later, comparing notes with Andrea as teenagers, that she had, in fact, been fully aware of every person who passed, filing each one away in the enormous, cheerful catalog of people she kept track of, while giving no outward sign that her attention had moved from him at all. By the time the streetlights flickered on, Joshua's mother found him sitting in the dirt in his good shorts — filthy, laughing, next to a girl he'd known for exactly three hours. She stood in the doorway for a moment before calling out to him, box still balanced against her hip, and took in the scene with an expression Joshua wouldn't understand until he had children of his own someday — equal parts relief and something close to wonder, the particular feeling of watching a worry dissolve before you'd even fully admitted to having it. She had spent the whole drive over quietly bracing herself for a harder version of this move, one where her careful, watchful son spent the summer alone in a new house, friendless, the way he sometimes did when placed among children who moved faster than he was built to move. She had not expected this. She had not expected any of this. "You made a friend," she said, half surprised. Joshua looked at Andrea. She was already looking back at him, stick still in hand, dirt smudged in a long streak down one cheek where she'd wiped away a laugh with the back of her wrist. Somewhere behind her, her own mother had appeared in the doorway of the house two lots down, calling her name for the second time, this time with the particular edge that meant the invitation was no longer optional. He didn't have the words yet for what he felt. He was six. He didn't know that some connections don't build slowly, brick by brick, the way you're told they're supposed to. He only knew that this girl — this stranger from a moving truck — already felt like someone he'd been missing. "Yeah," he said. "I did." Andrea stood up, brushed the dirt off her knees, and held out her hand. Not to shake. Just to hold. The way small children do when they've decided something without needing to discuss it. "Same time tomorrow?" she asked. He took her hand. "Same time tomorrow." Neither of them knew yet what that promise would grow into. They only knew, in the simple and absolute way that children know things, that they had found something worth keeping. That first night, in a bedroom that still smelled of fresh paint and cardboard rather than anything familiar, Joshua lay awake longer than his mother would have liked, listening to the unfamiliar sounds of a house settling into itself — a pipe ticking somewhere behind the wall, a tree branch he didn't yet know the shape of scraping faintly against the window, the muffled murmur of his parents' voices two rooms away, tired and relieved in equal measure. He had expected, based on nothing but the general dread of change, to lie there homesick for the old apartment, for the particular creak of its stairs and the shape of his old room. Instead he found himself running through the afternoon instead — the horse-dog-bird, the beetle, the gap-toothed grin — the way a person runs a thumb over a coin in their pocket, checking that it's still there. He did not know the word for what he was feeling, lying in a bed that didn't yet feel like his, in a house that didn't yet feel like home, on a street he'd known for less than a day. He only knew that some of the strangeness of the new house had already, somehow, gone quiet, the way a loud room goes quiet the moment you find one familiar face in it. He fell asleep, eventually, with the window cracked open to let in the last of the summer air, still faintly holding the shape of a small, dirt-smudged hand in his own. There was, too, a smaller, quieter thread running underneath that first summer — one Joshua wouldn't fully appreciate until years later, looking back. It had to do with the particular way Andrea handled his quiet, from almost the very first week, without ever once making it into a problem to be solved. Other children he'd met before the move — cousins at family gatherings, a boy from his old apartment building — had treated his silences the way you'd treat a stalled car, something to be pushed or prodded back into motion, peppering him with questions until he produced enough words to satisfy them, or giving up on him entirely and drifting toward louder, easier company. Andrea did neither. She would talk for what felt, to a six-year-old, like impossibly long stretches — narrating a game, arguing a point, describing in exhaustive detail a dream she'd had about a talking bicycle — and simply let his silences sit there beside her words, unbothered, the way you'd let a cat sit on the other end of a couch without demanding it participate in the conversation. It took him the better part of that first month to understand that she wasn't waiting for him to catch up, or performing for an audience that happened to include him. She was simply including him, in the particular way that made room for exactly the amount of him that showed up on any given day — sometimes three words, sometimes none, sometimes, on rarer afternoons, a full sentence delivered all at once, unprompted, that she received with the same easy attention regardless of length. There was an afternoon, deep in July, when a group of older children — eight, maybe nine years old, from farther down Third Street — had wandered past while Andrea and Joshua were mid-argument over whether Waffles the horse-dog-bird should also, at this point, be considered part fish. One of the older boys had laughed, not unkindly exactly, but with the careless superiority older children sometimes have toward younger ones, and said something about how the new kid never talked, like maybe he didn't know how. Joshua had gone very still, the particular stillness that came over him whenever attention landed on him from a direction he hadn't invited it from, and said nothing at all, which felt, in the moment, like proving the boy right. Andrea hadn't hesitated. She'd stood up from the dirt, drawn herself to her full, unimpressive height, and informed the older boy, with total conviction, that Joshua talked plenty, he just didn't waste it on people who weren't worth talking to, and that as far as she could tell, that description currently applied to him. The older boy, unprepared for the sheer confidence of a five-year-old dressing him down on a public sidewalk, had laughed again, less certainly this time, and wandered off with his friends without another word. Joshua hadn't thanked her, not out loud, not that day. He didn't yet have practice saying the things he meant. But he'd sat back down next to her afterward, closer than he had been before, and worked twice as hard on Waffles's newly proposed fish scales, and something about the quality of his silence in the rest of that afternoon — settled, rather than careful — told her everything he hadn't said. She never brought it up again either. It simply became one more fact folded into the ordinary architecture of their friendship, unremarked upon, the way a house absorbs the memory of every conversation that's ever happened inside it without needing to repeat any of them back. That first "tomorrow" had, in fact, come and went dozens of times over that same summer, and then another, and another after that, until the days stopped being individually countable and simply folded into a single ongoing arrangement that neither family formally agreed to but that both, within a matter of weeks, had come to depend on. Joshua's mother stopped asking whether he wanted to go outside; she simply handed him his shoes around the same time each afternoon, the way she might have reminded him to brush his teeth, an errand so routine it barely registered as a question anymore. Andrea's mother, for her part, began setting out two glasses instead of one whenever she poured juice in the late afternoon, without ever quite deciding to, the extra glass simply becoming part of the kitchen's rhythm the way the growing stack of Joshua's shoes by their front door became part of the entryway's. Within that first month, the two of them had mapped the entire block in the specific, exhaustive way only children have the patience for — which yards had dogs and which of those dogs were friendly, which sidewalk squares had the deepest cracks for stepping over, which house on Third Street had a porch light that buzzed audibly after dark and which had a mailbox shaped like a fish that Andrea insisted on greeting by name every single time they passed it. Joshua absorbed all of this information the way he absorbed everything, quietly and completely, filing it away with the same seriousness he gave to library books, until he knew the neighborhood as well as she did, though he would have gone on calling himself the new kid for another year at least, waiting for some official transfer of belonging he didn't realize had already happened. There was an afternoon, not long after that first week, when it rained without warning — one of those sudden summer downpours that arrived out of a clear sky and vanished twenty minutes later, leaving the whole street steaming — and the two of them had been caught halfway between houses with no shelter closer than Andrea's own front porch. She had grabbed his hand without asking and run, laughing the whole way, dragging him through puddles he would ordinarily have gone out of his way to avoid, until they collapsed, soaked through, onto the dry boards of her porch, both of them breathing hard, both of them grinning in a way that had nothing to do with anything either of them had said. "You're all wet," she told him, as if this were news, wringing out the hem of her shirt with great seriousness. "So are you." "I know. Isn't it great?" He had not, before that afternoon, considered being soaked through by an unexpected rainstorm to be great in any sense of the word. He found, sitting there dripping onto Andrea's porch boards while her mother's radio played faintly through the screen door behind them, that he was inclined to agree with her anyway. It was on a similarly unremarkable afternoon, a few weeks later, that Joshua first understood — in the vague, wordless way six-year-olds understand large things — that this was not simply a friendship of convenience, born only of matching ages and adjoining yards, the kind that dissolved the moment one family moved again or one child found a more interesting classmate at school. He was sitting on the curb outside the yellow house, waiting for Andrea to reappear from an errand her mother had sent her on, watching the empty sidewalk with a specific, unfamiliar restlessness he did not yet have a name for — a feeling that had nothing to do with boredom and everything to do with a version of the afternoon that felt incomplete without one particular person in it. When she finally came around the corner, backpack straps slipping off one shoulder, already talking before she was close enough for him to make out the words, that restlessness resolved itself all at once, the way a held breath resolves the moment it's finally let out. He did not think, at six, in terms of before and after. But some part of him understood, sitting on that curb, that there was now a before-Andrea and an after-Andrea version of his life, and that he had no interest whatsoever in going back to the first one. By late August, with the new school year approaching and both children slated, by pure geographic luck, for the same kindergarten classroom, the neighborhood itself had begun to take note of the pair in the small, half-affectionate way neighborhoods do. Mrs. Alvarez at the corner store had taken to keeping a second lollipop behind the counter whenever Andrea came in for one, on the assumption — usually correct — that Joshua would appear within the hour looking for her. The mail carrier learned both their names within the first two weeks and began greeting them as a set, the way you'd greet a matched pair of anything. Even old Mr. Halloran, three houses down, gruff and famously unbothered by most of the neighborhood's children, had been observed on more than one evening standing at his fence just to watch the two of them dig some new architectural folly into the dirt strip between sidewalk and street, shaking his head with what might, on a more generous read, have been called fondness. None of them could have said, watching a five-year-old girl and a six-year-old boy hunched over a lopsided drawing of an animal that had by then acquired wings, fins, and, at Andrea's most recent insistence, a single visible ear shaped like a satellite dish, that they were witnessing the beginning of anything in particular. It looked, from any reasonable distance, like exactly what it was: two children who happened to live near each other, filling an ordinary summer with ordinary games. By the end of that first summer, the two families had become fixtures in each other's evenings in a way that surprised both sets of parents, who had, after all, only meant to be polite neighbors when they'd first waved to each other across a moving truck. Joshua's father and Andrea's father discovered a shared, mild obsession with a baseball team neither of their wives had any patience for, and took to watching games together on Andrea's parents' porch, radios balanced on the railing, long after both children had been sent to bed. The mothers traded recipes and complaints about their respective jobs and, eventually, worries about their children that neither would have admitted to a stranger Andrea's mother confessing, one evening, that she sometimes worried her daughter's noise would exhaust the world before the world had a chance to love her back, and Joshua's mother admitting, in turn, that she sometimes worried her son's quiet would keep the world at arm's length before it ever got close enough to try. Neither woman, that evening, said the thing both of them were quietly starting to believe that whatever worry each of them carried about her own child seemed, somehow, to matter less now that the two children had found each other. That a loud girl and a quiet boy, put side by side, seemed to solve a problem neither parent had fully known how to name. But Joshua, even at six, even without the words for it, had already begun to suspect something more was true. He noticed it most clearly on the last evening of that first summer, the night before their first day of kindergarten, when both families had gathered on the Reyes family's porch for what would become, without either household quite deciding to make it official, an annual tradition one last unstructured evening before the school year swallowed the days whole. Andrea had fallen asleep sometime after dark, mid-sentence, in the middle of explaining an elaborate and entirely invented rule about how the game of tag they'd been playing all summer actually worked, her head tipped sideways against the porch railing, one hand still loosely holding a half-melted popsicle. Joshua had sat beside her in the quiet that followed, listening to the low murmur of the parents' conversation drifting from the other end of the porch, the cicadas working themselves into their evening chorus, the particular hush that settles over a street once most of its houses have turned their porch lights on. He hadn't moved her. He hadn't gone looking for his own mother to announce that it was time to go home, though it plainly was. He'd simply sat there, in the specific stillness he was built for, keeping watch over a sleeping girl he'd known for exactly one summer, already understanding in the wordless, absolute way six-year-olds understand the things that will matter most to them that whatever this was, it had already stopped being simple. Sitting there on the porch, watching her sleep through the last hour of the last day of the summer that had changed everything, Joshua found himself hoping, with a seriousness that surprised even him, that tomorrow would keep meaning the same thing for a very long time. Joshua, for his part, understood none of the rest of it yet, and would not have cared much if he had. He knew only that the summer he turned six had begun with a moving truck and a stranger's face, and ended with a friend, a whole map of a neighborhood learned by heart, and a standing appointment same time tomorrow that neither of them had broken once, not in that entire first summer, and that neither of them, if either had been asked, could have imagined ever wanting to.