Excerpt: Human Voices Wake Us, And We Drown

Early October in Whistling Hollow meant a slow descent of tranquilized peace, like Grandpa Mike when he took his evening Benadryll. Although she’d wasted no time in wrangling the boys outside, Mrs. Elaine Stearns had returned into her home as quickly as she’d come out. The girls still needed fussing over. Virginia Katherine, aged fourteen years, could more than dress herself and brush her own hair without any parental interference, but her clothing choices could be questionable. For her grandparents’ anniversary, she’d tried to wear a skirt whose hem had fallen barely to mid-thigh. On the other hand, Lucy couldn’t be left to her own devices for too long. Clever four-year-olds made more trouble than their less astute counterparts, and Lucy’s hands could find their way into a heavily locked Swiss bank safe, had she set her mind to doing so.

The second-eldest in the set of six, Elijah Jonathan Stearns already towered over the other boys he went to school with. Why two of his younger brothers couldn’t watch themselves, he didn’t understand. Marcel and Jude were the good ones. They listened when Mom told them things, and they didn’t backtalk Dad. Even now, they questioned nothing. Elijah meandered to the apple tree in the front yard and sat down with his ragged book of Yeats. Letting the kids handle themselves couldn’t go badly in the slightest. At the very least, Dad would be back home soon.

The candy apple red Schwinn sat on the driveway as a thrown, the plastic bow faintly glimmering in the washed-out autumn sunlight. Leaves danced a brown and orange ballet through the gutters and the sidewalks. Some stayed motionless, waterlogged from the week of on-off rain, but those that could fell into the wind, all pretenses forgot. Across the street, Mrs. O’Leary’s son walked the aging golden retriever, though, really, Biscuit had taken the lead and now walked Tom. In slippers and a bathrobe, widowed Mrs. Marshall padded down her front walk to the mailbox with a painted rooster. Mr. Gray and his daughter tinkered with their ancient Cadillac, buffed the hubcaps and got elbow-deep in the noisy engine.

A little green rice-burner jolted down the street with no audible noise attending it, just an apparent need to be anywhere but here. Silent, it still startled the cracked, fallen ballerinas and crushed several underneath its tires. Looking up from her bills and catalogs, Mrs. Marshall glared off after it, eyes narrowed, like a predator that had just barely missed its prey, at the shimmering Honda decal on the trunk. As she shook her head and tossed her greying ponytail, her fluffy pink housecoat dangled to her ankles like a boxer’s robe, chasing away the leaves like Moses parting the Red Sea, making them run like cowards from Achilles. As a storm cloud hanging over an otherwise perfect picnic, blackening the sky and threatening everyone with rain, but never making good, she glowered at the license plate when the car paused for the stop sign.

Maybe, she considered, reporting it to the police would benefit everyone on Cobbler Street. Maybe the hooligans driving it would park too close to someone else’s house, or too close to a government posting, or swerve just enough to say that they were drunk — and people like that just couldn’t be allowed to carry on. It would have been what they got for buying an Asian car in the first place. Maybe Richard Marshall and his little brat were too enthusiastic for that clunker they couldn’t ever fix, but at least they’d had the decency to go gaga for an American brand.