I sucked in a deep breath, my chest feeling impossibly tight. “Levi, calm,” Elsie’s high-pitched voice caused me to exhale, the pent up breath causing my heart to hammer against my ribs. When I looked up at Elsie’s face, I realized that I was crying. That tears were streaming down my face.

“I knew she was leaving me, Elsie. I saw it, I felt it.” A pained sound ripped from my throat, and I added, “And I left her, because I was young and naive and thought that if I left her, she might hang on… that it might never happen. That I could pretend it wasn’t happening.”

“Levi—”

“She closed her eyes alone, Elsie.” I searched for my lost breath, only to rasp, “She never woke up after that day. She died a week later. She died in hospital. But when her eyes closed she was all alone. All she’d had for comfort were these rosary beads, the rosary beads I can’t look at without feeling the guilt and the shame of leaving her to fade away, alone. But the rosary beads that I can’t let go. Because they were her; they are her to me. She wanted me to have them. Me, the son that allowed her fade alone.”

Elsie gripped her hands in mine and squeezed. Her physical strength was nothing, but the emotional bravery that passed from her to me flowed strongly. It was armor strong.

“Breathe,” Levi, she said, but I could see her breaking too. I watched this little blonde silent girl, the one who didn’t talk because people told her she sounded bad. She hadn’t yet told me her life story. And here I was, breaking like a damn pussy, desperately in need of her support.

“Shh,” she soothed, then surprising me all to hell, climbed on my lap, wrapping her arms around my neck. I was shocked into stillness, Elsie’s cheeks heating as she laid her head on my shoulder.

Needing to feel her as close as possible, I wrapped my arms around her waist and pulled her to my chest. I let her warmth seep in.

“How old were you, Levi?” Elsie asked. “When she passed.”

Gripping her tighter, I replied, “Fourteen.”

Elsie stiffened, then admitted, “Me too. I was fourteen when my mom left me. I was fourteen and I was completely on my own. When they… when it all became too much.”

I frowned, my sadness slowly fading. I wanted to know what she meant. I wanted to know why she was homeless. I wanted to know how her mamma died. I wanted to know how she’d ended up in Seattle. I wanted to know who ‘they’ were. Hell, I wanted to know it all.

“She was deaf. Completely,” Elsie whispered, the volume of her voice almost non-existent, like she didn’t know if she should be confessing.

My hold on her grew tighter.

“She was born deaf, to hearing parents. They never understood her. But worse, they never helped her. They kept her hidden away, their dirty little secret. Until they sent her out on her own trapped in her silent world. Pushed into a world where people didn’t understand her.”

“Elsie,” I whispered, not knowing what else to say.

“She fell pregnant with me—I don’t know my father. You see, my mom got involved with people that weren’t good for her. They made her take things that she wouldn’t ever shake.”

“Elsie—”

“But she loved me. Her half-hearing girl. The little girl she managed to get at least some help for. To get a hearing aid for, so I could at least understand some of what was happening the world,” Elsie’s voice hushed. “Sometimes I wish I’d never been given the miracle of hearing. When you can hear, you can hear what people say about you. You can hear their savage words. If you listen hard enough, you can even hear your fragile heart tear apart.”

Needing to see her face, needing to show her that I was here, that I was here for her, I pushed her back and our gazes collided.

Her bottom lip was trembling. “They never taught her to sign, Levi. She could barely read lips. They gave her no tools to survive, so she had to make them up.”

My muscles froze, waiting for what came next. I didn’t know what she had to say would crush my soul. “So we had to make our own sign language. We had a secret language all to ourselves. It was ours, our secret language hidden in plain sight from the world that didn’t want us. That had no place for us—at least that’s what she’d tell me. We at least had our own language. We at least had that…” she trailed off. I was seeing Elsie in a completely different light.

Because it was from the heart. She was confiding in me. I could tell by the tremor and wariness in her voice that she just didn’t talk about this stuff.

Like me.

A flicker of a smile hit her face, and Elsie said, “My mom didn’t talk much. She’d been told her entire life that her voice was horrible, embarrassing for those in her company. She’d been laughed at and mocked mercilessly until she would speak only to me. Even then it was rare. But she often told me she loved me. Even through the drugs that dominated her life, she often told me she loved me.”

Elsie’s arms dropped from my neck and she rose from my lap. I immediately felt the loss of not having her close, but the thought faded when I watched her walk toward my mamma’s statue, the one displaying the broken version of her life.

The guilt I always felt began to rise. When Elsie kneeled down and pressed her palm to my mamma’s marble cheek, I felt something unfamiliar ignite inside.

“She couldn’t tell me she loved me,” Elsie suddenly explained, talking about her mamma, “but she could show me. In our own way, she did.”

I was transfixed as a blush crept up Elsie’s chest and neck, to land on her cheeks. Her blue eyes turned to the sculpture and holding her breath, she leaned in, pressing her forehead to Mamma’s.

“Just like this,” she explained. “My mom would put her hand on my cheek, I would put my hand on hers, and our foreheads would touch. That was my mom telling me she loved me. It was how I told her I loved her back.”

I watched Elsie’s eyes close and a distant smile tug at her lips. Then she drew back, sitting down on her heels, her hands on her thighs. She looked as if she were in prayer. Elsie sat this way for a few minutes, gathering herself.

Her hand drifted to the locket on her neck and she held it in her clenched fist.

When a bolt of lightning grounded outside the warehouse, eschewing the darkness, Elsie’s eyelids fluttered open. She rose to her feet and walked over to me. Bending down, Elsie tilted her head to the side and regarded me.