The Voiceover Artist. Dave Reidy
hadn’t defrauded her, Brittany and I never would have met.
My radio-ready voice and years of experience as a busboy had helped me land a job as a server at The Nile, Carbondale’s finest restaurant, a white-tablecloth establishment frequented by local professionals and visiting university trustees. For almost two years, I’d worked five dinner shifts per week and, with scholarships and grants covering most of my tuition and fees, had saved almost $11,000. I offered my savings for our living expenses so that Brittany could use what remained of her inheritance to buy the right rare books. I wanted her to have her dream job, despite the damage her father had done. I wanted the same for myself.
As the woman on TV attempted to express to the unseen television interviewer how much her murdered lover meant to her, and convince the audience she never could have harmed him, she sucked her lips into her mouth and shook her head, trembling.
“Oh, Jesus,” Brittany said, sitting back. “She had me until the fake crying.”
“She did it,” I said.
“Yeah,” Brittany said over a sigh. “She did.”
As the prisoner pinched the bridge of her nose in tearful silence, Brittany found the remote in a blanket fold and turned off the television. She leaned against me and pressed her lips to mine as consolation for the touching we’d forgone while the prisoner told her lies.
Then Brittany laid her head on the far arm of the couch and stretched out her long legs, putting her feet in my lap.
“So why did your brother wait until a month before graduation to visit you?” she asked.
“He doesn’t have many free nights,” I said. “He’s always doing some kind of show.”
“He’s not doing a show tomorrow night?”
I waggled. “I guess he’s taking a night off.”
I understood that Brittany, in her way, had given me a chance to tell her something meaningful about my relationship with my brother. I could have confessed that our longstanding refusal to apologize to each other for anything made things between us difficult. I could have admitted that I hadn’t invited Connor to visit me in Carbondale until a week before, that I’d withheld the invitation until I was certain that Brittany and I were moving to Chicago and that my brother’s one-night stay would give me every occasion to unveil to him a life that was already better—and more promising—than either of us had imagined my life could ever be. I could have told Brittany I loved my brother but was plagued every day by my fear that his dazzling talent for improvisation and comedy, and the success his gifts stood to bring him, would put him beyond the reach of my ambition and my love. But I didn’t say any of these things. I answered Brittany’s question as if what she really wanted to understand were the scheduling challenges of the working comic actor, and she didn’t push me for more.
“So what’s he like?” Brittany asked, sliding her hand under the blanket and scratching her bare thigh with the crescent-moon whites of her fingernails.
At that question, my mind generated a cloud of adjectives that described my brother: talented, charismatic, dedicated, pained, ambitious, impatient, selfish, determined, unflappable, amazing. Getting a little uncomfortable with my silence, I waggled and picked one.
“He’s amazing.”
Brittany laughed at me. “He’s amazing?”
I shrugged again. “He is.”
“How is he amazing?”
“Well, for one thing, he creates characters and they’re real. Like, believable.”
“What else?”
She was daring me to make her care about Connor’s visit.
“He can make almost anyone laugh,” I said.
“Amazing!” Brittany said, mocking me with her smile, which was somehow made even sexier by her sarcasm. “What else?”
“He knows me better than anyone.”
The wide, brown eyes Brittany had inherited from her Laotian mother narrowed and darkened.
I waggled again and made a weak attempt to undo my mistake. “But not as well as you know me.”
Pulling her feet away, Brittany rolled onto her side and wrapped the blanket tightly around her. I recognized a pattern it had taken me months to identify and understand: when she was hurt even a little, Brittany became furious with herself, incredulous that after all she had been through and how little she expected of anyone, she could still be negatively affected by another person’s words or actions. The pain surprised her every time. I’d stopped wondering why Brittany couldn’t see that her vulnerability, like my stutter, could be chased away but never banished. This was another lesson about personal connections that I’d learned the hard way: that my seeing Brittany as she was—and loving her—could never guarantee that she’d see and accept herself.
I put my hand on the bump in the blanket that was her ankle.
“Don’t,” she said, kicking me.
I sat in purposeful silence, letting her anger burn off. To scatter the tension surrounding my vocal folds, I took one waggle, and another, and then a third.
Then I said, “Connor knew me when I couldn’t talk.”
This was where I should have started. Connor had seen me struggle and stew in my long silence. He had witnessed my constant, soundless screaming match with our father. No one, except our mother, had known the silent me—for eighteen years, the only me—better than Connor had.
“He knew me then, and you know me now,” I continued. “Now, nobody knows me better than you do.”
It was true. Insofar as my being able to speak had changed me, Connor hardly knew me anymore.
Brittany’s body seemed to soften a little, but she said nothing. Her eyes were pointed somewhere beneath the dark television set, her lower jaw thrust out. There was no talking her out of her inward-aimed fury. She would take it to bed with her.
Because of my gaffe, the last reasonable moment I had to ask Brittany to change her plans for the following afternoon, so that we could make the most of Connor’s brief visit, was also the least favorable. But I tried anyway.
“Connor gets here around four tomorrow,” I said, softly.
“I’m at the hospital then.”
I knew this, of course. Brittany volunteered every Tuesday afternoon in the neo-natal intensive care unit of the university hospital—in the two years I had known her, she had missed one shift, on account of stomach flu. Her job was to hold and feed incompatible-with-life newborns whose parents were gone, already mourning an imminent death that simply hadn’t happened yet. It was an unlikely fit for a woman who sought daily refuge from human interaction in the windowless, climate-controlled rooms that housed the leather-bound books she studied. Brittany did not stop to coo over babies in strollers and, outside of my apartment, did not so much as stroke my head or hold my hand. I’d always wanted to watch Brittany cradling the infants, to see that soft part of her even through glass, but she would not allow it—the hospital would not allow it, she said—so I was left with imagined glimpses of her standing stiff-legged, holding other people’s dying children, loving them as she loved me: as much and as little as she could.
“As it stands, we’ll be asleep about half the time Connor is here.” Feeling my throat tighten, I waggled twice. “So could you find a substitute for your shift tomorrow?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“It’s still almost a full day’s notice. I can make the calls for you.”
Brittany met my eyes. “No.”
“We can say you’re sick.”
“No, Simon!”
She stared at me, driving home her refusal with