He Thought I Was Deaf, I Heard Everything novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Red Wine

At a dinner for three Nina watches Tobias and Geneva play under the table, spills red wine on Geneva's white dress in front of guests, and hears the Halcyon chairman and Tobias plan her signature.

Geneva moved into my house in a single afternoon.

Her suitcases came up the stairs with a man to carry them, and she took the room across from Tobias's study, which she called "temporary."

She spoke to me slowly, with her whole mouth, and always looked at Tobias when she finished.

I smiled at her every time.

Smiling was free.

That evening the three of us sat down to dinner in the long dining room with six other guests, because Tobias liked to say that a team ate together.

Geneva sat at his left.

I sat at his right, where he could keep one hand on my chair and one on the table.

I looked around the table.

Two board members and their wives, a lawyer, and an old man with a heavy grey suit and reading glasses on a cord.

Tobias leaned toward me with the lazy kind smile he wore for cameras.

"Albert Ward," he mouthed, and tapped the old man's sleeve. "Halcyon."

The old man looked at me over his glasses and nodded.

Dinner began, a hundred soft clinks, and I let the sound wash through me until it stopped hurting.

I heard the wives discuss a school auction.

I heard the lawyer apologize for a joke.

I heard, under the table, a shoe slide across a shoe.

Geneva's foot was against Tobias's ankle.

He did not move away.

He picked up his glass with the hand that was not holding my chair and asked a board member about golf.

His other foot came forward an inch and pressed hers.

I buttered a roll.

"She's very patient," Geneva murmured to him, her mouth half behind her wine. "Doesn't she get bored?"

"She doesn't get anything," Tobias murmured back, and ate a mushroom.

I looked at the candles.

Then I reached for the wine, and I took my time.

The bottle was red, and heavy, and the neck was cold.

I filled my own glass and lifted it, and I tipped it a little too far as I turned to sign hello to the wife on my left, with large, sweeping hands.

The whole glass went over Geneva's white dress.

It poured down her lap and across the chair and drummed onto the floor.

She shrieked.

It was a high, ugly shriek, much louder than I expected, and it rang in my implant so sharply that for a second I almost grabbed my head.

I did not.

I stood up with my hand over my mouth and signed, sorry, sorry, sorry, big enough to be seen from the kitchen.

Every face at the table turned to Tobias.

He pushed back his chair.

"She says she's sorry," he said, loud and bright, with the voice of a man being gracious in public. "She says it's a lovely dress."

I had said nothing like that.

I looked at him and smiled with my mouth and nothing else.

Geneva was holding her skirt out of the puddle, white and then red, white and then red.

"I can't," she said. "Tobias, I can't, it's a Valentina, it's brand new."

"Go change," he said.

She went, crying, and the old man in the grey suit watched her go with a flat, unreadable face.

The room started breathing again.

The lawyer laughed too loudly.

A board wife began to describe a better dress she once ruined.

Mr. Ward leaned across the corner of the table and said to me, very slowly, with every word shaped, "That was a lot of wine, Mrs. Schuyler."

I could have answered in my own voice and ended it there.

I raised my eyebrows and shrugged, helpless and sorry.

His mouth twitched.

He turned his head to Tobias.

"Your wife has a good arm," he said aloud.

Tobias laughed.

"She's full of surprises."

"I hear she will sign at the closing."

"She will," Tobias said, and his hand tightened on my chair back.

I sat down again and smoothed my napkin and smiled at the wall.

Albert Ward gave a small grunt and went back to his plate.

He did not look pleased.

He looked like a man trying not to look at something.

Tobias leaned back, and he turned in his chair so that his face was away from me and toward Geneva's empty seat.

I could still see his mouth in the dark glass of the window.

He said it softly, to nobody, in the voice he thought only he could hear.

"She signs whatever I put in front of her."

Then he smiled at his own reflection.

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