A Silent Death

Chapter Eighteen

Ana’s excitement is palpable. It consumes her every thought, fills her physical being. It is a feeling she has not known in all the years since the shutters came down on her world. A feeling that brings back hope, like stumbling upon water unexpectedly in a desert. A feeling that perhaps life might just be worth rekindling.

Her fingertips tingle from the braille that she has read and reread on her screen. He will not have heard her voice, and she has no idea how it might have sounded to the operator who passed it on in text on a screen. Whether she spoke too loudly, or too softly, or if it still has that husky little catch that always surprised her when she replayed a recording of it. Something she never heard herself in real time.

Had the operator, she wonders, discerned at all the emotion conveyed in the brief exchange of words for which she had been the conduit?

Sergio’s call was so unexpected, so undreamt of, Ana still finds it hard to believe it really happened. All those years ago she had been able to hear his voice, and now has to imagine it from the patterns that raise themselves beneath her fingertips, capable only of drawing its rich soft cadences from recollection. Whatever hesitation it might have contained was impossible to interpret from the braille. Whatever apprehension lost for ever in the ether. Just his words in cold, hard little dots.

‘Hello, Ana. It’s Sergio.’

She had responded to the call, prompted by the buzzer that vibrated at her breast. Never, in any lifetime, expecting to read those words. At first she had been at a loss as to how to respond.

‘Sergio?’ Which had seemed so inadequate, given how laden this call was with its own history.

‘I want to say sorry to you a million times over, Ana. But not in a phone call.’

No words had come. She had sat frozen with disbelief, then fear that somehow this was some wicked hoax. It was more than twenty years since they had last spoken.

‘I have only now discovered where you are living. I cannot believe it. All this time, and only a few streets away. Oh, Ana, say you’ll see me. Let me come and tell you myself. You owe me nothing, I know. But I owe you everything. Not least an explanation. I could come later this afternoon, or early this evening. It depends when I can get away from work. Please, Ana.’

Finally she had found her inner voice and let it speak through the operator. ‘I’m not going anywhere, Sergio. And even if I could there’s nowhere for me to go.’

‘I’ll come as soon as I can. I’ll tell you everything then.’

And so the call had ended, leaving her to thrash about in a sea of emotions, drowning in her own past.