Paths

When Paige Johnston met Michael Andersen, she knew she had found someone wonderful. She was twenty, with a beauty that came more from overflowing energy that from her face, and a new self-assurance derived from no longer being in the minority. Paige had finally started to glow.

As a new transfer student at the Rochester Institute of Technology, she had been a little bewildered by the sprawling campus and the winding, tree- lined paths. One day, after she realized how late she was, she began running down an alley between two buildings (a shortcut she had noticed the day before), and, in the dim light, did not see the other person bolting towards her from the opposite direction.

They collided.

Apparently, Paige wasn't the only student who used the alley as a shortcut. Michael introduced himself pleasantly as he helped her gather her strewn books, and pulled her gently to her feet in a way that bespoke of an underlying kindness below the cool façade. He invited her for coffee, and she accepted the invitation, completely forgetting about the class she was supposed to be in.

It was then, she thought later, that she had begun to fall in love with him.

Theirs was a whirlwind courtship, complete with quiet sighs, moonlit walks, proffered bouquets, and candlelit dinners. Paige spent those few months in a hazy happiness she had never known before, the time slipping past her inconsequentially, leaving fuzzy memories that were more sensation than accurate record. She found herself smiling wherever she went, and was told by some of her teachers that she had even begun humming softly, atonally, as she took exams or finished homework.

And then, on a perfectly normal morning in mid February, after a long night of love-making in her swanky little apartment, Michael took her to New York City, took her to the top of the Empire State building, and explained that things could not continue the way they had been. That he needed a change. That the relationship was stagnating. That he needed more. That she deserved more from him.

And then he gave her a diamond ring, on bended knee, at the top of a building, on the summit of the world's most powerful city. She accepted his proposal, of course, her heart still pounding from the gelid fear that had risen in her breast when it had seemed that he was ending things. Michael stood up and opened his arms, enfolding her and shielding her from the wind.

And also, apparently, from the sight of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center.

Michael had handsomely bribed about ten people who worked in the building, so that he could escort Paige to the top at such an early hour. Consequently, they were alone, far above the sirens and the traffic, in a silence borne of being far from Earth. Although, of course, it had not felt any different for them than any other point in their lives- quiet was something they were more than accustomed to. And really, neither Paige nor Michael heard the plane thundering low over the city, or heard the epic crash as it slammed through the World Trade Center. They didn't hear the screaming, they didn't hear the sirens, they didn't hear the mangled cries that escaped from their own mouths.

Both of them were deaf.

But just as the newly blind discover their other senses become heightened, the deaf learn to see what they cannot hear. They see the tones in people's voices, the sound of a dog's bark in the shape of its mouth and others' reactions, the piercing wail of a baby's cry. . . they see it, and feel it, for want of a sense they've never experienced. The deaf learn to feel what others merely hear.

Perhaps that is why the spark of life that had just begun inside of Paige felt the horror of the day, in a manner no normal embryo should.

Paige and Michael did marry, though a malevolent shadow had fallen across their lives. A darkness entered Paige on September 11, 2001; a darkness borne of a hatred so vast that it could consume everything in its path and suck it into nothingness. It haunted her dreams, her every step, her every breath. . . every moment of her life. She retreated from her friends, dropped out of school, and took a menial job as a typist. Michael alone remained with her, the only one who could even begin to understand what had changed in the girl everyone loved so dearly. Even she didn't fully understand.

On October 1, 2001, Paige went into labor. Michael drove her to the hospital, somehow aware of the agonized screams being ripped from the throat of the woman stretched out on the backseat. At the hospital, the doctors frantically gave her every pain medication they could think of; although the woman could not hear her own preternatural cries, everyone else in the entire hospital could. Finally, she fell silent, and the contractions began to come faster. She writhed on the birthing bed, her arms flailing so violently that the orderlies were forced to strap her wrists to the metal bars at her sides, to prevent further injuries to herself and the doctors.

But the baby was slowly, steadily making her first appearance in the world. First the head, covered with thick reddish-blonde hair, then the tiny shoulders, now down to her waist. . .

Paige seized, every nerve in her body burning in a desperate agony that was almost inhuman in its scope. Michael, forced to wait in a small lounge down the hall, straightened and turned his head unerringly towards his wife hundreds of feet away through the warren of halls in the hospital. Paige, in her unspeakable torment, crushed her own wrist in her desperate attempts to be free of the straps, and she was successful; her right arm broke through the restraint. Desperately, she began signing to the doctors, struggling to tell them something of colossal importance, but they could not understand her.

And then, it was just too much.

Every muscle in her body contracted violently, including the PC muscles in the wall of her vagina. In her agony, her body crushed her half- born child's spine at the base, generating an appalling crack that made two of three doctors stumble and nearly faint. That was one noise Paige never felt, because almost all life had fled her at that point.

The baby, her legs dangling awkwardly, was pulled from Paige's body, her muscles now eerily lax. With her very last awareness, Paige's eyes fluttered open to meet her daughter's.

And she heard something.

Stunned, her mind reeling in the half-darkness of near death, she realized that her daughter, her infant daughter, was not making the sounds called screaming. She was speaking, straight to Paige's mind, in the voice of an adult. But Paige had never heard before, and could not understand what was being said. . . at first. Yet, a millisecond after her heart stopped, but seconds before brain death, Paige somehow understood.

You died to save me, Mother, and I know it, though many never will. Know that this sacrifice will not be forgotten. . . and your death will be avenged. I swear it.