I was at work when it happened. I had just finished folding pungent wild blueberries into the creamy muffin batter, thinking how the brilliant purple streaks that trailed each berry stood out like a bruise against white skin. I was about to fill the greased-andreadied pan when something stopped me. Something tangible, like the thump of a fist against my chest—I felt it. I felt my sister's voice for the first time in years, the way I used to feel it when we were children, coursing through me like my own blood, hearing her thoughts the way no one else could. Can you hear a whisper in your heart? Across the miles, the years, through callused layers of resentment and anger and pain, can a voice as familiar to you as your own slice through it all and find you? Help, she said softly, and the muffin tin fell from my grasp and landed with a clatter on the concrete floor.
Barry’s head poked out from the dish room that punctuated the long, narrow kitchen in the back of the bakery. A heavy electronic drumbeat thumped in the air behind him, the radio tuned to the dance music station where his current boyfriend was an early-morning disc jockey. “Everything okay in there, champ?” Barry inquired, the familiar sight of his blond poodle-fluff explosion of hair and long, wiry limbs bringing me back from wherever I had been.
“Yeah, fine,” I said, grinning at him shakily, my heart still resonating from the impact of Jenny’s voice, my mind racing to think what trouble she might possibly be in, why she could need my help badly enough for me to feel it hundreds of miles away.
Rubbing his large hands in the folds of a linen towel, Barry tilted the fuzzy tip of his goatee into his chest. “You sure, now? Not wishing you’d kept that fancy therapist’s gig?”
I shook my head and reached for a clean tin from under my workstation. “Nah. Just checking to see if you were awake,” I said, gesturing for him to go back to work with a wave of my hand. He acknowledged me with a tiny dish towel salute, then disappeared into his cave.
Grateful for the brief distraction from the worry that had risen within me, I refastened my defiant red mop into a ponytail at the base of my neck and got back to work, preparing the clean tin and filling it with batter. As I slid it into the shiny convection oven behind me, I thought how lucky I was to work with Barry. We’d met six months before, when I’d closed my budding therapy practice to become a baker. The decision to switch careers hadn’t been a terribly complicated one: I’d simply realized that someone as screwed up as I was had no business telling other people how to remedy what was wrong with their lives. Barry didn’t expect me to tell him anything; in fact, most mornings we barely spoke. We met at the front door of the bakery at three a.m., nodding our greeting. We understood that at this hour words were beside the point.
I had fallen easily into this routine of silent communication with Barry; it was a language already tightly woven into my subconscious, taught to me long ago by a sister whose profound disabilities had robbed her of words. The thought of Jenny’s angelic, heart-shaped face stopped me in my tracks.