Silence Speaks Louder

If Emilee had been a parent, she was positive that her first choice for a babysitter would not have been someone like herself: deaf, inexperienced, and slightly passive. When combined with an energetic eight-year-old and no parental supervision, the whole thing seemed like a volatile combination. It simply begged for disaster.

But, apparently, Denise had decided that it was a good idea--and she offered the opportunity to Emilee the next day after work. She needed someone to keep an eye on Frankie for a couple of hours while she ran errands, and both her husband and the other three sons were tied up in prior engagements.

Emilee had accepted. Logically, she should have, either way. Denise was her boss--even if she was completely off her rocker in asking Emilee, of all people--and it was best not to offend the woman who signed her paycheck. And she would be paid for this, of course, but it wasn't so much the money that bothered her as it was her confidence (or lack thereof) in her abilities to keep Frankie under control.

But three straight hours of graphic video games and a rowdy first-grader was not necessarily Emilee's idea of an ideal Saturday afternoon. Sure, Frankie was a well-enough behaved child, but the cold and snow outside had been keeping him cooped up for weeks; he was bound to go a little stir-crazy.

"It's A-A-B-up-down," Frankie was saying, as irritated as a child his age could get. "It's not hard, Emilee." He brandished the game controller in front of her face. "Come on, I want to beat this level, and you're making it take too long."

"Sorry," Emilee said. Video games weren't really her thing.

"S'okay," accepted Frankie distractedly, his tongue between his teeth as he clicked buttons furiously on the controller. Her offense had apparently been forgiven.

Emilee jostled the boy's shoulder playfully, but as she did, she glimpsed a flash of motion reflected in the television screen; Frankie took no notice. She whipped around to see Nick trying to sneak out of the kitchen, an apple in his hand. What was he doing here?

"What are you doing?" She voiced her thought without restraint.

"Getting a snack," Nick said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "What are you doing?"

Something was up, but Emilee couldn't quite pinpoint what that something was. Nick looked much less surprised to her than she was to see him.

"Why would your mom ask me to babysit if she knew you were going to be here?"

"Beats me," Nick said, shrugging innocently. His raised eyebrows suggested otherwise. Before Emilee had a chance to assess the meaning of this, he had already alighted the stairs and disappeared from the top landing. She sighed, and turned her attention back to the youngest Jonas.

He had bent down to tie his shoe. Emilee could tell Frankie was saying something by the way the edge of his jaw was moving, but of course she didn't know what.

"You've got to look at me when you talk," she reminded him. Frankie straightened, looking apologetic.

"Sorry, I said, do you want to go play in the snow?" His eyes were hopefully.

"You know we can't," Emilee told him, sorry to have to be the one to ruin his fun. "Besides, your mom said you need to take a nap at four, and it's..." she glanced at the clock on the wall, "three-fifty."

"Awwwwwh," Frankie groaned. "She's not here, though. Do I have to?"

"She's my boss, I have to listen to her. Come on, it'll be over before you know it. Let's get you to your room."

"Fiiiine," he said reluctantly, pressing pause on the controller. Frankie stretched as he stood and crossed the room, heading up the stairs. Emilee followed close behind.

"Hey, Frankie?" she asked in a low tone, when they had reached the boy's room. "Do you have any idea why your mom would ask me to babysit if Nick is here?"

"No clue," he said, hopping onto his bed. "Nick usually watches me when Mom and Dad are out, though."

"Oh." Truly baffling. Emilee rubbed her hand across her forehead.

"Are you sure I have to take a nap?" Frankie asked, in last, desperate attempt to escape. Emilee chortled.

"See you in a couple of hours." She watched the boy flop back onto his pillow, pouting, as she pulled the door closed.

Emilee stepped into the hallway. As she headed for the stairs, her fingers brushed the wall ever so slightly, and she felt the peculiar vibrations coming through the plaster. Familiar tremblings, they caused the corners of Emilee's mouth to raise ever so slightly.

A few strides down the hall told her, visually, what she already knew: the door to the room with the piano was open, and Nick was hunched over the row of keys with an intense posture. Emilee paused for a few moments, watching him play. There was a cetain amount of distress--maybe even grief--radiating from him in waves. She closed her eyes. The way the vibrations seemed to drop roughly from octave to octave piqued her interest.

She waited until he had stopped playing to speak.

"You got any more questions for me?" Emilee asked, leaning on the doorframe. Nick turned around, looking surprised to see her there. "Because I'd be willing to answer them for a bag of gummi bears."

Nick's cheeks turned a familiar shade of crimson, almost certainly at the recollection of his childish ploy to coerce answers from her.

"Sorry about that... it seemed like a good idea at the time." He motioned for her to enter and slid over on the piano bench. "Come here."

"You know, your answers weren't that great, either," he said as she sat down. "White as your favorite color? You're kidding, right?" Nick shook his head and looked at the sheet music propped up before him. "And here I was, thinking you were interesting."

Emilee's heart unexpectedly rose, just a little, at the word "interesting". Nick's fingers drifted lightly over the keys; he paused for a moment, in which Emilee felt him draw a deep breath. Then he began to play.

"What is this?" she asked tentatively, after a few moments.

"Just some melody I've been working with for a few days," Nick answered, not tearing his eyes from the sheets. Half a minute passed; he stopped abruptly and picked up the pencil resting on top of the piano, making a few adjustments to the note on the page here and there. Once it seemed he was satisfied, he began to play it again.

Emilee rested three of her fingers on the keyboard and closed her eyes. The melody was solid, tinged with emotion--the heavy look in Nick's eyes matched the vibrations she felt coming through the piano. Once again, that half-empty feeling that Emilee always got when 'listening' to Nick play had returned, and she wished above all to hear the music. She harbored a definite jealousy for all normal-hearing people in the world at times like this.

"Sad," she murmured, opening her eyes. Nick looked sideways at her and shook his head.

"That's crazy, I hope you know." Emilee raised her eyebrows at him in questioning, and he continued. "You said it was sad. You can't hear it. And it wasn't sad at all," Nick defended himself with the afterthought.

Emilee sighed. She'd let it go--for the moment.

"What are you doing up here?" Nick asked, resuming his piano playing.

"Making sure Frankie takes his nap," she answered. Emilee felt Nick chuckle beside her. "He's a good kid..." She found herself sticking up for the boy without much of a second thought. Her words trailed off, debating on whether or not the next question she wanted to ask was appropriate. It had only just cropped up in her mind. "Uhm. What are your other brothers like? Kevin and Joe, I mean. I haven't really... I haven't really had the chance to talk to them."

Nick pulled his hands off the keyboard and placed them in his lap, looking thoughtful.

"Kevin shreds." He seemed to catch the confusion on Emilee's face and clarified. "On the guitar. You know, as in, he's really good? He was the first one to learn how to play an guitar, and then he taught the rest of us.

"He's the most enthusiastic," Nick continued, offering up more information than Emilee had anticipated. "If it hadn't been for him, I don't know where we would be in our music careers right now--or if there would even be a band. He's the motivator, and he's got all these great melodies in his head." He nodded to himself, as if to affirm what he had said. "Kevin deserves more credit than he gets."

"So what about Joe?" Emilee was having trouble keeping up with his words; his mouth moved too quickly for her to catch every syllable. Talking about his family made Nick gesture emphatically, and it was rather distracting. Well—that, and the fact that his face was inches from hers.

"Joe's seventeen and a royal pain. But he's a great guy, and I'm convinced that he's the reason people even come to our shows. Have you ever seen us perform?" Emilee shook her head to indicate that she hadn't. "Well, Joe's very charismatic. He's got a stage presence that neither Kevin or I can measure up to. Incredible, really. What he has in the 'obnoxious older brother' category, he makes up for in his passion for music and the band."

Emilee smiled, anticipating the answer to her next question.

"And what about you?"

Nick actually laughed.

"And I am Nick, coolest of all the Jonas siblings."

"You're not going to tell me anything deep or insightful about yourself? You did spill just about everything about the others." After his honesty about the brothers, Emilee was surprised at his reluctance to share information about himself. Nick shrugged.

"I am for me to know, and you to find out."

Emilee raised one eyebrow at him.

"Now you're the one who isn't making sense," she muttered. Nick raised his eyebrows back at her teasingly.

"Is it hard to play the piano?" she asked him, changing the subject. A little enthusiasm showed itself in Nick's face, and he moved his hand next to hers.

"Not really," he said. "I've been playing for as long as I can remember. Try this." Nick placed his finger on the middle C spot, and trailed up to the eighth white key. "Simple."

Emilee copied him easily. The weight of the keys was uncomfortable and unfamiliar, but not difficult to work with. Nick smiled and looked at her curiously.

"I want to know how you do it. 'Listen', that is." He seemed sincere enough, even as he threw up air quotes with his fingers around "listen". "Could you explain it to me?"

Emilee bit her lip. Could she explain herself? She'd been having a hard enough time doing so all the times Nick asked her questions. Well, she could try.

"It's all about feeling... and it's easier with a piano than a violin, I'm beginning to notice. Deeper notes send stronger vibrations, while higher notes have softer vibrations and are a lot harder to hear." Emilee looked up at him to see if he was following; when Nick nodded, she continued. "You could probably feel it just by keeping your feet on the floor.

"How could I tell that your song was sad? When you're deaf, you learn to pay attention to everything else that clues you in, because you can't rely on sounds. It was a combination of things that told me this. For one, any particularly musical person would be able to feel the tones from those notes, though it would definitely be more obvious to a hearing individual. And second..." Emilee hesitated, knowing she might embarrass the teen next to her with what she wanted to say. "Second, the emotion is almost always shown clearly in the posture of the musician. If you had seen your own face while you were playing... It's one of the easiest ways to tell if the music is happy, or sad."

She had guessed right, at least--Nick's cheeks were once again pink. He looked away.

"Try this," Emilee suggested, borrowing his earlier words in an attempt to reconcile the conversation. "I'll play a few notes, and you try to hear the way I do. Okay?" Nick nodded again, glancing back at the keys.

She mimicked the note pattern Nick had just instructed her to play. It felt a little strange; this was one of the only times she had ever put her hands on a piano with the intention of playing.

"Do you hear it?" But he only shrugged. "You're not listening, Nick," Emilee said tiredly. She tended to lose patience quickly when people didn't understand the way her deaf comprehension worked.

"I am," he insisted, and plunked the keys shortly. "I just taught you this. It's a scale. C, D, E, F, G, A--"

"No. I mean, you're not listening. It's more than a simple scale."

She grasped his wrist and placed his hand, palm down, on the glossy wood; his fingers partially obscured the gold lettering that read "Steinway & Sons". It was hard to ignore the nervous electricity she felt as their skin made contact. "You're going to have to forget how to use your ears for a moment, and stop thinking technically. It's not so much knowing the notes. Block everything else, and concentrate on how it makes you feel.

"I'm going to play it once more... now, for the last time, listen."

She pressed down each key softly, up one octave and then another, then another. The higher the notes climbed, the less vibration she could feel, causing her to lose contact with her demonstration. So she ran her fingers back down the keyboard, sliding clumsily into an imitation of the melody Nick had played just minutes earlier. She was doing it horribly--after all, it was her first time ever touching a piano with intention to play--but Emilee had an excellent photographic memory. From what she could perceive, it really was beautiful as she had previously assessed. Still, she wished she could hum along... it was a shame that she didn't know what it actually sounded like. The series of tones was only a beat of soft and loud pulsations--a monosyllabic rhythm to her deaf audition.

Emilee glanced up at Nick after she touched the last key, who had a half-smile on his lips.

"How did you remember so much of that?"

"That's beside the point," Emilee said tersely. "Do you hear it?" Another dull, frustrating shrug from Nick.

"I can't 'hear' anything, so I still think you're crazy." He grinned; a rare expression on his face. It made Emilee's heart ache a little. "But I'll try, for your sake."

Emilee sighed exasperatedly. Teaching the deaf experience to a stubborn, normal-hearing person was proving to be slightly harder than she had imagined-- not that it was easy to teach that to anyone in the first place.

They were both silent for a moment. Nick fidgeted on the bench, reached for the pages of notes and flipped through them. Then--

"I asked my mom to hire you as a babysitter, so we could have a chance to talk again."

[&silence]

Walk you to work?

Emilee sighed. The note had landed on her desk as surreptitiously as it had the previous day, and the day before that, and the day before that. Nick had an insatiable curiosity--and an infinite amount of questions.

Her opinion on the notes kept changing. On one hand, it was flattering that someone wanted to know so much about her. But on the other hand, it made Emilee feel like some soty of sideshow that a spectator couldn't get enough of. Nick's questions were never too invasive, though they often bordered on asking for personal feelings--he generally focused on learning as much as possibly about how Emilee functioned day-to-day as a deaf person.

His odd fascination led him to walk her to work every day after school, always eliciting the same "look" from Denise, always leaving with the same "See you later" and a curt nod. Emilee was far from understanding the boy, but she couldn't bring herself to tell him no.

So like she did each time a note came her way, she signed it and tossed it back against her better judgment.

Sure.

The strongest pull factor that made Emilee agree each time, however, was the anticipation of a conversation with the one person she had ever known that wanted to hear what she had to say.

On second thought, she considered, listening to the crinkle of paper behind her that meant Nick was unfolding the note, it was more the fact of a chance she could elicit that ever-so-rare smile from him that made her say yes.