Aida Healdsburg — 1970 Soundtrack to Nightmare

Despite his great beauty, Aidan is never adopted for long. The nuns occasionally take him to foster homes but his silence unnerves people. He is as wordless and impossible to ignore as death. When he is placed in a home, quiet men begin beating their wives. Teetotalers start drinking. Gaunt men become gluttons. After he has left, his presence remains in the house like the scent of decay, impossible to eradicate. Two of his would-be parents commit suicide.

The only place that keeps him more than a week is that of a fix-it man, who repairs stereos and blenders. All Aidan has to do is drift near a broken object and it works again, good as new. The fix-it man’s business booms. He becomes successful. He becomes wealthy. No one seems to notice that the refurbished stereos only play in minor keys or that the small curious fingers of children get caught more often than usual in the whirling blades of repaired blenders.

One day when the fix-it man is driving home, his truck skids into the trunk of the giant oak that has arched over Dover Lane for more than one hundred years, providing shade from the sun and shelter from the rain. The fix-it man never awakens. He sinks into a coma, a sleep so like death that dreams fear to enter. Due to his recent financial success, he has enough money to afford a place in a renowned rest home in San Francisco, The Quiet Dignity Coma Care Residential Facility.

The oak’s trunk is gashed so deeply that for a month, sap leaks from its heart onto Dover Lane. It seeps into the pavement, dying it such a dark, lasting, red that even after the tree is cut down and carted away, the stain remains.

Whenever it rains, the road becomes so slick, drivers skid wildly out of control, flipping their cars, overturning in nearby fields, and occasionally sliding onto the Dover bridge and somersaulting into the shallow, rocky river below. In fact, if you take into account the auto accidents, suicides and matricide that Aidan induces, his death count would reach well into double digits.

At eighteen, when Aidan leaves the orphanage, the sisters breathe a sigh of relief. He has never been trouble. Never talked back; indeed, rarely talked at all. He is obedient, clean and scentless. The nuns can find no fault in him, but, neither can they feel affection. He makes them forget Christ and contemplate Aidan. He induces guilt. His very silence screams for attention. He is a shadow in the soul.