by Ginny Rorby
Joey wondered how he knew that. Without thinking, she touched one of the scars behind her ears. “I was sick,” she said, without looking at him.
“How old were you?”
“Almost seven. How’d you know I wasn’t born this way?”
If you’d been born deaf or lost it when you were very young, you wouldn’t speak as clearly as you do. My mother was born deaf, and my father lost his hearing the same way you did but he was only two. Until they learned sign language, they had no language. Was it meningitis?
Joey nodded, then hugged Sukari. “May I come back to visit?”
“Any time,” he said. Any time, he wrote, then added, I was going to ask you. She needs someone young for company. Bring your brother.
Joey hesitated. “I don’t know whether my mother will let me do that. She’s pretty nervous around animals. I don’t think she likes them much.”
That’s too bad. Maybe we should come to your house so she can meet Sukari on home ground.
“Don’t do that,” Joey said too quickly. “I mean … I’d like for you to come over, and my stepfather would love to meet you, but I need to figure out how to tell Mom we met and all that first.”
Charlie’s eyes narrowed a bit but he nodded. “I understand.”
* * *
It was a little after five and nearly dark when Joey straggled in, wet and cold. She’d wanted to give herself time to think about how she might tell her mother of meeting Charlie and Sukari, so she’d taken the long way home, coming through the deep woods of Jug Handle State Park, a thin strip of which formed the northern boundary of their property. She’d followed the familiar track uphill until it flattened out and became pygmy forest with its short, gnarled old cypress trees, rhododendrons, and dense thickets of huckleberries. Moisture clung to everything, and brushing through it had soaked her clothes.
Her mother met her at the door with the phone in her hand. “Where have you been? I was about to call the police.”
Oh brother, Joey thought and rolled her eyes. If she told her she’d followed a strange man to his house and played with a chimpanzee, her mother would never let her out of her sight again. “I got turned around,” she said.
Ruth shook the phone’s antenna in her face. “I should never have let you go by yourself.”
“I’m thirteen, Mom. Besides, I can’t hear, I’m not blind. I just wasn’t paying attention.” She handed over the basket brimming with mushrooms, then went to stand with her back to the woodstove, palms held to the heat.
Ray sat in his chair reading the Advocate-News by the dim light of a hurricane lamp. He nodded at her and she nodded back. “There’s a beefsteak in the basket.”
His droopy mustache, which he kept long to cover bad teeth, bobbed.
Joey looked at her mother to repeat what he’d said, but she was sorting the mushrooms, bagging the dye ones into Ziplocs to freeze.
Joey smiled at Ray, then turned to face the woodstove.
She really liked Ray. He was nice to her mother and nice to her, but they’d long ago stopped trying to communicate. At first, he’d tried to write her notes, but he couldn’t spell and Joey didn’t read well enough then to solve the puzzle of his scrawled words. Though she’d since learned to decipher his notes, he rarely bothered anymore. It was easier to let Ruth interpret. Still, she felt an odd kinship with Ray. He’d lost the tips of the first two fingers on his left hand when a log slipped, trapping them against the post meant to hold logs on the truck. Joey often wondered if he could still feel them, phantoms like her mother’s voice to her deaf ears. Though she’d wondered, she’d never asked. It had been enough just to feel that their losses gave them something in common. She looked at the two stubs supporting the newspaper and realized that after living in the same house for six years, she and Ray circled through the rooms like polite strangers. She’d spent the day actually talking with someone besides her mother, and it suddenly made her sad to think that she probably knew more about Charlie than she did about her stepfather.
“Ray,” she said.
He glanced up. He frequently looked as if he was in pain, his brow a series of ridges so deep that they looked plowed into his forehead.
“Can you still feel the tips of your missing fingers?”
His mustache moved.
Joey looked at Ruth.
“He said, he does. All the time. Why’d you ask?”
Joey shrugged. “I just wondered.”
The power suddenly came back on with a blaze of light as if the room had exploded. Their cheers woke Luke from his nap on the couch. Ray blew out the hurricane lamp, turned the TV on to await the news, then went back to his paper.
Joey stayed by the woodstove with the hem of her shirt held out to catch the heat against her skin. She wasn’t ready to lay aside the thrilling twist the day had taken. A few feet one way or the other and your whole life changed. She’d made a friend, two friends, and, in spite of her mother, she was going to learn to sign. She felt as if her world had just doubled in size.
She turned toward the kitchen, where her mother was slicing the beefsteak mushroom into strips like London broil. “Mom,” she said.
“What?” Ruth asked, after waiting for Joey to continue.
“Nothing.”
“What were you going to say?”
“Tell me again why you don’t want me to learn sign language.”
Ray lowered his paper.
Ruth leaned away from the stove and faced Joey, her brow creased. “I don’t want to go into this again,” she said. “What makes you ask?”
Ever since Smiley had taught her a few words, she’d wanted to learn sign language, but her mother had remained against it. Joey shrugged, turned to face the window, and smiled at her reflection in the glass. It was dark out, but in the glow of light from the house she could see that it was raining. She remembered the sound of rain on the aluminum roofs of trailers and wished she could recall its softer sound. “The water will be hot soon,” she said. “I’m going to take a shower.”
CHAPTER THREE
Joey’s legs twitched beneath the bedcovers like a dog’s in a dream-chase. In her dream, she darted from behind a tree to the cover of another within a few feet of the cage where a baby Sukari lay curled into a fist-size ball, her white bottom tinted orange by the glow of the fire over which her mother cooked on a spit. A man, his face in shadow, sat in his undershirt, drinking a beer and watching the big chimpanzee turn slowly above the hot coals. Joey was close enough to reach the clasp on the cage door. But if the man saw her, he would chase, catch, and maybe kill her this time. Joey trembled in her hiding place, sick with fear. The man leaned into the light from the fire to poke the coals with the broken leg of a stool. His face, strange at first, began to redden from the heat until it seemed to bubble and melt, but when he leaned back, satisfied with the level of the flame, his features cooled and he looked like someone she knew. Joey gasped and jerked awake. Her vibrating alarm clock shuddered against her hip. She patted her pajama pocket and pushed the button down through the material, then removed the clock and put it on the nightstand. Her thumb was wet and wrinkled. She left her arm out in the chilly air to keep herself from falling back to sleep, afraid the dream would come again.
After a few minutes, when her arm felt frozen and the dream had faded, she rolled over and turned on the light beside her bed. It was still dark outside and she could see her reflection in the sliding glass doors. I-SEE-YOU, she signed to herself and grinned.
It was Friday. There’d been no school for four days because of the power outage, and though she really hated school, today she couldn’t wait to get there and tell Roxy, her best friend, about Sukari and Charlie.
Last night, she’d had a hard time deciding what to wear. She’d draped her jeans and a brown sweater over the back of the chair near the woodstove before she went to bed, but now decided she wanted something else. She shivered as she stood in her closet trying to decide until finally the cold drove her to settle o
n a red V-neck, which was a good color on her but made her long neck look longer. She picked her red Converse All Stars to match her sweater, and yellow socks with red flowers. All dressed, she stopped to admire herself in the mirror and signed I-SEE-YOU again.
* * *
Mendocino coast winters were filled with short days, either rainy or clear and frosty. At this time of year the school day started before the sun came up, if it showed itself at all, and was not over until nearly dusk. Joey still disliked having to get up so early. Until two years ago, she’d been home-schooled, keeping her mother’s hours and learning her lessons during the slow times at a table in a windowless corner of the Old Dock Café.
Going to work with her mother was a habit that started in Reno. Ruth never left her at home or alone with anyone until she started first grade. After she went deaf, they were never apart and Ruth took over her education.
It was when Luke became too much for his babysitter to handle that home-schooling came to an end. His sitter, Mrs. Gomez, lived in the trailer park that surrounded the café and hers was the one directly across from the restaurant. Once Luke discovered how to break out of her little fenced-in yard and visit Ruth at will, it became impossible to get anything done. Her mother finally gave up and Joey entered a public school for the second time in her life as a seventh-grader.
For most of that year, Joey had been miserable. Worse than being the only deaf student, she was tall for her age and twig-thin, with so much hair that she thought she looked like one of those long-handled brushes her mother used to clear cobwebs from the ceiling. The only thing she liked about her looks were her eyes. They were as black as the trout pond in the woods behind their house, and her lashes were long.
Her feelings of isolation were more intense in the crowded school than they ever were at home with only her mother to talk to, or even in the quiet little café with its Spanish-speaking cook and an owner who only nodded and smiled at her.
She’d been reading her mother’s lips forever, even before she was deaf. When she was little, Ruth read to her every night, but they weren’t allowed to talk out loud when he was home, so her mother taught her to read locked in the bathroom, whispering every word.
Joey had done well with her lessons when her mother taught her, but once in school, she had a terrible time. It was too easy for teachers and the other students to forget she was deaf, not to face her when they spoke to her, but even when they did, she found their lips difficult, often impossible, to read. When she tried to explain her poor grades to her mother, Ruth said she wasn’t trying hard enough and called the school to make sure Joey was using their FM system.
Picking up the loaner FM system was Joey’s first stop every morning. To hear her teachers, she had to carry a microphone from class to class for them to wear on a cord around their necks and two boxy little amplifiers that she wore strapped to her chest like little square breasts. Worse, the headphones were big and bulbous and her auburn hair flared up on either side of the wide headband. Someone said she looked like a praying mantis and the nickname “bug-head” caught on and stuck.
The hardest part about being home-schooled had been not having friends, but when she got to school, she discovered that she was shy to the point of having sweaty palms. And she was too hard to talk to and written notes were too slow. For the first year and a half, she moved through the days alone, ticking off the classes in long, lead-filled minutes.
It wasn’t until last month, after the Christmas break, when Roxanne arrived at school, that Joey made her first real friend. Roxanne was what her mother would have called a “live wire,” and by the end of her first week everyone called her Roxy. Roxy’s mother was deaf, so her first language was sign. She immediately made Joey her best friend.
Telling Roxy about Sukari wasn’t the only thing on Joey’s mind while she waited for the bus. She was thinking about Kenny, the new boy in her biology class. His lips, like Roxy’s, were easy to read and he always smiled when he saw her. Most boys either ignored her or teased her but Kenny did neither.
On the bus ride to school, Joey practiced the alphabet by signing the letters of license plates with her hand in her coat pocket so no one would see her. Her mother worked Saturdays and she wondered if tomorrow would be too soon to go back to visit Sukari. It probably was, she decided. She didn’t want to make a pest of herself.
As the bus pulled in, she saw Kenny standing on the front steps with two other boys. When he smiled, her face flushed crimson. She raised her hand though not high enough to be called a real wave. When the boys he was with grinned and elbowed him, she ducked her head and went in the other entrance.
Over the Christmas holidays, the school had removed all the lockers and painted the walls beige on top and a gloomy gray on the bottom. Entering through the double doors continued to startle her, as if the job had been freshly done during the night. But she liked the change; it added room to the corridors. Before, stepping into the narrow halls was like being caught in an undertow. Now there were walls to hug but the color made what often felt like prison look like prison.
She went to the office to sign out the FM system, then to the library to return a book. While there, she wandered over to see if her sign language book was still there. It was, along with a new one called Signs of the Times. She took it down and looked to see if anyone had ever checked it out. No one had. Joey saw other students begin to leave the library. The first bell must have rung. She quickly looked up the sign for “name” in the index. With her back to anyone who might be watching, she tried out, MY NAME J-O-E-Y, then put the book back on the shelf.
The door to her first classroom was still locked so she walked to the glass doors at the end of the corridor. Roxy and her boyfriend were talking to Dillon and Kristin at a picnic table outside the cafeteria. Joey stepped back so they wouldn’t see her watching.
Brad, Roxy’s boyfriend, was sitting in the center at one end of the table, swinging his legs. Roxy tried to sit beside him, but he leaned toward her, blocking her way. She whirled and stomped a foot, then grabbed his arm and tried to pull him off the table. They wrangled until Dillon nudged Brad and jerked his head toward the breezeway between the two buildings. Joey thought for a second he’d seen her at the window, until, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Harley coming along the sidewalk in his motorized wheelchair. Harley wasn’t his real name; it was the nickname some kids had given him. He was in the eighth grade and had cerebral palsy.
Brad hopped off the table and loped toward him. He caught the chair by the armrests and stopped it before Harley could steer around him. Joey saw Harley yell at Brad, who let him go. Harley started forward again with a little jerk but Brad hopped in front of him. Harley stopped. Brad jumped aside. Harley started up again. Roxy and Kristin were laughing. Joey bit her lip, turned, and walked back to her classroom. Kenny was in her biology class, but first there was English. She had an hour before she’d see him again.
When the teacher came and unlocked the door, Joey took the amplifiers from her backpack and followed Ms. Rowe into the room.
“How are you, Joey?”
“Good, thanks.” Joey handed her the microphone with its neck cord, then took a seat in the rear corner. It was the most popular table, away from the center of things, and Joey knew to get there early or miss out on one of the four seats. She took the one facing Ms. Rowe. The room began to fill.
Kristin, Cindee, and Jason sat with her. Jason said, “What’s happening?”
“Nothing much,” Joey answered.
When they all laughed and Kristin slapped Jason’s shoulder, Joey knew that he hadn’t said “what’s happening” out loud. He’d only mouthed the words. This was a favorite trick to play on her. She smiled and put her headphones on.
Cindee opened a bag of Starburst candies and slid one across the table to each of them.
“Thanks,” Joey said.
Kristin examined the nails on her left hand while she shook a bottle of nail polish with the other.
> Ms. Rowe took roll, then clapped for their attention. Chapter 3, she wrote on the board, then held up the paperback of Steinbeck’s The Pearl and The Red Pony. They’d finished The Pearl a week ago. “Who wants to start?” she said.
Everyone laughed and turned to look at Joey. Kristin tapped one bulb of her headset with a newly polished fingernail. “You’re too loud,” she said.
Joey blushed and adjusted the volume.
Ms. Rowe blew in the microphone. “Can you still hear me?”
Joey nodded, though she couldn’t. The volume was too low, but she didn’t want to go through trying to find the level that she could hear but the rest of the room couldn’t. Besides, they were going to take turns reading, so she didn’t need to hear.
Terry got picked first. Joey slouched in her chair and read to herself. When Cindee tapped her shoulder, Joey had just started chapter 4. “It’s your turn,” she said.
Joey’s heart started to pound. Her teachers told her she read better than anyone in class, but she hated reading aloud because she knew her voice sounded funny. She found herself getting tangled up, as if she were reading with one eye and watching the class to see if she was pronouncing the words correctly with the other. She looked at Ms. Rowe, who was tapping on the microphone.
“Isn’t this working?”
Joey turned the volume up.
Kids giggled and plugged their ears. She turned it down again.
Jason reached, pulled the scrunchie off Kristin’s ponytail, and put it on his wrist like a bracelet. Kristin tried to grab it back. Joey’s attention was scattered, distracted by Kristin and Jason and trying to understand where they were in the book.
Ms. Rowe wrote on the board, 4th paragraph, page 166.
Joey flipped back to 166 and counted down. “The fifteenth of January came, and the colt was not born,” she read, then glanced at Jason. He had Kristin’s and his hand joined at the wrist with the scrunchie. “And the twentieth came; a lump of fear began…” Over the top of the book, Joey saw Jason’s nostrils flare and his head bob from side to side. Kristin kicked him. Cindee, who had borrowed Kristin’s polish, giggled behind her hand with its wet purple nails. Jason was imitating the nasal sound of Joey’s voice. She swallowed and found her place. “… a lump of fear began to form in Jody’s stomach. ‘Is it all right?’ he demanded of Billy,” she continued, pronouncing each word as carefully as she could, plodding along as if she were slow-witted.