by Ginny Rorby
As soon as she reached the edge of the yard, she glanced over her shoulder, expecting to see her mother coming at her. But there was no one there, just silence, sunlight, and a hummingbird at the feeder. Joey turned and started to run, down the trail toward Charlie’s.
CHAPTER SEVEN
When she came out of the woods at Charlie’s side yard, Joey saw an unfamiliar car in his driveway and felt like crying. If she went in, she’d have to cope with trying to read a stranger’s lips or with being ignored, which she preferred.
She leaned against a tree to catch her breath and to try to decide what to do. Go in or go home. Charlie’s expecting me, she thought. Her mother had told him she could go to the beach, though by now she must have called to tell him to send her home. If she hadn’t, Joey could play with Sukari until his guest left.
She crossed the yard and went up the front steps.
A pretty, blond woman, a bit younger than her mother, answered the door when she knocked. “Are you Joey?” she asked slowly, though with little exaggeration. “I expected a little girl,” she said, drawing the thumb of the “A” hand down her cheek to her chin, then clipping herself at the waist. “You’re tall, and beautiful.”
Joey blushed and ducked her head.
“I’m Lynn.” L-Y-N-N. She fingerspelled her name. “Charlie’s niece from Fresno.”
Joey shook the offered hand. “Is Charlie here?”
“Sure, sure, sorry. Come in.” She stood aside.
Joey stepped into the foyer and glanced around. Lynn tapped her shoulder. “They’re on the deck,” she said, then signed, SORRY, I DON’T KNOW SIGN LANGUAGE. “Well,” she said, then grinned, “except the alphabet and how to say ‘I don’t know sign.’”
Joey liked Lynn instantly, as she often did with people whose lips were easy to read. “That’s okay,” she said. “I don’t know much myself.”
From the living room, Joey could see Sukari dangling by one hand from the crossbar of her jungle gym and Charlie in a lounge chair. His eyes were closed, and even in the sun, his skin was the color of concrete.
Joey reached out and caught Lynn’s arm. “Is he sick?”
Lynn’s brow crinkled, then she shook her head. “Just a little tired, I think.”
Sukari spotted Joey, shrieked, dropped to the deck, and scrambled to meet her.
Joey grabbed her up and hugged her. “How’s my good girl?” she asked, waving at Charlie, who had jolted upright.
GOOD DEVIL ME, she signed.
“I can’t argue with that,” Joey said and laughed.
GO J-Y HOUSE, Sukari signed.
NO, STAY YOUR HOUSE.
Sukari rolled her upper lip, then signed, TICKLE-CHASE.
Joey tipped Sukari onto her back, then blew into the fur on her belly. When she lifted her head, Charlie motioned for her to come outside.
Joey leaned and kissed his cheek. “Did Mom call?”
“I don’t think so. Did she?” he asked Lynn.
Lynn nodded, then turned to Joey. “She asked if you were here and I said no. But she said if you showed up to send you home. Understand?”
“Yes,” Joey said. “We had a fight,” she said to Charlie. “I accidentally signed in front of her.”
“This has got to stop,” he said to Lynn, but Joey read his lips.
Though it was quite chilly, even in the sun, Charlie’s forehead and upper lip beaded with perspiration.
His niece patted his arm. “Don’t get upset. Doctor’s orders.”
“Somebody has got to fight this battle for her,” Charlie snapped.
Joey’s eyes flicked from mouth to mouth trying to keep up. “Doctor?” she said.
Lynn turned and smiled. “My orders. I’m a doctor. Understand?”
“Quit asking her if she understands,” Charlie scolded. “This means ‘understand.’” He flicked his finger off his forehead. “And this is doctor,” he added, putting the “D” hand against the pulse in his wrist. “Where’s my notepad?” he demanded.
“Grouch,” Lynn muttered and winked at Joey.
Charlie took the pad Lynn handed him. She shows up every month to check on me and the nursemaid in her comes out.
“You need a nursemaid,” Lynn said, then pointed to what she’d written at the bottom of the pad: I’m an obstetrician: I deliver babies. As Joey read, she leaned over her shoulder and added, He’s more trouble than ten babies.
Joey smiled, but there was something about the way Charlie looked that worried her. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
Her hovering is enough to make you think you’re sick.
Lynn jumped up and ran into the house. When she came back, she looked peeved, and gave Joey a thin-lipped smile. “That was your mother again.” She took the pad and wrote, I think you’d better go home. She sounded pretty mad.
Joey tried to smile. “I forgot she wanted me to babysit,” she said, because she didn’t want to upset Charlie any more than he was.
He frowned and crossed his arms over his chest. “Was that before or after she said you could go to the beach?”
Joey shrugged.
Sukari, who’d been sitting in another chair with her animal-alphabet book, quietly signing to her doll and to Hidey, stuck her bottom lip out and crossed her arms.
SEE-YOU LATER, Joey signed, then grinned and said, “I’m getting good.”
NO GO, CHASE SUKARI. She deserted the kitten and the doll, ran across the deck, and scrambled up the drainpipe.
Charlie held the pad up: You’d better make a run for it.
Joey nodded.
Sukari was perched on the eave. CHASE-ME.
LATER. J-Y TOILET, she signed, then slipped into the house, turning to wave when she reached the door. Lynn was holding a screaming chimp.
She signed I-LOVE-YOU and ducked out.
Joey dragged out the walk home, hoping that if she stalled long enough Ray would be there. Since her parents had argued over her signing, her mother had avoided confronting Joey when Ray was around.
But Ray wasn’t home. Ruth met her at the door, drying her hands on a dishtowel. “I said no beach.”
“I didn’t go to the beach.”
“I told you to stay here. You went to that old man’s house. You’re grounded,” her mother snapped.
“Great,” Joey said, and started for her room, but stopped and faced her mother. “What does that mean, Mom? That I can’t watch TV for a week? No radio? The dance is off?” Her voice began to shake. “I can’t be with any of my many friends? What does it mean?” she shouted, then ran into her room and slammed the door. She covered her ears and screamed, “What does it mean?”
The door flew open. “You are a different person since you met that old man,” her mother said. “I’ll tell you what grounded means. You are never to go near that house again. Ever.”
* * *
Joey lay on her bed, staring at the ceiling. She thought of running away, but that was such a joke, she almost laughed. She’d read about a boy in Florida who divorced his parents. Maybe she could do that. Ask the courts to award her to Charlie. The question of whether or not he’d take her was kicking around in her mind when the door opened as if it had been blown in by a gust of wind. Her mother motioned for her to come.
Joey sat up and wiped her eyes on her sleeves. “What?”
“Just come,” her mother snapped.
Charlie and Lynn were in the living room. Charlie sat in Ray’s chair; Lynn stood beside him, one hand on his shoulder, the other on her hip.
Charlie looked up when Joey came in and tried to smile. He was bundled up as if it were snowing out, and his skin was still an ashy-gray. “I had to come,” he said to Joey. It was an apology.
“I’m glad you did.” Joey wanted to hug him and tell him she’d just been wishing he’d rescue her. She smiled at Lynn. “I’m glad you came, too. Did you meet my mother?”
Lynn nodded. “I tried to stop him,” she said to Ruth. “I don’t think this is his business. She’s your da
ughter.”
Joey caught just enough of Lynn’s words to feel betrayed.
Charlie brushed Lynn’s hand off his shoulder. “Don’t undermine me. She needs to understand what this is about and I better do it while I can.”
“Charlie, not today,” Joey said. He looked real sick.
“Yes, today,” he said.
“That’s exactly right,” Ruth said to Lynn. “She is my daughter, and I don’t want her signing. I’m sure it’s fun to learn a few words to use with your uncle and the chimp, but…”
“What?” Joey said, having missed some of her mother’s response.
Ruth didn’t repeat it, so Joey moved so she could see all their mouths.
“Fun,” Charlie snapped. “Sign for fun.” He heaved himself up and put his hand against the wall for support. “She’s deaf, Mrs. Willis. She needs to learn to sign to survive.”
Lynn tried to get him to sit down again, but Charlie jerked his arm away from her.
“People will stare. They’ll pity her. Now at least she looks normal,” her mother said, but her face showed no anger. Joey thought that was strange until she realized her mother must also be worried about the way Charlie looked.
“My parents were normal,” he said. “And staring is just unfamiliarity with the language, like listening closely to someone speak French. It’s not pity. It’s curiosity.”
Too late, her mother’s hand flew to cover her mouth. She’d forgotten Charlie’s parents had been deaf. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean normal in that sense of the word,” she said. “I just want her to function in the hearing world. Hearing people don’t sign.”
“I’m hearing,” Charlie said. “What’s the real reason you don’t want her to sign?”
Lynn clamped a hand over his. “This has gone far enough.”
“Not yet, it hasn’t,” Charlie said.
Ruth stiffened. “I just told you the real reason.”
“I don’t think you have. People would watch her express herself with her beautiful hands and the whole world would know that your child is deaf. I don’t know why that scares you so.”
Ruth looked at Joey, eyes narrow. “You told him, didn’t you?”
“I … I told him it was meningitis,” Joey stammered.
“Is that what she told you?” her mother asked.
“It is. But I’ve seen the scars behind her ears. Meningitis doesn’t leave scars. How did she really lose her hearing?”
Ruth hadn’t believed her when Joey told her that she hadn’t told him the truth. Now Charlie had confirmed it. A little of the fight left her mother’s face at the same time as an odd expression crossed Charlie’s. When he shook his head, Joey knew he’d figured it out. “You don’t want her to use sign language because you are protecting yourself, not your daughter.”
“That’s a lie,” her mother shouted.
“No,” Charlie said. “It’s the truth. You feel it’s your fault that she’s deaf.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with her deafness,” her mother said. “It … it was meningitis.”
“No, it wasn’t, Mrs. Willis. Was it your ex-husband?”
Her mother’s reaction filled in the part Joey missed. She grabbed blindly for the sofa to keep from falling.
“Charlie, please stop,” Joey said. “It’s okay. I manage.”
Charlie took Joey’s hand. “Managing isn’t good enough.”
Lynn patted Joey’s back, then stepped around the coffee table and put her arm around Ruth’s shoulders.
Her mother’s head came up and she shook Lynn off. “Get out,” she said to Charlie.
“No, I won’t. This may be her only chance and I may be the only person who understands enough to tell you the truth. You’re denying your daughter a full life. You have the chance to be brave now. Admit to yourself the reason you don’t want her to sign is because more people will wonder how it happened. Don’t you see that what you tell them isn’t important, but what you tell Joey is. You are cutting her off from the rest of the world.”
Ruth’s head jerked as if she’d been slapped. “That’s not true. I just want her life to be as normal as possible. I don’t want people to feel sorry for her, to treat her differently.”
“Deafness is different, dammit. And for Joey it is normal not to hear. But she’s missing so much more because you’re trying to pound her deaf ears into hearing holes. She is what she is. Let her be deaf.”
Ruth sank to the sofa and looked pleadingly at Lynn. “He has no right.”
“I know he doesn’t.”
Charlie lowered himself into Ray’s chair, put his head back, and closed his eyes. “You two don’t know what it’s like for her. I do.”
Ruth was still on the sofa, sobbing into her hands, when Ray’s truck came down the drive. He came toward the house smiling, happy to see Charlie’s car, no doubt. His expression sobered when he saw them all through the front window: Charlie in Ray’s chair, pale as old decking, and Lynn and Joey on either side of Ruth, trying to comfort her.
Ruth hadn’t seen him coming and started violently when the door opened. Ray’s reaction to seeing her so anguished was to throw Charlie a questioning look, which didn’t last. He must have asked if Charlie was okay, because Charlie said, “I’m fine,” and introduced Lynn.
Ray’s ruddy cheeks reddened and he wiped his calloused, knobby-fingered hand on his pants before putting it in hers.
“We’re sorry,” Lynn said. “I’m afraid Uncle Charlie has stuck his nose where it doesn’t belong, but he’s very fond of your daughter and…”
Whatever Ray said was lost to Joey, but her mother’s head came up with a jerk. Lynn looked surprised and Charlie nodded.
“What did he say?” Joey asked, looking from one to the other.
“Have you ever understood anything Ray said?” Charlie asked.
Joey shook her head. “I can’t see his mouth.”
“Nothing? Ever?” Lynn asked. She looked stunned.
“No.”
Ruth took Joey’s hand. “Ray said, ‘It’s about time.’” She looked at Ray. “Have I really been that wrong?”
At first he shrugged, but then he nodded.
She turned back to Joey. “I didn’t do it for any other reason than I thought it was what was best. I need you to believe that.”
“I do, Mom.”
Later that evening, when Joey slipped back into her room from her shower, she noticed that one of her pillows was higher, as though an animal had crawled up beneath it. Since her sliding glass door was always open a crack large enough that she’d once surprised a young raccoon in her room, she thought something might have crept in and hidden there. She approached it cautiously, jerked the pillow away, and jumped back. Beneath it was a crinkled brown paper sack with a note from Ray scrawled on the outside, I found this at a yard sail a coupel weaks ago. Yur mother don’t no. Don’t tell her just yet.
Inside the bag was a worn paperback copy of the American Sign Language Concise Dictionary. Joey hugged it to her chest and began to cry.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The months passed. The air got drier. Salamanders disappeared from beneath rotting logs and winter woodpiles, back into their summer burrows, trading places, it seemed, with the lizards and garter snakes that had spent the winter sleeping underground. Everything rushed to bloom: the flowers she and her mother planted in March, as well as the weeds, English daisies, wild geraniums, clover, and dandelions. Only when Ray or Joey mowed did their yard look, with all the flower heads lopped off, like the lawn her mother wished for.
School ended in early June. Joey passed the eighth grade, though just barely. Except for visiting Charlie, playing with Sukari, and missing Kenny, who promised to write from Maine, where he spent the summers, she imagined herself passing yet another summer dreading the coming of fall, and wishing she never had to go back to school again.
Smells were keys to Joey, unlocking memories. The smell of Mercurochrome always reminded her of waking in the Reno
hospital, her head wrapped in bandages. The stink of stale beer or a dirty ashtray made her heart race. So, although it was now okay for her to continue teaching herself to sign, she did it in the privacy of her room or on her tree stump or at Charlie’s, anywhere her mother wasn’t likely to be openly confronted with the fact that she was still at it. She was afraid, just as the smell of warm, sunlit air reminded her of walking Charlie and Lynn to his car, that seeing her signing would remind her mother of that painful day.
One afternoon shortly after school let out for the summer, Ruth came home from work with a load of groceries. On top of one of the bags was the mail, which included a College of the Redwoods schedule of summer classes.
“Are you going to take another class?” Joey asked, as she helped unload the canned goods.
“Nope. You are.”
“Huh?”
“They’ve got a summer-session sign language class. Do you want me to see if they’ll let you take it?”
Joey bit her lip, then hugged her mother. “Oh, yes, please.”
Ruth nodded with her lips compressed. “It’s every day for six weeks.”
“I don’t care. And you don’t have to take me; I can ride my bike down.”
“No, I’ll drive you.”
Joey opened her mouth to say, I’m nearly fourteen, Mom, but caught herself. “You can if you want to, but I’ll ride facing traffic and cross the highway at the light.”
“All right. All right. I’ll register you on my way to work Monday.”
As it turned out, Joey was too young to enroll in a college class, so, to avoid the red tape of having to fill out forms and get the dean’s approval, her mother enrolled in the class herself and Joey attended using her name.
On the first day, Joey misjudged how long it would take to ride the four and a half miles to school and arrived a few minutes late to find them sitting in a big semi-circle practicing signing their names. When Joey slipped in and took an empty desk, the teacher smiled and pointed to the board where she’d written, No Talking and My name is Martha Alexander. She then signed what she’d written.