by Lisa Fenwick
The stranger tried pushing me away, shoving down on my shoulders, but I managed to get my arms around the man’s waist and bite his chest.
“What the…?” he said, trying to disentangle my arms and pry my teeth out of his chest simultaneously. But what I lacked in coordination and balance, I more than made up for in sheer drunken strength. The man gave up on trying to peel me away without getting a big bite taken out of his side and dropped three more hard punches into my head. The third one finally knocked me out cold, and I collapsed into an ungainly heap on the sidewalk. The man looked around, quickly, and ducked into the same alley I had just come out of. All I could do was lie and watch him as everything faded into darkness again the same way that it did when I was in that alley before.
Chapter Nine
Noah
The Past
March 2015
Disorientation. That one word summed up my entire universe.
I woke in intense pain, my head throbbing like a big bass drum in a marching band at halftime. It wasn’t just a standard headache. Heaped on top of that pressure was a fierce agony in my ears. They felt like somebody had hammered red-hot icepicks into them. And then there was the tinnitus. The ringing in my ears was jet plane loud. I couldn’t hear anything over it.
I was clearly in a hospital room, alone. There was a lot of machinery attached to me, but I had no idea what any of it meant. Between the confusion of where I was and the pain and the overwhelming ringing in my ears and the fact that I remembered nothing after kissing Ashley goodnight, excited to be leaving for Jamaica later that week, I was lost.
I thought I must have made some noise, because people started gathering around my bed. People in scrubs and lab coats were talking to me, but I couldn’t make out a single syllable over the background screech in my head. Somebody produced a whiteboard and wrote on it, “What is your name?”
“Noah Gould,” I said. I thought. Whatever came out of my mouth seemed to make sense, judging by the reactions of the people around me.
“Can you hear anything?” Somebody with the letters RN on her name badge wrote on the board.
I shook my head and said something.
“What?”
Then they wrote something down. What is today’s date?
I said, “It's March 9th.”
They shook their head and wrote on the mini whiteboard, March 21st.
Again they wrote, Noah, do you remember the fight?
I shook my head again. I was a lawyer, not a street brawler.
I said, “Contact Mom and then my wife, Ashley.”
I wasn’t sure why I said that. Maybe because I felt as if she was my wife, even though we weren’t officially married, but I knew that we would be.
She wrote, Mom has medical POA. Instructions to contact only her first.
I tried to get up and out of bed.
Even in my dazed state, I had no idea why Mom might have left instructions to call her only and not notify Ashley. That was just strange. There was no reason for it. Ashley was my fiancée. We already had wills written up and even extended care directives. Ashley should have been notified right away if there was an emergency, and I had legally binding documentation that gave her a say in my health care should I become incapacitated. There was something seriously wrong.
My mind started clicking through possibilities. If I was in the hospital and Mom was an intermediary between Ashley and me, what had happened to my fiancée when I was injured? Were we both hurt?
I asked, “Is Ashley okay? Did something happen to her?”
She wrote again, Wait. Your mom is coming, but so is audiology.
Mom had been by, and then I let the drugs do their job and dozed. When I felt a hand on my shoulder, I opened my eyes. Ashley was leaning over the bed. She waved at me.
I spoke. I saw her lips move, but there was still nothing over the deafening ringing in my ears.
She looked over at the whiteboard and frowned then pulled her phone out of her pocket. Good call. I’d been with her long enough to know she had the fastest two thumbs on the eastern seaboard. Way faster (and much more legible) than she’d be with a dry-erase marker.
She handed her phone over to me, with the notepad app open. “I asked how you’re feeling.”
“Terrible. But very happy to see you,” I said, remembering that I had only issues hearing, not speaking too. Nothing felt normal. The idea that I could speak, and everyone could hear me, but I couldn’t do the same just didn’t feel right to me.
“I’m glad you woke up, finally,” she wrote, and I looked at her with bleary eyes that felt too heavy to keep open.
“Me, too. They have me drugged up a bit. Everything above my neck is killing me,” I said but wasn’t sure how it sounded to her.
“I can imagine. It sounds like you were beaten quite severely.”
“Yeah. Do you know what happened? Mom said there are no details. Do you know where I was and why I went there?”
Ashley’s reply seemed way too curt, even in the state I was in at the time. “No. You texted me to say you had some errands to run after work to get ready for the trip. That was it.”
But even then, as she typed it, I had a feeling that she was lying. Why would I text her? And not call?
“The trip we should be on right now,” I said.
“Yes. I wish we were there right now.”
“I’d much rather be hearing the roar of the ocean than this. With a cold drink in one hand and a hot lady in the other.”
“Same.” That was the sum total of her reply. After I read that, she took the phone back. She tapped out a message and showed it to me. “I was only able to sneak out for a bit and have a huge meeting in a half hour. I’ll come by again after work, okay?”
I nodded, saying, “Smuggle me in a rum drink when you come back?”
She nodded and left. The last impression I had was that there were a thousand emotions warring across her face. I knew there was a lot about what happened that she wasn’t telling me, that Mom hadn’t told me. I was just in no shape to try to figure out what those things might have been. Not with the noise in my head and the pain and the general fogginess and confusion of both the coma and the sedatives.
Eventually, I got somebody to give me the police report. There weren’t many details. I’d stumbled out of an alley disoriented, obviously intoxicated, incontinent, and having vomited all over myself, confused, and bruised and bleeding from multiple blows to the head. A good Samaritan called 911 right away then checked the emergency info in my phone and called Mom. On my arrival at the hospital and with the approval of Mom, they induced a coma to treat some serious brain swelling.
One interesting detail from the police report was that I wasn’t robbed. The bystander that called for help said I was babbling incoherently into my phone when I came out of the alley. My wallet and watch and gold law school ring hadn’t been taken. I couldn’t imagine any circumstance under which I’d get into a fight that violent. The only reason I could imagine that I’d get roughed up in an alley would be a very strong-arm mugging, but not a single thing of mine had been taken. I still couldn’t figure out what I could have done that night. I wished Ashley would have had some insight, but the only thing she was ever able to tell me was that I had told her I had to run out after work to take care of some things for the trip.
The other really interesting detail about the whole thing was my phone history. There was no record on my phone of any communication with Ashley at all. My entire chat history with her had been deleted, as was my voicemail box. We would rarely talk while we were at work, and if we did, I was more likely to call her office from mine.
The culture at Andrews, Andrews, and Bettan was very anti-smartphone. Social media on your phone in the hallways and breakroom was frowned upon. Glancing at a text in a meeting would get you pulled into a superior’s office for a very stern talking-to. I never texted Ashley during the day, but there was no reason why I wouldn’t have kept in touch while out doing
whatever it was I was tending to after work. If either of us were out on errands, we’d be constantly in touch to coordinate whether we’d be dining together or separately, if we’d catch an episode or two of whatever show we were into, oftentimes doing some proper teasing to set the mood for when bedtime arrived.
That day, there was nothing. For all I could tell, both Ashley and I had shut our phones off when we left for work in the morning and didn’t turn them back on until after she found out I was in the hospital. And for me to delete our chat history entirely…
Ashley had been distant. She said she was overwhelmed by everything that had happened, about how suddenly everything had changed for me. During those weeks after the attack, I read a lot of messages on her phone, a ton of emails from her about how she just wasn’t able to find the strength to see past her own losses in the situation to be able to help me. Thousands of words of apology were given to me, regrets that she was too selfish to remain by my side, guilt that when we faced a challenge, she was not able to stand beside me.
And Mom? She was Mom. I found myself wishing that I had some of Dad's natural energy and optimism as I navigated the final deliberations with myself about the operation. I found myself just wishing he were still alive to sit by my bedside and tell me that whatever decision I made would be the right one for me.
As Ashley and I drifted further and further apart, what had really happened to me that night in the alley became less and less important to me. It was simply the catalyst that put into motion a chain of events that irrevocably changed my life. It was like caring whether it was an untended cigarette or a candle that started the fire that burned your house to the ground. Yes, the initial source of the flame was important, but when the smoke cleared, you could either worry about that, or you could sift through the ashes to find out what you could salvage and what you had to rebuild.
I knew that my relationship with Ashley was dead and I had to move on. It would take time, but in the end it would be worth it. She turned her back on me the one time that I needed her the most, and I would never forget let alone forgive her for it.
Chapter Ten
Amy
The Present
It was such a beautiful day that the antics of the Johnson brats barely registered as I passed their corner. Smokey was stepping lively as we walked over to the cottage but not so lively that he forgot his duties at the intersections, using his eyes to make sure that I didn’t step off the curb when there was a car coming.
As soon as I opened the front gate to the cottage’s spacious yard, I heard Boy start to bark. He hadn’t made any noise prior to me opening the gate.
“Hey, Amy,” Noah called a moment later, from out by the far corner of the house. He must have been sitting outside and seen me come up.
I never dressed up, not really. I tended to have the same clothes every day. It was strange to some, but I heard in some group for the blind that it was good to be consistent with clothes, so I tended to only have jeans and shirts in my closet. I had one dress, the one that I was wearing now and felt the need to wear, hoping that Noah would be around today. After all, we never set a time. We just said a day.
I waited until I could hear Noah’s feet shuffling on the grass before I spoke, knowing now that he had to be pretty close to read my lips well enough for us to converse. “Hello, Noah. Is Boy still up for a run?”
In the few weeks that he’d been renting the cabin, I’d been over every two or three days to let the dogs run. I’d managed to pick up a rhythm with Noah. I waited for Boy to notice me and go get him, or I’d do something else that gave him a visual alert to my presence if he didn’t see me, like ring his doorbell or send him a text that I’d arrived. Then I’d wait until I could more or less make him out, at which point I knew he was close enough to know what I was saying to him.
“I’m sure he is. Let me go inside and check.” He opened the gate, and Smokey and I followed him in. As we walked up toward the house, I could hear a very definite change in the noise Boy was making from inside. His barking became happier, more exuberant.
I tapped Noah, and he turned to face me. “Boy knows that his buddy is here.”
“I’m not surprised. Are you going to unharness Smokey now?” Noah asked. There was something about the tone of his voice, as if he knew exactly what it meant to Smokey to have me take his harness off.
“Not quite yet. Let’s have the dogs give each other a polite greeting first then let them play.”
“Sounds good,” Noah said.
It took me a second to figure out what bothered me about what he just said. “Ummm,” I said, not sure I should, but the curiosity got the better of me. “I’m surprised that you’d use such a figure of speech.”
“Considering…” Noah said. His big blurry snowman made some sort of gesture I couldn’t quite make out, then he turned to go up the porch steps and let Boy out.
“Smokey, sit,” I said. He pulled up right beside me and squatted down, his shoulder just barely touching me. I heard Noah clip a leash onto Boy and speak to him quietly while he brought him out of the house. I put a hand on the back of Smokey’s neck, where I could feel his body language better than I could see it. As soon as I felt Smokey calm, and Noah said, “Good boy!” I reached down and unbuckled the harness. Noah did the same to Boy’s leash.
“Smokey. Go play!” I said, and both dogs leapt away from us to chase each other around the house with a chorus of happy barks.
“You find it odd I said, ‘Sounds good?’” Noah asked, after the dogs had made their first lap around the house.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have said anything. It was insensitive of me.”
“I wasn’t offended that you’d asked,” Noah said. “People inevitably get curious about why I don’t sound deaf and why I so readily use hearing metaphors in my speech. We all have to deal with the questions, don’t we?”
“Yes,” I said, reaching up to touch my face, right below one of my eyes.
“A year ago, I was… attacked. Beat up, right there on the street,” Noah said. “The guy must had had some sort of martial arts training or something. Then again, maybe I was asking for it… because the police said that he didn’t mug me. Just attacked me, which was strange.” He seemed to drift off as he was telling me the story, I wondered what he meant by saying he deserved it. How could someone deserve to be beaten?
“You see, I don’t remember much about that night. Even to this day, it’s like I erased it, because I try to remember why I was out at a restaurant that late when I should have been on a trip. Then apparently, I changed my plans to go away. Everything is just a blur. Sometimes it just frustrates me. The guy hit me really hard on the sides of my head. Boxed my ears, as they used to say. It was enough to give me a concussion and also caused some significant damage to both of my ears. My eardrums were perforated. The tiny bones and some other structures beyond that were all severely damaged. It seems like a combination of the physical damage to those structures and the severe concussion left me with a truly unbearable tinnitus. They had to keep me sedated, because I couldn’t deal with it for more than an hour at best otherwise. The best prognosis they had was that even if I recovered my hearing, I was likely to never completely lose the ringing in my ears. I couldn’t bear it, Amy. It was killing me, so I opted for a surgical intervention to destroy my hearing. There was less than a fifty percent chance of it working, but I was at my wits’ end, so I had them do it.”
“And?” I asked, thinking about if I should have tried to do more about my sight or rather lack of it over the years.
“It worked.”
He went on to tell me about his experimental implants and the special hearing aids that worked with them, learning to read lips, and the voice training to hide the flatness that many deaf people had. “I learned to pay a lot of attention to how my voice feels in my throat and mouth as I speak,” he said.
As for understanding others, Noah said, “I still have a hard time with folks who
have strong accents or who have other affectations that change the shape of their mouth when they speak. Somebody with a cigarette in their mouth? I’m completely out of luck, or if they’re chewing gum, or if they speak only out of one side of their mouth. I wanted to use this time to help perfect my lip-reading abilities. My therapist says that I can do a lot better.”
We talked for a while, and I found myself listening and amazed at how far technology had developed over the years.
“You know. The attack cost me a lot more than just my hearing,” Noah said.
“How so?” I asked him.
“I was supposed to be married, but I lost my fiancée.”
“Was your fiancée hurt during the attack?”
“No. She wasn’t there when it happened. It was afterwards, while I recovered. Slowly, day by day, she gradually abandoned me. When I woke up from the coma I’d been in for a few days, I thought she’d be beside herself with joy at seeing me, but there was something off about her. I just wrote it off as me not really being able to read her or comprehend things after what happened. You know, with the brain injury and not being able to hear anything anymore and all that.”
“But you knew?” I asked.
“I knew. As time went on, it became pretty clear that my first impression was the right one. Something happened in those few days I was laid out in a hospital bed, and I lost her. The last day that she came to see me in hospital, she told me that I was too good of a man for her and that she felt like she was always holding me back. I had no idea what she meant. I never felt like she was holding me back. Exactly the opposite. I always felt more alive and more myself with her. She was always the reason why I tried to be a better person, because I had somebody in my life that I loved and admired, and I wanted to be everything I could for her.” He sighed.