If a Tree Falls (15 page)

During the day, I researched cochlear implants. Bill and I spoke to parents, audiologists, and teachers. We read articles and met with doctors. We scheduled the MRI and other preliminary tests. If Juliet was a candidate, the surgery could take place in September—seven silent, languageless months from now. Bill and I argued over the fact of his not signing.

“Jennifer, I am just not good at signing.”

“You need to
practice
. What if she’s not a candidate for the implant? Or what if it’s not successful? We need a language with her.”

“Then I’ll work at it.”

“Even if she
can
get the implant, don’t you want to be able to talk to her when it’s off: at bedtime, in the bath? In
the middle of the night, when she wakes up from a dream, don’t you want her to be able to describe it to you, and not wait and forget her dream by morning?”

More than anything, I wanted our family to embrace this language now, this language that required us to stay present to each other, to not turn away. A bridge to the silent world. How could I make him understand?

My eyes blurry with tears, I looked across the room at Juliet. She was lying back on a blanket, her hands up close to her face. I wiped my eyes to see her better. Her fingers were weaving patterns in the air—threads of Sign. Juliet was babbling with her hands!

At five months old, Juliet was signing words. A pulsating fist for milk. A knock in the air for yes. A finger peck to the thumb for chicken. Light on; duck; book; water; shoes. Sophia was signing too, and she was the first to notice when Juliet picked up a new sign. “Mama, Juliet is making the sign for cheese!” I looked at Juliet’s hands and saw that she had put the heels of her palms together and was making a twisting gesture: cheese.

When I sat, holding Juliet, Sophia wedged her way onto my lap. “Let me in!” she’d say, and I’d wiggle and rearrange
Juliet to make room for Sophia. Then Sophia would pet Juliet on her fuzzy head, and say in baby talk, “Are you hungry, honey? Want a bottle?” Or she’d pick up a familiar book and recite it to Juliet from memory. “Chrysanthemum didn’t
think
her name was perfect, She
knew
it.” Other times, Sophia would act out her displacement, fretting and whacking her doll against the wood edge of the window-seat. At still other times, Sophia would look into my eyes and say, “Right now, I wish it were just you, me, and daddy.” Often, I’d hug her tightly and say, “I understand how you feel, Sophia,” swallowing my fears that Sophia and Juliet might not grow close.

But there were times when I’d lose my composure and resent Sophia’s rejection of Juliet. “She’s part of our family, Soph,” I’d bark, full of intolerance. I’d find myself making demands on Sophia, demands too big for a three year old: “You’ll just have to wait,” or “Go look at books by yourself until I’m ready,” or “You are a big girl now—you’re crying over
this
?” I’d speak in a harsh tone, the displeasure in my face seeping into her skin. What scared me the most was how erratic I could be—full of sweet patience and generosity one minute, a biting sharpness the next. Shuddering, I’d rehearse consistent, empathetic responses: “This must be hard for you,” or “It’s frustrating, isn’t it, to have to wait,” or “I see how sad you feel.”

I treated the girls differently, despite myself. Partly because Juliet was just a baby, and she was my second, I found her easier to handle. If she turned over the cereal box, I’d see it as developmental: “she’s dumping.” If Sophia did it, I’d see it as an awful mess, one I didn’t need on top of everything else. I apologized to Sophia. But even if she could forgive me, I found it difficult to forgive myself.

Around the time Juliet was six months old, we were invited to a children’s music concert. A friend was playing a guitar part, so even though Juliet wouldn’t be able to hear it, we decided to go. Sophia stood at the edge of the stage with her friends, Ben and Katie, and danced. Bill and I sat in chairs. I held Juliet in my lap, bouncing her to the beat of the music. Juliet seemed bored and tired. Then, suddenly, she wriggled out of my grip, maneuvered off my lap and laid herself flat on the concrete floor by my feet. She pressed her whole body and the side of her face against the cold, dirty, concrete floor. A few minutes later she jerked up to her knees, turned to face us, and smiled broadly before flopping back down. She felt the whole concert from down on the floor.

Afterwards, we bought the concert CD, and for the
first time since we swayed to foreign lullabies with Sophia cradled in our arms, we played music in our house. Bill and I took turns swinging Sophia around and then Juliet. From “Possum in the Kitchen,” we switched to other CDs. We listened to old songs—“Locomotion”—and songs from our courtship—“Every Little Kiss” and “How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You.” Lucca barked excitedly, her tail and even her low hips swaying to the rhythm of “Brown Eyed Girl.”

We had stopped listening to music because background sound of any kind interfered with Sophia’s access to language. But now Sophia’s language pickup was unstoppable, and music could be added into the auditory mix. Sophia herself asked for “lassical” music. When Bill put on Handel’s
Messiah
, Sophia sat on the couch and attentively listened to it.

I hadn’t realized my own deprivation until the loss was restored. Now I wanted to blare music at top volume: “C ’MON BABY DRIVE SOUTH. WITH THE ONE YOU LOVE.” I wanted it to reverberate in my body like an electrical current. Of course, this caused Juliet to jump three feet off the floor because of the vibrations. So I held her up, way up in my arms, and she felt the music off the floor, up high in my pounding, pumped up, drowned out heart.

I found a new kind of trust after that concert. Juliet was flourishing; she was developing and learning through all her other senses. She alerted to our footfall and expected us at her bedroom door from the vibrations of our steps. She received my songs, even without hearing a sound, when I sang with her draped across my chest. Sophia, too, was compensating for her hearing loss in incredible ways, through sight and smell. Do hearing children know who stopped by the house while they were out, just by olfactory cues? Sophia could smell who came over while she was off at school! We hesitated to tell this to people, because it made them feel smelly.

I used to puzzle, as a philosopher, over the question of how one could know for certain what another person was thinking, or sensing, or experiencing. With my girls snuggled around me, I wondered: could I know, by analogy to my own experience, what they were experiencing? Some of their sensory faculties were heightened, and some lessened, in comparison to mine.

Except in Juliet’s case. Her sense of hearing was altogether absent: she heard nothing at all.

Though my life was still entwined with philosophy, I stopped teaching it. I was spending too much time with students
each week rather than with my own family. I wanted to be home as Sophia and Juliet grew. And I wanted to continue to explore my family ancestry. I was no longer searching for relatives by database, or soaking up the flavors of shtetl life in books. My deaf ancestry was alive inside me, captured, conjured, by my imagination. I wasn’t sure where it was taking me. But I had faith in it—a faith I hadn’t had in any philosophical argument I’d ever constructed. I was groping my way back, my finger running along a last tattered string. To lengthen. Find strength in.

My far-flung relatives, blankened by distance in time and space, readily absorbed the dyes of my mind, and filled the white pages of my black, leather-bound journal. My imaginings pumped my writing as I pushed swings, peeled bananas, and read board books. As I spoke and I signed and I waited and I hoped for news that Juliet would be a candidate for the cochlear implant.

I answered a phone call one morning from an ear surgeon we had met at Boston Children’s Hospital. She was calling to report that Juliet’s MRI showed her cochlea to be structurally intact; this meant that implant surgery was an option for Juliet! Electrodes could be strung along the curvature of Juliet’s inner ear, to do the work of her broken or
bent or missing cilia. She could be made to “hear” through an electronic process; she could have access to language and sound.

The surgeon also had some results from Juliet’s blood work. “Juliet’s hearing loss is genetic,” she said. “She has two deletions at the Connexin 26 gene site—35 del G and 167 del T.” I scribbled it down. “Recessive gene mutations, one each from your husband and you. In all likelihood, Sophia has these too.”

That afternoon, I went to my computer to look up Connexin 26. I found an online article about how, ordinarily, there are pairs at the gene site. Genetic mutations can cause deletions, with the result that there are singletons where pairs should be.

I gathered up the still-curling pages of my family chart, scattered across my desk amidst mugs of now cold tea. I stared at all the names, running this way and that, scribbled crosswise, scampering up and down family branches in desperate search of their other halves. The halves that make them whole. Make them hear. Make them heard.

Sophia and Juliet were heaped together in an overstuffed beanbag chair in my study. Juliet was slipping off, clutching a fold of blue denim. I wedged myself in, yanked Juliet up from the side, and pulled both girls close around me.