If a Tree Falls (2 page)

Sophia’s newborn diaper dangled off her tiny, silken body as I arranged her in her new infant car seat for the drive home. Upon our arrival, our German Shepherd, Lucca, barked out a welcome. I felt Sophia startle.

Inside, I settled Sophia in her crib, newly padded and
bumpered. Then I bustled about, preparing the nursery, and myself, for the continuous feeding and diapering cycles to come. With every sound—the closing of a drawer, the creak of a floorboard—my eyes darted to Sophia.

In the wee hours—our first night home with Sophia—I began to tie a string around the crib’s maple post, like I had seen my grandmother do for good luck. As I looped the thin red cord into a flouncy bow, I heard the clicking and beeping of our fax machine. I entered my study to see pages falling in curls off the paper tray, brushing against my feet. I picked up the cover sheet, and in my father’s distinctive, nearly illegible handwriting, read:
To Jenny, Love Dad.
I picked up the next page and saw that it was a family tree, scrawled in my father’s hand. He must have added Sophia to it!

I gathered up the various pages and I saw that some of the names of my relatives were marked with an asterisk: Nellie
¹
, Bayla
¹
, Bertha
¹
, Sam
¹
, Moe
¹
, Judith
¹
. I wondered what the asterisks might mean. Could they connote relatives who died in the Holocaust? Other names on the chart had a tiny
OK
written next to them.

I rifled through the pages. At the very bottom of the last page:

My t-shirt dampened with cold sweat. I shivered. I couldn’t seem to keep my hands, or the uncurled fax pages, steady. Sophia was crying—something I understood more from the cramping of my uterus and the letdown of my milk than from my sense of hearing.

I dialed my father—it was 7 a.m. in Connecticut. I could barely get any words out. He tried to dispel my worries. Again, he raised the audiologist’s point that Sophia may have fluid in her ears or a bacterial infection—something that will resolve quickly. “But the audiologist hasn’t seen our family chart,” I sputtered bitterly. I knew my father wanted to protect me, but was he in utter denial?

When I showed Bill the chart, he hugged me tight.

“It’s all right, Jenny. It’s going to be all right.”

“But how?” I countered. “There is deafness all around us.”

There was my
mother’s
hearing loss—which supposedly developed from infections in infancy, though now I couldn’t help but wonder if it was actually a genetic, progressive hearing loss. And there was the documented deafness on my
father’s
side of the family, too. Bill wasn’t aware of any deafness in his family history. But we’d come to learn from a hasty Internet search that Ashkenazi Jews—Bill and
I were both of Ashkenazi descent—have a heightened risk of carrying recessive gene mutations for deafness. If Sophia had a hearing loss caused by recessive gene mutations, she’d have inherited one each from
both
of us.

For the next two weeks, I put Sophia down only to devise, run, and then discount homespun hearing tests. I’d settle her on the bed, stand behind her, and clap my hands; then I’d question whether the sudden gust of wind created by the clap could explain her eye blink as well as the clapping sound itself. Or I’d rig up a towel (to shield the wind gusts) only to watch my clapping coincide with the billowing out of a stray thread that tickled her thigh. Or I’d wrap myself with a thick blanket (to dull the scent of my breast milk) while I cut the frayed edges of the re-rigged towel (to prevent thigh tickling). Then I’d clap my hands and hear Lucca bark at the same moment, perhaps in protest to it all. Eventually, I’d take Sophia back into my arms, sink into the bed, and try to synchronize my breathing with her gentle, sleeping breaths.

The morning of the follow-up appointment, Bill and I packed the diaper bag, settled Sophia into her car seat, and drove to the hospital. The jingle of bicycle bells. The ditty
of an ice cream truck. A car honk from behind. We didn’t speak. Bill looked ahead, driving. I stared out the window at the trees, a blur of gnarled greens and browns.

In a cramped testing room, we perched awkwardly on high stools and peered over the audiologist’s shoulder at the computer monitor. Sophia lay asleep on a blanketed examination table, electrodes gooed to her head. Indecipherable sound waves, like peaking mountain ranges, appeared as sketches on the screen, then disappeared.

Nearly an hour passed before the audiologist turned off the computer and led us to a cluster of chairs in the corner of her office. Sophia woke with a start, her arms flailing, then fell back asleep on the table. A fluorescent light hummed overhead. The audiologist chose a huge yellow binder from the bookshelf, then came and sat across from us in a chair, the binder on her lap.

“Sophia has a severe sensorineural hearing loss,” she began. She held up a page she had printed from her computer. It was a piece of graph paper spattered with little sound drawings: a barking dog, a ringing telephone, an airplane, a piano. There was a jumble of letters—the sounds of speech—clustered inside a banana-shaped outline. A sloping line, another mountain sketch, overlaid the drawings. The audiologist explained that the sloping line was Sophia’s audiogram; it showed what range of frequencies
and decibels Sophia could hear. Almost nothing in the “speech banana.”

“So she can’t hear us talk?” I asked hoarsely.

“No. She may hear some speech sounds—the wide open vowel sounds—but not much else.”

The audiologist told us that the typical working ear has over fifteen thousand tiny hair cells that convert sound waves into neural signals. In Sophia’s case, it was likely that a majority of these hair cells were broken or bent or missing. As she spoke, she handed me the binder. It was thick with information about deafness.

The audiologist enumerated possible causes of Sophia’s hearing loss, beginning with recessive genes from Bill and me. I could see that I was shaking before I felt it. I darted to the examination table, scooped up Sophia, and rocked her back and forth, back and forth. She was so tiny, just two weeks old, her hands still transparent.
What would life be like for her? How were we going to communicate?
The audiologist spoke about hearing aids, about sign language, about the cultural divide between Deaf and Oral schools. She was saying that deafness was sometimes syndromic, and that tests would need to be ordered to rule out eye, kidney, and heart disorders. We should schedule a genetics consult, she added as she looked over my family chart. Bill came to stand next to me, and steadied my quaking hand.

We drove home with the car windows up. I watched a cluster of businessmen standing together at a street corner, their faces animated with talk. One man’s face contorted in laughter. Another’s, in mock surprise. The car filled with Sophia’s short, bleating cries, then quieted.

I racked my brain for memories, as I had each day since receiving the fax. Had anyone ever spoken of deaf relatives?

My sister knew the family history. She had told me last night over the phone.

“Yeah, I remember looking at the family tree. There were two deaf sisters—Dad’s great-great aunts back in the 1870s. Some of their children and their children’s children were deaf, too. Two of Dad’s uncles—Sam and Moe. I don’t know if he knew them.”

I was shocked at what she knew. When did she learn all this?

My sister told me she wrote a paper on our family’s geneology years ago, in high school. Grandma Rose had traced the family lines back to the Wertheim strand, and some cousins had worked on it too, on the Fleischer side. My sister had interviewed a few relatives who remembered Dad’s uncles conversing in sign language at a family
reunion. “I’m sure Dad assumed you knew this, too,” my sister told me.

As a young girl, the youngest of four children, I was thrown in with the lot. At the dinner table, my older brothers were bursting with commentary, my sister, with earnest questioning. I couldn’t get a word in. I tried raising my hand, hoping to be “called on” as if in school. I tried shouting. Often, it was a visiting relative, an aunt or an uncle, who would finally cut in. “ Why are you yelling, Jenny?”“Because no one ever listens to me!” I was lost in the din.

Was I out of earshot when they spoke of deaf relatives? Or was I just not listening? There was deafness everywhere, up and down the limbs of my family tree! Not a word. Had I heard.

I slapped the thick binder against my legs. A break in the silence. Through the car window, the shade of loquat trees cast shadows across Sophia’s face. Bill steered the car into our driveway.

I carried Sophia into the house and placed her in her crib. She was asleep, her hands fisted high above her head. “We’ll fight together,” I wanted to whisper in her ear.

I walked out of the nursery, swallowing.

WITH SOPHIA, I LOST MY VOICE. Sophia couldn’t hear it and I couldn’t produce it. For weeks, I didn’t talk, sing, or read aloud. I picked her up and held her tight.

Lucca sprawled herself out in a sunny spot beside the bed and licked her paw pads, each cracked line smoothed by the broad, wet slurp of her tongue. Why didn’t her tongue get scratched or cut, I wondered, when her pads were edged sharp like cookie cutters? Lucca was licking her feet quicker and quicker, louder and louder.
Slap, lap; slap, lap; slap, lap.
I propped Sophia against my shoulder and clapped my hands together to make Lucca stop. Her chestnut eyes darted to me questioningly, her pointy ears wilting flat.

Bill was back at work, directing a nonprofit that advocated for abused and neglected children in dependency court. He oversaw the training and supervising of volunteers who met with the children, spoke to foster parents
and teachers, and tried to determine best home placements. In court hearings, the “child advocates” made their recommendations to a judge.

When Bill arrived home each night—light- or heavy-hearted, depending on the judicial outcomes—he took care of us. He diapered Sophia and walked Lucca. He fetched me the nursing pillow, the swaddling blankets, the burping cloths. He hugged me as he did when we first met, his strength around me leaving me breathless. He cradled Sophia gently, his eyes crinkling into a loving smile, his lips puckering into a soft kiss.

When I expressed grief over Sophia’s hearing loss, Bill brought a perspective he acquired from his work. His case-loads included a fifteen-year-old girl molested by three different relatives, a five-year-old boy starved in a house filled with food, an infant left alone for two days. Sophia was loved and cared for. She would thrive. Together, we’d see to it.