The psychiatrist is back—he just gave me a shot of something, and now I’m sitting on the bed all loose, all warm, all cotton-wool headed.
The city attorney is speaking to him, and I guess they don’t know that I read lips, or they don’t care, because they are just standing there talking about me.
It doesn’t make sense, says the city attorney. The Watsons never said she was deaf.
Maybe they didn’t know, says the psychiatrist.
She was two, for god’s sake! They wouldn’t have noticed she wasn’t speaking?
Don’t ask me, says the psychiatrist. Maybe she developed it later. But full deafness … I mean, if she is fully deaf … that’s usually congenital.
We need to get a translator in here, a … you know …
Sign language interpreter?
Yes.
The psychiatrist nods and leaves the room. The city attorney has his head in his hands again; I figure he had other plans for this weekend. Maybe he has a cabin too, I think.
He looks so sad, so vulnerable, that I get up and walk very slowly over to him, or kind of hop, actually, because I don’t want to put weight on my leg. Even moving like this, undignified, it’s like my feet aren’t touching the floor, like there’s a layer of feathers between me and the ground.
I keep walking. He is so far away.
In my mind is moonlight and stars, sunshine and flood. I am a tree, I think. I am rooted to the earth and that is all the mother I need, I move in years not seconds.
He is still a million miles away.
I go through all the seasons in the blink of an eyelid: I am weighed down by apples; I sleep under frozen earth; I burst into green life under warm air.
Then I am there, in front of him, and he flinches away from me, and the guard, who is still there but not important to me, steps forward.
I shape my lips. I can do it—(Mom) taught me, (Mom) would say yes, that’s right, or no, that’s not, here’s how you should tap your teeth, here on the palate is where your tongue goes.
(Mom) spent months on that.
I look at the city attorney—he has kind eyes, one blue, one green, not that this makes either more or less kind. It’s called heterochromia; my (mom) taught me that.
He doesn’t look scared. He still looks sorry for me.
I don’t like doing it, because I know it sounds weird, no matter what (Mom) says, I know it’s freaky. But I say it anyway, I say it with my mouth.
I’ve been having very strange dreams, I say.
I’m scared, I say.
Who am I? I say.
And then I black out.