If a Tree Falls Read online

  Yet when I focused my attention on Sophia, I saw my self-possessed little girl engaged with family and friends. Turning to voices. Chattering away. Not just in English, either; during Hanukkah, Sophia imitated the Hebrew words we sang as we lit our menorah! We had so many advantages—education and resources and technology. We felt equipped to deal with hearing loss. The risk that our next baby would be hearing impaired wasn’t so worrying. We were buoyed by Sophia’s wellness.

  Each morning, when the New York Times arrived at our doorstep, Sophia would toddle down the front steps to get it while Bill stood propped in the doorway, ready to catch its inner sections as Sophia bustled her way back inside. One September morning, Sophia paused as she leaned over the paper, its top half spread flat upon our brick walkway. There was a picture of a firefighter kneeling in solemn grief at a 9/11 memorial site. Without a word, Sophia gathered up the paper in her arms. She walked past Bill and went inside, took a Band Aid from the low kitchen cabinet, and placed it on the firefighter.

  Sophia’s word list, still on our refrigerator, now included not just “ happy” and “sad” but “excited,”“disappointed,”“worried,” “scared,” and “silly.” Sophia was particularly attuned to facial expressions, and at two plus years old, feelings were her focus. When one day I praised her for being generous to another toddler, she said, “ I am generous, but I also have jealous.” And when I offered to make a face out of whipped cream for her dessert, she requested a face that was “frustrated.”

  Sophia was oblivious to most social niceties. One night, at a neighborhood diner in time to catch the “early bird special,” Sophia pointed both at the leftover cups of coffee and at the predominantly elderly eaters and shouted: “OLD, OLD, OLD!” We thought this was typical two-year-old fare, and (while horrified) we reveled in the normality of it. But when I told Jan, she said, “That’s such a “deaf” thing!” Are the deaf just naturally and excruciatingly direct? In the Signing community, they certainly don’t pull any punches—just look up the sign for “fat” and you’ll see.

  Sophia began to converse, even bicker, with her best friend, Ben. They bickered mainly over the sippy cup of water that Sophia offered to Ben again and again, despite his patient declining and then his adamant refusals. It was a thrill to hear them in dialogue, in toddler-speak. Sophia delighted in choosing the colors of her newest set of earmolds: bright blues, pinks, purples, and greens swirled together. And at a birthday party for a friend, she sang “Happy Birthday,” enunciating the lyrics perfectly in full voice and astonishingly right on pitch. I looked across the room at Bill, whose eyes were welled up with tears. Neither one of us could have hoped for better. So many gains; at two and a half, Sophia’s language and speech were at her peer level.

  Only her weight trailed behind. We soldiered on with pasta and cream.

  To celebrate an anniversary, we arranged for Sophia to stay home with a trusted babysitter, and Bill and I went for a night away at a nearby inn. The next morning, we stopped at a bakery for pastries. A petite, elderly woman toting a big suitcase stopped us to ask for directions to a local shrine. When we got our bearings in the small Berkshire town, and realized that her destination was up a steep, winding road, Bill offered to drive her there.

  On the windy hilltop at Marian Fathers Mercy Monastery, the lady took our hands in hers. “You will have many blessings,” she said. She stood stalwart in the gusts, waving until we drove out of sight. I couldn’t know then that one was already burrowing in my womb. We would name her Juliet.

  At first, I was ill in the usual ways of pregnancy. Then I became ill in unusual ways. Shingles. Thyroid problems. A raging breast infection. The doctors couldn’t say what caused the infection—perhaps a remnant of the mastitis I’d had while nursing Sophia, breeding now at pregnancy speed.

  Seven months into the pregnancy, I lay in bed, listless and disoriented. The peach paint on our bedroom walls, a once cheerily soothing palette of historical colors, closed in on me: I had the not-so-fleeting thought that I was going to be smothered by someone in a flesh-colored leotard. I was home from Mass General Hospital after a surgery to remove the infectious tissue, but the infection was up and raging again. I was taking an IV dose of antibiotics and had a huge hole in my breast. When I looked down into it, I felt unsteady and faint. Visiting nurses came twice a day to pack and unpack it, and I had been instructed to shower four times a day, to let the hottest water I could bear run into it.

  Before the surgery, I had let Sophia climb into bed with me while I rested. There was a novelty, then, to my being home in bed in the middle of the day, and I could still manage to be upbeat. One afternoon, as Sophia wriggled her feet under my white down comforter, she brushed her bare toes against my legs. “Mama, you’re wearing new pants.” By toes alone, she learned that I had transitioned to the next stage in maternity clothes.

  Once the nurses started coming, Bill and I arranged a schedule so that Sophia was shielded from all of it—a schedule that took Bill away too, and I was left largely alone and lonely. Too hot and loopy to concentrate on anything, my consolation and my company was the baby inside me—my Juliet, though I didn’t know her yet—and Lucca, who sat at the side of the bed, protecting me, barking at the nurses, nuzzling me when they came near. Lucca was sick, too, with inoperable cancer in her bladder. We had discovered it months ago, when she began peeing bright red blood into spring’s green grass. In a sunny spot in my bedroom, Lucca’s wide eyes betrayed her discomfort as she shifted positions, circling again and again before gingerly sitting herself down. Once down, she panted heavily, her black lips wide open like the Joker of Batman days. I dangled my arm off the bed, stretching my fingers to caress her soft, felted ears.

  Lying in bed, I was pumped up with countless hard-hitting antibiotics, the dosages of which, I’d ascertained from obsessive online searches, had never been tested on humans. Only mice, and not even pregnant ones. My OB scheduled extra sonograms with the intent to reassure me, but each one showed a fetus moving very little or not at all. The technicians suggested it was natural for the baby to be “quiet,” given all that I was going through.

  A chunk of my breast missing. What might be missing in my baby? My worries for Juliet were unspeakable.

  Massachusetts, September 2003

  SOPHIA CAME IN for good-night snuggles. I held her tight against my huge belly. Her brown hair was growing long, her bangs feathering out around her wide eyes. I wondered how she felt about this impending baby, her big sisterhood bought, these past months, at a higher-than-usual price. The possibility of the baby’s deafness—how might it affect their relationship? Would they share a universe, their breaths, their thoughts, even their dreams, synchronized?

  Did I expect the new baby to be deaf? Did I hope it, for Sophia’s sake, supposing that it might be easier if her sibling was deaf? My speech had become so exaggeratedly precise and loud. Would I even know how to talk to a hearing newborn, in soft whispers and coos? Could I admit to myself that I longed for my new baby to hear?

  At this point, deafness was the least of our worries. With all that was going wrong, I didn’t know what to expect, or what to hope for. I could hardly find my hopes amidst my fears for this child. At night, in bed, I searched Bill’s face. He looked back at me, blankly. Perhaps Bill had tucked away his hopes, too. I rolled over to sleep. My journal lay, bound and untouched, in my dresser drawer.

  Weeks passed and the infection continued to rage. Our faith in the Mass General surgeon faded. My father researched and arranged an appointment with another surgeon reputed to be one of the best in New York City. One hot, sticky morning, early in my ninth month of pregnancy, I hugged Bill and Sophia and boarded an Amtrak train to Penn Station. My sister met me there, held my hand, took me to meet the surgeon, then to her apartment on West Eighty-third Street.

  My sister and I had become close in college. She’d transferred to Barnard, up by Columbia, and we lived just across Broadway from each other. We met for dinner at least once a
week back then, usually at the Hungarian restaurant for chicken paprikash. We studied together in her dorm room, went shopping, talked constantly on the phone. Years later, she would give Lucca to us after spotting her in an abandoned Brooklyn parking lot and nursing her back to health. I was sorry that my sister and I hadn’t been closer as children—that it took leaving home for us to open up to each other.

  In my sister’s apartment, decorated in “retro” style with my grandmother’s ornate furniture, I lay ill in her bed, propped up by fluffy pillows and eating comfort food she’d ordered in from a local diner—matzoh brie and rugelach. I spoke to Bill and Sophia by phone. The next morning, my mother met me at the surgery center on the Upper East Side.

  The second surgery left me scarred and bereft of one-third of my breast tissue but, finally, infection-free. When I returned home, Bill made me tea and situated me in bed. Sophia fussed over me, stroking my head, asking if she could kiss my “line” to make me all better. Lucca circled the bed, barking out her welcome.

  When my labor began a few weeks later, Bill called the babysitter to come stay with Sophia and Lucca. As we waited, Sophia watched me curiously. I tried to conceal the pain of the contractions coming every five minutes. I turned my face away, bending my body this way and that. At one point I hunched over a plant and pretended to check its soil while my uterus squeezed and cramped. Bill and I reached the labor and delivery unit when I was six centimeters dilated and in active labor. In less than an hour, I was nine centimeters dilated.

  Then, my labor stalled. For the next eight hours, I labored in excruciating pain, with no advancement. Of the five doctors in my OB practice, the youngest and least experienced was on call at the hospital that day. She came into our labor room in the midst of it and sat herself down in a rocking chair. She wore bright red clogs with her hospital scrubs, and she just sat, rocking, while I labored. Bill held onto me as I worked with birthing balls and squatting bars. The doctor prattled on about the Red Sox game and other things. Could I ask her to leave? I tried to keep my focus on birthing. She continued her chitchatting. Finally, she went on her rounds.

  Moments after the doctor left the room, I started to push out Juliet. A nurse called her back, handing her a box of sterile gloves. The doctor warned me that I was not yet at the pushing stage. But the raw, gripping insistence of my body won out. Despite all of the anti-infection drugs, the general anesthesia during my breast surgeries, and the worries about low fetal movement, Juliet was born perfectly, beautifully—blessedly—intact.

  I woke to see a hospital nurse standing over Juliet, and in a surge of panic I attempted a sit-up. My womb paid me back with a clotty gush of blood, my abdomen with a deep crampy pain. Chastened, I twisted and wiggled myself gently to a seated position, put on my glasses, then demanded to know what was happening. I saw that Juliet was swaddled and sleeping, but with electrodes stuck to her head and blue gooey stuff oozing into her hairline. Before the nurse could explain, I reminded her that I gave explicit instructions that Bill or I be awake and present for any tests they run, especially the hearing screen.

  The nurse gave me a measured look and said, “I am just repeating the hearing test to be sure of the result.”

  “Repeating?”

  “Yes. Your husband was with me yesterday when I performed it the first time. You were sleeping.” The white drawstring on her hospital pants had the blue goo on it, too.

  Flushing hot, I propped a pillow behind me and leaned back against its cool side. Bill was here this morning. He didn’t tell me. “She failed it?”

  “Yes. But I thought I’d run it once more to be sure.”

  The crampy pain was back and I shifted positions. “Is she failing it now?”

  “Yes.”

  At home, I laid Juliet down on a satin-edged baby blanket in the center of the living room floor. The smell of her diaper cream mingled with our wool rug, rough beneath my knees. My breasts ached under the medical order not to breastfeed Juliet in the wake of the surgeries. Cabbage leaves and frozen peas, fabled to quell lactation, rustled inside my bra.

  I tried to meet Juliet’s gaze, but her eyes didn’t register mine. She looked in my direction, but past me, through me, toward the sunlit window. It struck me that she had not yet met my gaze. I leaned over her, positioning my face directly in front of hers, but she still didn’t look at me. She began to arch her back. Little scales of cradle cap flecked from her scalp and floated in the air.

  Juliet’s spine formed a perfect bridge, her weight balanced on the soft spot of her head. I rearranged her, bending her knees up toward her belly to force a concave posture, but as soon as I took my hands off of her, she reassumed the arch position. I backed away from her—was she arching to get distance from me?—but she stayed in her backbend, the light from the window bouncing off of her upside-down chin.

  My baby couldn’t hear me. And she wasn’t looking at me, either. Whatever competence I felt as a mother the second time around—I was skilled now at newborn feeding and diapering and bathing and swaddling—was undermined by Juliet’s inexplicable arching, by her distant gaze, by the unknown degree of her hearing loss.

  I went into the kitchen to make a bottle. As with Sophia during those first weeks, every sound was exaggerated for me now that I knew Juliet was probably unable to hear it: the faucet rush of water, the scooping of the formula powder, the shaking of the mixture—I could make this louder or softer depending on how vigorously I shook—then the second faucet rush of water to heat the bottle. Finally, the sound of the canister rotating on the countertop; I turned it so I didn’t have to see the mocking words “Breast milk is best ...” as I walked back to the living room.

  In the living room, Juliet was still arched back. I scooped her up, but like a fish, she flipped and flailed. I nestled her into the crook of my arm and placed the bottle to her lips, but she squirmed herself to an upright sitting position with her back to me. She wanted to face out as she drank her bottle, her eyes away from me.

  How were we going to relate to each other? All my worries about motherhood were back, strong as ever. With Juliet here, I’d be less available for Sophia. Juggling two, I’d be less focused than with one. And my girls’ deafness, on top of everything, was like an enduring signpost of my own impediments to hearing, to connection and closeness.

  I draped Juliet over my shoulder to burp her, and sang to her from a mixed-up, past repertoire of show tunes and operatic arias. I landed on a song I remembered all the words to, Freddie’s song from My Fair Lady. I could picture the freckled, redheaded boy who sang the song in the production I was in as a teenager, when I dreamed of becoming a singer. “I have often walked down this street before. But the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before. All at once am I several stories high, knowing I’m on the street where you live.” The boy belted it out and now so did I. I didn’t stop for Bill’s footsteps down the stairs, and I continued on as he watched.

  “I don’t think she can hear anything at all,” Bill said when I was finished. The brainstem test that would tell the exact degree of Juliet’s hearing loss was a week away, but Bill repeatedly expressed his impression that Juliet was completely deaf. He paired himself with Sophia—whom I now missed desperately—while I, exclusively, cared for Juliet. I thought back to how Bill had held Sophia as a newborn, how he had balanced her in her entirety upon his strong forearm, zooming her face close to mine for kisses, then swaying her gently to sleep. Was it just the logistics of a second baby—a natural, sensible division of labor—that split us so? Or had the prospect of complete deafness driven Bill away?

  “She can hear my singing,” I said assuredly, and I moved on to “Quando Men Vo” from La Boheme.

  But in the middle I stopped. Bill was in the kitchen and I asked him to come back.

  “What about her sight, Bill? Do you think she can see?”

  “I am not sure,” he said, his eyes not meeting mine now either.

  Surrounded by old people wearing flimsy grey goggle
s, I sat with Juliet at the ophthalmologist’s office and narrated board books. The Three Bears. Hop on Pop. Time for Bed. When I came to Brown Bear Brown Bear, What Do You See? hastily stuffed into the diaper bag, I cast it aside and then thrust all the books back into the bag. It was doubtful that Juliet could hear anything I was saying to her, and with tears flooding my eyes and occluding my own vision, I was panicked that she couldn’t see. I sat impatiently, holding Juliet face-out as was usual now, and racked my brain for the information I once knew about Usher’s Disease, the syndrome in which deafness is linked with blindness.

  The waiting was interminable. The room smelled like formaldehyde mixed with ammonia. We were taken in for dilating drops, then sent back into the crowded waiting room. Highlights. Your Big Backyard. I couldn’t just sit there without showing her anything. When we were finally taken in to meet with the doctor, Juliet was squirmy from having sat so long. Quickly, the doctor shined a light into the backs of her eyes to examine her pupils. Just as he lowered the light, Juliet looked into my eyes for the first time. She looked into my eyes! I grabbed Juliet close in the darkness, and between heaving breaths, I planted soft kisses all over her face—her cheeks, her lips, her nose, and her eyes—her sparkling, light-filled, blueberry eyes.

  Just weeks after Juliet’s arrival, I was preparing to teach again at Mount Holyoke College. Thankfully, I was slated to teach just one class: Introduction to Philosophy.

  I knew better than to lead off with Bishop Berkeley. But there I was, standing at the blackboard, launching into idealism. I could see from the telltale signs of shifting and fidgeting that my students’ minds were beginning to wander. Just a few more words about Berkeley’s main tenet—to be is to be perceived—and my mind wandered, too.