_______ is the same. Speech _______ is slightly below your regular levels.
Speech what? Charlie said, and looked to the doctor.
DIS-SCRIM-IN-ATION, he mouthed dramatically.
So, it’s working? said her mother.
It never worked!
Probably normal “w-e-a-r and t-e-a-r.” This wire here looks a little frayed. We can order a new _______. Should take maybe three weeks.
Weeks? Don’t they make them at that place right down the road?
No rush, said Charlie. I don’t need it.
I can see that.
The interpreter signed it straight, without a hint of condescension, but Charlie wondered. Her mother glared.
What do you want from me, it’s broken! Charlie said aloud.
You can keep wearing this one while you wait. _______ will book your follow-up, but it should be a quickie. I’ll _______ in your most recent M-A-P and we can tweak from there.
Charlie made the interpreter spell out then repeat the signs she didn’t know, just as Headmistress Waters had done.
Receptionist. Program.
She copied them on a loop, logging them into her memory. The doctor handed back her processor and she reattached it to her head, watched her mother and him exchange thank-yous （no, thank you!）。 The interpreter winked on the way out.
Charlie felt the absence of sign as a hollow inside her as soon as they left the exam room. That was probably the most she’d understood a multiperson exchange ever, in any language. By the time they’d booked her next appointment, exasperation had grown in the empty space and, forgetting she should take charge of the route back to the parking garage, she followed her mother, whose woeful sense of direction brought them to the wrong elevator bay. They landed in the hospital’s decorative vestibule, each enlarged photo of a smiling miracle child salt in her wound. Out on the sidewalk she got her bearings, reset their course back toward the car.
Hey, slow down a sec, said her mother. Do you wanna get some, uh, coffee or something?
She gestured to the Starbucks across the street. When Charlie was a kid, her mother had purchased her cooperation at these appointments with the promise of ice cream, and now Charlie wanted to reject this offer of consolation coffee on principle, but her mother looked genuinely upset, so Charlie nodded and they jaywalked over.
She considered the strip of shops before her that made up Northeast Colson—fast-food joints, cellphone stores, a dollar store, and a kitchen supply shop. It was a part of the city they usually bypassed, launching straight from the garage back to the highway. Charlie had often fantasized about moving to a big city, someplace with a view and a body of water grander than the sluggish brown Ohio River. Mainly, she wanted somewhere she might blend in. Here, people on the street sometimes did a double take at the hardware on her head, which embarrassed her almost as much as it did her mother. But no one in a place like New York would give a fuck about the wire protruding from her hair, or her wonky voice, not with actually interesting people—artists, models, celebrities, naked cowboys, and creepy off-brand Sesame Street characters—to look at. Anonymity was what she craved most, she thought, as they entered the Starbucks.
Though it appealed to her conceptually, she still didn’t like the taste of coffee, so she ordered a Frappuccino, hoping that the ice and sugar would sufficiently mask the bitter undercurrent, then stood at the counter absently fingerspelling the drink list while they waited.
You’re getting good at that—she lifted her hand—stuff, Charlie’s mother said as they claimed a small table by the window. Her mother had a knack for the backhanded compliment. Charlie had watched her level acquaintances at WASP parties like Serena at Wimbledon.
Sign language, Charlie said.
Yes, well.
ASL.
Look, I understand why you’re frustrated.
Gee, thanks.
But you have to be reasonable. It could’ve gone a different way.
Meaning? Charlie stabbed at the icy chunks in her cup.
It’s not like we got you implanted to torture you. It was supposed to be a good thing. It could have worked.
Charlie nodded, now chewing her straw with vigor. It was a time-worn conversation. And somewhere in her depths, Charlie did know her mother’s intentions were good. But as it happened, it hadn’t been a good thing, not by any of their standards; it had been one tiny disaster after another. And now she’d have to start again—new processor, old tedium of calibration and the accompanying headache—all because her mother couldn’t let it go. There was no point fighting it. She was her parents’ possession for another two years, a voodoo doll on which to exorcise their sorrows. She pushed back from the table and stamped outside. She was only headed back to the car, but she needed to put some distance between herself and her mother.
The doctor said those wires fray all the time, said her mother as they got back in the car. Maybe a new processor will make a difference.
Charlie said nothing, looked out the window as they drove out of Colson, hurtling past Edge Bionics as they went. The plant made all kinds of prosthetics, including CI components—perhaps her next processor was being forged in there right this second. She wondered if her mother ever thought of the factory’s proximity to their home as an omen the way she sometimes did, if her mother gleaned serendipity from what Charlie had always read as inescapable menace. Edge had painted their name in blocky navy blue, but beneath it, she could still make out the faded outline where Goodyear’s logo had been, where the brick was bright red and clean from years of having been shielded by those big, cursive sheet metal letters. What other little cities had seen a fate like this, Edge fleshing out the skeletons of old warehouses and industrial towns, wielding the shiny hope of a new future?
She glanced at her mother, who was staring resolutely at the road in front of them. They returned to the highway, the cityscape quickly dissolving into townhomes, subdivisions.
Don’t forget to take me back to school, said Charlie.
I know.
It’s Exit Three.
I know.
It’s on the left.
Please, Charlie. I know how to drive.
Her mother pushed up her sunglasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. Charlie picked at a hangnail and thought about how unfair it was that she could be deaf and still bothered by awkward silences.
I thought you’d be happy about the play, she said after a while.
What makes you think I’m unhappy? said her mother.
austin spent the weekend at home vacillating between love for his sister and a growing disillusionment with his father, whom he watched curate playlists of children’s songs on his phone, shush and whisper things as he rocked Skylar to sleep. Austin fumed and cranked up the TV’s volume as far as it would go. Sky cried.
His mother, who’d managed to circumvent the subject of Skylar’s hearing in the initial videophone conversation with her parents, was now exhibiting her own brand of frenzy in the face of their imminent arrival—trying to cook though she definitely should have been resting.
If you keep opening the oven that bird will never cook, his father said.
Great, dinner canceled! she said.
Please go sit down. Austin will take care of it.
His father gestured to the green beans cans on the counter. Austin twisted the opener around a can, thinking about whether one day Skylar might explain to him what kind of noise the puncturing of metal made. He wondered if his mom had a plan for how to break it to his grandparents. He wondered if she had regrets. But for all the intimacy of ASL, and the emotional umbilical that Austin still often felt between them—mother and son bonded in silence—he could not bring himself to ask her. Instead he dumped the beans in a pot and took the cans out to the bin in the garage.