Mrs. Lund called me at 8:20 on a Monday morning in April, and the first thing she said was my daughter’s name.
Not hello. Not good morning. Just, “Amanda, it’s about Emma.”
She said it in that careful voice teachers use when they’ve already decided how to say a hard thing.
I was standing behind the front desk at Olson Family Dentistry with the second phone line blinking and a patient’s insurance card in my other hand. I set the card down. Kim, who does our scheduling, looked up from her screen, saw my face and stopped talking mid-sentence.
“Emma isn’t wearing her hearing aids today,” Mrs. Lund said. “I asked her where they were. She said her stepmom has them. She said she gets them back on Friday.”
For a second, I honestly thought I’d heard her wrong.
That’s the kind of joke the world plays on you when your child is hard of hearing. You start doubting your own ears instead of the thing you just heard.
“Friday,” I said.
“That’s what she told me. She said it was for talking back at supper on Saturday.”
Mrs. Lund paused. I could hear children’s voices somewhere behind her, the hallway noise of a school waking up.
“We had our spelling test first thing this morning,” she said. “I read the words out loud, like I always do. She sat there and cried through the whole thing. She couldn’t hear a single word, Amanda. She wrote her name at the top of the paper, and then she just put her head down on her desk.”
I put my free hand flat on the counter. It was cold. I remember that. And I remember the little bell on the front door jingling as Mr. Peterson came in for his nine o’clock cleaning half an hour early, the way he always does.
“I sent her down to the nurse once already,” Mrs. Lund went on. “Not because she’s sick. Just so she could have a quiet minute. She came back and sat in the front row and watched my mouth the whole time I was teaching fractions. She’s working so hard. She’s exhausted, and it isn’t even nine o’clock.”
“Thank you for calling me,” I said.
My voice came out flat and polite. The voice I use for patients who are behind on their bills.
“Thank you, Mrs. Lund. I’m going to fix it.”
“I didn’t know if I should call you or her dad,” she said. “You’re both on the emergency card.”
“You did right,” I said. “Give me a couple of hours.”
I hung up and stood there in my light blue scrub top with my gray fleece zipped all the way to my chin, because the office is always freezing in the morning. And I tried to decide what to do first.
Kim came around the desk. She’s worked with me for six years. She has two boys of her own, and she knows Emma, because Emma does her homework in our break room on the afternoons when the sitter cancels.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Kendall took Emma’s hearing aids,” I said. “Over the weekend. As a punishment.”
Kim’s mouth opened. Then it closed again. She didn’t say anything for a moment, which for Kim is a very long time.
“Took them where?” she finally said.
“Home, I guess. She’s keeping them until Friday.”
“She can’t hear without them,” Kim said, like I might not know.
“No,” I said. “She can’t.”
We found out about Emma’s hearing when she was four.
She was a quiet little girl, and everybody told me that was just her nature. My mother said I was the same way at that age. Chad’s mother said some kids are thinkers.
But I noticed things.
She turned the cartoons up louder than her cousins did. She didn’t come when I called her from the kitchen. She didn’t startle when the screen door banged shut behind her. At church, she watched the pastor’s face instead of looking down at her coloring sheet like all the other kids.
That spring, her preschool did a hearing screening. She failed it in both ears.
They sent home a half sheet of paper that said, “Please follow up with your provider.” I read it standing in the driveway with my car keys still in my hand, and I felt the whole world tip a little to one side.
Our family doctor sent us to a pediatric audiologist in Sioux Falls, sixty miles down the road. It was the closest one who worked with young kids.
The audiologist was a woman named Dr. Meyer. She sat Emma in a little soundproof booth with big headphones and had her drop a block in a bucket every time she heard a beep.
I sat outside the window and watched. Emma missed more beeps than she caught. She kept looking at the window, at me, like she was waiting for me to tell her when to drop the block.
The diagnosis was moderate hearing loss in both ears. Nobody could tell us why. Nobody in either family had it. Dr. Meyer said sometimes it just happens, and that the important thing was to get her hearing now, while she was still learning to talk and read.
“Without amplification,” she told us, “she’s hearing speech like it’s coming through a wall. She gets the vowels. She loses a lot of the consonants. So ‘cat’ and ‘cap’ and ‘cab’ all sound exactly the same to her.”
Chad sat next to me in that little office and held my hand. We were still married then. He asked good questions. He asked whether it would get worse. Whether she’d be able to play sports. Whether kids would tease her.
He asked about the cost last. And he asked it quietly.
“Thirty-four hundred dollars for the pair,” Dr. Meyer said. “That includes the earmolds, the fitting and the follow-up visits for the first year.”
Our insurance through Chad’s job at the time paid nothing toward hearing aids. Not one dime. I went home that night and found it in the plan booklet. They were listed under “Exclusions,” right underneath cosmetic surgery.
I thought that was just about the cruelest place on earth to put them.
We set up a payment plan with the clinic. $142 a month for twenty-four months. I paid it off a little at a time, the last payments coming after Chad and I had already split.
I never asked him for half. He offered once, and I told him to put it toward her school clothes instead. And he did. Every August, he took her to the outlet mall and let her pick out whatever she wanted, and she always came home with something purple.
