Dr. Meyer had a pair of loaner hearing aids laid out on a paper towel on her desk, already hooked up to her computer by a thin cord.
They were plain beige. Nothing like Emma’s purple ones.
Dr. Meyer has known Emma since that very first booth with the blocks and the bucket. She looked up when I came in and didn’t smile. She just nodded at the chair.
“I pulled her last audiogram from March,” she said. “Her hearing’s stable, which is good news. I’m setting these to her prescription now. They won’t be exactly like hers, but they’ll be close.”
I sat down in the chair where Emma usually sits. I watched the numbers move across the screen. Dr. Meyer worked fast and didn’t make me fill the silence.
After a while, she asked, without looking up, “Do you want to tell me what happened?”
So I told her. The weekend. The supper table. The talking back. Friday. I told it as plainly as I could.
When I finished, Dr. Meyer stopped typing. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.
“I see this more than you’d think,” she said. “Not usually as a punishment. But grown-ups who don’t understand. A grandparent who thinks she’s faking. A stepparent who thinks the aids are like reading glasses. Something you only need now and then.”
“She can hear some without them,” I said. “That’s what confuses people. If you talk loud, right in front of her face, she gets most of it.”
“Right. And so people think she’s choosing not to listen.” Dr. Meyer shook her head. “She’s not choosing anything. Without these, she’s guessing at half of every sentence, all day long. A school day like that is like running a race with a sack over your head.”
She tested the loaners in a little metal box that beeped and hummed. Then she snapped a pair of soft silicone domes onto the tubes in place of earmolds, because Emma’s custom molds were back at Chad’s house, sitting in a case with her own aids.
“These will sit a little looser without her molds,” she said. “She might get some whistling if they’re not seated right. Push them in gently, and tell her to keep her hair tucked behind them. But she’ll hear.”
She slid the loaners into a small clear pouch and set a card of 312 batteries beside it. Then she pushed a single sheet of paper across the desk.
“Loaner agreement,” she said. “Just says you’ll bring them back in the same shape. Replacement value’s $2,200 if they get lost, but nobody’s ever had to pay it.”
I signed it. My signature looked shaky.
Dr. Meyer pressed the pouch into my palm and closed my fingers around it.
“No charge for loaners,” she said. “Keep them as long as you need them. And Amanda?”
“Yes?”
“You did right, driving down here. A day matters at her age. Every day of words matters.”
Deb walked me back out to the lot. At the door, she held it open with one hip.
“You tell that girl Deb said hi,” she said. “And tell her she still owes me a Minnesota plate.”
It was 10:10 when I got back on the interstate. I did the speed limit, maybe a hair over.
The pouch sat on the passenger seat where I could see it. Every few miles, I reached over and touched it to make sure it was still there. The way you check on a sleeping baby in the back seat.
I called the school office from a gas station at the edge of town. The secretary, Gail, told me Mrs. Lund’s class would be out for late-morning recess until 11:30. That’s the one the third graders get before lunch, and Mrs. Lund had playground duty that week.
I pulled into the school lot at 11:15.
It’s a one-story brick building, the same school Chad and I both went to as kids, with the gym at one end and the playground out back by the ball field. The flag was snapping hard in the wind. I could hear kids shrieking all the way from the parking lot.
Mrs. Lund met me at the side door before I could even push the buzzer.
She’s in her fifties and has taught third grade in our town for almost thirty years. She had her graying brown hair pulled back and was wearing her green cardigan, the same one she wears every spring.
“Thank goodness,” she said. “Come on. She’s out back.”
She didn’t ask what I was carrying. She walked me down the hall past the art room and the lost and found box, pushed open the back door, and we stepped out into the spring daylight.
The grass along the edge of the playground had finally turned green after a long brown April. The blacktop was warm, and the four-square lines were faded almost white. Kids were swarming all over the climbing set and the big red slide. A few boys were arguing over a kickball out on the grass.
And Emma was standing at the bottom of the red slide in her purple jacket.
All by herself.
She wasn’t playing. She wasn’t even trying to. She was standing very still with her back to the slide, watching the other kids’ faces. Turning her head from one to the next. Trying to catch what they were saying by reading their lips. Her brown braid hung down over one shoulder.
She had something clutched in both hands, held tight against her chest.
It took me a second to see what it was.
It was her little tan hearing aid case. The one that sits on her nightstand at her dad’s house.
It was empty.
She had carried an empty case to school and held on to it all morning long.
