Joey nodded.
When her turn came, Joey fingerspelled her own name without thinking. Ms. Alexander was checking each student off in her roll book. HAVE R-U-T-H W-I-L-L-I-S.
With heart pounding, Joey slowly answered, MY NAME J-O-E-Y R-U-T-H W-I-L-L-I-S.
OKAY. Ms. Alexander checked her name off, smiled, and pointed to the next student, who was fingerspelling her name when she glanced back at Joey. She brought an index finger to her ear then around to rest against her lips before pointing at Joey. DEAF YOU?
YES.
UNDERSTAND A-S-L YOU?
LITTLE BIT, Joey answered.
HAPPY YOU HERE, J-O-E-Y R-U-T-H.
Joey bit her lip.
After class, she waited at Ms. Alexander’s desk until everyone else had left. She kept her head bowed and drew arcs on the carpet with the toe of her shoe until Ms. Alexander tapped her shoulder.
QUESTION?
Joey took a deep breath. “No, ma’am. I … I just want to tell you something.”
Ms. Alexander waited.
“My name isn’t Joey Ruth. I mean it is Joey, but Ruth is my mother’s name. I just finished eighth grade.”
TALL YOU.
Joey nodded. “I’m using her name.”
When Ms. Alexander’s eyes narrowed, Joey thought she was a goner, but instead she turned, uncapped the marker, and wrote, You are welcome however you got here.
On the second day, Ms. Alexander asked the other students to explain why they were taking the class. As they answered, she showed them the signs, then numbered and wrote each reason on the board:
1. New friend deaf.
2. Uncle deaf.
3. Father is losing his hearing.
4. Thinks it’s cool to talk with my hands.
So it went around the room. Mostly they each had someone with whom they wished to talk. But when it was the turn of the young woman sitting directly across the room from Joey, she didn’t answer. Instead she looked at Joey and tried to smile, then suddenly signed, SORRY, brought her hands to her eyes, and began to cry.
The woman in the desk next to her reached and squeezed the younger woman’s shoulder. Ms. Alexander put her hand up for everyone to wait. After a minute the woman wiped her eyes on the tissue someone handed her. She must have given her reason for being there when the tissue obscured her mouth, because Ms. Alexander began to show her the signs she needed.
The young woman nodded, looked at Joey, and signed, MY BABY BORN DEAF.
Out of the corner of her eye, Joey saw Ms. Alexander add it to the growing list on the board: 9. Baby born deaf.
All eyes turned to Joey as if they expected her to say something, but Ms. Alexander just pointed to the next person, who said she needed a second language to graduate. She blushed, then glanced first at the young woman with the deaf baby, then at Joey, before going on. “I thought ASL looked easier than French or Spanish because I already know how to speak English.”
Ms. Alexander broke her own rule. “It’s not easier,” she said. “It will be just as difficult as any other language you study.” 10. Need a second language.
When it was Joey’s turn, she realized she’d broken into a sweat. Her palms and her underarms were wet, but she swallowed and instead of answering, I’m here because I’m deaf, she looked across at the young woman. “I wasn’t born deaf,” she said, “so sometimes I imagine I still hear the sounds I remember, but I have a friend whose mother was born deaf and his father lost his hearing when he was two. His mother’s family all learned to sign, and eventually his father learned it, too. I know Charlie would say you are doing the right thing for your baby.”
Joey made no attempt to stop the tears that slid down her cheeks when Ms. Alexander wrote, 14. So I can talk to the people I love.
After class, the young woman came and hugged Joey and thanked her. A few other students came and signed, MY NAME … and NICE MEET YOU.
* * *
After school each day, Joey went straight to Charlie’s. The minute Sukari heard the squeal of her bike brakes, she’d appear at the front window hooting and signing, J-Y HERE. HURRY, HURRY. The second an exhausted-looking Charlie unlocked the door, she was out and into the milk basket Ray had wired to Joey’s handlebars for what became their daily ride home to play with Luke.
One afternoon Joey was sitting, as usual, in the yard watching Sukari and Luke play cowboy and Indian when Ray came home from the mill with two newly hatched, nearly dead Canada geese. Ruth interpreted for Joey as he explained that he’d found them lying at the muddy edge of the mill’s pond on Georgia-Pacific’s four-hundred-acre oceanfront property.
Over her mother’s objections, and with Sukari and Luke at her elbow, Joey lined her bathtub with newspapers and got an old yard-sale heating pad from the closet. She made them a bed on it under a cardboard box with a hole cut in the side so they could get in and out for food and water.
Ray called Charlie and he said, for the evening, just scramble them some eggs. Neither ate and in the morning, one was dead.
When Joey and Sukari came home the next day after school, the other one was running around and around in the tub, peeping and pooping.
Sukari was astonished. BIRD MAKE DIRTY, she signed, more or less to herself, every time the little goose pooped. She and Luke hung over the side and watched it for a long time until Luke got bored. But even his signing, TICKLE-CHASE, couldn’t get Sukari to leave her post by the tub.
By the end of the week, the gosling was three times the size it had been when Ray found it. Joey’d never seen anything grow that fast. “It’s like finding a different goose in there every afternoon,” she told her mother.
As far as Sukari was concerned, the goose was hers, and vice versa. One day Joey decided it was time to teach him—the gender that Luke had assigned him since there was no way to tell if it was a girl or a boy—how to find his own food. With Luke and Sukari at her heels and Ray and Ruth watching from the doorway, she carried the kicking, foot-tall goose outside and put him down in a patch of dandelions. The second his little webbed feet touched the ground, he ran in orbits around first one tree, then another, his wing-nubs held out for balance. Sukari signed, CHASE ME, BIRD, and somehow timed one of his loops to get in front of him. From that moment on, where Sukari went, the goose named Gilbert followed.
A four-foot-high culvert ran from side to side beneath Morgan Creek Drive. The year-round cascade of water through it had formed a shallow pool on their side of the road. Each afternoon, Joey arrived home with Sukari and let the goose out of the cage Ray had built for him. While she changed into shorts and a T-shirt, Sukari and Luke helped Gilbert find bugs to eat. Sukari tipped up pots, beneath which sow bugs and earwigs hid. She’d eat a few sow bugs, but earwigs had pincers, so she left them for Gilbert. She also picked dandelion leaves for him; she ate the flowers.
The trail to the pool started on the far side of the yard. It curved to parallel the slope of the road bed, then doglegged right, down to the creek. The minute the goose heard the screen door slam and saw Joey come out of the house, he started across the yard, feet slapping the ground in a roly-poly run. Sukari followed, shedding her T-shirt and diaper on the way. Luke, who lived in his cowboy outfit, would peel off his vest, gun belt, shirt, cowboy hat, and chaps, to arrive last in his boots and bare-bottomed. It was all Joey could do to finish stripping him before they plunged into the icy water, screaming, while the goose swam in circles, then bathed, showering them with water.
When Gilbert started to fly, it was clear that his days living surrounded by a redwood forest were numbered, but Joey stalled releasing him until school started in August. Late in the afternoon, on the first Saturday after classes began, they all drove to the manmade pond on a small cattle farm in Caspar, a tiny town seven miles south of Fort Bragg. Dozens of Canada geese arrived there each evening to spend the night floating, safe from raccoons and foxes, in the middle of the pond.
Joey’s biggest concern was how Sukari would react—whether she would let
them leave her goose there. They rode to the pond in Ray’s truck, Gilbert sitting in Joey’s lap, a hotel shoe-polishing mitt over his head to keep him calm.
Other Canada geese were feeding at the pond, as were an assortment of domestic geese. People came every day to feed them, so when they pulled off the road, all the geese came running to the cattle fence.
Ray lifted Gilbert over the fence, but the sight of all the other geese frightened him. He ran, lifted off, and flew out into the middle of the pond. Sukari screamed, leapt out of Joey’s arms, bolted over the fence, and charged the strange geese, which scattered in a panic.
Sukari loped along the levee that contained the pond until she was as close as she could get to where Gilbert floated. Joey had gone over the fence after her, but she stopped when Sukari did.
COME BIRD, Sukari signed.
Gilbert swam straight to her and walked out of the water. Sukari squatted down and slipped her arms under his wings. Joey glanced back at Ruth, Ray, and Luke, smiling.
“Look,” her mother said, pointing.
Sukari was sitting on the levee, her arms still wrapped beneath Gilbert’s wings, but he’d snuggled into her lap and lain his head and neck over Sukari’s shoulder.
When Joey called, Gilbert followed Sukari back to the truck and they all drove home again. The next weekend, without Sukari, they took Gilbert to a man in Little River. He had five other tame Canada geese and a twenty-acre pond.
For a month afterward, the first thing Sukari would ask when Joey came over was, GO SEE BIRD? And if they went to play with Luke, Sukari ran straight to Gilbert’s cage, signing, WHERE BIRD?
The first time she asked, Joey told her he’d flown away, but Sukari didn’t understand what that meant. Eventually, Joey just said she didn’t know, which was kind of the truth, and after a while Sukari gave up and quit asking. For a long time, Joey believed she’d forgotten, until they were sitting in the yard one day when Sukari suddenly looked up and began to scream. Joey glanced up in time to see a flock of geese disappear over the treetops. They were headed north, flying in formation. Sukari watched them go, signing, COME BIRD, until they were out of sight. She watched the sky for a few more minutes, then turned. BIRD GO, NEW FRIEND, she signed, then crawled into Joey’s lap.
* * *
Near the end of September, Ruth asked, rather unenthusiastically, if Joey wanted a party for her fourteenth birthday, which was on October 19. To her mother’s obvious relief, Joey said no. Whom would she invite, except Charlie, Sukari, and maybe Kenny, though he’d come back from Maine madly in love with some girl he’d met there?
At Charlie’s that weekend, he, too, asked if she wanted a party.
Joey shook her head. “Not really. There’s no one to invite.”
“What are we, chopped liver?”
She grinned. “You know what I mean.”
Charlie had let a few of his zucchinis grow to the size of small watermelons. He was cutting one into half-inch-thick slabs, which Joey was dipping a slice at a time into beaten eggs. Sukari was getting a lot of flour on herself and some on both sides of each slice of zucchini. They were following an eggplant parmesan recipe, but since neither of them liked eggplant, they were substituting zucchini. Well, I like a good party, Charlie wrote, after he rinsed and put away the knife. And since I don’t know how old the Dirty Diaper Devil is, I think the 19th would be a good day for her to turn four, so how about I throw a party for her and you can stop by if you’re in the neighborhood.
“You don’t have to do this.”
“I want to.” I’m an old man. How many of your birthdays can I expect to see?
“All of them, I hope.”
As it turned out, that weekend happened to be a good one for Lynn and her new husband to get away. A man, Charlie assured Joey, couldn’t possibly be good enough for her.
On the Wednesday before the party, Ruth picked Joey up at the speech therapist and took her to Spunky Skunk, the toy store in town, where she spent most of her allowance for a large box of crayons and a big coloring book full of bird pictures, including one of a Canada goose.
Though Ruth, in her way, had clearly gotten attached to Sukari over the summer, she drew the line at spending “hard-earned money” on a present for a chimpanzee. Joey was just happy she had agreed to go, since she still bore a grudge against Charlie. Though Ray had gone over a number of times to watch baseball or golf, her mother had rejected every invitation he’d extended, nor had she let Joey take Luke.
After showing Luke Sukari’s room and her tortoise, Joey left them to put one of Luke’s old ten-piece puzzles of a German shepherd together. It was the “gift” her mother brought wrapped in an old Harvest Market grocery bag, which advertised the annual Fourth of July salmon barbecue.
Though Charlie had been set to dislike Lynn’s husband, it turned out to be impossible. He, like Lynn, was a doctor, a cardiologist, with a big wide grin like Sukari’s. His name was Jack, which he knelt and fingerspelled slowly for Sukari after he noticed her trudging along at his heels signing, NAME YOU MAN? over and over.
“I only married him for your benefit,” Lynn told Charlie. “We needed somebody in the family who can keep you and your old ticker in line.”
“Hmph,” was Charlie’s reply.
After she and Sukari blew out the candles—fourteen on Joey’s half and four on Sukari’s—and finished having carrot cake and ice cream, Joey went to sit on the deck with the adults mostly as company for her mother, who she knew felt uncomfortable. She had come to the party only because it was Joey’s birthday, but she sat separately from the others, gazing off into the woods and speaking only when spoken to. Joey was trying to track the conversation when her mother suddenly jumped up and ran into the house. Everyone rushed after her.
Luke was crying and Sukari was standing on the couch throwing magazines and crayons at the puzzle.
“What’s the matter with you,” Charlie snapped at Sukari.
“Did she bite you?” Ruth asked Luke, which, by her face, she instantly regretted asking. They’d played together all summer and not bitten each other.
Sukari scrambled into Charlie’s arms, where she continued to scream and point at the puzzle.
“Oh, that’s it.” Charlie covered the puzzle with a cushion. “She’s afraid of dogs.” He patted her back. “Since I’ve had her, she’s never seen a dog, so I think that must be how they treed and killed her mother.”
Sukari stuck her lips out and signed, BAD, BITE SUKARI. Her forehead crinkled and her eyes widened.
After asking Joey if she minded, Lynn tore two pages from the coloring book and made Sukari and Luke sit together and draw. Luke scribbled for a few minutes, then ran to Ruth with his picture. Joey saw Sukari look up and watch as Ruth held it for everyone to admire, then hugged and kissed him. Sukari scribbled another minute, then came out onto the deck, dragging her picture.
Joey expected she’d take it to Charlie or herself, but she carried it straight to Ruth.
Throughout the summer, Sukari had kept her distance from Ruth, so her mother tensed a bit when Sukari laid it on her lap and poked her picture with a finger. GOOD GIRL ME, she signed. HUG.
When Joey interpreted, Ruth smiled. She leaned over. “This is the best one,” she said close to Sukari’s ear, and, just as she had done for Luke, she held it for everyone to see, then patted Sukari’s head.
Sukari waited a moment, then signed, HUG.
“She wants a hug, Mom,” Joey said. “Like Luke got.”
“Oh … well … I don’t know.” Ruth glanced around. Everyone was watching and smiling. “She’s a little person, isn’t she?”
HUG, Sukari signed again, then held her arms up.
Ruth reached over, put her hands under Sukari’s arms, and lifted her into her lap. She hugged the little chimp and kissed the top of her head.
Joey glanced at Ray, who winked at her and smiled.
CHAPTER NINE
On an uncommonly warm night in April, Joey awoke from a
dream of being adrift at sea in a small boat to find herself gripping the sides of her bed, which heaved and bucked beneath her. She sat bolt upright. Earthquake. She grinned. The framed poster that Charlie had given her for her birthday of Koko, the sign-language-using gorilla, and her kitten, All Ball, swung on its nail. Her little vibrating alarm clock, which was on the nightstand, duck-walked to the edge and fell off. This is so cool, she thought for a second before her ceiling fan came loose. Joey pulled her legs up and covered her head, but the fan fell only the length of its cord, then swung in wide, slow circles just inches above the bed. The redwood limbs, just visible in the gray light of morning, swayed here and there, up and down. Then, as suddenly as it had started, her bed stopped moving.
Joey jumped up. The chest in the hall had fallen against her door and she hit her shin on it. She lifted it back up against the wall and cut through the bathroom to Luke’s room where she spotted his two little legs sticking out from beneath his bed. Her heart leapt. “Are you okay?” She grabbed his ankles and pulled him out.
He was crying and she hugged him. “It’s okay, honey. We had an earthquake. It’s over now,” she said.
“Mommy,” he wailed when he saw the flashlight beam swaying down the dark staircase from Ruth and Ray’s room.
Ray had a lump above his left eye, which was already darkening.
Ruth squeezed around him. “Are you two all right?”
“We’re fine,” Joey said.
They were all smiling and laughing with relief when the house began to shake again.
“Aftershock,” Ruth said calmly, but she grabbed Ray’s arm.
The kitchen was a wreck. The bottom cupboards had had child-proof latches on them from the time Luke started to crawl, but the upper cabinets had flown open and nearly all the dishes, glasses, spices, herbs, and canned goods were on the floor. There was broken glass everywhere, splattered with Newman’s Own spaghetti sauce, which made the mess look bloody.
Joey knelt to hold a garbage bag open while Ray shoveled the broken glass into it. When he suddenly dropped the dustpan and went to the front door, the hair on the back of Joey’s neck prickled. She scrambled to her feet and ran after him.