She stopped and looked up when Jason made a throat-cutting motion.
“That was fine,” Ms. Rowe said, then pointed to Jason. “You next,” she said, smiling coldly.
Joey sank back into the chair and stared at the page. It blurred and swam before her eyes. Don’t let them see you sweat, her mother’s voice said in time to the dull thud of a headache coming.
Next period was biology. Kenny glanced at her when he came in. She felt herself start to blush and quickly looked away. She’d put her backpack on the empty seat at her table. When Kenny headed in her direction, she leaned to move it, but Dillon caught his arm and dragged him off to sit with him.
Their teacher, Mr. Cary, was working his way, though not in any regular order, through the phyla in the animal, plant, and fungi kingdoms. They had started with marine invertebrates and algae while the weather was still nice enough to visit tide pools, then they’d switched to amphibians and fungi when the rains started in November. Joey drew well and had made cards with hand-colored sketches of each organism on one side and a description and some characteristics on the other to use as flash cards. Her best grades ever were in this class.
“Do you have your aids?” Mr. Cary asked. She hadn’t given him the microphone because she tried never to wear the FM system in front of Kenny. He knew she was deaf but she wanted at least to look normal.
Joey shrugged. “I forgot them,” she lied.
Jason glanced at her and grinned.
“Today-is-a-lecture-class,” Mr. Cary said slowly. “Do-you-want-someone-to-take-notes-for-you?”
Joey wanted to slide under the table. She shook her head. “I can do it.”
Mr. Cary was no longer looking at her. “Thanks, Ken,” he said.
Joey glanced at Kenny, who smiled.
“Ken-said-he-would-take-notes-for-you.”
Joey blushed.
At lunch, when she got to the cafeteria, Roxy was already there with Brad, Kristin, and Dillon. Joey was almost at the end of the line and had raised her hand to wave, when Roxy turned away sharply. Well, that was okay. Joey understood. She wanted to be with her boyfriend, and Joey didn’t really like Kristin and Dillon that much, anyway. She’d wait to tell Roxy about Sukari this afternoon in history, their one class together. She took her sandwich and left the cafeteria. She had a place behind the library where she used to go and eat before Roxy was her friend.
“Where were you?” Roxy asked her when she flopped into the desk beside her in history.
“When?”
“At lunch. I saved you a seat.”
“I … I didn’t see you,” Joey said.
Roxy shrugged.
Their teacher rapped for attention. History was Joey’s worst subject. It was nearly all lecture and she couldn’t keep up. Roxy had volunteered to take notes for her, but her notes were so bad that they were nearly useless.
Roxy slipped her a note: There’s a dance next Saturday. Are you going?
Roxy knew she wasn’t going. Sometimes she did stuff like that, ask a question she knew the answer to. Joey wasn’t sure why.
I’ve been invited to a friend’s house, she wrote back, stretching the truth a little since they’d set no specific date. He has a … Joey stopped and crossed the last part out. Something warned her not to go any further. As much as she wanted to share meeting Sukari with Roxy, she couldn’t get the way she’d laughed when Brad was teasing Harley out of her mind. She suddenly decided it wasn’t a secret that would be safe with Roxy.
Roxy lived with her mother in a small apartment in a building that overlooked Noyo Harbor. Since the day they’d met Joey had been planning to take Roxy to the café to meet Ruth. How about coming down to meet my mother tomorrow?
Roxy reached across the aisle and scribbled, Can we eat free?
Joey smiled and nodded. Roxy was her mother’s link to the world, as Ruth was Joey’s. How could they not like each other?
At home that night, she was less sure. “I thought I’d bring Roxy down to meet you tomorrow.” Joey was setting the table.
“I’d like to meet one of your little friends,” Ruth said. “Which one is she?”
Joey hated it when her mother acted as if she were still a child and that her life was normal. “She’s not little, she’s my only friend, and I told you about her; her mother’s deaf,” Joey said sharply.
“Watch your tone of voice, young lady.”
“That’ll be a tall order,” Joey said, pulling on an earlobe.
“What’s with you?” her mother snapped.
“Nothing. It’s just you act as if I’m armpit deep in friends and beating boyfriends off with a stick.”
“You’re too young for a boyfriend.”
“Are you even listening to me?”
“I said yes. I’d like to meet her. What more do you want?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
* * *
The next day, Joey rode to work with her mother and spent the morning trying to study in her old corner, but she was too excited to get anything done. When her stomach began to growl, Joey decided it was time to go get Roxy.
She walked North Harbor Drive to the base of the staircase behind the Harbor Lite Motel. The climb was steep, at least 150 feet, and by the time she reached the top, she’d stripped down to her T-shirt. She walked the block and a half to Roxy’s apartment building and knocked on the door. Though it was nearly twelve, Roxy answered still in her pajamas.
“Did you forget?” Joey asked.
Roxy stepped out onto the catwalk and pulled the door closed behind her. “I can’t go. My mother’s on a tear.”
“Come on. Let me ask her. You can have whatever you want for lunch and ice cream and my mother will bring you home when she gets off at three.”
Roxy turned her head sharply, listening. “Well, that suits me, too, old lady,” she yelled through the crack in the door.
Joey flinched. “My mother’d kill me if I yelled at her like that.”
“My mother’d kill me, too, if she could hear me.” Roxy grinned. “She just said she doesn’t care where I go. So wait here. I’ll change clothes.”
Joey sat on the top step. A whale-watching boat lay off the harbor entrance, waiting to surf the next breaker through the narrow opening to the channel. The passengers weren’t looking too healthy; many were still hanging over the railing. A storm was due by nightfall and the seas were getting higher by the hour.
“Have you ever seen a whale?” Joey asked Roxy as they walked toward the staircase.
“Just ole Arnold, that blimp in our history class?”
“He’s real nice, though,” Joey said.
Joey had never told Roxy that the reason she didn’t sign was because her mother didn’t want her to. She hadn’t wanted to go into the reasons, all of which would have been offensive to someone who learned to sign before she learned to speak.
After Joey introduced them, the first thing out of Roxy’s mouth, when she shook hands with Ruth, was, “I’m going to teach Joey to sign.”
From the look on her mother’s face, you’d have thought she’d said she was going to teach Joey to rob banks. “I don’t want her signing,” Ruth said.
“She thinks I’m better off reading lips,” Joey said, trying to change the footing they were on, though she knew it was too late.
One of the reasons Roxy had been instantly popular at school was that she would say or do anything. The first words she taught Joey to sign were four-letter. Nothing was sacred. Roxy pulled herself up to her full height, looked Ruth right in the eye, and said, “Well, that’s really stupid.”
Ruth’s eyes narrowed. “My daughter. My decision. I wish I could say it had been a pleasure to meet you.” She spun and walked away.
When Roxy slammed out of the restaurant, Joey started to follow, but Ruth caught up with her at the door and grabbed her arm. “Don’t you dare follow that little … snot.”
“Why were you so mean to her? She’s my friend.”
&nb
sp; “Not anymore, she’s not.”
Joey jerked free of her mother and ran out the door. Roxy was marching back down North Harbor Drive toward the cliff and the staircase. Joey called to her, but she kept going.
When Joey spoke in normal tones, she couldn’t hear herself. “Roxy, wait,” she screamed.
Roxy kept going.
Joey took off running and caught her at the base of the staircase. “Please, don’t be mad at me. You’re my best friend.”
Roxy turned and for a moment Joey thought she was going to hit her. Her hands were balled into fists and her jaw was set. “Your mother’s an idiot,” she snapped.
Joey couldn’t bring herself to say I know she is and yet she was afraid to disagree with Roxy. She lowered her head and nodded.
When Roxy started up the stairs, Joey thought that was it. She’d lost her one and only friend. She squeezed her eyes shut against the sting of tears and turned away, but she’d gone only a few yards back toward the restaurant when Roxy tapped her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said, when Joey spun around. “She is an idiot, but let’s not let that stand in our way.” Roxy hugged her. “I am going to teach you to sign, in spite of her. How ’bout it?”
The relief Joey felt was overwhelming. Her head bobbed. “Oh, yes, please.”
* * *
Luke was picking up Spanish from Mrs. Gomez, and it occurred to Joey, as she and Roxy worked in the library on Monday with Signs of the Times open between them, that if she taught Luke to sign, starting now, he’d pick it up as quickly as Spanish and be able to sign with Sukari when they met. Before she and Roxy left for history class, Joey checked the Signed English Dictionary for Preschool and Elementary Levels out of the library and sneaked it home in her backpack.
That evening, after dinner, when Joey thought her mother was out helping Ray stack the firewood he’d split, she told Luke she had a game to teach him. They were sitting on the floor in his room, forming the signs for “want candy” with his hands, when her mother walked in.
“Want candy,” Luke shouted, then signed, WANT CANDY, for Ruth and giggled.
Joey’s stomach did a flip-flop as she watched the expression on her mother’s face go from pleasure at seeing Joey reading to Luke, to a tight-jawed, icy stare. She marched out of the room and came back with a pen and notebook, something she did whenever she considered what she had to say too important for Joey to miss a word. She’d already written, It’s okay to teach him some words for fun but I don’t want you two talking with your hands. It makes your handicap more obvious.
Like an ember in a dead-looking fire, resentment flared. “More obvious than hearing aids?” Joey snapped.
Her mother wrote something and poked the pad for her to read on. It could stunt … she dashed a line through “stunt” and wrote, slow down his learning to talk. He’s already mixing his English with Spanish.
Ruth snatched back the pad and added, And it will keep you from fitting in with people who can hear!
“How am I gonna fit in with the hearing, with only you to talk to, Mom?”
“Practice your lip-reading,” Ruth said, emphasizing each word. “And stay away from that awful little girl,” she snapped. “She’s trash.”
Joey opened her mouth to argue, but her mother gave her the look, jaw set, scarred eyebrow arched. The look threatened the silent treatment, which would disconnect Joey completely. She knew the sound of her mother’s voice was only a memory, but even so, she couldn’t risk being cut off from the only human sound she could still hear. She’d be a crab in a jar then.
When they first came to Fort Bragg, her mother had tried to make their homelessness an adventure. They’d parked someplace different each night, as if they were camping. Joey never went to Glass Beach without remembering the night they’d slept there.
For decades, Glass Beach had been the city dump and over the years since it closed, the ocean had broken up the glass jars and bottles and worn the shards down to small, smooth, jewel-like fragments. Ruth had sat on the sand and watched Joey select little pieces of the colorful glass to keep for a souvenir. Nearby, a little boy was collecting hermit crabs from an exposed tide pool. He had four or five of them in a jar when he put the lid on and carried them over to show Joey. When she saw them circling and circling, their tiny pincers feeling for a way out, she tried to take them away from him. He started to cry and Ruth made Joey give back the jar.
“Make him let ’em go, Mommy,” Joey cried. “Make him let them go.”
“They’re his, Joey,” her mother said.
Joey tried to grab the jar again. The little boy ran with it to his mother.
“Mommy,” Joey screamed, “make him let ’em go.”
“I can’t, Joey.” Ruth picked her up and tried to carry her away, but she screamed and kicked, pleading for the crabs.
“Joey, stop it. What’s the matter with you?”
Joey caught her mother’s face between her hands. “Mommy, they can’t hear in there.”
Tears came to her mother’s eyes. She turned and marched back across the sand to the little boy and his mother to explain that Joey was deaf and that she was afraid that the little crabs couldn’t hear in that jar. The boy’s mother’s indignant expression softened and she promised that he’d let them go before they went home.
That night, after her mother had forbidden her to see Roxy again, Joey lay on her bed staring at the ceiling, tears running in a steady stream from her eyes into her ears. The only person Joey had ever trusted completely was her mother and she felt like Ruth was pulling away. She couldn’t understand why adding Roxy, Charlie, and Sukari to her life might mean breaking the bond she and her mother had. Since she’d understood about the crabs, why couldn’t she understand now?
CHAPTER FOUR
Wednesday was speech therapy and the one day her mother still picked her up, though at the hospital, where her therapist was, rather than at school. Since she hadn’t taken the bus home, it was still early when Joey jumped from the car at the top of their driveway to collect the mail. As far as she could remember, she’d never received a letter or even a card, though there were a few in a shoebox from her grandmother who died when she was five. Joey handed the stack through her mother’s window without looking at it. It was while she was getting plates down to set the table for dinner that her mother tapped her shoulder and handed her the envelope.
“For you,” she said with a frown.
Joey turned it over and read her name and address. It gave her a strange sense of herself, as if she’d become an adult for the price of a postage stamp.
Ms. Joey Willis
19904 Morgan Creek Dr.
Ft. Bragg, CA 95437
She looked for a return address but there was only the name Mansell.
Having missed the chance to tell her mother about meeting Charlie and Sukari, she now found, with this letter in her hand, that she’d gone back to wanting to keep them a secret, but her mother waited expectantly. Joey stared again at her name and address, then put the envelope in the pocket of her sweater and began to set the table.
Her mother waved her hand in front of Joey’s face. “Who’s Mansell?”
“A person down on Turner.”
Joey started to turn away but her mother caught her chin. “A man, a woman, a child?”
Joey couldn’t hear her tone of voice but her mother’s face showed signs of growing anger.
“A man,” Joey said. “An old man. A doctor.”
“How did you meet him?”
“I was mushrooming on his property by accident.”
“Why would he write you a letter?”
Joey’s knees felt weak. “Because I’m deaf, Mom,” she snapped. “It’s hard to talk to me.” In that instant she knew why she wanted to keep their meeting from her mother. Charlie was going to be the one person with whom she wouldn’t feel ashamed of her deafness. He, unlike her mother, understood how she felt. And Joey knew that Roxy would tire of teaching her to sign, but Charlie wouldn??
?t.
“That doesn’t answer my question. Why is he writing you?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t read it yet.” She stared boldly back at her mother, but her stomach filled with butterflies. She wasn’t going to lose him to her mother’s suspicions and secret-keeping. She was thinking just that when Ruth snatched the plates away. “I think you should let me see it.”
“No. It’s mine. You can’t read my mail.” Joey whirled, headed for her room, but changed her mind, circled the sofa, and ran from the house.
She ran at first as if her mother were on her heels, then zigged and zagged up through the trees behind their house. About fifty yards up a slope, on the top terrace of their property, was the stump of a redwood tree that had grown there long before Columbus discovered America. The stump was over twelve feet across and had a burned-out hollow beneath it. When they’d first moved to this house, Joey, unsure of the kind of man Ray would be, found and kept the location of the tree a secret in case she ever needed to hide again. Now it was just her place to be alone.
On either side of the stump was a rectangular springboard hole where the loggers, who cut the tree in the early 1900s, before chainsaws were invented, plunged the end of a thick board into each side of its trunk. She’d seen pictures of men standing on these platforms, one on either end of a double-handled saw, cutting the tree off four feet or so above the ground. By putting a foot in one of the springboard holes, Joey could boost herself up onto the wide, flat top.
In the winter, she kept a small brown tarp hidden in the dry center of the hollow. Joey bent to retrieve it and felt the hair on her neck prickle. She whirled around, her heart racing, but as usual there was no one there. Sometimes silence gave her the creeps, especially in dim light with anger in the air.