I AM NOW deaf. I imagine Isabelle trying to comfort me by telling me that Beethoven went deaf, too.
Everything is quiet. Total and absolute quiet. The duck doctor and his ducklings come and shine the penlight into my eyes and poke at the bottom of my feet, but I can’t hear what they’re saying.
I can’t hear the few words Grandpa Marcus and Grandma Régine whisper to each other in my presence. I feel like I’m in a soundproof cage. The world is a silent movie, playing out in 3-D around me.
My freshman year at Morrison, I took an art class where the teacher, Ms. Walker, taught us origami. We were supposed to fold our handmade washi paper into whatever shapes we wanted. I wanted to make silence.
I looked up the Japanese letters for silence, which vaguely looked like two figures dancing. And when I finally managed to fold the paper into those shapes, everyone in the class, including Ms. Walker, thought that I had made Isabelle and me.
I miss the faint sound of the radio at night.
I miss music.
Even though Isabelle used to say I was tone-deaf, I miss my tone deafness. I miss echoes, the sounds of footsteps, and the nurses tiptoeing in and out in the middle of the night. I miss the intercom announcements, telling the staff about lunchtime seminars and Zumba classes. I miss all the other announcements urging the doctors and nurses to report to patients’ rooms or to the nurses’ station. I miss the sounds of shift changes, distant sirens, and car horns.
Now, the only voices I hear are in my head.
In the total silence of the hospital room, I try not to think too much about Isabelle. Because if she comes to me now, if I keep dreaming about her, I will never wake up. I will never leave here.
Instead, I think about Jean Michel Brun.
DO YOU WANT TO MEET UP LATER? He passed me a note in class when we came back to school after New Year’s.
While Isabelle and I were in New York at Uncle Patrick’s apartment that New Year’s Eve of the blizzard, Jean Michel Brun called me on my cell phone as we were watching the Times Square ball drop on television. Isabelle and I had begged Uncle Patrick to take us to some exciting music industry party, but we had worn him out that day and he was too exhausted to leave the house. Besides, he never went out on New Year’s Eve, Uncle Patrick said. He liked to stay in and reflect.
He wasn’t looking for a girlfriend or anything, Jean Michel told me. It sounded like he was reflecting, too. He had just broken up with someone who was going to another school, and he wasn’t sure he was over her yet.
“You might have texted me all this or written me a long email,” I said.
“Or I could have drawn you a picture,” he said. “But I wanted to hear your voice.”
“Why aren’t you at a party or something?” I asked.
“Why aren’t you?” he said.
“Happy New Year,” I said as the ball landed.
This was going to be the best year of my life.
Until it wasn’t.
Early in the new year, one day after school, Jean Michel and I went to a restaurant called Chez Moy in Little Haiti. The place was my idea. He had written, Do you want to meet up later? And I had written back, Chez Moy.
Chez Moy was surrounded by mechanics’ shops, storefront churches, and record shops that blasted music from giant loudspeakers on the sidewalk. The owner of the restaurant, Moy, was one of Dad’s old army buddies, whom he’d encouraged to move to Miami years ago. Moy was running for city commissioner in District 3, which includes Little Haiti. Pictures of him and his massive biceps, fully visible in his camouflage T-shirt, covered the restaurant walls.
Sitting across from Jean Michel, I nervously scratched at the roots of my braids while he tugged at his earring.
“I hear you want to go to art school,” he said.
“Who told you that?” I asked.
Then we both blurted out at the same time, “Tina!”
So he’d been talking to Tina. In computer science lab. About me.
“I’d like to go to art school, too,” he said.
Then we should go together, I wanted to say, but held back.
“I might try it on my own first, though,” he said. “Like Basquiat.”
“Basquiat was great,” I said.
“So are we,” he said.
I felt my cheeks flaming with embarrassment.
“That’s why we got an A on that project,” he added.
We were all still proud of that A, as though it was some masterpiece that the three of us had created together.
The waiter came and we ordered white rice and bean sauce, fried plantains—his plantains sweet, mine green. He spent a lot of time picking out the little islands of fat on his black bean sauce, making fork tracks in the plate of rice in front of him. I concentrated on my salad, fishing beneath the lettuce leaves as though someone had hidden a secret prize for me there. He had this habit of bopping his head as though a melody had just popped into it. I could almost see him doing that as he tried to think of something else to say.
He kept staring into his water glass, raising his face now and then to say something nice about the food, which he obviously hated.
Moy came out of the back room to say hello, and this seemed to impress Jean Michel. But Moy was really looking for volunteers to work in his campaign office.
If we volunteered, Moy said, we wouldn’t have to pay for our meals.
Even though we didn’t have to pay, Jean Michel left a ten-dollar tip for the waiter, which I like to think he did to impress me.
That weekend, Jean Michel and I went to Moy’s campaign office to help with Moy’s computer operations. We organized his call sheets and mailing lists by merging a bunch of databases.
“I have something for you,” Jean Michel said when we were done organizing Moy’s personal files. We also found Moy a new list of potential donors, which made him so happy that he offered to adopt us, if we didn’t like our parents.
What Jean Michel had for me was a framed postcard-size drawing of my face washed out with red and blue paint, in the style of Shepard Fairey. I was too flustered to speak, so I just leaned over and gave him a quick peck on the lips.
That was our first kiss.
At Moy’s victory-night party, several hundred people packed themselves into the restaurant. As soon as Mom, Dad, Isabelle, and I walked in, Jean Michel motioned for me to meet him in the back terrace. We found an uncrowded corner and he wrapped his arms around my shoulders as we listened to the speeches and cheers coming from inside.
“I have something to confess,” he whispered.
We were standing so close that he didn’t have to whisper, but he did anyway.
“What is it?” I asked.
I tried to make my voice sound all breathy and sultry, but it only made it harder for him to understand me.
“I can’t help but feel like I am the one who won tonight,” he said.
A few nights later, my parents, Isabelle, and I met the Marshalls at this monthly outdoor concert called Big Night in Little Haiti. Tina’s dad, Mr. Marshall, another old army buddy of Dad’s, was an aviation specialist with the US Coast Guard and didn’t get a lot of time off. He was there with us that night, and he and Dad were so happy to see each other that neither they nor our moms were watching us too closely.
The muraled plaza in front of the Little Haiti Cultural Center was packed with hundreds of people dancing and singing along with Emeline, the queen of Haitian music, and one of Isabelle’s favorite singers.
I’d asked Jean Michel to meet me near the stage. Isabelle wandered off to find some of her friends, and Tina and I went off to find Jean Michel. We found him staring dreamily at Emeline, who was belting out a heartbreaker of a ballad. Emeline was looking her most beautiful that night. Her piercing eyes and signature alluring smile were in full effect. She wore her hair bare and closely cropped for some songs, and wrapped in exquisite head scarves for others. Her earrings were like miniature sculptures, and her head wraps and dresses were so
intricately draped, layered, and embroidered that they could be hanging at the Smithsonian next to the gowns of first ladies and, well, other queens.
Jean Michel, Tina, and I stood under a canopy near the stage. We were mesmerized by Emeline’s sultry yet mournful voice, as people slow danced or squashed their bodies together around us.
Afterwards, Isabelle somehow managed to get backstage with one of her friends and, when Emeline wasn’t looking, took one of her earrings from her dressing room and slipped it into her pocket. It was a long, shoulder-grazing chandelier earring made with tiny rainbow-colored butterflies. Isabelle never wore the earring, as I thought she would, but she stuffed it in one of the flute case’s interior dividers, for luck.
The evening closed with a spirited procession, like a “second line” parade. The three of us joined the procession line bouncing behind Emeline, until we were too sweaty and tired to continue.
At some point I bent over and grabbed my knees to catch my breath and I felt Jean Michel’s hand on my spine, and it was almost like I grew wings there. I felt lighter than I have ever felt in my whole life.
Our stares became a little more intense at school after that, but we didn’t sneak off into corners, or skip classes to go to the movies, like I wanted to. We were waiting for that night, the night of the concert, to sit next to each other and let everybody know. I wanted to look so perfect for him that I took an extra fifteen minutes and made us late. Now, in the silent hospital room, Jean Michel’s drawing of me, the one I had hanging next to a Basquiat print on my bedroom wall, is right next to my necklace in what is beginning to look like one of those roadside memorials. Something like that would probably be made for Isabelle near the crash site.
WHEN MOM AND Dad and Aunt Leslie come to visit later that day, I still can’t hear. They are all mimes now, beautiful mimes, in a strange play. Their stage is this small room with the glass bricks on the wall. Their props are the wheelchairs that Grandpa Marcus and Aunt Leslie are pushing them in. Grandma Régine is the understudy, who’s not sure what to do with herself. She walks back and forth between the two wheelchairs to see if anyone needs anything.
What everyone needs she cannot provide. What everyone needs is to not be here, to be unhurt, to be with Isabelle.
Mom and Dad look a lot better. Dad’s hurt leg is still stretched out in front of him, his arm folded into a cast. His face looks a lot less prickly, though, a lot less battered, as does Mom’s.
Mom is wearing a pink knit cap that Grandma Régine must have bought her. I can imagine Grandma Régine just handing her the cap and saying, “This will cover your bandage.” And not much more. She would never ask Mom if she wanted a cap or what color she’d like. That’s just the way Grandma Régine is.
The cap looks good on Mom. It doesn’t slip off or anything. When Mom pushes herself up by holding the sides of the wheelchair, she doesn’t seem to be in as much pain as before. And when she bends down to kiss my forehead, it doesn’t seem as agonizing as the first or second time. Her body sways back and forth a bit. Aunt Leslie mouths off a warning, then rushes over and helps Mom to back into her wheelchair.
Dad looks worried. He cringes along with Mom. Then both my parents are just sitting there looking at me. Occasionally they ask Aunt Leslie some questions that seem to be about me. Aunt Leslie’s lips move carefully, as though she’s trying to think of more doctorly answers.
I make up dialogue for them.
Mom: How much longer do you think she’ll be here?
Aunt Leslie: Time will tell. We just have to be patient.
Dad: You just made a doctor’s pun.
Mom: But we’re waiting for her to be part of Isabelle’s funeral service. We want her to say goodbye.
That last part I think Mom actually does say. If I read her lips correctly. But the rest, I am not so sure.
What they’re actually saying is probably much more interesting. They might be talking about the weather, about Aunt Leslie’s beautiful green dress. Mom is probably wishing that she was wearing it instead of her hospital gown.
They keep staring at me. I wish I could talk to them with my eyes. I wish I could speak to them the way I’d spoken to Isabelle in that dream. I wish I could tell them that I’d already said goodbye to Isabelle. In our own way. In the language of the palms.
I wish I could tell them not to worry so much about me, that I am in here somewhere and will eventually resurface. But how can I be sure that things aren’t getting even worse? I want to make small talk, really small talk, like “Hi.” Just “Hi” might be enough. I just want them to know that I’m still here, that I still know who they are. I want them to know that I still love them. But they all sit there and keep looking at me, as though they’re holding a vigil.
I’m tired of my silence. I’m tired of having all these thoughts racing through my head. Even if I can’t hear them, I want to be able to say something. Just “Hi,” not much more. Just so they know that I’m trying so hard to come back.
So I begin with my toes. I try to think of how I can make my toes move. My toes would have to move first. It’s where the doctor keeps poking me. If only I can get one of my pinkie toes to move.
I draw a sketch of it in my mind. I even sing it to the tune of “Frère Jacques.” Pinkie to-e. Pinkie to-e. Just move please. Just move please. I try and I try and I try. And they all sit there looking at me. They can’t see how hard I’m trying. I’m trying to do what my dad in his army speak might call “signaling.” But I have no flares or smoke grenades. I know Morse code but can’t use it.
The last science project I did for physics class was about parasitic drag, the energy it takes to move things through water or air. Airplanes have to deal with it, as do swimmers in the ocean. It’s a lot harder to move forward than to fall back. I have to remind myself that no matter how hard it seems, I just can’t keep falling back.
SOMETIMES IN MY dreams, I walk down an empty hospital hallway. My legs are shaky and my knees buckle. I’m not sure where I’m going. All I know is that I have to get there.
Soon, other patients start to appear. They range from toddlers in their parents’ arms, to first graders, to kids who look way too old to be under eighteen. Some are sitting up in bed. Others are dragging IV poles behind them while pacing around their rooms. They only look up for a moment as I walk by.
When I feel dizzy, I lean against the dark grey hallway walls and rest. But I know I must keep walking. I must find Isabelle.
I feel like the girl in the magic act, the one the magician splits in half. The top part is me—the head that is leaning against the wall as I catch my breath—the rest is Isabelle.
Ahead looms the nurses’ station. The nurses say nothing to me as I walk by. They’re looking at computer screens, typing fast. I keep walking down the hall until I reach a room that is just like mine, a small room with glass bricks on the walls. Inside, lying there in a bed identical to mine, I see Isabelle. She looks exactly like I do, the way she always has.
She waves me in from the doorway until I’m close enough to touch her.
“Izzie,” I say.
“Hey,” she says.
“Izzie, I’m sorry I made us late.”
“No way,” she says, gesturing as if to brush that thought away.
“Fifteen minutes earlier—”
“I was late, too,” she says.
Then I remember her scurrying around the house, pulling her black skirt out of the dryer, then yanking white blouses off hangers and dumping the ones she wouldn’t be wearing on the bathroom floor. She was putting on her makeup while talking on the phone, making plans for beyond that night, for some homework she’d have to catch up on, some essay she’d have to write.
At some point I heard her talking to Ron Johnson.
“Wow, Ron,” she kept saying. “We’ll have to try that again.”
I felt jealous. Of Ron Johnson?
It sounded like she had been to his house and was planning to go there again. There was no time t
o ask her about that. We were both doing too many things at once. We were both terrified that the boys we liked wouldn’t like us enough. We were both anxious about what might come next. We were both late.
I reach out and hold her hands the same way I remember holding them in the car. I think of how hard we tried not to let go when we thought we were both dying.
I stand there all night holding her hands.
The magician has not yet arrived with his box and his saw. We are not yet cut in half. We are still fully ourselves. We are still entwined. We are still whole.
In some versions of this dream, Mom and Dad travel down the hallway with me. Mom with her pink knit bonnet and Dad being pushed by Mom in his wheelchair.
Always when they arrive, it hits me again that I have to keep saying goodbye to Isabelle.
Never in my wildest dreams would I ever think that we’d all be there now, in this room, saying goodbye to Isabelle. Which goes to show you that Aunt Leslie was wrong. Isabelle and I don’t have any special powers. If we did, I would have seen this coming. And if I knew all this was coming, I wouldn’t have spent so much time getting dressed to impress Jean Michel that night. I wouldn’t have taken so much time changing seven or eight times. I wouldn’t have forgotten my cell phone on my dresser, then have had to go back for it, which, I remember now, is why Mom angrily took both Isabelle’s and my cell phones away.
Isabelle didn’t want to be late so she wouldn’t have to rush onstage at the last minute. She also wanted to see Ron Johnson before the concert started.
“If we’d left fifteen minutes earlier, we would have missed all this traffic,” Dad had said.
Even now Isabelle is trying to protect me. I’m still not convinced that it was her fifteen minutes that made us late. If we’d left fifteen minutes earlier, she might be alive. If I hadn’t changed my clothes a bunch of times, if I hadn’t left my phone behind, then she might be alive. I couldn’t shake the thought that she was dead because of me.