Read If a Tree Falls for Free Online

baby is out. A girl. Another chance. A robust cry to ring in the smoke-choked dawn.

California, October 2000
    IN THE MORNING, I HUDDLED in bed with Sophia draped on top of me. I stroked her soft hair, her warm cheek. Why had I imagined Pearl losing her first child? There was no baby—no Shimon—listed as deceased on my family chart. Of the eight children listed, I knew only that Pearl’s daughters, Nellie and Bayla, were deaf. Whatever I grieved—Sophia’s hearing, the loss of an ideal for my baby—this imagined death far outstripped it. I fetched my journal, splayed open on the study desk. With the long leather string I tied it shut, then shoved it deep into my dresser drawer.
    After breakfast Bill and I walked tentatively, hand in hand, through the park. Sophia was burrowed close to me in the baby carrier, asleep. It was Saturday, and a cool breeze sent the leaves to billowing. The flyer had said that the Deaf playgroup would convene at picnic table 15A. As we approached the area, we saw parents and children
soundlessly greeting each other, conversing with fast, crisp hand movements and animated facial expressions. A woman caught sight of me and made an admiring face as she looked upon Sophia, nearly hidden by her floppy hat. I nodded politely, even as I felt my body pull inward. I had to remind myself to breathe. It was quiet all around me except for the occasional tapping sound of hand against hand, or a faint, involuntary vocalization.
    Bill and I had taken our first sign language class the week before—an evening class at a nearby community college. The room was filled with twenty-somethings in search of a fun elective. We wheeled in Sophia, asleep in her stroller. Bill said he would take her outside if she woke. Exhausted but desperate to learn, we fumbled awkwardly in an attempt to copy the movements and expressions of the teacher and the students all around us. We watched their hands, free to soar, as ours clenched with necessity and grief.
    Now, milling around the picnic table, our smiles were forced, our movements awkward. We could do little more than wave and introduce ourselves by laboriously finger-spelling our names. Deaf parents conversed easily with one another as children scampered off toward play structures and swingsets. My mind flooded with anxieties: How would we ever gain fluency in this language? If hearing aids
didn’t work for Sophia, would we need a live-in interpreter, a third person, to help us talk to our daughter?
    We walked beyond the picnic area, then found a narrow path leading to a river. Downhill from us, a little boy, no older than three, began running down the bank. His father rushed after him, waving his arms wildly, the biggest motions his body could make, signing to his son to stop. The boy did not see his father’s motions. His eyes were fixed on the glittering water and the white bloom of mountain laurel as he moved headlong, closer and closer. I gasped and shouted out senselessly to the boy. Bill began to sprint, then slowed as the father loped to his son. In time. Just in time to keep him from tumbling into the river.
    On the car ride home, Sophia woke up. Her big round eyes, glassy from sleep, now made me think of my mother’s eyes, huge marbles the color of the sea. As a child, they were to me an inlet to an incalculable tide. Sometimes they lapped me up and rocked me in their sweet, frothy wake. Other times they swept past me, as I bobbed unsteadily, alone. I used to sit, legs dangling, on my mother’s tiled bathroom counter as she made up her face in the gilded mirror.
    “Mom?”
    No answer.
    “Mom?”

    No answer.
    “Mom!”
    “What, honey?”
    “Mom, what color is the sky?”
    “Yup.”
    Was it her hearing loss? Or her need to tune out? To escape? Was it sheer exhaustion, raising four children and tracking conversations through the muddle of amplification? Why didn’t anyone help my mother when she was a child—get her hearing aids, teach her speech