August
In the days that followed, the Briggs household all but bristled with anticipation. There were times when you could sense Meghan’s newfound love floating through the air and other times when the worry Tracy carried in her heart made the mood as grim as that of a funeral parlor.
Lila cooked constantly. She made trays of biscuits, chicken casseroles, and beef stew enough to feed an army. When the refrigerator was filled to overflowing, she carried casserole dishes to neighbors up and down Baker Street, saying it was a sin to waste perfectly good food.
Two days after Lucas’s CT scan, Dr. Goldstein’s office called and scheduled a second visit. Before Tracy hung up the telephone, Lila had written the appointment on her calendar.
“Luckily I’m free,” she said, and offered to drive.
Knowing how her mama disliked the drive to Barrington, Meghan claimed such a thing wasn’t necessary. “I can spare time enough to take Tracy.”
With an indignant pout, Lila glared across the room. “Lucas is my only grandchild!” she said pointedly, then insisted at the very least she would accompany them.
“I don’t actually need either of you to come,” Tracy said, but the words came out thin and fragile-sounding.
“You might not think you need me,” Lila replied, “but you do.”
The look on Lila’s face was one of determination.
When they settled in front of Dr. Goldstein’s large mahogany desk, Tracy clasped her mama’s hand.
“Well, the CT scan has confirmed what I expected,” he said. “Lucas has enlarged vestibular aqueducts, or EVA, in both ears. The right ear is marginally worse, but both are badly damaged.”
Tracy felt her heart stop. Before it was simply a hearing test. An outside measurement of the sound going through Lucas’s ears. This time it was a picture, proof positive of the structural damage that prevented him from hearing. There was no longer even the slightest margin of doubt, and the reality of it was suffocating. It was as if a giant vacuum had suddenly sucked the oxygen from the air.
He kept talking. “EVA is a condition that begins in the first trimester of pregnancy.”
She inhaled sharply. “Was it something I did? Could I have taken more vitamins? Maybe it was something I ate or drank—”
“Nothing you did or didn’t do would have made a difference,” Dr. Goldstein cut in. “This is a congenital malformation, and its cause is unknown. Some schools of thought indicate it could be genetic, but even that’s debatable.”
“Genetic? How can that be? No one in our family . . . ”
Suddenly, Tracy realized she knew next to nothing about Dominic’s family. Her eyes filled with tears, and try as she may, she couldn’t stop them.
“That’s only a single possibility,” Dr. Goldstein said, “and there’s no proof.”
He continued, explaining that the vestibular aqueduct tube in the fetus’s ear usually narrows to the proper width by midterm.
“But in cases such as Lucas’s, it doesn’t.”
His voice droned on like a runaway train moving at breakneck speed, a disaster in the making with no way to stop it. He told how fluid collected in this tube and, over time, destroyed the tiny hairs that carried sound through the cochlea.
“There’s no way to repair the existing damage, but fortunately, Lucas is an excellent candidate for a bilateral cochlear implant, and with it, he should have near-normal hearing.”
Tracy tried to focus on the word normal, but it seemed impossible. How could you find even a semblance of normal in a situation such as this? She ran her hand over her forehead and closed her eyes for a moment, trying to picture what normal would look like.
It came to mind as Ella, a child thrilled to say the word cat. And after Ella, Gabriel Hawke, a man who loved music, ran a school for deaf children, used a cell phone, and spoke without fault. Tracy knew this was the normal she wanted for Lucas.
She lifted her eyes and looked across the desk. “Okay. What’s the next step?”
Dr. Goldstein said his office would schedule an appointment with Dr. Phyllis Crawford, the implant surgeon. “She’ll take over from here.”
Tracy asked question after question, some about Lucas’s condition and others about the possible cause.
When she ran out of questions, Lila took over, asking if certain foods would be more beneficial than others. Then, recalling how Lucas played with Sox, she asked, “What about dogs?”
“Dogs?” Dr. Goldstein repeated quizzically.
Lila nodded. “Lucas likes to play with the dog. Is that permissible? You know, because of germs?”
“A dog is no problem. It may even be a good distraction to keep Lucas’s focus off the implant site, which will feel a bit strange at first.”
“Will it be painful?” Tracy asked.
“No more so than any other surgery.”
It seemed the questions were endless. Every answer only brought about another question, and when they finally left the office, Tracy had an overwhelming need to talk with Gabriel again. He was the one person who could truly understand what Lucas was facing.
“Mama, there’s somebody I want you to meet,” she said.
That afternoon, they spent two hours with Gabriel, first talking about the challenges that lay ahead and then looking down the road to a time when they might expect Lucas to begin learning to speak full sentences. After Gabriel had explained the auditory mapping process, he suggested Tracy might want to watch part of a therapy session.
“Yes, I would,” she answered eagerly.
Lila gave Tracy a nod. “You go ahead,” she said. “I’ll stay here in the playroom with Lucas.”
With his hand touching her elbow ever so lightly, Gabriel guided Tracy along the corridor to the window of a therapy room where a toddler was learning to speak. For twenty minutes they stood shoulder to shoulder watching the boy give a name to each item and connect words.
“Brown dog,” he said.
The therapist asked, “Is the brown dog small?”
Shaking his head, he replied, “Brown dog big,” and proudly puffed out his tiny little chest.
Tracy turned her eyes to Gabriel, and before she asked the question, he knew what was on her mind. He took her hand in his and smiled. “Yes, given time, Lucas should be able to speak just as well.”
On the drive home, Lila was silent for a long while. She nervously picked at a loose thread on her jacket, crossing and uncrossing her ankles several times. They were close to Magnolia Grove when she finally asked, “Do you really think Lucas will be able to talk as well as the children we saw in the video?”
Tracy hesitated a few moments, then nodded. “That’s what I’m praying for, Mama. With every breath I take, I ask God to let Lucas hear, to let him speak, to let him live a normal life.” As she spoke, a tiny tear slid across the rim of Tracy’s eye and rolled down her cheek.
In the sunlight slanted across the dashboard, Lila saw the glisten of its track. “I’m praying for that also,” she said, then reached across and squeezed Tracy’s hand.
Late that evening, after Lila had gone to bed, Tracy called Dominic. Until now, she had told him only that Lucas had a problem. Now it was something she could name, and it had a solution.
She’d barely had time to say hello before Dominic said, “You ready to come home yet?” His voice was sharp with that undertone of arrogance she’d come to expect.
“I am home,” she replied. “And this isn’t about us, Dominic. It’s about Lucas.”
She went on to tell of the visit with Dr. Goldstein, then asked, “Is there any sort of deafness in your family? Maybe an aunt or uncle?”
“No,” he said with an air of agitation. “Don’t try to lay this problem on my doorstep. Whatever’s wrong with Lucas isn’t because of me.”
“I didn’t say it was,” she replied. “I’m only trying to figure out where—”
“So you right away suspect me? That’s what your sister said, huh?”
“This has nothing to do with Meghan. I told you, it’s about Lucas, so I thought maybe you—”
“Forget it. I don’t have any money. As it is I’m barely making the rent.”
“I wasn’t asking—”
“You should have thought about how you were gonna handle things before you walked out, stuck me with the apartment, and—”
“Dominic!” she shouted. “Will you just shut up and listen? I don’t want anything from you. Absolutely nothing. But since you’re Lucas’s daddy, I thought you deserved to know.”
“Okay, now I know.” His voice was flat with a rock-hard edge. “So what do you expect me to do about it?”
“Not a damn thing!” Tracy said, and slammed down the receiver.
In the back of her mind, she’d suspected something like this would happen, but she hadn’t been prepared for the heartache it would bring. She sat there for several minutes letting the tears roll down her cheeks, then she got up and tiptoed down the hall. From beneath the door she could see Meghan’s light was still on.
Before she had a chance to knock, Sox grumbled a warning. Meghan shushed him, then got up from her desk and opened the door.
Still red-eyed and teary, Tracy asked, “Do you have time to talk?”
“Of course,” Meghan answered, and pulled Tracy into her arms.