“Everything you’ve been through and now this.” My mother paced about the hospital room. I had a hairline fracture in my right hip, nothing that could be addressed by anything save for a firm wrapping, compresses, and rest. I’ve declined the pain medicines the nurses have offered. They had kindly faces, concern wafting through their voices like smells from an overfilled trash can. That was a pretty thought, a pretty picture. Nurses offering their help, offering to ease my pain, and I compared them to trash. “I don’t think all of this is fair.”
Mom, calm down. Please. They’re going to come in and sedate you. I had to finger spell sedate. S-E-D-A-T-E. I liked signing ‘calm’. It was the sort of gesture I’d expect the word to translate to in movement. Both hands in the air, palms pointed toward the floor, falling and rising in waves. I could see a husband signing this particular thing to his wife and then the ensuing fight―all fisticuffs and ill words culminating in mad, frenzied makeup sex.
I blushed at that.
As I felt my cheeks go crimson and hot, Tanner walked into my room.
“Hi,” he both said and signed. Of course, signing ‘hello’ is pretty intuitive. A hand wave through the air like any person would gesture at any other person while walking down the street on any day. But this wasn’t any day, this was here and now. I was in this bed and he was standing there looking handsome and full of life. “I wanted to come see how you were doing.” He tried to sign this time, but only knew ‘want’ and ‘see’. The other words he mimed, incorrect but effective still.
I was about to move my hands, about to relish in the wonderfulness of being with another human being who could fully understand what I was saying, when my mom butted in. “She’s going to be okay, but she won’t take the pain medicines. She’s always been stubborn. Always. If Ross hadn’t abandoned her, I’m sure she’d still be alone in Dallas trying to deal with cancer and everything else on her own.”
Tanner stared at my mom, his smile faltered slightly. “I didn’t know about the—”
Waving my hand in the air, a bit manically, I kept him from finishing his sentence. I made him look at me, not knowing why I was so desperate to explain, to make sure he knew that I didn’t have cancer now. The margins were clean. The chance of a recurrence was minimal. I didn’t want to talk about the routine checks, the routine screenings, the routine worries of ‘maybe it’s back’.
I don’t have it now. I’m fine now. This time, I did not sign with such care. My fingers moved in a frenzy, a storm of words and feelings. I did, that’s why I can’t speak. It was a tumor―T-U-M-O-R―here. I leaned forward and reached my right hand back, indicating where the small depression was. I’m fine now. I’m fine.
When my hands quieted, I slowly realized how childlike I seemed. Protesting that I was sick, interrupting my mother. Childlike and desperate.
“I’m glad of that,” is all he said and signed. And the smile that had faded some came back to life.
“She’s fine. She’s always fine.” My mom’s voice came back into the picture, pouring in against Tanner’s smile like tar over a flower. “I need a cigarette,” she muttered and walked out of the room without a backward glance. She’d always been manic, more so now. I think she was afraid to lose me like we lost Dad. I could forgive her a lot for that fact. It meant she cared, even if she did it in the most excruciating, annoying ways.
When she was gone, I gave Tanner my most apologetic look and then shrugged while also signing ‘moms’. He laughed and it was a glorious sound, deep and rumbly like a storm over still waters. “I know exactly what you mean”. He left out the word ‘exactly’ when he signed, but I could hear it of course. “My mom was such a helicopter parent that I was teased mercilessly about it until I turned sixteen and was big enough to beat up anyone who crossed me. Not that I’d really beat someone up. I’ve always been about saving people versus making them need saving.” His sign was spotty, but his words eloquent and full-bodied. I liked the sound and I wondered if he would like my voice, if he could only hear it.
I thought about the surgery the doctors have suggested. I wondered if it would help, if it would give me my greatest wish, or become a thread of hope quickly snipped. The latter, more likely. So far, I’d snubbed the idea. We’d still have to wait a while, anyway. I had to be two years cancer free, two years in remission before Doctor Marks would put me under the knife. It was a personal policy, she said, but backed up by research studies that she was more than happy to show me and discuss.
Tanner was saying something else, signing something else. I hadn’t been paying close enough attention to know what he’d said.
You don’t have to sign. I can hear you.
“I don’t mind,” he dually replied with his voice and hands. “Unless it bothers you?”
I thought for a moment―did it bother me? No, not the signing. What was bothering me was that he could speak and sign at once when I could not.
The truth is that I’m a little jealous―J-E-A-L-O-U-S, finger spelled, and I skipped all the nonessentials. A tip an ASL teacher had given me is that you can omit things without losing meaning. You can compound feeling by being over-expressive. It’s more than hands kiting through the air with long, ribbon tails to guide them. It’s an experience of body. I was still getting the hang of it and I wasn’t sure I’d ever be as skilled as the teacher. She was back in Dallas though. We skyped once a week, her teaching me new words and me trying to hone my abilities so I could carry on proper conversations.
Of course, those proper conversations don’t happen here in Lexington. Maybe there is a deaf community here and I’m too squirreled away in my own bubble to find it. That’s probably it, a whole pack of wonderful people who don’t care if I can speak, who could wave their hands about and beckon me into their confidence.
The truth is, every day I think I’ll be okay with not being able to talk and sign at the same time, but I’m not. I’m not sure I’ll ever be. I continued signing; only seconds have passed since I’d admitted I was jealous.
“I suppose I would be too, if our positions were reversed.” Tanner smiled and then shook his hands out the way a runner might before a race―jerky, wild movements and then clenching and unclenching his hands quickly. “You know, I took ASL all through college, but I don’t really use it much.”
Then stop. It’s really okay. I don’t mind.
My mother returned then, reeking of cigarette smoke and giggling like a schoolgirl. Behind her, the doctor who’d been overseeing my care, who was at least two decades her senior, was laughing also. The way he looked at her as they both pushed through the room was leacharous, and I know my mother was enjoying every second of it. She’d loved my dad to a fault, but she wasn’t made for the widow life. In the past year alone, she’d been on more dates than I could boast in my entire life.
Dates with different men, I mean. Ross and I had gone out plenty, before he turned bastard, cheated on me, and ran away from my problems, because ‘he wasn’t built for coping with a sick person. He couldn’t handle it.’.
But I could handle it on my own, because I was stronger than him. I’d never known what a bloody coward he was until that conversation. I should have realized it back when we’d first met, when he’d failed a test and panicked over how to tell his father. He’d bribed the professer instead.
“Well, I’m glad you’re doing alright.” Tanner took the entrance of Mom and my doctor as a signal to leave. I didn’t want him to go. Silly, since we’d just met, but he was the first real connection I’d felt since my diagnosis.
“It was nice of you to come check on her,” the doctor said, eyeing Tanner’s uniform. “You were one of the first responders?”
Tanner nodded. “It was nice to meet you, Mrs. Laurence.”
“Oh, I go by Misses now. Widowed these five years.” Mom looked at the doctor as she said it and the doctor, to his credit, repressed the horny grin that wanted to sprout on his face.
“Bye, Laurie,” is what Tanner said, but what he signed was I’d like to see you again? I could tell it was a question by his expression. He came closer, leaned over as if to pat my hand in parting, and I felt something cool and papery slide beneath my fingers.
Yes. I’d like that. I signed back. Mom knew a few signs, she probably would have understood had she been paying any attention to the exchange. But no. She was all eyes for the doctor with his white whiskers and thick glasses.
The last thing Tanner signed was ‘date’, making dual ‘d’s with his hands and touching them together lightly, as if his fingers kissed and spoke of things to come. I knew I blushed then, and went even more crimson when the blush elicited the widest, most sincere smile from Tanner.