He could feel the wine rising now all the way up through his torso to his face, which was hot, and his forehead, which was on fire. “Yes,” he said, “or no, I mean-you're not wrong,” and he tipped back the glass and drained it.
“Because,” she went on as if she hadn't heard him, “as beautiful and independent and smart as she is-and she “is” brilliant, I hope you realize that-there are problems, little frustrations that add up, you know what I mean?” Her eyes were shaped like Dana's, closer to round than oval, and they were the same deep rich color suspended somewhere between brown and gold; when he held her gaze, when he looked into them, he saw Dana just as surely as if he were re-creating her on his computer screen. From somewhere below them, distantly, there was the sound of a siren. “She can be stubborn,” she said.
From the kitchen, down the hall and two rooms away, there was the thump and clatter of things being shifted around, a sudden crash, a curse. “What?” he said, distracted. And drunk. Drunk for sure.
“She can be stubborn. But you already know that.”
He shrugged. This was neither the time nor place for a critique.
Vera-could he call her Vera? — seemed deflated suddenly. Her own wineglass was empty and she rose to refill it and gestured toward him, but he laid his palm over the rim of the glass and shook his head. Her face composed itself. She sat heavily. For a long moment she said nothing and he was beginning to think the interview was over when she waved her glass and said, “Cochlear implants. For example. Take cochlear implants.”
He'd never heard the term before he took his Sign language course. It was the first night, and one of the students wanted to know why the deaf didn't just go out and get implants and dispense with Sign altogether. The teacher-she was married to a physicist who was prelingually deaf and used a combination of speech, lip-reading and Sign to communicate-pointed out that not everyone was a candidate for implants, for one thing, depending on the extent and pathology behind their hearing loss, and that among those who were, the results were often mixed. She went on to explain the procedure-the patient would have a receiver and electrodes surgically embedded in the mastoid bone and cochlea in order to pick up sounds from a tiny microphone located behind the ear. In the best-case scenario, these sounds would be transmitted to the auditory nerve and the patient would have some measure of hearing restored, perhaps enough to allow him to function almost normally in the hearing world, especially if he'd lost his hearing later in life. For the rest, it might be enough to improve lip-reading and enable them to talk on the telephone, hear alarms and car horns, that sort of thing. It wasn't a magic bullet.
“You know about cochlear implants?”
He nodded.
“Well, Dana… and this really frustrated me and her father too, and maybe frustrated is too mild a word because I was ready to scream”-she paused to give him a brittle smile-“but of course Dana wouldn't have heard me no matter if I screamed all day and all night for the rest of my life. But the point is she refused to be evaluated. Wouldn't even go to the otologist, not even to find out if she was physically capable of improvement-wouldn't hear of it.” Another smile. “Listen to me. Just the way we talk, the expressions we use-”
“I hear you,” he said, and for a moment she looked startled. Then her features rearranged themselves again and she slapped the arm of the chair and they were both laughing, the siren playing distantly beneath them, keening as if to split the night in two.
Three
ALL THE RIVER TOWNS looked the same, block after block of rambling top-heavy old houses in various states of disrepair, derelict factories sunk into their weed lots, the unemployed and unemployable slouching along the cracked sidewalks while the sumac took hold and the ceremonial parking meters glinted under the sun. Peterskill was no different. Unless maybe it was worse. She'd been here before, when she was a girl-her parents had rented a bungalow on Kitchawank Lake one summer and every Saturday they'd take the family out to a restaurant in the heart of downtown Peterskill, her father irrepressible, shouting “Cucina Italiana, the real deal,” mugging and rubbing his abdomen in broad strokes till she and her brothers would break up laughing-but that was twenty years ago and nothing looked even vaguely familiar to her now. The lake she remembered. She'd had a canoe to fool around in that summer-it had come with the house-and she remembered taking it into the little coves on the far shore whenever she could pry it away from her brothers, and she would just drift sometimes, reading, nibbling at a sandwich, feeling the breeze on her face and taking in the intoxicating scent of the lake, the scent of decay and renewal and the strangely sweet odor that lingered when the speedboats had gone.
“I want to go out to the lake when this is over,” she said. “Or, I mean, when we're done here.”
They were sitting in the car beneath one of the big shade trees planted in some long-gone era of boosterism and hope, and Bridger had a map of the town spread across his lap. He looked up at her out of his too-broad face and ran a hand through his hair. “What lake? What are you talking about? You mean the river?”
She watched for the words, but already the impulse was dying away. After a moment, after he'd turned back to the map, she said, “Never mind. It's not important.”
On the way up from the city she'd quizzed him about her mother and how they'd seemed to get along so famously. “What did you talk about?” she asked him.
He was squinting against the glare of the road, his eyes jumping to the mirrors and back-traffic was heavy and it made him tentative. “You,” he said. “What else?”
“Yes?” She laid a hand in his lap and he glanced at her before coming back to the road. It was muggy, overcast, threatening rain. “Tell me. What did she say?”
She couldn't read him in profile, but she saw his lips move.
“I didn't hear you,” she said. “What?”
He swung his face to her, gave a little smile. “She said you were stubborn.”
“Me? Don't believe everything you hear, my friend, especially considering the source. Especially from your girlfriend's mother-”
“Girlfriend? I thought you were my fiancée?”
“Your fiancée's mother.” She glanced out the window on vegetation so dense they could have been in the Amazon-less than ten miles from the city and there was nothing visible but a fathomless vault of green. “So I'm stubborn, huh?” she said, turning back to him. “What brought that up?”
A shrug. “I don't know. That first night, when you did the dishes and went to bed right after we ate-?”
His head was tilted forward, eyebrows cocked. Was he asking a question or making a statement? “I'm not following you,” she said.
He glanced tensely at the rearview, then brought his face round so she could see the words: “When-you-were-in-bed.”
“Yes?”
“Cochlear implants. She said you wouldn't even go in to get examined.”
It took her a moment, the sweet smell of chlorophyll flowing at her through the vents, the sky closing in, darkening like a spread umbrella. She said, “She would think that. She was always pushing, pushing. But you don't understand-she didn't understand. It was my decision and nobody else's.”
“What about now? Would you do it now?”
She let out a laugh, the kind of laugh that was meant to be bitter, mocking, but it might have sounded like a scream for all she knew. “No way,” she said, and she relished the brevity and finality of the phrase, so much intransigence packed into two little syllables.