"Yes, what?" he asks.
"I'm tired of him using it against me. My deafness."
"How does he do that?"
"Because it makes me more scared than I already am! It keeps me at home. That piano I told you about? The one I wanted to play 'A Maiden's Grave' on? They sold it when I was nine. Even though I could still hear enough to play and could for a couple years more. They said – well, he said, my father said – they didn't want me to learn to love something that would be taken away from me." She adds, "But the real reason was that he wanted to keep me on the farm."
So you'll be home then.
Melanie looks into de l'Epée eyes and says what she's never said to anyone. "I can't hate him for wanting me to stay at home. But selling the piano – that hurt so much. Even if I'd had only one day of playing music it would have been better than nothing. I'll never forgive him for that."
"They had no right to do that," he agrees. "But you managed to break away. You've got a job away from home, you're independent -" His voice fades.
And now for the hard part.
"What is it?" de l'Epée asks softly.
"A year ago," she begins, "I bought some new hearing aids. Generally they don't work at all but these seemed to have some effect with certain pitches of music. There was a recital in Topeka I wanted to go to. Kathleen Battle. I'd read in the paper that she was going to sing some spirituals as part of the program and I thought…"
"That she'd sing 'Amazing Grace'?"
"I wanted to see if I could hear it. I was desperate to go. But I had no way of getting there. I can't drive and the buses would have taken forever. I begged ray brother to take me. He'd been working all day on the farm but he said he'd take me anyway."
"We got there just in time for the concert. Kathleen Battle walked out on stage wearing this beautiful blue dress. She smiled to the audience… And then she began to sing."
"And?"
"It was useless." Melanie breathes deeply, kneads her ringers. "It…"
"Why are you so sad?"
"The hearing aids didn't work at all. Everything was muddled. I could hardly hear anything and the notes I could hear were all off key to me. We left at intermission. Danny was doing his best to cheer me up. He…"
She falls silent.
'There's more, isn't there? There's something else you want to tell me."
It hurts so much! She only thinks these words but according to the fishy rules of her music room de l'Epée can hear them perfectly. He leans forward. "What hurts? Tell me?"
And there's so much to tell him. She could use a million words to describe that night and never convey the horror of living through it.
"Go ahead," De l'Epée says encouragingly. As her brother used to do, as her father never did. "Go ahead."
"We left the concert hall and got into Danny's car. He asked if I wanted some dinner but I couldn't eat a thing. I asked him just to drive home."
De l'Epée scoots forward. Their knees meet. He touches her arm. "What else?"
"We left town, got onto the highway. We were in Danny's little Toyota. He rebuilt it himself. Everything. He's so good with mechanical things. He's amazing, really. We were going pretty fast."
She pauses for a moment to let the tide of sadness subside. It never does but she takes a deep breath – remembering when she had to take a breath before saying something – and finds herself able to continue. "We were talking in the car."
De l'Epée nods.
"But that means we were signing. And that means we had to look at each other. He kept asking me what I was sad about, that the hearing aids didn't work, was I discouraged, had Dad been hassling me about the farm again?… He…"
She must breathe deeply again.
"Danny was looking at me, not at the road. Oh, God… it was just there, in front of us. I never saw where it came from."
"What?"
"A truck. A big one, carrying a load of metal pipes. I think it changed lanes when Danny wasn't looking and… oh, Jesus, there was nothing he could do. All these pipes coming at us at a thousand miles an hour…"
The blood. All the blood.
"I know he braked, I know he tried to turn. But it was too late. No… Oh, Danny."
Spraying, spraying. Like the blood from the throat of a calf.
"He managed to steer mostly out of the way but one pipe smashed through the windshield. It…"
De l'Epée kneads her hand. "Tell me," he whispers.
"It…" The words are almost impossible to say. "It took his arm off."
Like the blood running down the gutters into the horrible well in the center of the killing room.
"Right at the shoulder." She sobs at the memory. Of the blood. Of the stunned look on her brother's face as he turned to her and spoke for a long moment, saying words she couldn't figure out then and never had the heart to ask him to repeat.
The blood sprayed to the roof of the car and pooled in his lap, while Melanie struggled to get a tourniquet around the stump and screamed and screamed. She, the vocal one. While Danny, still conscious, nodding madly, sat completely mute.
Melanie says to De l'Epée, "The medics got there just a few minutes later and stopped most of the bleeding. They saved his life. They got him to a hospital and the doctors got his arm reattached within a couple of hours. For the past year he's had all sorts of operations. He's having one tomorrow – that's where my parents are. In St. Louis, visiting him. They think he'll get back maybe fifty percent use of his arm eventually. If he's lucky. But he lost all interest in the farm after that. He's pretty much stayed in bed. He reads, watches TV. That's about all. It's like his life is over with…"
"It wasn't your fault," he says. "You're taking the blame, aren't you?"
"A few days after it happened my father called me out on the porch. There's something about him that's funny – I can lip-read him perfectly."
(Like Brutus, she thinks, and wishes she hadn't.)
"He sat on the porch swing and looked up at me and he said, 'I guess you understand what you've done now. You had no business talking Danny into doing something as foolish as that. And for a selfish reason all your own. What happened was your fault, there's no two ways about it. You might just as well've turned the engine over on a corn picker when Danny was working on a jam inside.
" 'God made you damaged and nobody wants it. It's a shame but it's not a sin – as long as you understand what you have to do. Come home now and make up for what you done. Get that teaching of yours over with, get that last year done. You owe your brother that. And you owe me especially.
" 'This is your home and you'll be welcome here. See, it's a question of belonging and what God does to make sure those that oughta stay someplace do. Well, your place is here, working at what you can do, where your, you know, problem doesn't get you into trouble. God's will.' And then he went to spray ammonia, saying, 'So you'll be home then.' It wasn't a question. It was an order. All decided. No debate. He wanted me to come home this last May. But I held off a few months. I knew I'd give in eventually. I always give in. But I just wanted a few more months on my own." She shrugs. "Stalling."
"You don't want the farm?"
"No! I want my music. I want to hear it, not just feel vibrations… I want to hear my lover whisper things to me when I'm in bed with him." She can't believe she's saying these things to him, intimate things – far more intimate than she's ever told anyone. "I don't want to be a virgin anymore."
Now that she's started it's all pouring out. "I hate the poetry, I don't care about it! I never have. It's stupid. Do you know what I was going to do in Topeka? After my recital at the Theater of the Deaf? I had that appointment afterwards." Then his arms are around her and she is pressing against his body, her head on his shoulder. It's an odd experience, doubly so: being close to a man, and communicating without looking at him. "There's something called a cochlear implant." She must pause for a moment before she can continue. "They put a chip in your inner ear. It's connected by wire to this thing, this speech processor that converts the sounds to impulses in the brain… I could never tell Susan. A dozen times I was going to. But she would've hated me. The idea of trying to cure deafness – she hated that."