T. Boyle - Talk Talk

The problem now-the concern, the worry, the fear that was booming inside her with a dull echoing horror-wasn't Peck Wilson or his mother or wife or the wine-red Mercedes the police were impounding until legal ownership could be established, but Bridger. Bridger was somewhere behind the swinging doors in back of the nurse's desk, beyond the expressionless patients slumped in the rows of molded plastic chairs and the TV on the wall that was tuned, in another sick intrusion of irony, to an overwrought drama about emergency room doctors. They hadn't told her much, and what they had told her she wasn't getting at all until Terri Alfano wrote it down for her: Bridger, it seemed, was having trouble breathing and they'd done an emergency tracheotomy. He'd suffered laryngeal trauma and they were going to have to operate in order to clear the air passage and repair damage to the thyroid cartilage. That was the problem. That was why she was sitting here watching the clock and the swinging doors and the face of the nurse every time she jerked her eyes to the phone and picked it up.

An hour crept by, then another. The detective was gone now, long gone, and the waiting room had begun to fill again. Dana paged through a magazine and watched people's faces as they shuffled in and out the door on the arms of relatives and friends, their features tugged and twisted round the flash point of their suffering eyes. There had been no news of Bridger, and as the light failed beyond the windows and the night settled in, she turned to Terri Alfano and told her she might as well go home. “You don't have to sit here and keep me company, you know,” she said aloud, though she didn't mean it. She was glad for the company, desperate for it. She was confused and hurting, crushed with guilt over Bridger-it was her fault, the whole thing, involving him in this in the first place and then dragging him all the way out here, and for what? She shouldn't have been so hardheaded. She should have let it go. Should have left it to the police and the credit card companies instead of playing amateur detective, instead of taking it personally, as if the thief could have cared who she was, as if it mattered, as if “she” mattered. What was she thinking? But the worst thing, the thing that haunted her as she stared at the floor and shifted in her seat and raised her eyes to look at the nurse and the clock and the swinging doors that never swung open and gave up nothing, was leaving him when he needed her most, when he couldn't breathe, when he was clutching at his throat and thrashing on the pavement with the pain that should have been hers. There was a moral calculus here, and she'd failed it.

“It's all right. I'm fine.” Terri was idly turning the pages of one of the magazines Dana had been twice through already. She sat very still, her back arched, exuding calm. She was wearing a gray skirt with a matching jacket and a rose-colored blouse, very professional, prim almost, but she wasn't cold or rigid in the least, unlike so many interpreters-Iverson and his ilk. Little people who wanted to make themselves big at the expense of somebody else, somebody they could dominate in an ongoing psychodrama of mastery and dependency.

“Really,” she said, setting down the magazine. “I know you've got better things to do-”

Terri shrugged, held her palms out, smiled. They'd already talked about her boyfriend, how she could barely think of anything else though it had been six months since he'd moved to the Midwest for a job opportunity he just couldn't pass up and how she was waiting for him to come back for her. They'd talked about her parents, both of them deaf-“mother father deaf,” she signed-and how she'd been interpreting for them all her life, talked about shitty pay and long hours and the obligation she felt to the deaf community. And the guilt. Not to mention the guilt. They'd talked about Bridger, about the San Roque School. About Peck Wilson. “Believe me,” she said, signing under it, “it's okay. I want to stay. What if the doctor needs to tell you something-I don't know, something important? Crucial even?”

“I can read him.”

“Medical terms?”

“He can write them down.”

There was a pause. They both looked up to watch an elderly woman in slippers and housedress navigate the room to the admittance desk like a sad old prow on a breezeless sea. Terri's face bloomed. “Do you really want me to go?” she signed.

Dana shook her head. And then, for emphasis, two quick snaps of the index and middle fingers to the thumb: “No.”

It was past nine when the nurse who'd first spoken with them came through the swinging doors. She was wearing scrubs, replete with the soft crushed hat, and there was a suggestive stain, something dark and blotted, knifing across one hip. They both stood to receive her and as she made her way across the room, Dana could read her expression and her body language-she was satisfied with herself; everything was okay-so that when the nurse was standing there before them with a propped-up smile and telling them that Bridger was going to be fine, she already knew the gist of it. The details were something else. They'd implanted a polymeric silicone stent-“Could you write that down, please?”-to prevent granulation tissue from forming on the exposed cartilage, but he'd be released the following day and the prognosis was good. Full recovery. Though he wouldn't be able to speak for a period of two to three weeks and there might be some residual voice change.

“Residual voice change?” Dana looked from Terri to the nurse.

“He may sound different. That is, he may not have the full vocal range he had before the accident-or the injury, I mean. But maybe not. Maybe he'll recover fully. Many do.” She paused to let Terri catch up with her, though Dana was reading her and leaping ahead. The nurse was middle-aged, with sorrowful eyes and a pair of semicircular lines bracketing her mouth-which vanished when she smiled, as she did now. “He's not a singer, is he?”

“No,” Dana said, shaking her head even as the image of him in the car rose up before her, his lips puckered round the unknowable ecstasy of the tune generated by the radio, sweet melisma, the owl song: who who, who who.

Earlier, with Terri's help, she'd put in a phone call to his parents, people she'd never met. They lived in San Diego. His father had something to do with the military there, that was all she knew. She'd watched Terri's face as she'd translated, watched as she listened and the emotional content of what she was hearing transferred itself to her lips and eyes and the musculature beneath her skin. The parents hadn't heard from Bridger in a month. They were unhappy. The mother was flying out on the next plane. Was there blame attached? Was there ill will, rancor, animosity? “A deaf girl? He'd never mentioned he was seeing a deaf girl.”

And maddeningly, no matter how many times she punched in the number, her own mother wasn't picking up the phone-or she had it off. Terri kept getting her voice mail and each time she left a message to call back. Nothing yet. Dana had tucked her phone deep in the side pocket of her shorts where she'd be sure to feel the vibrator, and now she felt for it, just to reassure herself, and it was still there, still inert, still made of plastic, metal, silicon. A cold thing. All but useless. Maybe she should have brought a couple of carrier pigeons with her.

Terri saw her hand go to her pocket. She smiled, thanked the nurse, who was already shifting her weight to start back toward the swinging doors, and lifted her eyes to Dana's. “Still no luck?”

She shook her head. “I think she was going to go see a show some night this week, but I don't know-”

The moment hung there between them, and then Terri, signing beneath her words, said, “My place is small-and it's nothing really, nothing much-but there's a fold-out couch in the living room. You're welcome to stay. Really.”