T. Boyle: Talk Talk

The cast had come off a week ago, but even with it on he'd been able to manipulate the mouse and run his programs pretty effectively-in fact, he'd got so used to propping the thing up on the edge of his desk he felt strange without it, as if his arm were levitating all on its own. There was no pain, though when he took a deep breath he could still feel a premonitory prickling in the place where the two ribs had sustained their hairline fractures, and his voice was huskier now. He hadn't noticed the change himself-you don't really listen to yourself unless you're singing, and he hadn't felt much like bursting into song lately-but when he'd first got back and called Deet-Deet to suss things out and then Radko to offer his services in the absence of the girl with the breast implants, neither of them had recognized his voice, and that told him something.

And his mother. Right from the outset his mother had wanted to know when and how and to what extent he would regain his voice, demanding facts, statistics, terminology, chasing nurses down the hallway and dialing every specialist in the phone book, starting with Ahmad and running down to Zierkofski. She'd swept into the hospital in a cyclone of flowers, putting on her adversarial face and grilling the doctor who'd operated on him (a soft-spoken Taiwanese woman with peeled-back eyes who looked as if she were awaiting the gun at the start of the hundred-meter dash) till the doctor had thrown up her hands and said, “Look, maybe what you need is an outside specialist,” and his mother had tightened her voice till it was like strung wire and said, “That's exactly what we need.” He hadn't known what to do. He was unfocused and tentative, adrift on a sea of medication. He was having trouble swallowing and it felt as if there were something stuck in his throat, some balled-up wad of cardboard that kept him on the verge of gagging all the time, and that concerned him. It scared him. It made him susceptible to his mother and her reductive fears in a way that brought him back to his childhood-she was his mother, and she was there for him, and he was glad of it-and when she told him she'd made an appointment for Thursday back in San Diego with the best otolaryngologist in Southern California, all he could do was nod. It wasn't his fault. He wasn't thinking beyond the moment. And he wasn't-forgive him, because he was the one who'd been hurt here, he was the one in the hospital-thinking of Dana.

She'd driven back down to New York, that was all he knew, and he messaged her on his cell that night, the second night in the hospital, but he couldn't find a way to say what he wanted to say, not without seeing her face to face.

“Hi.”

“How you feeling?”

“Okay. Can't swallow too well.”

“What did the doctor say?”

“Not much.”

“When do you get out?”

“Tomorrow.”

“What time?”

“You don't need to come.”

“I do. I want to.”

“My mother's here.”

“So?”

They released him the next morning, early, and he called from the train to tell her he was on his way, hoping to catch her before she left the apartment. It was awkward-the cast was on his forearm but they wanted him to wear a sling for the first two weeks, just to keep it stationary-yet he was already adapting, flashing on the summer he'd spent under the hoop out back of the house when he was in high school and trying, with mixed results, to train himself to take the three-point shot from either side. His mother sat beside him with the newspaper and a cardboard cup of coffee, making one-way conversation-his father was going to be happy to see him, and the dog too, and he was welcome to stay as long as he liked because nobody had been in the guest room since Junie and Al had been there in the spring and did he know they'd sold their business and had all the figures worked out for early retirement? Could he believe that? Junie and Al retired? As he listened to the phone ring he couldn't help picturing Dana in motion, sliding out of the cab at Grand Central with the light exploding round her and the pigeons blasting up off the sidewalk in living color or tapping her foot and doing the crossword as the northbound train hurtled past them at Tarry-town or Dobbs Ferry or some such place, the numb staring faces passing in instant review and hers shuffled in with all the rest. There was no answer. His mother, in high spirits, leaned in to read him choice bits from the newspaper and she sipped her coffee and worked one shoe off and on again with the toe of the other, and when he needed to respond, when she put a question to him-“So what's she like, Dana? Are you two serious? It must be, I don't know, “difficult” to communicate?”-he wrote out the reply in an awkward scrawl on one of the paper towels from the restroom “(Awesome; Yes; Not too bad).”

Then they were in the cab, the streets crushed by the weight of the light, monuments of light cut and formed and shaped by the buildings, everything held in stasis till the cab turned one corner and then the next and the weight came down all over again and he couldn't swallow and he had to have the driver pull over so he could scramble out and get a bright red super-sized container full to the plastic brim with Coke and ice and the straw to deliver it sip by soothing sip. And then they were at the apartment and the doorman was phoning up and he watched his mother's face as the elevator rose toward the meeting of the mothers, his mother and hers, and what that meant or could mean. Vera was waiting for them at the door. She'd combed her hair and put on lipstick. “You poor thing,” she said, or something to that effect, and stepped forward to embrace him before he had a chance to introduce his mother, which he did a moment later with a shrug of the shoulders and a broad grimacing gesture that made the side of his face-the side that had hit the pavement-ache all over again.

He could see that his mother was tense, her smile automatic and her eyes panning away from Dana's mother to the open door and the dim interior beyond. She didn't know what to expect-she'd had no experience of the deaf and this was uncharted territory-but to her credit she held out her hand and Vera took it and then they were emerging from the hall into the living room in a scatter of small talk. “Would you like something to drink?” Vera wanted to know and he saw that she'd made an effort to push back the clutter so that the couch and easy chair presented their surfaces unencumbered and a good square foot of the coffee table was ready to receive the drinks and the blue can of Planters nuts. He watched his mother take it all in and he wanted to smooth things over, to make the off-hand comment that would put them at ease, but all he could do was hold out the Coke container and rattle the ice in response. His mother, looking doubtfully at the easy chair, momentarily lost her smile. “Water,” she said. “Thank you.”

Just as Dana's mother was about to turn away, thankful to have this little ritual of welcoming and graciousness to occupy her, he jerked his left arm into her line of vision, a sudden spastic gesture that must have made it seem as if he were fighting for balance, but it had the desired effect: he caught her attention. There was a suspended moment, both women staring at him, and then he signed, as best he could under the conditions, “Where is Dana?”

Vera looked to his mother and then turned back to him. “Sleeping,” she said. “I let her sleep in. I mean, after all she's been through-yesterday, yesterday especially.” She paused to draw in her breath. “Yesterday was a nightmare.”

“Yesterday?”

“At the station. When he-I was scared to death. Literally scared to death.” She saw his face then and caught herself. “You mean you don't know? Didn't she tell you?”