The Hearing Aids I Brought to Recess

It is a drive I have made more times than I can count. Every audiology appointment, every earmold fitting, every time a battery door cracked or a tube split.

Emma and I used to play the license plate game on it. She liked finding Minnesota plates because she said they looked friendly.

That morning I drove it with both hands on the wheel and the radio off. I kept thinking about her sitting at her desk with the spelling words floating past her.

I kept thinking about how she had walked into school that morning without her aids and without me, and how she must have known, right from the door, what kind of day it was going to be.

And I kept thinking about Kendall. I tried hard to be angry at her, and I was. But underneath it was something else, something more like confusion. Kendall wasn’t stupid.

She was a careful woman who balanced other people’s money for a living. How could she look at a child who couldn’t hear, and take away the thing that let her hear?

I didn’t have an answer by the time I pulled into the clinic lot. I just had a sore jaw from clenching it for an hour.

Deb met me at the window. She is somewhere near sixty, with reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she came around the counter and squeezed my arm before she said anything at all.

“She’s ready for you,” Deb said. “Go on back.”

The audiologist, Dr. Meyer, had a pair of loaner aids laid out on a paper towel on her desk, already connected to the computer by a thin cord.

They were plain beige, nothing like Emma’s purple ones. Dr. Meyer has known Emma since that first booth with the blocks and the bucket.

“I pulled her last audiogram from March,” she said. “Her hearing is stable, which is good news. I’m setting these to her prescription now. They won’t be exactly like hers, but they’ll be close.”

I sat in the chair where Emma usually sits and watched the numbers move on the screen. Dr. Meyer worked fast and didn’t make me fill the silence. After a while she asked, without looking up, “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

So I told her. The weekend, the supper table, the talking back, the Friday. I told it as plainly as I could.

When I finished, Dr. Meyer stopped typing and took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.

“I see this more than you’d think,” she said. “Not usually as a punishment. But grown-ups who don’t understand. A grandparent who thinks she’s faking. A stepparent who thinks the aids are like reading glasses, something you only need now and then.”

“She can hear some without them,” I said. “That’s what confuses people. If you talk loud right in front of her face, she gets most of it.”

“Right. And so people think she’s choosing not to listen.” Dr. Meyer shook her head.

“She’s not choosing anything,” she said. “Without these, she’s guessing at half of every sentence, all day long. A school day like that is like running a race with a sack over your head.”

She tested the loaners in a little box that beeped and hummed.

Then she snapped a pair of soft silicone domes onto the tubes in place of earmolds, because Emma’s custom molds were back at Chad’s house with her own aids.