The Hearing Aids I Brought to Recess

I don’t think I have ever moved as fast as I moved across that blacktop.

She saw me when I was halfway to her, and her whole face changed.

She ran, the case still in her hands, braid bouncing, and by the time she got to me she was crying a little, the tired kind of crying a child does when she has been brave for too long.

I knelt down right there on the blacktop. I didn’t care about my scrubs. I opened the pouch and shook one loaner into my palm so she could see it.

She looked at the tiny beige hearing aid lying there, then looked at me, and I could see her trying to decide whether she was allowed to believe it.

“Are those mine?” she asked. She said it too loud, the way she talks when she can’t hear her own voice.

“They’re borrowed, baby,” I said, slow and clear, so she could see my mouth. “Dr. Meyer loaned them to you. Yours are coming home.”

She held out her hand, and I put the first one in it. She held it the way you would hold a baby bird that fell out of the nest.

Mrs. Lund had come up behind us and was standing quietly a few steps back. Two little girls drifted over to see what was happening, and Mrs. Lund turned them gently back toward the slide.

I helped Emma tuck her hair behind her ears. Her fingers were shaking and so were mine.

She knew exactly how to put them on, she has done it every morning for five years, but the domes were new to her and she fumbled the first one.

I pushed it in gently, the way Dr. Meyer showed me. Then the second.

I closed the battery doors, and we waited. There is a little chime when they turn on, then a few seconds while they wake up.

And right then, the bell rang for the end of recess.

It is a loud old bell, mounted on the brick wall by the back door, the same bell that rang when I was nine. Emma jumped about a foot.

Her eyes went wide. Then, before I could ask if she was all right, she laughed. She threw her head back and laughed out loud, right there on the blacktop.

“It’s so loud, Mama,” she said, laughing and crying at the same time. “I forgot it was that loud.”

I pulled her into my arms and held her. The other kids ran past us to line up at the door, sneakers slapping on the blacktop, somebody yelling that it wasn’t fair, somebody else yelling that it was. Emma heard every bit of it. I could feel her listening.

“Can you hear me?” I whispered into her hair, barely a breath.

“Yes,” she whispered back. “You smell like the dentist.”

Mrs. Lund crouched down beside us. Up close I could see her eyes were wet too, and she was doing her best to pretend they weren’t.

“Amanda,” she said quietly. “I hope you don’t mind. After I talked to you this morning, I called Chad myself. At the elevator.”

I looked at her.

“I thought he ought to know what kind of morning his daughter had,” she said.

“From me, not secondhand. He asked if he could come see her. I told him lunch recess, at noon. He said he’d be here.”