The Horse I Sold So She Could Hear

Activation

They turned it on on a Wednesday in late April, at the audiologist’s office in Oklahoma City. I won’t say much about that room, because a small gray room is a small gray room.

What I’ll say is this. The audiologist, a calm woman named Karen with reading glasses on a chain, clicked something on her computer, and Harper’s eyes went wide, and she grabbed her daddy’s arm.

The first sounds are not words. They are beeps and buzzes, and voices come through like a radio between stations. Harper cried for about thirty seconds. Then she laughed, and signed, “Again.”

Karen told us not to expect words for months. She said Harper’s brain had to learn what sound was, and that it would be work, every day, for a long time, and that the work was the whole thing.

She gave us a sheet with the name of a speech therapist in Enid who did auditory-verbal therapy, which is the kind where you teach a child to listen and talk, not just to watch your mouth.

On the way out to the truck, in the parking lot, a semi went by on the interstate and Harper stopped dead on the sidewalk and turned toward it.

She had heard trucks before with her hearing aids. But not like that. Not with her face lit up like that.

That was a Wednesday. Easter was that Sunday.

Easter

Every Easter of my life has been out at the farm.

Mom hides eggs in the front yard, along the fence and under the cedar trees and in the old tractor tire planter, and the grandkids hunt them after church.

That year there were five kids hunting: Harper, and my cousin’s three, and a neighbor girl who always came. Mandy and Jake didn’t have kids yet, but Mandy always helped Mom hide the eggs.

We got there a little after noon. Harper had her implant on, with the processor hooked behind her ear and a little coil stuck to the side of her head with a magnet.

Her hair was in pigtails to keep it out of the way.

Nobody in the family had seen her since the surgery except at a distance. I had told Mom on the phone it went fine, and that they’d turned it on, and Mom had said, “Oh, good, so she can hear now,” the way you’d say a car was fixed.

Dad was out in the yard by the fence, hiding the last of the eggs in the bunch grass, bent over with his hands on his knees.

The other kids were lined up on the porch steps, waiting for the word.

Harper stood next to me in the yard holding her basket.

Then Dad straightened up and called across the yard, the way he’s called me in from the pasture my whole life. Big, flat, carrying voice.

“Harper! Come here, girl!”

Her head came up.

I watched it happen. She had never heard her grandpa’s voice before. Not like that.

She didn’t know the words yet, but she knew someone was calling, and she turned and found him by the fence, and her mouth came open.

She looked at me. She signed, “Is that Grandpa?”

I signed, “Yes. That’s Grandpa’s voice.”

And she walked across that yard to him with her basket bumping her knees, slow, staring at him, like he was a new animal she’d never seen.

Dad didn’t know what had happened. He just saw her coming. He crouched down in the grass so he was eye level with her, the way he does with calves.

Harper put her hand flat on his chest, where his voice came from. She held it there.

“Say it again,” I told him. My own voice wasn’t working right. “Say her name again, Dad. She can hear you.”

He said it. Quiet this time. “Harper.”

She laughed, a startled little laugh, and pressed her hand harder on his shirt.

Mom had come down off the porch. Mandy was right behind her. All the other grown-ups had gone quiet, and even the cousins on the steps had stopped fussing about the eggs.

Then Harper took her hand off Dad’s chest and signed something to him.