Unbroken Circle by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bottom Dog Press
Published: 2017-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

The best times are when Abby comes. She is Karen’s sister, and I love her, but this is a fierce secret no one knows. Abby is deaf. The lifeguard’s shrill whistle, the cries of toddlers in the wading pool, and their mothers’ reprimands are nothing to her. Abby is smaller than us, and Karen must watch her. When I first saw her, I didn’t know she was deaf. Peggy told me later in a whisper as if she might overhear. But Abby knew I was staring at her because she tried to hide behind my grandfather’s raft, propped up against the chain-linked fence to dry.

All the time, I try to imagine what it would be like to be Abby. First I stuffed cotton in my ears and walked dreamily around the house, but that only muffled my sister’s questions, my mother’s derision. I could still hear her running the vacuum cleaner; I could hear the air conditioner switching on and the steady hum of the refrigerator. I walked out on the patio, and the hot moist air enclosed me. I wondered if Abby lives in utter stillness or if she always hears against the background of her mind something like traffic swishing down our street, a noise at once overlooked and insistent.

Mr. Ferguson at the drugstore has a hearing aid, and when he doesn’t want to fool with customers, he switches it off. I’ve seen him do this. I’ve snuck back behind the high pharmacist’s partition to find him engrossed in one of his hunting magazines. Then I put my hands over his eyes and make him guess who it is. Even if he knows, he pretends he doesn’t, and afterwards he buys me a Coke from the machine in the stockroom. “Our secret,” he says, a finger over his lips, but I don’t know if he means the Coke or the glossy magazines with pictures of elk, moose, and deer.

But Abby’s world is as different from Mr. Ferguson’s as it is from mine because she has never heard a human voice. She sometimes makes strange sounds like gurgles and she laughs and cries. Karen told Peggy who told me that in the fall Abby is going to a special school in Atlanta just for deaf children. She already knows how to make sign language. She runs the quickest of all of us; she is as fast and silent as a cat. Sometimes I go to Peggy’s and we all play hide-and-go-seek, but no one can ever find Abby except sometimes Karen.

After the day she caught me staring at her, Abby tried to avoid me. Maybe she thought I was too curious or she was afraid of me. But recently, when Karen was buying snow cones at the pool’s snack bar, Abby let me hold her. I wrapped my arms around her wet waist and she didn’t even squirm, though as soon as she saw Karen coming, she broke away. So I try to watch her without her knowing it.

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