Laurie watched her across the room, reading her lips for a moment as she chatted with an older auntie. She was talking about the lace bugs plaguing the island’s avocado trees. Laurie sighed and moved on.
Zoe’s father was making the rounds, completely at ease with everyone in the crowd… except for a certain someone with deep red hair and eyes as bright as an overcast sky. Noah’s eyes went to Anne every few seconds; she studiously refused to look at him.
Did she even realize that the man was as much in love with her as ever?
People saw Noah’s flippant smiles and assumed that he was unserious, but they underestimated him. He had been there for Zoe, been there for Dawn and Kimo more than most people realized.
Even when their own daughters had moved away, Noah never forgot the people who had taken him in when he had nowhere else to go.
Drifting aimlessly through the crowd, Laurie found herself face to face with an old classmate. The woman smiled brightly and said something that Laurie couldn’t decipher – not that she was really trying.
She smiled vaguely and moved on, keeping an eye out for Mia. The eight year old was off with her cousins somewhere. It was difficult for Laurie to get used to this rapidly growing independence; there was still a part of her soul that never felt at ease unless Mia was in her line of sight.
Laurie loathed parties. She always had.
Lip reading was a difficult task made just about impossible by people who ate and drank and looked away from her mid-sentence. She was too tired to try to follow along as acquaintances said a hundred words that amounted to nothing at all.
She switched off her hearing aids and floated along in near silence, exhausted by the torrent of meaningless noise.
An extrovert might power through, but – introvert that she was – Laurie found crowds to be overwhelming on every level. She suspected that even if she had never experienced hearing loss, she would still have been the girl in the corner with a book.
She’d been terribly shy as a little girl, even when she could hear. Even more so then, maybe… her earliest memories were of overwhelm: music blaring, grown-ups screaming, TV so loud that it kept her up at night.
And then at five she was hospitalized with a high fever, and the world went quiet. Not silent, but muted. She could still remember the relief of it. No more shouting. No more waking up to the sound of death metal or glass shattering.
Just… peace.
She escaped into books, where she found reliable friends who carried her through the chaos of foster care. They were with her when she was sent back home to her mother – and when she went back into the system again, she could bring her dearest friends along with her. Mary Lennox, Princess Cimorene, Veralidaine Sarrasri… they were always there for her. Always the same.
The books themselves might disappear or melt in the rain, but the stories were forever. No matter where the state sent her, she could walk into a library and escape into a familiar world – summer in the Catskills with Sam, or Prince Edward Island with Emily. Those people and places were more real to her than any memories of her birth mother.
Laurie sighed, wishing she’d brought a book. She had left her books at home with the intention of being present with her family… but now she regretted it.
She could go outside, where things were quieter.
But then she might actually have to talk to someone.
All she really wanted to do was climb the stairs to her old room and curl up with a book. But she did plenty of that at home, and so she continued to make some effort at existing in the world beyond the page.
She wandered over to the dining table to pick at the vast array of food that friends and neighbors had brought. She grabbed a piece of homemade mochi and scanned the room in search of a familiar face.
Akemi stood off to one side holding a plate piled with lau lau. She was in the kitchen, which was just as full as the rest of the house. Open-concept spaces were hard on introverts. There were no corners for them to hide in.
Do you want to go outside?Akemi signed one-handed.
Laurie nodded. Maybe Mia was out there. Either that or upstairs with her cousins.
They wove their way through the crowd and out the kitchen door.
Immediately, she felt calmer. There was more space between people out back, and a fresh salt breeze drifted in from the ocean. She kept her eyes on the horizon for a long moment, letting it steady her. Then she followed Akemi around the corner.
Mia ran past, her face the picture of carefree joy.
Laurie’s heart lifted at the smile on her daughter’s face. She was so happy when she was with her cousins. Laurie wished that they could have more time together. If it were up to her, she would homeschool together with her sisters. But they sent their children to school, and Chris insisted that she do the same with Mia.
Anne and Oakley were on the back porch – hiding out, just like her. Those two were inseparable growing up, so close that they had merged into a single name. With Anne back on island nearly three decades later, they had picked up right where they left off.
Laurie had always been the tagalong younger sister. Only two years and one grade behind – but when they were young, that was enough. And now, with the family dynamics firmly in place, it still was.
