Akemi squeezed onto the bench between them. Laurie shifted a chair to face them and curled up into it, feet tucked beneath her.
“I can’t believe our baby sister is having a baby,” Oakley she said and signed.
Out of all of Laurie’s family, Oakley was the most proficient at ASL. Her college had allowed students to study American Sign Language in place of the foreign language requirement, and Oakley had opted to study a language she already knew rather than taking French or Spanish on top of her other coursework.
Her signs were crisp and clear… and it drove Laurie a bit crazy. It reminded her of running jokes on sitcoms with characters who pronounced French words likecroissantwith an exaggerated accent, irritating everyone around them.
“How are you feeling?” Anne asked Akemi.
Akemi muttered something unintelligible around a mouthful of food.
Laurie turned her hearing aids on, then winced and turned them right back off again. The noise of plates and music and conversation coming from every direction was too much, even out there.
She wondered sometimes how hearing people dealt with it all, the constant assault on their senses, like glaring lights you could never look away from. Babies crying, people shouting… there were plenty of times when she was grateful to be able to mute the world.
Now, though, she wished that there was a way to hear what her sisters were saying and tune out the rest. It was exhausting, living out there on the edge of things, having to work ten times harder than everyone else just to follow a conversation.
Akemi and Oakley were talking low and fast now – quiet argument, tense discussion, Laurie couldn’t tell. Now she wished that she had a book to retreat to. She loved the comfortable solidity of printed words.
Even when her sisters did sign, it was mostly just bits and pieces to accompany their spoken English. It helped, but it was still never easy to follow a conversation with more than one person speaking.
What really hurt was that it was much the same when she met up with her Deaf friends in Kona. Their handsflewwith an easy fluency that Laurie had never had the chance to learn; she felt slow and clumsy in comparison.
ASL was a fully realized language. It had its own grammar, its own culture — and Laurie wasn’t a native speaker. She hadn’t grown up with Deaf parents or attended a Deaf school. Her family had taken ASL lessons all together, but the gulf between weekly lessons and full immersion was as vast as Waimea Canyon.
The ASL they used together was far from fluent. Her sisters seemed to think it was – they were proud of what they knew –but in reality their signing (and Laurie included herself in this) was clumsy and heavily influenced by English grammar.
There was no School for the Deaf on the Big Island. The possibility of a residential school had been floated several times throughout her childhood, but in the end, she had remained in Pualena. She’d loved her sisters and foster parents too much to leave them. Their home was the first and only place that she had ever felt safe, and she’d clung desperately to that security.
Whenever a social worker brought up the option of leaving the Kalama home to live in the dormitories at the Hawaii School for the Deaf and Blind, Laurie would wail and sob and beg to stay where she was. She was a quiet child, and those were unusual outbursts for her. Between that and her birth mother’s insistence that she stay on island, the social workers never pushed too hard.
She wondered, sometimes, what her life would have been like if she had grown up in a Deaf community, fully fluent in American Sign Language.
Instead, she had grown up on the edge of things.
English or ASL, sisters or friends, it didn’t matter.
She was always the odd one out.
When she was younger, she hadn’t minded so much. She wasn’t interested in her classmates; she’d piled books around her like walls. The constant busyness of the Kalama home was more than enough socialization for her. She loved running errands with Halia and surfing with Annie Oakley. Akemi was her shadow in those days, and they passed countless happy hours with books and crayons and board games.
The written word was the one place where she felt at ease. Following some bumpy years early on, after the uphill struggle of speech therapy and lipreading and learning ASL, she hadthrivedin school. So much, in fact, that she had taken shelterin the world of academia. Multiple degrees, a masters, a PhD – she’d loved that world.
It was only now, in the extreme isolation of Hawi, that her chest housed a perpetual sense of discontentment.
Maybe that was just a part of growing up.
She was grieving her father, grieving the sense of wholeness that she’d felt when her family was intact. And she was grieving time with her daughter, too – still adjusting to this new age, where her little opihi would rather run off with her cousins than stick to Laurie’s side.
ShelovedMia with her whole heart. If it were up to her, she would be with her daughter all day, every day. But Chris had pushed for private school, and Laurie filled those hours as best as she could. She took a great stack of library books home every week, and she’d even picked up some odd jobs online – proofreading, copywriting, whatever she could get. It kept her busy and fed into an emergency fund that gave her some peace of mind.
Oakley flapped her hand repeatedly, moving into Laurie’s field of vision, and she looked up with a start.
“Hello, Earth to Laurie!”
What?she signed.
You OK?Anne asked.
