One of the guests greeted her in a friendly way, and she nodded in acknowledgement. The woman asked her something, but she looked away to grab a muffin mid-sentence, and Laurie couldn’t follow.
She grabbed a plate of food and retreated through the back door, then settled into a chair on the porch and looked out at the ocean.
Lipreading wasn’t easy, and people made it impossible when they looked away like that. That was part of the reason she always wore her bright purple hearing aids out in public; it made for fewer awkward exchanges with strangers. More often than not, though, she left them switched off. The garbled noise that came through mostly just grated on her nerves.
Despite the difficulties she’d faced in her early years, she didn’t really mind her hearing loss. As a small child, shealways found the noise of the world around her to be terribly overwhelming.
Laurie had always lived on the edge of things: first as an unwanted child, then as a foster kid, and later as the deaf girl at school… fitting in had never really been an option for her. Hearing kids had teased her – or more often, simply got frustrated and dismissed her – and she had never been fully immersed in the Deaf community either.
Aside from the teacher who had given the whole family lessons every week when she was small, she hadn’t grown up around anyone who was Deaf or hard of hearing. When she met Deaf people as an adult, she sometimes felt as adrift in the easy fluency of their ASL as she did when she was lip reading.
Her parents and sisters had made a concerted effort to learn American Sign Language, and she loved them for it, but they weren’t truly fluent. Not in the way that Deaf families were.
When her family signed, their word order was heavily influenced by English grammar, morphing their communication into a sort of pidgin – a bridge between English and ASL. When their dad was alive, he liked to tell people that he was fluent in five languages: English, Hawaiian, ASL, Hawaiian pidgin, and PSE (Pidgin Signed English).
The only language Laurie had ever felt fully comfortable with was written English. She loved being able to pin her thoughts down into fixed shapes, and she took comfort in the solidity of the written word.
From the time that she first learned to read, books were her escape and her solace.
She had never felt fully at home in the world, a place that she found to be too bright and busy and overstimulating. Crowds still overwhelmed her - deaf or hearing, it made no difference.
Chris had taken advantage of her tendency to self-isolate. A homebody by nature, she had been slow to notice when therelationship that had offered her refuge from the world began to morph into a prison.
Now she had to learn how to navigate the world on her own again.
First on the agenda was finding a place of her own. Living at home with Anne and her many guests was overwhelming. But there was more to it than that; marriage had shown her how dangerous it was to be fully reliant on anyone but herself.
Too late, Laurie realized that she hadn’t even touched her food. She spooned cold eggs into her mouth mechanically, forcing herself to eat, and washed them down with tepid coffee.
She was just scraping up the last of the eggs when her mom joined her on the porch.
How are you?Dawn asked.
Fine, Laurie signed automatically.
Dawn raised her eyebrows.Really?
She let out a huff of a breath, almost a laugh, and shrugged.
“It’s a lot of people,” her mom said.
“Yeah.” Laurie sighed and looked out at the ocean again. Dawn had always told her that she could come home… and when she finally did, there were strangers rotating through her room. They were lucky to even be able to stay in Akemi’s room, but still… it felt stressful.
Dawn tapped her knee and said, “I might know a place.”
Laurie frowned and asked, “For us, you mean? A house for Mia and me?”
“Mahina has an ‘ohana unit on her property. A nice place, not a little shed like Zoe’s.” She gestured dismissively to the detached room where her eldest granddaughter resided. “It has its own kitchen and bathroom and everything.”
Auntie Mahina was a good friend of her mom’s, and Uncle Mano had always been like a brother to her dad.
Laurie had been to their house a thousand times growing up, but the ‘ohana had been built more recently. She frowned, trying to picture it. She could vaguely remember a little cedar house tucked away in the back of the verdant garden.
“Doesn’t one of their kids live there?”
“Kekoa built it, and he lived there for years withhisson. But he just built himself a bigger house on another property nearby, and so the ‘ohana is available.”
“Would they really rent to me?”
