BY KAI COOLEY
Copyright is held by the author.
“I THINK the new neighbours are deaf,” John said, and my first thought was maybe he’d called out and I hadn’t heard, no one had heard. He was swaddled and propped up in his favourite chair, now pulled to the window. “Look, they talk with their hands.” My own paused fluttering over the prescription bottles long enough for me to bring my gaze to the glass, across our yards to where a man and woman were finger dancing in the space around their bodies. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said. But John had also said that recently about our bedsheets flapping in the wind and our cat’s cursive stretch on the rug.
“Now we can hold really rowdy parties with immunity,” I joked.
“They could probably still feel the vibrations.”
“They aren’t snakes!” I protested, and he laughed so hard he choked on the water I’d brought him.
He reminded me about the hammer and the anvil and the stirrup. I shrugged. It was always the sternum where I felt his voice.
Each of the neighbours alone was unremarkable, checking the mail, dragging the trash. But together their hands were trained starlings, and we watched them like we were journalists as they negotiated where to plant an azalea, what to do about a broken downspout.
“Just think, they never have to hear each other fart,” John said.
“The noise is not the most objectionable part,” I responded and then worried he might think I minded helping him in the bathroom.
Me, another time: “Think they would have been drawn to each other if they didn’t have the deafness in common?”
His brow furrowed. “Don’t most of us consider to be our soulmate whoever finally gets what we’ve been trying so hard to say?”
The neighbour woman was watering her flowers when we let the cat out. It walked out the fence to meet her. As she smiled and petted it, I imagined the warm rumble of its purr beneath her palm.
As usual John and I ventriloquized for the cat, this time, Hey, stranger, what are you having for supper?
The cat’s attributed dialogue had run the gamut over the years:
Mommy, if you go out in that dress, men are going to ask you ‘how much.’
Seems like Daddy might have had a bit too much wine after dinner.
Put the laptop away and pay attention to me!
Don’t leave us, I love you more than sunlight and snacks.
One morning, through our open bedroom windows, John and I overheard the soughs of sexual union. “Well,” he said, “that answers that question.”
I giggled and nuzzled his chest. He stroked my shoulder, but a minute later when the neighbours’ breaths hit their crest, I glanced up and saw John had tears on his eyelashes. “I’m sorry that we . . . that I . . . can’t,” he told me.
Weeks went by.
“The neighbours are arguing,” I told him. “In the kitchen.” I was holding his hand.
He didn’t open his eyes. “How can you tell?”
“There’s a lot of finger pointing.”
“Ah.”He smiled.
After the fight was over, I watched the woman turn on a stereo — yes, a stereo! — and stand with her body pressed against the speakers while the man slammed dishes in the sink.
“Did we ever fight like that?”
“Probably.”
“Such a waste of precious time.”
On the last night, while the nurses were coaching me like his life was a Broadway show they’d seen play to the end 50 dozen times before, and one had even tried her hand at speaking for the cat when it jumped onto John’s pillow (Kitty says morphine is your new best friend), the neighbours stood under bright lights in one of their rooms painting the drywall the crimson of a blood draw. I watched their rollers pull the shadows across our view in measured passes until I finally dropped my head to John’s blanketed knees.
The blackness swallowed and gulped.
Days later, as if in a queasy dream, I observed my feet walk to the chair by the window. I found myself sitting in the house alone in the dark while the clock’s secondhand clicked like a beetle.
Through the curtain gap, the neighbours were cooking dinner, gesturing and laughing as one does when you can’t hear the wolf padding toward your door. As one does desperately once you do.
The cat leapt on my lap, toured it quickly and jumped off. I was not John.
“You miss your daddy, don’t you?” I murmured.
Its green eyes flickered, mute as stars, and it struck me for the first time that in 16 years, it had never really spoken so much as a word.
***
Kai Cooley lives, writes, gardens, and walks dogs in the Appalachian foothills, in the U.S. Her work has appeared in Nerve Cowboy, Skipjack Review, Porchlight, and Still: the Journal.