It was more than Meghan had hoped for. How he said a word was unimportant. He’d attached names to objects, not because he’d heard the words but because he’d felt the vibrations. He was smart, and he wanted to learn. Already she could imagine the smile on Tracy’s face when he called her mama.
Bundling Lucas back into the stroller and packing away the quilt, Meghan started for home. She had not gone three full blocks when a car pulled alongside of them and screeched to a stop.
Tracy jumped out. “Where on earth have you been? I’ve been calling your cell all afternoon, worried sick that something horrible could have happened!”
Lucas raised his arms in the air and said, “Maaaa.”
Appearing dumbstruck, Tracy turned to Meghan. “Did he just—”
“Say mama?” Meghan answered with a nod.
“But how . . . ”
“I taught him to say it. He’s not autistic, but he—”
“So Mama was right after all!”
“Not exactly,” Meghan said, but by then Tracy had lifted Lucas from his stroller and was no longer listening.
Knowing there was a long and difficult road ahead, Meghan decided the explanation could wait. For now she would let Tracy enjoy this moment of great happiness.
A Painful Truth
On Saturday evening, Meghan filled the better half of a composition book with her thoughts. She wrote page after page telling of the afternoon with Lucas, detailing each action, explaining her discouragement when she feared her plan might not work, and telling of the overwhelming joy she felt when at long last it did. She expressed confidence that Lucas would one day speak as clearly as Gabriel Hawke and that he would grow to be a handsome and intelligent young man. Giving a nod to the challenges that lay ahead, she swore to stand by Tracy and see that the boy got all the help he needed.
Partway through the pages, she set the book aside and tapped out a lengthy e-mail to Gabriel Hawke. In it, she said he probably wouldn’t remember her but that she certainly remembered him. She told of Lucas and how because of Gabriel’s story she had taught the boy to say his first three words. At the end of several paragraphs, she wrote that she was hopeful Tracy would see fit to have Lucas attend Gabriel’s learning academy.
She clicked “Send,” then returned to the composition book. After nearly three years of writing about her and Tracy’s lives, the growth of the Snip ’N’ Save, and loveless dates that left her uninspired and unimpressed, Meghan was now bubbling over with thoughts of Tom Whitely.
“His face is narrow,” she wrote, “with hazel eyes that sometimes appear to be a mix of gray, green, and blue with flecks of copper circling the edge of the iris. Although you could say his hair is a sandy brown, it’s more the color of a wheat field in the waning hours of sunlight when the stalks radiate a golden glow. He’s tall like Daddy and has the same gentleness in his voice, but his shoulders are wider and his waist narrower. I look at him and can almost picture his arms around me, his lips pressed against mine.
“Last night when he walked me to my car, I thought he would try to kiss me, but he didn’t. Instead he touched his fingers to my mouth and whispered, ‘Tuesday.’ That may not sound like much, but, truthfully, it sent a shiver up my spine. If the touch of a finger can do that, I can’t begin to imagine what will happen when he actually kisses me.”
When Meghan had emptied her heart of words, she pulled the box of ribbons from the closet. Choosing the strand of metallic gold she had saved for just such an occasion, she wrapped it around the composition book and looped it into a bow. This time she didn’t knot the ribbon as she usually did. Already she knew this book was one she would return to, and when she did, a small tug on the end of the tie would allow it to fall open.
Meghan waited until Sunday evening to share with her mama and Tracy just how she had taught Lucas to speak the words. As they gathered at the kitchen table, she said, “There’s something I need to tell you.”
She began with reminding them of Gabriel Hawke and explaining the magic of his music. At first Tracy and Lila eyed her with a curious look, wondering if perhaps Gabriel was the reason for this strange new gleam in her eye.
“Are you dating this Gabriel?” Lila asked.
“No,” Meghan replied, “I’m not. I’m only saying how much I admire what he’s done with his life. Look at the challenges he’s overcome and how he reaches out to help others.”
Tracy turned her head, and she eyed her sister with a suspicious glare. “Does this have something to do with Lucas?”
“I suppose you could say that.” Meghan drew in a shallow breath. “Gabriel runs a school that teaches deaf children—”
Tracy slammed the palm of her hand against the table. “I don’t want to hear about it!”
Lila chimed in. “Tracy’s right. I’ve told you a dozen times boy babies are—”
“Get real, Mama!” Meghan’s voice was louder now, more emphatic. “I taught Lucas to say those words the same way Gabriel’s mama taught him to speak—by letting him feel the sound of the word in my mouth.”
As Meghan began to explain the process, tears welled in Tracy’s eyes and spilled out onto her cheeks.
“You’re my sister,” Tracy said. “How can you do this to me?” Her voice cracked, and when the words came out, they were raw and splintered like razor-thin shards of glass. “How can you sit there telling me my child is deaf? That he’ll never hear the sound of—”
“Stop it!” Meghan shouted. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself! Denying the truth won’t help Lucas.”
“I’m not denying anything! I know Lucas is having a hard time adjusting, but it’s only because—”
“It’s because he can’t hear!”
Lila watched the exchange the way one watches a tennis match, with eyes flicking back and forth from one daughter to the other.
“Girls, please!” she said, but they both ignored her.
“I can’t say for sure he’s deaf,” Meghan argued, “and you can’t say for sure he’s not! But I do know his hearing is not normal. Gabriel says—”
“Gabriel, Gabriel, Gabriel! I’m sick to death of hearing what Gabriel says! He’s never even laid eyes on Lucas, so how can he know?”
Meghan lowered her voice. “Maybe you’re right, Tracy. Maybe Gabriel can’t do anything for Lucas. Maybe nobody can, but you’ll never know unless you have him tested and get the kind of help he needs.”
A sob caught in Tracy’s throat, and there was a moment of nothingness before she spoke.
“Don’t you think I’m already trying to help him? I’ve got an appointment with the pediatrician. What more can I do?”
“He needs to go to a pediatric audiologist. Someone who can test a baby’s hearing and tell us what steps we need to take.” Meghan went on to explain Gabriel’s website indicated that in most cases where the problem was caught early on, a child’s hearing impairment could be corrected with either a hearing aid or surgery.
Tracy pushed back the tears and listened to Meghan’s tales, not of tragedy but of success. Recounting the stories she had taken from Gabriel’s website, Meghan told of children who were born deaf and before they were five years old had hearing sharp enough to catch the tick of a clock or hear the crunch of leaves beneath their feet.
Later that evening, Tracy and Lila sat in front of the large computer screen in the Snip ’N’ Save office and watched as Meghan pulled up Gabriel Hawke’s website. Reading aloud, she retold the story of how Gabriel had been born deaf and now wore hearing aids. A tear came to Tracy’s eye as they watched the video of him telling how his mother struggled to teach him to feel the vibrations of sound and how he could still remember the touch of his hand to her face.
And there were other videos. A professor who spoke of the need for patience while a child learns to listen, conversations between students and teachers, pictures of children studying at the Hawke School. They watched and listened as the children called out names of animals and objects the teacher pictured.
Lila pointed at a boy who looked to be near Lucas’s age. “It seems almost inconceivable that child was born with a hearing impairment,” she said. “His words are completely understandable.” She held back the remainder of her thought but couldn’t help weighing the child’s ability to talk against Lucas’s shrieks and keening.
After the videos, there were testimonial letters filled with the heartfelt gratitude of parents who claimed that because of Gabriel their child could now pull words together into a sentence and differentiate a request for soup versus sock. The letters held words such as compassion, understanding, devotion, miraculous. There was only the muffled whoosh of Lila’s sigh as Meghan read about how a cochlear implant placed in a toddler would last a lifetime.
It was after midnight when Meghan finally clicked off the computer and went to bed.
Tracy had leaned close to the screen and listened to every word but said nothing. At the end of it all, she’d walked away with her shoulders hunched and her eyes focused on some distant thing no one else could see.
It was hours before Meghan fell asleep, and when at long last she did, she dreamed of a baby crying, a baby she could neither find nor comfort. Throughout the night she tossed and turned, and it was near daybreak when she finally fell into a deep sleep.
She woke late, and by the time she came downstairs everyone else had already eaten breakfast. A plate of French toast was warming on the back of the stove, but she passed it by and poured herself a cup of coffee.
Standing there, she heard Tracy’s voice coming from the Snip ’N’ Save office. Although Tracy’s tone was insistent, Meghan couldn’t make out the words. She tiptoed toward the office and stood outside the door, listening.
“Yes, I realize you don’t have any new patient openings before October, but Gabriel Hawke is a close personal friend of my sister, and he felt certain you’d be able to work us in.”
The conversation went back and forth a few times, then Tracy said, “Sure, Thursday would be great. Thank you so much.” After a moment of quiet, she said, “Yes, I will certainly mention it to him,” and hung up.
Meghan stuck her head in the office. “Everything okay?”
Tracy turned and gave a slow nod of resignation. “As okay as it can be. I cancelled the appointment with Dr. Driscoll and got Lucas an appointment with Dr. Mallory on Thursday.”
“Dr. Mallory?”
“A pediatric audiologist in Barrington.” With a guilty grin tugging at the corner of her mouth, Tracy said, “I hope your Gabriel Hawke doesn’t mind, but I used his name to get an earlier appointment.”
The Portuguese Fisherman
By Tuesday morning there was an air of expectancy in the Briggs household, a sense of knowing something was going to happen but not knowing whether it would be good or bad.
At the breakfast table, Lila, a lifetime believer that food was the salve for everything, announced she’d be making chicken and dumplings for dinner.
“I won’t be here,” Meghan said. “I’m going out.”
Given that Meghan didn’t date all that often, and when she did it was almost always on a Saturday night, Tracy and Lila both turned with their eyebrows lifted.
“Out where?” Lila asked.
“I have a date.”
“On a Tuesday?”
Meghan stirred a spoonful of sugar into her coffee and nodded.
“Is this one of those Chamber of Commerce things?” Tracy asked.
“No.” The thought of seeing Tom again caused Meghan’s lips to curl into a smile. “I’m having dinner with Tom Whitely, the new vet.”
Hoping to hide the grin on her own face, Lila turned away.
That evening, Tom arrived early, but Meghan was ready and waiting. She’d been watching from an upstairs window and recognized the blue Audi when it turned in to the driveway. It was a convertible, and tonight he had the top down.
Earlier she’d thought of pinning her hair up, doing something a bit more glamorous than her usual look. She’d pulled a narrow black sheath from the closet and slipped it over her head, then twisted her hair into a dazzling black clip. But when she’d looked in the mirror, her reflection screamed, “This is not you!” At the last minute, she’d changed her mind and was now glad of it.
She watched him climb from the car and start up the walkway. He was dressed casually: khaki trousers and a white, open-collar shirt. She breathed a sigh of relief, glad she had changed into the sundress and strappy sandals. Meghan heard the ding-dong of the doorbell, but the last thing she wanted was to seem overly eager. She waited a minute, listened as he introduced himself to Lila, then started down the stairs.
He was standing in the living room, and when he looked up, his eyes widened.
“Wow,” he said. “You look fabulous!”
The way he said it caused a spot of color to rise in her cheeks.
“You too,” she said. “I mean, you look good. A manly kind of good.”
He laughed.
After several minutes of polite conversation with Lila and Tracy, he tactfully said they had a dinner reservation and should get going.
From the moment he backed out of the driveway, Meghan had a feeling it was going to be a good evening. Their conversation seemed to pick up almost exactly where it had left off Friday evening. He said he’d made a reservation at the Portuguese Fisherman and asked if that was okay with her.
“Doc Anderson recommended it,” he said. “He claims they have a flame-grilled Chilean sea bass that’s to die for. And if you don’t care for fish, they have pretty good steaks.”
“I love seafood,” Meghan replied. In truth, she would have eaten anything or nothing at all, because the pleasure of the evening was simply being with him.
The restaurant was in the next town over, a forty-minute drive that you could make in thirty if you took the highway. Tom didn’t. His GPS was set to bypass highways, and they drove leisurely along back roads rich with the smells of summer: apple orchards not yet ready for picking, fields of watermelon, and peach trees heavy with fruit.
As they drove, the breeze lifted the ends of Meghan’s hair from her shoulders, and in the setting sun it appeared more golden, luminous almost. Tom cast a sideways glance and smiled. When they stopped at a crossroad, he reached across and tucked a loose tendril behind her ear.
“If the wind is too much, I can raise the top,” he said, but she shook her head and told him it was perfect as it was.
The Portuguese Fisherman was a small building that looked as if it had at one time been a house. The entrance opened into a foyer that led to different rooms. The hostess, noticing the way Tom’s arm circled Meghan’s waist, suggested the Lareira Room. It was one with a stone fireplace along the wall and a scattering of candlelit tables circling a small dance floor. In the far corner, a man with silver hair and an easy smile strummed a guitar. Although he sang in his native language, Meghan knew these were love songs. The tenderness of his expression told the tale.
Tom held his hand to the small of her back and led Meghan to the table. Feeling the heat of his touch, she leaned closer and whispered, “This place is lovely.”
He smiled and again credited Dr. Anderson for the recommendation.
Once they were seated, he asked if she would like to share a pitcher of sangria. She nodded, and he ordered the red. It was rich and fruity, the kind that had been made hours earlier and was given time to soak in the flavor of sweet orange and fleshy peach. He filled both glasses, and they lingered over the drinks for a long while before ordering appetizers.
They talked of all the things they had yet to learn about one another. He spoke of the hardships after his father had died and described how he’d worked his way through college. During the years of grad school, he’d worked at a clinic in Ohio, saving every nickel so he could one day have a practice of his own.
As Meghan listened, she could imagine the boy and then the younger man, studious and dedicated to his cause. She fell into the magic of his words while he spok
e. With each thing he said, she asked for more, and he gave it freely.
“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you,” he said, and stretched his arm across the table, his palm open, an invitation for her hand to be placed in his.
As she reached out to accept his offer, Meghan lowered her eyes and said, “I’ve been thinking about you also.” The shyness of a new and still fragile relationship was in her voice. She didn’t mention how at night when she closed her eyes, she could picture the soft gray-green of his eyes and the curve of his mouth as he smiled. She said nothing of how she had written pages about him in her journal. Those thoughts were too private, and it was too soon.
She blushed at the remembrance of what she’d written, then hurried past the moment by asking about Agatha and her cat, Winnie.
“Winnie is doing fine now,” he said. “She had a mild trichobezoar.”
“Oh. With Winnie being a Persian and coughing as she was, I thought maybe it was just a hairball.”
He laughed. “That’s what a trichobezoar is. Vets give it a technical name to impress people.” Tom liked that she’d asked about Winnie and was impressed she’d known about hairballs. “Do you have a cat?”
“Mama does, but Beulah is strictly her cat and won’t come near anyone else.” With a twinkle in her eye she added, “Sox is my baby.”
“Lucky for me you found him,” he said. “Had you not brought Sox into the clinic, we might never have met.” He looked into her eyes, feeling this was the start of something special. In a voice as soft as velvet, he whispered, “I think it was fate.”
Meghan’s heart fluttered, and she felt the warmth of a blush coloring her cheeks. “Maybe it was something far more powerful than fate . . . ,” she said, and told him about the storm.
“For a while I thought we might not make it back, then this big wave came and pushed me ashore. The odd part is there are no waves in the lake. Not ever. There’s no force to push the water one way or the other.”
The Summer of New Beginnings: A Magnolia Grove Novel Page 15
