He Thought I Was Deaf, I Heard Everything novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Night the Sound Came Back
The implant switches on, Nina hides it from her husband and wears his red dress to the gala, and in a service corridor she hears Tobias tell his young lover it would be cleaner if she just died.
The implant switched on at 9:04 that morning.
I told no one.
By nine that night I wore the red dress my husband had chosen and smiled on the museum steps for the photographers.
At 9:47 I heard Tobias Schuyler's voice for the first time in two years.
He was telling a woman it would be easier if I were dead.
I need to go back a little.
Two years ago our car went through the guardrail on the Hudson Parkway.
I woke in a hospital bed with a shattered left eardrum and dead nerves on the right.
My belly was flat, and our daughter, who had been twenty weeks along, was gone.
The doctors said the silence would never lift.
Tobias cried at my bedside, and he learned forty signs.
He told magazines about his brave wife.
He gave me a diamond so heavy I felt it on my collarbone all day.
Then he stopped signing.
It happens to everyone eventually.
People talk over you, and around you, and about you while you stand a yard away.
A deaf woman at a party is a coat rack that smiles.
That is how I learned to read lips.
That is how I learned my husband lied.
But lips give you scraps.
You catch half a sentence before the speaker turns his head.
I needed whole sentences.
So eight months ago I called Peter Lowell, my old lab partner, the one man who ever built something with me.
I let him put an experimental array into my skull.
"Activation day, you should have someone with you," he said.
"I have myself," I said.
So I sat alone in a clinic on 68th Street while the audiologist ran her tones.
I heard a chime, and a woman's voice, and the ugly scrape of a chair across the floor.
I cried so hard she had to stop the session.
Then I went home and Tobias helped me into the red dress.
He fastened the diamond at my neck, and his hand settled at the small of my back.
"You look beautiful," he mouthed, slow and huge, the way you speak to a toddler.
I nodded and smiled.
At the gala he moved me through the crowd with one hand on my spine.
Board members bent down and shouted into my face.
"SO GOOD TO SEE YOU, NINA."
A man in a bow tie said my full name twice, "Nina Schuyler, Nina Schuyler," as though I might not know it.
I smiled and signed thank you.
Tobias said things I had not signed.
"She says she's thrilled to be back," he told a woman with a pearl choker.
I was not thrilled.
I was listening to forty conversations at once, and every one of them was louder than I remembered.
At 9:41 I went to find the coat check and found a service corridor instead.
It was marble, cold and empty.
At 9:44 I heard heels, a woman's, quick and light.
At 9:47 I heard him.
"Ninety days, Geneva. The Halcyon merger closes in ninety days and none of this matters."
A young woman answered, sulky and close.
"You said that in March."
"In March I didn't have the paperwork."
I stopped breathing.
My hand found a marble column.
It was cold and solid and real.
So that is what he sounds like, I thought, stupidly.
For two years I had imagined that voice.
In my head it was warm, like the man who stood outside my lab every night for a whole semester and told me he would love me until he was ashes.
It was not warm.
It was bored.
"She's dead weight," Tobias said.
"You don't know what it's like, coming home to a woman who can't hear you laugh."
"Who sits there smiling at you like a dog at a window."
The young woman giggled.
"Then do something about it."
"I will."
His voice dropped, soft and easy.
"It would be so much cleaner if she just died."
My phone was in my clutch.
I opened it with a thumb that would not stay still and pressed the red circle.
I held it against my hip and let it keep recording.
They talked about a lake.
They talked about a signature.
She said my name like it was a chore she kept putting off.
Then their shoes came toward me, and I made my face go slack.
I turned and walked back into the ballroom with my hand on the wall.
Tobias caught up with me before I reached the doors.
"There you are," he mouthed.
His fingers closed on my elbow.
"Where did you go?"
I signed, Looking for my coat.
He smiled at the people watching.
"She wanted some air," he told them, and it was not what I had signed.
I smiled at that too.
In the town car on the way home he thought I was watching the river lights.
He leaned over and kissed my hair.
"Ninety days," he said softly, to the glass and the dark and the wife who could not hear him, "and you won't even know."
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