Past tense = Finish, both hands flicked outward at the wrist.
English: I went to school.
ASL: Finish go school.
Future tense = Will, a hand thrust forward from the side of the head.
English: I’m going to school tomorrow.
ASL: Go school tomorrow will.
NOW YOU TRY! Tell your partner about a past or future dentist trip.
february had repressed her anxiety in the lead-up to her mother’s move by maintaining a workload so large she had little time to worry about anything else. True to her word, she’d said nothing about River Valley’s impending closure, not even to Mel, though she wasn’t proud of it. At first, she told herself she was holding off until after the midterms—perhaps she could reverse the decision with some good old-fashioned civic action. For weeks she spent each spare moment drafting pleading letters to the state legislature, even phone banked for some progressive-leaning PAC. But the first week of November came and went, and the statehouse had only gotten redder.
It wasn’t as if she’d ever doubted Ohio could end up here—she knew fear to be a potent motivator, had witnessed how easily it could sway a person. As a child, she’d seen her parents’ presences rouse insults in the mouths of impatient bank tellers and clerks, which February always heard, always carried with her, even when she wasn’t yet tall enough to see over the counters. By the time she was in college, she had seen the body of a man killed on the stoop of a liquor store, and the city burned, and reconstruction delayed again and again until its smolder was internalized. Even here in the bluer slice of the county, someone had twice planted a God Hates Fags sign in Mel’s herb garden. So, while the conservative doubling down wasn’t necessarily surprising, it was still a disappointment.
In education, like everything in America, money ruled the day, and Deaf education had been hyperstratified by the rise of the cochlear implant. Wealthier kids whose parents could pay out-of-pocket for surgery and rehabilitative therapies often found success in the mainstream; kids whose families couldn’t pay stayed deaf. But even as a shift in Medicaid coverage meant access to the device itself increased, access to the therapies and educational resources didn’t. The hearing world was shocked to find that the working-class kid of a single mom who couldn’t stay home and funnel practice sounds into his head, or drive him to countless therapy appointments all day, was not “cured” as the implant sales reps had promised. Those kids often wound up back at Deaf schools, only now with vast cognitive deficits. The more vulnerable her student body was, the less politicians cared, or even pretended to care, about their fate. She wrote to the new legislators anyway, but seldom heard back.
At the same time, she was drafting backup plans—mini deaf programs that could operate in microcosm within the public schools. She wanted to have them ready, to be able to make her demands and implement a transition team. The move needed to be as seamless as possible for the kids, especially the youngest ones, who were still learning to read. How would they communicate with hearing teachers and peers without English as a fallback? Surely she could guilt Swall into procuring them an empty classroom where her teachers and students could hole up for a few periods.
But the details were difficult to nail down when she couldn’t collaborate with anyone, and anyway, her attention was so often usurped by the urgent matters of the day—grading and PowerPoints for her own class, Serrano and Quinn to keep an eye on, and a dozen other crises in miniature that crossed her desk each week: the third-grade boys who’d made a pact that had ended in them flushing their hearing aids down the toilet; a two-day phone call shouting match with the textbook people, who’d sent audio recordings instead of braille copies of the midterm materials for her DeafBlind kids.
Then there was the ream of paperwork for her mother’s admission to Spring Towers—questions about her needs and preferences so granular February was both heartened that they’d thought to ask and distressed that it had fallen to her to dictate her very opinionated mother’s answers. She had avoided that latent role reversal embedded in every parent-child relationship with her father—he was gone so suddenly—and despite her mother’s diagnosis she was unprepared for it now.
She tried once to discuss the forms with her mother, but her mother had only grown agitated by the onslaught of questions. February could see she was scared that she could no longer find answers to inquiries about the basics of her own daily routines, things she had done for years, things she should know. February didn’t ask again, and was left to fill in her best guesses about what her mother might like to eat or watch on TV for the foreseeable future.
She continued this way for a few weeks, using the collapse of her school to distract herself from her mother’s departure, and her mother’s departure as an excuse for not talking to Mel about school. When her mom was all settled in and safe, and she and Mel were alone together again, then she would tell her. There was over a month before the district administrative meeting. She still had time.
* * *
—
Mel was prone to carsickness, so she would drive them into Cincy; that was a given. But when it came time to leave, February couldn’t stand the idea of putting her mom in the backseat alongside her suitcase and comforter, like she was headed off to summer camp, so February situated her mother in the passenger seat, then squeezed herself in beside the luggage. Her mother said little on the ride there, and Mel’s alternative rock station was in the middle of an acoustic hour so melancholy February almost asked her to turn it off, but she was afraid silence would feel worse.
They drove along Colson’s periphery, passing the graying Goodyear-turned–Edge Bionics plant and some desolate streets before the last of the city finally melted into pastures, fire and brimstone billboards looming large over soy plants and plastered to sides of barns. It was flat and brown like this for a while. Her mother asked twice where they were going, but February was grateful that when they reminded her about Spring Towers, she seemed to know what they meant.
Then up from the fields grew the exurbs, subdivisions, and warehouses that signaled they were approaching Cincy’s city limits. As Mel guided the car off the highway, February felt her mind pick up speed, and she worried she might enter a full-on panic attack, but instead she plucked one of the thoughts from the stream and tried to anchor herself to it: once she lost her job, she could get her mother back, and stay home to care for her. The idea briefly stayed her, but it left her with a bitter aftertaste.
Inside, Spring Towers was pristine—light walls, fresh-scrubbed tile, and chrome elevator bays. February wheeled a pair of her mother’s suitcases as they followed an aide up to the third floor to a room near the end of the hallway, where a tiny woman was hunched in a recliner watching television. The aide flicked the light switch to get Lu’s attention. Lu looked up, and the aide approached a large whiteboard on the side wall.
Guess who’s here? she wrote in large print.
Lu looked up at them with delight. Relief swelled in February at the interaction—they knew how to care for deaf people here. Her mom would be okay.
Who is that? her mother said, bursting through February’s moment of calm.
It’s your friend, L-u.
L-u?
From high school.
Lu rose from her chair and shuffled toward them, then pulled February’s mother into an embrace.
I’m happy you’re here, she said.
Me too, said February’s mother.