Danny wouldn't put up with her timidity. He'd roar into town on his Honda 350 with his sister perched on the back. She wore a black helmet emblazoned with fiery wings. Before her hearing went completely he'd take her to movies and would drive audiences to rage by loudly repeating dialogue for her. To their parents' disgust the boy would walk around the house wearing an airline mechanic's ear-muffs, just so he'd know what she was going through. Bless his heart, Danny even learned some basic sign and taught her some phrases (naturally ones that she couldn't repeat in the company of adult Deaf though they would later earn her high esteem in the Laurent Clerc schoolyard).

Ah, but Danny…

Ever since the accident last year, she hadn't had the heart to ask him back.

She tries now but can't imagine him here.

And so today, when she opens the door, she finds a middle-aged man with graying hair, wearing an ill-fitting navy-blue jacket and black-framed glasses. The man from the field outside the slaughterhouse.

De l'Epée.

Who else but him?

"Hello," she says in a voice like a glass bell.

"And to you." She pictures him taking her hand and kissing it, rather bashfully, rather firmly.

"You're a policeman, aren't you?" she asks.

"Yes," he says.

She can't see him as clearly as she'd like. The power of desire is unlimited but that of imagination is not.

"I know it's not your name but can I call you De l'Epée?"

Of course he's agreeable to this, gentleman that he is.

"Can we talk for a little while? That's what I miss the most, talking."

Once you've spoken to someone, pelted them with your words and felt theirs in your ears, signing isn't the same at all.

"By all means, let's talk."

"I want to tell you a story. About how I learned I was deaf."

"Please…" He seems genuinely curious.

Melanie had planned to be a musician, she tells him. From the time she was four or five. She was no prodigy but did have the gift of perfect pitch. Classical, Celtic, or country-western – she loved it all. She could hear a tune once and pick it out from memory on the family's Yamaha piano.

"And then…"

"Tell me about it."

"When I was eight, almost nine, I went to a Judy Collins concert."

She continues, "She was singing a cappella, a song I'd never heard before. It was haunting…"

Conveniently, a Celtic harp begins playing the very tune through the imaginary speakers in the music room.

"My brother had the concert program and I leaned over and asked him what the name of the song was. He told me it was 'A Maiden's Grave.' "

De l'Epée says, "Never heard of it."

Melanie continues, "I wanted to play it on the piano. It was… It's hard to describe. Just a feeling, something I had to do. I had to learn the song. The day after the concert I asked my brother to stop by a music store and get some sheet music for me. He asked me which song. 'A Maiden's Grave,' I told him.

" 'What song's that?' he asked. He was frowning.

"I laughed. 'At the concert, dummy. The song she finished the concert with. That song. You told me the title.'

"Then he laughed. 'Who's a dummy? "A Maiden's Grave"? What're you talking about? It was "Amazing Grace." The old gospel. That's what I told you.'

" 'No!' I was sure I heard him say 'A Maiden's Grave.' I was positive! And just then I realized that I'd been leaning forward to hear him and that when either of us turned away I couldn't really hear what he was saying at all. And that when I was looking at him I was looking only at his lips, never his eyes or the rest of his face. The same way I'd been looking at everyone else I'd talked to for the last six or eight months.

"I ran straight to the record store downtown – two miles away. I was so desperate, I had to know. I was sure my brother was teasing me and I hated him for it. I swore I'd get even with him. I raced up to the folk section and flipped through the Judy Collins albums. It was true… 'Amazing Grace.' Two months later I was diagnosed with a fifty-decibel loss in one ear, seventy in the other. It's about ninety now in both."

"I'm so sorry," De l'Epée says. "What happened to your hearing?"

"An infection. It destroyed the hairs in my ear."

"And there's nothing you can do about it?"

She doesn't answer him. After a moment she says, "I think that you're Deaf."

"Deaf? Me?" He grins awkwardly. "But I can hear."

"Oh, you can be Deaf but hearing."

He looks confused.

"Deaf but hearing," she continues. "See, we call people who can hear the Others. But some of the Others are more like us."

"What sort of people are those?" he asks. Is he proud to be included? She thinks he is.

"People who live according to their own hearts," Melanie answers, "not someone else's."

For a moment she's ashamed, for she's not sure that she always listens to her own.

A Mozart piece begins to play. Or Bach. She isn't sure which. (Why couldn't the infection have come a year later? Think of all the music I could have listened to in twelve months. For God's sake, her father pumped easy-listening KSFT through the farm's loudspeakers. In my bio, they'll find I was reared on "Pearly Shells," Tom Jones, and Barry Manilow.)

"There's more I have to tell you. Something else I've never told anyone."

"I'd like to hear it," he says, agreeable. But then, in an instant, he disappears.

Melanie gasps.

The music room vanishes and she's back in the slaughterhouse.

Her eyes are wide, she looks around, expecting to see Brutus approaching. Or Bear shouting, storming toward her.

But, no, Brutus is gone. And Bear sits by himself outside the killing room, eating, an incongruous smile on his face.

What had dragged her from the music room?

A vibration from a sound? The light?

No, it was a smell. A scent had wakened her out of her daydream. But of what?

Something she detected amid the smell of greasy food, bodies, and oil and gasoline and rusting metal and old blood and rancid lard and a thousand other scents.

Ah, she recognized it clearly. A rich, pungent smell.

"Girls, girls," she signed emphatically to the students. "I want to say something."

Bear's head turned toward them. He noticed the signing. His smile vanished immediately and he climbed to his feet. He seemed to be shouting, "Stop that! Stop!"

"He doesn't like us to sign," Melanie signed quickly. "Pretend we're playing hand-shape game."

One thing Melanie liked about Deaf culture – the love of words. ASL was a language like any other. In fact it was the fifth most widely used language in America. ASL words and phrases could be broken down into smaller structural units (hand shape, motion, and relation of the hand to the body), just like spoken words could be broken down into syllables and phonemes. Those gestures lent themselves to word games, which nearly all Deaf people grew up playing.

Bear stormed up to her. "What the fuck… with…"

Melanie's hands began to shake violently. She managed to write in the dust on the floor, Game. We're playing game. See? We make shapes with our hands. Shapes of things.

"What things?"

This is animal game.

She signed the word "Stupid." With her index and middle fingers extended in a V, the shape vaguely resembled a rabbit.

"What's that… be?"

A rabbit, she wrote.

The twins ducked their heads, giggling.

"Rabbit… Doesn't… fucking rabbit to me," he said.

Please let us play. Can't hurt.

He glanced at Kielle, who signed, "You turd." Smiling, she wrote in the dust, That was hippo.

"… out of your fucking minds." Bear turned back to his fries and soda.

The girls waited until he was out of sight then looked expectantly at Melanie. Kielle, no longer smiling, asked brusquely, "What do you have to say?"