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        Damien shifted back in his folding chair and the legs rattled loud on the linoleum, but Sam didn’t turn her head to look because Sam couldn’t hear anymore. Not everybody in the room could. Damien had no trouble picking out the ones who, like him, responded to the door clicking shut down the hall; to the screen, picked up and unexpectedly dropped again by the wind; to the air conditioning working through the vents like a sad exhale; to a cough. The rest of them, his fiancée and five or six others, simply sat, unaware of the noises but their eyes always moving, shifting from one thing, one face, to the next.

        The clock on the wall —for some, silent, for others, monotonous and piercing— showed seven minutes past six when the door at the back of the room opened and a woman came in with a breathless apology for being late. She took off her jacket and tossed it on the edge of the desk, turned around, and wrote her name on the whiteboard.

        “ Hello,” she said with a smile and with her hands. “My name is Ashley Mason.” She spoke slowly, giving her fingers time to catch up with her mouth, giving the group enough time to see. She pointed to herself, she crossed her hands, just a few fingers from each, she spelled her name, and then spelled it again. Closed fist, thumb on the side; closed fist, thumb crossed over fingers; index and middle fingers pointing to her right; finger and thumb in the shape of an L; fingers curled down at the middle knuckle, thumb bent in; pinky and thumb open in the shape of horns, and her hand look strangely demonic: this was “A-S-H-L-E-Y.” It was complicated, and Damien realized metrOsphere she hadn’t even gone through Mason the second time.

        “ I know a lot of you can’t hear me,” she continued, her hands fighting with each other in front of her solid black shirt, “but it’s important that you get used to seeing American Sign Language, though I’m going pretty slow. And for those who can hear me, it’s important that you get used to signing and speaking at the same time because you’ll be doing it.”          Sam tapped Damien on his knee. She had her notebook, the one they’d been carrying everywhere since the doctor’s appointment three weeks earlier, open in her lap, and she was scribbling with her pen. What is she saying? Damien scribbled back: Boring introduction stuff —later.

         “ We’re going to learn and memorize the alphabet today, and when we’re done we’ll introduce ourselves to each other.” She wrote an A on the blackboard, said “a” and raised her closed fist in the air. The class mimicked her. A, B...

        That was a lot of stuff, Sam wrote.
        Encouraging, though, isn’t it? He signed her name. S—A—M. She smiled. I can even do the long one, and he added —A—N—T—H—A.

        Sam took the pen back. I just can’t wait to get rid of this damn notebook.

        Me neither. He stood from their couch and walked into the kitchen for a sandwich and soda. Oberon padded in behind him. Damien would inevitably give the dog some meat and maybe a bit of cheese, scratch him behind the ears while scolding him that he has his own food, over there in the corner. He put his sandwich on a paper plate, accidentally dropped some for the dog, and went back into the living room. He had to be careful that Sam saw him coming, so he purposefully walked in front of the lamp and cast a shadow across the book she was reading. She looked up and smiled. He smiled back and sat down on the opposite end of the couch.

        He tapped her with the notebook and handed it across. Wanna watch a movie?

        She shook he head, no, and held up her book. Apparently it was good.

        Damien turned on the TV anyway. He had started The Princess Bride the night before, but never finished it. He put the subtitles on in case Sam lost interest in her book. At one point he laughed out loud and, forgetting, started to say something to Sam. He stopped himself mid-sentence and then stopped the movie. The silence bothered him. It seemed heavier when he could hear Oberon snuffing around behind the couch, or the metronome of the kitchen clock, or the cars driving by on wet pavement. Maybe complete silence would be better, maybe worse. Maybe not hearing anything sounded like you were under water. Maybe it sounded warm. But this, hearing the television, hearing Sam stir next to him when she couldn’t even hear her own breathing, hearing the fridge turn on —this was hell.

        He handed Sam the notebook. Does it sound like you’re underwater?

        It doesn’t sound like anything, Damien. There’s nothing at all.

        Damien had been surprised by Sam’s s strength through the previous weeks; his own strength, he knew, came in part from his fiancée, but at this moment something inside her broke down. She was weak again. She started to cry and put down her book. She stood up and started walking upstairs to the bedroom, and as she walked past Damien he reached out to her, touched her arm to pull her into him, but she shrugged him off. He scribbled I love you on the top page and threw he notebook at her back as she reached the doorway. The pages ruffled as it flew like a lame bird and hit the doorframe with a thud and fell to the floor. Oberon ran over to investigate. Sam didn’t notice. “I love you,” he shouted, and then quieter, “I love you.”

        Ashley Mason really was an uninspiring teacher, lingering somewhere between sleep and indifference. Her hair, like her teaching, was a little too fat; her classes, like her body, a little too long. There were a few notes between the fiancées about the boredom and how they weren’t exactly miserable sitting through a few hours a week, but it was a bit wearisome, like watching an infomercial at three in the morning. But Ashley knew what she was doing. She knew sign language and Sam and Damien didn’t, so they would sit through the classes and learn how to talk without talking.

         It had been a few weeks and everyone in the class had mastered the alphabet, memorized it, showed their friends, practiced at home in the mirror and spelled street signs from the passenger seat. They had moved on to more complex things: me, you, man, woman, and the like. Sam was struggling a bit, having trouble memorizing the words, symbols, for things.
        We’ll just practice more at home, Damien wrote.
        This is going to take forever.

         It was encouraging, though, to gather in an unused classroom at Emerson High every Sunday evening. It broke up forever into smaller, more manageable week-long increments. Ashley occasionally met with only the hearing partners of each pair for classes that had less to do with the mechanics of ASL and more to do with coping and care of a deaf loved one, but most often Damien and Sam went together to learn their new language. This week they were working on colors: blue (the right B sign, shaken side to side at wrist), brown (the right B sign placed against upper cheek and drawn straight down), yellow (the somehow demonic Y sign, shaken side to side at the wrist).

        I want to learn how to talk, have a conversation.
        Damien smiled at her, frustrated. This is the only way. All I can say right now is, “Yes, I like the blue tree.”

        Damien was mowing the lawn, his headphones on and his iPod pumping John Coltrane. It was hot out and he was sweating, but it felt good. Sam walked out of the house, waved to him, and signed his name. COME HERE, she said with her hands, her arms. Damien turned off the mower and jogged across the yard to the sidewalk where she stood waiting for him, smiling. GOOD, he signed back, both thumbs in the air. She pulled the notebook from where she had tucked it into her belt. I need to go to the store.

        NOW?, Damien signed.
        Yes, now. I need girl stuff.
        Let me put a clean shirt on first.

        He handed back the notebook and went inside. He was sick of driving all the time, never even a five-minute trip from his parents’ house for dinner where he could just sit in the passenger seat and look at the horizon. Sam would never drive again, the doctor had made that very clear. It was one of the few things he had made clear in the confusion surrounding Sam’s sudden and still unexplained deafness. Not to worry though, he told them, around eighty-five percent of adult hearing loss is a medical mystery. Sometimes these things just happened —no, often they just happened, he said, as if grown women wake in the morning to absolute silence every day. Damien washed his hands and face, grabbed a fresh shirt from his dresser, and took the car keys from the hook beside the door as he ran out. “Ready?” he asked, out loud. There was no answer. Sam was waiting beside the car.

        The trip to town was a short one and Damien fell easily into his car routine. It bothered him to turn the radio up so high with someone else in the car, but since Sam couldn’t hear it and there was nothing for him to hear besides the music, he turned it up anyway. But halfway there he turned it down again. “Sam?” he said.

        She didn’t respond, just watched the bridge outside, and the river below it, pass beneath their car. Of course she couldn’t hear him. “Sam, it felt good to mow the lawn today. It felt good to do something, to get lost in the noise. It’s been a while since I’ve done anything like work.” It was the first time he had spoken to her on purpose in the last seven weeks, almost two months of silence. “I had a lot of fun at dinner the other night, at Jon’s house. But it was hard, too. I worry about you when I leave you home alone. Well, you have Oberon, but you know what I mean.” He laughed. “We played euchre for hours, and ate that pizza that you hate. You know, the one Jenny always makes and sends along with Dustin, with all the weird Greek shit on it —purple olives with the pits still inside and that clumpy, stinky cheese.”

        She had stopped looking out the window at some point in his soliloquy; he was watching the road and hadn’t noticed. Her eyebrows furrowed like she was looking into the sun. She reached into her purse for a pen. Were you just talking?

        He laughed and shook his head, then signed NO for her. He pointed to the radio. Singing along.
        You looked like you were talking. He took the pen from her hand. Singing along —trying to. They pulled into the parking lot and he parked the car.

         “Did you need something?” Ashley asked. Class had just ended, one of the rare hearing-only classes, and Evelyn, whose husband had lost his hearing to fungal meningitis, closed the door behind her. Damien was leaning against the wall, near the door.
        “ Yeah,” he started. “No, no, not really.”

        “ What’s up?”

        He took a few steps toward the middle of the room, into the small circle of aluminum folding chairs. “I’ve started talking to Sam.” He sat down and Ashley sat down next to him. “Not sign language. I mean, we do that, a little bit. But I’m speaking to her. When she can’t see my mouth move.”
        “ She can’t hear you, Damien.”
        “ I know she can’t.” He laughed, short, through his nose. “Believe me, I know. I just need to talk, to speak. I can’t stand the silence.”
        Ashley leaned forward a bit; her blonde hair fell off her shoulders and slid past her black shirt, startling Damien. “Do you talk to other people enough? It’s very important.”
        Damien nodded. She had been talking about it during class today, about the importance that they, the partners who could hear, make sure they hear and speak enough. “I have conversations with friends, I talk to my parents, to her parents. But it’s the silence between us. I can’t take it anymore, so I just talk. It started a few weeks ago, in the car, and since then I’ve been doing it at home, while I’m watching TV, or after we go to bed, when the lights are off.

        “ It’s pretty normal, Damien. People need to speak: that’s why it’s so important the deaf have their own language.”

        “ Sometimes it’s not so much about speaking as about being heard.” And he started talking, telling Ashley everything he had wanted to tell Sam for more than two months, telling her about the card game at Jon’s, about his days at work —things too long and complicated to scratch on a piece of paper— about what the vet had to say about Oberon’s allergies, about how he felt when he woke up the week before to the thunderstorm, about how his parents had been fighting lately, and why, and how he hated it when she left the bathroom light on after she got up during the night, and what he wanted to tell her in the darkness before dawn when they lay in bed together, breathing, and how terribly he wished she could hear him breathe again, and he talked, and he cried, and he kissed her.

        He walked in the back door and Oberon galloped to greet him, put his paws on Damien’s shoulders and licked his face. “Hey, Buddy,” he said, scratching the dog behind his ears. “Where’s your mama?”

        She was sitting on the couch, as he had expected, reading another book. She had popped some popcorn in the microwave; at least she didn’t burn it anymore. The smell filled the house. The popcorn was on the couch next to her, and she didn’t know he was home. He walked into the living room and before his shadow passed over her he said, out loud, “I kissed her.” The shadow startled Sam.
        The notebook again:
        How was class?
        Good. It was good.
        What about?

        Body language, facial expressions, the importance of hearing and talking.
        Sam nodded. Sounds interesting.

        Damien lifted her face from the notebook. SAM, he signed. Then back to the notebook. I want you to say something to me.

      She looked at him the same way she had looked at him in the car. Okay.