If a Tree Falls by Jennifer Rosner

—they amplified the hum of the fan or the rumble of a passing truck just as much they amplified speaking voices. And they did so crudely , making sounds louder, but not clearer, thus adding further distortion to Sophia’s auditory process. The range of sound Sophia produced was narrow—high squeals and oohs—nothing like the rich babbling of babies, the sputterings of every possible language packed within. At ten months old, Sophia barely vocalized at all. And there was plenty of time each day when her hearing aids weren’t even in her ears:
at bath-time, at nap-time, and at all the other times in the day when she pulled them out, poised to stuff them into her mouth.
    I acquired an almost mystic ability to sense when Sophia was about to put an earmold in her mouth. Even in the car, when she sat behind me in her backward facing car seat, I knew. The drive to eat hearing technology—it deserves its own mention as a stage in oral development! I told myself it could be worse. At the Boston Children’s Hospital, there was a large shadow box in the Otolaryngology waiting room that displayed all of the things surgeons had taken out of the ears, noses, and throats of children since the 1950s: fish hooks, nails, coins, open safety pins, and unidentifiable metal objects, some as big as nail clippers, each pinned into its allotted square with a typed description of the object, where in the body it was lodged, and when (and by whom) it was removed.
    My fear that Sophia might choke on or swallow her hearing aids was matched only by my panic that we’d permanently lose them. They were expensive—over four thousand dollars—and she’d have to go weeks without hearing before they could be replaced. Sophia’s newest favorite game, while we walked along forest paths with Lucca, was to throw her hearing aids into the woods from high up on her perch in my backpack. Their beige color made a perfect
camouflage, and it sometimes took me hours, searching through leaves, retracing my steps, to find them.
    Late at night, Bill and I would each take a toothpick and delicately pick out the mashed bananas, the dirt, and the carpet fuzz from her hearing aid microphones. The “silver lining” of Sophia’s hearing loss was that when she slept unaided, we could be as loud as we wished: we could talk, we could shout, we could have friends over late into the night, we could have sex—so long as we didn’t change the light. Sophia would wake to changes of light.

    During Sophia’s waking hours, I spent time focusing with her on single words, “power words” that could help her get things she wanted. STOP and GO and MORE and ALL DONE . I did the (incessant) talking: “Do you want to OPEN the bag?; let’s OPEN it; I’m OPENING the bag; see, I OPENED it. ” Every utterance I made felt loud, over-articulated, contrived, and repetitive.
    Then one sunny summer morning, I sat Sophia in her blue and white striped high chair. Heavy cream filled her bottle and elbow noodles saturated with butter and cheese covered her tray. As usual, she was not much interested in eating. Instead she was all about testing me: looking right at me as I said “no,” and hurling bits of pasta onto the floor.

    And then I heard it:
    “UP!”
    “ What ? What did you say?”
    “UP!”
    I snatched her UP—her words would have power! I spun her around the kitchen, and called everyone I knew. Sophia’s first word: “UP!” She was an optimist!
    Then, just two days later: “OUT!”
    A mover, a shaker! Sophia wanted UP and OUT!
    And soon after, a long list of words: sock, cup, light, keys. And foods—so many foods—apple, pasta, banana, cheese, corn, soup—a happy byproduct of our obsessing over what (and how little) she ate. I wrote down every word she spoke on a bright pink page and placed it on our white refrigerator door.

    Sophia sported a curious Kentucky accent. And she spoke as if she frequented roadside fast food stands, asking for “hot doggies” and