Chapter 16 Raina
It turns out the best therapist in the country wasn’t as close as I’d hoped, but any amount of travel is worth it, even if I have to do it several times a week. I need this to go well, which means I’ll do anything to have the best.
My future depends on it.
The clinic looks like every other medical office I’ve ever hated. An attempt at spa-like tranquility—a soft glow from hidden lights, pastel art on the walls, gentle plinky music piped in through tinny ceiling speakers—but underneath, it’s the same clinical office as any other medical facility.
The waiting room is empty except for a woman in burgundy scrubs who sits behind a glass partition scrolling through her phone as she pretends not to look at me.
Thankfully, Gill was able to arrange for my appointment to happen after hours, not wanting anyone from the public to be here at the same time as me. It would make a security nightmare. She even had everyone at the office sign NDAs, not trusting them to abide by simple HIPPA laws.
Keaton’s hand rests on my lower back, guiding me as I choose a seat near the window and let my eyes roam, collecting details—ticking off the clichés. Stacks of old magazines. A plastic plant with dusty leaves. Three framed posters of vocal anatomy.
I check my phone and see four missed texts from Nash, two from Blake, one from Dare, and a group thread blowing up with a meme war between the guys.
Seeing how much they care about me makes me smile. I wish they could’ve all come with, but I wasn’t about to have them all making a spectacle waiting here for me while I have my appointment. I respond to them, then power down my screen.
For a full minute, I watch the reflection of myself in the window, an almost ghost in the glass. My hair pulled into a high bun, face bare. The outline of my neck is thin and pale, the bruises from the attack now faded to sickly yellow. I almost don’t recognize myself.
A moment later, a door swings open, and the burgundy-scrubbed woman calls my name. “Raina! You’re up.”
She leads me down a hallway that’s lined with more posters, this time less cartoonish, actual laryngoscopical photos of vocal folds—normal, inflamed, scarred.
I look away, but my eyes keep coming back to the grotesque pearl-white webs of tissue bridging the gap between the folds. I wonder if mine looks that alien.
I’m led to a small room with a single chair, a slim desk with one of those rolling doctor chairs under it, and a floor-to-ceiling mirror. “She’ll be right with you,” the woman says, and leaves the door ajar.
I sit, and immediately my back goes rigid, my hands curl into fists in my lap, nails digging crescents into the flesh of my thighs. The room smells faintly of coffee and a slight chemical tang of disinfectant.
I can’t help it—I reach up and touch my throat, as if I could feel the damage beneath the skin, map out every scar with a fingertip. It’s irrational, but I’m convinced if I press hard enough, I’ll feel the difference. That my whole body would vibrate differently, forever off-key.
A knock at the door startles me, making me jerk my hand away and drop it to my lap.
The woman who enters is not what I expect. She’s around fifty, maybe, her hair cut brutally short and streaked steel gray, her eyes an unblinking blue. She wears black slacks, a tailored shirt, and a single necklace of dark glass beads.
“Raina,” she says, and it’s not a question. She extends her hand, and I take it. Her grip is warm, brief, not the limp, lingering pressure I get from most doctors. “I’m Dr. Shapiro. Please sit.”
I’m already seated, but I nod anyway. Even the most calm, collected people can get nervous around me.
I’ll never escape my fame. She closes the door behind her, takes a seat across from me, and opens a battered black notebook.
No digital device. She clicks a pen and writes something without looking up.
Then she looks at me, really looks, and I feel like I’m being appraised, catalogued, and entered into a ledger.
“Have you ever worked with a voice therapist before?”
I shake my head.
“That’s fine. I read your file and your intake paperwork where you explained what happened and what you’d like the outcome of our appointments to be. Although I suppose I didn’t need that to know you want to sing again.” She gives me a smile.
“Very well. So, I don’t need to tell you that your voice is an instrument. And it’s been… re-tuned.” She lets the word hang in the air, letting me get used to the idea. “You’re going to have to learn to play it all over again.”
“I want you to understand that with the damage you’ve suffered, you won’t get the same range back that you had before, but the exciting part is learning what your new sound will be.
” She leans forward, elbows on knees, uncomfortably close.
“You know, some of the world’s most compelling singers had limitations.
Nodules, polyps, even full-on paralysis.
But they learned to use what they had, sometimes better than before. ”
She stands and crosses to a shelf crowded with tools—plastic models of larynxes, stacks of sheet music, a basket of latex resistance bands, and, incongruously, a tiny silver bell shaped like a cat. She picks up a printout from a manila folder and hands it to me.
“These are your images.” She taps a finger to a color photo of my larynx, the vocal folds stark and ghostly on a black field.
“Here’s the damage. See this ridge? That’s the scar.
” Her fingernail clicks the glossy paper.
“It will make high notes difficult, maybe impossible.” She waits for that to land.
It lands. The room tilts, and I feel my eyes start to sting.
“It doesn’t mean you’re done,” she says, reading the despair on my face. “Not unless you want to be.” Her voice is steady, not unkind. “But it won’t come easy. Most patients in your position have to mourn their old voice before they can build a new one.”
I look down at the image, at the slice of myself rendered so brutally vulnerable. It looks like a worm, or a slit in a piece of raw chicken. I hate it, and yet I can’t look away.
She sits back down, steeples her hands. “Here’s the plan.
We start with gentle phonation—hums, lip trills, soft vowels.
We’ll train breath support, work around the scar.
Over time, we can increase the load, see what your new instrument is capable of.
But you have to commit. No pushing. No cheating.
And no judging the early results. Can you do that? ”
I nod, but my jaw is set tight. “I can try.”
She studies me, then breaks into a slow, dry smile. “I believe you.”
For the next thirty minutes, we go through the basics.
Diaphragmatic breathing. Humming on an “mm” sound, feeling the vibrations in my face.
I fail every exercise. My voice cracks, dies, or comes out in a sad, hoarse wheeze.
At one point, I try a simple scale and my voice splinters, the high note collapsing into silence. I bite my lip so hard I taste blood.
“Again,” Shapiro says, unfazed by my failure. “Don’t aim for volume. Aim for clean.”
I do it again. And again. Each time, the sound is a little less terrible, but it’s nothing like the old me.
When the session ends, she gives me a page of exercises and a practice log. “Do this three times a day, no more than ten minutes each. We’ll record you once a week so you can measure progress, but don’t fixate on it. The goal is function, not perfection. I’ll see you in a couple days.”
I take the papers and stand, my legs numb.
As I walk to the door, she calls after me, “Raina.” I turn. “It’s going to suck for a while,” she says. “Let it. Then, when you’re done being angry, get to work.”
The next session, I come prepared. I’ve done the drills—tried to do them, anyway—at home in the only room that doesn’t echo. I’ve recorded myself, played it back, then deleted every file in disgust. I want to say I did the work, but I’m not sure if all that self-loathing counts as practice.
“Ready?” she says. She doesn’t say hello. She doesn’t need to.
We’re in a different room today. This one’s larger, almost studio-like, with a battered upright piano, a portable mirror on wheels, and a whiteboard already loaded with diagrams in blue and green marker.
On a side table: a box of tissues and a basket of stress balls shaped like various fruits. I don’t even sit before she starts.
“Show me what you’ve got.”
I stand in the center of the room, the mirror catching every bit of my posture and pinning me like a bug on display. “Start with an ‘mmm’ hum. Gentle, lips together, breathe in from the belly.”
I nod. Inhale. The air is cold, burning a path down my windpipe. I press my lips and try to hum.
It’s worse than before. The sound fizzles out in a breathy, almost apologetic whimper. My face flushes. I try again, pushing a little harder, and it comes out as a strangled squeak. I clamp down, mortified.
Shapiro doesn’t blink. “Too much tension in the jaw. Think ‘lazy lips.’ Don’t press, just let it vibrate.”
I unclench, relax my face, and hum again.
This time there’s something there—a resonance, faint but real, like a mosquito stuck in a mason jar.
It still sounds pathetic. I feel the vibrations, though, a weird tickle high in my nose, and almost none in my chest. The disconnect is jarring. It doesn’t feel like my voice at all.
“Better,” she says. “Now, match me.” She sits at the piano, plays a middle C, and hums, her own voice perfectly steady and bright. I copy the pitch, or try to. Mine lands flat, sinks lower, refuses to soar.
She motions me over. “You’re used to belting. That’s not an option right now. Think whisper, but with pitch.”
I close my eyes, try again, keeping it as light as possible. The note holds for half a second, then warbles off, dying. My throat aches, not from exertion but from humiliation. I open my eyes and see her watching me—not with pity, but with a kind of impersonal, scientist’s focus.
“Sit,” she says, patting the bench beside her.
When I do, she places one hand on the small of my back, the other just below my ribcage. “Breathe. Low. There’s no voice without air.”
I inhale. She nods approval. “Now, push out a gentle ‘ooo’ on the next exhale. Just the air. No more.”
I do as told. The “ooo” is thin, weak, but not a total disaster. She keeps her hand on my ribs, feeling for movement.
“Again.” We repeat it, over and over, until I’m nearly lightheaded with oxygen. Each time, the sound gets marginally steadier, the pitch less wobbly.
Finally, she says, “Let’s go up the scale. Just one octave, half-steps.”
I know the drill. I sing the scale, but at the first sign of strain—third or fourth note—the sound collapses, breaking into a cough. My face burns. I clench the edge of the bench to keep from shaking.
I try to hide it, but tears prick at my eyes, blurring the piano keys. She grabs a tissue and hands it to me, like it’s a baton in a relay race.
“You’re grieving,” she says. “It’s normal.”
I choke out a laugh, the sound so alien I almost don’t recognize it. “I sound like a duck.”
“I’ve heard worse.” She shrugs. “You’re here to build, not to perform.”
We go back to basics, a punishing sequence of lip trills, straw-in-water bubbling, and silent breathing drills. Each exercise strips away a little more of my illusion of control, but after a while, my body catches on. I find a rhythm. I manage a few seconds of consistent hum, even as it wobbles.
When she pushes me to try a gentle “ah,” my voice surprises me. It’s soft, unsteady, but it holds—a far cry from my old belt, but there’s a tone there, something I might one day shape into a melody. I hold the note as long as I can, and when it cracks, I bite my lip and look away.
Shapiro softens a fraction. “It’s okay to be mad,” she says. “But don’t let the anger freeze you up. You have to let it move through.”
I nod, swallowing the words I want to say. I want to scream. I want to throw something. Instead, I keep humming, keep breathing, even as my chest shakes with suppressed sobs.
We spend the next fifteen minutes in silence, save for the weird sounds I make. I record them all, as instructed, my thumb trembling on the phone’s mic button. By the end of the session, I can almost see the shape of a future voice—muted, maybe, but alive.
Shapiro writes a new prescription of drills, more intense, more focused. “Same schedule,” she says. “Three to four times a day, ten minutes each. Don’t overdo it. Recovery is a marathon, not a sprint. Text me if anything feels off.”
I nod, stand, and wipe my face with the back of my hand. I’m spent—physically, emotionally, spiritually.
When Keaton and I get to the house, I take a moment before going inside. I close my eyes and imagine the sound of my voice, the real one, as it might one day be. Not the old me, not the perfect me, but something new. Something mine.
And so my appointments continue, three times a week.