Chapter 33
LAUREL
“If something goes wrong, you call my mother. Not Grant.”
The nurse is still confirming my emergency-contact information, and the words sound strange in a room already full of strange things: my name printed around a plastic bracelet, a paper gown tied badly at my back, the medicinal bite of antiseptic, Mama sitting three feet away pretending to read a magazine she hasn’t turned a page of in twelve minutes.
The nurse pauses over her tablet. Her eyes flick from the screen to my bare ring finger and back with the discretion of someone who has probably watched marriages fall apart beside much scarier medical equipment.
“Vivian Bellamy is listed first. Grant Mercer is still your secondary contact from previous records. I can remove him.”
My throat tightens before anyone has put a damn thing near it.
Four years of hospitals, specialists and surgical centers have Grant threaded through them like a second pulse.
Grant signing discharge paperwork because pain medication turned my handwriting into evidence of a neurological event.
Grant sleeping in chairs beside hospital beds with his shoes still on.
Grant knowing I wanted ice the second I woke up and that I’d lie about my pain if a nurse asked in front of Mama.
Grant memorizing questions I was too scared to ask and asking them for me.
Grant holding my hand through the surgery that left me with the scar we are trying to outsmart today.
There are heartbreaks complete enough to make you question if every tender thing that came first was counterfeit.
Mine wasn’t.
“Remove him, please.”
Mama lowers the magazine, and the nurse taps the screen once.
One fucking tap.
Eleven years of marriage, fourteen years of knowing him, four years of medical forms carrying his name beneath mine—and a stranger removes him from the place he has occupied every time my body frightened me since I was twenty-one.
“Done.”
Good fucking riddance.
I look down at my bare hands, and smile.
Mama notices and mirrors the smile beaming on my face, hers saying everything she doesn’t need to put into words: About damn time.
My phone vibrates against my lap.
Dean: You aren’t allowed to die because I can’t afford the amount of therapy Mama would require.
A second message appears from Monica almost immediately.
Monica: Ignore him. We love you. Also, he has refreshed your flight information nine times despite the fact that you are already in Boston.
My smile widens even more when I see Nora has sent a photograph of a champagne bottle in her refrigerator, a strip of masking tape wrapped around the neck in her handwriting.
Nora: For when your vocal cord stops being a little bitch.
Celia’s message comes last, and it hurts differently.
Celia: Thinking of you. I’ve told no one. That includes Grant. Whatever happens today belongs to you first.
“Ready?” Mama asks.
“No.”
“Good.”
I frown. “Good?”
She folds the magazine and sets it down. “Baby, nobody worth trusting is ever completely ready for scary shit. The people who claim they are usually want money or their own podcast.”
She gets to her feet, smooths one shoulder of my gown, and finally looks down at the yellow hospital socks they gave me.
Her mouth flattens. “Though if this kills you, I’ll be furious you died dressed like a banana.”
A laugh escapes me, and I immediately press a hand to my throat. “Jesus, Mama.”
“Save Him for the procedure.”
∞∞∞
Dr. Levin walks me through the injection again as the monitor displays a grotesquely enlarged view of the two strips of tissue responsible for far too much misery in my adult life.
My right vocal fold looks healthy enough.
The left still carries the pale streak of scar tissue and refuses to meet the right the way it should, leaving the same narrow gap I’ve stared at on too many screens in too many rooms.
“Today gives us information as much as improvement,” Dr. Levin reminds me.
The temporary filler will add bulk to the weaker side and help the folds meet the way they should.
If speaking becomes easier, stronger, or less painful, we learn how much of my limitation comes from poor closure and how much comes from the scar.
It also gives us a better idea of what a permanent procedure might accomplish later.
And if it does very little, we learn from that too.
“How long does the material last?” The numbing spray has made half my mouth feel rented.
“Several weeks to a few months. Your body will determine how fast it breaks down, and you may have swelling today, so I care less about the first hour than what your voice does over the next several days.”
Good. I don’t want a miracle delivered under fluorescent lights as Mama films from the corner in portrait mode and everyone starts crying; I want my body to give me facts for once instead of another fucking grief process.
The needle still scares the shit out of me.
Dr. Levin works through the skin of my neck, the scope giving him a clear view of the injection site on the monitor, and I focus on Mama crushing my hand hard enough to qualify as an orthopedic concern.
Pressure comes first, followed by an internal sensation so revolting I refuse to describe it in case acknowledging it makes me move.
Every primitive part of my brain objects to modern medicine involving a man holding a needle near my larynx and saying, “Excellent. Stay very still,” as if those words belong anywhere near something sharp.
I stay very still.
When it’s finished, he gives me several minutes before checking everything again.
The left fold meets the right more completely. Not perfectly, but better, and tears spring to my eyes.
“Don’t assign meaning yet,” he says.
“I know.”
“You’re assigning meaning.”
“I’m extremely gifted.”
Mama makes a damp little noise beside me, halfway between a laugh and the beginning of another cry.
And now comes the part I’ve been dreading more than the needle.
Dr. Levin asks for a simple vowel sound. I inhale and give him one.
The voice coming out of me is mine, but altered. Fuller through the middle. Pressed from the swelling. Rough in places, imperfect, but different enough to make me stop halfway through.
Mama’s fingers close harder around mine. Dr. Levin keeps his attention on the monitor instead of my face because he is a good doctor and understands nobody needs to watch me have an existential crisis over the letter A.
“Again,” he instructs. “Easy. Don’t chase it.”
I try once more, and the sound sits differently inside my skull.
For four years, I’ve compensated so constantly I stopped recognizing any of it as effort.
Push here. Protect there. Cut a phrase short.
Avoid a pitch. Budget my words. Swallow the pain.
My entire voice became a collection of tiny accommodations I stopped noticing.
For two seconds, the mechanics change and something is missing. My eyes flood until my vision blurs.
“Does it hurt?” Dr. Levin asks.
I shake my head. It doesn’t hurt. There’s pressure, tenderness, a strange swollen heaviness I don’t recognize yet, but the burning scrape that has followed my voice for four years never comes.
I start crying hard enough that the scope has to come out because my sinuses have decided to join the emotional event.
Dr. Levin hands me tissues and goes over the instructions: relative voice rest for the remainder of the day, no singing, only necessary speech, plenty of water, no throat clearing, and no whispering because whispering isn’t rest no matter how many well-meaning people insist otherwise.
Tomorrow, I can start the gentle exercises Jenna prescribed.
The next few days will tell us more than this room can.
Mama keeps wiping at her face.
Since I am officially done talking, I type into my phone and hold the screen out to her.
Laurel: If you start praising Jesus loudly in this clinic, I’m leaving you in Boston.
She reads it, sniffs, and says, “He knows I’m grateful.”
∞∞∞
The silence afterward does something I don’t expect: it gives everyone else the floor.
Mama and I go back to the hotel, and since I’m forbidden from wasting my voice on unnecessary conversation, she fills the elevator ride by condemning a man on our floor for wearing loafers without socks and declaring nine-dollar hotel coffee evidence of moral collapse.
I communicate through my phone like an irritated hostage.
Nora FaceTimes twenty minutes later, sees the little whiteboard Mama bought from a pharmacy, and nearly falls off her couch laughing when I hold it up.
Laurel: I’ve entered my silent era. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Dean demands to be added to the call and starts shouting, as if FaceTime requires extra volume when one sibling has been medically prohibited from answering. Monica takes the phone from him after thirty seconds and tells him he’s the reason headphones come with volume warnings.
Daddy should be in one of the little squares, and for one second I can picture him there: glasses too low on his nose, asking Dr. Levin questions nobody else thought of, telling Dean to quit hollering, pretending he isn’t worried.
Bellamy men have historically treated emotional repression like an heirloom.
I turn my face from the screen until I can breathe through the ache. Mama sees it, and her hand closes around my knee in quiet comfort.
Later, she goes downstairs to terrorize the hotel staff into finding soup that isn’t, in her words, “nineteen dollars of hot salt water,” and I sit by the window overlooking a city with no idea anything important happened inside my throat today.
Fourteen messages from industry people wait on my phone. Nashville has already discovered I’m in Boston; nothing there stays private longer than milk stays fresh.
I ignore every one.
One message matters more.
Beckett: No need to answer. I hope today gave you useful information. Studio B stays blocked whenever you want it.
He listened closely enough to understand what today was actually supposed to give me.