Megan Callahan’s work has appeared in magazines like FreeFall, Nashville Review, Room, and PRISM, and in the fiction anthologies Best Canadian Stories 2021 and The Masters Review Volume X. A writer and translator, she lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.
Bobbi has never been in a classroom so silent. Pencil cases unzip. Textbook pages rustle. Winter boots squish and squeak on the linoleum. Standing at the front is a birdlike woman with slender limbs. Short black hair feathers around her ears. She mouths and gesticulates; her movements are big and fluid. On the whiteboard is her name: MAYA, in bold letters. Below she’s written the alphabet with preschool teacher precision. Around the crescent table, her twelve students gape. They ask questions with their eyes.
Maya points to letter A and makes a tight fist. Letter B is a flat palm with her thumb tucked to the side. She goes through them all, hands shaping and unshaping the air. A dozen faces twist. Fingers struggle to mimic.
(Maya), the teacher signs. She arches her thick eyebrows, points to herself, and smiles. Beckoning. Introduce yourselves, her eyebrows say. They go one by one, hands awkward as blind hatchlings learning flight: (Ali), (Fred), (Sara), (Xina). When Bobbi signs her double Bs, it’s like she’s high-fiving an imaginary friend.
To her left, her father is tense. He will not spell his name. On the desk his hands are pale, each one a fan of bones trapped under skin. He fiddles with his wedding band before taking out a slim notebook from his shirt pocket and writing in tremoring cursive: Can we go? Bobbi shakes her head and plucks the pen from his hand. Watch, she writes. Learn.
. . .
Not long after her mother’s death, Bobbi’s father began to break things: coffee cups, glass vases, framed family photos. Even the hand-painted ceramic bowl her mother had bought at a dusty shop in Lisbon—after bargaining for nearly an hour in clumsy Portuguese—Bobbi found in pieces on the kitchen tiles. Most Sundays, when she bussed to Park Ex to drop off groceries, she would find evidence of his latest outburst: shards of glass or indecipherable fragments in odd corners, sometimes swept into a dustpan and forgotten.
When Bobbi unlocked the door one morning in October, earlier than usual, she’d expected to see her father, flushed and towering over some disintegrated object, or else weeping on his knees with a bottle of table wine—as he sometimes did after—picking through the remains. Instead, she found him collapsed on the yellow couch. He was motionless, shirt rumpled, arm slung over his face. A sitcom blared. In the adjoining kitchen, the kettle was wailing.
Dead, Bobbi immediately thought. Relief was swiftly smothered by guilt. She crossed the room, windbreaker dripping rain, and kneeled on the rug. The plastic grocery bags slowly toppled beside her. Her father didn’t move. On the coffee table, a half-smoked cigar still smouldered on the lip of the ashtray. Was it a stroke, she wondered, or a heart attack like her mother? Maybe his diseased fat-choked liver?
“Dad,” Bobbi tried. She leaned closer and ran a finger along his stubbled cheek. Only then did he shudder awake, snort, and lift his head from the cushion.
“Jesus!” Bobbi stumbled back.
“Roberta?” Her father coughed wetly and groaned to his feet, running a hand through his grays. “Didn’t expect you till later.” He looked around, disoriented.
“My god,” Bobbi stuttered. “I thought, with all the noise—”
“What a mess.” Her father gestured in disgust to the mud she’d tracked across the carpet.
Bobbi flushed and pried off her boots. Her father said something but his voice was drowned by the noise.
“What?” she said. “Hold on.”
Bobbi switched off the television, then rushed to the kitchen and released the shrieking kettle from the stovetop. It had all but boiled itself empty. She let it cool in the sink. Scattered around the drain were the remnants of a mug, the small white shards like a handful of lost teeth.
In the living room, her father’s back was turned, his knees bent as he reached for his cigar. When she walked up behind him, he didn’t turn around. On impulse, Bobbi snapped her fingers behind his head. Once, twice. Nothing. She sucked in her breath.
“Dad,” she tried. “Dad! Can you hear me?”
Her father sighed and shifted his weight. Retrieved his Zippo from the coffee table.
. . .
It’s the third week of class and they’ve moved on to verbs. Maya’s patience is apparently limitless. She arrives bubbly and smiling, colorful knits and scarves swallowing her small bones. She flutters around the room and points to the whiteboard. Her students offer blank expressions, their faces dull in the cold light. The roads outside are slick with ice. Earlier there was sleet, tomorrow it will snow. Coats drape from the students’ chairs in various shades of gray, from charcoal to graphite to pewter.
(Again), Bobbi signs. (Slowly). She furrows her brow.
Maya nods and repeats the sequence. Hands raised, pinkies and thumbs outstretched like she’s saying hang loose, bro. Then held at her chest, palms cupping an invisible sphere.
(Play ball).
A few of the younger students are catching on quicker than the rest. They nod and take notes, sign with the verve of twenty-two-year-olds. Bobbi watches them with spite, feeling decrepit at thirty-five. At her side, her father swells with frustration. Maya paddles the air with both hands, palms down. (Walk). She walks across the room while signing. (Walking).
Metal chair legs screech. Bobbi’s father shoves into the hall and slams the door. Everyone stares. Bobbi blushes and shrinks in her chair. She circles her right fist above her chest.
(Sorry, sorry).
Maya smiles and waves the apology away. (It’s fine.)
Her teeth are small and white like rows of pearls. She lifts her fist and draws her thumb down the centre of her mouth. Bobbi searches her memory but can’t recall the sign. She sketches the shape in her notebook and surrounds it with question marks.
In the hall, released from the classroom, the students gather at the drinking fountain and talk too loudly. Bobbi winces at the shock of frequencies. One kid’s voice rises above the rest: He’s skinny, relaxed, one of the best in class. As Bobbi sidles past, he mimics her father’s scowl. Snickers behind his hand.
. . .
After the kettle incident, Bobbi tried to get Jill to come. She called her one evening after work, steeled for an argument. It was late when she exited the school, long past rush hour. In her windowless office, jammed at the end of a corridor near the cafeteria, she’d lost track of time. The bus was nearly empty. She balanced her tote bag of uncorrected essays on her knees—she’d let them pile up, and they were now a week late—and found the email with her sister’s new number. They hadn’t spoken in months.
“How is he?” Jill’s voice was muted, like she was driving through a tunnel. It was late afternoon in Vancouver.
“He hates his hearing aids. Won’t wear them unless I force him.”
“Not a surprise.”
“But he reads lips well.”
“I guess that’s how he was able to fake it for so long.”
Bobbi still couldn’t shake the weight of her father’s lie. Had her mother known? Likely she’d been complicit, ignoring his gradual hearing loss the same way she’d ignored his increasingly problematic drinking. “Your father’s a down person,” she used to tell Bobbi with a shrug, as if this excused everything. Her mother, the ultimate up person, had kept her father active by sheer force of will, dragging him on hikes and cycling trips. As a teenager, Bobbi had bristled at her mother’s unbridled energy. “The day’s half over!” she’d exclaim if Bobbi dared to rise past ten. She’d been a yoga instructor—the kind who believed in guided meditation and spiritual alignments—at a handful of studios across the city. Bobbi had tried to attend here and there. Her mother was a good teacher, patient and unflappable, with a crisp but cheerful attitude that always made her feel envious and lazy. After getting her English degree, Bobbi had drifted to teaching without much thought, and whatever well of enthusiasm she’d had at the start of her career quickly dried up. Just last week, she’d spotted two of her students cheating on an exam, averted her gaze, and done nothing.
“Still thinking of taking that signing class?” Jill asked.
“I’m trying to convince him. He’s being, you know. Difficult.”
“Shocking.” Jill snorted. “I assume he’s still drinking.”
“He misses Mom.” Bobbi hated the excuse as soon as it left her mouth.
“So do I, but do you see me wallowing?”
From Jill’s perspective, anyone who couldn’t pull themselves together and carry on after a tragedy was wallowing. “Happiness is a choice,” she often lectured Bobbi, which was just one reason among many that they seldom spoke. Her sister didn’t believe in luck and attributed her own easy life—an uncomplicated marriage, a steady line-up of acting gigs in B-list films—to positive thinking and meticulous decisions, each one fitting into place like a child’s building block.
The bus slowed at a dark intersection before lurching forward, jostling Bobbie sideways. A gangly teenager with a backpack slung over his shoulder dropped into a free seat. One of her students? Bobbi ducked her head and lowered her voice.
“Do you remember what Dad was like when we were kids?” She shut her eyes and tried to dredge up a memory. “You know. Before the drinking.”
“Who can remember that?” Jill’s voice was distracted, faraway.
“Right.” Bobbi sighed and blinked up at the fluorescents. “When can you come?”
Jill said nothing. Through the phone, Bobbi could hear her brother-in-law’s voice rising above a toddler’s squeal.
“Not for a few months,” Jill said. “We start shooting next week. And I have Lizzie, you know.” She paused, giving Bobbi time to consider all the things that she herself did not have. She thought of her apartment, barren save for the dying philodendron on her windowsill.
“I can send you money, whatever you need.”
Bobbi gripped the phone. She could see her sister, cruising down the Island Highway top-down in her Camaro, sunglasses reflecting the tangerine dusk. Husband in the passenger seat, baby buckled in the back.
I need you here, Bobbi wanted to scream. I need you to fucking help me.
“I get it,” she said, her voice steady. “Of course. Come when you can.”
She hung up.
Outside, the city was dark. A veneer of grime covered the bus window. On the blue plastic seat next to hers, someone had scrawled words in black marker. Poetry maybe, or a song she’d heard before: Can’t you hear me knockin’ on your window? Can’t you hear me knockin’ on your door?
. . .
Soon, class presentations. Bobbi is learning to transform thoughts into shapes. Signs are not words, the textbook says. They are concepts. Signing is not like speaking. Last week, Maya wrote a sentence on the whiteboard and slashed out half the words in red. Determiners? Nope. Pronouns? Forget them. Sign only what’s necessary, her hands and eyebrows said.
(Need ASL help)? Bobbi spells the words slowly, like her hands are underwater, and arches her eyebrows to signal a question.
“Bah!” her father barks, waving her away. “Don’t waste your time.”
He slams the fridge door, clutching a can of Molson Dry. Already a cluster of empties have accumulated on the counter. Her father spends most days slouching between the living room and kitchen, and Bobbi half expects to see a groove in the floorboards worn down by the constant swish-swish of his slippers.
(Don’t speak), Bobbi signs. (Sign).
Her father groans but lifts his right hand. He spells a word that she fails to catch.
(Again, slowly).
(ALONE). He flings the stormy E, clutches his beer, and slumps to the couch. Jeopardy plays on the distorted screen, Alex Trebek strolling silently across the stage. Eerie contestants move their lips like exotic neon fish. Now that he’s been found out, her father keeps the television muted. Bobbi flaps an arm in front of the screen to get his attention.
“Fine.” She makes sure he can see her lips. “Do what you want. Forget the fucking class, I give up. I’m done.”
Bobbi relishes the shock on her father’s face. She wrestles on her boots and marches out the back door, her gloved fist nearly punching through the flimsy screen. Her coat billows in the wind; her scarf whips behind her like a ribbon. A thought comes to her then unheeded: I don’t have to come back. Tramping through the snow, Bobbi seizes this new possibility with resolve. She rounds the house. Stops. Air whooshes from her lungs like they’ve been punctured.
On the shoveled stone walkway, shimmering like ice chips, are the broken bits of her mother’s vintage teacups. Smashed nearly to dust, as if they’ve been hurled from the very rooftop.
Bobbi drops to her knees. Gingerly, she sifts through the debris, looking for anything big enough to salvage. Around her, the wind heaves. The cold numbs her fingers. It’s a long time before she’s able to pry herself away from the porcelain ruins, a solitary pink shard cupped in her palm.
. . .
Class starts at eight p.m. As usual, Bobbi arrives early. Beneath the desk, her knee bounces. She flips open her textbook. Tell us about your hobbies. Favorite color, favorite animal. What languages do you speak? Talk about your family.
Soon the presentations begin. Maya crosses her legs beneath her wool skirt and watches the students. When they stumble, she draws her thumb down the centre of her mouth, and this time Bobbi recognizes the sign. (Patience), her mind offers up, the knowledge effortless and surprising. Maya applauds after each presentation, not by clapping but by displaying her palms, fingers splayed, and waving them wildly. Silent jazz hands, Bobbi jots in her notebook.
(Bobbi)?
Maya smiles and beckons her to the front. Bobbi swallows. Her mouth is wide and dry as the tundra, her underarms cold pits of nervous sweat. She thinks of all the hours she’s spent watching her own students bumble through presentations—all that painful twitching and stammering—and wishes she’d practiced more. But once her knees carry her across the room, her hands know what to do. They rise and dip, guided by muscle memory. Not so stiff anymore, she realizes. Almost graceful. She floats back to her chair and beams at the sea of waving hands.
Class is nearly over when Bobbi’s father walks in. What’s most shocking is the suit. He’s wearing his owl gray two-piece, the one he used to reserve for what he called “the big kahunas,” and a striped skinny tie that curves over his belly. His eyes flit around the classroom. When he shoulders in next to Bobbi, she gets a whiff of cigar smoke.
Maya is unruffled by his late arrival. She waits for him to get settled, then motions him to the front. The other students gawk. One scoffs and Bobbi turns to glare in his direction. It’s the same skinny kid she overheard at the drinking fountain, weeks ago. He’s grinning at her father like he’s a slow stupid cow. Bobbi tears her gaze from him, eyes forward, back straight. She has no idea what’s about to happen. It’s been three months since the course began and her father has yet to sign a single word.
In his suit, her father stands taller. His chest puffs out. Still, he looks old: sagging jowls, thinning hair. His face is flushed and puffy from months of heavy drinking. Mouth set, he drags his right thumb down his jaw, then lets his hand drop into his left. It lands with a wet clap that only Bobbi and the other students can hear. She recognizes the sign from their very first class: (Wife).
Her father spreads a hand, all blue veins and knuckles, over his face: (Beautiful). A smile—the first she’s seen in months—transforms his face, and for the briefest moment Bobbi glimpses the Dad of her childhood. He swings his hand up to his shoulder like he’s tossing a pinch of salt to ward off bad luck. Maya scrunches her brow, but Bobbi understands. The sign means past tense: back then, or before, or a long time ago. Her father finds her eyes from across the room and repeats the gesture, a weighty and sweeping motion. Maya leans forward. The other students stare. But he’s signing only for her, his Roberta, who’s all grown up and looks so much like her mother. So she opens her eyes wide, as wide as they can go, to let him know she’s listening.
