A Maidens Grave

begged him silently. Please! She lowered her head and began to tremble, crying. And so she did the only thing she could do—what she’d done earlier: closing her eyes, lowering her head, she went away. The place she’d escaped into from the slaughterhouse earlier today. Her secret place, her music room.
    It is a room of dark wood, tapestries, pillows, smoky air. Not a window in the place. The Outside cannot get in here.
    Here’s a harpsichord carved of delicate rosewood, florets and filigree, inlaid with ivory and ebony. Here’s a piano whose tone sounds like resonating crystal. A South American berimbau, a set of golden vibes, a crisp, prewar Martin guitar.
    Here are walls to reflect Melanie’s own voice, which isan amalgam of all the instruments in the orchestra. Mezzo-sopranos and coloratura sopranos and altos.
    It was a place that never existed and never would. But it was Melanie’s salvation. When the taunts at school had grown too much, when she simply couldn’t grasp what someone was saying to her, when she thought of the world she’d never experience, her music room was the only place she could go to be safe, to be comforted.
    Forgetting the twins, forgetting gasping Beverly, forgetting the sobs of the paralyzed Mrs. Harstrawn, forgetting the terrible man watching her as he inhaled for sustenance the sorrow of another human being. Forgetting Susan’s death, and her own, which was probably all too close.
    Melanie, sitting on the comfortable couch in her secret place, decides she doesn’t want to be alone. She needs someone with her. Someone to talk with. Someone with whom she can share human words. Whom should I invite?
    Melanie thinks of her parents. But she’s never invited them here before. Friends from Laurent Clerc, from Hebron, neighbors, students . . . But when she thinks of them she thinks of Susan. And of course she dares not.
    Sometimes she invites musicians and composers—people she’s read about, even if she’s never heard their music: Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt, Gordon Bok, Patrick Ball, Mozart, Sam Barber. Ludwig, of course. Ralph Vaughan Williams. Never Wagner. Mahler came once but didn’t stay long.
    Her brother used to be a regular visitor to the music room.
    In fact, for a time, Danny was her only visitor, for he seemed to be the only person in the family not thrown by her affliction. Her parents struggled to coddle their daughter, keeping her home, never letting her go to town alone, scraping up money for tutors to come to the house, impressing on her the dangers of “her, you know, condition”—all the while avoiding any mention of her being deaf.
    Danny wouldn’t put up with her timidity. He’d roar into town on his Honda 350 with his sister perched on the back. She wore a black helmet emblazoned with fiery wings. Before her hearing went completely he’d take herto movies and would drive audiences to rage by loudly repeating dialogue for her. To their parents’ disgust the boy would walk around the house wearing an airline mechanic’s earmuffs, just so he’d know what she was going through. Bless his heart, Danny even learned some basic sign and taught her some phrases (naturally ones that she couldn’t repeat in the company of adult Deaf though they would later earn her high esteem in the Laurent Clerc schoolyard).
    Ah, but Danny . . .
    Ever since the accident last year, she hadn’t had the heart to ask him back.
    She tries now but can’t imagine him here.
    And so today, when she opens the door, she finds a middle-aged man with graying hair, wearing an ill-fitting navy-blue jacket and black-framed glasses. The man from the field outside the slaughterhouse.
    De l’Epée.
    Who else but him?
    “Hello,” she says in a voice like a glass bell.
    “And to you.” She pictures him taking her hand and kissing it, rather bashfully, rather firmly.
    “You’re a policeman, aren’t you?” she asks.
    “Yes,” he says.
    She can’t see him as clearly as she’d like. The power of desire is unlimited but that of imagination is not.
    “I know it’s not your name but can I call you de l’Epée?”
    Of course he’s agreeable to this, gentleman that he is.
    “Can we talk for a little while? That’s what I miss the most, talking.” Once you’ve spoken to someone, pelted them with your words and felt theirs in your ears, signing isn’t the same at all.
    “By all means, let’s talk.”
    “I want to tell you a story. About how I learned I was