“You can’t protect your children from everything,” I say, an insufficient defense of Agnes Wakefield. “And, no matter what you do, you never really know how they’ll turn out.”

“It’s just lucky we turned out all right.” Elizabeth frowns out the window. “Is that school new?”

I glance to my right as we breeze by, catch the blur of the brick structure with its clean, modern lines. “They tore down the old one last year.”

“I guess it’s been a while since I’ve come this way.”

“You never visit.”

Elizabeth has always made excuses to avoid coming back home. I can’t remember the last time she visited. I wonder how long it’s been since she last went to the swamp.

I enjoyed the quiet of the swamp in a way that, I think, Elizabeth never did. When she came along on our adventures, it was always noisy—feet sloshing through muck, complaints of mosquitoes devouring her, attempted birdcalls to see if any would call back. Lots of talking. I don’t think she could ever really stand the quiet, so she had to fill it with something of herself so as not to feel even the vaguest hint of being alone. I was more like my father; I never minded the quiet, and sometimes I wanted to push her face into the muck just to shut her up.

My father was not born deaf, but he was deaf for as long as I knew him. I remember learning sign language very young, right alongside English, bred to be bilingual so I could communicate with him. I was precocious, as some children are. I appreciated the silence of our conversations, talks that could be quiet but at the same time filled with a world of words and ideas. The deft movements of his liquid hands, as if fingers could dance, communicated the tone of his voice as much as spoken word. I could pass a day without speaking if I was on bad terms with my mother and Elizabeth. You see more, you hear more, and you appreciate the quiet.

I do not know whether my father appreciated the quiet like I did, but then I hardly know if he even experienced it by then, he had been deaf so long. And what is silence to the deaf?

When you live with sound, going without must feel incredibly painful—a sense of absence, of missing some vital aspect of life, of withdrawal. But when you live without it, somehow it must seem natural—the silence comfortable rather than terrifying, so comfortable it ceases to exist. When silence exists, there is something awful in it, something awful in the emptiness and void of it, but when it is everywhere and it no longer exists, it can no longer do any harm.

We fall into another lull in the car. Up ahead, just there, is the doctor’s office, another clean modern building emerging from the wild landscape and its proselytizing cows. The road rumbles gently beneath us. The turn signal clicks as I slow to enter the parking lot. An advertisement murmurs from the radio. Even in the quiet, it isn’t really quiet after all.