The sessions exhausted and confused me and didn’t change anything. Mom was disappointed, and I remember the disappointment being trained on me, as if I weren’t cooperating with the experts, as if I didn’t want to get better. She’d lose all patience and start pleading, furious: “Say something, anything—Whitney, make a sound.”

Dad would shelter me, that’s what I remember. When Mom wasn’t around, he’d ridicule the experts. It’s okay, he’d tell me, just hang in there, take your time. There wasn’t much worth saying anyway. As if to prove it, he began speaking to me in plain sound, subverbal, like a crude clay from which words were shaped. He’d make monkey talk in the grocery store or at the public pool, frustrating my mother, who found this whole approach unproductive. But I loved my constant jabbering companion—he made me comfortable being in the world. Sometimes he’d just hold me, his breath on my neck, muttering in our private language.

It seemed like nothing could unfreeze my tongue—not until the day at the hospital. Dad had always been a healthy, active man. He’d jog in the morning, play hockey in Burbank, dribble basketballs between my legs, a blood clot worming toward his heart.

He survived a few days after the attack, unresponsive in a hospital bed. Mom told me later that she debated bringing me to see him, but the doctors thought it might be worthwhile. I was told to put on my best black shoes, with the little gold buckles, and then Mom drove me to the hospital.

In the room, her hands on my shoulders, we approached the bed. I don’t recall any tubes or machines, just his open eyes, the face of my companion. That’s when I began to speak, softly at first, then louder—nonsense words, primordial sounds—Mom’s hands springing off my shoulders. Thinking I was having a fit, she rushed me from the room. I never spoke to him again.

—

As I wrote in the P-I, in the piece Mort liked so much, I’ve come to believe that whatever voice I developed—whatever readers heard as their eyes moved over my words—carried forward from the hospital, when I reinvented speech from scratch.

But there’s something else I didn’t write, something I could never admit.

I wasn’t the girl I’d been before, the girl who crawled into the igloo. Mom observed it first, a certain mischief on my tongue, a tendency to elaborate and embellish.