I'll Scream Later (No Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

and remembers getting the call to come home, there’d been an accident, and we were in the hospital. He was the “adult” in charge. My parents had flown to San Francisco just that morning. When they walked into their hotel to check in, they were given a note at the front desk to call the hospital. They did, but the hospital refused to give them any details over the phone. They flew right back immediately. My mother still avoids San Francisco because she associates it with bad news.
    Of the three of us, my injuries were the most severe. My nose was bleeding—a man was holding me and I helped myself to the handkerchief he had in the front pocket of his suit. My pelvis was fractured. Marc hit his head near his eye, and Jean had cuts requiring stitches. This was before seat belts were the first thing you thought of when you got in a car, and it’s a miracle that we weren’t badly hurt.
    Marc and I shared the hospital room for the few days we were there. Neither of us was happy about the interruption in our summer vacation—why couldn’t it have happened during the school year! Marc was given a box of Bazooka gum, and I kept wanting some. But sharing wasn’t easy—he couldn’t move, so he kept tossing pieces of gum into my crib!
    He still remembers the nurses going insane from a whistling noise they couldn’t identify. They would pop their heads into the room, scout around, but they could never discover the source of that irritating noise. It was my hearing aids going off, and Marc decided he wasn’t about to tip them off.
    When we got back home, it felt as if a prison sentence had been lifted! The doctor told my mother that we could basically do anything we felt up to doing. I felt like playing nonstop to make up for the lazy summer days I’d missed out on.
    Jean was more traumatized than anyone else. She was horrified that we had been hurt while in her care, and as soon as she was better, she apologized to my parents, then left for home. My family stayed in touch with her for years afterward and we all think of her fondly, though she would never stay another summer with us.
    A couple of years later I found out how lucky I was to have had such a short recovery and no cast. My family was going out that night, and just before dinnertime I was ready and bored. I decided to go into the backyard while we waited for my mom to finish getting ready.
    We had a swing set with seats made of wooden slats. I must have been standing up on the swing because I got my foot caught between the slats, then fell—snap, that was the sound of my right leg breaking. I didn’t hear it, but I sure as heck felt it, screaming at the pain.
    So it was off to the ER again. Thankfully it was a clean break, no surgery needed. This time when I was released it was with a big plaster cast. It didn’t take me long to figure out how to get around. I was back on the block in just days with all the problems and perks a cast brings with it—getting all my friends to sign it, going nuts when I had an itch underneath it. My mom just remembers I worked it.
     
    W HEN I WAS five, I started taking sign-language classes. I remember my first night class with a Deaf teacher, Samuel Block, who isstill alive today, now in his nineties. This changed my world. Communication and meaning flowed back into my life at full force. He was so sweet, so smart, and so full of life.
    The temple we went to on Friday nights, B’nai Shalom, catered to both the Deaf and hearing Jewish community and had a rabbi signing at services, so I began to understand my religious heritage. A Sunday-school class was taught by my soon-to-be-aunt Sue, who was majoring in speech audiology and was a fluent signer. In that class was a six-year-old named Liz Tannebaum.
    I still remember meeting Liz for the first time. She was the first kid who looked like me and was Deaf like me that I connected with completely. I just knew it in an instant. I walked up to her and asked, “Who are