My Husband Was Deaf For Two Years. Then One Night In The Kitchen, He Spoke To Me In Perfect English. How Do I Ever Trust Him Again?

The Voice in the Kitchen

I was standing in our kitchen in Palo Alto, six months pregnant, my hands trembling as I held the note I’d just written for my husband. That’s how we communicated, how we’d always communicated: through written words, through sign language, through touches and glances. Richard was deaf, had been since a motorcycle accident five years before we met. Or so I’d believed for the past year and a half of our relationship.

He was reading the note over my shoulder, close enough that I could feel his breath on my neck, when he said, clear as day in a voice I’d never heard before,

“Margaret, I need to tell you something.”

I dropped the note. The paper fluttered to the floor between us and I watched it fall like I was in a dream or a nightmare, because my deaf husband had just spoken.

Let me go back. Let me tell you how I got here, standing in that kitchen, my whole world cracking apart like thin ice. I’m 68 years old now, and I’ve learned that some stories need to be told from the beginning, even when the beginning is painful to remember.

The Pressure to Settle Down

It was 1991, and I was 32 years old, still single, still working as a junior architect at a firm in San Francisco, still living in a cramped studio apartment I could barely afford. My mother called me every Sunday like clockwork, and every Sunday the conversation somehow circled back to the same topic.

“Your sister Catherine just told me she’s expecting again. That’ll be three grandchildren she’s given me, Margaret. Three.”

“That’s wonderful, Mom,”

I said.

“The Johnson’s daughter just got engaged, remember Amy? You two used to play together. She’s 26.”

I’d grip the phone tighter, stare out my window at the fog rolling in over the bay.

“I’m happy for Amy. I just don’t understand what you’re waiting for. You’re not getting any younger. Men don’t want to marry women in their 30s who…”

“Mom, I have to go. I have work to finish.”

But she was relentless. If I’m being honest with myself, after three decades of marriage and raising two children of my own, I can admit that I was lonely. Tired of coming home to an empty apartment, tired of watching my colleagues leave early for their kids’ soccer games while I stayed late to meet deadlines, tired of being the only single person at every family gathering.

So when my mother told me about Richard Hayes, I listened.

“He’s the son of Dorothy Hayes. You remember Dorothy? She was in my book club. Her son started some kind of computer company. Very successful, very handsome, and he’s ready to settle down.”

“Mom, I’m not going on another one of your blind dates.”

“This is different. He’s… Well, he’s special, Margaret. He had an accident a few years ago, a motorcycle accident. He lost his hearing.”

Something in her voice made me pause.

“He’s deaf? Completely?”

“But he’s learned to adapt. He reads lips beautifully, and he knows sign language. Dorothy says he’s the same charming man he always was, just quieter. A lot of women don’t want to deal with that, you know. But I thought you might be different. You’ve always been so patient, so understanding.”

I should have heard the manipulation in those words. Instead, I heard an opportunity. A man who wouldn’t judge me for being 32 and unmarried. A man who might be grateful for someone willing to learn sign language, to adapt to his world. A man who, because of his disability, might actually see me for who I was instead of what I wasn’t.

“Okay,”

I said.

“One dinner.”

A Silent Courtship

Richard Hayes was everything my mother had promised and more. Tall, with dark hair starting to gray at the temples, sharp brown eyes that watched my lips when I spoke. He wore expensive suits that fit perfectly, drove a Mercedes, and worked in Silicon Valley doing something with computer software that I didn’t quite understand.

Our first dinner was at an upscale Italian restaurant in San Jose. I’d spent two weeks learning basic sign language from a book, practicing in front of my bathroom mirror, but Richard made it easy. He’d brought a small notepad and pen, and when my clumsy signing failed, we wrote back and forth like teenagers passing notes in class.

“Your mother talks about you constantly,”

he wrote.

“The brilliant architect daughter. The stubborn one who won’t settle down.”

I laughed, a little embarrassed.

“She makes me sound like a prize mare she’s trying to sell.”

He smiled, and when he wrote his next message, I felt something shift in my chest.

“She undersold you.”

We started dating, if you could call it that. We’d meet for dinners, take walks along the beach, go to movies where we’d sit side by side in the dark. I’d forget that he couldn’t hear the dialogue. He’d read the subtitles when they appeared, and sometimes he’d take my hand and squeeze it during romantic scenes.

I learned sign language properly, taking evening classes after work. Richard was patient with me, correcting my hand positions gently, his fingers warm against mine as he showed me the right way to sign “love” or “tomorrow” or “beautiful.”

His mother, Dorothy, was thrilled. She invited us for Sunday dinners at her enormous house in Los Gatos, where she’d watch us sign to each other across the table with tears in her eyes.

“I was so worried he’d never find anyone,”

she told me one evening when Richard had stepped outside to take a call—or so I thought. I learned later he was just checking something on his pager.

“After the accident, he withdrew so much. Stopped seeing his friends. Broke up with his girlfriend, Julia. She said she couldn’t handle being with someone who was deaf. Can you imagine the cruelty of that?”

I couldn’t. I thought about Julia often in those early months. What kind of person abandons someone they love because of a disability? What kind of shallow, selfish woman was she?

Eight months into our relationship, Richard proposed. Not with words—he couldn’t speak, after all, or so I believed. He took me to the beach at sunset where he’d written in the sand in enormous letters:

“Will you marry me, Margaret?”

I cried. I signed yes over and over, and when he slipped the ring onto my finger—a beautiful diamond that must have cost three months of my salary—I thought I was the luckiest woman in the world.