last item was a plastic yellow sea horse the size of my pinkie finger. I touched the sharp ridges along its spine.
âWhere did you get this?â I said.
His hands came up. Man give it to me .
I signed: When ?
âSpeak?â said Graham to me.
âWhen?â I said to Frankie.
Frankie looked back and forth between us, his mouth turned down at the edges and his shoulders slumped. You in kitchen , he signed. Washing dishes.
Iâve been asked time and againâby doctors and speech therapists, who had failed to find anything physically wrong; by Lidia and my father; even by friends back in Illinois, whose calls Iâd stopped returning as their childrenâs vocabularies multipliedâwhy sometimes I chose to sign instead of speaking. When Iâd first started with the signing, not realizing how instrumental it would become, Iâd pressed Graham to learn some basics. Heâd said, âThe boy can hear, right? Why are we doing this?â Iâd said, âHe can hear, but he canât talk. I donât want him to feel alone.â I hadnât known why I was doing it until the words left my mouth. I knew people believed I should have been doing something quantifiable to help Frankie, and I didnât disagree. But so far, no diagnosis or treatment had been chosen for him. And I believed strongly that until we knew why he refused to speak, we would not entice him to start.
I cleared the table. Frankieâs eyelids were heavy, his stare unfocused. He made the sign for Sleep : one hand cupping his soft, full cheek. Graham lifted him and playfully slung him over one shoulder, then stooped to let me say good night before taking him inside. I poured myself a glass of wine. When Graham came back out, he stumbled over the doorway and dropped into a patio chair. He stretched his long legs and sighed. The Lullaby docked bow-in, so the wide stern patioâfully a third of the boatâs living spaceâfaced the canal. Breeze trembled in the mangroves and across the surface of the water.
âI like what you did with theâwhat do you call themâarea rugs,â said Graham, his voice a little shaky.
âWe needed a little sprucing,â I said, but I could tell he barely heard me.
Every few weeks it hit him, the need for sleep. I knew tonight he would take his pills, would lie down in our bed, and would fasten the soft black cuff that weâd leashed to the wall. He hated the pills, hated the cuff, but every couple of weeks he was forced to spend a few nights more or less the way regular people did. The cuff had come home with him after his third and final visit to Detention, after the incident on our anniversary. The doctor who gave it to him had said that heâd treated patients with such extreme parasomnia only a few times in his career. One patient had sex with strangers in her sleep; another stabbed her husband. He told Grahamâand I hated that doctor for it, though I never met him or even knew his nameâthat the worst was likely still to come.
I sipped my wine. Iâd steam-cleaned the houseboatâs carpet after weâd moved aboard, but the industrial gray stuff remained faded and stained. Frankie and I had gone from store to store, digging through sale piles, until Iâd found a jute rug for the deck, a small braided mat in sherbet colors for the kitchen, and a large, colorful wool one in Moroccan patterns for the salon. On the deck Iâd hung hurricane lamps, and on the sofa Iâd arranged bright pillows in orange, grassy green, magenta. The Lullaby was not pretty, no, but she was showing a little personality.
Graham rubbed his eyes and tried to focus. He gave me an effortful smile.
âWhy donât you lie down?â I said.
âWe should get a new mattress.â Heâd lain on our mattress two or three times, total, since weâd moved aboard, and never for more than an hour or two. âThat old one gives me the