Chapter 6 - Ordinary Miracles
Here's where things actually stand now.
Our daughter — we named her Wren — was formally diagnosed in June. Waardenburg syndrome, type 1, confirmed genetically in August, the same variant Rhys carries.
Moderate-to-severe sensorineural hearing loss in her left ear. Perfectly normal hearing on the right.
She was fitted with a hearing aid at fourteen weeks old. It's bright orange, because she got to choose the color herself by grabbing at three different options, and she grabbed the orange one twice in a row without hesitating.
She's thirteen months old now. She has nine words already. Her speech and language therapist says she's ahead of schedule, and I know every parent believes that about their own kid, but I actually have the paperwork to prove it.
She has a white forelock about two fingers wide, sitting just above her forehead and slightly to the left.
Nobody dyes it. That was said out loud exactly once, in July, by me, standing in our kitchen, and there was no discussion afterward. None needed.
Rhys stopped dyeing his own hair in September.
That took four months and two separate conversations with a therapist, and I have never watched him do anything harder in the six years I've known him. He walked out to the store with it undyed on a Saturday morning and came back inside after eleven minutes and sat in the car in our driveway for a long while before he could bring himself to come in.
He's had it gray-and-white for nine months now. Exactly two people have asked him about it. One of them was a woman in a checkout line who told him it was a great dye job.
He wears a hearing aid too, now. He finally got assessed in October, at thirty-five years old, for the first time since he was fourteen.
He came out of that appointment, stood in the parking lot, and told me the traffic was very loud.
"Yes," I said. "It's traffic."
"No," he said. "It's very loud." And then he laughed in a way I had genuinely never heard him laugh before.
Bram and Sabine and their two kids come over about twice a month now. We've been learning to sign since June — I'm bad at it, Rhys is somehow worse, and Wren, who is thirteen months old and has no idea any of this is complicated, already knows about fifteen signs.
Rhys hadn't spoken to his brother in nine years before all this.
They sat together in our backyard for four hours back in August, and I took the kids inside and didn't go back out, because that hour belonged entirely to the two of them.
We haven't seen Odette since that morning. I don't think we will again. Rhys has said, more than once, that he isn't exactly angry at her — that she was raised by a woman who did the same things to her first — and that she's sixty-six years old and frightened, and that none of that changes the fact that he can't be around her anymore.
I don't push him on it. It isn't mine to push.
And here's what I've landed on, thirteen months later.
He looked into that bassinet at ten past ten in the morning, saw white hair, and asked me what I'd done.
Everyone who hears this story wants that moment to be the worst part.
It isn't.
The worst part is everything it took to make a decent man say something that cruel.
Six years old, bent over a kitchen sink, every four weeks, a towel around his shoulders. Told he was marked. Told that the kindest thing anyone could do for him was make sure nobody ever had a reason to look twice.
Twenty-nine years of dye, hidden in plain sight.
And then a nurse hands him a daughter with the exact same hair, and the only thing his entire childhood ever taught him to feel is that something terrible has happened, and that it has to be somebody's fault.
Wren has never once been told she's anything other than exactly who she is.
May you like
She's thirteen months old. She has an orange hearing aid and a white streak in her hair, and whenever she catches her own reflection in the hallway mirror, she pats herself on the head, because she thinks she's absolutely hilarious.
She's not wrong.
