The Silent History: A Novel by Eli Horowitz, Kevin Moffett, Matthew Derby Page B

comfortably in the kid’s mouth, and it would do all sorts of exercises—opening and closing, side-to-side motions, circular grinding, tongue positioning. I brought in consultants, expert people who knew the methods and techniques you find in speech therapy. And the Chatter incorporated it all. It had a bunch of settings that the parent could control via a small remote. You could technically leave the Chatter in all day and just put it on random, which is what a lot of parents decided to do, because it was so comfortable and easy to wear that the kids seemed not to mind at all.
    Some parents got upset about the Chatter, because it didn’t make their kids talk. But I never claimed it would do that. If you look, even on the front of the box, it says this. It’s as clear as day that it was intended as a mouth exerciser. And in that spirit it was very effective. And I do think that kids got a lot out of it. And the parents, too, you know, because it did look, even at a short distance, like the kids were talking. Parents could take their kids out in public and not feel like they were being judged. I had many parents write to me thanking me for this. I don’t need their thanks, but I accepted it anyway, and I feel privileged that I was, you know, that they thought of me as a sort of advocate. And I was certainly able to get my business off the ground as a result. The Chatter was just the first of many products I developed to help that community. Helping those people cope became my core competency, if you will. Right in my wheelhouse.

 
    NANCY JERNIK
    TEANECK, NJ
    2019
    Spencer got kicked out of school. Or, they dismissed him from the school, which apparently they had every right to do, because they were a private institution, which was—I mean, I was paying for the school and they still kicked him out? I’d been getting these papers in his cubby. Incident reports, they called them. They would be like, The teacher’s aide was removing Spencer’s snow pants when he bit her and did not seem to understand that this is not allowed , or, Spencer punched another student in the back and didn’t apologize or express remorse . I specifically remember them using that term, as if he was capable of expressing remorse. And there was no more information than that. No suggestions for working on the behavior. No advice. What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t monitor him day and night, and wasn’t that the school’s job? He got a lot of these incident reports, so many that I guess one day they decided they’d had enough. I’m sure they were just looking for an excuse to get rid of him anyway. I had this sense that they looked at him as a walking vegetable, just this mute kid silently sucking up all their time and resources. They gave up, if you ask me. They just assumed he was never going to learn like the other kids. Never going to adapt. And I ran out of arguments to keep him there, because I think that underneath it all I essentially felt the same way.
    So we had nowhere to put Spencer, which was pretty much the main thing that made me lose my job at Yan Talan. The HR person said it was just because of what had happened on Wall Street the previous quarter, but I know that it was because I’d lost so much productive time staying at home with Spencer. I’d worked out a complicated child-care schedule with Ron, but he had just joined the nanofiber start-up and he was away all the time, and it was impossible to find a special-needs nanny in the dead of February. With my job, you know, it’s all about meeting with people face-to-face. Every day in the office was like a long conversation that started when you entered the building and didn’t end until you were home again, asleep—assuming you could sleep. Assuming you had time to sleep. That’s just advertising. That’s how it works. You can’t phone it in. Which I found out in a big way.
    So then I was alone in the house with Spencer every day, from six forty-five in the