We’ve all had to cope with frightening or dangerous
experiences now and then.
Phoebe didn’t cope well with these situations. Thankfully, she also had a strange condition
that caused her to make uncontrollable noises like a car alarm any time she was
threatened.
Her parents didn’t understand it, but there wasn’t much they
could do about it either. They
first noticed it two days after she was born. The hospital did a good job of covering up the fact that a
child snatcher had come into the newborn nursery and almost taken Phoebe right
out the front door. But given the
circumstances, they at least had to tell her parents. The nurse had found Phoebe, all swaddled up like a
caterpillar ready for metamorphosis, lying on the floor by the elevator, a
horrible, wailing honk emitting from her tiny, rose-shaped mouth. Her face was as red as if she were
screaming, but no scream; just that honk.
Phoebe was a quiet baby. She hardly ever squeaked or gurgled or even whined for
almost 2 years. When the parents asked Phoebe’s doctor if her silence was a
problem, he jokingly said that maybe the snatcher dropping Phoebe on her head
in surprise had “knocked the honk out of her.” At the parents’ stony-faced reactions, he cleared his throat
uncomfortably and told them that Phoebe would be fine, maybe just a late
bloomer.
It soon became clear that the honk hadn’t been knocked out of
her at all.
After a grocery store outing, when Phoebe was four, she and
her mother were walking to the car when a man rushed by and grabbed her
mother’s purse. Her mother held
on. Phoebe, watching the scruffy man from the child’s seat in the grocery cart,
went red in the face and opened her mouth, as if to start crying, and out came
the honk. The noise was so loud
that her mother and the thief both let go of the purse in surprise. The thief stumbled backwards and swore.
He turned and ran out of the parking lot, staring at the honking Phoebe over
his shoulder.
Her parents tried to keep Phoebe away from anything that
would bring out the honk. They
appreciated its usefulness, but it worried them. They were afraid that if the wrong people heard Phoebe’s
honk, they would take her away for experiments or use her for some sort of
unorthodox police training. But it
wasn’t easy to predict when the honk would be triggered.
Phoebe often went hiking with her father. During one hike, when she was fourteen,
Phoebe fell behind and couldn’t see her father anymore. Although her father had taught her
exactly what she should do if she ever got lost (in the hopes of avoiding
exactly what ended up happening), Phoebe panicked and started honking.
The hiking incident embarrassed the adolescent Phoebe. Her father had only been around a bend
in the trail and had found her right away honking with tears streaming down her
face as she held her hands over her mouth to try to cover the sound, to no
avail. When they got home that
night, she asked her parents if she could get her vocal chords removed. They told her no.
Over time, Phoebe learned to embrace her honk (indeed, her
parents knew she was beginning to accept it when she started calling it “my
honk” instead of an expletive).
When she bought herself her first car, she also got a bumper sticker
that said, “I brake for tailgaters,” but she crossed off “brake” and wrote
“honk.” The more she embraced it,
the more she was able to control it.
Indeed, there was a time when Phoebe was 26 and she was walking to her
car one night. She noticed a man
following her in the shadows. She
turned around and let out one loud HONK,
and the man fled. Phoebe smiled
and kept walking.
hahahaha -- love it!
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