Dealing with her mother remarrying to a man with twin daughters and her family moving, deaf sixth-grader Macy is told that she must help her elderly neighbor Iris Gillan, who is getting ready to move to a nursing home.

Three years after being kidnapped and rendered a "live specimen" in a cruel experiment to determine the cause of her deafness, fourteen year old Mary Lambert is summoned from her home in Martha's Vineyard to the mainland to teach a younger deaf girl to communicate with sign language. She can't help but wonder, can a child of eight with no prior language be taught? Still, weary of domestic life and struggling to write as she used to, Mary pours all...