For a full minute, I watch the reflection of myself in the window, an almost ghost in the glass. My hair pulled into a high bun, face bare. The outline of my neck is thin and pale, the bruises from the attack now faded to sickly yellow. I almost don’t recognize myself.
A moment later, a door swings open, and the burgundy-scrubbed woman calls my name. “Raina! You’re up.”
She leads me down a hallway that’s lined with more posters, this time less cartoonish, actual laryngoscopical photos of vocal folds—normal, inflamed, scarred. I look away, but my eyes keep coming back to the grotesque pearl-white webs of tissue bridging the gap between the folds. I wonder if mine looks that alien.
I’m led to a small room with a single chair, a slim desk with one of those rolling doctor chairs under it, and a floor-to-ceiling mirror. “She’ll be right with you,” the woman says, and leaves the door ajar.
I sit, and immediately my back goes rigid, my hands curl into fists in my lap, nails digging crescents into the flesh of my thighs. The room smells faintly of coffee and a slight chemical tang of disinfectant.
I can’t help it—I reach up and touch my throat, as if I could feel the damage beneath the skin, map out every scar with a fingertip. It’s irrational, but I’m convinced if I press hard enough, I’ll feel the difference. That my whole body would vibrate differently, forever off-key.
A knock at the door startles me, making me jerk my hand away and drop it to my lap.
The woman who enters is not what I expect. She’s around fifty, maybe, her hair cut brutally short and streaked steel gray, her eyes an unblinking blue. She wears black slacks, a tailored shirt, and a single necklace of dark glass beads.
“Raina,” she says, and it’s not a question. She extends her hand, and I take it. Her grip is warm, brief, not the limp, lingering pressure I get from most doctors. “I’m Dr. Shapiro. Please sit.”
I’m already seated, but I nod anyway. Even the most calm, collected people can get nervous around me. I’ll never escape my fame. She closes the door behind her, takes a seat across from me, and opens a battered black notebook. No digital device. She clicks a pen and writes something without looking up. Then she looks at me, really looks, and I feel like I’m being appraised, catalogued, and entered into a ledger.
“Have you ever worked with a voice therapist before?”
I shake my head.
“That’s fine. I read your file and your intake paperwork where you explained what happened and what you’d like the outcome of our appointments to be. Although I suppose I didn’t need that to know you want to sing again.” She gives me a smile.
“Very well. So, I don’t need to tell you that your voice is an instrument. And it’s been… re-tuned.” She lets the word hang in the air, letting me get used to the idea. “You’re going to have to learn to play it all over again.”
“I want you to understand that with the damage you’ve suffered, you won’t get the same range back that you had before, but the exciting part is learning what your new sound will be.” She leans forward, elbows on knees, uncomfortably close. “You know, some of the world’s most compelling singers had limitations. Nodules, polyps, even full-on paralysis. But they learned to use what they had, sometimes better than before.”
She stands and crosses to a shelf crowded with tools—plastic models of larynxes, stacks of sheet music, a basket of latex resistance bands, and, incongruously, a tiny silver bell shaped like a cat. She picks up a printout from a manila folder and hands it to me.
“These are your images.” She taps a finger to a color photo of my larynx, the vocal folds stark and ghostly on a black field. “Here’s the damage. See this ridge? That’s the scar.” Her fingernail clicks the glossy paper. “It will make high notes difficult, maybe impossible.” She waits for that to land.
It lands. The room tilts, and I feel my eyes start to sting.
“It doesn’t mean you’re done,” she says, reading the despair on my face. “Not unless you want to be.” Her voice is steady, not unkind. “But it won’t come easy. Most patients in your position have to mourn their old voice before they can build a new one.”
I look down at the image, at the slice of myself rendered so brutally vulnerable. It looks like a worm, or a slit in a piece of raw chicken. I hate it, and yet I can’t look away.
She sits back down, steeples her hands. “Here’s the plan. We start with gentle phonation—hums, lip trills, soft vowels. We’ll train breath support, work around the scar. Over time, we can increase the load, see what your new instrument is capable of. But you have to commit. No pushing. No cheating. And no judging the early results. Can you do that?”
I nod, but my jaw is set tight. “I can try.”
She studies me, then breaks into a slow, dry smile. “I believe you.”
For the next thirty minutes, we go through the basics. Diaphragmatic breathing. Humming on an “mm” sound, feeling the vibrations in my face. I fail every exercise. My voice cracks, dies, or comes out in a sad, hoarse wheeze. At one point, I try a simple scale and my voice splinters, the high note collapsing into silence. I bite my lip so hard I taste blood.
“Again,” Shapiro says, unfazed by my failure. “Don’t aim for volume. Aim for clean.”
I do it again. And again. Each time, the sound is a little less terrible, but it’s nothing like the old me.
When the session ends, she gives me a page of exercises and a practice log. “Do this three times a day, no more than ten minutes each. We’ll record you once a week so you can measure progress, but don’t fixate on it. The goal is function, not perfection. I’ll see you in a couple days.”
I take the papers and stand, my legs numb.
As I walk to the door, she calls after me, “Raina.” I turn. “It’s going to suck for a while,” she says. “Let it. Then, when you’re done being angry, get to work.”
The next session, I come prepared. I’ve done the drills—tried to do them, anyway—at home in the only room that doesn’t echo. I’ve recorded myself, played it back, then deleted every file in disgust. I want to say I did the work, but I’m not sure if all that self-loathing counts as practice.
