Page 98 of The Sign for Home

Then, as we were riding the subway back to Queens, I alerted him to the fact that Molly would be waiting for us when we got off. That’s when he had a complete meltdown: desperate vocalizing, hands flying. I had to assure the other passengers that I was not, in fact, kidnapping him. Once he calmed down, I tried to get him to believe that Molly was on our side, and how this was her idea and that she had called us all together and lied to Birch. Still Arlo didn’t trust her, nor me, it appeared. He was, however, glad that Hanne was waiting for us. After that he refused to talk to me anymore and just sat nervously, lost inside his head, his hands twitching with half-formed signs. One minute he was smiling, probably imagining the moment he would get to touch Shri, and the next, telling off some demon inside his head.Was it Molly? Birch? Me? All of us?

When we stepped off the subway car, Molly ran down the platform and hugged Arlo like he was some long-lost soldier back from the war. He just stood there, limp, not returning her embrace. As we drove back to get Hanne, Arlo sat in the back seat with Molly, his hands folded furiously in his armpits. Molly looked so wounded.

“Molly, for what it’s worth, he hasn’t signed a word to me for the last forty minutes. We’re interpreters non grata at the moment.”

Molly smiled weakly.

“He used to do this to me when I first started working with him,” she said. “If I didn’t know a particular sign or word, he would get so angry. He’d accuse me of lying and then wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the day. He played my emotions like a game of guilt Ping-Pong. It’s the one thing he got from his uncle.”

Molly closed her eyes and pinched her forehead like she had a headache. What she had to be feeling! In only a matter of weeks she had lost her lover, gotten kicked off the Ecuador mission, and now the young man who was like her son was threatening to never speak to her again. For the first time I began to truly feel sorry for her.

“We shouldn’t sweat it too much,” I said. “Once we get him to Shri for the visit, he’ll come around… at least a little.”

Molly opened her eyes and stared at me with the most hollow, sad gaze.

“Will he?”

48NURSING HOME

We met Hanne at the coffee shop and briefed Arlo on what Hanne had learned from her phone call. For reasons of interpreting, Arlo let go of his previous refusal to touch Molly or me. We had become mere tools, conveyors of information, which, in reality, was our role. After purchasing another blank notebook and large Magic Marker for Arlo, I walked with him to the nursing home, while we told Molly and Hanne to meet us back at the car in an hour.

As we approached the front of the facility, Arlo lifted his sunglasses, his eyes straining to comprehend where we were. His body shook from excitement, and a smile appeared and disappeared on his face every other moment.

“Nursing home nice?” he asked.

“It’s okay,” I signed. “To be honest, it looks a little run-down, but maybe it will be nicer inside.”

Ten feet from the entry, Arlo winced at the smells of the nursing care facility: disinfectants, medicines, recently cleaned-up incontinence, aging and wounded bodies. Even Snap sniffed the air and gave a small whine. I was familiar with the odor, having done jobs in such facilities many times. While it didn’t appear to be the best of residential rehabs, it certainly wasn’t the worst. The receptionist sitting at the front desk wore powder-blue scrubswith a teddy bear pattern. She appeared to be in the middle of a personal conversation. When we approached her, I coughed lightly so she knew we were there. While we waited for her to finish her call, I noticed a man through an open window in what appeared to be a nurse’s office. He was surrounded by open medicine bottles. The man, middle-aged and bald, had dark circles under his eyes and hollowed cheeks. With his thick fingers, he doled out pills into rows of pink blister packs as he watched what looked like a Russian-language soap opera on a nearby television. When he looked up at us, I smiled at him, hoping to create a positive vibe with everyone in the home, but instead he raised his eyebrows, shrugged, and retreated farther back into the nurse’s office.

I described what I saw to Arlo, which made him grow concerned. Finally, after a full three minutes of us standing there, the receptionist paused her phone conversation to look up at us.

“Can I help you?” she asked in a thick New York accent.

“Sorry to interrupt,” I said, simultaneously interpreting for Arlo. “We’re here to visit Shridevi Mukherjee.”

She told her telephone interlocutor to hold, and looked us up and down, suspiciously.

“You wanna visit Shri?” she said, picking up a logbook in front of her. “I don’t see any note. There needs to be permission from her family or the supervisor. Sorry.”

The receptionist returned to her call and swung her rolling chair toward the wall.

“What do?” Arlo asked, panicking. “Must see Shri!”

“Calm down,” I signed, then once again coughed to get the receptionist’s attention. “Excuse me?”

The receptionist mumbled something to her caller and then slowly spun her chair around, looking even more annoyed than just a moment before.

“What?”

“I’m sorry to bother you… Bella?” I said, checking her name tag. “We’re a little confused, because Shri’s auntie was supposed to call and let you know that we were coming to visit.”

The receptionist raised her eyebrows and exaggeratedly looked us both up and down before letting out a sarcastic snort.

“Relatives? What part of India areyoufrom?”

“Ha ha. Funny,” I said. “I know. But we are relatives. By marriage. I’m Shri’s brother-in-law, Doug, and this is my little brother, a good friend of Shri’s—Walter.”

I regretted the lie as soon as I said it and hoped she wouldn’t remember it the next time Arlo came for a visit a year hence.

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