Page 22 of The Sign for Home

“Hey! Pay attention! Understand? Best friends mean you, me, Martin will eat breakfast, lunch, dinner together. At bedtime we tell each other stories. We only DeafBlind kids at school. Must support each other! You big boy. Bigger than all Deaf Devils! Suppose they try bully Martin and me… what do? You must”—punches the air—“KO! Make Deaf Devils bloody and cry, cry, cry! Pah! Success! Agree?”

Your stomach sank. What had you done? If you told them the truth, that you were just a coward who happened to be tall, they would rescind their offer of best friendship. You had no choice.

“Agree!” you declared. “Will protect!”

“Great!” Martin signed. “Together we will be famous roommates team. You, strong one. Big Head Lawrence, smart one. Me? Most handsome man in the world! We will play best games, fun, enjoy, craziness!”

“Wait! One more thing,” Big Head Lawrence interrupted. “Tell Arlo about beds.”

“Oh, right. You will need sleep in bed by window. Me? I sleep by door, because I go bathroom a lot. Big Head Lawrence sleeps by back wall, because he scared of ghosts coming in window. Okay?”

Ghosts?The word made your heart leap. You learned at Sundaymeeting that demons can take the form of ghosts. To what kind of school had they sent you? Deaf Devil gangs? Nightmare dorms like Dogwood? And now demon ghosts?

“You teasing?” you asked.

Martin patted the side of your arm.

“Not teasing. School have many ghosts. It’s okay. If ghost comes to hurt you… quick wake up Big Head Lawrence. Why? Because best friend now and he can help. But don’t wake me up. I sleep strong.”

10HANNE

After my first day working with Arlo, I needed to decompress before I headed to an early-evening gig at the dental clinic. So I went to the No Filter coffee shop, where my best friend Hanne works. Hanne was an aspiring artist, and used to be an aspiring yoga instructor, and now is an aspiring nursing student in her second year at Dutchess Community College. Whether or not she will actually finish is always in question. Hanne likes to say that yearning for things she doesn’t have is her superpower.

Of course one of my favorite things about Hanne, besides her constant curiosity and near-boundless energy, is that she has absolutely nothing to do with interpreting. The last thing I want to do is spend my free time listening to snide comments about this or that fellow interpreter, or complaints about how some agency isn’t giving them work. And, of course, most of the interpreters in that area were also friends with my ex, and there’s still a lot of judgment coming my way. Who needs that crap? Hanne is my emotional and vocational palate cleanser and talks my ear off about whatever topic most obsesses her. At that moment it was anything and everything to do with nursing school. She loves recounting the grotesqueries of her clinical classes, everything from how to suck out mucus from a tracheostomy to learning how maggots in a wound can actually save flesh from infection. She can bea lot, and sometimes that’s exactly what I need.

“Cyrilje! Cyrilje!Goedendag!” Hanne shouted from behind the espresso machine, waving a small pitcher of steamed milk like a sexy Flemish mad scientist. “Come in! Come in! I need to tell you something!”

Hanne also has the annoying habit of peppering her sentences with Flemish despite the fact she left Belgium almost twenty-five years ago. I think it’s her way of trying to individuate herself from the rest of us who found ourselves stuck in Poughkeepsie.

“Okay,” I said hesitantly. “What is it? Whoever it is, I’m not going out with him.”

“Ach! It’s not about a boy. Last night I was reading my microbiology textbook and there was this chapter about parasites. It’s totally going to freak you out!”

“Gross,” I said. “No thanks.”

From the look in Hanne’s eyes I knew there would be no stopping her, even though she was in the middle of making a cappuccino and a customer was waiting.

“So, Cyrilje, it turns out there are these worms called blood flukes. Also known as schistosomes—and yes, I practiced the pronunciation. Anyway, you know how you like to go swim in the lake? So clean and beautiful, right? Wrong! Lakes can be filled with blood flukes, which look like teeny-tiny monster worms that burrow right into your urethra!”

“Stop!” I begged, exaggerating my cringing reaction. “I can’t—”

Hanne laughed very loudly, the way only a beautiful woman can without everyone thinking she’s crazy. (Which, truth be told, Hanne is a little.)

“Wait! Wait! There’s more! Then the little blood fluke babies travel up your penis and spend middle school and high school in your bladder. After graduation, if left untreated, they travel to your lungs, liver, and even the brain, causing all sorts of awfulness like enlargement of the liver and bladder cancer.Verschrikkelijk, right? Terrible,ja?”

Hanne finally handed her customer his cappuccino to go.

“Here you go,” she said. “Made with blood-fluke-free water.”

Oddly enough the man thanked Hanne for her reassurance and when he was leaving looked back at her in that way straight guys do when they want to carve the memory of a woman’s face into their mind.

“Have a nice day!” she called after him, rolling her eyes at his obvious flirtation.

Hanne had been my best friend in Poughkeepsie ever since high school. Her parents had relocated from Bruges when her father got a job at the old IBM plant. Hanne was fifteen years old and stunning with her blond hair and golden skin. A former teen model in Belgium, she was also a genius who spoke four languages and skipped two grades. In our junior year she had a crush on me and asked me out on a date. It turned into my very last attempt at being straight and the first time I ever told someone I was gay. I wept like a baby. She was great about it, hugged me and immediately started telling me all about her gay friends back in Belgium. During our twenty-four-year friendship we have been through hell together, including the whole thing with Bruno, and her marrying a heroin addict named Curtis.

Hanne got sober herself when she was pregnant with her son, Wout, but Curtis has been in and out of rehab over the last seventeen years and hasn’t been very good at earning a living. A few years ago she started vowing to leave Curtis as soon as Wout turned eighteen, and then she would move to New York, study oil painting, get a nursing job at a big hospital, and havemad and wicked affairs. If we had anything in common, it was that: our dream to get the hell out of Poughkeepsie. But each time one of us got close, something got in the way. We called it our Taconic Vortex of Hell. The Philly job offer looked like my first real chance to make the move.

“By the way,” Hanne said, lowering her voice like she had the most delicious secret, “I actually did meet this nice gay guy at the Promises meeting last Saturday. Sort of a bear, which you like, right?”

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