Page 25 of The Sign for Home

“That pretty much sums her up,” I said, finally letting a small laugh relieve my tension.

Hanne walked straight up to the windowpane, just inches from Arlo’s face, and stared directly into his eyes. The hairs on my neck jumped to attention.

“Hanne, I know he can’t see but… be careful. Okay?”

“I will.”

Hanne pressed her pointer finger on the windowpane, and as if shewere measuring out some future portrait, she outlined Arlo’s face, eyes, nose, and mouth. The accompanying squeak sounded like a small out-of-tune violin.

“You didn’t tell me he looked like that,” she whispered. “He’s like a beautiful sad broken doll with wandering eyes—like he’s searching for God.”

“Um… Hanne?” I warned, nervous. “Molly could come back any minute.”

Hanne stepped back from the window, but kept staring at Arlo intently, as if she were in the process of painting him.

“He needs different clothes. And that hair… ugh!Verschrikkelijk. Get rid of the bangs. You should fix him up, Cyrilje. You gay boys love that sort of thing,ja? He could be quite handsome, in my opinion.”

Hanne crossed back to the window and quickly kissed the pane of glass right in front of Arlo’s mouth, fogging it. Just then Arlo’s dog looked up to the right and barked, like she was warning me, and there was Molly approaching with a bag of groceries.

“Hanne!” I whispered harshly.

Hanne quickly moved away from the window and joined me hovering behind the coffee bar. The whole time she kept her eyes on Arlo.

“See? It’s all okay. Can you be honest with me about something, Cyrilje?”

“Always.”

“So when you and the student talk with your fingers to each other, aren’t you just a little attracted to him?”

I shook my head and groaned. “No. As a matter of fact, I’m not. For one, as you know, he’s not my type. And more importantly, I would never hook up with a client. I won’t even become close friends with someone Deaf if I know I’ll be working with them all the time. It causes too many ethical problems. My job is just to be the voices in the room. That’s it.”

Hanne looked at me mockingly.

“Just the voices in the room?” she repeated. “That’s such a sterile and pat answer.”

“We have to have rules,” I said. “If we want to stay sane and not inadvertently cause a mess.”

“I see,” she said, suddenly turning somber. “So if you save enough money this summer, when would you move to Philadelphia?”

“September. After the gig is done, and I pay off some bills. Maybe mid-September.”

Hanne forced a smile and muttered how great that was. Five seconds later she started wiping down the espresso machine, looking annoyed. Hanne has never been good at hiding her emotions, and I’ve become used to her artistic mood swings. Though I wasn’t sure if at that moment she was angry or sad. I walked to the counter and grabbed her hand.

“You know, Hanneje, you could always come with me.”

“Who knows,” she said. “Maybe I will. There are a lot of hospitals in Philadelphia. I’ll be a famous nurse-slash-artist and you’ll be a famous redheaded sign language interpreter.”

“Perfect. But what will you do with Wout and Curtis?”

Hanne grimaced. I might as well have asked her about a boil she needed to lance.

“Ach… them. Must we? Let’s see, in a few years my brilliant Wout will most likely be a computer game designer or perhaps an international assassin, and Curtis, my lost and messy husband? Hmm. He will hopefully have run off with his rehab counselor.”

We both laughed really hard. But at a certain point our laughing stopped, and Hanne and I looked into each other’s eyes. It was that thing that has always been there between us: our deep kinship as outsiders living lives we hadn’t planned or necessarily wanted, our mutual hope that someday we might be able to free ourselves from the Taconic Vortex of Hell, and our fear that neither of us ever would.

11WHAT IS THE GRASS?

Professor Lavinia Bahr finished writing the assignment on the whiteboard and turned to the class. She looked even more fabulous than usual, wearing an embroidered red-black-green-yellow dashiki blouse over a long black skirt with her head wrapped in a matching silk scarf. From her ears dangled large golden hoops featuring a pair of beaded bumblebees chasing each other around the gilded circles. Professor Bahr, the queen bee of summertime, the empress of the thesis sentence.

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