The 37th Hour (27 page)

Ligieia’s deep-brown eyes studied me, and she wasn’t saying no yet. I continued making my case. “I brought a legal pad along.” I touched my shoulder bag, where the notepad rode. “You won’t have to translate if it’s not convenient for you.”

She stepped back. “Come on in,” she said, grudgingly. “I’ll ask Sinclair if it’s okay.”

As she closed the door behind us, a little girl ran into the entryway. Her auburn hair was wet, and she was wrapped in a magenta bath towel held in place by her arms. She stopped alongside Ligieia and looked up at me, then she lifted her hands and began to gesture. The towel slipped to her feet.

“Hope!” Ligieia gasped, and knelt down to snatch up the towel and wrap the naked little girl again. Ligieia glanced up at me, and when she saw me starting to laugh, she began to laugh, too, rolling her eyes. It was the best icebreaker I could have asked for.

“Sinclair’s daughter?” I asked.

“Yeah, this is Hope,” Ligieia said. “The signing gives her away as Sinclair’s kid, I guess.”

I was looking down at Hope when I caught movement on the periphery of my vision. A tall woman stood behind Ligieia, her red hair loose. She trained a familiar assessing gaze on me from eyes that were just slightly Eurasian in their shape.

Sinclair. Ligieia hadn’t noticed her presence yet. I straightened and nodded to her, and she returned my greeting in kind.

The exchange had a formal feeling for me, and not just because I couldn’t speak directly to her. I had that feeling, like I’d found a missing person. Two days ago I hadn’t really known she’d existed, at least not by name, and now she felt like someone I’d been trying to locate for a long time.

“Hold on to that towel, honey,” Ligieia said to Hope, then she stood up and spoke to Sinclair, speaking and signing at once.

“This is Sarah Pribek.” Spelling out my name slowed Ligieia down. “She says that time is very important in a missing-persons situation, so she came up early. She wants to talk to you tonight.”

Hope watched the conversation silently. Sinclair lifted her hands and signed.

Ligieia looked at me. “Do you have a room in town?”

Damn, I thought, sensing a dismissal. “Not yet,” I said.

Sinclair signed again.

“She says she’s going to make up the spare room for you,” Ligieia translated.

Sinclair scooped her daughter up into her arms and walked back down the hall from which she’d come, while I stood taken aback by her unexpected display of hospitality. I was, after all, a total stranger.

Ligieia broke into my thoughts. “Why don’t you come into the kitchen with me? I was going to make some tea.”

“Look, I meant what I said about you not having to translate,” I repeated, following her. “You look like you were on the way to bed.”

“No,” Ligieia said. “I’m just studying. I have to have Act III of
The Merchant of Venice
finished by tomorrow.” She lifted a teakettle off the stove and shook it, checking the water level inside. “It seems kind of a waste of time. Hardly anyone performs
Merchant
anymore, and rightly so, because it’s so horribly anti-Semitic. I don’t think anyone even reads it anymore.” She struck a match before touching it to the burner: it was a very old stove.

“Have you known Sinclair long?” I asked her.

“Three years,” Ligieia said. “As long as she’s been at Bale. I was assigned to be her translator right away, and started doing her readings shortly after that.”

“Readings?”

“I perform her work at poetry readings and slams,” Ligieia explained. “There’s a lot of challenge in that, because I’m not just reciting her words. I’m translating the emotional content and trying to bring that across as well. I’ve had to really get to know Sinclair, to read her work like she would read it herself if she were a speaking person.”

I turned at the sound of light footsteps behind me and saw Hope, her copper hair combed, wearing a white nightdress and looking up at me with a child’s seriousness.

“Mommy says you’re a speaking person,” she announced, but she signed it as well, just in case. Her voice was pitch-perfect, clearly understandable. Until that moment I had thought she was deaf.

“Your mother’s right,” I said.

“Is your name Sarah?” she asked.

Ligieia interrupted. “Hope, does your mother know you’re in here?”

The girl looked at the floor. She didn’t want to lie.

“You know what I think?” Ligieia went on, bending slightly to address Hope. “I think she already put you to bed and thought you were going to stay there.” Ligieia straightened and pointed.

Hope ran from the kitchen, back down the hallway.

Ligieia shook her head, both indulgent and exasperated. “She’s always got to be a part of everything,” she said. Ligieia held a hand over the kettle’s spout, feeling for steam. “The brainiest little kid I’ve ever seen. Sounds like a ten-year-old when she talks. Signs fluently. I’m sure when she’s older she’s going to do what I’m doing, reading her mother’s poetry at performances. She’s gonna be something.”

“When did Sinclair divorce her father?”

Ligieia didn’t respond. Her eyes went to a space behind me, and I turned and saw Sinclair.

Shiloh was like that. Walked like a damn cloud. Often I didn’t hear him until he was right behind me.

“I was just about to pour,” Ligieia said.

We settled in the living room, which was low-ceilinged and crowded with houseplants, marked by eclectic splashes of color. When I was seated in a rocking easy chair, I put my nose down into my tea, stalling. I’d gotten in here by saying that it was important that I speak to Sinclair tonight, and the truth was that I had no urgent questions for her. I’d come here to satisfy myself that Shiloh wasn’t here, and it was plain to me that he wasn’t.

It was Sinclair who broke the silence, not me.

“I’m glad you came,”
she said through Ligieia.
“I’m very curious about Michael. It’s been years since I’ve seen him. I know you probably have questions for me first, though.”

I set my teacup down. “That was my first question: When was the last time you heard from him?”

Ligieia waited while Sinclair thought.

“About five, six years ago,”
she signed.
“I can’t remember exactly. I was in the Cities to do a reading at the Loft and give a guest lecture at Augsburg College, then I was driving down to Northfield, to lecture at Carleton. I remember the Carleton visit well, because I got there several days after a terrible car wreck near the Cities killed three of their students. It was very sad. Things like that hit a small school hard.”

“Oh,” I said. The anecdote struck a chord. “I remember that, too.”

“Do you want me to check the exact date?”

“Not necessary,” I said. “It was so long ago it’s almost undoubtedly not part of whatever has happened now. I was more curious about how much you’d kept in contact with Shiloh. Did you actually see him in person when you were there?”

“Yes. We ran into each other on the street.”

“You hadn’t arranged to see him?”

“I didn’t even know he lived there.”

“Have you heard from him since: letters, e-mail?”

Sinclair shook her head.

“When you heard that he was missing, did any possibilities about what would have happened to him come to mind?”

Sinclair shook her head again. Her terse answers weren’t meant to be unhelpful, I saw, but actually courteous: She was communicating directly with me.

“Why do you think he ran away, back when he was seventeen?” I asked her.

At this question she shifted her gaze from Ligieia’s hands to my eyes, and ran her thumb across her fingertips quickly. I wondered if this hand motion was akin to a speaking person licking her upper lip during an interview, a temporizing gesture.

“I didn’t hear about that until years later,”
Sinclair told me.
“But Mike didn’t get along with our father any better than I did.”

“That’s not what your brother and sister say.”

There was a slightly longer pause this time, as Ligieia waited for Sinclair’s hands to be still. Then Ligieia translated.
“They saw what they wanted to see. My family was accustomed to thinking of me as different, but they wanted Mike to be like them.”

“When you left home, where did you go?”

“Salt Lake City. I stayed with a group of friends who were . . . Jack Mormons?”
There was a momentary hitch in the translation process as Ligieia stumbled on the phrase.
“Mormons who had fallen away from the LDS Church.”

It was a term that wouldn’t have thrown me; I’d heard Shiloh use it before.

“When they went out of town for Christmas, I got lonely and went home. Michael slipped me into the house, through a window with a big tree outside it. It was the same way I used to sneak out.”

She paused for Ligieia to catch up.
“We got caught, and my father was pretty angry. I was sorry that I got Mike in trouble. But he would have broken away from our family sooner or later.”

“Did Mike come to Salt Lake City and look you up after he left home?”

“No. As I said, I never knew about that until years later.”

My questions, Sinclair’s gaze, Ligieia’s voice . . . I had a feeling like I was getting information through a system akin to an old rural party-line phone system. It felt slipshod.

“Why do you think he wouldn’t have gone to you?” I said. There was something else I needed to ask, but it was best circled around to later.

Sinclair’s gaze, so like Shiloh’s, was very direct on me. She signed.
“Mike was always very independent,”
Ligieia translated.
“Can I ask you why you’re asking about this? It was so long ago.”

I lifted the mug but didn’t drink again. The strawberry tea had been a tantalizing clear pink color when Ligieia had poured, but when I’d tasted it in the kitchen, it had proved sour in a thin, watery way.

“History,” I said. “I’m just looking for a pattern.” I forced a little of the tea down. “But if you haven’t seen him or heard from him in years, there’s not a lot else I can ask you,” I said.

In the moment that followed, it was neither Sinclair nor I who broke the silence. It was Ligieia.

“Does anyone but me want something stronger than this to drink?” Ligieia suggested. She glanced at Sinclair, who waffled a hand in the air with neither great enthusiasm nor disapproval. I was beginning to think that was the way Sinclair took everything, in stride, at peace.

Ligieia left the room.
Now we can really talk,
I thought, looking at Sinclair. But of course we couldn’t. I would have liked to speak to Sinclair without the extraneous presence of Ligieia. The girl was nice enough, but she had never known Shiloh; she had no stake in the conversation.

“I couldn’t sleep,” said a pettish young voice at my side.

I turned to look where Sinclair was looking. Hope came into the room, wearing her nightdress, barefoot. Sinclair shook her head with maternal exasperation.

Ligieia returned with a bottle of Bombay gin in her hand and stopped short when she saw Hope. “What’s this?” She looked to Sinclair. “Don’t get up. I’ll take her back to bed.” She held out her hand to Hope.

But Sinclair shook her head and signed something. Ligieia laughed.

“Everyone hates to be left out of a party, she says,” she explained to me. She looked at Hope again. “All right, baby, Mom says you get to stay awhile.” She turned away and poured gin into Sinclair’s glass, and then hers.

“Not for me,” I said too late when she leaned over my mug. Ligieia was already pouring with a heavy hand.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can get you more tea—”

“No,” I said quickly. “No problem, I’m fine as is.”

Ligieia put the bottle down and took her place on the sofa again.

“C’mere, Miss Hope, you want to sit between your mom and me?” Ligieia patted the space between herself and Sinclair.

But Hope climbed up onto the chair next to me, the chair dipping forward on its runners as she did so. There really wasn’t much room, and Hope’s weight settled against me, her head against my chest.

Ligieia’s eyebrows shot up, and even Sinclair looked mildly surprised. She signed something.

“You make friends fast,”
Ligieia translated.

“Not usually this fast.”

Hope looked up at me. “Is your name Sarah?” she asked again. She’d said she couldn’t sleep, but I could see in her eyes and hear in her voice that sleep was hard on her heels. Mine, too, I realized.

“Yes,” I told her.

Hope lifted a hand and began fingerspelling.

“She’s spelling your name,” Ligieia said. “She’s showing off for you.”

“Well, I’m very impressed, kiddo,” I said to Hope. “We’re gonna lean forward a little now,” I warned. The chair tipped forward again as I reached for the cool tea and gin.

I swirled the liquid in the cup, a stalling gesture like bouncing a basketball at the free-throw line.

I had planned not to drink the gin; since I first realized Shiloh had disappeared, I’d been on guard against alcohol, even just one drink. One drink, I’d told myself, could lead to others; the warmth of liquor easing the fear in my chest and the tension in my shoulders, taking me away from reality, dulling my mind, slowing my search. All when my husband needed me to be clearheaded.

Then I drank anyway. I was so damn tired. The gin did improve the taste of the tea.

“It’s your turn to ask the questions, I guess,” I said.

Sinclair lifted her hands and signed. She got right to it.

“Is Mike in some kind of trouble?”

I shook my head emphatically. That was as close as I could come to being able to communicate in her language. “No,” I reiterated. “Not that I know about. Something happened to him. I’m trying to find out what.”

Sinclair gestured again.
“How did you meet?”

“At work. We’re both cops.” As I said the evasive half-truthful words I felt a flicker of regret inside me. I almost wished I could tell the real story to Sinclair. Then the feeling passed. “It was a drug raid, actually,” I said. Even if it had only been Sinclair and me in the room, the true story was too long and time-consuming to tell, and besides, it was a story I’d never told anyone before.