Livia Lone (Livia Lone #1)(26)

They waited more. There was a telephone in the room. Like so many other things she was seeing here, Livia knew what a telephone was, but had never used one. From time to time, the phone would ring, and Tanya would pick it up and talk into it, then put it back the way it was. On one of these calls, though, she didn’t put it back—she nodded vigorously, and spoke excitedly, then handed the phone to Livia. Livia stared at the phone, uncertain, and Tanya gestured to it, as though expecting Livia to do something. Livia raised the phone to her face and looked at it. She could hear a tiny, tinny voice coming out. A woman’s voice, and she was speaking in Thai: “Hello? Hello, are you there?”

The feeling of someone she could understand, who would be able to understand her, was so overwhelming that Livia’s throat closed up and tears spilled from her eyes. Tanya stroked her arm, and strangely it looked as though she might cry, too.

Livia raised the phone to her ear the way Tanya had. “Yes,” she managed to croak in Thai. “Yes, I here. Please, please, do you know Nason? My sister. Where she is?”

“Hello? Your sister?”

“Yes, yes, my sister, Nason. Where she is? Please.”

“I . . . I don’t know that, but we’re going to try to help you. Are you Thai? The translators thought you might be.”

“Yes, I am Lahu.”

“You came from Thailand?”

“Yes, yes.”

The woman said words Livia couldn’t follow.

“Please, please, slower,” Livia said. “My Thai no good.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “I work for the Thai government. In America. In Washington. The capital of America.”

Livia was confused. “America . . . what? Why?”

“You’re in America. In Llewellyn, Idaho.”

America? No. That couldn’t be right. But they’d been on the boat for a long time . . . had they crossed the ocean? Livia had never felt so disoriented, so cut off from everything she knew. She might as well have been told she was on the moon.

She desperately wanted to understand the woman’s other words. “Lew-el-in?” she said carefully. “I-da-ho?”

“A town in America. And I am with the Thai Embassy in Washington.”

It was so frustrating not to know the words. “Em-ba-see?”

There was a pause. “Okay, the first thing is to find a Lahu speaker to talk to you.”

“Yes, please that! Please Lahu.”

“All right. The police will take care of you there. Until we find a Lahu speaker.”

“Wait, wait, my sister, Nason. Where she is?”

“The police can help with that.”

“But—”

“The police will help. We’ll find you a Lahu speaker. You’re going to be okay.”

“But—”

Livia heard a click. After a moment, there was a buzzing in the phone. She looked at it, not understanding, put it to her ear once more, then realized the Thai woman was gone. She handed the phone back to Tanya and started to cry again.

Tanya stroked Livia’s shoulder and spoke in her soothing voice. She handed Livia a square of delicate white paper, like paper for the toilet. Livia looked at the paper, not understanding. Tanya smiled, took the paper back, then gently touched it to Livia’s cheeks. Livia was confused—they used this kind of paper for drying tears, not just for the toilet? It was a small thing, but everything was so overwhelmingly alien here that this drying paper upset her and made her cry harder. But she raised the paper to her cheeks and dabbed at them, because it seemed to be what Tanya wanted.

After that, they just waited. More doctors came and went. Tanya spoke to them. They didn’t bother Livia.

Periodically, voices came out of Tanya’s radio. The radio was attached by a spiral cord to a little black box clipped to the shoulder of Tanya’s uniform. A microphone, Livia understood, like the one on the karaoke box in the village. Tanya would pick up the microphone when the voices came out of the radio and talk into it. One of these conversations lasted longer than the others. Tanya glanced at Livia while she spoke, and it sounded like she was arguing. When the conversation was over, she squatted so she was looking up at Livia, who was still sitting on the table. She spoke some words—a question, from the tone—and Livia could tell she was sad, or uneasy, which made Livia uneasy, too. A moment later, another blue-uniformed woman came in, this one pasty white. Tanya gestured to the pasty woman and said to Livia, “Camille.”

Tanya was introducing this new police person. Which meant she was leaving. Livia had been right. She knew not to trust Tanya. Not to trust anyone.

Livia turned her face away and said nothing. She heard the women talking, and then the sound of the door as it opened and closed. When she looked again, Tanya was gone, replaced by Camille.

Someone brought more hot food on a tray—some kind of meat, and vegetables Livia didn’t recognize. She devoured it all anyway. Then they brought her a blanket and a pillow. She slept curled up on the table, waking up frightened and disoriented several times during the night, and dreaming she was back in the forest with Nason.

In the morning, Tanya returned with several new people: three pasty men in suits and neckties, and a woman in western clothes but with a Lahu face. The woman looked at Livia and said in Lahu, “Hello, I’m Nanu, though here I’m called Nancy. Are you the one called Labee?”