“You know,” she said, trying to hold on to the moment because in the next moment she was going to have to go into that store, “it's easier to learn foreign Sign than a spoken language. Much easier. I picked up FSL right away because my mother thought I should meet deaf French kids.”
“Iconicity,” Bridger said, surprising her. “Like when you sign 'cup.'” He demonstrated, his left palm the saucer, his right cupped over it. “We learned it in the class I took. German, French, Chinese, whatever-a cup is a cup, right? What about Marcel Marceau-I bet he would have been good at it. Did he know Sign, you think?”
Just then a movement on the far side of the street caught her eye, and she started. A man in a flowered shirt, baseball cap and wraparound sunglasses scrambled up to the door as if he were in a hurry-as if someone were chasing him, as if he were a fugitive-pulled back the door and disappeared inside. “Bridger!” she shouted (or might have shouted; she couldn't tell, but it felt like a shout). “Bridger, it's him!”
She was out of the car before he was, a deaf woman in the middle of the street, cars coming both ways and she staring down a UPS man in a boxy brown UPS truck that was right there in front of her though she couldn't hear his horn or the metallic keening of his brakes, and even as Bridger caught up to her and grabbed her arm she was telling herself to slow down, stay calm, focus. Then they were on the far side of the street, up on the sidewalk, and Bridger might have been saying something, but she wasn't paying attention-her eyes were fixed on the door ahead of them. She saw her own reflection there, a shifting of shapes, the gleaming metal handle of the door, and she took a deep breath and stepped inside, Bridger right behind her.
There were eight people in the place and she tried to take them all in simultaneously, including the heavyset woman behind the desk who looked up and gave her an expectant smile and the old man fumbling for change at one of the copy machines. Her heart slammed at her ribs. The overhead lights seemed to recede, painting a thin pale strip of illumination across the heads and shoulders of the eight figures in their various poses, bending, gesticulating, lips flapping on air-and where was he? Her eyes jumped from one to the other, and then suddenly there he was. There, at the back of the store, where the bank of mailboxes ran in a neat continuous file from waist- to shoulder-leveclass="underline" she saw the bright flash of the shirt first, then his profile under the bill of the cap as he stood over the wastebasket, discarding junk mail. Oblivious. Completely oblivious. As if he were the most innocent soul in the world. The son of a bitch. She couldn't believe it.
She felt Bridger wrap an arm round her waist, an admonitory tightness straining the ligaments of his wrist and fingers. “Calm,” he was telling her, “stay calm.” It took a moment-she was just staring, all the rage and disbelief she'd felt over the way she'd been violated rising in her till she was strung tight with it, ready for anything, the accusation, the physical assault, the spewing up of the deaf woman's shriek that was so caustic and inhuman it could set off all the alarms up and down the block-and then Bridger disengaged his arm and she felt his fingers on her chin, urgently tugging her face around. “That's not him,” he signed.
She looked harder. Small Sign, very quiet: “No, it is. It is.”
Bridger shook his head emphatically and her eyes went from him to the man in the cap and back again. “Not even close,” he said.
By this point the man had finished with his mail and abruptly pivoted on the ball of one foot to hurry up the aisle toward them, a sheaf of what looked to be bills and a manila envelope clutched to his chest, and she saw how wrong she'd been-even with the sunglasses and the bill of the cap pulled down low, this man was nothing like the one in the photograph. He was older, hair graying at the fringes of the cap, his nose splayed across his face as if it had been molded of clay, lips bunched round a look of eternal harassment. He wasn't the thief. He wasn't Frank Calabrese or whatever his name was. He was nobody. She watched him plunge impatiently through the door and scurry off down the street and still the blood pounded in her veins.
“All right,” Bridger said, swinging her round to face him, “we're going up to the counter now and you're going to be Dana Halter. Okay? You cool with that? Because I tell you, there's no other way.”
She wasn't cool with it. Wasn't down with the program or hip to it or copacetic or even just basically willing, but she let him guide her up to the counter and tried on a smile for the heavyset woman, who gave it right back to her. “Can I help you?” the woman said, and that was easy to read-context, context was all.
“Yes, please,” Dana said, and dropped her eyes a moment while she extracted her driver's license from her purse and laid it on the counter. “I'm Dana Halter?” she said, looking up again. “I just-I don't know, I guess I misplaced my mailbox key…”
The woman was younger than she'd first appeared. She was wearing a pink cable-knit sweater that gave an unfortunate emphasis to her shoulders and upper arms, her skin was pale to the point of anemia and she wore a pair of clunky-looking glasses with clear plastic frames. But her eyes were what mattered, and her eyes were nonjudgmental. She barely glanced at the license and then slid it back across the counter. “No problem,” she said, and her smile brightened, and then she said something else.
“I'm sorry, what?”
Dana saw the woman flick her eyes to Bridger and then Bridger said something.
“She said,” he repeated, speaking slowly so that she could read his lips, “that there is a twenty-five-dollar fee for replacement keys and I said that was okay. Right, honey?”
“Yes,” she said, nodding vigorously and holding the woman's eyes, “sure. That's only fair, and I'm sorry-it was my fault, not my fiancé's.” She was elaborating now-lies always required elaboration. “So stupid of me.” She turned to Bridger, playing the airhead, the doll-face, the bimbette. “My bad, honey,” she said. She was beginning to enjoy this, especially the aftershock of the term “fiancé” on Bridger's face. But then the woman said something else and she had to ask “What?” again.
“Number?” the woman was saying. “What number?”
This was what she'd been afraid of-any honest person, any normal person, would have had the number on the tip of her tongue, but Dana didn't have it because she was an imposter-she wasn't Dana Halter at all. Or not this Dana Halter. She felt her lips tighten. For a split second she looked away, averting her eyes like a criminal, a liar, a scam artist, and she struggled to control her voice as she repeated the version of the story she'd rehearsed about this being their second home and how they'd been away and how to her embarrassment-Can you believe it? — she'd forgotten the number. But here was her ID-she thrust the driver's license across the counter again, and dug out her social security card and a major credit card too-and she wondered sweetly if the woman could just look it up in her records?
The smile was gone now and the woman's eyes had lost their sympathy. She didn't look suspicious so much as uneasy-an understanding was awakening inside her and Dana recognized it and for the first time in her life played to it. She stood absolutely still, poised at the counter in the silence that was eternal, and let her eyes do the talking for her. “Yes,” her eyes said, “I'm different,” and it hardly hurt at all to see that this time it was the woman who had to look away.