Dreams Underfoot

begun to trickle across the Atlantic as yet, but it was obvious that Lucia was already an eager proponent. A strand of safety pins dangled from one earlobe; others held the tears of her Tshirt closed in strategic places.

“I don’t even remember telling you about the gig,” Amy said.

Lucia waved a negligent hand towards the small poster on the wall behind her that advertised the band’s appearance at Feeney’s Kitchen this weekend.

“But you are famous now, ma cherie”, she said. “How could I not know?” She dropped the accent to add, “You guys sound great.”

“Thanks.”

Amy looked at the tabletop. She set her stein down beside a glass of white wine, Lucia’s cigarettes and matches and a halffilled ashtray. There was also an empty teacup with a small bright steel teapot on one side of it and a used tea bag on the lip of its saucer.

“Did you come alone?” she asked.

Lucia shook her head. “I brought a foundling—fresh from who really knows where. You probably noticed her and Matt making googoo eyes at each other all through the last piece you did.” She brought a hand to her lips as soon as she’d made the last comment. “Sorry. I forgot about the thing you used to have going with him.”

“Old history,” Amy said. “I’ve long since dealt with it. I don’t know that Matt ever even knew anything existed between us, but I’m cool now.”

“It’s for the ,better.”

“Definitely,” Amy agreed.

“I should probably warn my little friend about him,” Lucia said, “but you know what they’re like at that age— it’d just egg her on.”

“Who is your little friend? She moves like all she was born to do was dance.”

“She’s something, isn’t she? I met her on Wolf Island about a week ago, just before the last ferry—all wet and bedraggled like she’d fallen off a boat and been washed to shore. She wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing and I thought the worst, you know? Some asshole brought her out for a quick wham, barn, and then just dumped her.”

Lucia paused to light a cigarette.

“And?” Amy asked.

Lucia shrugged, blowing out a wreath of bluegrey smoke. “Seems she fell off a boat and took off her clothes so that they wouldn’t drag her down while she swam to shore. Course, I got that from her later.”

Just then the door to the club opened behind Lucia and a gust of cool air caught the smoke from Lucia’s cigarette, giving it a slow dervishing whirl. On the heels of the wind, Amy saw Matt and the girl walk in. The seemed to be in the middle of an animated discussion—or at least Matt was, so they had to be talking about music.

Amy felt the same slight twinge of jealousy watching him with the dancer as she did in the first few moments of every one of the short relationships that came about from some girl basically flinging herself at him halfway through a gig. Though perhaps “relationship” was too strong a word, since any sense of responsibility to a partner was inevitably onesided.

The girl laughed at what he was saying—but it was a silent laugh. Her mouth was open, her eyes sparkled with a humored appreciation, but there was no sound. She began to move her hands in an intricate pattern that, Amy realized, was the American Sign Language used by deafmutes.

“Her problem right then,” Lucia was saying, “was finding something to wear so that she could get into town. Luckily I was wearing my duster—you know, from when I was into my Sergio Leone phase—so she could cover herself up.”

“She took off everything while she was in the water?” Amy asked, her gaze returning to her friend.

“Even her underwear?”

“I guess. Unless she wasn’t wearing any in the first place.”

“Weird.”

“I don’t see you wearing a bra.”

“You know what I meant,” Amy said with a laugh.

Lucia nodded. “So anyway, she came on the ferry with me—I paid her fare—and then I brought her back to my place because it turned out she didn’t have anywhere else to go. Doesn’t know a soul in town. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure she spoke English at first.”

Amy looked over Lucia’s shoulder to where Matt was answering whatever it was that the girl’s hands had told him. Where had he learned sign language? she wondered. He’d never said anything about it before, but then she realized that for all the years she’d known him, she really didn’t know much about him at all except that he was a brilliant musician and good in bed, related actions, perhaps, since she didn’t doubt that they both were something he’d regard as a performance.

Meow, she thought.

“She’s deafmute, isn’t she?” she added aloud.

Lucia looked surprised. “Mute, but not deaf. How you’d know?”

“I’m watching her talk to Matt with her hands right now.”

“She couldn’t even do that when I first met her,” Lucia said. Amy returned her attention to Lucia once more. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I know sign language—I learned it when I worked at the Institute for the Deaf up on Gracie Street when I first got out of college—so when I realized she was mute, it was the first thing I tried. But she’s not deaf— she just can’t talk. She didn’t even try to communicate at first. I thought she was in shock. She just sat beside me, looking out over the water, her eyes getting bigger and bigger as we approached the docks.

“When we caught a bus back to my place, it was like she’d never been in a city before. She just sat beside me all wideeyed and then took my hand—not like she was scared, it was more like she just wanted to share the wonder of it all with me. It wasn’t until we got back to my place that she asked for pen and paper.” Lucia mimed the action as she spoke.

“It’s all kind of mysterious, isn’t it?” Amy said.

“I’ll say. Anyway, her name’s Katrina Ludvigsen and she’s from one of those little towns on the Islands further down the lake—the ones just past the mouth of the Dulfer River, you know?”

Amy nodded.

“Her family came over from Norway originally,” Lucia went on. “They were Lapps—as in Lapland—except she doesn’t like to be called that. Her people call themselves Sami.”

“I’ve heard about that,” Amy said. “Referring to them as Lapps is a kind of insult.”

“Exactly.” Lucia took a final drag from her cigarette and butted it out in the ashtray. “Once she introduced herself, she asked me to teach her sign language. Would you believe she picked it up in two days?”

“I don’t know,” Amy said. “Is that fast?”

“Try fantastique, ma cherie.”

“So what’s she doing here?”

Lucia shrugged. “She told me she was looking for a man—like, aren’t we all, ha ha—only she didn’t know his name, just that he lived in Newford. She just about had a fit when she spotted the picture of Matt in the poster for this gig.”

“So she knows him from before.”

“You tell me,” Lucia said.

Amy shook her head. “Only Matt knows whatever it is that Matt knows.”

“Katrina says she’s twentytwo,” Lucia went on, “but if you ask me, I think she’s a lot younger. I’ll bet she ran away from home—maybe even stowed away on some tourist’s powerboat and jumped ship just outside the harbor because they were about to catch her and maybe take her back home.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“Not a damn thing. She’s a nice kid and besides,” she added as Katrina and Matt walked by their table, heading for the bar, “I’ve got the feeling she’s not even going to be my responsibility for much longer.”

“Don’t count on it,” Amy said. “She’ll be lucky if she lasts the night.”

Although maybe not. Katrina was pretty, and she certainly could dance, so there