So no. Livia wouldn’t trust Tanya, even though the woman was being nice. She wouldn’t trust anyone.
They waited. A woman in a white uniform brought food on a tray. Though Livia was painfully hungry, she wasn’t sure she should eat, because eating would keep her alive. But then she thought of Nason. So she devoured everything on the tray—chicken and rice, a sweet drink, and a weird, jiggly, translucent red cube that tasted like berries. Tanya stepped out when Livia was done, and came back a moment later with another tray just like it. Livia finished everything on that one, too.
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.