Await Your Reply (14 page)

But John Russell only tilted his head sympathetically. “Who knows?” he said. “I actually sometimes wish I’d done more traveling and maybe a little
less
settling.” And he patted his round belly wryly.

“I think probably most people waste their lives in one way or another,” John Russell said. “You know—one time I tried to figure out how much time I’d spent in my life playing video games and watching TV. My rough estimate is, like, ninety-one thousand hours. Which is actually probably conservative, but that amounts to just over ten years. Which I have to say, I found a little scary—though, it hasn’t stopped me from watching TV and playing video games, but—it’s sad, I guess.”

“Well,” Miles said. “It seems like it would be hard to calculate something like that.”

“I’ve actually put together a spreadsheet,” John Russell said. “I’ll show it to you sometime.”

Miles nodded. “That would be cool,” he said—and he couldn’t help but think how the idea of John Russell’s “spreadsheet” would have delighted Hayden.

“That kid is a bigger freak than we are, Miles,” Hayden used to say.

And Miles would protest. “We’re not freaks,” Miles would say. “And he isn’t, either.”

“Oh, please,” Hayden would say.

He remembered how amused Hayden had been by the fact that John Russell went by both his first and last name. “What a ridiculous affectation,” Hayden had said. “But I actually kind of like it.” And then Hayden had performed a small parody of John Russell’s delicate hen-like way of walking. Which, despite himself, Miles had found hilarious, and even now it was hard not to think of John Russell as a humorous character.

But he was not going to think about Hayden.

“Anyway,” he said.

He and John Russell had pints of beer, and both of them lifted their glasses to their lips and took a sip. They smiled at each other, and Miles was aware of how urgently he wanted them to be friends, to be normal friends, but instead there was an awkward silence that he didn’t know how to fill. John Russell cleared his throat.

“In any case,” John Russell said, “people take different paths. Like—for example—did you hear about Clayton Combe? You remember him, don’t you?”

“Sure,” Miles said, though he hadn’t thought of Clayton Combe in years.

He was a boy at Hawken School that both he and John Russell had disliked: a bright, popular student, beloved by nearly everyone, athletic, good-looking, but also, they thought, a condescending ass. He had the most hideously self-satisfied grin Miles had ever seen on a human being.

“You won’t believe this,” John Russell said, confidentially. “Everybody thought he was going to do so well? As it turns out, he killed himself. He was an investment banker at ING, and there was an embezzlement scandal of some sort. He claimed he wasn’t guilty, but he got convicted and he was supposed to get about fifteen years in prison but then he—”

John Russell raised his eyebrows significantly.
“Hung
himself.”

“That’s awful,” Miles said.

And it was, though he didn’t necessarily feel that badly about it. He remembered how Hayden had disliked Clayton Combe
intensely—how he used to mimic Clayton’s way of tilting his head back when he smiled, as if he were being applauded. Hayden would raise his hand and wave to an imaginary, appreciative crowd, like a beauty queen on a float, and Miles and John Russell used to find this parody uproarious.

And then, Miles couldn’t help it, the detective part of him woke up and blinked.

Wasn’t ING one of those companies, Miles thought, one of the many entities that Hayden bore some grudge against?

Hadn’t he mentioned it in one of his emails? One of his various rants?

But he didn’t have to let himself go in that direction.

“Poor Clayton,” he heard himself murmur. “That’s so …,” he said. “So strange.”

But was it? Was it strange?

He reflected on this, in the week after that conversation with John Russell. Why did it always have to circle back to Hayden? Why couldn’t he just sit there and have a pleasant conversation with an old friend? Why couldn’t the story of Clayton Combe just be a bit of gossip? And he refused to research it. He was not going to look up news articles about Clayton Combe; he was not going to turn it into some paranoid fantasy.

But then, ultimately, he wrote it down in his notebook anyway:

Did Hayden destroy the life of Clayton Combe and drive him to suicide?

Unknown.

He was feeling very vulnerable at that point. Very vulnerable and unsettled and depressed, and he kept thinking about what John Russell had said.
Most people waste their lives in one way or another
.

I have to change directions
, Miles thought. A person can use his life wisely, if he just thinks about it. If he just makes a plan, and sticks to it!

Yet, despite his best intentions, he’d find himself going through his files once again.

He’d find himself staring out the window of his apartment, looking out toward the northeast, out over the suburban treetops. A few blocks away was the street where his family used to live, and he could feel their old house sending out uninterpretable signals, telegraphing its absence, since of course it wasn’t there any longer.

He thought about going over to look at the site.

What was left? he wondered. Was it just a grassy lot? Was there a new house where the old one once stood? Was there anything left that he would recognize?

The house had burned down during his sophomore year at Ohio University. Hayden had been missing for more than two years by then, and Miles had never been able to bring himself to come back. What reason was there? His father, his mother, even his stepfather, Mr. Spady, were all dead, nothing to return for except morbid curiosity, which he ultimately resisted. He didn’t want to see the remains of the structure, burnt timbers and caved roof, charred pieces of furniture; he didn’t want to imagine the windows lit with fire, the neighbors gathering on the lawn as the fire truck and ambulance arrived.

He didn’t want to envisage the possibility of Hayden standing there, shadowed in the copse of lilacs at the edge of the yard, perhaps with his arsonist’s tools still in a backpack on his shoulder.

There was no real evidence of this—nothing beyond a vivid snapshot in his imagination, a picture so sharp that sometimes he couldn’t help but add the house to the tally of Hayden’s crimes. The house, and his mother and Mr. Spady.

And now, he thought, there was poor Clayton Combe, hanging himself in a jail cell. He thought of Hayden’s Clayton Combe impression: chin up, eyes rolled back, mouth stretched into a rictus of self-regard.

Down below his third-story window, he could see the roof of the building next door; a mummified newspaper, still rolled and rubber-banded but slowly decaying; and a smattering of leaves came running down the alleyway in a formation like birds or football players; and then a helicopter appeared, gliding heavily, passing close to the treetops, its thick propellers chopping the air up. On its way to the hospital, no doubt, though Miles watched it sternly. For years, Hayden had believed that helicopters were spying on him.

A few days later, Miles had found a job. Or rather (he sometimes thought) the job had found him.

He was downtown, had managed to put together a few interviews, low-level programming and IT support, an “associate” position at the public library, nothing spectacular, but who knew? He was settling down, he thought, he had to be persistent and optimistic—though optimism wasn’t easy to come by walking down Prospect Avenue. So many empty storefronts with their long-faded
SPACE AVAILABLE
signs, so many soundless blocks. Probably, he thought again, it was a mistake to come back.

He was thinking this when he saw the old novelty shop, Matalov Novelties, just around the corner on 4th Street, nested among the ancient jewelry stores and pawnshops.

He was amazed it was still there. It was the last place he would have thought of surviving the economic spiral that had overcome most of these downtown establishments. Matalov Novelties hadn’t crossed his mind in years—certainly not since his father had died, back when they were thirteen.

When they were children, their father used to take Miles and Hayden with him when he went to the novelty store. A treat—to go with their father to this peculiar run-down establishment.
The magic shop
, he called it.

They had never been allowed to see their father perform—not as a clown, not as a magician, certainly not as a hypnotist. At home,
he was reserved, untheatrical, which had made their visits to Matalov Novelties all the more impressive in their minds. Their father holding their hands: “Don’t touch anything, boys. Just look with your eyes.” Which was very difficult, since it was, after all, a magic store—rows and rows of shelves, floor to ceiling, a clutter of antiques and odd devices, wooden figurines like chess pieces in the shapes of gargoyles, Chinese finger traps, feather boas, top hats and capes, an elderly rhesus monkey in a silver cage—

—and then the old woman would emerge. Mrs. Matalov. Aged but not doddering, though her spine was curving into a question mark, a hump raising her bright silky blouse. Her hair was like dandelion fluff, dyed a peach color, and her lips were red with the waxy, glistening lipstick that old silent-movie actresses wore.

“Larry,” she said, her voice accented. Russian. “So good to see you!” Their father made a small bow.

When Mrs. Matalov saw Miles and Hayden, she performed a brief dramaturgical double take, drawing a slow gasp through her teeth, her eyes widening.

“Oh, Larry!” she said. “Such lovely boys. They break my heart.”

As Miles thought back to this, it felt more like a memory of a children’s storybook than an event that had actually happened. Like a lie Hayden would make up. And so he was hardly surprised to find that Matalov Novelties appeared to be closed. A folding metal grate was pulled across the entranceway, and the narrow shop window was covered with paper.

But still—beyond the grate, through the frosted glass of the door, he could see that the place wasn’t empty. He could make out shelves, and when he reached through the grate to tap on the glass, he thought he saw movement. He stood there, hesitantly, and soon, enough time had passed that he began to feel foolish he was still waiting.

Then, abruptly, the old woman jerked the door open and peered out at him through the bars.

“No retail!” she shrilled. “No Indians, no Browns, no Cleveland
memorabilia. This is not a retail establishment.” Her accent was muddy, even thicker than he remembered. He stood gaping as she waved a hand at him:
go, go
.

“Mrs. Matalov?” he said.

Needless to say, she had aged in the seventeen years since he had last seen her. Even when he was a child, she had been an old woman; now she was practically a skeleton. She had grown shorter, smaller. The curve of her spine was so pronounced that her vertebrae stood out in ridges along her stooped back, and her head was tilted toward the ground so that she had to peer up like a turtle to see him. Her hair was very thin, just a few sparse tufts, though still dyed the color of a peach. It was impossible that she was still alive, Miles thought. She must be well into her nineties.

“Mrs. Matalov?” he said again. He tried to speak loudly and clearly, and he put on what he hoped was a winning smile. “I don’t know whether you would remember me. I’m Miles Cheshire? Larry Cheshire’s son? I’m in Cleveland and …”

“One moment,” she said crossly. “You’re babbling, I can’t hear what you’re saying. One moment please.”

It took more than a moment for her to unlock the metal grate and pull it back, but once it was open, she appeared to be willing to let him inside.

“I’m really sorry to bother you,” Miles said, gazing around, the rows of shelves the same as he recalled, the junk-store smell of cigarettes and dust and sandalwood and wet cardboard. “I,” he said sheepishly, “—don’t mean to intrude. I haven’t been in Cleveland in many years and I was just passing by. Nostalgia, I guess. My dad was an old customer of yours.”

“Larry Cheshire, yes. I heard you already,” Mrs. Matalov said sternly. “I remember. I myself am not a nostalgic person, but come in, come in. Tell me what I can do for you. You, too, are a magician? Like your father?”

“Oh,” Miles said. “No, no.” As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he saw that the shop was not, after all, unchanged since his childhood.
It was more like an old garage or attic, and the shelves extended back where the dark aisles were clogged with a disorder of stacks of partially opened boxes. Clustered at the front of the shelves were a number of desks and tables, each one bearing a number of old personal computers of various antiquated generations; and monitors, and tangled birds’ nests of electrical cords and connection wires. At one of the desks sat a dark-haired girl—perhaps twenty or twenty-one years old?—wearing black clothes and black lipstick and pointed silver earrings, like the teeth of some prehistoric carnivore. She glanced up at him, expressionless and emanating irony.

“No, no,” Miles said. “Definitely not a magician. I never exactly pursued—” And he felt himself blushing, he didn’t know why. “I’m not anything, really,” he said, and watched as Mrs. Matalov stalked through the maze of desks—a wobbling but unexpectedly swift gait, like someone hurrying over thin ice.

“What a shame,” Mrs. Matalov said. She sank into a wheeled office chair, where several ornamental pillows cushioned her back. She motioned for him to come and sit as well. “Your father, I liked him very much. Such a kind and gracious spirit.”

“He was,” Miles said. She was right: but how much time had passed since he’d remembered his father? An old bit of grief awakened and turned over in his chest.

“Poor man!” she said. “He was a very talented performer; you knew that. If he had lived in a different time, he might have made a lot of money, instead of playing at children’s parties.” She clucked her tongue at this, a series of soft exclamation points, and Miles felt as if she were going to reproach him, a young man who was squandering his life. But she merely eyed him shrewdly.