Await Your Reply (24 page)

“Ryan.”

And the man nodded. “Good,” he said. “You know how to answer a question.”

And Ryan wasn’t sure what to say to that. He was staring across the table, hoping that Jay would lift his head, that Jay would look at him, would give him a signal, some sense of what to do.

But Jay didn’t look up, and the man bent his attention toward Ryan.

“You’re Kasimir Czernewski, I guess?” the man said.

Ryan was staring down at the tabletop, on which water stains had spread into a map—a continent, surrounded by tiny islands.

He could feel his skin shuddering—the involuntary physical response he associated with being wet and cold, but this, this was actual fear, this was what being terrified felt like.

“We’ve been keeping an eye on you, too, you know,” the man said. “I think you’re going to be surprised to find how many of your bullshit bank accounts are not solvent anymore.”

Ryan could hear the words the man was saying, he could process them, he knew what they meant—but at the same time they didn’t feel like real sentences. They sunk into his consciousness like a weighted fishing line cast into a pond, and he felt the ripples circle out across his body.

What did he want from Jay right then? What does a son want from a father in such a situation?

To begin with, there is the fantasy of heroic action. The father who might give you a confident, reassuring wink—a little
chk, chk
at the edge of his mouth, and suddenly he breaks free of his bonds and produces a gun that was strapped to his ankle and the bullets enter the back of the torturer’s head and he freezes midstep and
falls face-forward and your dad gives you a shy grin as he rips the tape from his legs and swings around, gun aloft, aiming for the henchmen—

And then there is the father of steely determination. The father who shows you his gritted teeth:
Stay firm! We’ll face this together! We’ll be okay!

Or the father of regret—eyes brimming with tenderness and sorrow, eyes that say:
I am with you. If you suffer, I will suffer tenfold. I send you all my love and my strength …

And then there was Jay. Blood had been running out of his hair into his face, and tears had made pathways through some of the dried blood, and when their eyes met, they barely recognized each other.

For the first time in a long time Ryan thought of Owen. His other father. His former father—the father he had known all his life, who had raised him, the father who thought he was dead. At this very minute, Owen might be waking in Iowa to let the dog out, standing in the yard in his pajamas and watching as the dog sniffed and circled, looking out at the streetlights that were beginning to go dim as the sun came up, bending down to pick up the newspaper from the grass.

For a moment, Ryan was almost there. He might have been sitting like a bird in the old bur oak in front of the house, peering tenderly from above as Owen unwrapped
The Daily Nonpareil
to look at the headlines; as Owen snapped his fingers and whistled and the dog came running, pleased with herself; as Owen glanced up, as if he could sense Ryan somewhere above him, leaning down, a brush of air across the top of Owen’s uncombed, sleepy head.

“Dad,” Ryan said. “Dad, please, Dad.”

And he saw Jay wince. Jay didn’t look at him, he didn’t lift his head, but a shudder ran through him, and the man in the suit straightened with interest.

“Oh my goodness,” he said. “This is an unexpected development.”

Ryan lowered his head.

“Ryan,” the man said, “is this your father?”

“No,” Ryan whispered.

He let his eyes fall back to the cloud-shaped water stain on the table. A continent, he thought again. An island, like Greenland, an imaginary country, and he let his eyes trace along the coastlines, the bays and archipelagos, and he could almost hear the voice of the meditation tape.

Imagine a place
, the voice said.
Notice first the light. Is it bright, natural, or dim? Also notice the temperature level. Hot, warm, or cool? Be aware of the colors that surround you. Allow yourself to simply exist…
.

A hiding place, he thought, and for a second he could picture the tents that he used to construct when he was a little boy, the kitchen chairs draped with a big quilt, the dark space in the middle where he would pile pillows and stuffed animals, his own underground nest, which he pictured extending outward into soft, dim, winding corridors made of feathers and blankets.

“I’m going to start with the left hand,” the man said. “And then the left foot. And then the right hand, and so on.”

The man reached down and touched the freckled skin of Ryan’s forearm, very lightly.

“We’re going to put a tourniquet here,” he murmured. “Which is going to be tight. But that way you won’t bleed out quite so fast when I cut your hand off.”

For some reason, Ryan was almost distracted. He was thinking of Owen. He was thinking of that ghostly hand that had risen up and grasped his wrist, back when he was a student in a dorm room. He was thinking of his cave under the bedspread.

The man said: “Above the wrist? Or below the wrist?”

And Ryan hardly knew what was being asked until he felt the
wire encircling just above his hand, just above the joint of his thumb. He was shaking so badly that the wire quivered, too, as the man tightened it.

“Please don’t,” Ryan whispered, but he wasn’t sure whether any sound had come from his mouth, after all.

“Now, Ryan,” the man said, “I want you to tell your father to be reasonable.”

Jay had been watching all of this with a stricken, glassy look, and his eyes widened as he watched the man wrap the thin wire around Ryan’s wrist.

“I’m Jay,” he cried hoarsely, and the sound was like the call of a crow on a branch. “I’m Jay, I’m Jay, I’m the person you’re looking for, my name is Jay Kozelek, I’m the one you want….”

But the man only let out a thick, disgusted sound.

“You must think I’m an idiot,” the man rasped. “I
know
Jay Kozelek. He was my
roommate
. I know what he looks like. We used to sit around and talk and watch movies together and all that shit, and I thought he was my friend. That’s the worst thing. I actually felt personally close to him, so I know exactly what his face looks like. Do you get that? I know what his face looks like. Do you honestly think you can scam me, after all this time? Do you think I’m a moron? Do you think I’m kidding around here …”

None of this made sense to Ryan, but he couldn’t think properly in any case.

The man had already begun to tighten the grip on the handles of the cutter, and Ryan let out a scream.

It actually took a very short time.

Astonishingly short.

The wire was sharp, and it sank deeply into the flesh until it reached the radiocarpal joint. It hitched just below the radius and
ulna, slipping along the edge of bone until it found the softer gristle, and the man tightened his fists around the handles and pulled tighter, pumping his arms in a quick sawing motion, and the hand came off abruptly. Cleanly.

Ukh
, the man said.

There was that memory,
     a ghost reaching up out of the air to touch his wrist and

Not really conscious.

Not looking, not looking at his hand, but there was a hard voice
—Jesus fucking Christ, what are you doing?—
and Ryan’s eyes opened and he could see the man standing there, looking down at the floor, blinking. The wire still held loosely in his hands, but he had gone pale and there was a wet sheen over his face. A pinched look, as if he’d taken a drink of something he should have spit out.

There was another man there, too, now—one of the ones Ryan had thought of as a “henchman”—saying,
oh my god Dylan are you insane you said you weren’t really going to do it
, and Ryan shuddering and woozy as the two figures blurred into silhouettes and then sharpened against a flare of light reflected against the kitchen window, one of them holding a kitchen towel and bending toward Ryan

and Jay’s voice—

“He’s going to bleed to death, you guys, it’s not his fault, please don’t let him bleed to death—”

And then the man, Dylan, staring at Ryan with a wide-eyed, horrified revulsion. The rumpled black gangster suit hung on him like a costume someone had dressed him in while he slept, and he stood there, dazed, uncertain, like a sleepwalker who had awakened into a room that he thought he’d only been dreaming about.

“Oh, jeez,” Dylan whispered.

Then he bent over to throw up.

I
t was three and a half hours from Denver to New York on JetBlue Airways, time enough to swing from panic to acceptance and back again several times, and Lucy sat upright in her chair in a state of uneasy, pendulous suspension, her hands folded tightly in her lap.

She had never been on an airplane before—though she couldn’t bring herself to admit this embarrassing fact to George Orson.

David Fremden. Dad.

She had been trying to wrap her head around the fact that actually there was no such person as George Orson.

It wasn’t simply that everything she knew about him had been invented, or borrowed, or exaggerated—it wasn’t simply that he had lied. It was larger than that, an uncanny feeling that opened up in her mind whenever she tried to think calmly and logically about the situation.

He didn’t exist anymore.

It made her think of the days after her parents died, the laundry basket still full of their unwashed clothes, the refrigerator stocked with food her mother had planned to cook that weekend, her father’s cell phone filling up with calls from customers who wanted to know why he had missed his appointments. At first they would leave behind a few empty spaces in the world—customers who relied on her father, patients who were waiting for her mother to nurse them at the hospital, friends and coworkers and acquaintances who would miss them, for a time—but these were very minor rips and tears in the fabric of things, easily repaired, and the thing that shocked her the most was how quickly such absences began to close. Even after a few weeks you could see how soon her parents would be forgotten, how their presence became an absence, and then—what? What did you call an absence that ceased to become an absence, what do you call a hole that has been filled in?

Oh
, she kept thinking.
They’ll never come back
. As if the idea were supernatural, science-fictional. How could you believe that such a thing was possible?

That was the thought she had, in bed beside him the night he’d told her the truth, as she traced her fingers across the arm, which was not George Orson’s arm.
I’ll never talk to George Orson again
, she thought, and she drew her hand back.

He was right there, the same physical body she had been with for so long now, but she couldn’t help but feel lonely.

Oh, George
, she thought.
I miss you
.

And now she thought it again as she sat in her seat next to David Fremden on the airplane and tried to compose her thoughts.

She missed George Orson. She would never talk to him again.

She had never been on a plane before and she was aware of the terrible, unfathomable distance between herself and the ground. She could sense the air quivering beneath her feet, a shudder of empty space, and she tried to avoid looking out the window. It
wasn’t so bad to look out and see the thick meringue contours of clouds, but it was harder when the earth began to appear through. The topography. You could see the geometric spread of human habitation, the tiny pencil lines of fields and roads and the boxy spatter of towns, and it was hard not to think of how it would be to fall—how long you would have to plunge before you finally landed.

She’d never have told this to George Orson, anyway. She’d have hated to seem so unsophisticated, for George Orson to see her as some silly rube of a girl, atingle with ignorant dread over the idea of air travel, pressing her nails into the upholstery of the seat arms as if somehow that could anchor her.

David Fremden, meanwhile, looked entirely composed. He was watching the miniature television screen that was embedded into the headrest of the seat in front of him, pausing over a program on pyramids on the History Channel, passing quickly by the news and the weather, smiling nostalgically at an episode of an old 1980s sitcom. He didn’t look at her, but he let his hand rest on her forearm.

“You still love me, don’t you?” he had asked her—and the question pulsed, as if she could feel it through the whorls of his fingertips.

But there were other things she had to bear in mind, as well. Events were moving fairly fast now. The world continued on, and she had to make some decisions, even without reliable information. There was, purportedly, 4.3 million dollars, in a bank in the Ivory Coast, Africa. There was, at least, more than a hundred thousand dollars currently in their possession.

Their carry-on baggage was in the overhead compartment, right there above them, and that was fine so far, though that, too, was a source of unease.

They had spent their last night in the Lighthouse Motel, side by side in the library, each with a cylinder of cellophane tape, each with a stack of hundred-dollar bills.

David Fremden had a big old atlas, 25 × 20, and Lucy had a dictionary and a Dickens novel, and they sat there, affixing bills to the pages.

“Are you sure this will work?” Lucy had said. She was flipping her way through
Bleak House
, fragments of text rising up as she laid a bill on the page and pinned it down.
“The fog is very dense, indeed!” said I
. And she pressed Ben Franklin over the line of words, and then flipped a couple of pages forward.
“It’s disgraceful,” she said. “You know it is. The whole house is disgraceful.
” And she covered it again, though once again some grain of the book rose up:
We found Miss Jellyby trying to warm herself at the fire …

“It’s not a problem,” David Fremden said. He himself was working more rapidly than she, lining a row of three hundreds down the center of Ireland, pressing a tongue of adhesive tape along the edge of the bills with his thumb. “I’ve done this before,” he said.

“Okay,” she said.

“The universe,” he observed, “makes rather an indifferent parent, I am afraid.
”

“But isn’t there an X-ray machine?” she said. “Won’t they be able to see through the covers of the books?”

… is the portrait of the present Lady Dedlock. It is considered a perfect likeness, and …

“Look,” David Fremden said, and he sighed. “You’ll just have to trust me on this. I know how these security systems work. I really do know what I’m doing.”

And so far, yes, he had been right, though she had been dreadfully nervous. Her body had felt almost mystically visible when they came to the front of the security line, as if her skin were giving off an aura of light. She was shocked that people weren’t staring at her, but no one seemed to notice. She put her satchel—which contained a few toiletries and a T-shirt and the books—into a gray plastic tub, and she couldn’t help but think of the swollen pages of
Bleak House
,
stuffed full of money, even as she bent down to remove her shoes, even as the conveyor belt carried her bag through the tunnel of the X-ray machine.

“Okay,” said the security guard, and motioned her forward through the doorway-shaped metal detector, a thick, blank-eyed, weight lifter guy, perhaps not much older than she was, beckoning her through, and there were no alarms, no hesitation as her bag passed through, no second glance at her wretchedly dyed hair, nothing.

David Fremden put his hand on her elbow.

“Good job,” he murmured.

And so now the plane was on the tarmac in New York. They were sitting in their seats, waiting for the captain to turn off the
FASTEN SEAT BELTS
sign, though some of the passengers around them were already impatiently stirring in their seats. Lucy herself was still trying to recover her equilibrium from the experience of landing, the grinding sounds the wheels made as they unfolded, the sudden, quivering bump as the plane touched the landing strip, the way her ears had filled up with a plug of viscous air. She tried to be stern with herself.
You’re such an idiot, Lucy. Such a white trash hillbilly, what are you scared of? What are you scared of?

But the truth was that her leg had developed a tic, she could feel one of the muscles giving a small involuntary twitch and when she put her hand on her thigh she could hear another voice in her head, a small, sad tremor.

I don’t want to do this. I think I’ve made a mistake
.

It was like butterflies had begun to alight on her, hundreds of butterflies, and they were each one of them made of lead. It wasn’t long before she was covered with them.

There was a soft, deep bell tone, and en masse the rest of the passengers began to sigh and rise, converging into the aisles and opening the overhead compartments and leaning close to the person in
front of them, not disorderly, not exactly, but almost like a school of fish or migrating birds, and she looked up as David Fremden stood to join them.

“Brooke,” he said. He reached down and took her hand in his and gave it a tight squeeze. “Come on, sweetheart,” he whispered. “Don’t fail me now.”

It was easy enough to get onto her feet. It was easy enough to shuffle down the narrow aisle of the airplane, following behind David—her father—

He handed over her backpack with one of those gently teasing smiles that reminded her so much of George Orson. That grin that had so impressed her back when she was a student in his AP history class, back when he told her he thought she was sui generis. “People like you and me, we invent ourselves,” he had said, though there was no way to know back then that he meant it literally.

She missed George Orson.

But she took a breath and fell into the shuffling queue of travelers. It was easy enough. Easy enough to put her head down and trudge through the tight rows of seats. Easy enough to walk past the stewardess, who stood at the front of the plane nodding like a priest, peace be with you, peace be with you, ushering them into the accordion tunnel that led up into the terminal.

“You look peaked,” David said. “Are you feeling all right?”

“I’m fine,” Lucy said.

“Why don’t we get a cup of coffee,” he said. “Or a soda? A little something to eat?”

“No, thanks,” Lucy said.

They had turned into the rambling avenue that ran past the various gates—counters and podiums surrounded by clusters of anchored chairs, pods full of waiting people, and as far as she could tell, no one was looking at them. No one gave them a second glance, no one wondered if they were father and daughter, or
lovers, or teacher and student. Whatever. Back in Pompey, Ohio, the two of them might have caused a stir of curiosity, but here they hardly registered.

Lucy gazed at a trio of women in burkas, blue, faceless, nunlike figures, chatting amiably in their native tongue, and a tall, balding man swept past them, speed-walking, swearing joyfully into his cell phone, and then an old woman in a wheelchair, wearing a full-length fur coat, pushed along by a black man in gray coveralls—

Lucy could feel the weight of her backpack.
Bleak House
and
Webster’s Dictionary
and
Marjorie Morningstar
, which between them contained perhaps fifty thousand dollars.

She adjusted the strap on her shoulder, then tugged at the hated butterfly T-shirt as it inched up, exposing her belly. She was aware of how much she would have disliked Brooke Fremden, back in the day. If Brooke Fremden had come traipsing down the halls of Pompey High School, with her cutesy mall-girl clothes and her juvenile, perky backpack, Lucy would have been repulsed.

But when David Fremden looked over his shoulder at her, his look was mild and fatherly and distracted. She was just a girl, just a teenage girl. This was what they looked like; it didn’t matter to him as long as she was keeping pace.

He didn’t miss Lucy, she thought.

“You’ve done this before,” she said. “I’m not the first.”

This was on the night before their trip. They were still in the house above the Lighthouse Motel, and they sat there on the couch in the television room, side by side, their bags packed and the rooms hushed in the way of places that are about to be abandoned. The books were taped full of money, and they should have just gone to bed, but instead they were sitting there watching the opening monologue of some late-night talk show host, and his face, David’s face, was entirely blank, that flat television-watching expression, and at last she repeated herself.

“You’ve been other people before,” she said, and at last he looked away from the TV and glanced at her warily.

“That’s a complicated question,” he said.

“Don’t you think it’s fair to be honest with me?” she said. “We’re …”

Together?

She thought about it.

Maybe it was better to say nothing. It was weird—all this time she’d spent in this musty television room, all the hours she’d spent alone with nothing but old videos for company,
Rebecca
and
Mrs. Miniver
and
Double Indemnity
and
How Green Was My Valley
and
My Fair Lady
and
Mildred Pierce
. Sipping diet soda and glancing out at the raggedy Japanese garden and waiting for the chance to get back into the Maserati and drive away to someplace wonderful.

He had been “a lot of different people.” He admitted as much.

So—it was probably logical to think that there had also been other girls, other Lucys, sitting on this same couch and watching the same old movies and listening to the same stillness as the Lighthouse Motel brooded over its dusty swathe of empty lake bed.

“I just want to know—” she said. “I want to know about the others. How many have there been—in your life. In all this.”

And he looked up. He pulled his gaze away from the TV and met her eyes and his expression wavered.

“There’s never been anyone else,” he said. “That’s what you don’t understand. I’ve been looking—I’ve been looking for a long time. But there’s never been anyone like you.”

So.

No, she didn’t believe him, though maybe he had managed to convince himself. Perhaps he truly thought that it didn’t matter if she was Lucy or Brooke or whatever other name she would take on. Perhaps he imagined she would remain the same person on the inside, no matter what name or persona she adopted.

But that wasn’t true, she thought.

More and more, she was aware that Lucy Lattimore had left the earth. Already there was hardly anything left of her—a few scraps of documents, birth certificate and social security card in her mother’s drawer back in the old house, her high school transcript resident on some outdated computer, the memories of her sister, Patricia, the vague recollections of her classmates and teachers, already fading.