Await Your Reply (28 page)

“But things are getting better again,” Stephanie said, and her voice was mild and hopeful. “Since the peace accord, we are returning to our old selves, and it makes me happy. To meet a young woman such as you in this hotel, that’s a good sign. I will tell you a secret. I love the art of coiffure. And it is an art, I think. I feel that it is, and if you like what I do with your hair, you should tell your friends: ‘Go to Abidjan, go to the Hotel Ivoire, visit Stephanie!’”

Later, when she tried to tell George Orson the story of Stephanie, she found it difficult to explain.

“You look remarkable,” George Orson said. “That’s a fantastic haircut,” he said, and it was. The blond was surprisingly natural-looking, not the fluorescent peroxide color she had feared; it hung straight, cut blunt above her shoulder, with just a little wave to it.

But it was more than that, though she wasn’t sure how to articulate
it. That dreamy sense of transformation; the intense sisterly intimacy as Stephanie had leaned over her, serenely talking, telling her stories. It was what it must feel like to be hypnotized, she thought. Or like being baptized, maybe.

Not that she could say this to George Orson. It would be too overwrought, too extreme. And so she just shrugged, and showed him the clothes she’d bought at the boutique in the hotel mall.

A simple black dress with thin straps. A dark blue silk blouse, lower cut than she’d usually buy for herself, and white pants, and a colorful African-print scarf.

“I spent a lot of money,” she said, but George Orson only smiled—that private, conspiratorial smile he used to give her when they first left Ohio, which she hadn’t seen in a long time.

“As long as it’s not more than three or four million,” he said, and it was such a relief to hear him joke again that she laughed even though it wasn’t very funny, and she posed flirtatiously, standing up against the bare off-white wall as he took her picture for the new passport.

He thought he could get them new passports within twenty-four hours.

He was drinking more, and it made her uncomfortable. More than likely he had been a drinker all along, sequestered in his study in the old house above the Lighthouse Motel, slipping heavily into bed beside her in the middle of the night, smelling of mouthwash and soap and cologne.

But this was different. Now that they were sharing a single room, she was more aware of it. She watched him as he sat at the narrow hotel room writing desk, scrutinizing the screen of his laptop, typing and surfing, typing and surfing, taking gulps from his tumbler. The bottle of Jameson whiskey he’d gotten from room service was almost empty, after only two days.

Meanwhile, she lay in bed, watching American movies that had
been dubbed into French, or reading through
Marjorie Morningstar
, which had survived the removal of the taped bills better than
Bleak House
had.

They’d had a moment, when he’d seen her new haircut and clothes, a brief return to the couple she’d imagined they were, but it lasted only a few hours. Now he was distant again.

“George?” she said. And then when he didn’t answer: “Dad …?”

This made him wince.

Drunk.

“Poor Ryan,” he said cryptically, and he lifted his glass to his lips, shaking his head. “I’m not going to screw up this time, Lucy,” he said. “Trust me. I know what I’m doing.”

Did she trust him?

Even now, after everything, did she believe that he knew what he was doing?

These were still difficult questions to answer, though it helped to know that she was carrying around a backpack that contained almost a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

It helped that they were no longer in Nebraska, that she was no longer a virtual prisoner in the Lighthouse Motel. When he left the next morning on one of his errands, she was free to wander if she wished, she could ride the elevator down to the lobby of the hotel. She carried the backpack with her, strolling through the corridors and shopping boutiques in her new clothes, trying to think. Trying to imagine herself forward just a few days. Rome. 4.3 million dollars. A new name, a new life, maybe the one that she’d been expecting.

The hotel was a massive complex, but surprisingly quiet. She had expected the lobby to be crowded with people, like the throngs that had rushed along the terminals of the airports in Denver and New York and Brussels, but instead it was more like a museum.

She moved dreamily through a long lobby. Here on the wall was
a stylized long-faced African mask—a gazelle, she guessed—with the horns curving down like a woman’s hair. She saw two African women, in bright orange and green batik, strolling peaceably; and a hotel employee gently shepherding a bit of litter into his long-handled dustpan; and then she passed outside into an open-air promenade, with tropical gardens along one side, and graceful botanically shaped abstract statues, and a colorful obelisk, decorated with shapes and figures almost like a totem pole; and then the promenade opened up, and there was a cement bridge that led across turquoise pools to a small green island, from which you could look across the lagoon toward the skyscrapers of Abidjan.

Wondrous. She was standing on a path lined with globed streetlamps, under a cloudless sky, and this was probably the most surreal thing that had ever happened to her.

Who, back in Ohio, would have ever believed that Lucy Lattimore would one day be standing on a different continent, at the edge of such a beautiful hotel? In Africa. With an elegant haircut and expensive shoes and a light, fashionable white pleated dress, with the hem lightly moving in the breeze.

If only her mother could see her. Or that horrible, sneering Toddzilla.

If only someone would come along to take her photograph.

At last, she turned and walked back through the gardens again, back toward the center of the hotel. She found her boutique, and bought another dress—emerald green, this time, batik-printed like the outfits of the women she’d seen in the hallway—and then with her shopping bag she found her way to a restaurant.

Le Pavillion was a long, simple room that opened into a patio, almost entirely empty. It was past lunchtime, she supposed, though there were still a few patrons lingering, and as the maître d’ led her to her place, a trio of white men in flowered Hawaiian shirts looked up as she was led past.

“Beautiful girl,” said one of them, bald, arching his eyebrows. “Hey, girl,” he said. “I like you. I want to be your friend.” And then
he spoke to his cohorts in Russian or whatever, and they all laughed.

She ignored them. She wasn’t going to let them ruin her afternoon, though they continued to talk raucously even as she held her menu up like a mask.

“I am good lover,” called the one with spiked dyed orange hair. “Baby. We should meet us.”

Assholes
. She gazed at the words on the menu—which were, she realized, entirely in French.

When she came back to the room, George Orson was waiting for her.

“Where the fuck have you been?” he said as she opened the door.

Furious.

She stood there, with the backpack full of their money, and a tote bag from the boutique, and he winged a projectile at her—a little booklet, which she deflected with an upraised hand. It hit her palm, and bounced harmlessly to the floor.

“There’s your new passport,” he said bitterly, and she stared at him for a long time before she bent to pick it up.

“Where have you been?” he said as she stoically opened the passport and looked inside. Here was the photo he’d taken yesterday—with her brand-new hairdo—and a new name: Kelli Gavin, age twenty-four, of Easthampton, Massachusetts.

She didn’t say anything.

“I thought you were … kidnapped or something,” George Orson said. “I was sitting here, thinking:
What am I going to do now?
Jesus, Lucy, I thought you left me here.”

“I was having lunch,” Lucy said. “I just went downstairs for a minute. I mean, weren’t you just complaining that I wasn’t assertive enough? I was just—”

He cleared his throat, and for a second she thought he might be
about to cry. His hands were shaking, and he had a bleak look on his face.

“God!” he said. “Why do I always do this to myself? All I ever wanted was to have one person, just one person, and it’s never right. It’s never right.”

Lucy stood there looking at him, her heart quickening, watching uncertainly as he lowered himself into a chair. “What are you talking about?” she said, and she supposed that she should speak to him gently, apologetically, soothingly. She should go over to him and hug him or kiss his forehead or stroke his hair. But instead she just regarded him as he hunched there like a moody thirteen-year-old boy. She tucked her new passport into her purse.

She was
the one who should be frightened, after all. She was the one who ought to need comfort and reassurance. She was the one who had been tricked into falling in love with a person who wasn’t even real.

“What are you talking about?” she said again. “Did you get the money?”

He peered down at his hands, which were still quivering, making spasms against his knees. He shook his head.

“We’re having negotiating problems,” George Orson said, and his voice was smaller, the mumbling agitated whisper he’d get when he woke up with his nightmares.

Not like George Orson at all.

“We may have to give up a much larger cut than I expected,” he said. “Much larger. That’s the problem, it’s all corruption, everywhere you go in the world, that’s the worst part of it—”

He lifted his head, and there was hardly a trace of the handsome, charming teacher she’d once known.

“I just want one person I can trust,” he said, and his eyes rested on her accusingly, as if somehow
she
had betrayed
him
. As if
she were
the liar.

“Pack your bags,” he said coldly. “We need to move to a new
hotel right away, and I’ve been sitting here for a fucking hour waiting for you. You’re lucky I didn’t leave.”

As she waited down in the lobby, Lucy didn’t know whether to be angry or hurt. Or frightened.

At least she had the backpack with their money. He wasn’t likely to leave her without that, but still—the way he had talked to her, the way he had transformed in the last few days. Did she know him at all? Did she have any idea what he was really thinking?

Besides which, she couldn’t stop thinking about what he had said about the money.
Negotiating problems
, he’d said.
We may have to give up a much larger cut
. Which upset her. She had been counting on that money, maybe even more than she had been counting on George Orson, and she found herself touching the lumps in her backpack, feeling through the canvas to the stacks of bills that she’d arranged beneath some folded Brooke Fremden T-shirts.

It was late afternoon, and people were arriving at the Hotel Ivoire at a greater pace than they had the day before. There were a number of Africans, some in suits, others in more traditional dress. A few soldiers, a pair of Arab men in embroidered kurtas, a Frenchwoman in sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat, arguing on a cell phone. Liveried hotel agents were trailing along behind various guests.

She should not have come down to the lobby alone, though at the time it had felt like an act of defiant dignity. She had packed her bag angrily as George Orson spoke in rapid, incomprehensible French on the phone, and when she finished with her suitcase, she stood there, trying to piece together what he was saying—until he had glanced up sharply, covering the receiver with his palm.

“Go ahead on down to the lobby,” he said. “I have to finish this phone call and I’ll be down in five minutes, so don’t wander off.”

But now it had been more like fifteen minutes, and still he hadn’t appeared.

Was it possible that he would ditch her?

She felt her backpack again, as if somehow the money might be spirited away, as if it weren’t entirely solid—and she was tempted to unzip the backpack and double-check, just to be positive. Just to look at it.

She scoped again through the expanse of lobby, the cathedral ceilings and the chandelier and the long decorative boxes full of tropical plants. The Frenchwoman had lit a cigarette and stood gently tapping the toe of her high-heeled shoe. Lucy observed as the woman glanced at her watch, and after a hesitation Lucy walked over.

“Excusez-moi,
” she said, and made an attempt to imitate the accent that once upon a time Mme Fournier had tried to inculcate in her students.
“Quelle,
” Lucy said.
“Quelle … heure est-il?
”

The woman looked at her with a surprising benevolence. Their eyes met and the woman took the cell phone away from her ear as she examined Lucy, up and down, with a soft, motherly look. With pity, Lucy thought.

“It is three o’clock, my dear,” the woman replied, in English, and she gave Lucy a questioning smile.

“Are you quite all right?” the woman asked, and Lucy nodded.

“Merci,” Lucy
said, thickly.

She had been waiting for him for almost a half hour now, and she turned and walked toward the elevators, her wheeled suitcase trailing crookedly behind her, the beautiful open-toed sandals she had bought for herself clicking against the glowing marble tile, the people seeming to part for her, the African and Middle Eastern and European faces regarding her with the same wary concern that the Frenchwoman had, the way people look at a young girl who has been a fool, a girl who knows at last that she has been cast aside.
You’re lucky I didn’t leave without you
, she thought, and when the elevator doors slid open with a deep musical chime, Lucy could feel the swell of panic inside her. The numbness in her fingers, the sense of insects crawling in her hair, a tightness in her throat.

No. He wouldn’t abandon her, he wouldn’t really abandon her, not after all of this, all the distance they had come together.

She was aware of the elevator beginning to rise, and it was as if the gravity were lifting up out of her body like a spirit, it was as if she could open up like a milkweed pod, a hundred floating seeds spilling out of her, floating off, irretrievable.