Await Your Reply (7 page)

“Would you want to go to college, even if you had enough money that you’d never have to get a real job?

“Which is to say,” George Orson continued. “Do you want to go because you want to be an educated person, or do you only go because you want a career of some sort?”

“Hmm,” Lucy said, and tried to draw a bead on the beach ball, which was lolling woozily in the wind. “I think I just want to be an educated person, actually. Though maybe if I had so much money that I never had to work, I’d probably choose a different major. Something impractical.”

“I see,” George Orson said. He stood behind her; she could feel his chest against her back as he tried to help her take aim. “Like what?” he said.

“Like history,” Lucy said, and smiled sidelong at him as she released the arrow, which traveled in a wobbling, uncertain arc before landing in the sand about a foot away from the beach ball.

“You’re close!” George Orson whispered—still pressed close up against her, his hand around her waist, his mouth alongside her ear. She could feel the wing-brush of his lips moving. “Very close,” he said.

She thought about this again as she went outdoors and stood there in her sleep T-shirt, her hair flattened against the side of her head and nothing attractive about her at all, currently.

“George?” she called—yet again.

And she stepped tenderly barefoot across the gravel driveway
toward the garage. It was a wooden barnlike structure with high weeds growing up along the sides of it, and when she drew closer, a flurry of grasshoppers scattered, startled by her approach. Their dry wings made a maraca sound like rattlesnakes; she pulled her hair back into a ponytail and held it with her fist.

They hadn’t driven the Maserati since they arrived here. “Too conspicuous,” George Orson said. “There’s no sense in calling a lot of attention to ourselves,” he said, and then the next day she woke and he was already out of bed and he wasn’t in the house and she found him at last in the garage.

There were two cars in there. The Maserati was on the left, completely covered by an olive-green tarp. On the right was an old red and white Ford Bronco pickup, possibly from the 1970s or 80s. The hood of the pickup was open and George Orson was leaning into it.

He was wearing an old pair of mechanic’s coveralls, and she almost laughed out loud. She couldn’t imagine where he had found such an outfit.

“George,” she said. “I’ve been looking all over for you. What are you
doing?
”

“I’m fixing a truck,” he said.

“Oh,” she said.

And though he was basically still himself, he looked—what?
—costumed
in the dirty coveralls, his hair uncombed and standing up, fingers black with grease, and she felt a twinge.

“I didn’t know that you knew how to fix cars,” Lucy said, and George Orson gave her a long look. A sad look, she thought, as if he were recalling a mistake he’d made in the distant past.

“There are probably a lot of things you don’t know about me,” he said.

Which gave her pause, now, as she vacillated at the mouth of the garage.

The truck was gone, and a shiver of unease passed across her as
she stared at the bare cement floor, an oil spot in the dust where the old Bronco had been.

He’d gone out—had left her alone—had left her—

The Maserati was still there, still covered in its tarp. She was not completely abandoned.

Though she was aware that she didn’t have the key to the Maserati.

And even if she
did
have a key, she didn’t know how to drive a stick shift.

She mulled this over, looked at the shelves: oil cans and bottles of nuclear-blue windshield wiper fluid and jars full of screws and bolts and nails and washers.

Nebraska was even worse than Ohio—if such a thing were possible. There was a soundlessness about this place, she thought, though sometimes the wind made the glass in the windowpanes hum, the wind running in a long exhaled stream through the weeds and dust and dry bed of the lake, and sometimes unexpectedly there would be a very startling sonic boom over the house as a military plane broke the sound barrier, and there was the rattle of the grasshoppers leaping from one weed to the next—

But mostly it was silence, a kind of end-of-the-world hush, and you could feel the sky sealing over you like the glass around a snow globe.

She was still in the garage when George Orson returned.

She had pulled back the tarp from the Maserati, and she was sitting in the driver’s seat and wishing that she knew how to hot-wire a car. How appropriate, she thought, for George Orson to come back and find his beloved Maserati missing, and it would serve him right, and she liked to imagine the look on his face when she pulled back up the driveway sometime after dark—

She was still fantasizing about this when George Orson drove into the space beside her with the old Bronco. He looked puzzled
as he opened the door—why was the tarp off of his Maserati?—but when he saw her sitting there, his expression opened into a gratifying look of alarm.

“Lucy?” he said. He was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, very nondescript—his version of a native costume—and she had to admit that he didn’t look like a wealthy man. He didn’t even look like a teacher, with his face unshaved and his hair growing out and his jaw hard with suspicion, he could actually be said to look menacing and middle-aged. Briefly she had a memory of the father of her friend Kayleigh, who was divorced and lived in Youngstown and drank too much, and who had taken them to the Cedar Point amusement park when they were twelve, and she could imagine Kayleigh’s father in the parking lot of Cedar Point leaning up against the hood of the car, smoking a cigarette as they came toward him, she remembered being aware of the way his arms were muscled and his eyes were fixed on her, and she thought,
Is he staring at my boobs?

“Lucy, what are you doing?” George Orson said, and she looked at him hard.

Of course, the real George Orson was still there, underneath, if he cleaned himself up.

“I was just getting ready to drive off in your car and steal it and go to Mexico,” Lucy said.

And his face settled back into itself, into the George Orson she knew, the George Orson who loved it when she was sarcastic.

“Sweetie,” George Orson said. “I made a quick trip into town, that’s all. I had to get some supplies—and I wanted to make you a nice dinner.”

“I don’t like being ditched,” Lucy said sternly.

“You were sleeping,” George Orson said. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

He ran a hand across the back of his hair—yes, he realized it was getting shaggy—and then he reached down and opened the door to the Maserati and climbed into the passenger seat.

“I left a note,” he said. “On the kitchen table. I guess you didn’t find it.”

“No,” she said. They were silent, and she couldn’t help it, that slow, vacant feeling was opening up inside her chest, that end-of-the-world loneliness, and she put her hands on the steering wheel as if she were driving somewhere.

“I don’t appreciate being left alone here,” she said.

They looked at each other.

“I’m sorry,” George Orson said.

His hand lowered over hers, and she could feel the smooth pressure of his palm against the back of her hand, and he was, after all, possibly the only person left in the world who truly loved her.

B
ack in the days before Hayden began to believe that his phone was being tapped, back when he and Miles were in their early twenties, he used to call fairly frequently. Once a month, sometimes more.

The phone would ring in the middle of the night. Two
A.M.
Three
A.M.
“It’s me,” Hayden would say, though of course who else would it be, at such an hour? “Thank God you finally picked up the phone,” he would say. “Miles, you’ve got to help me, I can’t sleep.”

Sometimes he would be worked up about an article he had read on psychic phenomena or reincarnation, past lives, spiritualism. The usual.

Sometimes he would start ranting on the subject of their childhood, telling stories about events that Miles had no memory of whatsoever—events he was fairly certain Hayden had invented.

But there was no arguing with him. If Miles expressed any reservation or doubt, Hayden could easily become defensive, belligerent, and then who knew what would happen? The one time they’d
gotten into a heated disagreement about his “memories,” Hayden had slammed down the phone and hadn’t called again for more than two months. Miles was beside himself. Back then, Miles still believed that it was only a matter of time before he tracked Hayden down, only a matter of time before Hayden could be captured or otherwise induced to come home. He had an image of Hayden, calmed and perhaps medicated, the two of them sharing a small apartment, peaceably playing video games after Miles came home from work. Starting a business together. He knew this was ridiculous.

Still, when Hayden resurfaced at last, Miles was very conciliatory. He was so relieved that he told himself he was never going to argue with Hayden again, no matter what Hayden said.

It was four in the morning, and Miles was sitting up in bed, holding the phone tightly, his heart beating fast. “Just tell me where you are, Hayden,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“Miles, Miles,” Hayden said. “I love it that you worry!”

He claimed that he was living in Los Angeles; he had a bungalow, he said, right off Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake. “You won’t find me if you come looking for me,” he said, “but if it makes you feel any better, that’s where I am.”

“I’m relieved,” Miles said, and he took out one of the yellow sticky notes he kept on his nightstand and wrote: “Sunset Blvd.” and “Silver Lake.”

“I’m relieved, too,” Hayden said. “You’re the only one I can really talk to, you know that, don’t you?” Miles listened as Hayden drew an extended breath that he imagined was probably smoke from a joint. “You’re the only person in the world who still loves me.”

Hayden had been thinking a lot about their childhood—or rather,
his
childhood, since the truth was Miles didn’t recall any of the incidents Hayden was obsessing about. But Miles kept his objections to himself. It was the first time Hayden had called him since their
argument, and Miles stared down at his little sticky note in silence as Hayden held forth.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about Mr. Breeze,” Hayden was saying. “Do you remember him?”

And Miles wavered. “Well,” Miles said, and Hayden made an impatient sound.

“He was that hypnotist, don’t you remember?” Hayden said. “He was pretty good friends with Mom and Dad—he was always at those parties back in the day. I think he dated Aunt Helen for a while.”

“Uh-huh,” Miles said, noncommittally. “And his name was ‘Mr. Breeze’?”

“That was probably his stage name,” Hayden said. His voice stiffened. “Geez, Miles, you don’t remember anything. You never paid attention, you know that?”

“I guess not,” Miles said.

Supposedly, according to Hayden, this incident with Mr. Breeze happened at one of the parties their parents used to have. It was late at night, the wee hours, and Hayden came down to the kitchen in his pajamas, couldn’t sleep, sweaty from the top bunk, the forced air vent had been blowing from the ceiling onto him, he’d been awake anyway from the sounds of music and laughter and the thick hum of adult talking that came wafting through the floorboards and into his dreams. As for Miles, he would have been peacefully asleep in the bottom bunk.
Insensate
, as always.

The two of them, Miles and Hayden, were eight years old but small for their age, and Hayden was cute and solemn as he drank his glass of water in the kitchen. Mr. Breeze lifted him up and put him on a stool at the counter.

“Tell me, little boy,” Mr. Breeze said, in his deep, deep voice. “Do you know what ‘cryptomnesia’ means?”

Mr. Breeze looked down into Hayden’s eyes as if he were admiring his own reflection in a pool, and he took his index finger and
let it hover right at the center of Hayden’s forehead, though he didn’t let it touch.

“Do you ever remember things that didn’t really happen to you?” Mr. Breeze said.

“No,” Hayden said. He looked, unsmiling, back at Mr. Breeze, in the way he always looked adults in the eye: impertinent. Their aunt Helen had come in and she stayed, watching.

“Portis,” she said. “Don’t tease that child.”

“I’m not,” Mr. Breeze said. He was dressed in black jeans and a flowered cowboy shirt, and he had lines around his mouth that looked as if someone had ironed creases there. He peered kindly at Hayden’s face.

“You’re not afraid, are you, young man?” Mr. Breeze said. Out in the next room, there was the sound of the party, some bluesy rock song, some people slow-dancing; out in the yard, a drunk lady wept bitterly while a drunken friend tried to counsel her.

“We’re just going to take a wee peek at his past lives,” Mr. Breeze told Aunt Helen. And he beamed at Hayden. “What do you think about that, Hayden? All the people that you used to be, once upon a time!” Mr. Breeze drew in a soft, anticipatory breath, barely audible.

“I so seldom get a chance to work with a child,” he said.

This Mr. Breeze was fiercely drunk, Miles imagined. So was Aunt Helen, probably. So were all the other adults in the house.

But even drunk Mr. Breeze held Hayden pinned fast with only the pupils of his eyes. “You want to be hypnotized, don’t you, Hayden?” he said.

Hayden’s lips parted, and his tongue tingled in his mouth.

“Yes,” Hayden heard himself say.

The gaze of Mr. Breeze locked into Hayden like one puzzle piece fits into another.

“I want you to tell me what it was like when you died,” Mr. Breeze said. “That moment,” he said. “Tell me about that moment.”

Mr. Breeze had taken Hayden and slit him open the way a fisherman would slit open the belly of a trout. That was what Hayden said. “Not my physical body,” Hayden explained. “It was my spirit. Whatever you want to call it. My soul. You know. Inner self.”

“What do you mean by ‘slit’ you open,” Miles said uneasily. “I don’t get it.”

“I’m not saying sexual,” Hayden said. “You always assume sexual, Miles, you pervert.”

Miles shifted the phone where it was making an uncomfortable, sweaty spot against his ear. It was getting close to five in the morning.

“So—?” Miles said.

“So that was how it started,” Hayden said. “Mr. Breeze told me I had more past lives than any other person he’d ever met—”

“A harvest,
” Mr. Breeze told Hayden. “You produce an unusually large harvest,” he said. The lives were clustered inside of Hayden like roe—

“Fish eggs,” Hayden said. “That’s what ‘roe’ means.”

“Yes, I
know,
” Miles said, and Hayden sighed.

“The thing is, Miles,” Hayden said, “no one realizes, once these things have been opened up, you can’t close them again. That’s what I’m trying to explain to you. If most people had to live with the memories I’ve had to live with, a lot of them would kill themselves.”

“You mean your nightmares,” Miles said.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s how we used to refer to them. I know better now.”

“Like the pirate stuff,” Miles said.

“Pirate stuff,
” Hayden said, and then he was witheringly silent. “You make it sound like some little romp through Neverland.”

The pirate stuff, so-called, had been one of the recurring nightmares of Hayden’s childhood, but they hadn’t talked about it in
years. It was true that he used to wake up screaming. Horrible, horrible screams. Miles could still hear them vividly.

In the dream Hayden used to talk about, he was a boy on a pirate ship. A cabin boy, Miles supposed. Hayden remembered a coil of heavy rope where he would curl up to sleep. There was the dense flapping of the sails and the creak of the masts as he lay there trying to rest, and the smell of wet wood and barnacles, and when he opened his eyes a crack, he would see the bare dirty feet of the pirates, which always had infected sores on them. He would huddle there, hoping not to be noticed, because sometimes the pirates would give him a kick. Sometimes they would grab him by the back of his shirt or his hair and yank him onto his feet.

“They always want me to kiss them,” Hayden would tell Miles. This was back when he was eight, ten years old, and he had woken up screaming. “They always want me to kiss them on the lips.” He grimaced: their breath, their nasty teeth, the filth in their beards.

“Gross,” Miles said. And he remembered thinking even then that there was an unnatural quality to Hayden’s dreams. The pirates would kiss Hayden, and sometimes they would cut off a hank of hair—“as a reminder of yer kisses, me lad”—and one of them even cut off a piece of his earlobe.

This particular pirate was Bill McGregor, and he was the one Hayden feared the most. Bill McGregor was the worst of them—and at night when everyone else was asleep, Bill McGregor would come looking for Hayden, his step slow and hollow on the planks of the deck, his voice a deep whisper.

“Boy,” he would murmur. “Where are you, boy?”

After Bill McGregor cut off the piece of Hayden’s earlobe, he decided that he wanted more. Every time he caught Hayden, he would cut a small piece off of him. The skin of an elbow, the tip of a finger, a piece of his lip. He would grip the squirming Hayden and cut a piece off of him, and then Bill McGregor would eat the piece of flesh.

“And when I’m finished playing with ye,” Bill McGregor whispered, “I’m going to sneak up behind you and—”

Which is exactly what he did, according to Hayden. It was a spring night and Bill McGregor came up from behind him and clapped his hands tightly over Hayden’s eyes and slit his throat and tossed him overboard, and Hayden went flailing into the sea with his neck clutched between his hands as if he were trying to throttle himself, blood gurgling out between his fingers. He could see a trickle of blood droplets falling upward as he plunged headfirst into the ocean—he was aware of the moon and the starry sky vanishing beneath his feet, the swallowing sound he made when he hit the water, the fish flitting away as he sank deeper, strands of seaweed, unfurling eddies of jugular blood, his mouth opening and closing, limbs growing limp.

His exact moment of death.

Yes, of course Miles knew about this. Hayden had the dream regularly when they were kids, once or twice a week sometimes. He would jump down into the bottom bunk and under the covers with Miles—and if Miles wasn’t awake yet, he would shake him until he was. “Miles,” he would say. “Miles! Nightmares! Oh, God! Nightmares!” And he would curl up around Miles as if they were back together in their mother’s belly.

Miles had always prided himself on the fact that he was a good brother. He never got angry, no matter how many times he heard the story of Bill McGregor and so on.

But when he mentioned something to that effect, Hayden didn’t speak for a long time.

“Oh,
right,
” Hayden said. “You were such a good brother to me.”

They sat there listening to each other breathing. On Hayden’s end, there was the gurgling sound of a bong. Not surprising.

Yes, Miles knew what he was getting at. Hayden thought that he should have stuck by him no matter what. He thought that Miles
should have just thrown away his relationship with their mother and the rest of the family and sided with him, no matter how extreme his stories and quarrels and accusations became.

This wasn’t a topic that Miles felt comfortable discussing, but with Hayden it was difficult to avoid. Sooner or later, every conversation would circle back to these various obsessions that he had, his nightmares, his memories, his grudges against their family—

“His pathological lies,” their mother called them. “He is a deeply, deeply troubled person, Miles,” she said, on any number of occasions. She used to warn him that he was too easily deceived, that he was too much Hayden’s follower—“his little factotum,” she said, acidly.

This was during that period when she was trying to get Hayden institutionalized and she said, “Just you wait, Miles, sweetheart, because someday he will betray you just like he has betrayed everyone else. It’s only a matter of time.”

And so when Hayden called and said that he needed help, he needed his brother’s help—“Just to talk awhile, I can’t sleep, Miles, please just talk to me”—well, Miles couldn’t keep from thinking of his mother’s warning.

It was especially difficult when Hayden would insist so strongly on his version of their lives, his version of events. Events that Miles was pretty certain had never actually happened.