Always

by Sophie Lark

  The concierge did in fact come outside, but he didn’t chivvy her away. Instead he took out a vape pen and took a few discreet puffs, exhaling away from her.

  “I smoked for forty-two years,” he said. “I’m trying to quit, finally.”

  “That’s very admirable,” Anika said. “Don’t worry, I won’t stay here too long. I’m just trying to figure out the best way to find my friend.”

  “I don’t mind,” the concierge said kindly. “It’s just that I don’t want you to be waiting.”

  “What do you mean?” Anika asked.

  “I can’t give out any information,” he said, taking another puff and exhaling slowly, “but you know, when you work the front desk you get familiar with the cabbies and the Uber drivers that mostly make airport runs. And of course, a suitcase is a clue, too.”

  “Oh,” Anika said. “Oh! Thank you!”

  She hopped up again.

  “Good luck finding your friend,” the concierge said, tucking his vape pen back into his pocket.

  “Yes! Thank you!” Anika said again.

  Of course this information didn’t tell her where James had gone, but it did indicate who would be likely to know. James and Liam were embroiled in preparations for their hedge fund—it was likely that James’s trip was in service to that cause. If so, Liam would know the details.

  Anika was already pulling out her phone. It was ten p.m. now. Late to call Liam, but it couldn’t be helped.

  “Liam!” she said when he answered. “I hope I didn’t wake you up?”

  “Oh please,” he said with a chuckle. “I’m old, but I’m not that old. I was just reading. What can I do for you, Anika?”

  “Do you know where James went? He flew somewhere today, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Liam said, “he went to Hong Kong.”

  “Hong Kong?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know when he’ll be back?”

  “I’m afraid not. Is anything wrong?”

  “No,” she said hesitantly. For a moment, Anika considered spilling the whole story to Liam. She suspected that he already knew or had guessed most of it.

  Actually, what she really wanted to do was ask him, Does James still have feelings for me?

  But there was no real purpose to asking. Because regardless of Liam’s answer, Anika already knew that she was getting on a plane.

  “No, nothing’s wrong,” she said firmly. “Only, if you speak to James, please ask him to call me.”

  “I will,” Liam promised.

  “Wait,” she said, before Liam hung up. “Do you know where he’s staying in Hong Kong? What hotel?”

  “No,” Liam said, “I’m sorry. I can try to call him?”

  “That’s alright,” Anika said. “I’ll let you get back to reading.”

  Anika ordered a car again.

  When the driver pulled up, she considered asking him to swing by her house first so she could pack a bag, grab her toothbrush even. But she felt compelled to hurry, hurry, as fast as she could. She couldn’t chance one more thing happening before she could speak to James.

  So when the driver asked, “To the airport?” Anika replied, “Yes, please, as quickly as you can.”

  The driver laughed and said, “Nobody ever wants me to get them there slow.”

  And then, because he could see Anika’s anxiety, he assured her, “Don’t worry, not much traffic tonight.”

  Still, every minute, every red light felt like torture to her.

  She was glad she hadn’t stopped to pack. Thank god she always kept her passport in her purse, since she didn’t drive and had no license to use as ID. Maybe she could pick up a few toiletries at the airport after she checked in.

  As the car sped ahead, she used her phone to book the first available flight to Hong Kong.

  22

  Though Anika had visited many places in her life, she had never been to Asia. Shortly before her mother fell sick, they had planned an elaborate, much-anticipated, trip to Japan, prompted by Anika’s teenage reading of the historical novel Shogun, and her subsequent infatuation with all things samurai. Of course the trip never happened, and Anika hadn’t been able to muster the same enthusiasm to visit that corner of the world since.

  She knew Hong Kong was nothing like Japan. But other than a few basic facts, she knew little else about the island nation. A long time ago, Aunt Molly had lived there for a few months when she was dating a British financier. That was before the territory had reverted to Chinese rule.

  Anika expected it to be extremely wealthy, packed with people, and speaking a language of which she knew not a single character. This was a problem, since she also had no idea where she was going. She didn’t even know the name of James’s hotel.

  She had already booked the first flight out of JFK the next morning. Once she arrived at the airport, she spoke to a helpful ticket agent who offered to put her on standby for an even earlier flight with Cathay Pacific. If they could find a space for her, she’d be departing at nine a.m.

  The good news was that the flight was nonstop. The bad news was that it was sixteen hours and ten minutes long. And she’d be in coach. Anika pictured that stretch of time crammed into a stiff, narrow, upright seat, horribly close to a seat-mate of undetermined awfulness, and decided it was a price worth paying.

  “I’ll take the standby,” she said.

  Anika passed through security easily—it was quite a streamlined process, when all you had was the clothes on your back and a purse. With time to kill, she wandered around the airport looking for a shop to buy some basic toiletries and then somewhere to eat a midnight snack.

  She found a little restaurant that served breakfast twenty-four hours a day. She ordered fruit, yogurt, oatmeal, and tea, and sat down to eat. Knowing that internet service would be spotty up in the plane, she wanted to use the opportunity to do some reconnaissance.

  Anika was not nearly as versed in social media stalking as Stella or Hannah, but she had read more than a few Sherlock Holmes stories, as well as watched an inordinate amount of Law and Order. She knew that small details could contain a multitude of information.

  Still, it was a ludicrous task she had set for herself. Even assuming that James was in Hong Kong proper, and not one of the outlying cities like Kowloon, she was still looking at a proverbial haystack of seven million people.

  Yet somehow, Anika was full of hope. She was a practical person, a rational person. She didn’t usually believe in luck or destiny. But today she felt that she would find James, somehow, some way. And if she could find him, and speak to him face to face, everything could be set right between them at last.

  Her first strategy was to check Facebook, but it seemed like Hannah was right in saying that nobody under forty used Facebook anymore—James didn’t even have a profile, let alone a recent post mentioning where he was staying. Anika checked Google news, hoping that James might be famous enough to have prompted a mention about his activities, but she drew a blank there too. The only stories were from months back when he had sold his company.

  He did have an Instagram account, it appeared, and thankfully it was public. However, it was not an account like Hannah’s with dozens of pictures and stories detailing the ongoing progress of her day. Oddly, it didn’t even include pictures of James himself, not at parties and events as she would have expected, and not even in more casual settings like on a beach or a ski hill.

  Instead, all the photos were snapshots of places and objects, most of them uncaptioned and untagged. Here was a bowl of peaches on a wooden table. Here was a mosaic of Moroccan tiles. Here was a little cactus in a turquoise pot. Here was a bird on a snowy branch. Some Roman coins under glass. And old man pouring tea. A wild rabbit. Skateboarders at Venice Beach.

  Anika recognized the location of the last photo. She’d been to Venice Beach a couple of times and had ridden a bike past that skate park. She checked whether the photo had a pin attached. It did, and indeed the location was noted as Venice Bea
ch.

  As she scrolled through, she could see that while James didn’t generally pin the location of specific buildings (the Sydney Opera House appeared in the corner of a picture of a lobsterman on a pier, but the location was only noted as Sydney, Australia), he did at least generally indicate the country. In this way, scrolling back through the last two years, Anika saw that he had been to Hong Kong at least three times.

  At no point during those visits had he tagged a particular address or hotel, but she did notice something from the last two visits, a single shared location: one was a photo of a child’s train, left abandoned on a floor made of bright green marble. And a few months later, there was another picture posted from Hong Kong, of a brilliant array of tropical flowers, beneath which could be seen a square of that same green marble. Anika couldn’t be certain, but it appeared that both pictures were taken in the same hotel lobby.

  If James had stayed at the same hotel on two previous visits, was it not likely that he had returned there again? Was he the sort that always stayed at the same place, as long as the showers were good and the bed was soft?

  For all the hundreds of things she knew about James, she didn’t know this, because they’d never taken any trips together.

  Well, it was the best clue she had for now. Operating under the assumption that James either hadn’t seen her calls and texts, or wasn’t planning to respond to them, she would use whatever she could to find him.

  Screen-shotting the photo off Instagram, she did a reverse image search, hoping to find a similar photo tagged with the name of the hotel. No luck there. So she simply started searching Hong Kong hotels, focusing on those closest to the financial district. She checked their home pages, looking for pictures of their lobbies.

  After an hour of this, she had a list of six hotels with green floor tiles that might possibly match the ones in James’s photos. It was difficult to be certain, since of course the angles and the objects shown on the hotel websites were not the same as what James had chosen to snap.

  At this point, it was nearly three in the morning. The physical and emotional exhaustion of Anika’s day were beginning to hit her like a slap to the face.

  She paid her bill and walked over closer to her departure gate to find a couple of adjoining seats where she could stretch out with her head on her purse to try to catch a nap before her plane started boarding.

  23

  Though Anika tried her best to be a grounded person, someone who lived in the real world instead of the la la land of wealth and privilege, she did occasionally bump up against the hard truth of what it was like to truly live a plebeian life.

  For example, she had never actually flown coach before. It turned out to be just about as miserable as Seinfeld had led her to believe. It didn’t help that she was sandwiched between two large businessmen, who commandeered the armrests and slept so heavily that she had to physically climb over the one on her right to escape to the toilets to take a pee.

  Her general state of nervousness, her anxiety to get to Hong Kong as quickly as possible and her fear that it would all be for nothing when she did arrive did not help the situation. She couldn’t focus on any of the movies playing on the tiny television screen embedded in the seat-back in front of her, nor could she read the ebooks stored on her phone.

  She did eventually catch a few fitful hours of sleep, only to be woken by the flight attendants delivering a meal that was not worth waking up for.

  Still, all these things were nothing, nothing compared to the shock of landing in Hong Kong.

  Anika had never been anywhere so completely foreign. As soon as she exited the airport, taking a cab into the city, she was hit by the sounds, the smells, and the humidity. New York was no stranger to hot summers, but she had arrived at the tail end of monsoon season, and the thick mugginess of the air was like nothing she had ever felt.

  The same could be said of the crowds. She was used to being surrounded by hundreds of people, but somehow the chatter of voices in a language she couldn’t understand, the styles of clothing like and yet unlike what she was used to, the patterns of traffic and pedestrians shifting in ways that were not as predictable to her, all combined to confuse and amaze her. And the billboards! Everywhere she looked, dozens upon dozens of billboards were stacked and layered and stretched all the way across the street, some brilliant neon, some hand-painted, some in English, many more in Cantonese, a riot of color and light all shouting for attention.

  She was relieved that her cab driver spoke good English, and he assured her that at least half the people on the island did.

  “Half the people speak English,” he said, “half Mandarin, and everybody speaks Cantonese.”

  “Do you know many of the hotels?” Anika asked him. “The ones downtown?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Have you ever seen this one?”

  Anika showed him the photos on her phone.

  “Do you know which hotel that is? In the pictures?”

  “You have a picture of the front?” he asked her.

  “No, just those.”

  “Sorry,” he said, shaking his head, “I don’t go inside, usually.”

  “Okay,” Anika said. “Let’s try the Pottinger first, then.”

  It was the most luxurious of the hotels she’d found via image search. She really wasn’t sure whether the James of today stayed in the most opulent hotels, or more casual spots, but it seemed as good a place to start as any.

  Her flight had arrived at 2:10 p.m. Hong Kong time, it was now half past three. Anika was starving, but she had an even more pressing need: before she entered the hotel, she walked a few blocks up the street looking for a place to buy some fresh clothing. The long flight had not been kind to her; she felt wrinkled, sweaty, and disgusting. She found a little boutique that carried not only an array of summery dresses, but also a rack of cotton bras and underwear.

  Anika bought a pale blue sundress and fresh underwear, plus a pair of sandals. At the airport, she had exchanged the cash in her purse for Hong Kong dollars, but the shop took her credit card without issue. Actually, it seemed to process faster than most places back home, and the clerk wrapped her purchases in tissue with a speedy efficiency, and a polite “Thank you for your business!” that likewise put to shame plenty of her customer service interactions in SoHo.

  No wonder China is taking over the world, Anika thought.

  Carrying her shopping bag, she entered the first hotel on her list.

  She could tell at once it was the wrong place. It was much smaller than the lobby in James’s picture, and the pillars didn’t match. She did take the opportunity to show James’s photo to the concierge, asking if perhaps she recognized the hotel?

  “I’m so sorry,” the pretty receptionist said, in impeccable English. “I don’t recognize it. Would you like a recommendation for some other places you could stay? I’m afraid we’re fully booked.”

  “No,” Anika said, “thank you, though. Is it alright if I use your bathroom before I leave?”

  “Of course,” the receptionist said.

  The bathroom was bigger and far nicer than many an apartment in New York. The sink was a trough large enough to bathe cattle in, with a basket of fluffy towels to dry one’s hands and a second basket full of toiletries, all of which smelled divine. With no one around to judge her, Anika half stripped and washed every place she could reach, even her hair. Then she changed into the fresh clothes she had bought, dumping the wrinkled, dirty ones into the trash.

  She brushed her teeth using a plastic toothbrush and miniature tube of toothpaste she’d gotten at the airport, then applied deodorant and perfume from the hotel’s basket. Soon she was feeling like a completely new person.

  She brushed her damp hair as well, but there was no point trying to do much with it, besides letting it curl up as much as it wanted to in the humidity. She did pin it back a little with a barrette from her purse. Throwing her bag back over her shoulder, she strode out of the bathroom, fee
ling refreshed and ready.

  This sense of renewal lasted while she visited the second hotel and the third. By the time she reached the fourth, her confidence was flagging. No one seemed to recognize the lobby from the odd angle of her pictures, and she was beginning to realize how very alike most of the hotels looked in general, from the furniture to the chandeliers. She couldn’t even be 100% certain that she hadn’t failed to recognize one she had already visited.

  Not to mention, she thought miserably, You have no idea if James is even staying at the same place again.

  Worst of all, it was getting late. Anika was going to have to book a room at the next place she visited, whether it was James’s hotel or not.

  At the fifth hotel on her list, she pleaded with the short, slightly chubby concierge to take a look at the pictures in case he might recognize her target.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I haven’t been to that many other hotels, and I can’t say I’d remember the floor anyway. But...” and he paused, looking at a previous photo on James’s Instagram feed. “This...” he said, hesitantly.

  “What?” Anika asked.

  It was a shot of the Hong Kong harbor, taken from a corner window seat. The cushioned bench met at a point where a single slim bar divided two huge plate glass windows, through which could be seen a nearly 180 degree view of the water, dotted with barges and sailboats, ringed on either side by an array of shorter skyscrapers.

  “This was taken from a hotel,” the concierge said.

  “Which one?” Anika asked breathlessly.

  “It’s the reading room at the Ritz-Carlton,” he said. “My cousin works there.”

  Anika could have kissed him.

  “Thank you! Thank you!” she cried.

  Her next cab driver didn’t speak English, but he recognized the words “Ritz-Carlton” well enough. He drove her to a tall glass tower located at the very edge of a spit of land jutting out into the waters of the western harbor.

  As soon as Anika entered the lobby, she knew she had found the right place. Though it no longer contained a vase of tropical flowers, Anika recognized the same table from James’s photo, and of course the same pale green tile.