by Dan Chaon
“Somewhere,” he said, “if we can find the key to the filing cabinet.”
But now, standing in the study, she couldn’t help but take another look at the safe. She couldn’t help but reach out and test the brass and ivory handle just to be sure that, yes, it was still locked and sealed and impenetrable.
Not that she would steal from George Orson. Not that she was obsessed with money—
But she had to admit that it was a concern. She had to admit that she was very much looking forward to leaving Pompey, Ohio, and being rich with George Orson, and probably it was true that this was part of the attraction of this whole adventure.
In September of her senior year of high school, two months after her parents’ deaths, Lucy was just a depressed student in George Orson’s Advanced Placement American history class.
He had been a new teacher, a new person in their town, and it was obvious even on the first day of class that he had a presence, with his black clothes and his uncanny way of making eye contact with people, those green eyes, the way he smiled at them as if they were all doing something illicit together.
“American history—the history that you have learned up until now—is full of lies,” George Orson told them, and he paused over the word “lies” as if he liked the taste of it. She thought he must be from New York City or Chicago or wherever, he wouldn’t stay long, she thought, but actually she did pay more attention than she was expecting to.
And then in study hall she heard some boys talking about George Orson’s car. The car was a Maserati Spyder, she had noticed it herself, a tiny silver convertible big enough for only two people, almost like a toy.
“Did you get a look at it?” she overheard a boy saying—Todd Zilka, whom Lucy loathed. He was a football player, a big athletic person who was nevertheless the son of a lawyer and did well enough in school that he had been inducted into the National Honor Society, after which Lucy herself had stopped going to meetings. If she had been braver, she would have resigned, denounced her membership. In middle school, it had been Todd Zilka who had started calling her “Lice-y”—which wouldn’t have been such a big deal except that she and her sister actually had contracted head lice, pediculosis, and were dismissed from school in shame until the infestation could be cleared up, and even years later people still called her “Lice-y,” it might be the only thing they remembered about her when their twenty-year reunion rolled around.
“Toddzilla,” was Lucy’s own private name for Todd Zilka, though she did not have the power to make such a name stick on him.
The fact that a creature like Toddzilla could thrive and become popular was one good reason to leave Pompey, Ohio, forever.
Nevertheless, she listened surreptitiously as he spouted his stupid opinions to his idiotic friends in study hall. “I mean,” he was saying, “I’d like to know where a crummy high school teacher gets money for a car like that. It’s like, an Italian import, you know? Probably costs seventy grand!”
And, despite herself, that gave her pause. Seventy thousand dollars was an impressive amount of money. She thought again of George Orson standing in front of them in the classroom, George Orson in his tight black shirt talking about how Woodrow Wilson was a white supremacist and quoting Anaïs Nin:
“We see things not as they are, but as we are. Because it is the ‘I’ behind the ‘eye’ that does the seeing.”
And then one afternoon not long later, Toddzilla raised his hand and George Orson gestured toward him, hopefully. As if they might be about to discuss the Constitution together.
“Yes …? Ah—Todd?” George Orson said, and Toddzilla grinned, showing his large orthodontic teeth.
“So Mr. O,” he said. He was one of those teenage jock boys who thought it was cool to call teachers and other adults by trite, jocky nicknames. “So Mr. O,” Toddzilla said. “Where’d you get your car? That’s an awesome car.”
“Oh,” George Orson said. “Thank you.”
“What make is that? Is that a Maserati?”
“It is.” George Orson looked at the rest of them, and Lucy thought that for a fraction of a second she and George Orson had looked directly at each other, that they were in communion, silently agreeing that Toddzilla was a Neanderthal. Then George Orson turned his attention down to his desk, to the syllabus or whatever.
“So, why would you become a high school teacher if you can afford a car like that?” Toddzilla said.
“Well, I guess I just find teaching high school really fulfilling,” George Orson said. Straight-faced. He looked again at Lucy, and the corners of his mouth lifted enough so that his dimple peeked out. There was a sharpness, a glint of secret hilarity that perhaps only she could see. Lucy smiled. He was funny, she thought. Interesting.
But Todd hadn’t liked it. Later, in study hall, in the cafeteria, she heard him repeating the same question, critically. “How can a high school teacher afford a car like that?” Toddzilla wanted to know. “Full-fucking-filling, my ass. I think he’s some rich pervert or something. He just likes to be around teenagers.”
Which was probably the first time she thought: Hmmm. She herself was intrigued by the idea of a wealthy George Orson, his soft but masculine, veiny hands.
They had left Pompey in the Maserati, and maybe that had been the reason she felt so confident. She looked good in that car, she thought, people would look at them as they were cruising down the interstate, a guy in an SUV who watched her as they passed, and he made a display of winking at her, like a silent movie actor or a mime. Wink. And she made her own show of not noticing, though in fact she had even bought a tube of bright red lipstick, sort of as a joke, but when she looked at herself in the passenger side mirror, she was privately pleased by the effect. Who would you be if you weren’t Lucy?
Which was a question they found themselves talking about frequently, when George Orson wasn’t sequestered in the “study.”
Who would you be?
One day, George Orson found an old set of bow and arrows in the garage, and they went down to the beach to try shooting them. He hadn’t been able to find an actual target, and so he spent a lot of time setting up various objects for Lucy to shoot arrows at. A pyramid stack of soda cans, for example. An ancient beach ball, which inflated only halfheartedly. A large cardboard box, which he drew circles on with black Magic Marker.
And as Lucy nocked her arrow into the string and drew back the bow, trying to aim, George Orson would ask her questions.
“Would you rather be an unpopular dictator, or a popular president?”
“That’s easy,” Lucy said.
“Would you rather be poor and live in a beautiful place, or be rich and live in an ugly place?”
“I don’t think poor people ever live in beautiful places,” she said.
“Would you rather drown, or freeze to death, or die in a fire?”
“George,” she said, “why are you always so morbid?” And he smiled tightly.
“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 fe
el 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.
9
Back 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 Hay
den 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?”