by Dan Chaon
“Who is Oliver Aku—?” she said, stumbling over the pronunciation, in the way she’d once clumped ungracefully through French sentences in Mme Fournier’s class. “Akubueze,” she tried again, and George Orson smiled wanly.
“He’s nobody,” George Orson said, and then after a brief hesitation, he tilted his head regretfully. He had promised to answer any question she asked. “He’s—just a middleman. A contact. I had to pay him off, of course. But that wasn’t a problem.”
Their gazes met, and she remembered what George Orson had once told her about how he used to take classes in hypnosis: those bright green eyes were perfect for it, she thought. He peered at her, and his eyes said: You must relax. His eyes said: Can you trust me? His eyes said: Aren’t we still in love?
Perhaps. Perhaps he did love her.
Perhaps he was only trying to take care of her, as he said.
But it was frustrating, because even with all these documents in front of her, he was still vague with the truth. He was a thief, that much he had admitted, but she still didn’t understand where the money had come from, or how he had managed to acquire it, or who, exactly, was looking for him.
“I didn’t steal from a person, Lucy—that’s what you have to understand. I didn’t take money from a sweet old rich lady, or a gangster, or a small-town credit union in Pompey, Ohio. I’ve taken money—embezzled, let’s say—from an entity. A very large, global entity. Which makes things a bit more complicated. I mean,” he said, “I remember that you used to be interested in someday working for an international investment firm. Like Goldman Sachs. Right?
“And if, for example, you were able to figure out a way to skim money from the treasury of Goldman Sachs, you would soon come to understand that they would do everything in their power to find you and bring you to justice. They would utilize law enforcement, certainly, but they would probably also resort to other means. Private detectives. Bounty hunters. Would they employ assassins? Torturers? Probably not. But you understand what I’m saying.”
“No, I don’t, actually,” Lucy said. “Are you saying you stole money from Goldman Sachs?”
“No, no,” George Orson said. “That was just an example. I was just trying to …” And then he sighed, resignedly. A sound unlike George Orson, she thought, almost the opposite of the conspiratorial chuckle she’d first found so attractive and charming. “Look,” he said. “I wish things hadn’t come to this. I kept thinking I could just sort this out on my own and you wouldn’t even have to know about—any of this. I thought I could work everything out so you wouldn’t have to be involved.”
And he was quiet then, brooding, tapping the edge of his fingernail against his coffee cup. Tink, tink, tink. Both of them self-conscious and anxious. It was depressing, Lucy thought—and perhaps it actually had been better when she didn’t know anything, back when she was trusting him to take care of things, trusting that they were on their way somewhere wonderful, a shy but witty young woman and her urbane, mysterious older lover, maybe on a cruise ship on their way to Monaco or Playa del Carmen.
She reflected, letting this old fantasy brush briefly over her. Then, at last, she lowered her head to peruse the other documents George Orson had presented to her.
Here was the travel itinerary. From Denver to New York. From New York to Felix Houphouet Boigny airport in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
Here were the social security cards and birth certificates they would use: David Fremden, age thirty-five, and his daughter, Brooke Fremden, age fifteen.
“I can get the passports expedited; that won’t be a big problem,” George Orson was telling her. “We can have a rush passport in two to five days. But we would need to act right away. We’d have to go to a courthouse or a post office to put in the application tomorrow—”
But he stopped talking when she looked up at him. She was not going to be rushed. She was going to think about this scrupulously, and he needed to understand that.
“Who are they?” she said. “David and Brooke?”
George Orson gave her another reproachful frown. Still, even now, recalcitrant with his information. But he had promised to answer.
“They aren’t anybody in particular,” he said wearily. “They’re just people.” And he passed the palm of his hand across his hair. “They died,” he said. “A father and daughter, killed in an apartment fire in Chicago about a week ago. Which is why these documents are quite useful to us, right now. There’s a window of time, before the deaths have been officially processed through the system.”
“I see,” she said again. It was about all she was able to think of to say, and she shut her eyes briefly. She didn’t want to picture them—David and Brooke, in their burning apartment building, gasping in the smoke and heat—and so instead she stared hard down at the birth certificate as if it were a list of test questions she was studying.
Certificate of Live Birth 112-89-0053
Brooke Catherine Fremden March 15,1993
4:22 A. Female Swedish Covenant Hospital
Chicago Cook County
Here was the maiden name of the mother: Robin Meredith Crowley, born in the state of Wisconsin, age thirty-one at the time of Brooke’s birth.
“So,” Lucy said after she had perused this document mutely for a while. “What about the mom? Robin. Won’t they ask about her?”
“She actually died some time ago,” George Orson said, and made a small, shrugging gesture. “When Brooke was ten, I think. Killed in a, hmmm.” And then he grew reticent, as if to spare Lucy’s feelings—or Brooke’s. “In any case,” he said. “The mother’s death certificate is there somewhere, too, if you want to …”
But Lucy just shook her head.
A car accident. She supposed that was what it was, but maybe she didn’t want to know.
“This girl is only fifteen,” Lucy said. “I don’t look like a fifteen-year-old.”
“True,” George Orson said. “I hope that I don’t look like I’m thirty-five, either, but we can work on that. Believe me, in my experience, people are not good at judging age.”
“Hmm,” Lucy said, still staring down at the document. Still thinking about the mom. Robin. About David and Brooke. Had they tried to escape the fire, had they died in their sleep?
The poor Fremdens. The whole family, gone from the face of the earth.
Outside, in the backyard, the late morning sun was burning brightly over the Japanese garden. The weeds were tall and thick, and there was no sign of the little bridge or the Kotoji lantern statue. The top of the weeping cherry rose up out of the weeds as if gasping for breath, the drooping branches like long wet hair.
There were so many, many things that were troubling about this situation, but she found that the one that actually bothered her the most was the idea of pretending to be George Orson’s daughter.
Why couldn’t they just be traveling companions? Boyfriend and girlfriend? Husband and wife? Even uncle and niece?
“I know, I know,” George Orson said.
It was uncomfortable because he was such a subdued George Orson, a diminished version of the George Orson she knew. He shifted in his chair as she turned from staring out at the backyard. “It’s regrettable,” he said. “To be honest, I’m not particularly happy about it, either. It’s more than a little creepy for me, as well. Not to mention that I’ve never had to think of myself as someone who’s old enough to have a teenage child!” He tried out a small laugh, as if she might find this amusing, but she didn’t. She wasn’t sure exactly how she was feeling, but she wasn’t in the mood to appreciate his clever remarks. He reached out to touch her leg, and then thought better of it, drew his hand back, and she watched his proffered smile shrink into a wince.
This wasn’t what she wanted, either: the tense discomfort that had developed between them ever since he had begun to tell her the truth. She had loved the way that they used to joke together. Repartee, George Orson called it, and it would be terrible if that was gone, if somehow things had changed so much
between them, if their old relationship was now lost, irretrievable. She had loved being Lucy and George Orson—“Lucy” and “George Orson”—and maybe it was just an act that they were doing for each other, but it had felt easy and natural and fun. It was her real self she had discovered when she met him.
“Believe me, Lucy,” he was saying now, very solemn and not like George Orson at all. “Believe me,” he said. “This wasn’t my first choice. But I didn’t have much recourse. In our current situation, it wasn’t particularly easy to acquire the documents we needed. I didn’t have a whole variety of choices.”
“Okay,” Lucy said. “I get it.”
“It’s just pretending,” George Orson said. “A game we’re playing.”
“I get it,” Lucy said again. “I understand what you’re saying.”
Though that didn’t necessarily make it any easier.
George Orson had “some things to take care of” in the afternoon.
Which was almost reassuring, at some level. Ever since they had come here, he had been disappearing for hours at a time—vanishing into the study and locking the door, or driving off without a word in the old pickup, off to town—and today was no different. After their talk, he’d been in a hurry to get back to his computer and she’d stood there in the entrance of his study looking at the big desk and the old painting with the safe behind it, like a prop in a bad murder mystery.
He put his hand on the doorknob. She could tell he wanted to close the door—though not in her face, of course—and he hesitated there, his smile first reassuring, then tightening.
“You probably need some time to yourself, in any case,” George Orson said.
“Yes,” she said. She watched as his fingertips twitched against the clear cut glass of the doorknob, and he followed her eyes, looked down at his impatient hand, as if it had disappointed him.
“You know that you don’t have to do this,” he said. “I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to leave. I realize that it’s a lot to ask of you.”
She wasn’t sure how to respond. She thought:
She thought:
Then he shut the door.
For a time, she paced outside of the study, and then she sat at the table in the dining room with a diet soda—it was a hot afternoon—and she pressed the cool damp can against her forehead.
She had been left to her own devices in this way for weeks now, left to watch TV endlessly, adjusting the ancient satellite dish that turned its head with a slow metallic hum, like the sound of an electric wheelchair; laying down hand after hand of solitaire with an old pack of her dad’s playing cards that she had brought with her for sentimental reasons; browsing through the bookshelves in the living room, a dreadful collection of old tomes that you might find in a box at an old lady’s yard sale. The Death of the Heart. From Here to Eternity. Marjorie Morningstar. Nothing anybody had ever heard of.
She was trying to think. Trying to imagine what to do, which was exactly the same thing she’d been doing for almost an entire year, ever since her parents had died. Scoping through the future in her mind, trying to draw a map for herself, looking out into a great expanse like a pilot over an ocean, looking for a place to land. And still no clear plan emerged.
But at least now she had more information.
4.3 million dollars.
Which was a significant and helpful detail, if in fact it could be believed. There were aspects to his story—to this whole thing—that felt exaggerated, or embellished, or distorted. Some aspect of the truth was concealed within what he’d told her, in the manner of those old picture puzzles she used to love as a child, drawings of ordinary landscapes in which simple pictographic figures—five seashells, or eight cowboy hats, or thirteen birds—had been hidden.
She selected an old hardcover from the shelf, and once again she riffled through the pages. Over the past few weeks, she had been through every book on the shelf, thinking that perhaps a note would drop out from between the pages. She had been through every cabinet in the kitchen, every dresser in every bedroom; she had tapped the walls as if there might be a secret door or compartment. She’d even been down to the lighthouse-shaped office of the motel, where she’d looked through the dusty rack of brochures for local amusements that had long ago closed down, where she’d opened boxes to find elderly rolls of toilet paper, still wrapped in plastic, cabinets full of moldering towels; she’d even been into the motel rooms themselves. She’d taken the keys from the hooks behind the counter and opened the rooms one by one—cleared out, all of them, no beds, no furniture, nothing but bare walls and bare floors, nothing but an unremarkable coating of dust.
In all that time, the only clue she’d found was a single golden coin. It was in a cigar box on a high shelf in a closet in one of the empty bedrooms on the second floor of the house, along with some oddly shaped rocks and a tiny horseshoe magnet and some thumbtacks and a plastic dinosaur. The coin was heavy, and appeared to be an old gold doubloon, very worn, though it was most likely just a child’s souvenir of some sort.
Still, she had taken it, she had hidden it in her suitcase, and it was this coin that she thought of when she had first seen the deposit slip. 4.3 million dollars, and childishly she’d had a brief image of chests full of these golden coins.
Of course she was aware that greed was part of her decision. Yes, she knew that. But she did also love him, she thought. She loved the way it felt to be with him, that easy, teasing camaraderie, that sense he gave her that the two of them, only them, had their own country and language, as if, as George Orson used to tell her, they’d known each other in another life—and she guessed that she could even stand to be Brooke Fremden for a while if he were David….
And it could even be fun.
It could be one of those confidential adventures that they shared. One of the stories that made up a private history that only they knew about. They would be at a dinner party in some place like Morocco and someone would ask how they had met and the two of them would exchange private looks.
It was almost three-thirty in the afternoon when he finally emerged from the study. Lucy was sitting in the living room in one of the high wingback chairs that had been draped in a tarp, staring again at Brooke Fremden’s birth certificate.
Here were the scrawled signatures at the bottom:
I certify that the personal information provided on this certificate is correct to the best of my knowledge and belief. That was the father.
I certify that the above named child was born alive at the place and time and on the date stated above. That was the doctor—Albert Gerbie, M.D.
And when she looked up, George Orson was standing at the edge of the room. He had been combing his hands through his hair, and now it stood up in tufts, and he had the look of someone who had been reading scientific formulas or columns of numbers for too long, an expression both tense and vacant, as if he were surprised to find her sitting there.
“I have to go out for some supplies,” he said. “A few things that we need.”
“Okay,” she said, and he appeared to relax a little.
“I want to try to buy a few things that make you look younger,” he said. “What about something pink? Something a bit girly?”
She looked at him skeptically. “Maybe I should come with you,” she said.
But he shook his head emphatically. “Not a good idea,” he said. “We shouldn’t be seen together in town. Especially not now.”
“Okay,” she said, and he glanced at her gratefully as he put on the baseball cap he always wore when he was making an excursion. He was thankful, she supposed, that she wasn’t arguing with him—and he touched her hand, running his fingers distractedly along her knuckles. She gave him a hesitant smile.
He hadn’t locked the door to the study.
She stood at the door of the house watching the old pickup as it turned onto the county highway that led away from the motel. The sky was scalloped with layers of pale gray cumulus clouds, and she folded her arms across h
er chest as the pickup went up over a hill and vanished.
Even before she turned back to the door, she knew that she would go straight to the study, and in fact she even quickened her pace. That locked study had been a point of contention between them, ever since they’d arrived. His privacy—though didn’t that contradict all his talk, all the things he’d said about sharing their own secret world, sub rosa, he said.
But when she brought this up, he only shrugged. “We all need our personal caves,” he’d told her. “Even people as close as we are. Don’t you think?”
And Lucy had rolled her eyes. “I don’t see what the big deal is,” she said. “What, are you looking at porn in there?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” George Orson had said. “It’s just part of having an adult relationship, Lucy. Giving people their space.”
“I just want to check my email,” she said—though in fact, there wasn’t anyone who would have sent her a message, and naturally he knew that.
“Lucy, please,” he said. “Just give me a few more days. I’ll get you a computer of your own, and you can email to your heart’s content. Just be patient a bit longer.”
The study was much messier than she expected. Very unlike George Orson—who was a folder of clothes and a maker of lists, a man who hated to see clutter or dirty dishes in the sink.
So this was a side of George Orson she’d never seen, and she stood, uneasily, on the threshold. There was a sense of feverishness, chaos, panic. In any case, there was no doubt that all of those hours and hours he had spent holed up in this room had not been spent idly. He had been working, just as he’d claimed.
There was a jumble of different machines in the room—several laptop computers, a printer, a scanning bed, other things she didn’t recognize—all of them connected in a tangle of cords and plugged into a strip of electrical sockets. The lips of his bookshelves were lined with empty soda cans, energy drinks, and there was a smattering of discarded clothes on the floor—a pair of boxer shorts, some T-shirts, a single sock curled up—along with many, many chocolate bar wrappers, though she had never seen George Orson eat candy. Some books were also spread out here and there—their pages tagged and bulging with bookmarks. The Sacred Pentagram of Sedona. Fibonacci and the Financial Revolution. The Thing on the Doorstep. A Practical Guide to Mentalism.