by Dan Chaon
“I think I saw your sister, once,” he said. And then, seeing her expression brighten, he amended quickly.
“In Rolla,” he said. “It was about five years ago. It must have been right before they …”
“I see,” she said.
He shrugged regretfully—he was familiar with the way those sparks of information could light up and then extinguish. The repeated letdowns, the discouragement.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“No, no,” she said. “I didn’t mean to seem—disappointed.” She looked down at her glass, touched the condensation along the rim. “It’s been ages since I’ve met anyone who’s actually seen her. So: tell me everything you remember. It’s important, and useful, even the small things. Did she speak with you at all?”
“Well,” he said.
It felt as if there were an intimacy in the way that her eyes had settled on him, waiting, damp and sadly hopeful. What could he tell her? He had talked with some people, other graduate students whom, no doubt, she had also talked to; he had gone to that house, where Rachel was living, and she had come to the door briefly, but she hadn’t said much, had she? Just threatened to call the police—which had scared him, he guessed. He was a coward about authority, he had always felt that the cops would side against him, how could you explain a person like Hayden, after all, without sounding crazy? I know who you are, Rachel said. I will call the police.
And why hadn’t he been more persistent? Why hadn’t he pushed his way inside, sat down with the poor girl and told her exactly who he was, and who Hayden was?
He could have helped her, he thought. He could have saved her.
He looked back down at his hand. Even in identical twins, the fingerprints, the creases of the palm, were distinct, and for a moment he imagined telling Lydia this random fact, he didn’t know why.
In the beginning, Lydia had tried to contact the authorities. But they hadn’t been particularly concerned or helpful.
After that, there had been a series of private detectives.
“But that was very expensive,” she said. “I’m not a wealthy person, and in any case, I never managed to hire anyone who was especially bright. They just followed one dead end after the other, charging me hourly plus per diems all the way through, and getting nowhere. Not with your brother.
“These detectives would spend, I don’t know—hundreds and thousands of dollars—and then they would come back to me with these ridiculous things. A post office box in Sedona, Arizona. An Internet polling company in Manada Gap, Pennsylvania. An abandoned motel in Nebraska. And then one of them wanted money to pursue some international leads, as he called them. Ecuador. Russia. Africa.
“And for a while, I suppose I convinced myself that I was getting somewhere. That I was getting closer, even though—”
She smiled tightly, wearily, and Miles nodded.
“Yes,” he said.
He knew the exhaustion that a person began to feel after a few years. Trying to find Hayden required a particular stamina, a patience for small details that might lead nowhere, the perseverance of a cartographer who was mapping a shoreline that wound and raveled into the horizon, that you’d never reach the end of.
He sometimes thought about the autumn after their father died. That was when Hayden had been fascinated with irrational numbers, with the Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio, making drawings of rectangles and nautilus shells and meticulously filling pages and pages of a notebook with the infinite decimal extension of the ratio.
Miles, meanwhile, found his first semester of algebra almost unbearable. He would look at the equations and he couldn’t make them mean anything, nothing but a spidery scuttling behind his forehead, as if the numbers had turned into insects inside his brain. He would sit there and glare at the problems—or, worse, he would begin to do them and his own solutions would somehow detour onto an unexplainably wrong track, so that for a time he’d believe that he’d finally figured out a method—only to discover that, in fact, x did not equal 41.7. No, x equaled -1, though he had no idea how that was possible. Sitting before a work sheet of these equations, night after night, was the worst fatigue he’d ever experienced, so eventually his mind felt like it had been eaten away into a lace of thin, almost weightless threads.
“Oh, please,” Hayden used to say, and he would gently take the paper from Miles and show him, once again, how easy it was. “You’re such a baby, Miles,” Hayden said. “Just pay attention. It’s simple if you just take it in steps.”
But Miles was frequently near tears by that point. “I can’t do it,” he would say. “I can’t think the right way!”
It was that frustration, that sense of futility he would later remember when he began looking for Hayden. He could see the same thing in Lydia Barrie’s expression.
Lydia combed her fingers gently through her hair, and looked down critically at her highball glass, which was empty, save for a lime slice that was curled into the fetal position at the bottom. She was, Miles thought, a little drunk, and she looked less refined and dignified. Her hair hadn’t fallen back into its previously sculpted form, and a few strands were awry. When the noncommittal pony-tailed bartender came over to see if she wanted another drink, she nodded. Miles was still working on his beer.
The bar was dark and windowless, and replicated the pleasant feeling of night, though outside the sun was still shining.
“It’s funny,” Lydia said, and she watched gloomily as first a napkin, and then the refilled glass, was placed on the bar in front of her. “Honestly, I suppose I must have spent thirty thousand dollars on these detectives, and after a while I think I just kept pressing forward because I didn’t want to believe that the whole thing was a waste.
“I don’t know,” she said, and drew a breath. “I suppose I can understand why Rachel would leave and never contact me again. I can understand why she wouldn’t want to speak with me. I said some very unkind things to her, when she didn’t come to our mother’s funeral. I said some things that I regret.
“But she hasn’t contacted our sister Emily, either. Or Aunt Charlotte. I understand that she was very unhappy, and maybe she was so devastated by our mother’s death that she couldn’t stand to face it.
“But who just abandons their family in that way? What kind of person decides that they can throw everything away and—reinvent themselves. As if you could just discard the parts of your life that you didn’t want anymore.
“Sometimes I think, well, that’s where we are now, as a society. That’s just what people have become, these days. We don’t value connection.”
She peered at him, and the composure she’d had when they first met had dissipated. There was a precarious aura in the air, an unnerving weight.
“I’ve done some things,” she said. “I’ve slept with people that I never talked to afterward. I left a job once. I left on a Friday and I didn’t call or tell my boss that I quit, or anything. I just never went back. I once told a man I worked with that I went to Wellesley—I guess that I was trying to impress him, and when he asked me about people he knew who had graduated from Wellesley, I pretended I knew them. Because I wanted him to like me.
“But I never disappeared,” she said. Her hand closed around her drink, her manicured nails, and her fingertips flattened and blanched against the glass. “I never vanished, so that no one could find me. That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it? That’s not normal, is it?”
“No,” Miles said. “I don’t think it’s normal.”
“Thank you,” she said. She gathered herself, straightened, ran the flat of her palms against the front of her blouse. “Thank you.”
Perhaps she was as crazy as he was, Miles thought, though he wasn’t sure if that was a comforting thought. Perhaps there were people all over the world whose lives Hayden had ruined, they were a club, a matrix that crisscrossed over the map, who knew how many there were? Hayden’s influence expanding outward like the Fibonacci numbers he used to recite—1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21
, 34, 55, 89 … and so on.
Meanwhile, Lydia Barrie had pressed the heel of her palm against her forehead and closed her eyes. Miles thought that perhaps she’d fallen asleep, and he thought about sleep himself. He was so tired—so tired—so many hours of driving, so many hours of daylight and thinking, thinking.
But then Lydia lifted her head.
“Do you think she’s still alive?” she whispered.
It took Miles a moment to realize what she was asking.
“Well,” he said. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think he might have killed her,” Lydia Barrie said. “That’s what I mean. I think she might be buried somewhere, anyplace, any one of the places that I’ve traced them to, or someplace I don’t know about. That’s why—”
But she didn’t finish. She didn’t necessarily want to continue with this line of thinking, and so she only sat there, her palm pressed against her face.
“Of course not,” Miles said. “I don’t think he’s—”
Though in fact he did think so. He imagined, once again, their old house on fire, he could picture his mother and Mr. Spady in their bed on the second floor, perhaps waking up too late, the room filled with smoke—or perhaps not waking up at all, perhaps only a few seconds of struggle, their eyelids fluttering awake and then closing again as the oxygen vanished and the wallpaper lit up with trickles of flame.
Was it so far-fetched to imagine that Hayden had done something to Rachel Barrie?
“I have some papers upstairs in my room,” Lydia Barrie said thickly. “I have some—documents.” He observed her as she brought her gin and tonic into the air. As she touched the edge of the glass to her lips.
“I think they are authentic,” she said, and took a long sip from her drink. “I think they’ll be of interest to you.”
17
Sometimes Ryan imagined that he saw people from his past. Ever since his death, this had become a regular occurrence, these minor hallucinations, tricks of perception.
Here, for example, was his mother, standing on a busy street corner on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis, her back to him, opening an umbrella as she hurried into a crowd.
Here was Walcott, sitting in the window of a bus full of rowdily singing fraternity brothers. This was in Philadelphia, not far from Penn, and Ryan stood there staring as they were borne past, all of them tunelessly caroling along with Bob Marley.
Their eyes met, his and Walcott’s, and for a second Ryan could have sworn that it truly was him, though the Walcott on the bus just peered out at him, his mouth moving, “Every little thing gonna be all right,” they were singing, and Ryan was aware of motion passing over him, a shadow of a bird or a cloud.
This is what it would be like to see a ghost, he thought, even though he was the one who was dead.
He knew it wasn’t really them. He was aware that it was just a trailing cobweb of subconscious, a misfiring synapse of memory, an undigested bit of the past playing games with him. He had been letting his mind wander too much, he thought; that was all it meant. He needed to focus. He needed to meditate, as Jay suggested. “You need to find the silence inside yourself,” Jay advised, and one day when he was back from a particularly stressful trip, they listened together to one of Jay’s relaxation CDs. “Picture a circle of energy near the base of your spine,” the CD told them, while they sat in chairs in the darkened back bedroom, their bare feet on the floor. “Inhale … exhale … letting your breathing become deep and even …”
And it was relaxing, actually, though it didn’t really help. The next week, in Houston, he thought he saw Pixie—her hair longer and darker but still recognizable—the very image of Pixie, in fact, smoking a cigarette on the curb outside the downtown Marriott, looking bored and wistful as she toyed with the thin ring in her eyebrow.
No.
It wasn’t her, he realized, he could see as soon as he stepped out of the taxi that this woman was probably in her thirties or even forties. Why had he even thought there was a resemblance? It was as if she had only been Pixie for a second, appearing just for a few shuttering snapshots out of the corner of his eye. Another little con game his brain had played on him.
Still.
Still, he thought, it was not entirely impossible—even in a country of three hundred million—it was not beyond the realm of possibility that he might eventually encounter someone he once knew.
In fact, he was pretty certain he had actually seen his old psychology professor, Ms. Gill, in an airport bar in Nashville. His connecting flight had been late, and he had been lingering in the terminal of Nashville International, pulling his wheeled carry-on past newsstands and fast-food booths and souvenir shops, looking for some way to distract himself, and there, suddenly, she had been. Sitting in the Gibson Café underneath some guitar memorabilia, she had regarded him casually as he walked by. And then their eyes had connected, and he saw her expression tighten, a startle of attentiveness crossing her face.
It appeared as if she recognized him from somewhere; he saw her puzzling. His head was shaved, and he was wearing aviator sunglasses, and a short-sleeved security guard’s uniform, so it was surprising that she would even look twice. But she did. Wasn’t he one of her former students? Didn’t he look like that boy who had died—who had committed suicide—the one who had been failing her class, who had come to her office to see if there was any way he could do work for extra credit?
No. She wouldn’t have made that connection. It was only that he looked vaguely familiar, and she scrutinized him for a second, a sad, single professor lady with a bad haircut and an overbite, she had perhaps contemplated suicide herself, she had thought about that kid, drowning himself in the lake, and she had wondered what that would feel like, she herself had always thought that carbon monoxide would be the way to go, carbon monoxide and sleeping pills, no struggle …
And he walked by and she put her vodka and cranberry juice to her lips and he thought about Jay’s meditation audios.
“The next energy level is near your forehead,” the woman narrator said, in her soothing, dreamy monotone. “Here is the chakra of time, the circle of daylight and nighttime in their eternal passages, which will guide you to awareness of your soul. Let yourself free your mind, and as you accept the power and awe of your own soul, so will you realize the soul within everyone and everything.”
He thought of this as he queued himself into the line at the airline check-in desk, and he placed his fingers lightly to his brow.
“That’s where the pineal gland is,” Jay had told him. “That’s where your melatonin comes from, and it regulates your sleep cycle. That’s cool, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Ryan had said. “Interesting!”
Though now he wondered what Ms. Gill would have had to say about it all. She had been skeptical, as he remembered, with no patience for New Agey nonsense, and he looked over his shoulder.
Despite his talk of meditation and relaxation and so forth, Jay had been feeling anxious lately, too.
“God damn it, Ryan,” he said. “Your jitters are starting to rub off on me. I’ve got the fucking fantods, man.”
Ryan was sitting at one of the laptops, opening a bank account for one of his new acquisitions—Max Wimberley, age twenty-three, of Corvallis, Oregon—and he glanced up, still typing, filling in the blocks of information on the application.
“What’s a fantod?” he said.
“I don’t know,” Jay said. He was at a computer of his own, tapping on the escape key with his index finger, and he shook his head at the screen, irritably. “It’s just some old-timey Iowa word that my dad used to use. It’s like, when a goose walks over your grave. Do you know that saying?”
“Not exactly,” Ryan said, and Jay let out an abrupt, particularly foul set of curses.
“I can’t believe this,” Jay said, and he smacked the palm of his hand down onto his keyboard, hard enough that two of the letter keys popped out and bounced onto the floor with a small rattle, like a pair of
dice. “God damn it!” Jay said. “I’ve got a bug on this computer! That’s the third time this week!”
Jay pushed his hair back from his face, tucked it behind his ears, combing the sides of his head nervously with his fingers.
“Something is going on here,” he said. “I’ve got a bad feeling, Ryan. I don’t like it.”
Ryan wasn’t sure what to think. Jay could get temperamental sometimes. He liked to act as if he were the mellow, easygoing philosophical type, but he had his own superstitions, his own fears and illogics.
For example, there was that argument they’d had about the driver’s licenses. This was back when Ryan had first left college and started working for Jay, back when he was going to the DMVs, traveling to various states.
Back then, Ryan didn’t truly understand what he was doing. He figured that it was illegal somehow, but then again a lot of things were illegal and they didn’t necessarily hurt anybody. He was still trying to get his mind around what was happening to him. His decision to leave college. His failure to call his parents, the “search” for him that he had somehow managed to lose control of. He was still trying to adjust to the idea that Jay was his real father, that Stacey and Owen had been lying to him for his whole life.
Participating in a little shady activity fit in with the general murkiness of his thought process at the time.
Besides which, it wasn’t as if he were robbing a bank. It wasn’t as if he were mugging old ladies or cheating orphans. Instead, he’d spent a lot of time waiting. Standing in line. Sitting in plastic chairs against the wall across from the Department of Motor Vehicles counter. Reading Wanted posters that had been taped to the wall, various public service things about drunken driving and wearing seat belts and so on.
He watched the other people as they took their tests and made their applications, paying attention to the questions they were asked, the snags they ran into—no social security card, no birth certificate, no proof of residency.