Await Your Reply

by Dan Chaon

  “You still love me, don’t you?” he had asked her—and the question pulsed, as if she could feel it through the whorls of his fingertips.

  But there were other things she had to bear in mind, as well. Events were moving fairly fast now. The world continued on, and she had to make some decisions, even without reliable information. There was, purportedly, 4.3 million dollars, in a bank in the Ivory Coast, Africa. There was, at least, more than a hundred thousand dollars currently in their possession.

  Their carry-on baggage was in the overhead compartment, right there above them, and that was fine so far, though that, too, was a source of unease.

  They had spent their last night in the Lighthouse Motel, side by side in the library, each with a cylinder of cellophane tape, each with a stack of hundred-dollar bills.

  David Fremden had a big old atlas, 25 × 20, and Lucy had a dictionary and a Dickens novel, and they sat there, affixing bills to the pages.

  “Are you sure this will work?” Lucy had said. She was flipping her way through Bleak House, fragments of text rising up as she laid a bill on the page and pinned it down. “The fog is very dense, indeed!” said I. And she pressed Ben Franklin over the line of words, and then flipped a couple of pages forward. “It’s disgraceful,” she said. “You know it is. The whole house is disgraceful.” And she covered it again, though once again some grain of the book rose up: We found Miss Jellyby trying to warm herself at the fire …

  “It’s not a problem,” David Fremden said. He himself was working more rapidly than she, lining a row of three hundreds down the center of Ireland, pressing a tongue of adhesive tape along the edge of the bills with his thumb. “I’ve done this before,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “The universe,” he observed, “makes rather an indifferent parent, I am afraid.”

  “But isn’t there an X-ray machine?” she said. “Won’t they be able to see through the covers of the books?”

  … is the portrait of the present Lady Dedlock. It is considered a perfect likeness, and …

  “Look,” David Fremden said, and he sighed. “You’ll just have to trust me on this. I know how these security systems work. I really do know what I’m doing.”

  And so far, yes, he had been right, though she had been dreadfully nervous. Her body had felt almost mystically visible when they came to the front of the security line, as if her skin were giving off an aura of light. She was shocked that people weren’t staring at her, but no one seemed to notice. She put her satchel—which contained a few toiletries and a T-shirt and the books—into a gray plastic tub, and she couldn’t help but think of the swollen pages of Bleak House, stuffed full of money, even as she bent down to remove her shoes, even as the conveyor belt carried her bag through the tunnel of the X-ray machine.

  “Okay,” said the security guard, and motioned her forward through the doorway-shaped metal detector, a thick, blank-eyed, weight lifter guy, perhaps not much older than she was, beckoning her through, and there were no alarms, no hesitation as her bag passed through, no second glance at her wretchedly dyed hair, nothing.

  David Fremden put his hand on her elbow.

  “Good job,” he murmured.

  And so now the plane was on the tarmac in New York. They were sitting in their seats, waiting for the captain to turn off the FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign, though some of the passengers around them were already impatiently stirring in their seats. Lucy herself was still trying to recover her equilibrium from the experience of landing, the grinding sounds the wheels made as they unfolded, the sudden, quivering bump as the plane touched the landing strip, the way her ears had filled up with a plug of viscous air. She tried to be stern with herself. You’re such an idiot, Lucy. Such a white trash hillbilly, what are you scared of? What are you scared of?

  But the truth was that her leg had developed a tic, she could feel one of the muscles giving a small involuntary twitch and when she put her hand on her thigh she could hear another voice in her head, a small, sad tremor.

  I don’t want to do this. I think I’ve made a mistake.

  It was like butterflies had begun to alight on her, hundreds of butterflies, and they were each one of them made of lead. It wasn’t long before she was covered with them.

  There was a soft, deep bell tone, and en masse the rest of the passengers began to sigh and rise, converging into the aisles and opening the overhead compartments and leaning close to the person in front of them, not disorderly, not exactly, but almost like a school of fish or migrating birds, and she looked up as David Fremden stood to join them.

  “Brooke,” he said. He reached down and took her hand in his and gave it a tight squeeze. “Come on, sweetheart,” he whispered. “Don’t fail me now.”

  It was easy enough to get onto her feet. It was easy enough to shuffle down the narrow aisle of the airplane, following behind David—her father—

  He handed over her backpack with one of those gently teasing smiles that reminded her so much of George Orson. That grin that had so impressed her back when she was a student in his AP history class, back when he told her he thought she was sui generis. “People like you and me, we invent ourselves,” he had said, though there was no way to know back then that he meant it literally.

  She missed George Orson.

  But she took a breath and fell into the shuffling queue of travelers. It was easy enough. Easy enough to put her head down and trudge through the tight rows of seats. Easy enough to walk past the stewardess, who stood at the front of the plane nodding like a priest, peace be with you, peace be with you, ushering them into the accordion tunnel that led up into the terminal.

  “You look peaked,” David said. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Lucy said.

  “Why don’t we get a cup of coffee,” he said. “Or a soda? A little something to eat?”

  “No, thanks,” Lucy said.

  They had turned into the rambling avenue that ran past the various gates—counters and podiums surrounded by clusters of anchored chairs, pods full of waiting people, and as far as she could tell, no one was looking at them. No one gave them a second glance, no one wondered if they were father and daughter, or lovers, or teacher and student. Whatever. Back in Pompey, Ohio, the two of them might have caused a stir of curiosity, but here they hardly registered.

  Lucy gazed at a trio of women in burkas, blue, faceless, nunlike figures, chatting amiably in their native tongue, and a tall, balding man swept past them, speed-walking, swearing joyfully into his cell phone, and then an old woman in a wheelchair, wearing a full-length fur coat, pushed along by a black man in gray coveralls—

  Lucy could feel the weight of her backpack. Bleak House and Webster’s Dictionary and Marjorie Morningstar, which between them contained perhaps fifty thousand dollars.

  She adjusted the strap on her shoulder, then tugged at the hated butterfly T-shirt as it inched up, exposing her belly. She was aware of how much she would have disliked Brooke Fremden, back in the day. If Brooke Fremden had come traipsing down the halls of Pompey High School, with her cutesy mall-girl clothes and her juvenile, perky backpack, Lucy would have been repulsed.

  But when David Fremden looked over his shoulder at her, his look was mild and fatherly and distracted. She was just a girl, just a teenage girl. This was what they looked like; it didn’t matter to him as long as she was keeping pace.

  He didn’t miss Lucy, she thought.

  “You’ve done this before,” she said. “I’m not the first.”

  This was on the night before their trip. They were still in the house above the Lighthouse Motel, and they sat there on the couch in the television room, side by side, their bags packed and the rooms hushed in the way of places that are about to be abandoned. The books were taped full of money, and they should have just gone to bed, but instead they were sitting there watching the opening monologue of some late-night talk show host, and his face, David’s face, was entirely blank, that flat television-wat
ching expression, and at last she repeated herself.

  “You’ve been other people before,” she said, and at last he looked away from the TV and glanced at her warily.

  “That’s a complicated question,” he said.

  “Don’t you think it’s fair to be honest with me?” she said. “We’re …”

  Together?

  She thought about it.

  Maybe it was better to say nothing. It was weird—all this time she’d spent in this musty television room, all the hours she’d spent alone with nothing but old videos for company, Rebecca and Mrs. Miniver and Double Indemnity and How Green Was My Valley and My Fair Lady and Mildred Pierce. Sipping diet soda and glancing out at the raggedy Japanese garden and waiting for the chance to get back into the Maserati and drive away to someplace wonderful.

  He had been “a lot of different people.” He admitted as much.

  So—it was probably logical to think that there had also been other girls, other Lucys, sitting on this same couch and watching the same old movies and listening to the same stillness as the Lighthouse Motel brooded over its dusty swathe of empty lake bed.

  “I just want to know—” she said. “I want to know about the others. How many have there been—in your life. In all this.”

  And he looked up. He pulled his gaze away from the TV and met her eyes and his expression wavered.

  “There’s never been anyone else,” he said. “That’s what you don’t understand. I’ve been looking—I’ve been looking for a long time. But there’s never been anyone like you.”

  So.

  No, she didn’t believe him, though maybe he had managed to convince himself. Perhaps he truly thought that it didn’t matter if she was Lucy or Brooke or whatever other name she would take on. Perhaps he imagined she would remain the same person on the inside, no matter what name or persona she adopted.

  But that wasn’t true, she thought.

  More and more, she was aware that Lucy Lattimore had left the earth. Already there was hardly anything left of her—a few scraps of documents, birth certificate and social security card in her mother’s drawer back in the old house, her high school transcript resident on some outdated computer, the memories of her sister, Patricia, the vague recollections of her classmates and teachers, already fading.

  The truth was, she had killed herself months ago. Now she was next to nothing: a nameless physical form that could be exchanged and exchanged and exchanged until nothing remained but molecules.

  The stuff of stars—that’s what George Orson once said when he was holding forth to their history class. Hydrogen and carbon and all the primordial particles that existed from the very beginning of time, that’s what you’re made up of, he told them.

  As if that were a comfort.

  They would be flying to Brussels, first. Seven hours, twenty-five minutes, on a Boeing 767, and then from there another six hours and forty-five minutes to Abidjan. They had already made it through the most difficult passage, David Fremden said. The customs exercises in Belgium and Ivory Coast were negligible. “We can actually relax now and think about the future.”

  4.3 million dollars.

  “I don’t want to stay in Africa for very long,” he said. “I just want to get the money situation settled, and then we can go wherever we want.

  “I’ve never been to Rome,” he said. “I’d love to spend some time in Italy. Naples, Tuscany, Florence. I think that would be a wonderful, growing experience for you. I think it would be exciting, actually. Like Henry James,” he said. “Like E. M. Forster,” he said. “Lucy Honeychurch,” he said, and chuckled as if this were a bit of levity she would appreciate—

  But she had no idea what he was talking about.

  Back in the day, back when he was George Orson and she was his student, she half enjoyed his high-handed trivia, the bits of Ivy League education he would drop into conversation. She used to roll her eyes and pretend to be exasperated by his pretentiousness, the way he raised his eyebrows in that gently reproachful way—as if she’d expressed some lack of knowledge that surprised him. “Who’s Spinoza?” Or: “What’s sodium pentothal?” And he might have a complicated and even interesting answer.

  But that was not who they were anymore, they were not Lucy and George Orson, and so she sat there wordlessly, she looked down at her ticket, New York to Brussels, and

  Who’s Lucy Honeychurch? Who’s E. M. Forster?

  It didn’t matter. It wasn’t important, though she couldn’t help but think again of the question she’d asked George Orson the night before: what happened to the other ones, the ones before me?

  She could imagine this Lucy Honeychurch—a blond girl, no doubt, a person who wore thrift store sweaters and vintage eyeglasses, a girl who probably thought she was more clever than she actually was. Had he taken her to the Lighthouse Motel? Had they walked together through the ruins of the drowned village? Had he dressed her up in someone else’s clothes and hurried her to an airport with a fake passport in her purse, off to another city, another state, some foreign place?

  Where was the girl now? Lucy wondered, as people began to stand, as the plane for Brussels announced the beginnings of boarding.

  Where was the girl now? Lucy thought. What had happened to her?

  23

  Here was Banks Island, Aulavik National Park. A polar desert, Mr. Itigaituk told them dryly, in his genial, affectless voice. As they flew, he pointed out landmarks as if they were on a tour: there was a pingo, a conical volcano-shaped hill, filled with ice rather than lava; here was Sachs Harbour, a cluster of houses on a barren, muddy shore; and here were the small interlocking ponds of the dry valleys, and—look!—a herd of musk oxen!

  But now, as they walked across the tundra toward the place where the old research station was supposed to be, as the waiting Cessna plane grew smaller and smaller behind them, Mr. Itigaituk was taciturn. Every twenty minutes or so, he stopped to regard his compass, to press his binoculars to his eyes and scan the gray expanse of pebbles and rocks.

  Miles had been given a pair of rubber boots, and a jacket, and he took a nervous glance over his shoulder as he trudged along through the damp gravel and puddles and the chill, faintly misty air.

  Lydia Barrie, meanwhile, was striding along with remarkable poise, particularly for someone who was surely, Miles thought, colossally hungover. But it didn’t show in her face, and when Mr. Itigaituk pointed out a bowl-like depression of gray-white fur—the corpse of a fox, which a goose had made a nest out of—Lydia regarded it with dispassionate interest.

  “Gross,” Miles said, staring down at the fox’s head, the skin tight over the skull, the shriveled eye sockets, the teeth bared and freckled with goose dung. Two eggs lay in the rounded impression of rotten hair.

  “Well said,” Lydia murmured.

  It had been a few miles since they’d said anything to each other. There was, naturally, a certain amount of awkwardness, given what had happened between them the night before, a certain post-intimacy reticence—which wasn’t made any easier by the ambient disquiet that had settled over him. A hum in his ear that wouldn’t go away.

  This was crazy, he thought.

  Was it probable that Hayden had come to this place, was it likely that he was actually living here in this tundra flatland, the pinprick of the Cessna still visible, many kilometers behind them?

  Perhaps he had been on more futile chases than she had, perhaps he had grown fatalistic. But this didn’t look very promising.

  “How much farther do you think we have to go?” he said, glancing tactfully toward Mr. Itigaituk, who was by now about ten yards ahead of them. “Are we sure we’re going in the right direction?”

  Lydia Barrie adjusted the fingers of her glove, her eyes still on the fox, the bones and fur that had made some goose such a comfortable resting place.

  “I’m feeling fairly confident,” she said, and they looked at each other.

  Miles nodded wordlessly.

  For a while, he had b
een telling her about Cleveland.

  About Hayden, naturally, but also about their childhood, and their father, and even his life today, his job in the old novelty shop, Mrs. Matalov and her granddaughter—

  “And yet here you are,” Lydia said. “It sounds as if you could have been happy, Miles, and yet here you are, on an island in the Arctic Ocean. It’s a shame.”

  “I guess,” Miles said. He shrugged, a little flustered. “I don’t know. ‘Happy’ is a strong word.”

  “‘Happy’ is a strong word?” she repeated mildly, in the way a therapist might. She raised her eyebrows. “What an odd thing to say.”

  And Miles shrugged again. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just meant—I wasn’t that happy in Cleveland.”

  “I see,” she said.

  “Just—neutral. I mean, I was working at a catalog company, basically. It wasn’t anything special. You know. Spending my nights in an empty apartment most of the time, watching TV.”

  “Yes,” she said, and straightened the collar of her coat as wind blew across them.

  It wasn’t cold, exactly. Miles estimated that the temperature was somewhere around fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and the endless daylight beamed down upon them. The sky had a glassy, silvery sharpness—more like the reflection of a sky in a pair of mirrored sunglasses. That eerie phosphorescent blue the earth has, when seen from space.

  “So,” Lydia said at last. “If we find him, do you think you’ll be happy then?”

  “I don’t know,” Miles said.

  It was a lame answer, no doubt, but honestly he wasn’t sure how he would feel. To have things resolved, finally, after all these years? He couldn’t quite imagine.

  And she seemed to understand that, too. She inclined her head as their feet made soft hushing sounds through the gravel, which was piled in wrinkled ridges like the pebbles in the bed of a stream. Left that way, Miles guessed, by the accumulation and melt of snow.