Await Your Reply (17 page)

“Cards?” Ryan said weakly, and he tried to glance over his shoulder. If he dashed into the four lanes of Las Vegas Boulevard, what were the chances that he would be hit by a car? Fairly high, he guessed. He shook his head at the bald man, as if he didn’t understand. “I … I don’t have any cards,” he said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You don’t understand?” the man said, and he laughed with good-natured surprise, a bit taken aback. “Cards!” he pronounced, slowly, and he gestured at Ryan’s hand. “Cards!”

“Cards!” the spike-haired man repeated, and he grinned, showing his gold-tipped front teeth. He held up a dozen or so of the cards from the escort services, fanned out like a hand of poker, a full house of Fantasie and Britt and Kamchana and Cheyenne and Natasha and Ebony.

And then Ryan realized what they were talking about. He glanced down at the stack of pictures he himself had collected as he walked down the strip. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah, anyway, I …”

“Yes, yes!” said the bald one, and the men all burst into laughter again. “Cards! Beautiful girls, my main man!”

“Thirty-nine United State dollars! Incredible!” said the man in the golf cap, who had so far been only observing. And then he let out an extended comment in Russian, which was met with more hilarity. The man held out one of his own cards for Ryan to take, offering it.

“You like Natasha. Big titty Russian girl. Very nice.”

“Yes,” Ryan said, and nodded. “Yes, very nice,” he said, and he gazed down the block—Bally’s, Flamingo, Imperial Palace, Harrah’s, Casino Royale, the Venetian, the Palazzo—all the places he had been planning to visit, all the ATMs he still had to withdraw from before he came at last to the Riviera, where he would check in to the hotel under the name Tom Knott, a young accountant who was attending a convention.

“My name is Shurik,” said the bald Russian, and held out his hand to be shook.

“Vasya,” said the one with the spiked hair.

“Pavel,” said the one in the cap.

“Ryan,” Ryan said, and he felt his face growing hot almost immediately as he pressed palms with the three men, one after the other. It was the most basic mistake—his own real name, given thoughtlessly, and he felt more flustered than ever.
Mr. J so good to find
, he thought. Was it significant? Or not?

“Ryan, my main man,” said Shurik. “We come with us, yes? Together. Come. We find the best girls. Right?”

“Right,” Ryan said. And then, as the three of them parted for him, as they prepared to fall in behind him, following with their giant tulip cups and their cards and their hopeful, friendly expressions, he made an abrupt feint, a zigzag, pushing himself into the flow of tourists on the sidewalk.

And then he took off running.

It was a stupid thing to do, he told himself later.

He stood in the queue at the check-in desk of the Riviera Hotel, his heart still quickened in his chest.

The poor guys. How startled they’d been when he broke off and dashed away. They hadn’t made any attempt to pursue. Thinking of their stunned expressions as they watched him flee, he couldn’t believe they’d ever been anything more than innocent
foreign tourists. A bunch of drunken guys, looking for a native to befriend.

Jay was right: he needed to calm down.

Still, it was hard to shake the adrenaline once it set, that tight, jittery tension, and he sat in his room in the Riviera—Tom Knott, age twenty-two, of Topeka, Kansas—looking again at the escort girls.
Natasha. Ebony
.

This was the thing he hated most about himself, about his old self—that nervousness, worry knitting inside of him. By the time he got to his sophomore year at Northwestern, he spent so much time fretting about all the work he wasn’t doing that he didn’t have time to actually work.

He guessed that was why he found himself thinking about Pixie again. Despite what had happened, despite the aftermath, the six weeks he had spent with Pixie had probably been the best time of his life. They were skipping classes fairly regularly, and he had been getting home in time to destroy the letters the school was sending about his absences and tardies, and erase the messages on the answering machine from the attendance secretary, and his parents had continued obliviously without noticing anything out of the ordinary. He was, he realized, a pretty good actor. A pretty decent liar. He had not done any homework of significance for a while by that point, and for the first time in his life he had taken a test and he had absolutely no idea what they were asking him. It was his chemistry midterm, and he circled multiple choice questions at random and invented calculations that he had no idea how to perform, and he had a wonderful thought.

I don’t care about anything
.

It was like the fundamentalist kids when they talked about being born again. “Jesus came into my heart and emptied me of my sin,” a girl named Lynette had told him once, and in some ways that was what had happened to him. All his burdens were lifted, and he felt light and transparent, as if the sunlight could shine right through his body.

I don’t care about anything
, he thought,
I don’t care about the future, I don’t care what happens to me, I don’t care what my family thinks, I don’t care, I don’t care
. And each time he said it in his mind, it was as if a weight detached and flickered away like a butterfly.

And then one day he came home and his mother was in the kitchen, waiting.

As it turned out, it was not the attendance secretary or one of his teachers who had contacted Stacey; it was Pixie’s father. He had apparently intercepted some of the emails they had exchanged, and had found Pixie’s journal, and then—this was the aspect that Ryan hadn’t expected or understood—Pixie had confessed everything to her father.

Who was enraged. Who wanted to kill Ryan.

“Do you have a daughter, Mrs. Schuyler?” Pixie’s father had asked, and Ryan’s mother was sitting there at work, at her desk, in the office of Morgan Stanley in Omaha, where she was a CPA, and Mr. Pixie said, “If you had a daughter, you would know how I feel.

“I feel violated. I feel defiled by your pervert son,” he told Stacey. “And I want you to know,” he said, “I want you to know that if it turns out my daughter is pregnant, I am going to come to your house and I am going to take your son and knock his teeth through the back of his fucking skull.”

By the time Ryan came home, Stacey had already called the police, who had charged Pixie’s father with aggravated menacing, and she was talking to a lawyer friend who was getting a restraining order, but she didn’t tell him this when he came into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and peered into it. He didn’t pay much attention to her. She was often in a bad mood, as far as he could tell. She would situate herself in the kitchen or the TV room or some other area where they could see her being silent, and then she
would emanate dense radioactive waves of negativity. He knew better than to look at her when she was in this mode.

And so he got out some milk as she sat there at the kitchen table. He shook some cereal into a bowl and poured milk over it, and he was about to take his snack into the TV room when Stacey looked up at him.

“Who are you?” she said.

Ryan lifted his head, reluctantly. This was also her method, these soft-spoken inscrutable questions. “Um,” he said. “Excuse me?”

“I said: who are you?” she murmured in a sadly musing voice. “Because I don’t think I know you, Ryan.”

He had his first glimmer of nervousness then. He knew that she had found out—what? How much? He felt the expression on his face tightening and growing blanker. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“I thought you were a trustworthy person,” Stacey said. “I thought you were responsible, mature, you had a plan for yourself. That’s what I used to think. Now I can’t fathom what’s going on inside of you. I have no idea.”

He was still holding his bowl of cereal, which was making almost inaudible whispering noises as the puffed kernels soaked up the milk.

He couldn’t think of anything to say.

He didn’t want his adventure with Pixie to be over, and he imagined if he just said nothing, it would last for a while longer. He could still be happy, he could still not care about anything, he could still meet up with Pixie in the morning on the north side of school and watch her smoking a cigarette and toying with her lip ring, threading it back and forth through the flesh of her mouth.

“Do you want to ruin your life?” Stacey was saying to him. “Do you want to end up like your uncle Jay? Because that is the way you are headed. He screwed up his life when he was just about your age, and he has never recovered. Never. He turned himself into a loser, and that’s where you’re headed, Ryan.”

It wasn’t until years later that he understood what she was talking about.

You are going to end up like your father
, that was what she actually meant. His father: Jay, getting a girl pregnant at age fifteen, running away from home, floating from shady job to shady job, never to settle down, never to have a normal life. In retrospect, he could see why she had come down so hard on him, he could even sympathize somewhat. She knew what kind of person he would become, even before he did.

And she was not going to let him end up like Jay. For two weeks, Ryan had been sent to a wilderness camp for rebellious teens, while his mother put the pieces of his life back in order. One of those hiking and team-building and group therapy isolation camps, full of military-esque counselors doling out “tough love” and diagnosing their psychological sicknesses. They had lost their way; they were suffering from unhealthy misperceptions about themselves; they needed to change if they ever wanted to become productive members of society, if they ever wanted to see their friends and family again….

Even when he returned, he was under what basically amounted to house arrest for the rest of the school year. She had taken away his cell phone and Internet privileges, and then she had contacted all his teachers to make arrangements for him to make up all the work that he had missed, and she had him seeing a therapist once a week, and she enrolled him in an SAT prep course, and in a community service program called the Optimist Club, which met three days a week to clean up parks and give toys to poor children and conduct recycling drives and so forth. She switched him out of band, which was the only class he had shared with Pixie, though it actually didn’t matter because Pixie herself had been transferred by her father over to St. Albert High. He never saw her again. Her father was found guilty of aggravated menacing and sentenced to probation.

As for Ryan’s father, Owen, he was mostly uninvolved during this
period, taciturn and glum as he always was in the face of Stacey’s stubborn organization. Owen did manage to talk her into letting Ryan take guitar lessons, and that was one nice thing about his last year and a half of high school. He and Pixie had talked about forming a band, in which she would be the drummer and he would be the lead singer, and he used to like to fantasize about that. He liked to sit in his room and make up songs on the Takamine that Owen had bought for him. Ryan wrote a song called “Oh, Pixie.” Very sad. He wrote another called “Aggravated Menace,” and one called “Soon I’ll Be Gone,” and “Echopraxia,” which, if he ever made an album, might end up being the single.

It was pathetic, he thought, to be thinking about those lame old songs.

It was depressing because he had spent the whole night thinking about Pixie, remembering her, wondering where she was now. What had happened to her? And he was nowhere close to getting laid.

It was even sad that his paranoia about the Russians had turned out to be nothing, after all. Despite his encounter on the street, there hadn’t actually been any intrigue, there hadn’t been any adventure with gangsters, nothing but the herds of tourists and the workers who went about the job of fleecing them with the grim nonchalance of a clerk at a late-night convenience store.

Maybe he would always be lonely, he thought, and he spread out the escort service cards on the desk and looked at them. Fantasie. Roxan. Natasha.

He sat there at his hotel room desk, contemplating. He typed in his name and room number, and there was a breath as the cyberspace made its connection.

He opened up the Instant Message window, and

No, there wasn’t any new greeting in Cyrillic.

And so he just typed a note to Jay. “Mission accomplished,” he wrote, and then, he decided, he might as well go to bed.

T
hey could be leaving soon. That was one thing. On their way to New York, and then to international destinations.

And they could be rich, too, if everything went according to plan.
If she
was the type of person who would do this sort of thing.

The documents were spread out between them on the kitchen table, and George Orson adjusted and aligned papers in front of him, as if parallel lines could make their conversation easier. She saw him glance up, surreptitiously, and it almost embarrassed her to see his eyes so earnest and guilty—though it was also a relief to have him wordless. Not trying to assure her or convince her or teach her, but just waiting for her decision. It was the first time in a while that a choice of hers had mattered, the first time in months she didn’t feel as if she were walking in some dreamscape, amnesiascape, everything glowing with an aura of déjà vu—

But now it had solidified. His schemes. His evasions. The money.

She lifted a single sheet off of the sheaf that he’d laid in front of her. Here was a copy of the wire transfer.
BICICI
, it said at the top.
Banque Internationale pour le Commerce et l’Industrie de Côte d’Ivoire
. And there was a date and a code and stamp and several signatures and a total.
US$4,300,000.00
. Here was the letter confirming the deposit. “Dear Mr. Kozelek, your fund was deposited here in our bank by your partner Mr. Oliver Akubueze. Your partner further instructed us to execute transfer of the fund to your bank account by completing the bank’s transfer application form, and he also endorsed other vital documents to that effect….”

“Mr. Kozelek,” Lucy said. “That’s you.”

“Yes,” George Orson said. “A pseudonym.”

“I see,” Lucy said. She looked at him, briefly, then down at the paper:
US$4,300,000.00
.

“I see,” she breathed. She was trying to make her voice cool and disinterested and official. She thought of the social worker she and Patricia had to visit after their parents had died, the two of them watching as the woman paged through the papers on her cluttered desk.
I wonder what experience the two of you have with taking care of yourselves?
the social worker said.

Lucy held the paper between her thumbs and forefingers in the way the social worker had. She glanced up to look at George Orson, who was sitting patiently across the table, holding his cup of coffee loosely, as if warming his fingers, even though it must have been eighty degrees outside already.

“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.

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.