Await Your Reply (25 page)

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?

H
ere 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 been 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.

“And if we don’t find him?” Lydia said, after they had trudged in silence for a while. “What then? You’ll just get back into your car and drive home to Cleveland?”

“I suppose so.”

He shrugged again, and this time she laughed, a surprisingly lighthearted, even affectionate sound.

“Oh, Miles,” she said. “I can’t believe that you
drove
all the way to Inuvik. That just astounds me.” She glanced up ahead at Mr. Itigaituk, who was a dozen or more yards ahead of them, leading determinedly onward.

“You’re a very odd person, Miles Cheshire,” she said, and regarded him thoughtfully. “I wish—”

But she didn’t complete her sentence. She let it drift off, and Miles guessed that she had thought better of what she was going to say.

He was trying to think about the future.

The longer they walked, the more it became clear to Miles that this was yet another one of Hayden’s elaborate practical jokes, another maze that he had created, that they were winding their way through.

He
would
go back, he guessed. Back to Cleveland, back to Matalov Novelties, where the old lady was waiting impatiently for him to return to work; and he would return to his corner of the cluttered store, sitting at his computer under the framed black-and-white photos of old vaudevillians, sometimes contemplating the photo of his own father, his dad, dressed in a cape and tuxedo, holding a wand with a flourish.

As for Miles, he was not a magician, nor would he ever be, but he
could picture himself becoming a respected figure among them. Their shopkeeper. Already, he had a good eye for the inventory and expenses at Matalov, already he had straightened the disordered shelves and updated the website to make shopping more user-friendly doing something
useful
at least, making a small pathway through his life that his father might have respected.

Wasn’t that enough? Wasn’t there the possibility that he could settle in, that he could become happy or at least content? Wasn’t there the chance that—after this one last time, the shadow of Hayden would begin to draw away from his thoughts and he could finally, finally escape at last?

Was that so difficult? So improbable?

And then he glanced up as Mr. Itigaituk turned and called back to them.

“I see it,” Mr. Itigaituk said. “It’s just up ahead!”

Lydia adjusted her sunglasses and craned her neck, and Miles shaded his eyes against the gleaming sky and the wind, squinting toward the horizon.

They all stood there, uncertainly.

“So,” Miles said at last. “What do we do now?”

Mr. Itigaituk and Lydia Barrie exchanged a look.

“I mean,” Miles said, “do we just walk up to the door and knock? Or what?”

And Lydia regarded him, her sunglasses an unreadable blankness.

“Do you have another suggestion?” she said.

The research station was like a beachfront house. A stilt house, Miles thought, except that there was no water or shoreline in sight, no sense that there would ever be flooding here.

The building itself was little more than three linked mobile homes, propped up on piles, about four or five feet off the ground. It had the white corrugated metal siding he’d seen so much of back
in Inuvik, and on the flat roof was a small orchard of metal antennae and satellite dishes and other transmitting instruments. Along the side of the building was a large capsule-shaped tank, such as holds natural gas, and a few metal barrels, also raised on stilts, probably for petroleum. Some wires ran from the main building to a small wooden shack, the size of an outhouse.

“Are you sure this is …,” Miles said, and Mr. Itigaituk turned to glare at him with a brisk hunterlike focus.

“Shhhhhhh,” Mr. Itigaituk said.

The place was obviously abandoned, Miles thought. The windows—four on each side—were not windows you could look out of. They had a gray opaque film over them, probably a form of insulation. A weathervane, an aluminum wind spinner, was creaking in the tranquil thicket of metal poles on the roof of the building.

As Mr. Itigaituk crept forward, a raven lifted up from the ramshackle outhouse structure and sailed off.

“He’s not here,” Miles whispered, more to himself than to Lydia.

He had never believed in any of Hayden’s paranormal nonsense, though over the years he had played along with various of Hayden’s obsessions: past lives and geodesy, numerology and Ouija boards, telepathy and out-of-body travel.

But he did believe in
something
.

He did believe that when he finally found Hayden, when he finally came within striking distance, he would be able to tell. There would be some extrasensory “twin” radar, he thought. An alarm would be triggered and he would sense it in his body. It would go off in his chest like a cell phone set to vibrate. If Hayden was inside this building, Miles would know it.

“This isn’t the place,” he murmured.

But Lydia only turned to him, blankly. She put out her gloved hand and rested it on Miles’s shoulder.

Hush
.

She was watching with an ardent, almost quivering attention. He
thought of a gambler, that prayerful second of held breath as the roulette wheel slows and the silver ball settles into its place at last.

She looked so certain and focused that he couldn’t help but doubt his own instincts.

Maybe. Maybe it was possible?

She seemed to know things that he did not, after all, she seemed to have done her research.

What if Hayden really was there? What would they do?

Miles and Lydia stood at a distance from the building as Mr. Itigaituk came to the set of wooden stairs that led up to the door.

They watched as Mr. Itigaituk crouched to creep up each step. Together they watched; they caught their breath as he placed his hand on the knob of the door.

Not locked.

Miles closed his eyes.
Okay
, he thought.

Okay. Yes. This is it
.

The place was empty.

The door opened unsteadily, and Mr. Itigaituk stood for what seemed like a long while, peering in. Then he turned and looked at them.

“Uninhabited,” Mr. Itigaituk said, and finally the spell broke. Miles and Lydia both realized that they’d been standing at a distance, as if waiting for Mr. Itigaituk to defuse a bomb.

“Nothing,” Mr. Itigaituk said critically, and gave them both a mild, accusatory look. “Nobody here for a long time.”

A
very
long time, Miles realized. Perhaps a year, maybe more. He could tell from the mushroomlike cellar smell of the air as they stepped inside.

The front room, about the size and shape of a semi truck trailer, was gray-carpeted and entirely devoid of furniture. Some pieces of
paper were pinned to the corkboard that lined the walls, and they set up a flutter of henhouse anxiety when the wind came in.

“Hello?” Lydia called, but her voice was small and wan. “Rachel?” she said, and stepped hesitantly toward the open doorway that led toward the back rooms. “Hello? Rachel?”

It was darker in the back rooms.

Not pitch-black, but dim, like a hotel room with the shades pulled, and the resourceful Mr. Itigaituk took a small flashlight from his pocket and clicked it on.

“God damn it,” Lydia Barrie said, and Miles said nothing.

Here, in this next room, the walls were lined with folding tables, such as you might find in a high school cafeteria. And there was some unplaceable equipment—a large boxy thing, with jagged picket-fence teeth; smaller weathervanes and pinwheel-like wands; a file cabinet with the drawers removed, folders scattered on the floor.

The musky old-clothes smell was stronger now, and Mr. Itigaituk ran the line of his flashlight into a side room that Miles saw was a kitchen and pantry area. Dirty dishes were piled high in the sink, and empty cans and candy bar wrappers lined the counter space, beneath cupboards that were open and mostly empty.

A box of Cap’n Crunch cereal, almost unrecognizably faded, was sitting on the table, next to a bowl and a spoon and a can of condensed milk.

Mr. Itigaituk solemnly turned to look at Lydia, and his expression confirmed what Miles had been thinking. The place had been abandoned for—years, Miles guessed. It wasn’t even a close call.

“Fuck,” Lydia Barrie said, under her breath, and at last she took a flask from her bag and sipped from it. Her face was drawn, tired, and her hand had a tremor as she offered the flask to Miles.

“I was feeling so confident,” she said as Miles took the flask. He considered it, but didn’t drink.