Await Your Reply (5 page)

I
n the waiting area of Enterprise Auto Rental, Ryan checked through his identification materials again. Social security card. Driver’s license. Credit cards.

All the flotsam that proved that you were officially a person.

In this particular case, Ryan was officially Matthew P. Blurton, age twenty-four, of Bethesda, Maryland. Ryan didn’t think that he looked like he was twenty-four, but no one had ever questioned him, so he supposed that he must not look suspicious.

He sat there politely, thinking about a song that he was learning on the guitar. He could picture the tablature in his mind, and his fingers moved inconspicuously as he thought of the positions on the frets, the ham of his hand on his thighs, palm up, the fingers posed into various combinations like sign language.

He knew that he ought to be paying more attention; he was going to screw things up if he didn’t take better care. That’s what Jay—his father—would probably tell him.

And so he lifted his head to see what was going on.

At the counter, there was a middle-aged African American woman in a navy-blue coat and a small purple hat, and Ryan observed her surreptitiously as she withdrew a billfold from her purse.

“My grandmother is ninety-eight years old!” the lady was saying. She regarded her billfold as if she were playing a game of pinochle, frowning, then withdrew a bent ancient-looking credit card. “Ninety-eight years old!”

“Mmmm-hmmm,” said the young man behind the counter, who was also African American. The young man’s eyes were on the computer screen, and he typed out a burst of letters onto the keyboard.

“Ninety-eight years old,” he said. “That’s a long time to be alive!”

“It certainly is,” the woman said, and Ryan could sense that they were on the verge of settling into a comfortable conversation. He glanced down at his watch.

“I wonder how long my lifeline is,” the young man at the computer mused, and Ryan watched as the woman nodded.

“Only the Lord knows,” the woman said.

She set her credit card and driver’s license upon the counter.

“You know,” the woman said, “it’s not easy at that age. She doesn’t talk much at all anymore, but she does sing a lot. And prays. She prays, you know.”

“Mmmm-hmmm,” the young man said, and typed again. “Does she have amnesia?” he said.

“Oh, no,” the woman said. “She remembers things okay. She recognizes the folks that she wants to, at least!”

They both laughed at this, and Ryan found himself smiling with them. And then—at least partly because he was stupidly smiling at an eavesdropped conversation—he felt lonely.

Back home in Iowa, where he’d grown up, there were practically no black people to speak of, and he’d noticed since coming east
that it seemed like black people were always nice to one another, that there was a camaraderie. Maybe that was a stereotype, but still he felt an unexpected sense of longing as the man and woman chuckled. He had an idea about ease, warmth, that private sense of connection. Is that what it was really like? He wondered.

Lately, he had been thinking about contacting his parents, and there was a letter he had in his mind.
“Dear Mom & Dad,
” obviously.

“Dear Mom & Dad, I’m sorry that I haven’t been in touch in so long, and I thought I should let you know that I’m okay. I’m in Michigan—
”

And then, right, they would want to know, or they would figure out.
“I’m in Michigan with Uncle Jay, and I know that he is my biological father, so I guess that is one thing we can stop pretending about—
”

Which started already to sound hostile.
“I’m in Michigan with Uncle Jay. Staying here for a while until I get some things figured out for myself. I’m writing some songs, earning some money. Uncle Jay has a business venture that I’ve been helping him out with—
”

Bad idea to even mention “business venture.” It came off immediately as shady.
Jay?
they would think. What was the nature of this “business”? Immediately they would think drugs or something illegal, and he had already promised Jay that he wasn’t going to tell anyone.

“Swear to God, Ryan,” Jay had said as they sat on the couch in the cabin in Michigan, playing video games together. “I’m serious. You’ve got to swear that you’re not going to breathe a word of any of this.”

“You can trust me,” Ryan said. “Who am I going to tell?”

“Anybody,
” Jay said. “Because this is extremely, extremely serious stuff. Serious people could become involved, if you know what I mean.”

“Jay,” Ryan said, “I understand. Really.”

“I hope you do, buddy,” Jay said, and Ryan nodded earnestly, though truthfully he didn’t understand much about the project they were engaged in.

He knew that it was illegal, obviously, a scam of some sort, but the actual purpose was elusive. One day he’d be Matthew P. Blurton and he’d rent a car in Cleveland and then drive the car to Milwaukee and return it at the airport, and then he’d board a plane in Milwaukee using an ID card for Kasimir Czernewski, age twenty-two, and fly to Detroit, and then later, online, he’d transfer bank funds in the amount of four hundred dollars from Czernewski’s bank account in Milwaukee to the account of Frederick Murrah, fifty, of West Deer Township, Pennsylvania. Was it simply a very complex shell game, one person sliding into the next person and so on down the line? He assumed that there must be financial gain involved somehow, but if so he hadn’t seen evidence of it yet. He and Jay lived in basically a hut in the woods, a little hunting lodge, lots of top-notch computer equipment but very little else of value as far as he could tell.

But Jay looked so serious and stern. He had straight shoulder-length hair, surfer hair, Ryan thought, black with a few threads of early gray running through it, and the droopy army surplus clothes of a teenage runaway. It was hard to imagine him projecting an attitude that wasn’t mellow, but suddenly he was startlingly fierce.

“Swear to God, Ryan,” Jay said. “I’m serious,” he said, and Ryan nodded.

“Jay, trust me,” Ryan said. “You trust me, don’t you?”

And Jay said, “Sure I do. You’re my son, right?” And then he gave Ryan that grin that, despite himself, Ryan still found pretty dazzling, even breathtaking, like he’d almost got a crush or something
—You’re my son
, and that deliberate eye contact, both unnerving and flattering, and Ryan, all flustered, was like:

“Yeah, I guess I am. I’m your son.”

This was one of the things that they were still figuring out—how to talk about this stuff—and it was all still very uncomfortable, they
would start to talk about it, and then neither one of them knew what to say, it required a certain language that was either too analytic or too corny or embarrassing.

The basic fact was this: Jay Kozelek was Ryan’s biological father, but Ryan had only found out recently. Up until a few months ago, Ryan had thought that Jay was his uncle. His mother’s long-estranged younger brother.

Ryan’s existence had been due to the usual teenage mistakes; that was the short version. Two sixteen-year-olds getting carried away in the back of a car after a movie. This was back in Iowa, and the girl’s, the mother’s—Ryan’s mother’s—family was strict and religious and didn’t believe in abortion, and Jay’s older sister, Stacey, wanted a baby but she had something wrong with her ovaries.

Jay had always felt that honesty was called for, but Stacey hadn’t felt that it was a good idea at all. She was ten years older than Jay, and she didn’t think very highly of him in any case—in terms of his morals, his ideas about life, the drugs, etc.

There’s a time and place
, she had told Jay, back when Ryan was a baby.

And then later she said:
Why does it matter to you, Jay? Why does it always have to be about you? Can’t you think of someone else besides yourself?

He’s happy
, Stacey said.
I’m his mom and Owen is his dad and he’s happy with that
.

Not long afterward, they had stopped talking to each other. Jay had had some run-ins with the law, and they had argued, and that was that. Jay was hardly mentioned when Ryan was growing up—and then only as a negative example.
Your uncle Jay, the jailbird
. The hobo. Never owned anything he couldn’t carry. Got involved in narcotics when he was a teenager and it ruined his life. Let that be a warning. Nobody knows where he is anymore.

And so Ryan hadn’t learned the truth—that Stacey was actually his biological aunt, that his little-seen uncle Jay was his “birth father,” that his biological mother had committed suicide in her sophomore year in college many years ago, when Ryan was a three-year-old
kid living in Council Bluffs, Iowa, with his supposed parents, Stacey and Owen Schuyler, and Jay was backpacking around South America—

Ryan hadn’t learned all of this until he was himself in college. One night Jay had called him up and told him all about it.

He was himself a sophomore in college, just like his real mother had been, and maybe that was why it struck such a blow.
My whole life is a lie
, he thought, which he knew was melodramatic, adolescent, but he woke up that morning after Jay had called him and he found himself in his dorm, a corner room on the fourth floor of Willard Hall, and his roommate, Walcott, was asleep under a mounded comforter in the narrow single bed beneath the window, and a gray light was coming in.

It must have been about six-thirty, seven in the morning. The sun wasn’t up yet, and he rolled over and faced the wall, chilly old plaster with many thin cracks in the beige painted surface, and he closed his eyes.

He hadn’t slept much after his conversation with Uncle Jay.
His father
.

At first it was like a joke, and then he thought,
Why is he doing this, why is he telling me this?
though all he said was, “Oh. Uh-huh. Wow.” Monosyllabic, his voice ridiculously polite and noncommittal. “Oh, really?” he said.

“I guess it’s just something I thought you ought to know,” Jay told him. “I mean it’s probably better if you don’t say anything to your parents, but you can make your own decision about that. I just thought—it seemed wrong to me. You’re a man, you’re an adult, I feel like you have a right to know.”

“I appreciate that,” Ryan said.

But once he’d spent a few hours sleeping on and off, once he’d turned over the facts in his mind a few hundred times, he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with the information. He sat up in
bed and fingered the edges of his blankets. He could imagine his parents—his “parents,” Stacey and Owen Schuyler, asleep, back in the house in Council Bluffs, and he could picture his own room down the hall from theirs, the books still on their shelves and his summer clothes still in the closet and his turtle, Veronica, sitting on her rock underneath her heat lamp, all of it like a museum of his childhood. Maybe his parents didn’t even think of themselves as fakes, maybe most of the time they didn’t even remember that the world they had created was utterly false at its core.

The more he thought about it, the more everything began to feel like a sham. It wasn’t just his own faux family, it was the “family structure” in general. It was the social fabric itself, which was like a stage play that everyone was engaged in. Yes, he saw now what his history teacher meant when she talked about “constructs,” “tissues of signs,” “lacunae.” Sitting there in his bed, he was aware of the other rooms, rows and stacks of them, the other students, all of them housed here waiting to be sorted and processed into jobs and sent down their various paths. He was aware of the other teenage boys who had slept in this very room, decades and decades of them, the dormitory like a boxcar being filled and refilled, year after year, and briefly he could have risen up out of his body, out of time, and watched the generic stream of them entering and exiting and being replaced.

He got out of bed and took his towel off the bedpost and figured he might as well go down the hall to the communal bathroom and shower, and he knew he had to get a grip on himself and study for his chemistry test, he was earning a D, C-at best,
Oh God
, he thought—

And maybe it was at that moment that he broke loose from his life. His “life”: it felt suddenly so abstract and tenuous.

He had originally just gone out for coffee. It was by that time around seven-thirty in the morning, but the campus was still sleepy. From the sidewalk he could hear the music students in their carrels, the scales and warm-up exercises mingling dissonantly, clarinet,
cello, trumpet, bassoon, winding around one another, and it felt like a fitting sound track, like the music you hear in a movie when the character is about to have a mental breakdown and they clutch their forehead in anguish.

He did not clutch his forehead in anguish, but he did think, once again—

My whole life is a lie!

There were many things to be troubled by in this situation, many things to feel angry and betrayed about, but the one that for some reason Ryan felt most keenly was the death of his biological mother.
My God!
he thought.
Suicide. She
killed
herself!
He felt the tragedy of it wash over him, though now it was past. Still, it outraged him that Stacey and Owen hadn’t cared whether or not he knew about this. That they found out about it and tsked, and he was probably in the living room in front of the television, three years old, watching some trite and educational program, and they might have shaken their heads and thought what a favor they had done for him, raising him as their own, all the money and effort they’d put into turning him into the kind of kid who could get a scholarship to Northwestern University, into the type of person who could take his place in the top tier, how hard they had worked to mold him. But there was no indication they ever
contemplated
revealing the truth about his parentage, no indication that they realized that this was
important
, no sense that they understood how badly they had wronged him.