by Dan Chaon
And there were papers strewn everywhere—some in piles, some crumpled into balls and discarded, some documents taped to the walls in a haphazard collage. The drawers to the file cabinet—the one he said he couldn’t find the key to—had all been taken out, and the overstuffed hanging folders were stacked into various towers around the room.
It could easily be mistaken for the room of a crazy person, she thought, and a nervous feeling settled in her chest, a smooth, vibrating stone forming just below her breastbone as she stepped into the room.
“Oh, George,” she breathed, and she couldn’t decide if it was scary, or sad, or touching to imagine him emerging day after day from this room as his normal, cheerful self. Coming out of this tsunami with his hair combed and his smile straightened, to make her dinner and reassure her, to watch a movie with his arm draped gently over her shoulder, the day’s frenzied activity closed and locked behind the study door.
She knew well enough that she shouldn’t move anything. There was no way to tell what organizational principal was at work here, though it might not appear as if there were any. She stepped attentively, as if it were a lake covered with new ice, or a crime scene. It was okay, she told herself. He had promised to tell her everything, and if he hadn’t, it was her right to find out. It was only fair, she thought, though she was also uncomfortably aware of those fairy tales that had scared her when she was a child. Bluebeard. The Robber Bridegroom. All those horror movies in which girls went into rooms they weren’t supposed to.
Which was paranoid, she knew. She didn’t believe that George Orson would hurt her. He would lie, yes, but she was sure—she was positive he wasn’t dangerous.
Still, she crept forward like a trespasser, and she could feel her pulse ticking in her wrist as she laid one soundless foot in front of the other, picking a slow pathway through the clutter, treading with deliberate steps along the edge of the room.
The papers taped to the walls were mostly maps, she saw—road maps, topography, close-ups of street grids and intricately detailed coastlines—not places recognizable to her. Scattered throughout these maps were some news items George Orson had printed from the Internet: “U.S. Prosecutors Indict 11 in Massive Identity Fraud Case,” “No Developments in Case of Missing College Student,” “Attempted Theft of Biological Agent Thwarted.” She glanced at these headlines, but didn’t pause to read the articles. There were so many; every wall of the whole room was papered with 8½ × 11 sheets of paper. Maybe he had lost his mind.
And then she noticed the safe. The wall safe he had shown her the first day they had arrived, back when this room was just another one of the dusty curiosities he was touring her through. Back when he blithely told her he didn’t have the combination.
But now the safe was open. The painting that had hidden it, the portrait of George Orson’s grandparents, was swung back, and the thick metal door of the safe was ajar.
In a horror movie, this would be the moment in which George Orson would appear in the doorway behind her. “What do you think you’re doing?” he would purr in a low voice, and she felt her neck prickle even though the doorway was empty behind her, even though George Orson was long gone, on his way to town.
But still she walked toward the safe, because it was full of money.
The bills were in bundles, just like you saw on TV in gangster movies, each stack about half an inch thick, rubber-banded and piled into neat columns, and she reached and took one. One-hundred-dollar bills. She guessed that there must be about fifty bills in each rubber-banded little bale, and she balanced one in the palm of her hand. It was light, no heavier than a pack of cards, and she riffled through the stack, not breathing for a second. There were thirty of these little parcels: about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, she calculated, and she closed her eyes.
They really were rich, she thought. At least there was that. Despite her doubts, despite the chaos of papers and garbage and the books and maps and news stories, at least there was that. Up until then, she realized, she had almost convinced herself that she was going to have to leave.
Without thinking, she touched the cash to her face, as if it were a bouquet. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you, God.”
16
They had arranged to meet in the lobby of the Mackenzie Hotel, which was where the woman said she was staying. “My name is Lydia Barrie,” she had told him over the phone, and when he gave her his name, there was a moment of hesitance.
“Miles Cheshire,” she repeated, a skeptical edge to her voice—as if he had given her some stage name. As if he had told her his name was Mr. Breeze.
“Hello?” he said. “Are you still there?”
“I can meet you in fifteen minutes,” she said—a bit stiffly, he thought. “I have red hair, and I’m wearing a black overcoat. We shouldn’t have trouble finding each other.”
“Oh,” he said. “Okay.”
Her voice was so curiously clipped, so strange and abrupt, that he felt a pang of uncertainty. When he went around putting up his flyers, he had imagined that—at the very best—he would get a few responses from some local teenagers, perhaps a clerk at the liquor store, or a waitress, or a curious and watchful retiree, or some derelict interested in the reward. That was the type of caller he usually got.
So this woman’s eagerness made him uncomfortable.
He probably should have been more cautious, he thought. He probably should have deliberated more before arranging a meeting, he should have prepared a cover story.
All of which came to him too late. Too late he remembered the letter that Hayden had sent him: someone may be watching you, and I hate to say this but I think you may actually be in danger, and now he thought perhaps he shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss Hayden’s warning.
But the woman had already come into the lobby. She was already peering around, and he was the only person standing there. He glanced over his shoulder, to where the girl at the front desk was talking avidly on the phone, utterly oblivious as the woman came toward him.
“Miles Cheshire?” she said, once again pronouncing his name with a faint touch of skepticism, and what could he do? He nodded, and tried to smile in a way that would seem honest and disarming.
“Yes,” he said. He shifted uncertainly. “Thank you for coming,” he said.
She was, Miles guessed, a bit older than he was—somewhere between thirty-five and forty, he imagined, a thin, striking woman with high cheekbones and a sharp nose and smooth red hair. Her eyes were large and gray and intense, not bulging, exactly, but prominent in a way that he found unnerving.
He was also aware of how dumpy he looked, in cheap jeans and an untucked, un-ironed button-down shirt, more than a little disheveled, he realized, probably smelling of beer and the cheap barroom fish he’d eaten for dinner. Lydia Barrie, on the other hand, was wearing a light, glossy black trench coat, and emitted a faint scent of some mildly floral businesslike perfume. She fixed her gaze on him, and her eyebrows arched as she looked him up and down.
She removed a thin cloth glove to shake his hand, and her palms were soft and lotioned, very cold. But it was she who shuddered when Miles’s fingers touched her palm. She was staring at his face, her big eyes round with suspicious hostility.
“It’s striking,” she said. “The person in your poster is also named Miles.” He watched as her lips pursed: an unpleasant memory. “His name is Miles Spady.”
He stood there, blankly. “Well,” he said.
Obviously, he should have been prepared for this. He had encountered this particular alias before, back in Missouri—it was an unpleasantly pointed invention on Hayden’s part, a secret jab, marrying Miles with the last name of their hated stepfather—and there had even been the time in North Dakota when Hayden had checked into a motel using the name Miles Cheshire.
It was foolish of him to give this woman his real name, a stupid mistake, and he tried to think. Should he show her his driver’s license, to prove his own honesty?
&n
bsp; “Well,” he said again.
Why hadn’t he done more preparation? Why hadn’t he dressed up a bit, why hadn’t he memorized a simple explanation, instead of thinking he could extemporize?
“That’s not actually his real name,” Miles said at last. It was the only thing that he could think of, and—oh, why not? Why not just tell the truth? Why was he still playing a game that had long ago grown stale? “Miles Spady—” he said. “That’s just a pseudonym; he does that all the time. Frequently, he’ll use the names of people he knows. Miles is my name, and Spady is the name of our stepfather. It’s a joke, I guess.”
“A joke,” she said. Her eyes rested on his face, and her expression flickered as her thoughts settled into place.
“You’re related to him,” she said. “I can see the resemblance.”
Well.
It took him aback. It was a peculiar feeling, after all this time.
In all the years he had been showing this old photo of Hayden, no one had ever made the connection. For a while, it had dumbfounded him, and then eventually it was just another small, nagging doubt.
They were identical twins—obviously there was a similarity—so why had it been so many years since anyone had remarked on it? Miles guessed that he’d aged differently than Hayden had—he’d gained weight, his face had hardened and grown thicker—but still, he had always felt a little hurt that no one ever seemed to connect his own face with the boy in the poster.
So it was a relief, even a consolation, to hear her say the word “resemblance.” It was as if his body solidified for the first time in—he couldn’t remember how long.
Miles let out a breath.
“He’s my brother,” he said at last, and it was such a liberation to say it, such a release. “I’ve been looking for him for a long time now.”
“I see,” Lydia Barrie said. She regarded him, and her hostility deflated slightly. She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear, and he watched as she closed her eyes, as if she were meditating.
“Then I guess we have something in common, Miles,” she said. “I’ve also been looking for him for a long time.”
He was lonely: that’s what he told himself later, when he began to worry that he should have been more cautious, more circumspect. He was lonely and tired and disoriented and sick of playing games, and what did it matter? What did it matter?
They sat at the bar of the Mackenzie Hotel, and he had another few beers, and Lydia Barrie drank gin and tonics, and he told her everything.
Well—almost everything.
It was disconcerting, he found, once he began to put the whole story into words. Their unbelievable childhood—which, even in the blandest summary, sounded like a comic book. Their magician/clown/hypnotist father. The atlas. Hayden’s breakdowns, the past lives and spirit cities, the various identities he inhabited, the emails and letters and clues that mapped out a treasure hunt Miles had been pursuing for years now. Perhaps that was the most embarrassing thing to admit, that he had been following this trail for more than a decade now, and hadn’t gotten any closer.
How did you explain that? Was it enough to say that they were brothers—that Hayden was the last person alive in the world who shared the same memories, the last person who could remember how happy they were at one point, the last person who knew that things could have been different? Was it enough to say that Hayden was a conduit through which he could pass back in time, the last thread that connected him to what he still thought of as his “real” life?
Was it enough to say that, even now, even after everything, he still loved Hayden more than anyone else? He still longed for the old Hayden every day, the brother he had known as a kid, even though he knew that would sound crazy. Desperate. Pathological.
“I’m honestly not sure what I’m doing at this point,” he said, and he folded his hands on the surface of the bar. “Why am I here? I don’t actually know.”
Over the years, he had imagined himself telling his tale to someone—a wise therapist, perhaps; or a friend he’d become close to—John Russell, maybe, given time and proximity; or a girlfriend, once they’d gotten to know each other and he was sure she wouldn’t immediately run away. The girl at Matalov Novelties, Aviva, Mrs. Matalov’s granddaughter, with her dyed black hair and skeleton earrings and sharp, sympathetic, knowing eyes—
But he never would have imagined that the person he’d finally reveal himself to would be someone like Lydia Barrie. There were, he thought, few people more unlikely than this owlishly watchful, tightly wound woman, with her gloves and her trench coat and her pale, elegant skin.
But it was, nevertheless, easy to talk to her. She listened intently, but didn’t seem to doubt what he was telling her. None of this surprised her, she told him finally.
Lydia Barrie had been looking for Hayden for more than three years—or, to be exact, she had been looking for her younger sister, Rachel.
Hayden was Rachel’s fiancé. Or had been.
“This was back in Missouri,” Lydia Barrie said. “My sister was attending the University of Missouri at Rolla, and your brother was her teacher. He called himself Miles Spady—he was a graduate student in math. He was supposedly British. He said he’d gone to Cambridge, and his father was a professor of anthropology there, and I think we were a little dazzled by him when he came home with her that December.
“We were five women. It was Rachel and me and our middle sister, Emily, and my aunt Charlotte, and our mother. Our father died when we were young, and so there was that: it was a novelty to have a man in the house.
“And it was also that my mother was so ill. She had ALS, and she was in a wheelchair by that time. We all knew that she was going to die soon, and so—I don’t know—everyone wanted it to be a wonderful Christmas, and I’m sure he realized that. He was very charming, and kind to our mother. She wasn’t able to talk anymore, but he would sit with her and converse, and tell her about his life back in England, and—
“I believed him. He was convincing enough, at least. In retrospect, I realize that his accent struck me as slightly put-on, but I didn’t think too much about it at the time. He seemed very smart, very nice. A little eccentric, I thought, a little affected, but nothing that made me feel especially suspicious of him.
“Undeniably, I wasn’t paying an enormous amount of attention. I was living in New York, just home for a few days for the holiday, and I was involved in my own life, and I wasn’t terribly close to Rachel. We’re eight years apart, and she was—always a very quiet girl, secretive, you know? And in any case, I thought it was silly for them to be saying they were engaged, since they weren’t planning to get married until after she graduated from college, and that was well over a year away. She was a junior at the time.
“And then, in October of the following year—about five months after my mother died—the two of them disappeared.”
Lydia Barrie was reticent for a moment. Staring into her drink. Miles wondered whether he ought to tell her about how obsessed Hayden used to be with orphans. How they used to play pretend games when they were children in which they were orphans in danger, runaway orphans, how he used to love this children’s book, The Secret Garden, about a little orphan girl …
But perhaps this wasn’t the best time to mention it.
“I was so angry with her,” Lydia Barrie said, at last, softly. “We hadn’t been talking. I was upset with her, because she hadn’t come to our mother’s funeral, and so we were out of contact, and it was actually some time before I realized that she was not in school anymore. And there was no way to reach her.
“They left town together, apparently, but no one knew where they were going, and they effectively … Well, it probably doesn’t sound ridiculous to you if I say that they vanished.”
And she looked at Miles with her large, prominent eyes, and he was aware of how pale her skin was, almost transparent, like onion paper through which he could discern her delicate veins. He watched as she reached up and pushed a strand of hair b
ehind her ear.
“My family hasn’t seen Rachel since,” Lydia Barrie said.
Rachel, he thought. He recalled her name, the name he had been given by Hayden’s friends from the math department.
That girl, peering out of the door of the crumbling rental house, the screen door with the torn flap in its mesh, the dusty sofa parked underneath the front bay windows.
It came to him with a shudder. His own appearance in the story that Lydia Barrie had been telling. He had been following it, almost abstractly, picturing that December scene, Hayden in the living room with the mute quivering mother, the two of them staring into the fire, under the shadow of a blinking Christmas tree; Hayden at the breakfast table with these women, buttering toast and talking in his stagy British accent, which, Miles remembered, was one of his favorites; Hayden placing his arm across Rachel Barrie’s shoulder as gift-wrapped packages were being distributed, a carol playing from the stereo.
He saw all of this in his mind as he listened, as if he were watching the grainy, sweetly sad home videos of some strangers, and then abruptly Rachel Barrie’s eye appeared in a door crack and gazed out at him.
I know who you are, she said. I’ll call the police if you don’t leave.
The two of them, Miles and Lydia, sat there at the bar, both of them quiescent. She lifted her glass, and even though there were other people in the bar, talking and laughing, and there was music playing, he was aware of the faint xylophone rattle of ice in her glass.
