What Could Be Saved

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  But she’d been with Laura for a moment, she had. And the electric joy, now ebbing, that had surged through Laura told her that she’d been wrong before, totally wrong. She didn’t love the new Genevieve more; how could she have thought that? And she knew what the old Genevieve would want, of course she did. Blinking away tears, she took her phone from her pocket.

  “What are you doing, dear?” asked Genevieve. She had never had a habit of saying dear. It was probably what the speech therapist called a prop word, being deployed in this case to obscure the fact that she wasn’t sure of Laura’s name.

  “Nothing,” said Laura. She tapped in a short message, waited for the whoosh of the email going out, and then put her phone down and stood, taking up her mother’s glass. “I’ll get some lemonade instead, shall I?”

  Coming back through the center hall carrying the lemonade, she paused outside her mother’s sitting room. An uninterrupted monologue came from upstairs: Noi on the telephone, giving someone lengthy instructions. Laura set the glass onto the marble table in the hall and went into the sitting room, walked around the desk to pull open the bottom drawer. It still held the sturdy manila envelopes Genevieve used instead of file folders. Laura had that habit too now, standing the envelopes on their ends, putting them in strict alphabetical order. Edward had been delighted by Laura’s desk drawers. She flipped through the envelopes. Maybe it wouldn’t be there. But it was, standing among the others, inscribed with the single word: Philip. Laura hesitated, then took it out and closed the drawer. She slipped the envelope into her messenger bag, which was slouching in the entry hall, then retrieved the lemonade and took it to her mother.

  * * *

  The reply to Laura’s email came the next evening. It said nothing about money.

  Thank you for responding. He was living here in Bangkok with my father, who died last month. I’m writing for him, as I believe that he has not used email before. I am hoping you can help with the next step. I am settling up the house.

  Has not used email before? That seemed frankly insane. Even Genevieve had used email until her diagnosis. Hoping you can help sounded vaguely scammy-solicitous. Laura was regretting the impulsive decision to answer the email. She looked at the digital clock at the top of her laptop screen. Six-fifteen p.m. here meant five-fifteen a.m. in Bangkok. Apparently Claude was an early riser.

  Do you have Skype? she typed into a reply email. Can we video call?

  If this was a fraudster in an internet cafe in Côte d’Ivoire or Bangladesh or Ukraine, video would be out of the question. Laura would get an excuse saying the computer’s camera was broken, or the connection too slow.

  My Skype name is Claude4142 came the answer.

  A couple of minutes later the bouncy ringtones sounded, and then the video blinked to life on Laura’s screen, showing a glowing white sweep of forehead and a pixelating eyebrow. The head retreated and the image coalesced into a sixtyish gamine with a chin-length haircut and red lipstick.

  “Allô,” she said, frowning at what must be the location of Laura’s face on her screen, her eyes looking down instead of directly into the camera. “Miss Preston? Laura?” Her accent sounded French.

  “Yes,” said Laura, resisting the urge to shout. “Um, Claude?”

  “Yes,” said the woman. With a pitch of her head back and forth, as if shrugging off an accolade, she added, “Claudette.”

  In the old days, such an exchange would have taken weeks, onionskin envelopes borne by airplanes crossing above the clouds, perhaps an enormously expensive telephone call, the dialogue overlapping and echoing. Not anymore. In this miracle age everyone was connected all the time, as though by a Möbius strip of electrons flowing unbroken around the earth, and it had taken only a few moments to bring the two of them face-to-face, the video a bit fitful but the sound perfectly clear.

  Claudette was waving to someone off-screen. “Moment,” she said to Laura, and moved out of view as a shape loomed into the frame to replace her. A slender man, wearing what looked like muslin pajamas, like the garb of a hospital patient or an inmate. Was his head shaved? He walked slowly, irregularly forward—was he limping?—coming closer and closer until Laura was looking at his midsection. “Elle est là,” said Claudette’s off-screen voice, and the man backed away again. The picture froze for a second, a line of static fizzling across the screen, and then abruptly his face was very close.

  “Lolo?” he said. The image went transiently Cubist, patching itself with blocky pixels, then juddered into perfect clarity. His mouth was puckered with concentration; his brown eyes looked into hers. She could see her own face reflected, tiny pale ovals twinned in the black of his pupils. “Is that you?”

  Chapter Two

  “DIDN’T YOU ask him any questions?” asked Edward, following Laura as she took the overnight bag out of her guest room closet and carried it into her bedroom. “You didn’t ask him anything about where he’s been all this time?”

  “The connection was terrible,” she said, scooping clothing from bureau drawers. “Clear for less than a minute before the call dropped.” It seemed that all Laura had been able to say as the video sputtered and froze was Oh my God, and then when the call failed and would not reconnect, Stay there, stay there, the way you’d shout to a friend who was leaning over the upper floor in an indoor mall waving to you as you ran to the escalator. Stay there, I’m coming. “It’s lucky my passport is still good.” It had almost expired, slumbering in a drawer.

  “And you think it was him?” he said. “What did he say to prove that it was him?”

  “He didn’t have to say anything.” She laid T-shirts and underwear onto the bed, tumbled an armful of socks beside them.

  “Just stop,” said Edward, putting his hands on hers. “Stop for a minute.”

  He sat on the bed and after a moment she sat with him, among the soft piles of clothing.

  “You realize that this is crazy,” said Edward intently.

  “Not if it’s him,” she said.

  “You know that’s not likely,” he said. “You know that the odds are very, very much against it.” He was still holding her hands in his; he squeezed them. “Take a breath and just think for a minute. What did you see—or what did he say—that made you think it was him?”

  She hated being told to take a breath, like a child, like a hysterical woman. Much less being told to think. It wasn’t like Edward to condescend in that way, but naturally he was very alarmed, having arrived to pick her up for Thursday dinner-and-movie and found her packing.

  “How do you explain how you recognize your brother?” she said.

  “Well,” he said. Extremely reasonable. “I grew up with my brother. I saw him every day of my life from the age of three until I went off to college. I’ve seen him regularly since then. That’s how I recognize him. I wouldn’t necessarily recognize someone whom I hadn’t seen since childhood.”

  “You might if it was your brother,” she said.

  He tried again. “Was there something specific about the man you saw? His features, his voice?”

  She groped around in her memory to find whatever had surged up in her when looking into the man’s eyes on the screen, but it was like reaching into a fog; what she grasped at dissipated and swirled away.

  “He looked like Daddy,” she said, finally. “His face looked like Daddy’s.” She frowned. “He’s bald, though.” Her father had always had a good head of hair. But if this man were Philip, he was older now than Robert ever got to be; maybe, given time, Robert would have lost his hair too. “Or his head could be shaved. It was hard to tell. He was tall like Daddy.” At least, he’d been a lot taller than Claudette.

  “What else?” said Edward. “What did he sound like? How did he seem?”

  “He seemed—amused. Not silly. More like wry.” She didn’t add that his voice hadn’t sounded quite American. There had been something about the vowels. Laura herself had apparently had an accent when they came back to the States; teasing from her new sch
oolmates had made her aware of it. “Like he was thinking of a private joke. Not laughing at anyone. Not really even smiling. Just—calmly amused.”

  “Okay,” said Edward. With energy, as though she’d handed him a tool that he could use to pick a stubborn lock. “Not frantic, or frightened, or overcome with emotion?” She shook her head. “So—not much like a person who’d been abducted and held prisoner. Not like a person who’s seeing his sister for the first time since he was eight.”

  “Maybe he’s got Stockholm syndrome.” She had a thought. “Or maybe he has what Mum has. Maybe he doesn’t even know where he is.”

  “How well do you remember your brother?” asked Edward. “You were very young.”

  “I was seven,” she said. An actual lifetime ago, and also yesterday. “We were close.” But had they really been, or was that something she had been told for so long that it had taken the place of memory?

  “Try something for me,” he said. “Close your eyes and try to picture him as a child.”

  She closed her eyes and looked at the brown darkness inside her lids. After half a minute or so during which she banished a dozen stray thoughts, there he was, Philip, a little blond boy standing beside the open door of a car. His face was screwed up, his eyes squinted as though he was looking into the sun or bracing himself for a blow. Where had that image come from?

  “Tell me about him.” Edward’s voice was soft. “Keep your eyes closed and look at him.”

  “He had blond hair,” she said. “Almost white. We both did then.” Keeping her eyes closed, feeling a bit foolish and stagey, the way she’d felt during the hypnosis sessions she’d done in her thirties in order to quit smoking. “He was small for his age. People always asked if we were twins.” She smiled. “He’d get very offended by that; he was fifteen months older.” The boy in her mind’s eye looked nervously defiant. How unfair, to make one shutter-click moment in a person’s life represent that whole person. As she was thinking that, she remembered her hands being enfolded, similar to the way Edward was holding them now, and an earnest voice: I’ll teach you.

  “He was kind,” she said, her voice breaking a bit, tears brimming behind her closed lids. “He was a good brother.”

  “Okay,” Edward said. “So what you remember is a small, blond, kind boy.” She nodded. “And today you spoke with a tall, bald, wryly amused middle-aged man, for less than a minute on a bad Skype connection.”

  She opened her eyes. Was this what Edward did as a prosecutor, did he use a witness’s own words to break her, selecting among them and repeating them back, nibbling away at certainty and fostering doubt? She pulled her hands from his.

  “I knew the man on the video,” she said. “I knew him.”

  “Maybe you wanted to,” said Edward gently.

  “Maybe. I don’t know,” she said. “But what I do know is that if Mum were able—” Her voice buckled in her throat; with effort, she made the next words firm. “She would go. So I am going.”

  She stood up, put the bag onto the bed, pulled the zipper to open it, then rolled a T-shirt into a cylinder of cloth and tucked it inside.

  Edward said, “Is any part of this you running away from—what we talked about?”

  “Edward, no. It’s not about that.” She pushed some sock balls into the deep corners of the bag. “I know this isn’t rational. But that’s just it—it’s not rational. It’s how I feel.” Five narrow rolls of underwear; she considered and added another pair. A dictum of Genevieve’s: you never, ever regretted extra underwear.

  “Have you actually booked a flight?” He looked relieved when she shook her head. “If you can wait a couple of weeks, I’ll go with you,” he said.

  “No,” she said, then tried to soften it by adding, “I’m not sure how long it will take.” Edward’s schedule was too tight to insert a hairpin, the way he liked it. No room there for an open-ended, spontaneous overseas trip.

  “You remember that NPR segment about internet hoaxes,” he said as she rolled up two pairs of loose cotton trousers and laid them beside the soft bricks of underwear. “We both said how nuts it was, that that man flew to Africa after a few emails.” The man had been robbed and beaten, left for dead; the report had speculated about other victims who hadn’t survived to tell their stories.

  “I honestly don’t think Claudette is running a lonely-hearts fleecing operation,” Laura said. She doubled a brassiere, cup nestled into cup, slid it into a chink of space.

  “There are other kinds of scams,” said Edward. Then, “What did Bea say? Why isn’t she going with you?”

  “Bea has thirty thousand things on her schedule this week alone,” said Laura evasively. A pair of jeans, a light sweater for the sure-to-be-air-conditioned hotel. The little bag was nearly full.

  “You could take Noi. To translate.”

  “Noi has a life, she can’t just drop everything,” said Laura. “I think I’ll be able to get along in English. Bangkok is a major city.” She spoke with an authority she didn’t feel. She hadn’t been to Bangkok as an adult; she didn’t know anything more about what it was like now than a person who’d never been there at all.

  Into one side pocket of the bag went the transparent plastic baggie of travel-size, TSA-friendly toiletries, a bottle of ibuprofen in case of migraine, antacid for gastric reflux, antihistamine for allergy, prescription thyroid pills. If it took a village to raise a child, it took a pharmacy to support someone over fifty.

  “I am begging you,” said Edward. “Please step back from this for a minute.” Frustration and concern radiated from him. “What’s your plan for after you get there?”

  “I’ll bring him back.” She zipped the bag shut.

  “What if he doesn’t have a current passport?”

  “I’ll get him one,” she said. “I have Mum’s papers.” From the top of the bureau she retrieved the manila envelope that she’d smuggled out of the Tudor after lunch with her mother. She slid it into the large flat external pocket of the bag, all by itself, where it would be safe if any of the liquids leaked in flight. She stood back, considered. Had she forgotten anything?

  “That won’t be enough,” Edward said. “Are you listening? Look at me.” His brow was wrinkled, his eyes intense. “Those papers demonstrate that there was once a boy named Philip Preston. They won’t prove that the middle-aged man living in that house is that same boy.”

  “The embassy will help,” said Laura. As Edward opened his mouth to respond, she said, “Stop. I’ll figure things out when I get there.”

  He followed as she carried the bag downstairs. In the foyer, she turned to face him.

  “I know you don’t want me to go,” she said. “I understand that. But I’m a grown-ass woman.” She’d heard this phrase in movies and podcasts, but hadn’t ever spoken it before. After hearing herself say it, she decided she probably wouldn’t again. “I really am fully capable of making decisions.” If he were her husband, if they were legally bound, would she be obligated to defer to his feelings? Was that part of what was included in making it official? “That’s my brother. I’m going to go get him. You need to stop trying to stop me.”

  “I’m not trying to be overbearing,” Edward said. “I’m concerned, Laura. I’m concerned the way anyone who loves you would be concerned. And if you’re so sure about this, why haven’t you told your sister?” He was guessing; Laura’s face told him he was right. “Why not make another video call? This time with Beatrice. She’s older; she has to remember him better than you do.”

  “She wouldn’t agree to that. She didn’t even want me to answer the email.”

  “Just ask her,” said Edward. “Please.”

  Laura set down the bag and took her phone from her pocket.

  I think it might actually be Philip, she typed. Call me.

  She sent that to Bea, then typed another message and sent a second text bubble to nestle on the screen below it:

  I don’t want to do this without you.

  “Thank you,”
Edward said, relieved. “Please promise you’ll wait to hear back from her before doing anything—” He put his arms around her and buried the next word, whatever it was going to be, in her hair. Rash. Stupid. Or possibly, if she gave him the benefit of the doubt, just more.

  * * *

  While waiting for Bea to respond, Laura and Edward stayed in for dinner and streamed a movie, as if it were any ordinary evening. Not totally ordinary, as they never did these things at Laura’s house, where the refrigerator was typically empty and the creature comforts sparse. Edward didn’t suggest they go back to his, though; he studied the options on the food delivery app on her phone and gamely folded himself onto the sofa in her office to watch the movie on the monitor swiveled around on her desk. It all had a somewhat concessional feeling, as if Edward was trying to demonstrate that he could be flexible, that merging their lives would not be a one-way effort. Or perhaps he was simply being practical, keeping an eye on Laura so she didn’t go to the airport.

  As they dished out vindaloo and saag and divided up the samosas, the brittle dialogue between them eventually loosened into real conversation. The movie was good and by the closing titles, with her phone silent and forgotten on the armrest and Edward yawning beside her, the tingling excitement that had been like champagne in Laura’s arteries after the Skype call had dissipated. The whole episode seemed foolish now, like the vaporous logic of a fever dream considered in the light of day. The rush-packed bag in the front hall was frankly daffy. No wonder Edward had been so upset.

  “I can stay,” Edward said as he stood up and stretched, his anxious glance at the clock undermining his words.

  “No, it’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have any stuff here. You’d have to get up so early.”

  He put his arms around her, his forehead against hers.

  “Promise you won’t fly away in the middle of the night,” he said.