“I promise,” she said.
Their kiss good night almost ignited into something, but with effort Laura pulled back, patted him on the chest with her flattened hands, There, enough, and pushed him out of the door to his car.
Wandering back through the house turning off lights, she paused in the living room, where she’d left her laptop open. The browser homepage was a search window; its cursor blinked at her.
She’d read an article once about anonymous aggregated search data, how people often typed full sentences into Google, questions about personal dilemmas, as if beseeching an oracle. How can I tell if he’s cheating and What if it’s cancer.
She sat, took the computer onto her lap, and typed into the search box Should I go to Bangkok. In just a few clicks she found herself down an internet rabbit hole, in a discussion forum for frequent long-haul air travelers. It was amazing how much that specialized community found to discuss and quarrel about, in message threads cryptic with acronyms and inside jokes. Update: the new 767 widebodies have a seat pitch of 30 degrees, unbearable. AVOID. When Laura’s phone buzzed, she put it to her ear with one hand, the other still tapping the down-arrow key to scroll.
“Don’t want to do what without me?” came into her ear.
“Thanks for responding so quickly.”
“We were having a no-screens night,” said Bea. “I checked my phone before bed, and got this—what is this?”
“Just what it said.”
“You think it’s Philip. What, that email from the other day? Based on what?” Bea’s voice was accusing but late-night low, although her children were not sleeping infants anymore but teenagers, probably online-gaming with headsets on, upstairs in her suburban mansion.
“A video call,” Laura said. She was being obnoxiously curt, she knew it. She’d planned to explain everything carefully and clearly and without emotional overlay, but Bea’s attitude had put her back up. Some grooves of siblinghood were cut so deep that no measure of good intentions could jump the needle free.
“You responded to the email.” A barely suppressed sigh.
“He called me Lolo.” Laura switched to a travel search engine window in her browser, typed in IAD, then BKK. “No one else has ever called me Lolo except family.” She scrolled down, checking boxes to limit the search. “Also, his eyes.”
“Lolo is in your email address,” Bea said. “What about his eyes?” Then, her voice sharp, “Are you texting?”
Laura stopped pressing keys. “No.”
“Tell me about the video call, please.” A clipped imperative.
Laura described it: how Claude, the writer of the email, had turned out to be not a man but a brisk Frenchwoman; how the person who was supposed to be Philip was tall and bald and how although the connection was poor and extremely brief, she’d had a very good look at his face.
“What did you say to him?” asked Bea. “What did he say?”
“I asked him ‘How are you?’ and he said ‘All right.’ ” She heard his voice again, that odd, not quite American pronunciation. “And then the call failed and wouldn’t reconnect.”
“Did he—” But Bea cut herself off. It was too big, there were too many questions. “I can’t believe you did that.”
“We could video-call him together. You and me,” said Laura.
“You know it can’t be him. It’s ridiculous.”
“Tell me that after you see him for yourself,” said Laura.
A pause.
“I’m not sure how much that would help,” said Bea.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure I would recognize him,” she said. “I barely remember him.”
“How is that possible?” said Laura, indignant. Beatrice had been twelve.
“I feel bad enough about it,” snapped Bea. “It’s hard now to sort out what I remember and what I was told,” she added in a softer voice. “You know, all those fundraisers.” The ones Laura hadn’t been allowed to help with. “Maybe we should talk to Uncle Todd.”
“He didn’t even know Philip,” said Laura, trying to keep the eye roll out of her voice. She’d always found Bea’s hero worship of Uncle Todd annoying. He wasn’t their uncle, wasn’t even a friend of the family. He was a Company man who had appeared in the wake of their father’s death like a benefit issued along with the pension payments. After the funeral he’d been a recurrent presence, attending school graduations and sending along cards at birthdays and Christmas signed Fondly. Laura didn’t even know who’d named him Uncle—probably Bea. While Genevieve had always been politely indifferent to him and Laura had tolerated him, for some reason Bea treated him almost like a stepfather.
“He might be able to do a background check on that Claude person,” Bea was saying. “I hate to waste his time on something like this, though.”
“Mum wouldn’t think it was a waste of time,” said Laura. “She would have replied to the email right away. She would have flown to Bangkok by now.”
“Would have means nothing,” said Bea. “All we have is is.” A sigh. “Hold on while I look at my calendar.” Some muffled noises as she took the phone from her ear. Her voice returned, sounding farther away, obviously in speakerphone mode. “You picked the worst time to pull this.”
Laura’s hands crept back to her keyboard, pressed keys quietly. Her sister’s doubt had chased her own away; she felt the tingling in her blood again.
“I can do a video call tomorrow,” said Bea, as if granting a great favor.
Laura scrolled down the list of outgoing flights and clicked to select IAD to NRT leaving very early Saturday morning, connecting NRT to BKK and arriving midafternoon local time on Sunday.
“Hello?” said Bea. “Can you arrange it for tomorrow night? You have to come here.” Of course Laura would have to go there; Bea had never been to Laura’s house. There was always a good reason not to—the traffic; the children; it made the most sense to meet at the Tudor instead, where they could also see Mum—but still the fact remained that after arguing vociferously against the expenditure for the renovations to Laura’s house, Bea had never seen the final product.
“I’ll send an email to Claude right now,” Laura said, clicking BOOK RESERVATION.
* * *
She and Bea made the video call together the next evening from Bea’s Northern Virginia home, in the bay-windowed nook on the ground floor that Bea used as an office, with her sixteen-year-old twins hovering curiously in the background. Clem wasn’t there, and Laura didn’t inquire. One didn’t ask where Clem was, just as one had never asked about Daddy.
“Hey, guys, what’s the latest brainmelt?” said Laura to the nephews, while Skype was starting up. “Still Fortnite?”
“Fortnite is for babies,” said Dustin.
“Not necessarily babies,” said Dean, hastening to gentle his brother’s statement. “Just—not serious gamers.”
“It’s all about loot crates,” said Dustin with derision. “Not really about skill.”
She didn’t see enough of these boys; they were growing into men in between her visits, stuttering from eager rambunctious youngsters to awkward adolescents to near-adults with the wispy beginnings of facial hair. Dustin had given her a hug when she’d come in, and her nose had come to his shoulder.
“Hey, what are you two doing home on a Friday night?” Laura asked.
“Final exams next week,” said Dean. She’d gotten a smile but no hug from Dean, who was shyer and more solemn than his brother. Laura had never had trouble telling the twins apart.
“What’s a loot crate?” said Laura.
“Focus,” said Bea sharply, as the Skype ringing tones began. “Boys, give us some privacy, please.” They complied good-naturedly, no curdle of rebellion on their identical faces, returning to the adjacent great room, where they’d been lounging when Laura had arrived.
Claudette answered as before, saying “He is just coming” without explaining the delay, or where he was coming from. The connection was
again poor, and the conversation as a result was halting. Bea asked questions Laura hadn’t thought to: How had Claudette become involved, how long had Philip been living there?
“My father died last month,” said Claudette. She didn’t pause to allow the offering of condolences. “I came to settle his affairs and found this house full of people.” Her arched eyebrows invited them to join in her surprise. “I sorted the others, and now your brother is the only one left in the house.” Her tone was hard to read—did she mean in the house like vermin, or like a stowaway, or like a prisoner? The video froze, and her next sentence began in its middle. “—he gave me your names, and I used Google.”
That explained why she’d contacted Laura. Bea had been married and using her husband’s name since before there was an internet, and while Genevieve had had a significant internet presence at one time, at this point it was vestigial. She was a smiling figurehead on the Foundation’s website, a reverent mention on its About page; there wouldn’t be current contact information for her online.
“Here he is,” said Claudette. She turned the computer a little bit, toward a bank of windows; the screen went bright white, and the figure that lurched into the frame appeared first as a tall dark column wrapped in a flare of light. The column sat down in front of the computer, blocking the sun, and the picture adjusted, slowly congealing into the same gaunt man in mental-hospital pajamas whom Laura had seen during the previous call. Laura stared at his eyes, trying to see what she’d seen before.
“Don’t cry,” said the man who might be Philip.
I’m not crying, Laura almost said, but Bea spoke first.
“I’m not crying,” said Bea. Her eyebrows were lowered and her features were drawn together; for a moment she was thirteen again, fierce in that way she’d been at the new American school, wielding a field hockey stick with vicious accuracy, making the varsity team on her first try. “Is that you? Philip?”
“How are you, Beatrice?” said the man. “Queen Bea.”
“Where have you been?” Her voice was a flickering flame between anger and disbelief.
“Mostly here,” he said, a patch of static flitting across the image. “Where have you been?” It had the cadence of a routine politeness: Very well, and how are you?
“You know what I mean,” she said.
There was a ghost of a smile on the man’s face. “You’re not sure it’s me,” he said.
“It’s been a very long time,” said Bea.
“You look the same,” said Philip.
“I don’t, actually,” said Bea. “And you don’t either. If it’s you.”
“If it’s me,” said the man.
There was a pause, the two eyeing each other across the continents.
Then Bea leaned closer to the screen. “What was the color of your Easter basket ribbon?” she asked, rapping the words out, delivering the question like a gunshot.
In the wake of her surprise, Laura thought: Clever Bea. Clever, clever Bea. The answer had kicked through her own mind immediately.
They’d had the same baskets every year, heavy with treasure, gold-wrapped chocolate coins and slippery American jellybeans suspended in nests of ribboned green cellophane. Larger items rested on top of the faux grass, wooden Swiss-made toys or metal Chinese-made toys, a sparkling hard-sugar egg not for eating with a peephole in its side and a pastoral scene within. And always, leaning against each basket handle, presiding over the hoard like a solid-chocolate emperor, the rabbit. In a clear crackling bag stamped with the logo of a Belgian chocolatier in Washington, somehow transported across the world without melting. The children never questioned that Easter-morning magic, scrambling around the house in a rare episode of sanctioned chaos, each hunting for his or her specific basket. The floppy satin bow tied onto Laura’s basket was pale yellow. Bea’s ribbon was light blue. Philip’s was a pastel green.
It was such a good question. Who else would know the answer but a Preston child? Robert was gone, and Genevieve was as good as gone.
“B for Bossy,” said Philip, still with that almost-smile.
“We called you that,” Laura murmured to Bea. “Philip and I. We called you Bea for Bossy, behind your back.” She just now saw the pun in it—that Bea was a homonym for the letter B. She felt a stab: they’d been so young.
“What color was your ribbon?” Bea pressed Philip, ignoring Laura.
He could have forgotten, thought Laura. Couldn’t he? He could have forgotten the ribbon. He could have forgotten the Easter baskets themselves. Perhaps Laura and Bea remembered the details so well only because the tradition had persisted for them until they were well into their teens, the same baskets and the same bows. If Laura had been eight the last time she’d seen her basket, she might not now remember anything about it at all.
The camera jerked around, the video pixelating and then settling on Claudette’s scornful face. “You’re asking him to remember a ribbon?” she demanded. “Ask a better question.” She shoved the camera back into its former position, so that Philip’s face was centered again. Off-screen, Claude’s voice continued: “The name of your school. The dog’s name.”
“We didn’t have a dog,” said Bea and Philip in unison.
“Voilà.” Claude, off-screen, triumphant.
Bea put a hand in front of her mouth to shield it from the camera, whispered to Laura. “The school was Pattaya?”
Laura shook her head no. If Bea could confuse the name of their school, Patana, with the Thai beach resort Pattaya that they’d visited as a family, then Philip forgetting an Easter basket ribbon seemed utterly reasonable.
“This is ridiculous,” said Bea. She took her hand down from her mouth and spoke to the man on-screen in a challenging voice. “If you are Philip, why would you wait so long? Why wouldn’t you have contacted us long before now?”
Because he’s been a prisoner, thought Laura. Because he’s been in a cult.
The camera turned again, the room wheeling by. “He is not well,” Claudette said as the tumbling granules of video melted into each other and resolved into her face. Her expression was severe. “I have been trying to reach you for weeks. You can’t do this by telephone. You need to come here.”
The video window closed with a ping and a dialogue box appeared: Rate this call!
“Whoa,” said Dustin from the other room. “She hung up on you, dude.”
“That in itself tells me all I need to know,” said Bea, pushing her chair back from the desk and standing.
“Come on,” said Laura, reaching for the mouse and clicking Reconnect, getting an error message. Had she and her sister been looking at the same screen? “You really don’t think that was Philip?” she said. “He looked just like Daddy.”
“He didn’t,” said Bea. But she was shaken, Laura could tell.
“He called you Queen Bea.”
“People in college called me that,” said Bea. She left the room, and Laura heard a long rush from the kitchen tap, then the beeps of the coffeemaker being programmed for the next morning’s brew. “One more hour, then bedtime,” she called to the boys.
Laura abandoned her attempts to reconnect the call, got up from the chair, and went into the kitchen.
“Bea,” she said.
Her sister was shaking coffee from a bag into the filter section of the coffeemaker. “Dammit,” she said, holding the bag upright, looking at it. “This is decaf.” She put the bag down and braced her hands on the counter, head bowed. “You don’t know,” she said. “You have no idea.”
Laura didn’t say what she was thinking: I would know, if I’d ever been included.
“All those years,” said Bea. “All the false leads. And that hope. That hope every time.” She turned her head toward Laura. Those blue lamps of eyes, so like their mother’s. “I can’t do it again.”
“Okay,” said Laura. “Okay.”
Bea turned her head back. She stayed there for several seconds, leaning against the counter, looking down at the veined stone. Th
en she nodded and straightened up, went to the freezer, took out a different bag of coffee.
Laura opened the ride-sharing app on her phone as she walked toward the great room, where her nephews sat on perpendicular sofas with their laptops, papers and textbooks surrounding them like a debris field. They looked up at her approach.
She held up her phone, where a tiny car icon was navigating a corner. “Christina my driver is eight minutes away,” she said. “Good luck on your exams.”
“Was it him?” the twins chorused.
“No,” called Bea from the kitchen, as Laura said, “Maybe.”
* * *
When she let herself into her house, there was the packed bag, docile and waiting. She hadn’t canceled the reservation yet; the flight would leave in the morning. She remembered her sister’s face, that mask of pain. Then the man on the screen came into Laura’s mind, his unreadable expression, the quiet If it’s me. Maybe Bea couldn’t do it, but that didn’t mean Laura couldn’t. She lifted the bag. It weighed so little; it contained everything she needed. Her heart felt light, purposeful.
Chapter Three
SHE’D BOOKED business class on a Japanese airline for the first leg: fourteen hours from Dulles to Narita, a window seat in a cabin filled with businessmen. It was a luxurious journey, an orchid trembling in the bathroom vase and an omnipresent flight attendant, who appeared at Laura’s elbow to offer something—a cloudy nonalcoholic citrus cocktail, an eye mask, a snack—approximately every forty minutes. The meal deemed dinner without regard to a clock was complicated and many-coursed, a tiny thing followed by a slightly less tiny thing followed by marinated eel and cucumber on a scoop of steamed rice. Laura hadn’t thought she was hungry, but she ate and ate. She slept for a while, woke into a darkness scattered with small patches of light: no-smoking signs, fasten-seat-belt signs, call buttons. The engines hummed under her; the cabin air that had been sweet at first had grown stale. Outside the window was a wrinkled lightless land mass that the seat-back monitor told her was Alaska.
What Could Be Saved Page 4
