By the time Lily’s old enough to make mistakes, real ones—the ones that ripple forward in time subtly, ravenously, touching unrelated parts of her life and others’ lives—those mistakes have already been made for her.
But it’s not right to complain.
She knows that.
It gets you nowhere and does nothing for the world.
Everyone else, God knows, has enough of their own shit on their plate.
She’s up in the morning, de-fogging her brain with coffee.
Having an occasional pained laugh with the old sitcoms.
That’s when the Knock comes.
It’s an assertive thing on her front door, like someone delivering a summons or subpoena.
She wonders if she’s in trouble, though there’s no reason she should be.
Other than a few delinquent credit card bills.
And a late library book.
And the parking tickets.
But they call for that, or send nasty stuff in the mail.
She goes to the door, opens it, revealing a guy with a Mike Ditka mustache.
(Only cops and Polish guys wear mustaches like that, and there aren’t many Polish guys in South Carolina.
Yep, she’s in trouble.
But God, why?)
Are you Liliana Allen?
She wants to lie and say no, but she’s too tired to come up with an alternative story.
Another cup of coffee and she’d probably have told him she was the Duchess of Cambridge.
Yes, she says.
He smiles then, sticks out a big, meaty cop-hand, wide as it is long.
Bruce Sherwood.
(Sherwood…)
Can I come in?
She pauses: What can I do for you?
I sent you an email.
She looks at him; things are coalescing in her head, but last night’s Coors Lights have knocked a few dozen points off her IQ….
Sherwood looks at her, eyebrows levitating with enthusiasm.
The one about the lost assets, he says.
The sixteen-point-four million dollars.
He shakes his head with a bemused chuckle.
Don’t tell me you didn’t read it.
She’s invited him in.
She’s offered him coffee without thinking about it, and he’s said yes.
(Problem with that is you’ve got a sum total of one coffee cup in the apartment.
Which currently lazes in the sink, atop the mound of dishes.
A rancid inch of last night’s final Coors Light still in it.
[Get washing, girl.
Oh so subtly.])
This Bruce Sherwood guy, he gets comfortable fast.
He’s idly flipping through her Shape magazine as she washes out the cup and they small talk.
She rolls her eyes to herself at the sight of the magazine.
Nothing worse than a fat chick with a fitness magazine.
(Her only real exercise: Costco.
Miles of aisles.
And forty pounds of new stuff she’s got to push through it in a cart.
Talk about a marathon.
A calorie-burning extravaganza.
[Of course, you probably put it all back on when that forty pounds of stuff gets back home and inevitably works its way into your mouth in the coming days and weeks.]
But that’s life, isn’t it?
Couple steps forward, a whole bunch back.)
She sloshes some coffee into the mug, hopes the bitter, coppery skunk-taste of the beer doesn’t bleed through the liberal amounts of dish soap she’s employed.
She hands it to him.
Thanks, he says, mini-slurping at the hot contents.
She opts to remain standing.
After all, you’ve got to be ready.
This could easily be a rape scenario.
(“She actually let him in?
He offers her sixteen-mill at the door and she lets him in?
Sorry, sister, but maybe you deserved to end up decapitated in that ditch with your panties around your ankles.”
That’s the kind of thing she would’ve said anyhow, from the peanut gallery of her futon, if she were watching such a story unfold on Forensic Files, Cold Case Files, or any of those other late-night murder-porn shows.)
But Bruce Sherwood’s breaths come in fat-man wheezes; belly-breaths constrained by that large belt buckle.
I’m just gonna get into it, if that’s all right with you, Liliana.
By all means.
You ever heard of an heir finder?
She shakes her head.
Basically, what we do is find heirs; you do know what an heir is…
She gives him a look.
I know, sorry, just have to check; in my line of work, you’d be amazed who you cross with.
Anyhow, what we do is match up lost heirs with lost assets; an older generation somewhere back down the line leaves an asset somewhere—some real estate, say, or a safe deposit box—but they die without properly accounting for it, you know, in a will or what have you, and it’s just been sitting there all this time collecting dust.
What we do is find those things, and return them to their rightful owners.
She finds herself smiling, trying to work a few steps ahead of him.
It’s her m.o.
She’s trying to figure out how he’ll turn this into a scam—it’ll be a fee, won’t it—money up front—promise of a huge payday for her down the road, but she’s gotta write him a check first—
Which brings us to your grandfather, Gray Allen, he says.
He looks at her expectantly, like she’ll perhaps chime in.
She opts not to.
You did have a grandfather named Gray, right?
Died before I was born.
He produces some pages printed from the internet.
I did a genealogy on you guys.
Gray Allen, deceased 1945.
One offspring: your father.
And since your father and mother are also now deceased, that leaves you as sole heir.
My grandmother’s still alive.
But if I’m not mistaken, they were divorced in 1944, and thus not eligible for any of the assets he’d accumulated after their separation.
She refills her coffee, smiling.
(What’s the retainer going to be?
$595, she thinks.
He’ll go 595.
But then again, he did actually do some research—even if it is a couple of pages on the internet—fifteen minutes of work, tops—
$1,195.
He’s gonna go 1,195.)
So let me guess where you’re going, she says.
You said $16.4 million in the email.
My grandfather left it out there somewhere.
And it’s mine for the taking.
Is that what you’re here to tell me?
Bruce widens his perma-smile.
That’s exactly what I’m here to tell you.
This man, she thinks, with that all-too-easy smile, is a half-breed: part game show host, part puppy.
I’ll give you a minute if you want to get some goose bumps, he says.
(Ooh, he’s used that one before!
It’s too good not to have!
He’s actually fun, this one, in a cheesy, keep-at-arm’s distance kind of way.
Too bad he’s going to ruin it all in a couple of minutes asking for the 1,195.)
So, what do I got to do, she says, baiting.
Well, in a nutshell…you’ve got to find him.
But let’s back it up: you’re probably wondering what the 16.4 mill is, how it got to be 16.4 mill.
She nods sure.
Apparently, Bruce says, right before your grandfather’s deployment, he invested all his savings—which was not a ton, a couple hundred bucks—in three hundred shares of PR Ordnance.
They were a maker of bombs, basically.
Which is the sort of business you wanted to be in in 1944.
&n
bsp; What with the world’s endless appetite for blowing each other up at that point.
No clue if that was his actual thinking, but I always try to understand the narrative of these stories—the hows and the whys.
I’m not just about the money, he says.
(Say that again when you ask me for the 1,195.)
The important thing here is PR Ordnance is bought five years later by Stateside Aviation, which, in turn, merges with General Aeronautics a dozen years later, which grows and grows and grows…then is bought out by Lockheed Martin.
The sum of all of this?
The stock he bought, through all those splits and mergers, is now worth $16.4 million on the open market.
It’s just sitting there in no man’s land, waiting for you to claim it.
But you say I have to find him.
You do.
He’s dead, Lily says.
You and I know that, but the SEC doesn’t; all they see is MIA/KIA in the Pacific in 1945.
Basically, Bruce says, shaking his head, because your grandfather’s a missing-in-action, and hasn’t been proven legally dead, it can’t go through the probate process that’d give you legal control of the assets.
They want a body, she says.
They want a body, he nods.
Isn’t there a way to have him declared legally dead?
I made some initial inquiries, and because of the significant amount of money we’re talking here, there’s going to be resistance: it becomes a real mess if they make that legal declaration, yield that money to you, then find out a few months later he’s actually alive somewhere on a tropical island, surrounded by brown-skinned honeys, and he wants his money back.
She absorbs it all.
I wouldn’t know where to look.
I know nothing about him, just that he died in World War Two.
And, from everything I know, it was in Europe, not the Pacific.
You don’t need to do it all by yourself, Bruce says, that’s what I’m here for.
You wouldn’t believe how many resources there are to find MIAs—there are still forty-five thousand MIAs from World War Two, believe it or not, and people are looking for them every day.
But the family members are always the crucial piece, Bruce says.
Because they have access to the tiniest leads—stories in the family, old correspondences, that sort of thing—and those little leads suddenly mushroom into huge leads when you bring them to resources like JPAC; sorry, Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command.
He takes the perfect beat, eyes her: You’re the key, Liliana.
She considers him briefly.
He’s good, knows how to make it all so damn exciting.
How much, she says finally; time to pull back the veil and see the real intentions, as always.
How much what?
You want some sort of starter’s fee—
Oh no, no money up front.
?
But there’s something in it for you; you wouldn’t be here.
Exactly right, I wouldn’t be here.
Heir finder’s just another word for leech, I’m not gonna deny it.
But you know what?
I’d argue I’m the kinda leech you want in your life.
I don’t get paid unless you get paid.
She takes pause at that.
I take a percentage of what you get.
How much.
Ready for a swift kick in the groin, he smiles, full of self-loathing.
Twenty percent.
He looks at her apologetically.
But she’s actually vaguely pleased.
It’s not $1,195.
Money out of her pocket.
For all intents and purposes, it’s zero.
Because twenty percent of nothing is nothing.
Look, he says, producing a card, think about it; it’s all a lot to take on.
She nods, half shakes her head, half exhales in a fashion that says, exactly.
He rattles his car keys as he leaves: But really, call me.
This is legit, and it’s a big deal.
He hands her the now-empty coffee cup appreciatively.
By the way…was there beer in this?
They share a knowing smile.
And he exits.
She kicks it around for the better part of the weekend.
She’s tickled by it.
Even if it ends up being bullshit.
It feels strange, like there’s been a little tear in the fabric of her reality, and someone else’s life has spilled in by accident; someone with a life lived like it’s supposed to be lived.
Someone not fenced in by the Cordon.
Even if it’s bullshit, a conman’s scheme, there’s possibility in it.
Possibility of a thousand things good and bad, none of which she can really anticipate.
And that’s all she really wants, in a lot of ways: to not know what comes next.
Wes passes her on the way to her cubicle, acts too busy to notice her.
This, for example, is something she could anticipate.
Every time he gets drunk on the weekend and swings for the fences with her, he comes back to work and acts as if nothing happened.
No problem, she thinks.
Water off a duck.
Because suddenly she is the Bearer of Secrets, bullshit or not.
When Jack unceremoniously forwards her a week’s worth of work—last week’s, his—she absorbs it with furtive glee—because though she is meek, low man on the totem, a woman of no prospect in a poorly plumbed office park, she is silently, under her TJ Maxx business suit, growing wings.
And while the Customers lay into her—by phone in sharp-edged voices, by email with a deluge of all-caps and exclamation points—she feels like she is floating.
Not in her chair, not in this cubicle, not in this office, not in this life.
The crushing gravity of her existence has for a moment loosened hold of her.
She cautions herself on this feeling, she knows it, knows what it can lead to.
It is the giddy prospect of better things, of a warm and never-changing bedrock beneath her feet.
She thought it was beaten out of her in high school, hope.
When she was lovesick for one boy, then another.
Drunk on grand, bittersweet hope.
The impossible promise of Ever After.
And such was her rebel, Goth-girl motto: All In For Love.
She’d written that in sprawling six-inch letters inside of her English folder.
(Oh God.)
Both boys had only proven to be men-in-training—world-class salesmen, cooers, coddlers, until they’d gotten what they wanted, or better put, gotten bored.
They were like sharks in that way, she decided—and not in the obvious way, not in their mercilessness—but instead in their inability to sit still—if they didn’t move, their gills didn’t get the oxygen required to live, and they’d die.
It was hardwired into them: this restless needing.
They were gone before they even knew they were gone; she could see it in their eyes.
But that was comparatively small potatoes, she realizes now.
High school wounds: who cares?
There was nothing at stake.
Just a broken heart.
None of the ancillary stuff of breakups later on.
The collateral damage of money and family and living arrangements and such.
(Oh no, Lily.
We are not doing this.
You are supposed to be a world-class Forgetter.
Remember?
What is not said is not remembered.)
She did not then and will not now moan about it.
Everyone gets diced up by life, in one way or another.
It’s the ones who wallow in it that are insufferable.
Christalmighty, get on with it.
Get some separation, move on.
(And that’s precisely what I did.
I got separation.)
She could work with men, date them, even sleep with them, but she’d develop this ability, inside her head, to stay on the outside of things, to not take the bait, no matter what feelings burgeoned within her.
And she wasn’t the Angry Single Chick.
God knows she’d seen enough Angry Single Chicks—the ones who protest too much—swearing off men forever, though all they ever really wanted was Brad Pitt and a yard full of mini-Pitts.
It’s like, relationship-wise, she’d skipped her twenties and even middle age, and gone straight to bemused old hand.
Men were ultimately funny.
Actors who didn’t know they were bad.
Wholly transparent, with no clue that they were so.
Any complexity they exhibited during the romance stage—whether in business, relationships, dating, or conversation—could always be reduced to a binary of sex and power.
In some ways, she appreciated that.
You sort of knew where you stood with men, if you looked at it in that light.
You needn’t get confused, frustrated—or more important, hurt—by them being what they were.
It was your expectations that were wrong, not men.
Women: that was a whole ’nother thing.
She knew this firsthand living inside her own head.
Hooboy.
It was like an abstract painting in there, paint splattered every which way.
She pitied the person who tried to unwind it.
God knows she couldn’t.
She knows where this is all going.
Her grandmother.
Another woman—Lily in spades, really—and the woman she’ll need to call if she’s serious about wanting to get a sense whether there’s anything to Bruce’s bullshit pitch.
Now, on Tish Allen Archuleta: Lily loves her and hates her.
That needle creeps evermore toward hate over the years.
Tish made Lily.
Caught her—not necessarily voluntarily—when that yawning chasm opened up beneath Lily the moment her mother died, eighteen short months after her father had.
Tish tough-loved her along through her childhood.
Instilled in her the bulldog qualities she’d learned as a hardscrabble youth in the Great Depression.
Keep the stiff upper lip.
Never complain.
Be thankful for what you got.
And never let the sons of bitches see you cry.
In later years, Lily wondered if this was in part a shrewd way of dissuading her from ever complaining to Tish, burdening her with the usual pained chaos of a hurt teenager’s life.
The Far Shore Page 3
