Free Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon Page A

Maserati?—but when he saw her sitting there, his expression opened into a gratifying look of alarm.
    “Lucy?” he said. He was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, very nondescript—his version of a native costume—and she had to admit that he didn’t look like a wealthy man. He didn’t even look like a teacher, with his face unshaved and his hair growing out and his jaw hard with suspicion, he could actually be said to look menacing and middle-aged. Briefly she had a memory of the father of her friend Kayleigh, who was divorced and lived in Youngstown and drank too much, and who had taken them to the Cedar Point amusement park when they were twelve, and she could imagine Kayleigh’s father in the parking lot of Cedar Point leaning up against the hood of the car, smoking a cigarette as they came toward him, she remembered being aware of the way his arms were muscled and his eyes were fixed on her, and she thought,
Is he staring at my boobs?
    “Lucy, what are you doing?” George Orson said, and she looked at him hard.
    Of course, the real George Orson was still there, underneath, if he cleaned himself up.
    “I was just getting ready to drive off in your car and steal it and go to Mexico,” Lucy said.
    And his face settled back into itself, into the George Orson she knew, the George Orson who loved it when she was sarcastic.
    “Sweetie,” George Orson said. “I made a quick trip into town, that’s all. I had to get some supplies—and I wanted to make you a nice dinner.”
    “I don’t like being ditched,” Lucy said sternly.
    “You were sleeping,” George Orson said. “I didn’t want to wake you.”
    He ran a hand across the back of his hair—yes, he realized it was getting shaggy—and then he reached down and opened the door to the Maserati and climbed into the passenger seat.
    “I left a note,” he said. “On the kitchen table. I guess you didn’t find it.”
    “No,” she said. They were silent, and she couldn’t help it, that slow, vacant feeling was opening up inside her chest, that end-of-the-world loneliness, and she put her hands on the steering wheel as if she were driving somewhere.
    “I don’t appreciate being left alone here,” she said.
    They looked at each other.
    “I’m sorry,” George Orson said.
    His hand lowered over hers, and she could feel the smooth pressure of his palm against the back of her hand, and he was, after all, possibly the only person left in the world who truly loved her.

9
    B ack in the days before Hayden began to believe that his phone was being tapped, back when he and Miles were in their early twenties, he used to call fairly frequently. Once a month, sometimes more.
    The phone would ring in the middle of the night. Two A.M. Three A.M. “It’s me,” Hayden would say, though of course who else would it be, at such an hour? “Thank God you finally picked up the phone,” he would say. “Miles, you’ve got to help me, I can’t sleep.”
    Sometimes he would be worked up about an article he had read on psychic phenomena or reincarnation, past lives, spiritualism. The usual.
    Sometimes he would start ranting on the subject of their childhood, telling stories about events that Miles had no memory of whatsoever—events he was fairly certain Hayden had invented.
    But there was no arguing with him. If Miles expressed any reservation or doubt, Hayden could easily become defensive, belligerent, and then who knew what would happen? The one time they’dgotten into a heated disagreement about his “memories,” Hayden had slammed down the phone and hadn’t called again for more than two months. Miles was beside himself. Back then, Miles still believed that it was only a matter of time before he tracked Hayden down, only a matter of time before Hayden could be captured or otherwise induced to come home. He had an image of Hayden, calmed and perhaps medicated, the two of them sharing a small apartment, peaceably playing video games after Miles came home from