8

Lucy woke and she was alone in bed. There was the crumpled space where George Orson had been sleeping, the indented pillow, the blankets pulled aside and she sat up as the room loomed over her. The sunlight rimmed the edges of the curtains, and she could see the watchful closet door and the dark stern shape of the bureau dresser and the half-light reflections in the oval vanity mirror, movement, which she realized was herself, alone in the bed.

“George?” she said.

Nearly a week had passed and still they were here at the old house in Nebraska and she was starting to feel a little anxious, though George Orson had tried to be reassuring—“Nothing to be concerned about,” he said. “Just a few things that have to be sorted out….”

But he didn’t explain further than that. Ever since they’d arrived, he’d made himself scarce. Hours and hours locked in the downstairs room he called “the study.” She had actually kneeled in front of the locked door and fit her eye to the keyhole beneath the cut-glass doorknob, and she could see him as if through a pinhole camera, sitting behind the big wooden desk hunched over his laptop, his face hidden behind the screen.

And naturally it had occurred to her that something had gone wrong with their plan.

Whatever the “plan” was.

Which, Lucy realized, she was not that clear about.

She pulled aside the drapes, and the light came in and that felt a bit better. There was a dry, earthy basement smell that was particularly noticeable in the morning, waking up, a taste of underground in her mouth, a taste of rotten fabric, and the windows didn’t open, they were painted shut, and it was clear that the house had been sitting in its own dust for a long time. “I’ve had an exterminator in, don’t worry,” George Orson had told her, “and a cleaning woman—once every few months. The place has never been abandoned,” he said, a bit defensively, but all Lucy wanted to know was how long it had been since someone had actually lived in the house, how long since his mother had died?

And he estimated, reluctantly.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably about—eight years?” She didn’t know why he acted as if even a simple question were an invasion of his privacy.

But a lot of their conversations had been like that lately, and she lingered at the window in her oversize T-shirt and panties looking down at the gravel road that led from the garage past the house and the tower of the lighthouse and the courtyard of the motel units to the two-lane blacktop that ribboned its way eventually back to the interstate.

“George?” she said, more loudly.

She padded down the hallway, and then she went downstairs to the kitchen and he wasn’t there, either, though she saw that his cereal bowl and spoon had been washed and placed neatly into the dish drain.

And so she went out of the kitchen and through the dining room to “the study—”

“Study.” Which, to Lucy, sounded British or something, pretentious, like some old murder mystery.

The Study. The Billiard Room. The Conservatory. The Ballroom.

But he wasn’t there, either.

The door was open and the room was curtained and carpeted and there was a chandelier made of brass with dangling glass dew-drops.

“That was my mother’s idea of elegance,” George Orson had told her when he showed her the room for the first time and she’d folded her arms over her chest, taking it in. His mother’s “idea” of elegance, she assumed, was not real elegance—though to Lucy it was in fact fairly impressive. Beautiful oriental carpet, gold-leaf wallpaper, heavy wooden furniture, shelves full of books—not junky paperbacks, either, but real hardcover books with thread-bound spines and thick pages and a dense, woody smell.

Was there a difference, she wondered, some fine distinction of good taste or breeding that would make it okay to call a room a “study” but not okay to have a light fixture that is called a “chandelier”?

There were a lot of things she had yet to learn about social class, said George Orson, whose college days at Yale had sensitized him to such things.

So what did it say about her that her own experience of chandeliers, studies, and so on was so limited? She herself had come from a long, long line of poor drudgers, Irish and Polish and Italian peasants—nobodies, stretching back for generations.

You could draw her family in two dimensions, like characters in a comic strip. Here was her father, a plumber, a kindly, beer-bellied, muddy little man with hairy hands and a bald head. Her mother: windblown and stern, drinking coffee at the kitchen table before she went off to work at the hospital, a nurse but only a licensed practical nurse, just a vocational degree. Her sister, simple and round like her father, dutifully washing dishes or folding a basket of clothes and not complaining as Lucy sat moodily, lazily, on the couch reading novels by the latest young female authors and trying to emanate an air of sophisticated irritation—

She couldn’t help but think of her lost, sadly cartoonish family as she looked around the empty study. Her old loser life, which she had left behind for this new one.

In the study was an old oak desk, six drawers on either side, all of them locked. And a file cabinet, also locked. And George Orson’s laptop, password protected. And a wall safe, which was hidden behind a framed picture of George Orson’s grandparents.

“Grandpa and Grandma Orson,” George Orson had said, referring to the grim pair, their pale faces and dark clothes, the woman with one light-colored eye and one dark—“called heterochromia,” said George Orson. “Very rare. One blue eye. One brown eye. Probably hereditary, though my grandmother always said it was because her brother hit her in the eye as a child.”

“Hmmm,” Lucy had said, and now, alone in the room, she regarded the picture once again, the way the woman fixed her heterochromatic gaze on the photographer. A frankly unhappy and almost pleading look.

And then she unhooked the latch the way that George Orson had shown her, and the old photo swung out like a cabinet door to reveal the nook in the wall with the safe.

“So,” Lucy had said when she first saw it. The safe had appeared to be quite old, she thought, with a combination wheel like a dial on an antique radio. “Aren’t you going to open it?” she said, and George Orson had chuckled—though a bit uncertainly.

“I can’t, actually,” he said.

Their eyes met, and she wasn’t exactly sure what to make of his expression.

“I haven’t been able to figure out the combination,” he said. Then he shrugged. “I’m sure it’s empty, in any case.”

“You’re sure it’s empty,” she said. And she looked at him and he held her gaze, and it was one of those moments in which his eyes said, Don’t you trust me? And her eyes said, I’m thinking about it.

“Well,” George Orson said. “I doubt very seriously whether it’s full of gold doubloons and gems.”

He gave her that dimpled half smile of his.

“I’m sure the combination will turn up somewhere in the files,” he said, and touched her leg playfully with the tip of his index finger, as if for good luck.

“Somewhere,” he said, “if we can find the key to the filing cabinet.”

But now, standing in the study, she couldn’t help but take another look at the safe. She couldn’t help but reach out and test the brass and ivory handle just to be sure that, yes, it was still locked and sealed and impenetrable.

Not that she would steal from George Orson. Not that she was obsessed with money—

But she had to admit that it was a concern. She had to admit that she was very much looking forward to leaving Pompey, Ohio, and being rich with George Orson, and probably it was true that this was part of the attraction of this whole adventure.

In September of her senior year of high school, two months after her parents’ deaths, Lucy was just a depressed student in George Orson’s Advanced Placement American history class.

He had been a new teacher, a new person in their town, and it was obvious even on the first day of class that he had a presence, with his black clothes and his uncanny way of making eye contact with people, those green eyes, the way he smiled at them as if they were all doing something illicit together.

“American history—the history that you have learned up until now—is full of lies,” George Orson told them, and he paused over the word “lies” as if he liked the taste of it. She thought he must be from New York City or Chicago or wherever, he wouldn’t stay long, she thought, but actually she did pay more attention than she was expecting to.

And then in study hall she heard some boys talking about George Orson’s car. The car was a Maserati Spyder, she had noticed it herself, a tiny silver convertible big enough for only two people, almost like a toy.

“Did you get a look at it?” she overheard a boy saying—Todd Zilka, whom Lucy loathed. He was a football player, a big athletic person who was nevertheless the son of a lawyer and did well enough in school that he had been inducted into the National Honor Society, after which Lucy herself had stopped going to meetings. If she had been braver, she would have resigned, denounced her membership. In middle school, it had been Todd Zilka who had started calling her “Lice-y”—which wouldn’t have been such a big deal except that she and her sister actually had contracted head lice, pediculosis, and were dismissed from school in shame until the infestation could be cleared up, and even years later people still called her “Lice-y,” it might be the only thing they remembered about her when their twenty-year reunion rolled around.

“Toddzilla,” was Lucy’s own private name for Todd Zilka, though she did not have the power to make such a name stick on him.

The fact that a creature like Toddzilla could thrive and become popular was one good reason to leave Pompey, Ohio, forever.

Nevertheless, she listened surreptitiously as he spouted his stupid opinions to his idiotic friends in study hall. “I mean,” he was saying, “I’d like to know where a crummy high school teacher gets money for a car like that. It’s like, an Italian import, you know? Probably costs seventy grand!”

And, despite herself, that gave her pause. Seventy thousand dollars was an impressive amount of money. She thought again of George Orson standing in front of them in the classroom, George Orson in his tight black shirt talking about how Woodrow Wilson was a white supremacist and quoting Anaïs Nin:

“We see things not as they are, but as we are. Because it is the ‘I’ behind the ‘eye’ that does the seeing.”

And then one afternoon not long later, Toddzilla raised his hand and George Orson gestured toward him, hopefully. As if they might be about to discuss the Constitution together.

“Yes …? Ah—Todd?” George Orson said, and Toddzilla grinned, showing his large orthodontic teeth.

“So Mr. O,” he said. He was one of those teenage jock boys who thought it was cool to call teachers and other adults by trite, jocky nicknames. “So Mr. O,” Toddzilla said. “Where’d you get your car? That’s an awesome car.”

“Oh,” George Orson said. “Thank you.”

“What make is that? Is that a Maserati?”

“It is.” George Orson looked at the rest of them, and Lucy thought that for a fraction of a second she and George Orson had looked directly at each other, that they were in communion, silently agreeing that Toddzilla was a Neanderthal. Then George Orson turned his attention down to his desk, to the syllabus or whatever.

“So, why would you become a high school teacher if you can afford a car like that?” Toddzilla said.

“Well, I guess I just find teaching high school really fulfilling,” George Orson said. Straight-faced. He looked again at Lucy, and the corners of his mouth lifted enough so that his dimple peeked out. There was a sharpness, a glint of secret hilarity that perhaps only she could see. Lucy smiled. He was funny, she thought. Interesting.

But Todd hadn’t liked it. Later, in study hall, in the cafeteria, she heard him repeating the same question, critically. “How can a high school teacher afford a car like that?” Toddzilla wanted to know. “Full-fucking-filling, my ass. I think he’s some rich pervert or something. He just likes to be around teenagers.”

Which was probably the first time she thought: Hmmm. She herself was intrigued by the idea of a wealthy George Orson, his soft but masculine, veiny hands.

They had left Pompey in the Maserati, and maybe that had been the reason she felt so confident. She looked good in that car, she thought, people would look at them as they were cruising down the interstate, a guy in an SUV who watched her as they passed, and he made a display of winking at her, like a silent movie actor or a mime. Wink. And she made her own show of not noticing, though in fact she had even bought a tube of bright red lipstick, sort of as a joke, but when she looked at herself in the passenger side mirror, she was privately pleased by the effect. Who would you be if you weren’t Lucy?

Which was a question they found themselves talking about frequently, when George Orson wasn’t sequestered in the “study.”

Who would you be?

One day, George Orson found an old set of bow and arrows in the garage, and they went down to the beach to try shooting them. He hadn’t been able to find an actual target, and so he spent a lot of time setting up various objects for Lucy to shoot arrows at. A pyramid stack of soda cans, for example. An ancient beach ball, which inflated only halfheartedly. A large cardboard box, which he drew circles on with black Magic Marker.

And as Lucy nocked her arrow into the string and drew back the bow, trying to aim, George Orson would ask her questions.

“Would you rather be an unpopular dictator, or a popular president?”

“That’s easy,” Lucy said.

“Would you rather be poor and live in a beautiful place, or be rich and live in an ugly place?”

“I don’t think poor people ever live in beautiful places,” she said.

“Would you rather drown, or freeze to death, or die in a fire?”

“George,” she said, “why are you always so morbid?” And he smiled tightly.

“Would you want to go to college, even if you had enough money that you’d never have to get a real job?

“Which is to say,” George Orson continued. “Do you want to go because you want to be an educated person, or do you only go because you want a career of some sort?”

“Hmm,” Lucy said, and tried to draw a bead on the beach ball, which was lolling woozily in the wind. “I think I just want to be an educated person, actually. Though maybe if I had so much money that I never had to work, I’d probably choose a different major. Something impractical.”

“I see,” George Orson said. He stood behind her; she could feel his chest against her back as he tried to help her take aim. “Like what?” he said.

“Like history,” Lucy said, and smiled sidelong at him as she released the arrow, which traveled in a wobbling, uncertain arc before landing in the sand about a foot away from the beach ball.

“You’re close!” George Orson whispered—still pressed close up against her, his hand around her waist, his mouth alongside her ear. She could feel the wing-brush of his lips moving. “Very close,” he said.

She thought about this again as she went outdoors and stood there in her sleep T-shirt, her hair flattened against the side of her head and nothing attractive about her at all, currently.

“George?” she called—yet again.

And she stepped tenderly barefoot across the gravel driveway toward the garage. It was a wooden barnlike structure with high weeds growing up along the sides of it, and when she drew closer, a flurry of grasshoppers scattered, startled by her approach. Their dry wings made a maraca sound like rattlesnakes; she pulled her hair back into a ponytail and held it with her fist.

They hadn’t driven the Maserati since they arrived here. “Too conspicuous,” George Orson said. “There’s no sense in calling a lot of attention to ourselves,” he said, and then the next day she woke and he was already out of bed and he wasn’t in the house and she found him at last in the garage.

There were two cars in there. The Maserati was on the left, completely covered by an olive-green tarp. On the right was an old red and white Ford Bronco pickup, possibly from the 1970s or 80s. The hood of the pickup was open and George Orson was leaning into it.

He was wearing an old pair of mechanic’s coveralls, and she almost laughed out loud. She couldn’t imagine where he had found such an outfit.

“George,” she said. “I’ve been looking all over for you. What are you doing?”

“I’m fixing a truck,” he said.

“Oh,” she said.

And though he was basically still himself, he looked—what?—costumed in the dirty coveralls, his hair uncombed and standing up, fingers black with grease, and she felt a twinge.

“I didn’t know that you knew how to fix cars,” Lucy said, and George Orson gave her a long look. A sad look, she thought, as if he were recalling a mistake he’d made in the distant past.

“There are probably a lot of things you don’t know about me,” he said.

Which gave her pause, now, as she vacillated at the mouth of the garage.

The truck was gone, and a shiver of unease passed across her as she stared at the bare cement floor, an oil spot in the dust where the old Bronco had been.

He’d gone out—had left her alone—had left her—

The Maserati was still there, still covered in its tarp. She was not completely abandoned.

Though she was aware that she didn’t have the key to the Maserati.

And even if she did have a key, she didn’t know how to drive a stick shift.

She mulled this over, looked at the shelves: oil cans and bottles of nuclear-blue windshield wiper fluid and jars full of screws and bolts and nails and washers.

Nebraska was even worse than Ohio—if such a thing were possible. There was a soundlessness about this place, she thought, though sometimes the wind made the glass in the windowpanes hum, the wind running in a long exhaled stream through the weeds and dust and dry bed of the lake, and sometimes unexpectedly there would be a very startling sonic boom over the house as a military plane broke the sound barrier, and there was the rattle of the grasshoppers leaping from one weed to the next—

But mostly it was silence, a kind of end-of-the-world hush, and you could feel the sky sealing over you like the glass around a snow globe.

She was still in the garage when George Orson returned.

She had pulled back the tarp from the Maserati, and she was sitting in the driver’s seat and wishing that she knew how to hot-wire a car. How appropriate, she thought, for George Orson to come back and find his beloved Maserati missing, and it would serve him right, and she liked to imagine the look on his face when she pulled back up the driveway sometime after dark—

She was still fantasizing about this when George Orson drove into the space beside her with the old Bronco. He looked puzzled as he opened the door—why was the tarp off of his 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.