Await Your Reply: A Novel

Book by Chaon Dan

Chapter One

We are on our way to the hospital, Ryan’s father says.
Listen to me, Son:
You are not going to bleed to death.

Ryan is still aware enough that his father’s words come in through the edges, like sunlight on the borders of a window shade. His eyes are shut tight and his body is shaking and he is trying to hold up his left arm, to keep it elevated. We are on our way to the hospital, his father says, and Ryan’s teeth are chattering, he clenches and unclenches them, and a series of wavering colored lights—greens, indigos—plays along the surface of his closed eyelids.

On the seat beside him, in between him and his father, Ryan’s severed hand is resting on a bed of ice in an eight-quart Styrofoam cooler.

The hand weighs less than a pound. The nails are trimmed and there are calluses on the tips of the fingers from guitar playing. The skin is now bluish in color.

This is about three a.m. on a Thursday morning in May in rural Michigan. Ryan doesn’t have any idea how far away the hospital might be but he repeats with his father we are on the way to the hospital we are on the way to the hospital and he wants to believe so badly that it’s true, that it’s not just one of those things that you tell people to keep them calm. But he’s not sure. Gazing out all he can see is the night trees leaning over the road, the car pursuing its pool of headlight, and darkness, no towns, no buildings ahead, darkness, road, moon.
2
A few days after Lucy graduated from high school, she and
George Orson left town in the middle of the night. They were not
fugitives–not exactly–but it was true that no one knew that they
were leaving, and it was also true that no one would know where
they had gone.

They had agreed that a degree of discretion, a degree of secrecy,
was necessary. Just until they got things figured out. George Orson
was not only her boyfriend, but also her former high school history
teacher, which had complicated things back in Pompey, Ohio.
This wasn’t actually as bad as it might sound. Lucy was eighteen,
almost nineteen–a legal adult–and her parents were dead, and
she had no real friends to speak of. She had been living in their parents’
house with her older sister, Patricia, but the two of them had
never been close. Also, she had various aunts and uncles and
cousins she hardly talked to. As for George Orson, he had no connections
at all that she knew of.

And so: why not? They would make a clean break. A new life.

Still, she might have preferred to run away together to somewhere
different.

They arrived in Nebraska after a few days of driving, and she was
sleeping, so she didn’t notice when they got off the interstate.
When she opened her eyes, they were driving along a length of
empty highway, and George Orson’s hand was resting demurely on
her thigh: a sweet habit he had, resting his palm on her leg. She
could see herself in the side mirror, her hair rippling, her sunglasses
reflecting the motionless stretches of lichen- green prairie
grass. She sat up.

“Where are we?” she said, and George Orson looked over at her.
His eyes distant and melancholy. It made her think of being a child,
a child in that old small- town family car, her father’s thick, calloused
plumber’s hands gripping the wheel and her mother in the
passenger seat with a cigarette even though she was a nurse, the
window open a crack for the smoke to trail out of, and her sister
asleep in the backseat mouth- breathing behind their father, and
Lucy also in the backseat, opening her eyes a crack, the shadows of
trees running across her face, and thinking: Where are we?
She sat up straighter, shaking this memory away.

“Almost there,” George Orson murmured, as if he were remembering
a sad thing.

And when she opened her eyes again, there was the motel. They
had parked in front of it: a tower rising up in silhouette over them.
It had taken Lucy a moment to realize that the place was supposed
to be a lighthouse. Or rather–the front of the place, the
façade, was in the shape of a lighthouse. It was a large tube- shaped
structure made of cement blocks, perhaps sixty feet high, wide at
the base and narrowing as it went upward, and painted in red and
white barber- pole stripes.

THE LIGHTHOUSE MOTEL, said a large unlit neon sign–fancy
nautical lettering, as if made of knotted ropes–and Lucy sat there
in the car, in George Orson’s Maserati, gaping.

To the right of this lighthouse structure was an L- shaped courtyard
of perhaps fifteen motel units; and to the left of it, at the very
crest of the hill, was the old house, the house where George
Orson’s parents once lived. Not exactly a mansion but formidable
out here on the open prairie, a big old Victorian two- story home
with all the trappings of a haunted house: a turret and wraparound
porch, dormers and corbeled chimneys, a gable roof and scalloped
shingles. No other houses in sight, barely any other sign of civilization,
barely anything but the enormous Nebraska sky bending over
them.

For a moment Lucy had the notion that this was a joke, a corny
roadside attraction or amusement park. They had pulled up in the
summer twilight, and there was the forlorn lighthouse tower of the
motel with the old house silhouetted behind it, ridiculously creepy.
Lucy thought that there may as well have been a full moon and a
hoot owl in a bare tree, and George Orson let out a breath.

“So here we are,” George Orson said. He must have known how
it would look to her.

“This is it?” Lucy said, and she couldn’t keep the incredulousness
out of her voice. “Wait,” she said. “George? This is where we’re
going to live?”

“For the time being,” George Orson said. He glanced at her ruefully,
as if she disappointed him a little. “Only for the time being,
honey,” he said, and she noticed that there were some tumbleweeds
stuck in the dead hedges on one side of the motel courtyard. Tumbleweeds!
She had never seen such a thing before, except in movies
about ghost towns of the Old West, and it was hard not to be a little
freaked out.

“How long has it been closed?” she said. “I hope it’s not full of
mice or–”

“No, no,” George Orson said. “There’s a cleaning woman com-
ing out fairly regularly, so I’m sure it’s not too bad. It’s not abandoned
or anything.”

She could feel his eyes following her as she got out and walked
around the front of the car and up toward the red door of the
Lighthouse. Above the door it said: office. And there was another
unlit tube of neon, which said: NO VACANCY.

It had once been a fairly popular motel. That’s what George
Orson had told her as they were driving through Indiana or Iowa or
one of those states. It wasn’t exactly a resort, he’d said, but a pretty
fancy place–“Back when there was a lake,” he’d said, and she
hadn’t quite understood what he meant.

She’d said: “It sounds romantic.” This was before she’d seen it.
She’d had an image of one of those seaside sort of places that you
read about in novels, where shy British people went and fell in love
and had epiphanies.

“No, no,” George Orson said. “Not exactly.” He had been trying
to warn her. “I wouldn’t call it romantic. Not at this point,” he said.
He explained that the lake–it was a reservoir, actually–had started
to dry up because of the drought, all the greedy farmers, he said,
they just keep watering and watering their government- subsidized
crops, and before anyone knew it, the lake was a tenth of what it
had once been. “Then all of the tourist stuff began to dry up as well,
naturally,” George Orson said. “It’s hard to do any fishing or waterskiing
or swimming on a dry lake bed.”

He had explained it well enough, but it wasn’t until she looked
down from the top of the hill that she understood.

He was serious. There wasn’t a lake anymore. There was nothing
but a bare valley–a crater that had once held water. A path led
down to the “beach,” and there was a wooden dock extending out
into an expanse of sand and high yellow prairie grass, various
scrubby plants that she imagined would eventually turn into tumbleweeds.
The remains of an old buoy lay on its side in the windblown
dirt. She could see what had once been the other side of the
lake, the opposite shore rising up about five miles or so away across
the empty basin.

Lucy turned back to watch as George Orson opened the trunk of
the car and extracted the largest of their suitcases.

“Lucy?” he said, trying to make his voice cheerful and solicitous.
“Shall we?”

She watched as he walked past the tower of the Lighthouse office
and up the cement stairs that led to the old house.
3
By the time the first rush of recklessness had begun to burn off,
Miles was already nearing the arctic circle. He had been driving
across Canada for days and days by that point, sleeping for a while
in the car and then waking to go on again, heading northward
along what highways he could find, a cluster of maps origamied on
the passenger seat beside him. The names of the places he passed
had become more and more fantastical–Destruction Bay, the
Great Slave Lake, Ddhaw Ghro, Tombstone Mountain–and when
he came at last upon Tsiigehtchic, he sa...