Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

“See, that’s how I can tell you’re from the coast,” his coworker Navarro said later, when Leon mentioned the emptiness of downtown. “You people think a place has to have a downtown to be a real place.”

“You don’t think a downtown should have some people in it?”

“I think a place doesn’t have to have a downtown at all,” Navarro said.

He’d been there six months when Miranda called. He was in the RV after his shift, doing the crossword puzzle with ice packs on his right knee and left ankle, alone because Marie had gotten a night job stocking shelves at the Walmart across the expressway, and the call was so unexpected that when Miranda said her name he almost couldn’t comprehend it. There was an odd half beat of silence while he recovered.

“Leon?”

“Hi, sorry about that. What an unexpected surprise this is,” he said, feeling like an idiot because obviously unexpected and surprise were redundant in this context, but who could blame him?

“Good to hear your voice,” she said, “after all these years. Do you have a moment?”

“Of course.” His heart was pounding. For how many years had he longed for this call? Ten. A decade in the wilderness, he found himself thinking. Ten years of traveling far beyond the borders of the corporate world, wishing uselessly to be allowed back in. The ice packs slipped to the floor as he reached for a pen and paper.

“I’m afraid I’m not calling for the happiest reason,” Miranda said, “but let me just ask you first, before I get into it, would you be at all interested in coming back on a consultant basis? It would be a very short-term thing, just a few days.”

“I would love to.” He wanted to cry. “Yes. That would be…yes.”

“Okay. Well, good.” She sounded a little surprised by his fervor. “There’s been…” She cleared her throat. “I was going to say there’s been an accident, but we actually don’t know if it was an accident or not. There was an incident. A woman disappeared from a Neptune-Avramidis ship. She was a cook.”

“That’s terrible. Which ship?”

“It is terrible. The Neptune Cumberland. ” The name wasn’t familiar to Leon. “Listen,” she was saying, “I’m convening a committee to look into crew safety on Neptune-Avramidis vessels as a general matter, and Vincent Smith’s death in particular. If you’re interested, I could use your help.”

“Wait,” he said, “her name was Vincent?”

“Yes, why?”

“Where was she from?”

“Canadian citizen, no permanent address. Her next of kin was an aunt in Vancouver. Why?”

“Nothing. I knew a woman named Vincent, a long time ago. Well, knew of her, I guess. Not that common a name for a woman.”

“True enough. I think the important point here is, I don’t need to tell you that this is the only investigation into her death that will ever happen. To be candid with you, if I had the budget I’d commission an investigation from an outside law firm.”

“That sounds expensive.”

“Extremely. So this is all she’s going to get, just an internal investigation by the company she worked for. Companies have a way of exonerating themselves, don’t you find?”

“You want an outsider,” he said.

“You’re someone I trust. How soon can you be in New York?”

“Soon,” he said. “I just have to wrap up a few things here.” He was calculating the length of the drive from southern Colorado. They spoke for a while about travel arrangements, and when he hung up he sat for a long time at the table, blinking. He checked the call log on the phone to confirm that he hadn’t imagined it. NEPTUNE-AVRA, a 212 area code, 21 minutes. The text on the call display seemed apt; it had been like receiving a phone call from another planet.

After Alkaitis, there was a different kind of life. Leon and Marie lasted a half year in their house after the collapse of the Ponzi, six months of missed mortgage payments and ruinous stress. Leon had put his entire severance package and all their savings into Alkaitis’s fund, and the returns didn’t make them wealthy but you don’t actually need much to live well in South Florida. They’d bought the RV just before Alkaitis was arrested. In the months that followed, with Leon trying to get more consulting work at Neptune-Avramidis, which was convulsed with layoffs and had put a freeze on consultants, and Marie rendered unemployable by anxiety and depression, the RV in the driveway had at first seemed malevolent, some kind of horrible joke, like their financial mistakes had taken on corporeal form and had parked there next to the house.

But in the early summer they were eating omelets for dinner by candlelight, the candles less a romantic gesture than a means of saving money on electricity, and Marie said, “I’ve been emailing with Clarissa lately.”

“Clarissa?” The name was familiar, but it took him a moment. “Oh, your friend from college, right? The psychic?”

“Yes, that Clarissa. We had dinner in Toronto all those years ago.”

“I remember. What’s she up to these days?”

“She lost her house, so now she’s living in her van.”

Leon set his fork down and reached for his water glass, to dispel the tightness in his throat. They were two months behind on the mortgage. “Tough luck,” he said.

“She says she actually likes it.”

“At least she would’ve seen it coming,” he said, “being a psychic and all.”

“I asked her about that,” Marie said. “She said she’d had visions of highways, but she’d always just assumed she was going on a road trip.”

“A van,” Leon said. “That seems like it’d be a difficult life.”

“Did you know there are jobs you can do, if you’re mobile?”

“What kind of jobs?”

“Taking tickets in fairgrounds. Working in warehouses around the holiday rush. Some agricultural stuff. Clarissa said she got a job she liked in a campground for a while, cleaning up and dealing with campers.”

“Interesting.” He had to say something.

“Leon,” she said, “what if we just left in the RV?”

His initial thought was that the idea was ridiculous, but he waited a gentle moment or two before he asked, “And went where, love?”

“Wherever we want. We could go anywhere.”

“Let’s think about it,” he’d said.

The idea had seemed crazy for only a few hours, maybe less. He lay awake that night, sweating through the sheets—it was hard to sleep without air-conditioning, but they were keeping a careful budget and Marie had calculated that if they ran the A/C that week they’d be unable to pay the minimums on their credit card bills—and he realized the plan’s brilliance: they could just leave. The house that kept him up at night could become someone else’s problem.

“I’ve been thinking about your idea,” he said to Marie over breakfast. “Let’s do it.”

“I’m sorry, do what?” She was always tired and sluggish in the mornings.

“Let’s just get in the RV and drive away,” he said, and her smile was a balm. Once the decision was made, he felt a peculiar urgency. In retrospect, there was no real rush, but they were gone four days later.

When he walked through the rooms one last time, Leon could tell the house was already done with them, a sense of vacancy pervading the air. Most of the furniture was still there, most of their belongings, a calendar pinned to the wall in the kitchen, coffee cups in the cupboards, books on shelves, but the rooms already conveyed an impression of abandonment. Leon would not have predicted that he and his wife would turn out to be the kind of people who’d abandon a house. He would’ve imagined that such an act would bury a person under fathoms of shame, but here on the expressway in the early morning light, abandoning the house felt unexpectedly like triumph. Leon pulled out of the driveway, made a couple of turns, and then they were on the expressway leaving forever.