Three weeks after that, he called me one afternoon and offered me twenty thousand dollars. Mainly out of bafflement, I said sure, knock yourself out. Amy squealed when she heard, and she took me out to dinner.
It was published eight months later, a square hardcover with a grainy photograph of a nondescript Santa Monica house on the front. It looked to me like the kind of book you had to be out of your mind to even pick up, let alone buy, but the L.A. Times noticed it, and it got a couple other good reviews, and, weirdly, it became something that sold a little, for a while.
The world rolled on, and so did we. Stuff happened. I quit my job, we moved. If I was anything now, I was the guy who’d written that book. Which meant, presumably, I now needed to become a guy who’d written some other book. Nothing had come to mind. It kept continuing to fail to come to mind, with a steady resolve that suggested not coming to mind was what it was all about, that failing to come to mind was its chief skill and purpose in life.
A couple hours later I was in the living room. I’d drunk more beer, but this hadn’t seemed to help. I was adrift in the middle of the couch, mired in the restless fugue state characteristic of those who’ve failed to conjure something out of thin air. I knew I should unpack the box of Web “research” I’d halfheartedly accumulated. But I also knew if I hit the clippings and nothing shook out of it, then walking back into town and buying some good, long nails would move up to Plan A. The laptop had done me little deliberate harm. I wasn’t ready to kill it yet.
I took an unearned work’s-done cigarette from the pack on the table and headed out to the deck. I stopped smoking indoors the year Amy and I got married. She’d tolerated it at first because she’d done a little tobacco herself, back in the day and long before I’d known her, but had taken to using air-freshening devices and raising an eyebrow whenever I lit up. Subtly, and sweetly, and for my own good. I didn’t especially mind the new regime. I could smoke all I wanted at work, and now houseguests couldn’t accuse me of attempted manslaughter by secondhand smoke, and it just made life easier all around.
I leaned against the rail. The world was silent but for the confidential whispering of trees. The sky was clear and cold above, and midnight blue. I could smell firs and faint wood smoke from a distant hearth fire—likely our neighbors, the Zimmermans. It was good here, I knew that. We had a fancy house. The landscape was rugged, and not much had changed for it in a long time. Birch Crossing was real without being an ass about it: Pickups and SUVs were equally represented, and you could buy a very fancy spatula if you wanted. The Zimmermans were a five-minute drive away, but we’d already had dinner at their house twice. They were a couple of retired history professors from Berkeley, and conversation had not exactly flowed the first time, but the gift of a single-malt on our second visit had oiled the wheels. Both were sprightly for people in their early seventies—Bobbi filled the CD player with everything from Mozart to Sparklehorse, and Ben’s black hair was barely flecked with gray. He and I now chatted affably enough on the street when we met, though I suspected that his wife had the measure of me.
And yet a week ago, I’d been standing right there on the deck when something had happened.
I was watching Amy through the glass doors as she chopped vegetables and supervised a saucepan on the stove. I could smell simmering plum tomatoes and capers and oregano. It was only midafternoon, and there was enough light to appreciate both the view and the house’s good side. Instead of being in the office until after nine, my wife was at her kitchen counter happily making mud pies, and she remained appealing from both left and right and front and back, too. I’d even gotten an idea down that morning, and halfway believed I might produce another book about something or other. The spheres were in alignment, and nine-tenths of the world’s population would have traded places with me in a heartbeat.
Yet for a moment it was as if a cloud drifted across the world. At first I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. Then I realized I had no idea where I was. Not just the name of the town—I couldn’t even remember what state I was in. I couldn’t recall what had happened to me, or when, had no idea of how I’d gotten to this place and time. The house looked unfamiliar, the trees as if they’d been slipped into position when I wasn’t looking. The woman on the other side of the big window was a stranger to me, her movements foreign and unexpected.
Who was she? Why was she standing in there holding a knife? And why was she looking at it as if she couldn’t remember what it was for? The feeling was too pervasive to be described as panic, but I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise. I blinked, looking around, trying to lock into something tangible. It wasn’t a reaction to the newness of the environment. I’ve traveled a lot, and I’d been sick to death of L.A. I was tired because I hadn’t been sleeping well, but it wasn’t that either, or the usual shadows that came to haunt me. It was not about regrets or guilt. It wasn’t specific.
Everything was wrong. With everything.
Then the cloud passed. It was gone, just like that. Amy looked up and winked at me through the glass, unquestionably the woman I loved. I smiled back, turned to the mountains to finish my smoke. The forest looked the way I had come to expect. Everything was okay again.
Dinner was good, and I listened while Amy went over the structure of her new job. She’s in advertising. Maybe you’re familiar with it. It’s a profession that seeks to make people spend money so that folks they don’t know can buy an even bigger house. In this way it’s somewhat like organized crime, except the hours are longer. I said this to Amy once, suggesting they should tell clients to dispense with ads and demographics and encourage people to buy their wares through direct threats against their person and/or property. She asked me never to say this in front of her colleagues in case they took it seriously.
The revised basis of her employment was important to us because her new position as roving creative director across her company’s empire—with offices in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and back down in L.A.—was what had enabled us to get out of L.A. It was a big change for her, a California girl born and bred, who’d liked being close to the family who still lived in the city where she was born. She had painted her willingness to move as related to the sizable hike in salary, but she’d never really been obsessed with money. I believed instead that she’d done it mainly for my sake, to let me get out of the city, and over dessert I told her I was grateful.
She rolled her eyes and told me not to be a dork, but she accepted the kiss I offered in thanks. And the ones that came afterward.
When I’d finished my cigarette, I pulled the phone out of my pocket to check the time. It was half past eleven. Amy’s job involved many client dinners, especially now, and it was possible she hadn’t even gotten back to her hotel yet. I knew she’d pick up her messages as soon as she could. But I hadn’t heard from her all day, and at that moment I really wanted to.
I was about to try her number again when the phone chirped into life on its own. The words AMY’S CELL popped up on the screen. I smiled, pleased at the coincidence, and put the phone up to my ear.
“Hey,” I said. “Busy, busy?”
But the person on the other end was not my wife.
“Who is this, please?”
The voice was male, rough, loud. Coming from Amy’s number, it was about as wrong as could be.
“It’s Jack,” I said. It sounded dumb. “Who—”
“Is this home?”
“What? Who are you?”
The voice said something that might have been a name but sounded more like a random collection of syllables.
“What?” I repeated. He said it again. Could have been Polish, Russian, Martian. Could have been a coughing fit. There was a lot of noise in the background. Traffic, presumably.
“Is this home?” he barked again.
“What do you mean? What are you doing with—”
The guy had one question, and he was going to keep asking it. “This is number says ‘Home’?”
A light went on in my head. “Yes,” I said, finally getting what he was driving at. “This is the number listed as ‘Home.’ It’s my wife’s phone. But where’s—”
“Find in cab,” the man said.
“Okay. I understand. When did you find it?”
“Fifteen minutes. I call when I get good signal. Phones here not always so good.”
“It belongs to a woman,” I said, loudly and clearly. “Short blond hair, probably wearing a business suit. Have you just driven someone like that?”
“All day,” he said. “All day women like this.”
“This evening?”
“Maybe. Is she there, please? I speak her?”
“No, I’m not in Seattle,” I said. “She is, and you are, but I am not.”
“Oh, okay. So…I don’t know. What you want me?”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Stay on the line.”
I quickly walked downstairs and into Amy’s study. Stuck dead center to the flat screen of her computer was a Post-it note with a hotel name written on it. The Malo, that was it.
All I could hear through the phone was a distant siren. I waited for it to fade.
“The Hotel Malo,” I said. “Do you know it?”
“Of course,” he said. “Downtown.”
“Can you take it there? Can you take the phone to the hotel and hand it in at reception?”
“Is long way,” the man said.
“I’m sure. But take it to reception and get them to call the lady down. Her name is Amy Whalen. You got that?”
He said something that sounded very slightly like Amy’s name. I repeated it another few times and spelled it twice. “Take it there, okay? She’ll pay you. I’ll call her, tell her you’re coming. Yes? Take it to the hotel.”
“Okay,” he said. “Twenty dollar.”
My heart was still thudding after he’d hung up. At least I knew the score. No reply to my last message because Amy hadn’t heard it, which gave me a time before which she had to have lost the phone. When had that been? Around nine, I thought. Or could be she’d lost it earlier in the day and chosen to wait until she got back to the hotel to fill me in. Either way, she needed a heads-up to deal with this guy, assuming he was on the level. When phones are stolen, the thieves will sometimes call a home number, pretending to be a helpful citizen, in the hope of reassuring the owner that the phone isn’t lost. That way the victim will hold off getting the phone killed at the provider, leaving the perpetrator free to use the hell out of it until the agreed handover time, when he just drops it in the trash. If this guy was using that scam, there wasn’t a lot I could do about it—I wasn’t going to cancel Amy’s phone without talking to her first. The hotel’s number wasn’t on the note, unsurprisingly—we always communicated via cell when she was out of the house, which is how come mine was down as “Home” in her contacts list.
Ten seconds on the Internet tracked down the Hotel Malo. I called the number and withstood the receptionist’s mandatory welcoming message, which included highlights of the day’s restaurant specials. When he was done, I asked to be put through to Amy Whalen. A faint background rattle of someone typing. Then: “I can’t do that, sir.”
“She’s not back yet?” I checked the clock. Nearly midnight. Kind of late, however important the client. “Okay. Put me through to voice mail.”
“No, sir, I meant I have no one here under that name.”
I opened my mouth. Shut it again. Had I gotten the dates wrong? “What time did she check out?”
More tapping. When the man spoke again, he sounded circumspect. “I have no record of a reservation being made under that name, sir.”
“For today?”
“For the past week.”
“She’s been in town two days,” I said patiently. “She arrived Tuesday. She’s in town until Friday morning. Tomorrow.”
The guy said nothing.
“Could you try ‘Amy Dyer’?”
I spelled “Dyer” for him. This had been her name before we married, and it was credible that someone in her office might have made a booking for her in that name seven years later. Just about credible.
Tapping. “No, sir. No Dyer.”
“Try Kerry, Crane & Hardy. That’s a company name.”
Tapping. “Nothing for that either, sir.”
“She never checked in?”
“Can I help you with anything else this evening?”
I couldn’t think of anything else to ask. The guy waited a beat, told me the hotel group’s Web URL, and cut the connection.
I took the Post-it from the screen. Amy’s handwriting is extremely legible. You can make out what it says from low-lying space orbits. It said Hotel Malo.
I dialed the hotel again and got put through to reservations. I rechecked all three names. At the last minute, I remembered to get myself transferred back to the front desk, this time reaching a woman. I told her that someone would be bringing in a cell phone, asked if she’d hold it under my name. I gave her my credit-card number against twenty bucks to pay the driver.
Then I went back on the Web. Did searches for hotels in downtown, for anything similar to “Malo.” I found a Hotel Monaco, only a few streets away. Their Web site suggested that it was exactly the kind of place Amy hung her coat on trips: funky decor; restaurant specializing in Pan-Cajun this, that, and the other; complimentary goldfish in the rooms. Whatever the fuck that meant.
I looked at her note again. It could just about be “Monaco,” if written in a hurry or while having an embolism. It might even be she’d misheard the name when being told where she’d been booked and written it down wrong for me. Mal-o/Monac-o. Maybe.
I called the Monaco front desk and got someone human and responsive. She was able to quickly and regretfully establish that my wife was not, and had never been, resident in the hotel. I thanked her and put the phone down. I did this calmly, as if what I’d done made the slightest sense. As if I could really have misread the note or Amy misheard something from an assistant and as a result happened to name a hotel that actually existed, only a couple of streets away in the same town.