“Yes, I know, they’re saying he rescued a four-year-old boy, but who is he and what was he doing on that plane?”
Now a live image of Scott’s house on the Vineyard. How is that possible? Scott sees his three-legged dog in the window, barking soundlessly.
“Wikipedia lists him as some kind of painter, but has no personal information. We contacted the Chicago gallery where Mr. Burroughs allegedly held his last show in 2010, but they claimed never to have met him. So ask yourself, how does a nobody painter who hasn’t shown a painting in five years end up on a luxury plane with two of the richest men in New York?”
Scott watches his house on TV. A shingled, single-story home rented from a Greek fisherman for nine hundred dollars a month. It needs a paint job—and he waits for Cunningham’s inevitable joke, the painter’s house that needs a paint job—but it doesn’t come.
“And so now, live on this network, this journalist is asking—if there’s anyone out there who knows this mystery painter, please call the station. Convince me that Mr. Burroughs is real and not some sleeper agent posing as a has-been who just got activated by ISIS.”
Scott sips his tea, aware of the stares of the two soldiers. He feels a presence behind him.
“Looks like going home is out of the question,” Gus says, having wandered up behind Scott.
Scott turns.
“Apparently,” he says, feeling a completely foreign disconnect—who he is inside versus this new idea of him, his new identity as a public persona, his name pronounced with vitriol by a famous face. And how if he goes home he will walk out of his life and onto that screen. He will become theirs.
Gus watches the TV for a moment, then goes over and turns it off.
“You got anywhere you can crash for a few days,” he says, “under the radar?”
Scott thinks about it, comes up blank. He has called the one friend he has and ditched him in a gas station parking lot. There are cousins somewhere, an old fiancé, but he has to believe that these people have already been discovered in the Google search of modern curiosity. What he needs is someone nonlinear, a name generated seemingly at random, that no private eye or computer algorithm could ever predict.
Then a name enters his head, some cosmic synapse firing. Two words spoken with an Irish lilt that paint a picture: a blond woman with a billion dollars.
“Yeah, I think I know who to call,” he says.
Chapter 13
Orphans
Eleanor remembers when they were girls. There was no yours and mine. Everything she and Maggie owned was communal, the hairbrush, the striped and polka-dot dresses, the hand-me-down Raggedy Ann and Andy. They used to sit in the farmhouse sink, facing the mirror, and brush each other’s hair—a record on in the living room—Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie or the Chieftains—the sounds of their father cooking. Maggie and Eleanor Greenway, eight and six, or twelve and ten, sharing CDs, swooning over the same boys. Eleanor was the younger, towheaded and spritely. Maggie had a dance she did, twirling with a long ribbon until she got dizzy. Eleanor would watch and laugh and laugh.
For Eleanor there was never a time where she thought in terms of I. Every sentence in her head began with we. And then Maggie went to college and Eleanor had to learn how to be singular. She remembers that first three-day weekend, spinning in her empty room, listening for laughter that never came. And how that feeling, of being alone, felt like bugs in her skeleton. And so on Monday, when school started, she threw herself off the cliff of boys, opening her eyes for the first time to the idea of couplehood with someone else. She was going steady with Paul Aspen by Friday. And when that ended three weeks later, she switched to Damon Wright.
It was the lightbulb behind her eyes guiding her, this idea—never be alone again.
Over the next decade there was a series of men, crushes and infatuations, surrogates. Day in and day out Eleanor dodged her central defect, locking the door and rolling up the window, eyes doggedly forward, even as its knocks became louder and louder.