He backed up in a spurt of pebbles and rolled out the gate; she watched through the holes in the hedge as his car flashed away. She clutched the medallion.
Later she stood out on the poolside terrace drinking wine with Jim the lawyer and listening to the fountain at the end of the pool, where water flowed over jumping marble porpoises. He came over once or twice a week in the early evening, when his wife worked late or had made other plans. There were no children.
“Look at me. Already I’m jealously guarding my property,” she said. “As though I earned it or something.”
“You don’t want your asshole cousin coming in and trashing the place,” said Jim. “It’s hardly irrational.”
“Because it’s mine,” she said, shaking her head. “My personal Club Med.”
“Club Med is pathetic,” said Jim.
“You know what I mean.”
“What I think is, you’ve had the rug pulled out from under you twice in your life. This house is the first good thing that’s happened to you in a long time. Naturally you want to keep it. You’re human.”
“But you’re not,” she said, turning to press herself on him, holding her wineglass out to the side. “You’re a lawyer.”
“Your best bet is just to play defense. Wait and see. See if he bothers to make a claim.”
She looked up at his face, its gray, heavy-lidded eyes. He never seemed to open them as far as he could. His lassitude was calming.
Reading in bed, she put down her book and reached for the old letter from Hanoi. She held the yellow paper carefully and reread the looping, faded script: The Emperor is a very sophisticated gent, about 40 or 43, and looks much like what you’d expect of a modern Rajah. It bore an embossment at the top, Charles Adams Sumter III. She flipped the papers over: his signature said Chip.
Chip had known the old man, she thought. The old man had known him. Long dead, no doubt.
A plane crossed the sky, blinking, and she lay back on the pillow. But then she woke up and it was early morning. She remembered the plane as though it should still be there; she had the sense that only a second had passed. It was so early the outside was still almost silent, and through her wide window she saw the yellow streaks of dawn. She reached out for her telephone. 411.
She said his name and the operator asked for an address.
“I don’t have one,” she said.
“Three listings in the metro area,” said the operator briskly, and rattled them off as Susan reached for a pen.
At the first number a woman answered, groggy, and mumbled something in Spanish. She sounded young. Susan apologized for waking her but didn’t regret it. The second number was out of service, and the third was an answering machine that seemed to belong to a young family.
She went downstairs to forage for breakfast but a stubbornness nudged at her so that midway through her bowl of cereal she got up and left the cornflakes soaking to call Information again. This time she asked for more listings, listings for the whole state. She had no evidence he was here, if he was even living, but it was her only lead. There were eight numbers in all, not too many, and she sat with her coffee at the kitchen table, the list in front of her, and dialed methodically. One man had an English accent, which gave her hope at first—maybe because it imbued him fleetingly with age or stature. But he hung up when she asked more. The next number gave her a voicemail with a generic message, so she left her own. The third rang for some time until she heard a distant voice at the other end: the name of a business, and she was disappointed. Then the words came again. Sunset Villas.
“Are you—I’m sorry. What are you?”
“We’re a residential community. For seniors.”
She stretched out the coils of the phone cord on a finger, then released.
“I’m looking for a Mr. Sumter. A Mr. Charles Sumter.”
There was the buzz of static, then nothing. She’d been cut off. But no—a click and someone else picked up.
“Switchboard. Mr. Sumter is away from his room,” said a second voice.
She asked if he went by Chip, but the woman didn’t know. She asked how old he was, and the woman didn’t know that either. It was an 805 area code, Santa Barbara.
The villas were condos that overlooked the sea, a blocky off-white complex built around a pool. It was a gray day, with a cold wind whipping down the coast, and the concrete paths that led between the buildings were mostly deserted. Here and there a palm tree with dry fronds scraped and flapped or a square bed of bright geraniums was laid flat by the wind. There were no signs on the paths so it was hard to know where the lobby might be. After a while she came up behind a woman with a walker, who was proceeding slowly enough to be caught easily. The woman pointed.
Stepping through the automatic doors into the reception area, with its turquoise carpet and framed posters of old musicals, she was surprised; it seemed low-rent for oceanside real estate. To her right was a wall that blared OKLAHOMA! and CATS, and to her left was a glass wall into a small cardio room, where elderly figures looked haggard but determined on StairMasters and treadmills. Their legs pumped doggedly beneath them and they were looking straight forward, looking right at her. She had to turn away quickly lest one of them suddenly collapse.
The woman at the desk gave her a photocopied floor plan of the kind they handed out at motels, with an apartment number circled, and then she was up a long ramp to the second floor, along a catwalk and at the room, ringing the doorbell. A nurse opened the door, a nurse in a baby-blue dress and sneakers, or maybe she was a cleaning person. Susan followed her down a white-walled hallway, their footfalls noiseless on the off-white carpet.
Chip sat on a floral couch in front of a large window. He was a dark form with the light behind him, but she could tell he was very old and thin, with white hair. He wore an argyle sweater. He must be in his nineties. Wind chimes hung behind him in multitudes: glass butterflies, aluminum pipes, hummingbirds dangling beneath bells.
But there couldn’t be wind; it was a picture window and did not open.
He struggled to rise, but she shook her head.
“Oh no, please. Mr. Sumter,” she said, and bent down to hold out her hand. His own was very soft. Behind him the fuzzy, blue-gray ocean was visible: he had been given a good room. Not all the residents could have so clear a view.
After she sat down across the wicker coffee table the cleaning woman brought them tea and poured the contents of two pink packets into his cup for him—or maybe not a cleaning woman, given the tea service. Her role remained unclear.
Susan told him who she was and asked if he had known her uncle, and when she said her great-uncle’s name a smile broke on the old guy’s face.
“Good old Bud,” he said fondly, and picked up his cup of tea.
“So how did you know him?” she asked. She was prepared to explain herself but Chip did not need an explanation. He was happy to talk and spoke slowly and carefully: they had known each other through the State Department, where Chip had been in service. But her great-uncle had not been in the department because he’d failed some kind of Foreign Service test, though Chip did not use the word fail. So Albert had not been a diplomat but because of his line of work, which was import-export, he had been a fixture in various expat communities during a certain era.
In Bali, said Chip, and Peru, and Japan, and Indochina under the French.
“He moved in our circles, you see,” said Chip warmly, and sipped his tea.