The Family Remains(49)
Lucy exhales slowly. ‘Are you able to tell me what name he was using? For his booking?’
The receptionist’s eyes go to a door behind her, and then back to her screen. She lowers her voice and says, ‘Sure. It was Joshua Harris.’
Lucy nods. ‘Great. Thank you. Thank you so much. I’m so grateful to you.’
‘Joshua,’ Marco hisses in her ear as they head towards the lifts. ‘That’s the name. The name that guy from the bike-tour place said. Joshua Harris. It’s him!’
‘Well,’ says Lucy, watching the lift doors open and sliding through, ‘we’ll get in touch with him soon. But first, let’s go and check out our lovely room.’ She can’t think about it now. She just needed him to be here. To be here now. She doesn’t want to search for him, to wait for him. She needs him just to be here and needs to know that Phin is safe.
Their room is beautiful. She booked the most expensive room they had; the Aurora Suite is its name. It’s four times the size of the room they used to live in in Giuseppe’s building in Nice. Marco gets his own sofa bed in a separate section of the room. They also have a terrace and a kitchenette. It is decorated in shades of aqua and washed-out ochre with framed botanical prints on the walls and an ice-blue neon light over a sideboard formed of the word ‘aurora’.
Stella scoots about the room, enjoying the sense of space. Marco unloads Henry’s iPad and laptop from his fancy new backpack and climbs on to his sofa bed with a bottle of Coke from the mini-bar and a packet of nuts. Lucy sits in an upholstered chair, her hands hanging between her knees, her head heavy on her neck, and allows the stresses of the journey, of the last four days, of in fact every living moment since she received that text message from Henry on Friday afternoon, to pass through her from her gut to her lungs and then out to her extremities, and she sighs so loudly that Stella and Marco both look up at her.
‘You OK?’ says Marco.
She finds a smile. ‘Yes. I’m fine. I’m just very, very tired indeed.’
She sends Henry a message, although she knows it is futile. Henry. Who knows if you’ll ever see this. But we’re here. We’re in Chicago. We’re at the Dayville. Please please call. PLEASE.
She glances up and sees Marco smiling at her. ‘What?’
‘Wanna know where Henry is?’
‘Yes,’ she begins, ‘of course I do. But not today, not yet, we’ll start looking for him tomo—’
But then she stops. Marco has turned around the screen of Henry’s iPad and is showing her a hotel in another part of Chicago called the Angel Inn. He taps it with one finger and smiles at her from underneath his overgrown curls. ‘About ten minutes from here, in an Uber.’
‘I don’t understand?’
‘The guy with the bike. Kris Doll. I just WhatsApped him. I said that the man we were looking for also goes by the name of Joshua Harris and we were still trying to find him to let him know his dad was dying. And Kris said that funnily enough he’d just seen Joshua this morning at this hotel.’ He taps the screen of the iPad again. ‘Kris said he thought something seemed off with him. He asked him about Henry Lamb but he pretended he’d never heard of him. And get this, Mum, get this. The guy with the bike told me that he is friends with Phin. Our Phin. He actually knows him. And not only that, but Phin is in Chicago right this very minute.’
Lucy gasps. ‘Seriously?’
‘Oui, maman, seriously.’ Marco’s face is alight with triumph. ‘Shall we go?’ he says. ‘Shall we go now?’
‘Go where?’
‘To the Angel Inn?’
‘No, Marco. Not now. We’re all shattered. Let’s—’
‘No, Mum. Let’s go now. What if Henry moves again? What if he finds out we’re here and decides to run off? We might never ever find him again. Come on. It’s not even five. Please.’
Lucy sighs again, then straightens her neck and her back, slaps her hands against her thighs and says, ‘Yes. Of course. Yes. Let’s go.’
39
April 2017
It was nearly three in the morning. Despite the warmer weather by day, it was cold now and Rachel could see her breath. She turned the corner to the place she’d arranged to meet the Uber and watched the driver’s progress anxiously on her phone until he finally arrived, his headlights cutting holes into the night-time mist, and she climbed into his back seat and said that yes, she was fine, thank you, how are you and then watched London through the window, the sleeping curves of it, the drawn curtains, the occasional pixel of light here and there, the gentle stretches of empty road, the calm waits at red lights for nobody and nothing, the soft pulsing click of the driver’s indicator and then the lights shining off the filthy dark water of the Regent’s Canal, white fairy lights strung across a barge, the peculiar shape of her building, the upended fridge, the glow of the nightlight in the entrance hall, her key in her front door, the smell of a neglected home, a fan of mail on the doormat. She dropped her bag at her feet, then collapsed on to her knees, tears running down her face, down her neck, into her pyjama top.
Rachel woke up a few hours later. She was in her own bed. The sheets had a dull, musty tang. She should have left her bed with clean bedding before she’d moved to Michael’s but she hadn’t thought. And last night she had been too broken to think about changing them. She had stood for half an hour in the shower, the pressure turned high, as high as it would go, tears mingling with the water as it poured down over her head. Now she was wearing pyjamas that she had not worn for many, many weeks, which still smelled of the fabric conditioner she used here in her own home. Her skin felt tight and raw from the hour of sickened, nauseated, rageful crying she’d done the night before.