Chapter Eleven - Maya
I go for the walk. I didn’t sleep much last night and he damn well knows it. But I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of listening to me yawn all afternoon. It’s lovely out here. I can’t tell if I think it’s lonely or not. I wonder how often Conrad comes here, and what he gets out of it. Thoughts of him from last night rush in between every breath I take. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here. I also don’t know how I’m supposed to get through the next few days without my stuff. I’ve got a toothbrush and my change of clothes. That’s about it.
The pond is the color of the cloudy sky. It’s so quiet out here. You can get used to anything, and the background noise of the city barely registers to me anymore. Until I’m in a place like this, where I can actually hear the water stirring in the slight breeze. It’s the kind of place, and moment, that you want to share with someone. It’s been a long time since I’ve shared anything real with someone besides Angela. My most serious relationship had been with a guy named Ian. It was good but not great. Still, I thought we might wind up together. When Ian told me he was leaving me for someone else, I couldn’t believe it. It hurt, it always does, but once he was gone, it wasn’t just him that I missed. I thought about how we would never do certain things together again. Even if there were a million perfect moments in my future, there was no longer any guarantee that anyone would be there to share them with me. In a way, it felt like I had stopped existing, and I don’t mean that in the “You’re not complete without a man” way. But other people prove to us that we’re here.
Which brings me back to here. Where is here? What are we doing? I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life for a real mystery. Now I’ve got one. Of course, the mystery could turn out to be why I let myself get talked into any of this.
There are ducks on the pond. I didn’t see when they flew in, but now they’re drifting around in a lazy circle. Now I see a frog on the bank. It’s a regular wildlife party out here. But now I’m thinking about Conrad and his hands, and shoulders, and how he’s lying in a bed—or so he says—thirty seconds from where I sit. The real animal is in the cabin and I still don’t know what he wants from me.
I turn to look, half expecting to find him watching me from the upstairs window like a serial killer. But the window is empty. Conrad’s not in his bed anymore, though, he’s walking down the trail towards me with a smile on his face.
“Here,” he says, handing me a bag of bread slices. Then he whistles.
“You can’t whistle for ducks,” I say. “They’re not like—”
At the sound of his whistle, the ducks turn and glide towards us. Shows what I know about ducks, I guess. “Wow, I say. You’re like the duck whisperer.”
“Maybe that’s the book you should write,” he says. “The Man Who Loved Ducks.”
I tear a few pieces of bread and toss the chunks into the water. The ducks go wild. They were obviously expecting this. “What makes you think that my book would be about you?”
“I think there’s a big role for you in it,” he says. Conrad sits in the chair next to me and sighs. Then he takes my hand. I turn my head to look at him, but he’s staring at the lake. I don’t take my hand away. Whatever this is, it’s a shared moment.
“Are you happy?” I say.
He laughs. “I’d have to be a pretty ungrateful, crazy bastard to say no, right?”
“Does that mean you’re a crazy, ungrateful bastard?”
He turns towards me. “The truth is, I’ve never been that interested in happiness. I’m not sure what it means. At least, that’s what I thought. I always had a plan. I always knew what was going to be next. So I executed the plan and I got what I wanted. Did that make me happy? I didn’t really think about it like that.”
“You’re talking about it in the past tense like something changed.”
Conrad smiles. He squeezes my hand. “Something has. Something did.”
“What was it?” The sun is starting to set behind him and it’s making his blond hair look like it’s on fire.
“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” he says, taking his hand away. “Now, you’re still my assistant. It just so happens that I need some assisting this evening.”
“After the stunt you pulled last time, you think I’m going to come anywhere near you?”
“Yes. I think you will. It’s my job to know what people are like.”
Whatever it is, it’s a shared moment.
“Come on,” he says. “I’ve got a couple of things for you. Then we’ll eat. Then we’ll get to work.” He stands up and takes the bread from me, which I had forgotten about. He throws the slices into the pond like they’re Frisbees. The ducks rush back into the water in a quacking mob. I watch his broad back as he strides back to the cabin. There’s nothing to do but follow him. To see where this leads.
When I get inside, the kitchen table is covered in toiletry supplies. “I know we left quickly,” he says, “and I wasn’t sure how long we’d be here, so I had my pilot go into town and get some supplies for you.”
It looks like enough supplies to keep us here until Judgment Day. “So, we might be out here for like…a year?” Is this going to turn into a horror movie? Does he know something I don’t? Has the world I knew been destroyed by nuclear radiation and we’re the last people in the world?
“Not a year. We don’t have enough food for that,” he says, getting into the refrigerator. “But what we do have, I’m about to cook for you. So strap yourself in.”
As shared moments go, even if we’re about to plunge into the apocalypse, there are worse ones than having a hot billionaire cook for you in a cabin. “I’m strapped,” I say. “But I still want to know what we’re doing out here. What are we working on?”
“Well,” he says, “Isn’t it obvious? We’re just trying to get to the bottom of it all?”
I ask him what in the world he’s talking about. He happily ignores me.