Page 66 of Always

Yet somehow, Anika was full of hope. She was a practical person, a rational person. She didn’t usually believe in luck or destiny. But today she felt that she would find James, somehow, some way. And if she could find him, and speak to him face to face, everything could be set right between them at last.

Her first strategy was to check Facebook, but it seemed like Hannah was right in saying that nobody under forty used Facebook anymore—James didn’t even have a profile, let alone a recent post mentioning where he was staying. Anika checked Google news, hoping that James might be famous enough to have prompted a mention about his activities, but she drew a blank there too. The only stories were from months back when he had sold his company.

He did have an Instagram account, it appeared, and thankfully it was public. However, it was not an account like Hannah’s with dozens of pictures and stories detailing the ongoing progress of her day. Oddly, it didn’t even include pictures of James himself, not at parties and events as she would have expected, and not even in more casual settings like on a beach or a ski hill.

Instead, all the photos were snapshots of places and objects, most of them uncaptioned and untagged. Here was a bowl of peaches on a wooden table. Here was a mosaic of Moroccan tiles. Here was a little cactus in a turquoise pot. Here was a bird on a snowy branch. Some Roman coins under glass. And old man pouring tea. A wild rabbit. Skateboarders at Venice Beach.

Anika recognized the location of the last photo. She’d been to Venice Beach a couple of times and had ridden a bike past that skate park. She checked whether the photo had a pin attached. It did, and indeed the location was noted as Venice Beach.

As she scrolled through, she could see that while James didn’t generally pin the location of specific buildings (the Sydney Opera House appeared in the corner of a picture of a lobsterman on a pier, but the location was only noted as Sydney, Australia), he did at least generally indicate the country. In this way, scrolling back through the last two years, Anika saw that he had been to Hong Kong at least three times.

At no point during those visits had he tagged a particular address or hotel, but she did notice something from the last two visits, a single shared location: one was a photo of a child’s train, left abandoned on a floor made of bright green marble. And a few months later, there was another picture posted from Hong Kong, of a brilliant array of tropical flowers, beneath which could be seen a square of that same green marble. Anika couldn’t be certain, but it appeared that both pictures were taken in the same hotel lobby.

If James had stayed at the same hotel on two previous visits, was it not likely that he had returned there again? Was he the sort that always stayed at the same place, as long as the showers were good and the bed was soft?

For all the hundreds of things she knew about James, she didn’t know this, because they’d never taken any trips together.

Well, it was the best clue she had for now. Operating under the assumption that James either hadn’t seen her calls and texts, or wasn’t planning to respond to them, she would use whatever she could to find him.

Screen-shotting the photo off Instagram, she did a reverse image search, hoping to find a similar photo tagged with the name of the hotel. No luck there. So she simply started searching Hong Kong hotels, focusing on those closest to the financial district. She checked their home pages, looking for pictures of their lobbies.

After an hour of this, she had a list of six hotels with green floor tiles that might possibly match the ones in James’s photos. It was difficult to be certain, since of course the angles and the objects shown on the hotel websites were not the same as what James had chosen to snap.

At this point, it was nearly three in the morning. The physical and emotional exhaustion of Anika’s day were beginning to hit her like a slap to the face.

She paid her bill and walked over closer to her departure gate to find a couple of adjoining seats where she could stretch out with her head on her purse to try to catch a nap before her plane started boarding.

* * *

23

Though Anika tried her best to be a grounded person, someone who lived in the real world instead of the la la land of wealth and privilege, she did occasionally bump up against the hard truth of what it was like to truly live a plebeian life.

For example, she had never actually flown coach before. It turned out to be just about as miserable as Seinfeld had led her to believe. It didn’t help that she was sandwiched between two large businessmen, who commandeered the armrests and slept so heavily that she had to physically climb over the one on her right to escape to the toilets to take a pee.

Her general state of nervousness, her anxiety to get to Hong Kong as quickly as possible and her fear that it would all be for nothing when she did arrive did not help the situation. She couldn’t focus on any of the movies playing on the tiny television screen embedded in the seat-back in front of her, nor could she read the ebooks stored on her phone.

She did eventually catch a few fitful hours of sleep, only to be woken by the flight attendants delivering a meal that was not worth waking up for.

Still, all these things were nothing, nothing compared to the shock of landing in Hong Kong.

Anika had never been anywhere so completely foreign. As soon as she exited the airport, taking a cab into the city, she was hit by the sounds, the smells, and the humidity. New York was no stranger to hot summers, but she had arrived at the tail end of monsoon season, and the thick mugginess of the air was like nothing she had ever felt.

The same could be said of the crowds. She was used to being surrounded by hundreds of people, but somehow the chatter of voices in a language she couldn’t understand, the styles of clothing like and yet unlike what she was used to, the patterns of traffic and pedestrians shifting in ways that were not as predictable to her, all combined to confuse and amaze her. And the billboards! Everywhere she looked, dozens upon dozens of billboards were stacked and layered and stretched all the way across the street, some brilliant neon, some hand-painted, some in English, many more in Cantonese, a riot of color and light all shouting for attention.

She was relieved that her cab driver spoke good English, and he assured her that at least half the people on the island did.

“Half the people speak English,” he said, “half Mandarin, and everybody speaks Cantonese.”

“Do you know many of the hotels?” Anika asked him. “The ones downtown?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Have you ever seen this one?”

Anika showed him the photos on her phone.

“Do you know which hotel that is? In the pictures?”

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