I armed the tears away from my face and snorted up the snot. “Mom,” I said. “Hi.”
She came into my room and hugged me. “What is it? Do you need to talk?”
The note lay on the table.
“Is that from your girlfriend? Is everything all right?”
She’d given me an out. I could just blame it all on problems with Ange and she’d leave my room and leave me alone. I opened my mouth to do just that, and then this came out:
“I was in jail. After the bridge blew. I was in jail for that whole time.”
The sobs that came then didn’t sound like my voice. They sounded like an animal noise, maybe a donkey or some kind of big cat noise in the night. I sobbed so my throat burned and ached with it, so my chest heaved.
Mom took me in her arms, the way she used to when I was a little boy, and she stroked my hair, and she murmured in my ear, and rocked me, and gradually, slowly, the sobs dissipated.
I took a deep breath and Mom got me a glass of water. I sat on the edge of my bed and she sat in my desk chair and I told her everything.
Everything.
Well, most of it.
Chapter 16
This chapter is dedicated to San Francisco’s Booksmith, ensconced in the storied Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, just a few doors down from the Ben and Jerry’s at the exact corner of Haight and Ashbury. The Booksmith folks really know how to run an author event — when I lived in San Francisco, I used to go down all the time to hear incredible writers speak (William Gibson was unforgettable). They also produce little baseball-card-style trading cards for each author — I have two from my own appearances there.
Booksmith: 1644 Haight St. San Francisco CA 94117 USA +1 415 863 8688
At first Mom looked shocked, then outraged, and finally she gave up altogether and just let her jaw hang open as I took her through the interrogation, pissing myself, the bag over my head, Darryl. I showed her the note.
“Why —?”
In that single syllable, every recrimination I’d dealt myself in the night, every moment that I’d lacked the bravery to tell the world what it was really about, why I was really fighting, what had really inspired the Xnet.
I sucked in a breath.
“They told me I’d go to jail if I talked about it. Not just for a few days. Forever. I was — I was scared.”
Mom sat with me for a long time, not saying anything. Then, “What about Darryl’s father?”
She might as well have stuck a knitting needle in my chest. Darryl’s father. He must have assumed that Darryl was dead, long dead.
And wasn’t he? After the DHS has held you illegally for three months, would they ever let you go?
But Zeb got out. Maybe Darryl would get out. Maybe me and the Xnet could help get Darryl out.
“I haven’t told him,” I said.
Now Mom was crying. She didn’t cry easily. It was a British thing. It made her little hiccoughing sobs much worse to hear.
“You will tell him,” she managed. “You will.”
“I will.”
“But first we have to tell your father.”
Dad no longer had any regular time when he came home. Between his consulting clients — who had lots of work now that the DHS was shopping for data-mining startups on the peninsula — and the long commute to Berkeley, he might get home any time between 6PM and midnight.
Tonight Mom called him and told him he was coming home right now. He said something and she just repeated it: right now.
When he got there, we had arranged ourselves in the living room with the note between us on the coffee table.
It was easier to tell, the second time. The secret was getting lighter. I didn’t embellish, I didn’t hide anything. I came clean.
I’d heard of coming clean before but I’d never understood what it meant until I did it. Holding in the secret had dirtied me, soiled my spirit. It had made me afraid and ashamed. It had made me into all the things that Ange said I was.
Dad sat stiff as a ramrod the whole time, his face carved of stone. When I handed him the note, he read it twice and then set it down carefully.
He shook his head and stood up and headed for the front door.
“Where are you going?” Mom asked, alarmed.
“I need a walk,” was all he managed to gasp, his voice breaking.
We stared awkwardly at each other, Mom and me, and waited for him to come home. I tried to imagine what was going on in his head. He’d been such a different man after the bombings and I knew from Mom that what had changed him were the days of thinking I was dead. He’d come to believe that the terrorists had nearly killed his son and it had made him crazy.
Crazy enough to do whatever the DHS asked, to line up like a good little sheep and let them control him, drive him.
Now he knew that it was the DHS that had imprisoned me, the DHS that had taken San Francisco’s children hostage in Gitmo-by-the-Bay. It made perfect sense, now that I thought of it. Of course it had been Treasure Island where I’d been kept. Where else was a ten-minute boat-ride from San Francisco?
When Dad came back, he looked angrier than he ever had in his life.
“You should have told me!” he roared.
Mom interposed herself between him and me. “You’re blaming the wrong person,” she said. “It wasn’t Marcus who did the kidnapping and the intimidation.”
He shook his head and stamped. “I’m not blaming Marcus. I know exactly who’s to blame. Me. Me and the stupid DHS. Get your shoes on, grab your coats.”
“Where are we going?”
“To see Darryl’s father. Then we’re going to Barbara Stratford’s place.”
I knew the name Barbara Stratford from somewhere, but I couldn’t remember where. I thought that maybe she was an old friend of my parents, but I couldn’t exactly place her.
Meantime, I was headed for Darryl’s father’s place. I’d never really felt comfortable around the old man, who’d been a Navy radio operator and ran his household like a tight ship. He’d taught Darryl Morse code when he was a kid, which I’d always thought was cool. It was one of the ways I knew that I could trust Zeb’s letter. But for every cool thing like Morse code, Darryl’s father had some crazy military discipline that seemed to be for its own sake, like insisting on hospital corners on the beds and shaving twice a day. It drove Darryl up the wall.
Darryl’s mother hadn’t liked it much either, and had taken off back to her family in Minnesota when Darryl was ten — Darryl spent his summers and Christmases there.
I was sitting in the back of the car, and I could see the back of Dad’s head as he drove. The muscles in his neck were tense and kept jumping around as he ground his jaws.
Mom kept her hand on his arm, but no one was around to comfort me. If only I could call Ange. Or Jolu. Or Van. Maybe I would when the day was done.
“He must have buried his son in his mind,” Dad said, as we whipped up through the hairpin curves leading up Twin Peaks to the little cottage that Darryl and his father shared. The fog was on Twin Peaks, the way it often was at night in San Francisco, making the headlamps reflect back on us. Each time we swung around a corner, I saw the valleys of the city laid out below us, bowls of twinkling lights that shifted in the mist.
“Is this the one?”
“Yes,” I said. “This is it.” I hadn’t been to Darryl’s in months, but I’d spent enough time here over the years to recognize it right off.
The three of us stood around the car for a long moment, waiting to see who would go and ring the doorbell. To my surprise, it was me.
I rang it and we all waited in held-breath silence for a minute. I rang it again. Darryl’s father’s car was in the driveway, and we’d seen a light burning in the living room. I was about to ring a third time when the door opened.