A wave of nausea hit him as he unlocked his door, knowing his computer would be staring him in the face right when he walked in.
Mercifully, the email account had timed out, so he didn’t have to relive the experience in its entirety. He nudged the laptop closed and collapsed onto his bed, mentally and physically exhausted from traipsing around campus all morning, and he was dead asleep before he even hit the mattress.
Instantaneously he was transported back to the double doors of his day care center. It had been a long time. As was always the case, he was standing next to his teacher, waiting for his parents to arrive, but this time there was no rain.
A flood of sunshine from the cloudless sky amplified the reds, blues and yellows of the slides and swings in the fenced-in playground off to the side of the front parking lot. Across the street, he could see the bright green soccer field and baseball diamond where he and his friends would spend their afternoons when the weather allowed.
To his left, the narrow two-lane drive in front of the facility stretched past a row of one and two-story concrete office buildings and on toward the entrance of the office park where the road opened up into a busier four-lane highway.
Off to his right, repeated glimmers of reflected sunlight were bouncing off the back of a furiously swaying stop sign from the corner opposite the day care center straight into his eyes. The sign was in continuous chaotic motion, as though the thin pole that supported it may snap at any second. But curiously there wasn’t so much as a ripple in the grass around it. And the leaves in the tree next to it were perfectly still.
Then out of nowhere the sky suddenly blackened, and a driving rain began to fall, as his gaze was involuntarily pulled back to his left, where he saw headlights approaching. Emotionally incapable of watching what he knew was coming next, he tried to look away, but he couldn’t. He knew he had to be dreaming, but he couldn’t manage to snap himself out of it.
Just then, a soft but completely out-of-place chime broke his concentration, disintegrating the dream world, as it dawned on him that it was his phone alerting him to a new email.
“Stop sign,” he whispered to himself as he opened his eyes.
Looking over at the clock, he was amazed to find that he’d been asleep for over an hour; it had felt like less than a minute.
There was a four-way stop in front of the day care center. And the day care center was off the main road in an office park that had no through streets. His whole life, he’d been trying to suppress the specifics of that day, not dissect them.
Whoever had hit his parents head on would’ve had to have floored it from the end of a cul de sac, run through a stop sign, and swerved (or stayed) in the wrong lane. If that driver hadn’t also died in the crash, which was likely, he would have had to have been charged with a crime. Either way, there had to be police records documenting what happened.
Would he have any right to them as his parents’ only survivor? And if he did, would he be able to access them as a minor?
As he pondered these questions, he grabbed his phone to see who had sent him the well-timed email. His inbox contained only one new message: a reply from Leonard Weinstien.
“Thank you for contacting me,” the email read. “I’m sorry I won’t be able to tell you much via email. Previous experience has left me distrusting of computers. I would, however, be more than happy to meet with you face-to-face. I’m retired with no one depending on me and (sadly) not much to do. So I’d be quite flexible as to where we could meet. — Leonard.”
Corbett’s head and eyelids drooped slowly downward in unison, nearly giving in to an overwhelming urge to sleep, before they snapped back up and started their same slow descent all over again. He had been parked in front of his terminal for 24 hours and counting, the most recent half-hour of which had been a constant struggle to maintain consciousness.
Well beyond any benefit that coffee could impart, he decided to stand up and pace for a few seconds, all the while keeping his bloodshot eyes fixed on his monitor. The hacker hadn’t been in the system for 6 days, which was an unusually long hiatus for him, and Bradford’s juicy email had been dangling out there on the mail server since just before this marathon session had begun. With only one shot at this, he couldn’t allow himself to fall asleep.
Just as he sat back down, considering whom he might be able to trust to watch over his monitor for an hour or so while he caught some desperately needed shut-eye, someone logged into Bradford’s email. The IP address was from New York, but it wasn’t one he recognized. This was it!
In a matter of seconds the tracer embedded in the email’s corrupted attachment gave up the hacker’s true IP address, which Corbett furiously scribbled down, and then, just as he’d predicted, it was gone — destroyed by the host computer.
At long last, he could finally let his guard down. He plodded along through thirty more minutes of inefficient work, which normally would’ve taken him ten, and narrowed the location of the hacker down to somewhere in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Finalizing his exact location would only be a matter of time. But, more pressingly, he needed a nap.
As the shot of adrenaline from the vivid recollection of his former day care center’s surroundings wore off, Ryan felt the hollowness that had pervaded his morning gradually creeping back in. And he had no interest in burying this like he had with his parents’ deaths for so long.
He had good friends on campus he could talk to — loyal, insightful and trustworthy, but none of them had ever experienced anything even remotely similar to losing a parent, much less a whole family. There were only two people he knew who could possibly relate to what he was going through. One was Dillon, who would probably be twistedly happy to hear about Ryan’s lost little sibling so he could use it as more ammo against Avillage. The other was Annamaria.
Hit with a peculiar giddiness at having a legitimate excuse to call her, he reached for his phone. But as soon as he started to dial, his heart began palpitating and his palms began to sweat; self-doubt began to creep in. Did he really need to bother her with this? Where would he start? Why would she care? She hardly knew him.
By the time her name popped up on the display, he couldn’t will his thumb down to the green phone icon on the screen to initiate the call.
It would probably be more productive to look a little further into the emails, he decided.
After a few deep breaths, he opened his laptop back up and logged back in as his dad. The junk-to-personal email ratio remained fairly high, as he continued to sift through the messages. In a way he was fortunate his dad hadn’t deleted much, but it did make for more work for him.
He decided to scroll back a full year, cleaning up the junk as he went, so he could go through the messages quickly and chronologically.
A pattern began to emerge as he continued back through the year. Relatively few of the more recent emails from J.R. had a curved arrow next to them, indicating a reply, while the farther back he went, the more likely the messages were to be marked with an arrow. Somewhat surprisingly though the frequency of the incoming emails seemed to have stayed relatively constant.
Eventually, he made his way back to the day of his sixth birthday, a full year before his parents had died, and then reversed course, reading through each message in its entirety. While Ryan’s dad had sent a fairly high volume of emails to J.R., J.R. seemed to be the originator of every single thread.
One email to Ryan’s mom contained the sarcastic subject line “My ‘best friend’” and was loaded with complaints about J.R.’s never leaving him alone and his paranoia that they wouldn’t end up at the same hospital after fellowship. At the end of the message he wistfully posed the question, “how do you break up with a friend?” To which his wife had responded, “You move. Don’t worry. We’ll get those jobs in Boston.”