Will started to follow Dad to the kitchen table, but detoured by the fridge on the way to grab a protein drink. There went the time he’d planned for breakfast.
“First, I need to apologize how I handled things when we talked last time,” Dad said, to Will’s surprise. “I should have made clear to you that you’ve been doing an excellent job and that I really do trust you to lead the company.” He paused. “You aren’t alone in making a few mistakes when you have a lot on your plate. When your mother and I found out we couldn’t have kids . . . well, let’s just say that I went through some rough times. It was impossible to keep all of that out of the office, even though I tried.”
Will had never really thought much about what his parents had gone through when they realized they couldn’t have children—or at least, thought they couldn’t. How heartbreaking for two people who loved children so much and were so great with kids to think that they’d never be able to have any.
Dad shook his head. “You know your mother and I love you. We’ve considered you our son from the moment we took you home, even before you were officially ours. I was so happy to finally have a son of my own that I think I naturally assumed you’d want to follow in my footsteps. I pushed you to go to Westminster and then to Virginia Tech, because I thought they’d be the best preparation for being CEO of AirVA one day. The degrees you got were meant to prepare you for the job, then as soon as you were done with school, I had you slotted in as COO before you’d had a change to get any real-world experience at all.”
“I wanted to do all of that, though,” Will protested.
“Maybe you did. But maybe part of the reason you wanted to was that I wanted you to. Will, I never meant to make you feel like you had to follow some sort of prescribed pattern.”
Will thought about it. Would he have wanted to get business and engineering degrees if he hadn’t met his father? If he’d still been that homeless kid but maybe miraculously gotten some sort of scholarship? What path would he have planned to take then?
“I don’t think it’s really possible to separate things like that,” Will said slowly. “If I hadn’t met you, I might have followed a different path. But that doesn’t mean that path would have been better or more what I wanted. I wanted to go to business school, and I wanted to take over the company someday. I still do.”
“Do you?” Dad’s brows drew together. “I got to thinking last night, and I realized I never asked you what you wanted. When I got out of rehab and saw how well you’d done with the company, I thought it was better to step back, to let you continue what you’d started. I’d started the company by your age, after all. But it’s different, starting from scratch and doing something you thought of yourself, rather than stepping into the role when the company has expanded hugely. Is working for AirVA what you want? If you want to do something else, I don’t want you to feel trapped.”
It was a bit amusing to realize that maybe he had a bit of Dad in him after all. Maybe Dad, too, sometimes thought he knew what was best for people without asking them. Like Will, he was learning otherwise.
Will shook his head vehemently. “No, Dad, I don’t want to do something else. I do love AirVA—maybe not as much as you do, but I’m getting there. It’s been crazy and overwhelming, but I don’t want to give it up.”
“And what about being CEO? I’ve recovered enough now that I think I could take over the role again if you wanted me to . . . but I don’t want to undermine you, either. If you’re comfortable staying as CEO, then the job is yours.”
“What about you?” Was Dad truly content in retirement?
Dad laughed. “You’ve seen right through me, haven’t you?” He sighed. “You were right, of course. Fifty-eight is too young to retire. When I was still struggling physically, I felt so very old. But now that I’m up and about on a cane and walking isn’t such a chore, I’m bored. I need to be productive. I don’t really want to be CEO again, but I was thinking about trying to get on the Board of Advisors and maybe taking a larger role at the shelter as well.”
“Can I think about it?” Will asked. Making this decision in the midst of everything going on with Chris Younge didn’t seem like a good idea.
Dad nodded. “Wise decision. After we get past this situation, we can talk about it.”
“Speaking of Younge, I was wondering if you could get in touch with a private investigator.”
Dad raised his eyebrows. “To check out his story?”
“I’m not sure why we didn’t think of it sooner. But maybe we could prove that he didn’t know my mom or that he wasn’t in the area, or something.”
“It’s hard to prove a negative,” Dad said. “But we think alike, you know. I decided to hire an investigator after the meeting with the board. I haven’t heard anything yet, but these things take a little while.”
The doorbell rang again. Will winced and glanced at Dad. “Uh . . . that’s probably Elizabeth.”
Dad’s eyes went wide. “Really! The two of you have plans?”
“Sort of,” Will said.
The doorbell rang again. Dad showed no signs of leaving. “Aren’t you going to answer it?”
Will sighed and opened the door.
“Hi, Will. Oh . . . and Mr. Darcy.” She looked wide-eyed between the two of them, then must have seen something in his father’s face, because she blushed.
Dad stood up and came to take her hand. “George.”
She chuckled. “Really? You’re George, too?”
“That’s right, you knew Will as George.”
“Yep. It’s taken some getting used to, to realize that Will and George are the same person.”
“Well, I’d better be going,” Dad said. He passed Elizabeth, then turned and gave Will a wink on his way out the door. “Good luck to both of you!”
“Ready?” Will asked her.
Elizabeth nodded. “Where are we going?”
“I didn’t think to ask, but did you bring those pictures with you, by chance?” Will asked.
Elizabeth nodded and pulled them out of her purse.
“To the park to start with, then. I was thinking of walking back through the neighborhood I lived in last, since I remember it best. We could talk to people who lived there then, show them the pictures of me, and see if anybody remembers us. If I’m lucky, somebody will remember that my mom and I lived there with Mark. That would at least poke holes in Younge’s story, as he claims that we left him and lied about it when we went to the shelter.”
It was rather strange to drive to the park. The perspective was odd from the parking lot, foreign in a way. He’d always approached on foot from the south, directly from the street.
Elizabeth chuckled from the passenger seat beside him. “I don’t think I’ve seen it from the parking lot since I was in kindergarten. My aunt and uncle used to take us here when they visited sometimes. When I came myself, I was always on foot.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” he admitted.
Will smiled to see the path to the duck pond, the playground, and their bench just as they’d been when they were kids. And there was the . . . was that the great forest they used to play in?
It was disorienting to realize that he could see the highway through the “forest” where they had whiled away so many happy hours. He’d remembered the woods being so deep and dark, but in reality, the trees were spaced fairly far apart with bright sunshine dappling the ground between them. Such was the dark wood that had served as the Western Wood and the Boxcar Children’s forest and the trees on Tangerine Island and the wonderful Terabithia. He supposed, in the end, that imagination was all that was needed.
Lizzy led the way. Without needing to speak, they took a seat on the bench where they’d spent so much time as children.
“It would be a cliché to say that it looks smaller now,” Elizabeth said. “But I do remember there being more trees. I think there really were.”
“I bet they cut them down,” Will said. “Safety reasons or something.”<
br />
“Hmm.” She paused for a moment. “Think the ducks look smaller, too?”
He laughed.
She smiled, but it disappeared quickly. “Will . . . I’m sorry about what I said to you when we argued about the job.”
“No, it was my―”
“It wasn’t all your fault,” she interrupted, putting a hand on his shoulder. He went warm at the contact. “I was angry and said a lot I shouldn’t have.” She laughed. “And it was ridiculous to say you didn’t know what hard work and suffering were like just because your family had been rich. Even if you hadn’t been adopted and gone through everything you did, that wouldn’t have meant you didn’t know how to work hard. And there are different kinds of suffering than eating ramen noodles.”
“I . . . thanks. I think.” Her words made him think. “You know a bit about that, don’t you? I mean, you weren’t poor when we met here when we were kids, but you had your own stuff going on.”
Elizabeth nodded, swinging her legs in a way that was reminiscent of the child she’d been. “Yeah. My parents have hated each other, oh, forever, I guess. Maybe they thought they were in love when they got married, I don’t know. They couldn’t even be polite to each other around us. My dad liked me the best, for some reason. Maybe because I learned to read early and liked to read like him. So of course, that made my mother hate me just to get back at him.”
He scooted a little closer to Elizabeth so their arms were touching. She leaned towards him, resting her head on his shoulder.
“I came to the park to escape all the little cutting things she’d say. She didn’t mind. She was happy for me to be out of the house as much as possible.” She turned slightly to smile at him. “Offering you that peanut butter sandwich was the best thing I’ve ever done. You were everything to me during those two years.”
“Jane?”
Elizabeth sighed. “Jane was, and is, pretty much perfect. I adored her, and I still do. But my mother does as well. It was hard being constantly compared to Jane and coming up wanting. Jane was so sweet that she didn’t pick up on my mother's harsh words, because she couldn’t imagine anybody actually meaning such things. She would always try to defend our mother to me, tell me that she wasn’t so bad.”
“Didn’t want to hear it?”
“Not in the slightest. Jane always sees the best in everyone, though.”
Darcy chuckled. “Except Caroline.”
“I couldn’t believe she said that! I guess all of Caroline’s snarky remarks had finally become impossible to write off as being misunderstood.”
He was quiet for a minute. “You know, it was that book you gave me, Around the World in 80 Days, that ended up the reason I was adopted by the Darcys.”
Her eyes went wide. “The book? How?”
“Dad noticed me because I was reading it at the shelter. He asked what I was reading, and it turned out to be a favorite of his.” Will bumped her shoulder. “He became my new book friend after you left.” He remembered something suddenly. “It was a birthday present, wasn’t it? From your father? I remember it was a month early or something because he got your and Jane’s birthdays confused.” He thought for a minute. “Did he realize it when your actual birthday rolled around? I’d think the cake would be a dead giveaway.”
She buried herself a bit farther into his shoulder, and he wrapped an arm around her. “Uh . . . no. My mother was . . . well, she wasn’t particularly fond of me. So we never really did anything for my birthday.”
He jerked away and stared at her, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. “You never did anything for your birthday?” He had always pictured her surrounded by friends and sisters, doing normal kid things like birthday parties and vacations to Disneyworld, all of the things that he never got to experience.
Elizabeth shrugged and shook her head. “Jane sometimes did something special. When we got old enough, she’d make me a little cupcake of my own.”
“So you never had a party, never got presents? Did your sisters get parties?”
“The younger ones did, because they were ‘little.’ Of course, they were always little, and I never was, according to Mother. Jane didn’t care for parties when we were young—she was too shy—so she got to have a friend come spend the night or go to an amusement park with her. I was too old for parties and too young for sleepovers, or so Mother always said until I stopped asking.”
He hadn’t had birthday parties either, not while living with his birth mom, but she’d sometimes given him something when she remembered, candy or gum usually. And of course he’d had great parties and presents with the Darcys.
“Jane gave me presents, and sometimes friends would. My dad would slip me something in private. It’s not like I was completely neglected or anything, Will. Nothing compared to what you went through. Honest.”
He gave her a squeeze anyway. He didn’t know what to say. No, it wasn’t to be compared to what his situation was like. But that was because they were totally different, not because he’d had it harder, or that it was a competition.
“So,” she said, standing up quickly, “ready to go?” She clearly wanted to change the subject, so he let her.
He nodded. “Honestly, this is a long shot. I never really went into any of the places along the way, except sometimes the convenience store on the corner, but you never know what people will remember.”
She took his hand as they walked along the path he’d taken so many times as a boy. Her hand was warm and soft in his. It was strange to think how different he’d felt the last time he’d made this walk. Now he was almost floating.
The only familiar business between the park and the apartment complex was an auto shop, but it looked far more upscale than it had the last time he’d seen it. He’d had no reason to go in there as a boy, so no use looking for familiar faces there. The payday loan place and the tattoo parlor had been replaced by a smoothie shop and a hair salon. The old 7-11 on the corner had now been replaced by Sheetz. They went in anyway, but nobody had been working there long enough.
The apartment complex still existed, but it, too, had had a face-lift in the intervening years. The structure was the same, but it had a nice paint job, a new playground, a larger parking lot, and a swimming pool. Apparently it had experienced the same gentrification that the area closer to the shelter had.
He and Elizabeth split up, each taking one of the pictures and going door to door to see if anybody remembered Will and his mother. Will also went down to the super’s office to see if they had any records of when Mark lived there, but the super told him apologetically that the records were private.
“Even if they weren’t,” she admitted, “we don’t keep records going that far back here. Corporate might have them somewhere, but Eastern Management has only owned the complex for the past five years, and I don’t know whether the previous company would have kept records when they sold it.”
Will had had the highest hopes for apartment 211 and the neighboring apartments. It had been a long shot to imagine Mark still living here, and of course he wasn’t, but none of the neighbors seemed familiar either, and none recognized him.
“No luck,” Elizabeth said as she rejoined him.
“That’s a dead end, then,” he said.
“What next?”
“Next, I think we get experts lined up to talk about the shelter, then I need to convince some of the local papers to write about it.”
“What about other places you lived?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know any. Before Mark’s, we didn’t stay in any place longer than a month or two. I’ve long since forgotten any addresses I used to know, and I don’t even know if I’d recognize the places if I saw them, as the area has changed so much.”
Elizabeth was frowning. “You moved around a lot . . . Will, where did you go to school?”
“For what? Elementary?” He felt stupid, as he wasn’t following why Elizabeth was asking.
“Yeah, elementary.”
“Brecki
nridge. Why?”
“The entire time? I mean, for all of elementary school? You said you moved around a lot.”
“Pretty much all of it, I think, except maybe kindergarten. I think we were still in Richmond then.” He shrugged. “I guess we must have moved around a lot but not far enough to be in a different school district. I went to Walter Williams for middle—that’s where all the Breckinridge kids went.” He could tell Elizabeth was excited, but what was she excited about?
“Let’s go see if Breckinridge will let you see your school records, Will! We can see what adults were listed, who was your emergency contact, and maybe we could find some of your former addresses. If nothing else, knowing you were always in Breckinridge’s school district narrows the area where you must have lived.”
Will was ready to head over to the school, but then he realized the time. “It’s 4:15,” he said. “Do you know how late school offices are open?”
She shrugged. “Bet it’s on their website.”
The website showed that the offices closed at four, so they would have to wait until tomorrow.
“I should make some phone calls before end of business,” Will said. “Do you want to come over? I owe you Chinese after today, at the very least.”
Elizabeth smiled at him. “I’d love to.”
Will called The Chronicle first, where he managed to get hold of the reporter who had written an article questioning the shelter in last week’s paper.
“All I’m saying,” Will said firmly, hoping he didn’t sound as anxious as he felt, “was that I’m assuming you, as an unbiased professional, want to get both sides of the story. You can’t do that without coming down to the shelter and talking to the director.”
The reporter seemed skeptical, but finally agreed to come down to the shelter on Saturday for the opening. Will would try reaching some more reporters tomorrow. The Journal was usually pretty fair and covered events like this.
“Food’s here!” Elizabeth called brightly.
A Good Name: A Modern Pride and Prejudice Variation Page 25