by John C. Ford
“You have no idea what he would have done.”
“Yes I do. And I knew that if I was going to leave, I had to shut the door completely. It would have been too painful any other way. Staying away from you has been the hardest thing in my life.” She raised her chin, resisting tears. “But it’s made me very . . . tough. I think you’ll find that your greatest sources of pain in life also show you your greatest strengths.”
“Glad it worked out for you,” Smiles said.
She closed her eyes against his sneer.
“Smylies?” It was Mr. Perry, outside the curtain. Melanie slipped outside and began whispering to him, buying them time.
Smiles still had stores of anger to burn. “But you didn’t stay away, did you? You tried to get my mom involved—the one who was actually there for me.”
Smiles took pleasure in the mud puddles of mascara on her face, the bloodshot stains on her eyes. She dabbed at them, collecting herself. “A year ago I heard about your father’s cancer,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do, honestly—I’d always wanted you to get this information after you turned eighteen, when you were an adult and could handle it. But I felt it important that someone close to your father know before the end. In case there was a chance for amends. So I informed Rose. She didn’t believe me, naturally. And that’s when we went together to Professor Worth, to confirm for her that your father had stolen Mr. Eltsin’s work.”
Smiles refused to believe it. He fanned the fire inside himself—that’s what he would hold on to, not his mother’s accusations. “You don’t know what he did. This doesn’t mean anything.” Smiles swept the notebook off the table. It fluttered and smacked against the wall.
His mother watched it fall. Something snapped, and when her eyes bored into him again, they were clear and white. “I know exactly what he did. He ruined all of us.”
She was nearly yelling. Melanie had stepped back into the room. She looked on, her head retreating on her neck, a scared bystander. Smiles’s mother took a stride toward him, closing the space between them. Her stiffened spine made her three inches taller. She angled over the table. “You want to know? This is what your father did. He took the trust of a beautiful young man and destroyed him. When Andrei Eltsin was doing work for your father, he was approached by the Russian intelligence service. They wanted him to inform on the advanced work being done here. They wanted him to spy. Andrei wanted nothing to do with it, but he made the mistake of going to your father for guidance.
“Unfortunately for him, he had also just gone to your father with his brilliant idea for making asymmetrical encryption viable over the Internet. He trusted your father. He looked up to him as a mentor. And do you know what your father did?” She leaned farther over the table, and Smiles felt himself retreat. “Do you know what he did?”
Smiles waited for it.
“He set him up. He told Andrei to meet with the Russian spies again, so they could get more information before going to the authorities. Then he called the State Department and told them he suspected Andrei of spying. They arrested him a few days later, at the meeting your father had told him to arrange. All so he could steal Andrei’s idea and call it his own.”
She backed down to her heels, her chest heaving under her blouse. Smiles felt as though he’d been cored out, as if some essential part of himself no longer existed.
“That’s what your father did,” she said as the calm returned to her voice. “He might as well have killed that man. He ruined his life, and mine, too. I wanted to be his wife. I wanted to run Alyce Systems with him.” Her fingers clawed at the island. And she whispered, “I wanted, more than anything, to be your mother.”
“I got the mom I wanted,” Smiles said.
But when she turned and left the room, he felt abandoned again.
241
MELANIE WATCHED SMILES carefully as he started up the car. She wouldn’t have blamed him for breaking down, or needing to be alone, or wanting to turn the car directly into oncoming traffic. In the short span of fifteen minutes, the burnished image of his father had been utterly demolished.
She didn’t know how Smiles could face his dad now, but he was pointing the car toward the hospital. “You mind if we see him?” Smiles said. The first words he’d spoken since leaving the bank.
“No,” Melanie said quietly.
It wasn’t just his dad who had been revealed at the bank, either. Melanie now had her own demon.
“Your father wasn’t the one who had that letter destroyed,” she said. “My dad did it.”
Melanie was sure of it. He’d done it for the same reason he’d lied to her and Jenna: He didn’t want any of this coming out, because it would mean the end of his career as well. He must have known all along that Mr. Smylie had stolen the formula. Still, he’d chosen to go along with it. His entire career was a lie, just as much as Mr. Smylie’s was. The truth hit her like a series of punches as they drove in silence to the hospital, parked in the garage, and walked across the skywalk to the cancer center.
Melanie had never been as proud as Smiles as she was at that moment. He kept himself firmly together while she dangled on the edge of sanity right next to him. Their lives had changed drastically in the last half hour, and she wondered how this would affect each of them down the line. But looking at him there, holding himself steady through the push of the crowd in the skywalk, she liked his chances of being okay.
He was never the cracked dish I always imagined him to be. She thought this as they pushed open the doors of the neuro-oncology center. At the reception desk, a striking woman with manicured dreadlocks offered tender eyes for Smiles. Her name tag said SHANTI.
Seeing their disheveled state, she leapt from behind the desk and locked her hands in front of her. “Your dad’s okay, but he’s in with someone. Let me see if I can clear them out of there. One minute.”
They watched her disappear down the hallway, leaving them standing near a corner of chairs and golf magazines. Everything about the situation was horrible, but Melanie could at least enjoy the fact that her need to mother Smiles had left her entirely.
Shanti returned up the hallway and beckoned them back.
“Go ahead,” Melanie said to Smiles. “I’ll wait for you.”
And then she saw the person coming up behind Shanti, the one she’d cleared out of Mr. Smylie’s room. It was her dad. He labored over to her, looking sharp in a charcoal suit with subtle pinstripes. Starched white shirt. French cuffs. Gold tie. Ready for the IPO.
“How could you, Dad?” Melanie said.
251
HE LOOKED BETTER today. He looked much better, but somehow Smiles knew he was close to the end.
Smiles didn’t go to his usual seat, the one by the picture of his mom. Instead he walked to his dad’s side, pulled away the L-shaped tray with his dinner plate and Economist magazine, and took a seat at the edge of the bed. He felt no anger at all.
His dad breathed deeply. “You know, then?”
Smiles nodded. He wondered if his dad remembered their last conversation, when he’d asked if Smiles had seen the package. It didn’t matter.
“You told me about the notebook on my birthday. You wanted me to know, didn’t you?”
“It’s the great burden of my life, that lie.” He looked about the silent room, as if it might offer a way out of his past. “That poor man—”
“Dad, you don’t need to.” A group of nurses passed loudly in the hallway. From the next room, Smiles heard the deflating hiss of a machine. He shifted closer to his dad, laying a hand against his leg. “You’ve been a great father,” he said.
His dad shook his head. “Andrei was a great father. He had a wife and child here, more important to him than anything. He snuck back into the country just to be with them.” His eyes had gone away somewhere, going over the thoughts of Andrei Eltsin that must have plagued him his whole life. His f
ather waved a weak hand toward the green screen. Tomorrow morning, the company would go public. Smiles was going to be here for it—he wasn’t going to let them put his dad on the screen if he was weak. Smiles was going to protect him to the end.
“The frustration was too much for him,” his dad said, unable to let Andrei Eltsin rest. “Alyce taking off, realizing the potential of his idea. He cracked, or perhaps the State Department found him again. That’s when he killed himself.”
Smiles nodded, and saw that his dad’s lips were dry and cracked. He passed him a cup of juice from his tray and watched his dad suck at the straw, looking older than Smiles had ever seen him.
“Love of family. That’s what I should have taken from him, not his ideas. Family is the most important, remember that.” His dad let the straw go and Smiles returned it to the tray. “When you leave,” his dad said, “will you call Mr. Hunt back here? It doesn’t matter how late he comes.”
“Sure, Dad,” Smiles said. He got up and went to the iPod, scrolling through the classical music choices and settling on something from Mozart, his dad’s favorite. By the time he looked up, his dad was asleep.
Smiles settled into the seat by the picture of his mom and listened to the whole album there. Every once in a while Shanti stopped at the door to make sure they were okay. When the music stopped playing his dad opened his eyes and found Smiles.
“Good night, Robert,” he said.
257
SMILES HAD FORGOTTEN about Melanie. But there she was in the softest chair the waiting area had to offer, her feet resting on the table with the magazines, her cheek puffed out on one side. It was her I’m-doing-some-thinking-about-life look.
He was going to have to do a lot of that himself. He knew that what he learned about his dad hadn’t really hit him yet. Still, the day had crashed over him violently. And maybe he was just dazed from the impact, but he felt a lightness as he walked over and nudged Melanie’s foot. After so much had gone wrong in the absolute worst possible way, anything else he had to face seemed rather small by comparison.
Right now, he had to face Melanie. They’d never really talked after his birthday night, and they needed to clear the air.
Melanie stirred herself upright. “How are you?” she said, then shook her head at the question. “Scratch that. Ignore me.”
“I’ll manage. You?”
She nodded too enthusiastically to be the truth.
Smiles was starving, and he thought for a second about asking her to the kabob place. She might misinterpret that, though, and the truth was that his heart was in a strange place—stolen by a girl who’d taken $7 million with it.
“My dad wants your dad to come back and see him. Like, tonight. It doesn’t matter how late, he said. Mind asking him for me?”
“Yeah, sure,” Melanie said as she stood. “Is he going to be okay for the IPO tomorrow?”
Smiles shrugged. “So listen,” he said, “probably not the greatest timing known to man, but could we talk about us for a second?”
“Yeah, uh, if that’s what you want.”
Shanti shuffled some papers at the desk, stuffing things in folders and wrapping up for the night. “Let’s walk,” Smiles said, and they waved good-bye to her on the way out.
They weren’t alone again until they got to the skywalk. Night had fallen while he was in with his dad, and the hospital campus was a landscape of grays through the skywalk windows. “So after that night, you know, my birthday. Things got crazy, but I wanted to talk to you. Because you’re really important to—”
“Hey, Smiles?” Melanie had stopped in the middle of the skywalk. “Would you mind if I said something first?”
“Uh, no—go ahead.” He returned to her, watched her stare out at a crane glowing with yellow lights.
“I can’t even imagine what you’ve been through, okay? I was dealing with some stuff this weekend, too, though.” Her eyes followed the sway of the crane. “And it’s just . . . I’ve always defined myself in relation to other people. I’m your girlfriend, you know? Or my dad’s daughter. Or somebody’s student. Even in my own head. It’s really stupid.”
“You’re not stupid, Mel. That’s the last thing you are.”
“Yeah, well, I guess it’s time for me to be me. Whatever that is.”
He saw, then, what she was trying to say.
“I get it,” he said. “I never really deserved you, Mel.”
She shook her head. “We just came to an end.”
“You know,” Smiles said, “you’re much better at these breakups the second time around.”
Her laugh soothed him.
“I think you’re going to like being Melanie Hunt,” he said.
“She’s okay?”
“She’s super cool,” Smiles said, and they walked together to the Infiniti.
Smiles got takeout from the kabob place, then let an action movie roll across his eyes just so he could stop thinking about everything for a minute. It didn’t really work—he turned it off before the all-female special ops force even made it into the North Korean nuclear power plant. He had camped out on his sofa, where he used to crash three or four times a week. But his favorite spot no longer felt like home.
The ghost of Erin whispered in his ear. He went out to the all-night drugstore, then spent a good hour using the cleaning products all around the place, vacuuming and scrubbing and washing the glass of his aquariums clear. After the carpet cleaner set into the rug for half an hour, Lake Jägermeister came up without a hitch. By the time he’d put the second load of laundry in downstairs, the place was spotless and bright, looking three times larger without his junk strewn across the floor.
He stowed the cleaning products under the kitchen sink. “There,” he said, not sure who he’d done it for, but proud all the same. He was going to have to leave this place soon, unless he found a job that paid the rent. And Erin wasn’t walking through that door, either. Did he want her to? Did he even know her? Nothing in his life was real except a clean carpet and a sudden urge to get back to his dad.
He grabbed his duffel bag from his newly organized closet and threw some overnight stuff inside. Smiles didn’t know how much more time he had left with his dad, and tomorrow was going to be a big day.
“The mathematics are usually considered as being the very antipodes of Poesy. Yet Mathesis and Poesy are of the closest kindred, for they are both works of the imagination.”
—Thomas Hill
TUESDAY
“Revenge is profitable.”
—Edward Gibbon,
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
263
“THEY JUST LEFT,” Shanti said.
It was after midnight now, but she was still at the hospital. Her purse still hung across her shoulder like it had hours ago, when she’d been getting ready to leave the first time. A team of businessmen had shown up on her way out, she said. They had come to see his dad.
“I didn’t feel right leaving him,” Shanti said. “Not tonight.”
“Thank you.” Smiles assumed that Mr. Hunt was one of the visitors, but didn’t know why he would have brought a whole team with him. “Any idea what it was about?”
Shanti yawned and shook her head.
“Well, I guess I didn’t feel right leaving, either. Okay if I spend the night in there?”
“Sure, honey. Blankets in that little closet.” She fished her keys out of her purse, gave him a hug, and flashed a sad smile on her way out.
Smiles walked the darkened hallway to his dad’s room, stopping for a moment at the open door. The beeping machines throughout the floor sounded like a twisted version of a summer night. Smiles cleaned off the whiteboard with his shirt, then wrote as perfectly as he could: Robert Smylie. He leaned against the doorjamb and looked on for a minute, his dad’s small body lying peacefully under the sheets.
&nbs
p; People do their best, his dad had said after he’d signed the document. They do their best and they make terrible mistakes. Smiles had thought he’d been talking about his mother, but he was talking about himself.
Smiles turned the Mozart album on low and found a paper-thin blanket in the small supply closet in his dad’s room. He sunk into the chair in the corner, stretching his legs out on the wobbly ottoman and pulling the blanket up to his shoulders. The light from the hallway glinted off the metal clasps on the video production boxes. Above them, he could just make out the dark architecture of the lights and monitors assembled for the big show.
The thought of his dad performing tomorrow—touting his company to the world, the one built on a lie—made Smiles uneasy. But something told him, as his eyes fell shut for the night, that his father would never get the chance.
They wheeled his body away at five o’clock in the morning, the nurses moving in a somber ballet about the room. Smiles woke just as an overnight nurse he didn’t know was taking his dad’s pulse, finding him gone. She gave him a moment at the bedside, and then the quiet rush of activity began—his dad being untethered from his hospital bed, calls being made, men in scrubs whisking the body downstairs until it was released to the funeral home, they said. At some point, Smiles signed a form that was thrust in front of him.
He wished Shanti had been there. He wished Erin had been there. He stayed in the room because no one asked him to leave, and because he could still feel his dad’s presence. Morning hadn’t broken yet. Smiles returned to the chair and pulled the blanket over himself. Looking around the room, it occurred to him that he would have to bring his dad’s things home with him—the picture of his mom and the iPod with all his favorite music on it. It was then that he noticed that the music had been shut off, and it was then that he began to cry.