by Caron Todd
“Liz?”
“I should go home.” Taking care not to spill her milk, she put her mug on the table. Bella and Dora watched her stand, their dark eyes showing what seemed to be endless depths of worry.
Liz smiled shakily. “Look at them. Do they really know, or are they just mood rings?”
“They know.” Jack stood a comfortable distance away. “You don’t have to run off just because you’re upset. We’re better friends than that.”
“Maybe not if I told you everything.”
“About Andy? I think you need to tell somebody. You’re bursting.”
She wanted to stay. This wasn’t a confessional, though. It wasn’t a therapist’s office. The problem didn’t have a solution. There was no point. She sat down and Jack went back to the sofa. The dogs sat, too, still watching.
“Andy didn’t stand up for himself,” she began.
“When Wayne provoked him?”
“He just stood there, listening. Everybody knew not to listen to Wayne, especially at parties or dances when he was drinking, but Andy listened. As if he believed what he was hearing.”
Jack didn’t say anything.
“Do you see?” The picture was clear as could be in her mind. “He was standing at the top of the hill, looking into the gravel pit and he hesitated. He didn’t smile or laugh, he wasn’t playing. Maybe he saw how far away the water was, how shallow. Maybe he was thinking it wasn’t such a good idea. So they said, ‘He’s afraid.’ And he didn’t stand up for himself. So I said, ‘He’s not afraid.’”
“You mean he had to prove he wasn’t afraid.”
“For me.” Her voice was unsteady. “I wanted my outsider boy of a husband to prove himself. He didn’t have a choice.”
“Sure he did.”
“You don’t get it—”
“I get it.” Jack sat forward. “You were young and a little unsure of yourself and your judgment left something to be desired.”
“And he died.”
He didn’t absolve her. “That must be very hard to live with.”
Her eyes closed.
“Liz.” He spoke softly. She couldn’t believe how kind he sounded. “It would be nice if we never did anything wrong. No regrets, no mistakes. Unfortunately that isn’t possible. So, it would be nice if our mistakes never hurt anyone. But that isn’t possible either. Emotions were high that night. A series of bad judgments were made, by a lot of people. Including you and Wayne and Andy. My parents made a bad judgment years ago. They went out for groceries during a blizzard. The next week I spent my sixth birthday with my uncle, wondering where they were.”
“Jack—”
“Do you think I was never mad at them, or never found a way to blame myself? Bad things happen. The point isn’t to blame yourself to the end of days, the point is to find a way out of it.”
“I can’t see any way out of it. Grandma says I should let it go. Move on.”
Again Jack was silent.
“You don’t agree?”
“How can I? The only acceptable thing would be to undo what happened. Repair the mistake. I can’t undo it.”
“No, you can’t.”
He made it sound even more final than it already did in her own mind. “I don’t feel like part of the modern world, sometimes. People are always talking about forgiveness and healing. It’s so…” Her voice trailed off.
“Restful?”
“Trite.”
His eyebrows went up. “Well…that sounds very tough, but I don’t like where it leaves you.”
She almost smiled. “Me, neither.”
“Your grandmother told me what happened after the accident.”
“You mean that nobody cared?”
“That you left because you blamed the whole town.”
“I shouldn’t have. Except for Wayne. And what I did was worse.”
“Ah, you’re into the self-flagellation stage. If I hadn’t complained that there wasn’t any peanut butter…” Jack picked up the guitar and played a few bars of “Pathétique.” “When I first heard this on the radio—I was fifteen, I think—it blew me away. Even now it’s one of my favorite pieces. You know why?”
She shook her head.
“It reminds me that we’re capable of so much more than most of us ever bother to reach for. Do you find that? Some music makes you feel like a better person.”
“Or like you should be a better person.”
Jack stopped playing. “There’s an idea people used to have—I mean, a long time ago, 1500s—that we’re all on a ladder balanced between the animals and the angels. We yearn to reach higher, climb higher, but something always pulls us down.”
“You’re telling me to climb the ladder.”
“Don’t you want to?”
More than anything, she wanted to. Her throat felt too tight to say so. She nodded.
“Then let go of what’s pulling you down and climb.”
“It’s not that simple!”
“When you’re ready, it’s exactly that simple.”
“When you’re ready. That’s the hard part, then. Climbing up to Beethoven’s angels is easy. Being ready is hard.”
“They weren’t Beethoven’s angels—”
“It’s like one of Grandma’s cookbooks.”
Jack almost laughed. “What does cooking have to do with angels?”
“I don’t remember which book it is, I just remember Grandma reading this part to me, years ago. You know how the recipe for rabbit stew starts? First catch your rabbit.”
They both smiled.
“Liz, you’ve built your life in a certain way and all of a sudden it doesn’t fit. You need to build something else.”
“So that’s it? That’s how I climb. I just say, The End.”
“And then you turn the page.”
Closing the book on Andy.
LIZ PULLED A CARDIGAN OVER the turtleneck she already wore and moved her worktable and chair away from the cold zone around the window. It had been an unsettling afternoon. She could hardly wait to open her sketchbook and start drawing.
Her mind was so full, images seemed to run from it to her hand and out the pencil. The woodland fairies first. She decided to give Jack the battle he wanted. A gargoyleish Wayne Cooper appeared in front of him and without wasting a second, Jack’s character ran him through with a very sharp stick. Right away, she felt guilty. The least she could do was handle Wayne herself. She erased Jack’s weapon, then sketched her character swooping down from a nearby tree on a drooping branch, stick-sword poised to pierce through Wayne’s nonexistent heart. Take that, you beast of the mud burrows! Liz smiled at the satisfying, cartoonish thought, then quickly drew a healing fairy to patch him up.
Next, Andy’s mallard appeared, uninjured and floating in the creek, then flying. In the middle of some woods, a deer, and behind it, the cabin with ants in the logs and mice in the corner and the tree growing from the roof. Finally, Andy. Even though she had the photograph now, she couldn’t get him right. She was drawing the memory of a memory.
She retrieved the photo from the bedside table and brought it over to the light so she could compare it to her sketch. Andy, standing in front of his house in town. Tall, but gangly, his chest and shoulders not yet filled out. Hair longer than the grown-ups liked, and so blond you’d think he was always in the sun. The corners of his mouth were just beginning to curve. She’d clicked too soon.
She remembered the day, she took the picture. It was a hot, still afternoon near the end of July. Later, hail as big as crab apples had fallen, breaking windows and wiping out the north wheat field. She and her mother had stopped by Andy’s place with an ice cream pail full of fresh-picked strawberries, as a welcome. It was just after he and his parents and his little sister had moved to Three Creeks. Someone had broken into their house in the city, and even though they hadn’t been aware of other straws, that was the last one. They wanted to live in a place where they would know their neighbors, where people still smiled whe
n they saw each other and said hello.
She’d never met anyone like him. He’d been to art show openings in Winnipeg’s warehouse district, where she wasn’t allowed to go without an adult. With some friends, he’d gone on a road trip to Toronto to see six Van Gogh paintings…all that way to see six paintings. He’d never played baseball or hockey in his life and didn’t care if anyone found that strange. He wanted to be a wildlife artist. When she’d heard that she’d invited him home to see her drawings. He’d leafed through the sketches of family horses and dogs, and then he’d asked where she planned to study.
“Study drawing, you mean?”
“Yeah. I’m going to the Emily Carr school in Vancouver.”
Liz didn’t have any idea what she wanted to do after high school. Susannah planned to be a paleontologist—she’d settled on that when she was ten. Pam was going to be an elementary schoolteacher, so she wouldn’t have to move away when it was time to get a job. Emily vacillated between the two options. Liz liked baseball and swimming, so when people asked she always said she was going to be a gym teacher, and they always said it was a good choice. “Can you make money drawing?”
“Probably not.” Andy had grinned, as if making money was the last thing that mattered. Later, curled up on her bed with a polite distance and her stack of drawings between them, he had suggested they could go to Vancouver together after graduation in June. Find an apartment with a view of the ocean—get as many roommates as they needed to afford the rent—and buy fresh fish at Granville Market every day. They could watch ships come in from all over the world. Maybe they’d even see whales. Everything about him had surprised her. Falling for him was easy.
She wouldn’t ever say it out loud, not to anyone, but sometimes she wondered if it would have lasted. They’d known each other for less than a year. They never would have come to dislike each other, but they might have grown apart as they grew up. How would they have handled it? Not with anger and recriminations, she was sure of that. She could see Andy studying the problem with that frown he’d always got in physics class and saying something casual like, “Think we should forget about it, Liz?” He’d have some story to tell her, something about an artist who’d wandered the world in search of life, but who never stopped loving the woman he’d left behind.
Was she wrong to hold people responsible for what happened? That day on the swing, when they’d all crowded on, she had been calling for even more kids to join them when the adults had intervened. If the branch or the rope had broken, if someone had been hurt, would she have been blamed? When you knew what you were doing was risky, were the consequences still an accident? The two incidents weren’t the same, though. There was no hostility on the swing.
She couldn’t sit, she couldn’t keep still. Liz paced to the window. How could you turn the page if you were at the end of the book? If you turned the page at the end of the book you didn’t get more story, you got an index or the author’s acknowledgments or advertisements for books to come.
There was a poem—she couldn’t remember the title—that told the story of the Norse Gods. They’d all died after a shattering final battle, and the world died with them. The very end of the poem was unexpected. After reams of death and defeat, the earth reemerged, all fresh and sunlit green. It had been such a relief to read that.
Liz didn’t know how long she stood at the window remembering Andy, letting each day they’d spent together sift through her mind. It was the middle of the night when she brought lamps and tables from the other upstairs bedrooms and began sketching, her hand moving so fast she kept dropping the pencil.
At the end of the week she spread the finished paintings across the bedroom floor. Twenty in all, on watercolor paper, eleven inches by seventeen. Each held more detail than she’d ever managed to record before, a close-up of some aspect of woodlands life. The leafy canopy of poplar, maple, elm and oak with variations of shape and shade, full of the life it sustains. The forest floor, with layered grasses hiding rodent holes. A funnel spiderweb, glistening after rain. In each painting, a boy stood or sat or crouched, watching, or drawing what he saw.
She could almost feel Andy beside her, focused, interested, telling her how much her technique had improved. His drawing from the school library would be the cover, and the text would be his, too, as much as she could remember of his eager spilling of nature facts. “Did you know prairie dogs keep separate rooms down there, Liz? It’s like an underground house. Nurseries, pantries, bathrooms. They’re very clean, very social…”
The paintings blurred. It was the best she could do. All she could do.
She went to her worktable. Flipping past drawings of her grandmother and Tom and Jack and the view outside, she found a blank page and tore it from her sketchbook. She pressed the top of the paper down toward the middle, and the bottom up to meet it, then folded in the sides. After one last look at Andy’s photo, she tucked it into the makeshift envelope and placed it at the bottom of her overnight bag.
CHAPTER TWELVE
AT LAST, THINGS WERE LOOKING UP. That morning, two weeks to the day after it hit, the virus deleted itself. No explanation, no goodbyes. The cracker program was zipping along, breaking each password in seconds. Baseball. Summer. Home Run. You’re Out. It was pathetic. Jack was using stream of consciousness passwords, backed up by a time-limited, and therefore toothless, virus.
Despite their intriguing names, like myprogram.doc and secure.exe, most of the files Reid had managed to open so far were empty. Others contained pages of elementary computer code. It looked as if Jack had just pasted in old school assignments. Maybe he had. Along with the couple hundred easy passwords and the short-lived virus, it might have been protection enough from some people.
Reid, on the other hand, was determined to see this through. If there was a valuable file guarded by a real password somewhere on this crowded diskette, he would find it. And when he opened that file, Croker would have to swallow all the things he’d never quite said over the past two weeks. That would almost be reward enough. Almost. He’d also like to hear an admission that it didn’t matter one bit whether or not he’d known about Jack’s Winnipeg apartment. A dust mite by dust mite search hadn’t turned up a thing.
Reid leaned in to look at the monitor more closely. After ripping along through about a hundred and fifty passwords, the cracker program had slowed down. The password on a file called xn.210.exe was offering a challenge. He waited, trying to talk himself out of the anticipation he was starting to feel.
It took nearly an hour, but the password fell. This one was a little different: 319-B-mnr. Jack’s address on Munroe Avenue growing up, with the vowels removed and the underscore symbol thrown in. It was stronger than most of the passwords Jack had chosen. Even more interesting were the numerals and letters on the screen when Reid opened the file.
The human radar lurking in the next room appeared in the doorway. “Got something?”
Reid kept his tone noncommittal. “Something.”
Croker strode to the desk and stared at the unreadable text. “It’s encrypted? Run the program. Break it.”
Reid worked to avoid any trace of sarcasm. “Decrypt the algorithm with the password cracking software?”
“How do you handle it then?”
Reid took a few seconds to enjoy Croker’s uncertainty. “We brute-force it, with a different program. You get the idea? We basically take a battering ram to the code.” An idea struck him, and he laughed quietly.
“What now?”
“I’m just wondering if I’ve underestimated Jack.”
“And that’s funny?”
Reid laughed again. “The virus was frustrating, but other than that he applied virtually no security. What if everything we’ve seen so far is window dressing? What if he didn’t need an effective password because he used his algorithm to encrypt his algorithm?”
Croker swore. It was under his breath, but it was still an unusual display of emotion, and Reid enjoyed it.
“Use an unbreakable code to encrypt an unbreakable code,” Reid continued. “Why didn’t we think of that possibility? We’ll never get it, if that’s what he’s done. Well, not until we run it through a supercomputer for a thousand years. You understand, that’s an optimistic estimation.”
Croker shook his head emphatically. “He wouldn’t have done that. He needs to be able to access the code, too. If he recorded the key, what’s to stop us from finding it? If he didn’t record it, he couldn’t be sure of remembering it. Unless there’s something you’re not telling me, like he’s got a photographic memory.”
“He’s got a lousy memory.”
“Then quit wasting time.” Croker paced away. His voice was still quiet, but something in it made Reid take notice. He wasn’t sure when he’d begun to realize he wasn’t in charge of the operation, although he was the one who had approached Croker. At first they’d let him think he was calling the shots. It was a bit embarrassing to discover his ego was that strokable. Gradually, it had dawned on him that he wasn’t even an equal partner. He was there because he knew Jack and he knew codes. He’d decided from the beginning not to think about who these people were, but they sure as hell weren’t a charitable foundation. What would his status be once he’d given them what they wanted?
Croker must have been counting to ten. Now he said, “Have you started running the appropriate program?”
It was obvious he hadn’t. “I’m thinking. It’s an added tool we security experts sometimes use.” Reid leaned away from the monitor, studying the contents of xn.210.exe, trying to see the collection of figures as a whole. It wasn’t as random as it had looked at first. There was a pattern. “Huh.” It was a short, disbelieving sound that brought Croker to heel.
“What is it?”
Reid didn’t answer. He activated his code breaking program and entertained himself by watching the tic beside Croker’s eye while they waited for the result. It came much faster than he expected.