“Here’s the story,” I say. “After our friends died, and you learned about Caroline, we needed to get away, so we came here. We found the stuff in the cabin. We met Dad and started asking questions. And he… well, he ran away from us, and we couldn’t stop him. When we caught up with him, it was over.”
“And the server?”
“We found it like that.” I feel so tired I can hardly speak. “He must have smashed it himself.”
Ellis is nodding. “I found my sister online, and I dragged you to Bolinas. And after I found out she was dead, because I’m an irresponsible drunkard, instead of informing my parents, I ran off to Shasta County with you.”
“They’ll never figure out he killed her, though.” The words feel alien in my mouth. “He did push her off that cliff, didn’t he?” He sent her a skull, too, but maybe triggering her didn’t work and he had to do the job the old-fashioned way.
“Probably.” Ellis stares straight ahead at the road. “But it’s not like it matters if we pin that on him, right? Not now.”
“Still,” I say, “Caroline deserves for people to know what really happened to her. She tried to warn me.”
Blink, and the I-5 spools out before us like a dappled gray river, yellow lines stretching to infinity. I close my eyes and see the lime-green light of the spot where my father rests in the Glare. Are the Randoms still there, or did they go with him?
When I turn on my phone, approaching San Rafael, things become real again—the reflective signs, the clouds, the gash on Ellis’s temple.
“We’ll have to explain that,” I say, but don’t hear the answer, because text after text from Erika is scrolling down my screen.
Please call and tell me you’re okay.
I mean it.
Then, from this morning: Please, please call.
Please answer.
Several hours later, around the time we left Dad’s property: Mireya’s here. Seems ok, but scared. Wants to see you.
The next text, from forty minutes ago, is the one that makes me sit up straight, nerves alight and stomach churning: This is Mireya. You need to come home and help me find yr dad. He made the Glare, and Rory figured it out. Some kind of signature in the code he sent me. Turning all phones off now.
So Mireya figured it out, too. When the cops find Dad on that clifftop, they’ll think they know exactly what happened—that he couldn’t run from his own guilt, however they choose to understand it.
But that’s not what matters now. Mireya needs to know she’s no longer in danger. “Ellis,” I say, “step on it.”
Our street looks the same. The sun is lowering, its late glow catching in the cottonwoods as they ripple in the bay breeze, leaves showing their silvery undersides.
Ellis pulls into our driveway, and I slide out before he can stop the car, the seat belt alert dinging. “Wait!” he yells.
I’m already pounding up the front steps, my breath catching with the sudden exertion after so many hours of forced immobility, because I know who’s in there.
My brother, who showed me how to ride the waves. Erika, who sat with me in the grass of the dark backyard. Two people who just lost a family member because of me and don’t know it yet.
And Mireya, who brought me to school with her, who shared the story of her own distant dad with me. If she hurts Clint or Erika, if she hurts herself, if anyone’s hurt—
The key turns, and I throw open the door to find Clint stretched on the living room rug, adding a piece to a Lego skyscraper.
He squirms when I try to hug him, relief bringing tears to my eyes, and says in a tense, adult voice, “They’re in there.”
I wish I could hold tight to him and tell him everything, because whenever and however he hears, this is going to rip his world in two. Sometimes it’s the absent parent who becomes the lodestar of your life, because you can imagine him however you want him to be.
From the kitchen, Erika’s strained voice calls, “Hedda?”
I have no weapon to meet Mireya if she comes at me the way she did last time. But she won’t, will she? The conditioning can’t last. With Ellis close behind me, I tiptoe from hardwood to dingy pink tile, bracing myself.
Erika and Mireya sit on opposite sides of the kitchen table with a pot of tea between them. Steam in the air reddens their cheeks.
Their eyes meet mine—Erika’s nervous, Mireya’s raw and red—and I know no one here is seeing Randoms. Not right now. Erika says, “Thank God you’re okay,” but in a flat voice, and she doesn’t get up.
Mireya says, “We’ve been waiting.”
“We need to talk. It’s all right.” I try to send her the full message with my eyes, reluctant to say it in front of Erika, because Ellis is right about no one believing us. No more skulls. “Erika, I—I was up in Shasta County. Dad was there. Something happened.”
Erika is staring at me. “Is it true, then?”
“What?”
“Your dad killed Rory,” Mireya blurts out. Her forehead is washed but not bandaged, covered with short dark gashes.
I expect Erika to protest, but she only says in a small, emotionless voice, “When your father was drunk once, he told me he’d written a piece of code that could make people see things that weren’t there. He said it was his greatest achievement, and he only got rid of it because he was afraid it had hurt you. He said it was the hardest decision of his life.” Her gaze moves from me to Mireya. “I didn’t take him seriously. I should have, shouldn’t I?”
“It’s over now,” I say.
The tension in Erika’s jaw shows me this isn’t over for her. She thinks Dad will come back to sit in this kitchen, maybe tonight, and she’ll have to decide whether to repeat everything Mireya said about the Glare or let it go.
She doesn’t know his grandfather and the Randoms have got him, unsafe and unsound.
“Hedda,” Ellis calls from the living room.
There’s too much to say, and shrinking time to say it in. “Erika, I—”
The doorbell rings, an abrasive chirp.
Erika jumps to her feet. She glances at Mireya as if expecting her to bar the way, but Mireya shrugs.
Erika goes to the door. “Oh!” I hear her say, startled. “We weren’t expecting you.”
And then a familiar voice, a voice that brings back ten years of patient hard work under desert skies, says, “I got Hedda’s letter.”
I sink onto the chair that Erika vacated, feeling the last ounce of resistance bleed out of me. “Mom, I’m in here.”
Mom comes with us to the police station. She sits beside me the whole time we talk with Detective Lu and two of her colleagues. Her eyes flash whenever she gets near a screen, but she doesn’t say anything.
It’s a bizarre story—so much death in it, so close together. We can’t explain the motive for Dad hurting Rory, so we don’t try, hoping that whatever is on his laptop will fill in some blanks.
Detective Lu asks Ellis and me the same questions, over and over. Her eyes remain wary, but right before she lets us go home, she makes a call to the sheriff of Shasta County and asks him to send two deputies to Dad’s property.
Ellis goes home to his parents, and we go back to the gabled house behind the cottonwoods. Mom is quieter than I’ve ever known her. She makes tea for Erika and heats leftovers. Right before dinner, the detective calls and speaks to Erika. We eat in silence while Clint plays a game in his room, and then Erika nearly chokes on a bite, her eyes full, and says, “I have to tell him,” and gets up and goes upstairs.
Which leaves Mom and me alone.
Here we are in the kitchen with the dingy pink tiles, where I tried to cut words on my arm to stop the Randoms from coming. In the beautiful home where she raised me until everything went wrong.
I face her across the table. Her black hair is down and combed, and she wears makeup and a turquoise sweater, something she’d never do on the ranch, and she looks younger. Softer.
I feel guilty now for thinking she created the Glare, but i
t’s true she tried to sever herself from parts of her life, just like Dad did. “You came because of my letter,” I say. “Because I told you I’m not afraid of the Glare anymore.”
It feels like ten years ago that I wrote that letter—so proud of myself for shaking off childhood fears.
Mom nods, and her jaw tightens, making her look more like the mom I know.
“You just left your sick friend?”
She shakes her head. “My friend’s estranged sister decided not to be estranged from her after all. They’re having a long visit.”
Everything about her expression says, And you do need me here, right? Look what happened. I told you so.
Normally that look would send bolts of hot rage through me, but I’m not capable of holding bolts of hot rage today. Every time I close my eyes, I see the canopy of trees below Dad’s resting place.
Still, there’s something I have to point out. “You didn’t even call. Why?”
“I knew what you’d say.”
“You didn’t want me to be prepared. You figured you’d just show up and drag me back to the ranch, and I’d be too freaked out to say no.”
Mom contemplates the tabletop, letting me win the stare-off. “Does it matter what I was planning when I left?”
She’s right. Things have changed, and I won’t have much choice about going back with her now.
With one eye on her, I pull out my phone and turn it on. (Don’t buzz. Please.) I draft a message to Ellis.
When I glance up again, Mom’s glaring with the force of a cyclone—nostrils flaring, leaning forward in her chair as if she hopes to wrest the phone from my hand by sheer brainpower.
But she doesn’t actually reach for it.
I switch the phone into airplane mode. I put the phone down.
And then I get up and fold her in my arms, shocked by how small and brittle she feels for the first time in my life. She stiffens for an instant, but then she wraps her own arms around me and holds tight.
So fierce. So determined to protect me, though she hasn’t known how to do that for a while.
“It’s okay, Mom,” I say, rubbing her shuddering back. “I’m okay. You don’t have to worry anymore.”
The goats seem to like Ellis. He rubs their foreheads and even lets two bored adolescent kids chase him around the barn.
“Careful,” I say, “or they’ll try to make you stay here forever.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t mind.”
“You’ve never been here when it’s a hundred and fifty degrees.” I load him down with a bucket of hen feed and draw a gallon of water. “Or alone all winter with nobody but a middle-aged technophobe for company.”
Both of us glance toward the house, where Mom is busy stirring gravy and mashing sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving dinner. When I told her Ellis would be driving out for a visit, she took it surprisingly well; she’s even been making civil conversation with him. But then, a teenage boy in the house could never be as disturbing to her as the unwelcome guest I brought back with me from California: my phone.
Once a day I turn it on to exchange e-mail with Ellis, Mireya, Clint, and Erika, and sometimes to talk with them. The rest of the time, I hide it in a rotating roster of places, just in case Mom gets ideas. So far, she hasn’t found it, or maybe she isn’t looking.
Maybe she’s started to accept that I, too, have a line to the outside world. And maybe she’s glad to know she was half-right: Something did reprogram my brain.
Someone.
“But you’re okay, right?” Ellis asks. “I mean, you don’t feel as alone as you used to?”
I remember what Dad warned me would be the result of smashing the server: no California, no college. I feel my jaw stiffen. “I can take it. Just not forever.”
“You’ll get into Cal next year. No worries.”
I will go to college, and it can’t come soon enough. With some of the money from Dad’s estate, I take community college courses in town twice a week now. They give me a chance to go online and to see other human faces, and each time I return to the ranch—on my own now, with my license and my own beater car—I don’t feel as much like I’m going to Siberia.
Outside the barn, November sunlight falls soft on our faces, reflected off the vast stretches of yellow- and red-brown. Ellis thinks it’s cool how barren it is out here—easy for him to say, having lived in Marin all his life.
I can’t pretend I don’t miss it.
The chickens cluck up a racket, milling around our calves, and I remember how I named them all: Agatha and Dorothea and Judy and Noreen. My friends.
“I’ll be back in the summer,” I say, showing Ellis where to pour the feed. “Erika says I can watch Clint while she’s working.” And you’ll be right next door.
Down by the creek, the cottonwoods have yellowed, and the dry air has a bite to it. Wedding Cake Mesa looms red on the horizon.
“I saw Erika just before I left,” Ellis says, watching the hens scramble for feed. “She said she’s thinking about selling the house and moving to a condo.”
Erika’s hinted as much to me, but the news still hits hard. I turn away, snapping the water bottle into its stand. “I love that house. But I know it’s expensive.”
Dad’s warning wasn’t just talk. With him gone—say it, dead—Erika is struggling with debts and property taxes and private school tuition. It doesn’t help that everyone thinks Dad shot himself because he stabbed Rory in the hatchback, and that he stabbed Rory because Rory found out Dad was giving away software on the Dark Web that contained code that belonged contractually to Sinnestauschen Labs, code that Caroline stole and passed to Dad for his own game.
At least, that’s how the cops and reporters understand it, and it’s the only story anyone’s likely to believe. As for what exactly happened on the Dark Web—well, it’s called the Dark Web for a reason.
I don’t want to think Dad planned Rory’s murder. I want to think he triggered Rory and stabbed him, as he claimed, in self-defense. But what difference does it make?
Sometimes, during the long desert nights, I have a waking dream in which a neighbor sees Dad get into Rory’s hatchback, and he’s arrested that same day. He never drives out to Bolinas to push Caroline off the cliff. He never drives to Shasta to move the server. We smash it, and he goes to jail and helps other inmates learn basic computer skills.
And every time I visit him, he reminds me I’m the one who brought the Glare back home. He tells me about his unbearable nightmares and the words “You’re pathetic” he can’t expel from his head.
“Hey.” Ellis touches my elbow. “You doing okay?”
“It’s just so weird having you here. Like you belong to a different part of my life, a different world.”
He picks up the empty feed bucket. “You’re coming back to California.”
“I hope so. It’s just, well—if I do come back, I don’t know if I’ll be ready.”
Ellis’s brows pull down. “Because of phones? Do you still get triggered?”
I shake my head too quickly. “I think that’s over. It’s just different out here. Want to go see if the table’s set?”
I don’t tell him what I’m thinking: that Dad never escaped the place he grew up or the fears that lived in him those summers in Grandpa Frank’s cabin. No amount of magical thinking could sever him from his past; no amount of code could rewrite it.
Emily, Rory, Anil, Mireya, me—we all had past “fails” we were ashamed of. We tried to click away from them, but the Glare brought them back. And hearing a phone buzz still sets something vibrating deep inside me like a residual organ.
We walk to the house, the sky striped the color of a bruise, and maybe Ellis can tell what I’m thinking about, because he takes my hand.
After all the leftovers have been stowed in the fridge and the dishes have been hand-washed, we take a walk up the ridge in the dark. I could find the way blindfolded, and Ellis insists he doesn’t need a flashlight if I don’t.
“Don’t
risk your neck just for fun,” I warn him.
“I can’t watch the game out here. I gotta entertain myself somehow.”
Way up, where there’s a view of the valley for miles, we spread out a blanket, then arrange three candles among the crags and light them. Rory, Anil, Caroline. Emily’s out of the hospital and getting better every day, just like Mireya and me.
The flames waver fluidly in the darkness, casting ghostly reflections against the glass holders, but they can’t drown the brilliance of the stars.
I hesitate a moment, then pull out Raggedy Ann and prop her up a safe distance from the candles. She has new eyes now, but I haven’t replaced her limbs, and I wonder sometimes where they are and who has them.
As Ellis stretches out on the blanket, and I lean against him—tentatively, because we haven’t really started touching again yet—his phone buzzes. I feel it against my hip.
Look at me, the phone says, like always. Look, look, look, look.
I hold my breath, not daring to turn and look at Ellis. My shoulders go rigid, my eyes scanning the crags around us and the ragged line between the mesa and the stars.
They are there. They must be. I always know when they’re there.
But I see nothing. I hear nothing.
“Hedda.” Ellis’s hands creep round my waist, pulling me back into the shelter of his body, like they did that night at the gas station. “It’s okay. Nothing’s there.”
Does he know how close I came to hurting him that night?
I try to relax into his arms. “I’m fine.”
If I reached under his jacket and grabbed his phone right now, if I activated the camera and peered through it into the darkness, what would I see?
The desert pitch-black feels different now, dense with unseen presences. The candles that honor the dead keep dipping and pulsing, and Ellis’s breath is warm on my neck.
He thinks the game’s over, but I know Dad’s out there somewhere, still playing. It was his choice, after all, to make it unwinnable.
The Glare Page 24