Before and Again

by Barbara Delinsky

  My periphery caught the flicker of headlights in the rearview. Heart pounding, I sank a little lower, watched, waited. The headlights passed, taillights receded. Only then did I dare take a breath.

  Setting the phone down, I gestured Chris into the passenger seat. As he wormed up from the back, he was a lanky tangle of arms, legs, and torso, but I figured that if he had gotten himself in there, he could get himself out.

  He did. Then he just sat, waiting to go.

  I cleared my throat. When he looked at me, I looked at his lap. We had been through this before. I didn’t care what his mother did, but this was my vehicle, and I didn’t take chances. When I had to drive, seat belts were non-negotiable.

  As soon as I heard the click, I checked the side-view mirror and returned to the road.

  We drove in silence, actually were of like minds in this, Chris and I. Whenever I drove him places—like the times Grace had been stuck at the Spa and he had a hockey game or a dentist appointment—we didn’t need noise. I didn’t like his music; he didn’t like mine. He didn’t like sharing personal thoughts; I didn’t like prying. Had Lily survived to fifteen, I would have wanted to know her music and, yes, would have pried if I felt she had something on her mind. But Chris wasn’t my child, which freed me of responsibility. I was maybe an aunt, maybe a friend, in either of which cases, we drove in peace.

  Tonight, though, peace was scant. Grace’s absence was nearly as disturbing as the specter of tomorrow’s arraignment. Chris had been released into her care at the court hearing, but his being alone now didn’t feel like care to me. It felt like abandonment in a time of need. The tension in him was palpable. He didn’t have much of a beard yet, but even if he had, I doubt it would have hidden the stiffness of his jaw, clearly visible despite the waning light. And then there was the jiggling of his leg.

  Signaling at the obelisk, I turned left on Cedar. Once on the straightaway again, I said, “Want to talk?”

  He didn’t reply, just stared at the houses we passed. After we crossed the Blue and the space between houses increased, he shifted his legs in the foot well. It was only seconds before the jiggling resumed.

  We were approaching the pretty yellow farmhouse, when, sounding brash, he said, “It isn’t hard, y’know. Anyone can do it.”

  Hacking, I thought. Here we go.

  “It’s about tricking a person into giving up personal information,” he said. His voice didn’t crack as much as before. Nor did he push it deeper. I wanted to think he trusted me enough to just be who he was, but I suspected defiance was at play. Whatever, he seemed more focused on content than style. “Once you have that, you’re in.”

  “But how do you get it?” I asked, treating it like a hypothetical discussion. We weren’t talking about a crime Christopher Emory was accused of committing, simply what hacking was about, and I was curious.

  We passed the farmhouse. Several weak lamps appeared in the windows, along with the vivid color of a flat-screen. For a split second, I wondered whether Devon was in the news again tonight, but the colors were quickly gone. As we drove on, the landscape was increasingly shadowed.

  “First, you make a mock-up of a Twitter log-in,” he said and snorted. “Takes maybe an hour to do that.”

  “Seriously? And it looks like the real thing?”

  “The URL is different, but just a little, so most people don’t notice. They’re annoyed, they’re in a rush, they see the little blue bird.” He retreated to the side window again.

  “Then what?”

  He chewed on the inside of his cheek for a minute, like he was suddenly not sure he should be telling me this. But I sensed he couldn’t hold it in anymore. Knee going up and down, up and down with the jiggle of his leg, he faced me again. “You write something that looks like an official message from Twitter. It could read, ‘Maggie Reid just asked to follow you. Log in to approve.’ You send it to the target.”

  “So you need either an email address or a phone number,” I said. Grace would have both for Ben Zwick. “But if a person has a public account”—which I was sure Ben did—“wouldn’t he question why he’s being asked to approve a follower?”

  “He’d think it’s just a security precaution. Or maybe he recognizes the name of the person who wants to follow him. You can get names like that in a few clicks.”

  I bet. High school classmates, work colleagues, relatives—Google had it all. Someone as ego-driven as Ben Zwick wouldn’t be able to ignore the lure of a long-lost friend or, even more, a professional rival who wanted to follow him.

  “So,” I said, “the target types in his log-in information. Then what?”

  His shoulder moved under the gray hoodie in a dismissive shrug. “The hacker has what he wants, and the target is redirected to the real site. That’s it. That’s how you hack.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Yuh.”

  “Is this, like, common knowledge?”

  He focused on the windshield.

  “Do all your friends know how to do it?”

  He frowned.

  “You do know it’s wrong.”

  That earned a defensive, “I didn’t say I did it.”

  “But just so we’re sure, Chris, you do know it’s wrong.”

  The guilty look on his face said he did. I left it at that.

  We approached the ski slope, which seemed ridiculously innocent compared to the thoughts in my truck. So late in the day, it was a shadowed mass of evergreen spikes and gloomy swaths, some wide and straight, others narrow and curving out around the sides. Cables ran up the center of the hill, chairs dangling in a mild breeze, but otherwise all was still. That should have been ominous, but I had skied here enough for memory to add a gaggle of brightly colored parkas.

  Chris Emory had taught me to ski. Oh, Grace would say it was her. And yes, she was the one who had made me do it. But after she got me outfitted and gave me brief instructions, she was skiing off, leaving bunny-land for steeper slopes.

  Chris stayed with me. He wasn’t the best skier—wasn’t terribly coordinated, which was why Grace insisted he play hockey, like it would make him an athlete, like the coaches could make him a man. He did need male role models. But he never excelled on the ice any more than he did on the slopes. I always suspected that he loved teaching me to ski simply because it gave him an excuse to stay easy and slow.

  The ski slope came and went. We drove on until I reached my turnoff, then the white post that marked Pepin Hill. I signaled, made the turn, and started up, all the while growing surer that this had been a confession. I should have been shocked, but was not. An odd part of me was proud that he excelled in this, at least. And to mess with the press? What he’d done to Ben Zwick was awful. But maybe, just maybe Ben deserved it.

  Who to tell? Absolutely no one. Unless Michael had bugged my car, Chris’s confession went nowhere.

  I was concerned about him, about Grace, about me. But I was also flattered that he had confided in me, regardless of what Michael Shanahan said. I had my reasons for hating the press. If Chris had done what he was being accused of, he had his. Sometime, somehow, they would come out.

  Right now, my caring gene said that Chris needed a breather. In that regard, my pets were a godsend. He stayed outside while Jonah bounded in and out of the woods, then came in and gave Hex and Jinx two lanky legs to wind around. I could hear their purring from the kitchen. The therapy they offered was priceless.

  “I want a pet,” Chris announced, bending over to scratch ears.

  I had taken pizza from the freezer and was tossing a salad. “Ask your Mom.”

  “Like I haven’t?” he returned, sounding annoyed. “She always says no. She says they tie you down. I keep telling her I’ll do the feeding and stuff, but it’s like she can’t handle anything more than me.”

  She could barely handle him, I thought and, when his eyes met mine, knew he agreed. He looked away without saying the words, and actually said nothing more of substance until he’d eaten three h
uge pieces of the pizza, a large helping of salad, and half a dozen Oreos. We were cleaning up, me at the sink, him handing over glasses and plates, when he said, “She doesn’t have many friends.”

  I put the last dish in the dishwasher. “She does.”

  “Not like close friends, only you.” He paused. “Maggie?”

  As I closed the dishwasher, I met his gaze and raised my brows in inquiry.

  “You always talk to me like I’m a grown-up. I need you to do that now, because I don’t know who else to ask. Since all this happened, she’s been gone—I mean, like, not physically, at least, no more than she always is—but she’s, like, in another world, and she’s biting her nails. She never did that before.”

  I hadn’t noticed. But then, I had barely seen her since all hell had broken loose. That said, it didn’t take a genius to figure out why. “She’s worried about you.”

  “Yeah, well, if that was it, wouldn’t she be the one telling me how bad hacking is? Wouldn’t she be the one asking questions?”

  “Maybe she’s afraid of the answers.”

  “I get that, but something’s off, like it’s not me that’s giving her the creeps. When she’s home, she sits there staring at the table or the floor or her phone, and she looks like she’s waiting for something.” He left the last word up in the air, like he was asking me to tell him what, but I didn’t have a clue.

  Feeling useless, I wiped my hands on the dish towel. Hot chocolate, said a little voice in my head. He needs hot chocolate. With whipped cream. We both do.

  Opening the cupboard, I removed cocoa powder, sugar, and vanilla. They were on the counter and I was reaching into the lower cabinet for a saucepan when he said, “What do you know about my dad?”

  Bent in half, I went still. I hadn’t seen that coming.

  I straightened holding the saucepan. “Your dad? Uh, nothing. Why?”

  “She doesn’t talk to you about him?”

  “Never.” I went to the fridge for milk. “You want to tell me?”

  He was leaning against the counter on the far side of the sink, shifting his long legs like he didn’t know how best to arrange them, but his face was suddenly all boy, all angry. “Like I know?” he blurted out. “I don’t know anything. She won’t talk about him. I mean, I get nothing. I’ve asked her a bazillion times, but she makes a face, like the … the”—he glanced at what I held—“the milk smells bad.” His knee went in and out, in and out. “Do I look like my mother? I’m talking hair, eyes, height—like DNA—and the answer is no. I look like him, but that’s all I know. I don’t know where he lives or what he does. I don’t even know his name.”

  At the stove now, I said, “Maybe she doesn’t know it herself,” because it seemed like the only way to defend Grace’s refusal to talk. I’d had a friend in college who got pregnant during spring break, ten shots, one night, no clue until weeks later. The only problem was that I knew better. His father was a liar, Grace had told me that first night.

  I couldn’t share that with Chris. I couldn’t let it be the only thing he knew about the man.

  And anyway, he was shaking his head. “She knows. She just won’t tell me. Like I’ll go try to find him? Why the fuck would I do that if the guy doesn’t want me?”

  “Chris.”

  “Birth certificate.” His voice cracked under the press of emotion. “His name would be there, right? Wrong. Mine says I was born in Chicago, but I’m not sure it’s true. Bogus birth certificates are easy to get. Were they ever married? Are they divorced?”

  I poured milk into the saucepan and added the other ingredients. The silence was charged. He was waiting for me to say something.

  I lit the gas and stirred, watching white blend to cocoa as it warmed. Then, looking up, I found his eyes. They were the same soft brown as Grace’s contacts. It struck me that she wore these more often than the blues or greens. I wondered if aligning with her son was why. “I don’t know the answers to your questions, Chris. I wish I did. I just don’t.”

  He stared at me for another minute, then dragged his hands up his face and through his curls. With a loud exhale, he deflated. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It’s only natural you’d wonder these things. At some point, Grace will give you answers.”

  “You think?”

  “I do. Your mother loves you.”

  “You think?” he repeated, still doubting.

  “I know,” I said, because it was the truth. From the start, I had always known this about Grace. She might not exhibit maternal love as I would have. But over and above her quirkiness, what had drawn me to her from the first was her concern for Chris. I had seen her leave the Spa mid-massage when word came that a puck had hit him in the face. “She’s just a private person. She has her own issues. We all have them.”

  “Not you.”

  “Yes, me. No one slides through life without bruises.” I searched for a positive way to say it. “My favorite app is CALM. Know why? Because I’m not. So when I see something there that resonates, I remember it. Like, Obstacles do not block the path, they are the path. It’s a Zen proverb—and no, don’t roll your eyes, I’m not into Zen anything, only this makes sense. There are always hurdles in life. Getting over them is how we move forward. It’s how we grow.”

  “Sure.”

  “Trust me on this.”

  “Oh, I do,” he said with a sarcasm that was all wrong in a fifteen-year-old whose curls made him look like he was five. “It’s my mother I don’t trust. I mean, she sits there and stares, so I guess she’s controlling herself, but then sometimes she gets this wild look in her eyes. It’s scary. I mean, is she angry at me? Angry at the world? I don’t have any fucking idea,” he said with a wild look of his own. “But I have to be in court tomorrow. What if the judge sees that look? What if he says she isn’t fit or something, and he puts me in a juvenile facility—”

  “He won’t—”

  “Or foster care.” His eyes widened, like he had an idea. I don’t think it was premeditated, just a sudden brainstorm on the heels of the discussion. “Come with us, Maggie.”

  “Uh, where?” I knew, of course, just needed time to formulate my answer.

  “To court. You’re her best friend. You’re always sensible. If anyone can keep her steady, you can.”

  He had no idea what he was asking. Even if I wanted to do it for his sake, I couldn’t handle the press, which might focus on my being the only near-kin they could find and make me their next story. I couldn’t risk that. It was everything I’d built a new life to avoid. I would lose it, literally and figuratively. And that was even before Shanahan had his say.

  Smiling sadly, I reached for mugs. “I can’t, Chris.”

  “Because you have to work?”

  “No.” Work would have been a lame excuse. Appointments could be shifted. “It isn’t about work. I just can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because—because it’s inappropriate. Jay is the only one who should be with you.”

  “Jay’s a lawyer. You’re our friend.”

  “I know.”

  “Isn’t this what friends do?”

  “Yes—”

  “If we ever, ever needed you, it’s now.”

  “Chris—”

  “I thought you liked me,” he said, sounding hurt.

  “I do—”

  “Then how can you not come?”

  * * *

  Later, I would think, KO’d by a fifteen-year-old. At the time, all I could think was that once he personalized it, I had lost. Chris Emory needed love. He needed attention. He needed to know that you didn’t have to pay for loyalty—like they were paying Jay—when friends were involved. This was a pivotal time in his life. He needed to know that someone who absolutely didn’t need to be there would be there for him.

  That said, I didn’t fully commit, just told him I would try. I topped his hot chocolate with a mountain of whipped cream, thinking that my mother would never have used canned whipped cream
but for all her whipping from scratch, she had deserted me when I’d needed her most. I couldn’t desert Chris. He wasn’t my child; I had only known him four years, had no more idea where he’d come from than he did. But what I did now seemed as pivotal to my life as hacking was to his.

  Then Grace came to pick him up, Chris immediately said I was coming, and the look of hope on her face clinched it. She needed that kind of friend.

  Maybe I did, too.

  * * *

  After they left, I sat in the living room in the warm and furry crowd of Hex, Jinx, and Jonah, and made mental lists.

  The DON’T GO list had three points. First was the past, as in memory of courtrooms, judges, and the media. Second was the present, as in adding me to the spotlight now focused on Grace and Chris and jeopardizing my anonymity in Devon. Third, and legally crucial for my future, was Michael Shanahan.

  The MUST GO side wasn’t as me-centric. It involved keeping Grace moored. And freeing Jay from the distraction of an unhinged client, so that he could focus on his job. And, yes, being there for Chris.

  But there was something else. It had to do with character. I tried to push it aside with arguments like, It’s not my responsibility, I’m too bruised myself, I can’t save the world. But I kept returning to it. My being in court to support my friends was the right thing to do.

  Character? Oh, yeah. Who did I want to be in this life? Was I willing to stand up for something I believed in? I did believe in Chris and, even, in Grace. Neither was malicious. And what they faced? We weren’t talking hurdles; we were talking roadblocks that could obstruct their entire future.

  Sitting there, even with seconds of hot chocolate, my problems with Edward seemed suddenly mild.

  * * *

  I barely slept. The first time I came awake, I breathed deeply—in for five, hold for three, out for five, repeat. The next time I woke up, I made sleep tea—one cup, then a second. I dozed again, woke up, used the bathroom.

  Barely sleeping wasn’t new for me, but this night wasn’t about Lily. It was about Michael Shanahan. If I went with the Emorys tomorrow and he found out, he might decide I had violated my probation and take me back to court, in which case I would be exposed. That, way more than prison, was my fear. I wanted to look at my probation agreement, just to check on what he could or could not do, but that meant opening the green velvet box under my bed to get it, and I couldn’t yet, couldn’t yet.