Saving Hannah

by J P Barnaby

  “Good morning,” Wes said as he came in. His curly blond hair was cut close in a contemporary corporate style, and the indigo-colored management polo made his blue eyes more vivid. Wes perched his lanky self in one of the visitor’s chairs and waited.

  Aleks didn’t say anything right away. He simply looked at the screen again. Wes waited. They’d worked together long enough for him to know that Aleks would get around to it in time. Sometimes he needed to center himself. It had turned into one of those times.

  After a long moment, Aleks laced his fingers behind his head and spun the chair to face Wes.

  “What do you see when you look at that?” he asked and nodded toward the center screen of his seven-screen console.

  Wes stood up and moved close to the monitors. He studied the picture for a moment and scanned the text. “I see a desperate man,” he said finally and moved back to the visitor’s chair. “A good man trying to help his little girl. I can’t imagine it’s easy to beg for the kindness of strangers to keep your kid alive.”

  “Makes you want to help him, doesn’t it?” Aleks stopped himself from printing the picture just to hold it.

  “From a marketing standpoint, seeing him interact with his daughter would increase his personability. They also need some kind of website, either a HelpMe or some other kind of crowdfunding site, maybe with video,” he said, studying the screen again.

  “That’s not what I asked you. Would you want to help him?”

  “Would I want to? Sure. Would I? I don’t know. There are hundreds of down-and-out stories right here in Atlanta. I can’t contribute to them all.” Wes studied Aleks’s face. “I have my charities that I donate to regularly; so do you. What’s special about this guy?”

  “Put through a charity funding requisition. Make it ten thousand dollars,” Aleks said, more brusquely than he intended.

  “This guy isn’t a 501(c), Aleks. It can’t be a charity request.”

  “It can’t be in my name,” Aleks muttered as he scanned the tops of the buildings outside. He spent a lot of time finding answers through the corner windows of this office. Even after the remodel, he could still feel his father here.

  “Do you know this guy?”

  Aleks nodded, and his gaze landed on a church. He watched the building, marveling once again at the painstakingly intricate architecture. No one appreciated that kind of craftsmanship in America. “He was my college roommate at Georgia Tech.”

  “Your lives seem to have taken different paths.”

  “Do you remember that Jonesboro thing that happened a few years ago?”

  “The one where one of their own employees hacked them and threatened to release the data?”

  “He hacked them to show their data wasn’t safe, not to release it,” Aleks corrected. “Well, you’re looking at that guy.”

  “No wonder he’s broke. He went to prison for that, right?”

  “Yeah, says he got five years.” Aleks checked one of the googled stories.

  “Did he get pregnant in prison?”

  Aleks looked at Wes sharply and then relaxed. He didn’t want to think about what might have happened to Thomas in prison. “I don’t know the story behind the kid. He’s probably married and had the kid before he went in.” The pang in his stomach at that thought surprised Aleks. Damn it. He was supposed to have buried that years ago, after Thomas walked out.

  “Why can’t the donation be in your name? Something happened between you.”

  “A kiss that seems like a lifetime ago.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a reason to withhold money this man needs, especially if you were friends once.”

  “I know. Seeing that news story this morning just hit me weird. What’s on the agenda for today?” He didn’t want to talk about Thomas anymore. He’d decide what to do later. Even if Thomas had left without a word, he still needed help. His little girl needed help.

  Wes pulled out a small tablet and tapped the screen a few times. “Well, you have a board meeting in half an hour. That should be fun. Then, later this afternoon, a meeting about the Salzar Tech buyout. They want to discuss their CRM software.”

  “We told them we were going to integrate it. What’s there to talk about?”

  “Sounds like they’re panicking about the merger. They just need a reassurance.”

  “I’m not a day care.”

  Wes raised a well-manicured eyebrow at him.

  “Sorry.”

  “Want an espresso before your meeting? I can run downstairs and grab you one.” He tucked the tablet under his arm.

  “No, board meetings make me jittery anyway. I don’t need caffeine on top of that.” Aleks held up a hand, waving him off.

  “Things still tense?”

  “They’re second-guessing their decision to put me in the CEO position now that my father is gone.”

  “You didn’t give them much of an option,” Wes said with a smile.

  “I own controlling interest in the company. They piss me off and I sell, investors panic, their stock price is through the toilet, and my father’s company is ruined. They think I hated my father and I’m a brat who would do it just for spite.” Aleks sighed and looked out the window for a long moment. Even with the pending board meeting, he still couldn’t get Thomas’s face out of his mind.

  “What are you going to do?” Wes leaned over the keyboard and sent himself a link to the article.

  “I don’t know yet. Cashier’s check via courier would probably do it,” Aleks said, not looking away from the window.

  “I meant the board meeting.”

  “Oh, nothing. They can’t oust me without sufficient cause, which I haven’t given them. Things will get less awkward when they figure out I’m not just some kid from the programming pool. I do happen to have an MBA.” Aleks turned back to the computer and clicked the windows closed.

  “Leave your card, and I’ll get the money to the little girl,” Wes said, grabbing his tablet from the desk.

  Aleks nodded once, and Wes headed for the door. He watched as the young man left the office for his own cubicle outside. He was grateful for the board’s insistence that he hire a personal assistant. He’d resisted. It felt extravagant, something rich people did because they had more money than sense. In the end, however, he had to agree that Wes had become a game-changer for him. After taking on the CEO position, Aleks had a schedule that never stopped. He liked it because he couldn’t pencil in being lonely or fit time to feel sorry for himself. He simply worked.

  It must be horrible for Thomas, having nothing but time.

  A box popped up on his screen, reminding him of the board meeting. He almost contained the sigh, but in the end it slipped out in a huff. The company was all he had left of his father’s legacy. He had the money, of course, but cold cash didn’t remind him of home. It didn’t remind him of his mother. Aleks had let the lease on the apartment go; his father hadn’t owned a house. Hadn’t wanted one. He’d always had a restlessness about him, the same one that had brought them to America after Aleks’s mother died. The moment he’d become alone in the world, an accessory to his jet-setting father.

  Aleks picked up his tablet and electronic pen and headed for the door. Wes would take detailed notes, but he always took his own as well, a habit he’d picked up as a programmer. Everyone sees the final product differently in their heads, so capturing detailed requirements became essential.

  He waved to the receptionist, Gina, as he passed. She waved back as she talked on her headset. Aleks had spent a year coding the engine of a BI system with a team led by Gina’s husband. They were nice people, good people. Most of his company were good people. He didn’t know all of them, not anymore, but they worked together like a well-oiled machine, first for his father, and now for him.

  David Lowenstein sat near the head of the table, speaking with Mark Stanza, when he entered. David had been with his father since God was a boy, but Stanza came on the year before as VP of operations to replace Don Billings. B
illings had retired amid allegations of sexual harassment levied by one of his assistants. Personally, Aleks believed the assistant, but to head off any potential problem for the company, they offered Billings a way out and a severance package to rival the national debt. The assistant was currently finishing her MBA at Georgia Tech, courtesy of the company. Everyone was happy.

  “Good morning, Aleksander,” David said with a smile like that of a caring uncle. Aleks could remember David being in their lives since they moved to the US twenty years before.

  “Aleks,” Stanza said, inclining his head. Aleks couldn’t get a good read on the man. During meetings, Stanza didn’t speak much. When he did, they were quiet, calculated words. He never got angry or shouted anyone down; his emotional IQ seemed limitless.

  Aleks took his place at the head of the table and pulled up OneNote on his tablet. He knew he had a few minutes because few executives showed up to board meetings on time. Since he’d started at Polytech, he’d noticed that the higher up the food chain you went, the later people were for meetings. Apparently they felt their time was more important and everyone else could wait. Another reason Aleks always tried to be on time. Everyone’s time was valuable.

  They trickled in one after another, talking in small clusters. Aleks noticed clusters in turn sneaking peeks at him as they spoke in hushed voices. The memory of his father’s funeral smacked him hard. People standing around in small groups, whispering behind their hands, watching him when they thought he wasn’t looking. It creeped him out that they were doing it now.

  “Okay, let’s get started,” Aleks said as Wes slipped into the conference room, placed the hot tea he’d gotten from downstairs next to Aleks, and took his place. He attached the folding keyboard to his tablet and waited. Aleks tipped the cup to him in thanks. Then he tapped the agenda on his screen and brought it up.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw David shift in the seat to his right, and then Sarah Barnett just down the table did the same. Cindy Marsh didn’t meet his gaze but stared quietly at her own tablet as if trying to memorize the agenda.

  “First item—”

  “Aleks, there’s something we need to discuss first.” Stanza cut him off and glanced at David, and his look overflowed with meaning.

  “Aleksander, the board is concerned,” David said, and Aleks cut him off. There would probably be a lot of abrupt sentence ending in the meeting.

  “The board is concerned about having a code monkey at its helm. I get that. But my father had been grooming me for this position since I was about ten. That’s the only thing he wanted from me, to take over the company when he retired. It didn’t happen that way, but I’m here nonetheless. I am the majority stockholder, as my father was, and I’m not going to trust this job to anyone else.”

  Stanza sat forward in his chair. “Aleks, let me be blunt. Your father died under terrible circumstances—”

  “Yes, I imagine being shot in the back of the head was pretty terrible,” Aleks deadpanned, and his colleagues fell into a shocked silence. Even Wes stared at him for a long moment.

  “Well, yes, but this company can’t afford another scandal. Stock prices are fluctuating daily. We need to get this company on stable ground. We’re not suggesting that you leave, simply that you let someone with the experience to do so lead us into the next phase of growth.” Stanza glanced around the table. Aleks did the same. Some of the board members were nodding; others were staring steadfast at the table.

  “What scandal do you think is going to happen, Mark?”

  “Aleks….” Aleks saw him struggle for words for the first time since he’d started with the company. Then he sighed. “Aleks, people don’t just get shot execution-style in the back of the head.”

  “So you think my father brought it on himself?” Aleks asked quietly, trying to rein in his anger.

  “We think we’re having a hard time justifying handing the company over to someone with so little business experience,” Sarah said, her gaze focused on him rather than her tablet for the first time in the meeting.

  “If your father was into something that contributed to his death and it comes to light, people are going to wonder if you were involved too,” Stanza added.

  “He was mugged,” Aleks said quietly. “They took everything.”

  “We don’t need to get into the specifics,” David said quickly. “The point was to express our concerns, and we have. It seems Aleks has made his decision too. Let’s move on.”

  After a long look between David and Stanza, they turned to the new acquisition of Salzar Tech.

  “THAT WAS brutal,” Wes murmured as he closed Aleks’s office door behind them ninety minutes later.

  “Thanks for the tea.” Aleks moved over to stand in front of the window. Wes took a seat in the chair across from his desk and waited.

  “Wes, do you believe in fate?” Aleks asked Wes’s reflection in the glass.

  “I don’t know. I never really thought about it.”

  Aleks turned away from the window. “Did you send that cashier’s check?”

  “No, I have it, but I didn’t get a chance to mail it before the meeting.”

  “Hold on to it,” Aleks said as a small smile played at the corner of his lips. “I have an idea.”

  γ͵

  THOMAS STOOD at the sink, drying the last of the breakfast dishes while his mother finished putting together her lunch. Hannah stayed upstairs in bed. It had been a long night for her, and no one wanted to watch her go through another round of throwing up. Charlotte dropped into a chair, all of her strength seeming to forsake her at that moment.

  “We need to start packing things up. We’ve got a month, maybe less, before they auction off the house.” The dark circles under her eyes brought their situation into sharp focus. He’d relied on his mother to care for Hannah during his time in prison, and it had taken years off her life. The long hours of working to care for an infant as a single mother when she should have been retired, coupled with the leukemia battle, was more than anyone should have to endure.

  “It won’t come to that.” Thomas’s voice sounded braver than he felt. He knew they had no other options, but it tore his insides out that someone wanted to take his childhood home away from them.

  “Of course it will, Thomas. Don’t be stupid. No one will help us out, and we don’t have anything worth selling to make up the back payments. They’re going to take the house. We have to be prepared when they do.” She stood up and slipped into a pair of flats. “You’ve done a good job keeping the house up and stuff while I been working. Now I need you to start packing. Can you do that?”

  Thomas sagged against the side of the sink. “I don’t know what else to do. I’ve applied for everything from computers to ditchdigging.”

  “I know, son. Life ain’t fair. If it was, your daddy….” She trailed off.

  “I know, Mama.”

  “We’ve got no choice but to keep moving forward. See if you can find us a two-bedroom over in Villa Rica. At least I’ll be closer to work there.” She tried to smile, but the expression simply came off as pained. Then she picked up the brown paper lunch bag from the counter and disappeared through the back door.

  Thomas put his watered-down coffee on the table and sat down as the old car started up in the drive. The mug warmed his hands. Despite the morning heat, everything had turned cold in the wake of those papers. The most recent defeat in a war they were losing. He glanced around the kitchen, memories flooding him with every tiny detail: the apple clock on the wall he’d made for his mother in high school, the hutch his father built the year before his mom had finally left him. He noticed the absence of plants, the ones that had died because she was working and caring for a sick child. One day he’d build her the biggest garden the world had ever seen.

  One day, after he figured out how to get them all out of this mess.

  Hannah peeked around the corner from the stairs then, sleep clouding her tiny eyes.

  “Daddy, if I weren�
��t sick, would we still have to move away?” Her voice seemed so small and so far away that Thomas couldn’t help but take those ten steps over to sweep her up. He’d missed the early years of her life, but she’d accepted him without question when he got out.

  “Honey, we don’t know what would happen if things in life were different. They aren’t different, so right now we just have to do the best we can as things come along.”

  “What if Mommy hadn’t died?”

  Thomas carried Hannah into the living room and cradled her in his arms as he tucked himself into the corner of their worn couch. Memories stared, accusing him from every corner. Their current predicament rested entirely on his shoulders. He was the one who’d fucked up, not Sherry, and certainly not Hannah. He just couldn’t stand seeing the disappointment in his daughter’s eyes if he told her. His mother was right. His little girl didn’t need to know anything about prison. Daddy had been away—they’d left it at that.

  “Your mama was a beautiful woman, almost as pretty as you are. And she loved you more than anything on earth.” He’d told her this a million times in her young life, but she never tired of hearing about her mother.

  “Did she like flowers?”

  “I think she did. I brought them to her a few times, and she liked them.”

  “Because you’d done something wrong?”

  Thomas laughed. “Sometimes.”

  “Did she like alligators?” The tattered plush, a prize won from a cheap pizza crane game, danced on the air as she held it aloft. Its tail had worn through and was dangerously close to coming off. Mama had sewn it more times than he could count.

  “I think she’d have liked the stuffed kind.” He booped her nose with Lizzy’s little snout.

  “Do you think she would have liked me?”

  “Oh, darlin’, she loved you more than anything in the world,” he said again. He wanted to tell her that Sherry was looking out for them. But it seemed cruel to make Hannah think that her mother sucked at being a guardian angel.