Chapter 11
The bus pulled into the Portland station a little after nine in the evening.
The passengers filed off, heads lowered, not speaking.
I stood outside and felt lost. I still had the address Beth had given me, two days—three years—ago.
There was no guarantee Amy and Lyle still lived there.
It was the only lead I had, and the only thing left to me.
Like I’d told Beth, there was nothing else.
My existence had gone from boring, secure normalcy to madness in a few subjective days.
I pulled out my wallet and counted my money.
There wasn’t much left, but I hoped it was enough.
I asked a woman if I could borrow her phone and stood there with her watching me closely as I looked up the cheapest rideshare or taxi service I could find that would also still take cash—most would not.
I had a small bit of luck, finally: the house was close to the Greyhound station.
The website for a taxicab service that accepted cash gave me an estimate.
I would have just enough for the ride. Hopefully.
I booked the cab and gave the woman her phone back. I received a tired smile in return.
The car showed up twenty minutes later. I read the address to the driver from the note on Beth’s kitchen stationery that read “God is Love.” I watched the world go by in the stained back seat until the driver pulled to a stop.
After I stepped out and paid, I still had three crinkled dollars left to stuff back into my wallet.
Three dollars. My life savings. Not much for retirement.
The taxi peeled away, leaving me on the sidewalk in a suburban neighborhood that could have been plucked from any major city in the US.
The house before me was a tiny brick affair, with a tidy lawn and a small garden gone brown in the winter weather.
In the orange glow from the nearby streetlights and the white from the LED light blazing above the reddish front door, the house resembled something out of a fairy tale. Almost.
The lights inside were on. The blinds were drawn. The mailbox had a number. No name.
I swallowed and ignored the distant rumble of my stomach. I straightened my back, tried not to worry about how I must smell, and walked along the narrow path to the front door. Up the steps and onto a small deck that was little more than concrete covered with faded Astroturf.
I saw my hand rising up and knocking, as if from a great distance—as though I was someone else watching. There was a pause. It lengthened. I pressed the doorbell. The curtains in the eye-height window in the door swished. I glimpsed a face. The lock rattled, and the door swung open.
An adolescent boy stood before me. He was tall and thin, with the long-limbed awkwardness of youth. His hair was brown and cut short, but still messy, as if combing his hair was the last thing in the world he’d bother doing. He stared at me, from almost my height, through a pair of thick glasses.
“Lyle?” It was a croak.
His lips parted. Then he stepped forward and threw his arms around me, almost knocking me back down the steps. “I knew you’d come back,” he said into my chest. “I knew it.”
I clutched at my son’s strong, thin shoulders. Tears flowed down my cheeks. “Of course I did, bud. I promised I would. I’m just sorry it took this long.”
We stood holding each other, me smoothing down his mussed hair and whispering comforting, meaningless things, while he hugged me tight.
He stepped back and adjusted his glasses.
Then he grew up in front of me. “We can’t let Mom see you.
” He looked down at his wrist. A complicated smartwatch wrapped around his thin arm.
“She’ll be back from her class in an hour or so. ”
“Class?” It wasn’t relevant but I couldn’t help myself.
“She’s working on her master’s. Night school.” He gestured inside. “Come on. Dad.” The last word came out an afterthought, rolling unnaturally off his tongue. It hung between us.
“Thank you, Lyle.”
He shut the door behind me and led me through the cozy house.
It felt warm and inviting, the walls lined with clever sayings printed on fancy paper and framed.
It smelled like Amy, the same mixture of her favorite coffees and foods and cleaning agents.
It smelled like home. It was dizzying. Disorienting.
“I’m going to hide you in the basement,” Lyle said. “I’ve been prepping it.”
“Prepping?”
“For you. For when you got here.”
The words sent a shock through me. He’d been waiting for me. He’d been waiting for me, holding on to my promise I’d return.
Tears blurred my vision. “I’m so sorry, Lyle.”
He tilted his head.
“I’m so sorry this happened,” I said, the words coming out straggled. “This wasn’t … this was never what I…” I trailed off, not sure what I was saying.
But Lyle seemed to understand. He nodded, solemn, an eerie, older version of the little boy I knew. “I know, Dad. That’s why I’ve believed in you.” He held out his hand. “Come on. Let me show you.”
I took his hand. We entered and crossed the kitchen to a blank white door.
Lyle opened it and flicked a switch. An exposed LED bulb came to life, revealing a set of wooden stairs leading to an unfinished basement.
Tufts of red insulation pressed from beneath a silvery covering on either side of the stairway, bulging through gaps in the studs.
“Come on,” Lyle said. He took two steps down and turned back. “Close the door so Mom doesn’t suspect anything.” His eyes were invisible, the reflection of the light filling the lenses of his glasses. “I always have the door closed.”
“Okay.” I shut the door and followed Lyle down.
It was cold but dry. In one corner stood a small washer and dryer next to a modest and aging water heater and equally old furnace. Lyle ignored these. He turned right at the foot of the steps and opened a second door on a wall dividing one half of the basement from the other.
“This is my area,” Lyle said as he held the door for me. “My Batcave.”
“Oh, wow.”
Inside were two running desktop computers, matched with four large flat-panel monitors.
There was a long table, the portable kind with spindly metal legs, sagging under electronic gear.
A wheeled chair, its upholstery ripped and torn, sat near the bank of monitors.
I recognized it. “Hey, my chair.” I sounded inane in my own ears, but when I glanced back, Lyle grinned.
He shut the door and went to the chair. He patted it. “I know.” His eyes darted up to mine, and away again. Shy. “I made Mom keep it. I think she’s forgotten about it now. She never comes in here. She knows it’s my space.”
“How is she? How’s your mom?”
Lyle’s face blanked, emotion shutting down. My mouth went dry. Lyle regarded me. “She’s … fine. She works a lot. Long hours. She’s going to night school. Trying to get her MA in education. Wants to move up to high school. Administration.”
“Has she, you know. Remarried?”
“Not yet. I think she will soon. She’s been seeing this guy for a while now.”
“Okay. That’s—that’s good.” It’d been two days, for me, since she’d handed me the divorce papers.
Not even two weeks for me and none of this had happened.
Just eleven days earlier, I’d kissed her goodbye like any other morning and driven to work and fallen out of midair into the street.
And here she was. In love again. Potentially remarrying. I was a memory. A ghost.
Lyle peered at me through his thick glasses.
I swallowed again, fighting the lump in my throat, working to keep the tears from spilling over. When I found my voice, I nodded toward a large contraption sitting in the center of the room. “What’s that?”
Lyle’s eyes brightened. The mask vanished, and he stepped forward. “This is what I’ve been working on. This is my Device.” The way he said the word capitalized it.
The contraption, or Device, or whatever it was, was formed of aluminum struts.
The base was octagonal, four feet across.
The vertical struts formed a closed cylinder, which arced and came together just over my height, maybe six and a half feet above the floor, nearly touching the exposed piping on the ceiling.
Wires crisscrossed the struts, a complicated but somehow coherent mess.
He knelt by it, fiddling with cables. “I had to jury-rig the interface, using ancient Ultra-5 SCSI signals. I scrounged up those computers from garage sales, mostly. Parts here and there, you know?” He glanced up at me and back down again.
“I got lucky. About eight months ago a company nearby went bankrupt and they were going to e-waste all their equipment, but Mom found out from a coworker and stepped up big-time. Got the company to let me have my pick of the equipment if I kept it under a certain dollar value. I spent all night digging around in the warehouse with a flashlight and a big bag. Got two of my best screens from there.” He gestured at the bank of blinking screens.
“But the interface was the hardest part. No one uses SCSI anymore, it’s Stone Age.
I had to go to the library and learn the signal coding from scratch.
But I did it. And I was able to get a copy of ScalaLab, too, for the data analysis.
It’s older, and I had to customize some of the code, but it works. ”
I gazed at it. This was something he had put together alone over the course of years. I felt the clamp on my heart again, stealing my breath away. Lyle gazed up at me, trying hard not to show how much my approval meant. “It’s amazing, bud,” I said, and meant it. “What does it measure?”