Page 5 of The Code (Orphan X)

“Or,” Evan says, “we can continue.”

Clay’s jerking breaths fill the brief silence. Wafting breeze from the fair brings a whiff of popcorn and shouts of delight.

Dale and Franky snap into motion, scurrying to Clay. They lift him gingerly, legs and armpits, and stagger out of the alley, grunting.

It takes some time.

Clay moans and makes gagging noises.

Here at the periphery it is dark and cold and Evan feels even more alone than he did when he stirred into consciousness abandoned in the forest. He stands in the dead end until the grunts and cries fade, until there is only the smell of cotton candy and the distant sound of laughter, the glow of life and fun at the center of things.

Then he starts for the bus stop.

The convenience mart attached to the gas station has rubbing alcohol and days-old hot dogs spinning greasily on a roller grill.

He grabs the rubbing alcohol and stares a moment at the hot dogs, tempted.

In the end he opts for a bag of beef jerky and a small bottle of water, saving ten bucks for the bus.

A ride this distance is eight bucks but he wants two for overage in case there’s been an increase.

He sits on the curb at the air pumps, pries his boot off gingerly, and peels the sock free. The toe stares up at him woefully. The smell is not good.

There is more road to travel and he cannot afford infection.

Thunder rumbles through the night sky, and the air tastes wet and heavy. Time to get on with it. He uncaps the rubbing alcohol, braces himself, and dumps it over the gash of the nail bed. Squeezing his eyes against the pain, he rides out the sting, which proves to have legs.

He allots himself five breaths, same as the SEAL instructor with the janky scissors gave him. Then he eases sock and boot back on, gets up, and heads next door to the bus station.

He checks the boards, finds a solitary route to Arlington, and gets in line. Ahead of him, a heavy woman wrangles two bratty kids who twist and turn weightlessly when she grabs their arms. Her hair is taken up in a messy bun, her face flushed menopausally.

After she finishes, he steps up to the window and asks for a ticket.

The clerk, a humorless long-faced man, prints one out.

“That’ll be twelve dollars.”

Evan has perhaps his first moment of full-fledged denial in his life. “Sorry, what?”

“Twelve dollars.”

He only has ten left of his twenty. It cannot be that he miscalculated. He could not have been this foolish. His brain is out of juice. He feels like he is slowly winding down.

“It’s normally eight bucks,” he says helplessly.

The clerk says, “We added late routes for the carnival. Late routes cost more.”

Two dollars. Evan has made it all this way only to come up two bucks short.

The clerk goes back to a well-worn paperback, something called One Shot with a target on the cover. Evan knows not to make a scene. The bus leaves in ten minutes, and stealing or figuring out how to stow away seems unlikely in that time.

In a daze, he turns around and walks out of the bus station.

He can feel the weight of his flesh, exhaustion pulling at his bones.

He sinks roughly to the curb. His shoulders slump. His head lolls forward.

He knows there is always something to do but he is so, so tired and he cannot think of anything.

Thunder roars again and the sky opens up. He miscalculated that, too.

It pours down on him.

He lets it.

Pouring off the back of his head, draining off his cheeks, his lips.

He wants to melt into the gutter and wash away.

“Hey,” a voice says behind him. And then: “ Hey! ”

His head feels like it’s filled with sand. With great effort, he turns.

It’s the flustered mom from inside, leaning out the doorway, one hand pressed flat to the glass pane. “D’ya need my help, hon?”

He has no idea why this question—this tiny kindness—makes him want to cry.

“I’m two bucks short,” he says. “To get home.”

“Well, come on up out of that rain. We can certainly find you two dollars.”

His aching muscles obey on a slight tape delay. But he rises.

“C’mon now,” she says, one hand on his shoulder, guiding him in and back to the ticket counter. “You look like you’ve had a tough run.”

Approaching the counter he feels ashamed and so, so grateful.

He tries to thank her but his mouth just clutches.

“It’s okay, hon,” she says, dipping into her wide-mouthed purse. “Sometimes we all just need a little help.”

When at long last Evan hobbles up the long dirt road to the farmhouse, there is a strange truck in Jack’s driveway. A Chevy Silverado with a UVA law school license-plate frame.

He stares at it, frozen in his boots. He is not sure he can handle one more surprise this night. It might as well be an alien spacecraft.

He does not know how long he has been standing there, shoulders zombie-tilted, staring at the truck. But at some point he comes back into himself.

As he has been instructed for circumstances like this, he circles the house to enter through the back door. No one is to see him. He is a secret, an Orphan.

Given Jack’s meticulousness, he is not to leave a trace in the house. He rinses off with a hose that has been coiled beneath the back stoop to ensure it doesn’t freeze solid. After shedding his boots, he washes his blistered feet, cringing as the water sluices across his left toe.

The cold water is nearly unbearable.

He pats dry as best he can and digs dirt out from beneath his remaining nine nails.

He leaves his clothes in a filthy heap beneath the stoop with the hose. He will burn them later. He wears boxer briefs and nothing else. Shivering violently, he enters the back door into the kitchen.

Voices carry up the hall from Jack’s office.

A young man’s voice. Confident.

Once or twice Jack has mentioned a first cousin once removed who is in college.

Trembling and mostly naked, Evan eases silently through the kitchen and up the hall.

He reaches the stairs up to his room, hesitates, and then moves past them to eavesdrop outside Jack’s study. Warmth from the fire emanates from the room, flickers against the hallway wall, making it glow. He knows he shouldn’t be here, that this is an unspoken violation.

“… if you know she’s the one, then what are you waiting for?

” Jack is saying. “There’s never the right time for it.

There’s never a right time for anything—getting married, having a kid, deciding to move.

It’s up to you to fill up your life. You make your own timing.

You make your own stability. You make your own family. ”

Bare in the hall, Evan recoils as if stung. It’s not just the words. It’s the tone Jack is using. Gentle.

He never uses that tone with Evan.

Evan creeps upstairs, wincing with every other step, and plunges himself into a steaming shower.

He knows he should hurry since there is still wood to chop before he can sleep but instead he leans in, letting the nozzle blast the top of his head.

With enough water running down his face, he can pretend he isn’t crying.

By the time he’s out and dressed, the Silverado is gone. He stares out the dormer window as fresh snow layers over the tire tracks.

The record player is going downstairs. Evan cocks his heads, listens. Dvorak’s New World Symphony . Jack loves its trills and turns and falling fourths, its references to Beethoven’s Ninth and black spirituals.

He tapes his toe and hobbles downstairs.

Jack remains in his armchair, swirling liquid amber in a cut-crystal lowball.

Within view on the side table, framed in tarnished silver, rests the photograph of his late wife with her seventies oversize eyeglasses and the curtain of brown hair that falls to her waist.

Evan knows already that when Jack is dead and gone, this is how he will most remember him, sitting in his armchair among the crowded bookshelves with his single-barrel, listening to an orchestra played by needle.

“I heard you,” Evan says.

An accusation.

Jack does not react. His eyes alone shift over to take him in.

Despite Evan’s best efforts, the volume of his voice ticks up: “I heard the advice you gave him.”

“Control your mood,” Jack says.

“‘A full life.’ ‘Stability.’ ‘A family.’”

“Mind your emotion,” Jack says.

“You’ve never given me advice like that. Not once .”

“Check your vitals,” Jack says.

“ No! ” Evan shouts, the stress of this unending mission piling up inside him. “I heard you. You want that for him. Not for me.”

He has never shouted at Jack.

He does not know what will happen next. Perhaps the world will implode.

The rocks glass rests on a coaster to Jack’s side. He tents his hand above it, turns it precisely 180 degrees, sets it back down. “So you heard me talking to Court.”

Court. Stupid rich-kid name.

“And,” Jack asks slowly, “you think my advice was a sign of what? Respect? Care? Affection?”

Evan’s face burns, his nonverbal tells spilling out everywhere. He is wildly out of control.

He says, “Sure.”

Jack lifts his gaze to meet Evan’s. “That I don’t have toward you.”

Evan musters courage. “Yes.”

“Because you’re just an Orphan. And I’m just your handler.”

“ Yes. ”

Jack chuckles then, a low grumble, and Evan’s shame flares even hotter.

His ears are burning. Why the ears?

“Two stories,” Jack says.

“What?”

“There are two stories here you can choose between.”

“This is reality,” Evan spits. “It’s about my life . It’s not about stories.”

“Sure it is. Deal with the world like you’re in a story. And the world will respond in kind.”

“That makes no sense. What’s that even mean?”

“Do you really want to know?” Jack says. “That requires listening.”

Evan says, “Yes,” though he does not want to listen at all.

Jack downs the last of his scotch.

Then he pulls himself forward in his armchair, reaches into a heretofore invisible ice bucket at his far side, and drops a spherical ice cube into a fresh glass. Next he lifts a squat unmarked bottle of clear liquid from the same spot.

Jack uncaps the bottle and pours in a splash.

Evan is stunned by what he is witnessing. Jack never doesn’t drink scotch. It feels like another small piece of his world is crumbling. He is inexplicably furious and slightly intrigued.

“What is that?”

“Vodka,” Jack says. “A friend makes his own.”

“Who?”

“That master chief I had run you around some.”

“Why not scotch?” Evan says accusatorily.

“Because I want to think clear, not deep.”

Jack takes a minuscule sip, closes his eyes to really taste it. A pleased exhale.

“Now,” he says, settling back. “Two stories. Want the first?”

Evan says, “Sure.”

“You’re a foster kid no one wanted and no one cares about.

I’m being paid to turn you into an expendable weapon.

If you drown in a training tank or die on a night swim or freeze to death in the mountains, no one gives a shit.

We’ll find another. There are countless kids no one wants in this country.

You are replaceable. That’s the whole point of you.

You’re not like Court, a young man with a future, deserving of love and happiness. Deserving of belonging.”

The words assail Evan. His worst fears and deepest shame all at once.

His mouth has gone dry. He cannot respond.

“That’s one story. If you act like that story is the truth, it will become truth. You’ll force it on the world and the world’ll be only too happy to accommodate.” Jack lifts the glass and it catches the light of the fireplace, setting the spirit twinkling in the crystal. “Or…”

It takes a moment for Evan to find his voice again: “Or what? ”

“Or maybe you’re in another story. Maybe I’m not just your handler. Maybe I’m your guardian angel.”

Evan gives a low snicker. The noise is cheap, below him and his training, but he cannot help it.

“You’re sore about that toenail,” Jack continues. “That surprise we all caught when those young men tried to jump you at the carnival. The psyops play at the airport. I get it. But we left you that twenty-dollar bill in your boot, didn’t we?”

Shock tingles across Evan’s skin and he remembers: Jack knows everything.

“You did all that. Now look at you. Sitting here strong.”

Jack takes another exacting sip of vodka. Evan studies it through the crystal. Something about it beckons to him.

“As for Court? That boy couldn’t handle that. Not one single part of it.”

All the air has gone out of Evan. It is the highest praise Jack has ever paid him.

And yet he would trade the compliment in a moment.

He would trade everything to be the one with a Chevy Silverado and a law school license-plate frame and a girlfriend who was the one, the one he could start a family with.

“The world’s fragile, Evan. You know that.

You know how quickly this can all go away.

Like that.” Jack’s broad-knuckled fingers snap.

“One leaked location of an Ohio-class sub. A seizure of a key diplomat at Dubai International. An arms shipment deliberately sent across a red line. Men like Court can’t know that. You. You have to know it.”

“Why?”

“So you’ll know what to do when it matters. You have to carry it. For everyone who can’t.”

“Like a curse.”

“Not everyone has a chance to carry something heavier than they are. Few folks ever get that honor.”

“Honor?” Evan says. “ Honor? ”

“To know that everything you say and do matters.”

“Bullshit,” Evan says. “I’m not that important.”

Jack takes another measured sip, swallows. Then says again in that low rumble: “Everything you say and do matters, son.”

“It doesn’t. It can’t. You can say that, Jack. But it’s bullshit. So why should I just act that way?”

“Because,” Jack says, “that’s what makes it true.”

Evan feels awash in fear and grace but nothing so much as confusion.

You are replaceable. That’s the whole point of you.

Or: You have to carry it. For everyone who can’t.

He stares at the lowball glass set on the side table at Jack’s elbow. His mouth twitches.

“Well,” he says, a touch sourly, “which story is it?”

With a groan, Jack pulls himself up out of the armchair. He lifts the crystal glass, fingers tented across the mouth so it dangles low at his side. The ice globe rolls alluringly.

He pauses, not looking at Evan but past him to the hall where he is headed.

“That,” Jack says, “is up to you.”

He lets the glass thunk down on the old letter desk at Evan’s side. A finger of vodka pointedly remains in the glass.

“Now get moving,” he says. “That wood’s not gonna chop itself.”

Evan listens to his footsteps moving away. As Jack’s words turn inside him, he feels a shuddering of light move through him and then a sudden peace. He dips his chin, gives a private smile that even he does not understand.

He reaches for the glass. Gives the remaining half inch of vodka a swirl. Hesitates.

Then he lifts it to his lips.