Page 26

25.

Look, I know what you’re thinking. How could she not have seen this coming? It was all right there on the page, from the jump: We must rise together and fight back against the march of technology, even if it requires violence, to eradicate the voices that are blindly leading us toward our own inevitable destruction. He wasn’t exactly subtle about his intentions. Why didn’t I think to question the bag that smelled like fertilizer; the gun in the glove box; the use of a seventeen-year-old girl as a honeypot decoy? None of it added up to anything good.

I should have seen disaster coming, and found a way out of it; maybe even found a way to stop it. Instead, I had volunteered for the job.

If it makes you feel any better about me, I’ve thought these things, too. I’ve spent the last twenty-eight years hating myself, wondering whether na?veté is really a valid excuse for blindness. All these years later, I still don’t have an answer to that question.

But in my defense, I was just a kid. And I had never really known anyone but my father. How was I to know what was normal and what was sociopathy? How was I to distinguish mental illness from reason, when whatever he was was all I’d ever known?

—

I disconnected the modem in order to free up the phone line. And then I sat there, frozen, for far longer than I knew I should. Get the go bag, light the fuse, run. Get the go bag, light the fuse, run. Get the go bag, light the fuse, run. Outside the cabin, I could hear the wind picking up in the pines, a storm blowing in. I listened hard, wondering if I’d be able to pick up the crunch of approaching tires; feet picking their way through the snow.

I sat there, weighing my options. I could do as my father had instructed, and head to North Dakota to meet him. He would surely have a plan to navigate me through this mess. My father, however, was a murderer, which made whatever plan he might have suddenly far less appealing. So perhaps I could head in the other direction, toward California and self-determination, to continue my search for answers about my mother. But then I would be totally on my own, a fugitive without a support system. And what if there still weren’t even any insights about my mother to be found; what if she was simply a dead schoolteacher, and I was heading off on a wild-goose chase?

Option three: I could stay here and passively await my fate. Either the return of my father, or the arrival of the authorities, or nothing at all.

I wasn’t about to decide until I had more information; and the information I needed was in my father’s padlocked study.

The axe was out by the firewood pile, half buried in a crust of dirty ice. It was snowing again, tiny pellets hardened almost to hail, blown sideways by the wind. By the time I retrieved the axe and returned to the house, I was soaked to the bone, my skin red and stinging, my boots caked with slush. I stood at the study door, hefting the familiar weight of the axe handle; and then I swung it as hard as I could.

The doorframe splintered open on my third try, and the bolt swung loose.

I dropped the axe and went to my father’s desk. As he’d promised, Malcolm Torino’s address was sitting right on top, an old envelope with a return address scrawled in the left-hand corner: 4263 26 St. NE, Heimdal, North Dakota.

I folded the envelope into quarters, and then eighths, and tucked it in the pocket of my jeans. The wad of twenties that I’d taken from my father was still there, warm and slightly damp. I’d counted it in the motel room: exactly five hundred dollars, minus the sixty I’d spent on gas and hot dogs on the road. More money than I’d ever possessed in my life. It finally occurred to me to wonder why, exactly, my father had bank-fresh money. And so much of it, when we were supposedly so broke.

Then I stepped back and studied my father’s desk itself: The old wooden beast he’d hauled home from the Salvation Army so many years ago, battle-scarred and ink-stained. The forbidden drawers that locked with the missing key. The bottom drawer contained money, he’d said. And then there was the top drawer, where I’d found the photo: What else was I going to find in there, if I really started to dig?

I grabbed the brass handle of the top drawer and yanked it as hard as I could, just in case the lock was loose again; but all that accomplished was wrenching the muscles in my wrist. Instead, I began methodically ransacking the room, dumping out every can and mason jar and oatmeal carton I could put my hands on; but all I found were bent paper clips and oxidized pennies and caps to pens that had dried up years ago. Teetering piles of crap, stacked almost to the ceiling: Wherever the key was hidden in this chaos, I was never going to findit.

Outside, hail began to clatter against the windows. My breath collected in misty clouds in the unheated cabin; and I thought, again, about building a fire in the stove, making myself a meal. Maybe inertia was the best path after all. To await my fate—father or feds—like an obedient little duckling.

Instead, I went and grabbed the axe.

The desk was made of much sturdier wood than the doorframe. With my first swing, the edge of the desk splintered, but held. I swung the axe again, and again, and again—sweat popping out on my forehead, a scream building up in my chest. It felt like some subterranean geyser of emotion—all the rage and frustration I’d spent so many years sublimating—had finally broken the surface. It stopped only when the front of the desk finally gave way, the drawers disintegrating into slivers.

Panting, I went for the bottom drawer first.

The drawer was stacked to the top with bundles of money in paper bank wrappers. Ones and fives and tens and twenties, mostly; but also some fifties, and even a solitary stack of hundreds. The wrappers were labeled with boggling (at least, to me) sums: $100, $500, $1,000. I picked up the pack of hundreds and thumbed through the stack of bills, just to make sure they were real. They were.

I pushed this aside and pulled out the remains of the top drawer.

I could tell, immediately, that the drawer had been rearranged since I’d last been in it. I dumped it upside down and began sorting through the pile, until I found the photo I’d seen before: Esme and Theresa. I put this aside as well and began picking through the rest of the papers. On top was a manila folder I hadn’t seen before, with JANE written across the front. When I opened it, I found the handwritten cipher pages, now neatly organized into a stack. I riffled through the meaningless pages, recalling the one sentence I’d managed to translate before : Peter’s advances in logic programming and neural networks dovetail neatly with her theories about the future of intelligence. That name : Peter . Maybe it was a wild coincidence that this was also the name of the “friend” he’d just killed in Seattle, or maybe these pages were some sort of blueprint that explained his plans. A memoir, perhaps. Or a letter to me, explaining what he’d done.

Whatever it was, he seemed to have expected me to findit.

I put these with the money and photo, to decode later, and kept digging, not sure what I was looking for but knowing that something in here had to shed light on the mystery of my name, my mother, my entire existence. But there was nothing but some yellowing documents: receipts for farm equipment, outdated prescriptions, the deed to the truck. Disappointed, I kicked the mess away fromme.

But then, there it was. A plain white envelope, a little crumpled around the edges, perhaps from having once been shoved in someone’s pocket. I was about to sweep it up with the rest of the pile when I realized that it was sealed, and two initials had been written on the front in my father’s cramped cursive: E.N.

I tore it open and extracted a Social Security card and a birth certificate.

CERTIFICATE OF LIVE BIRTH, the document read, STATE OF CALIFORNIA. COUNTY OF SAN MATEO.

San Mateo. A name that was curiously familiar, though I couldn’t figure out why. But a warning bell was going off, softly, in the back of my brain.

Both the Social Security card and birth certificate belonged to a girl, Esme Sarah Nowak, who had been born to Adam Nowak and Theresa Nowak. The birth certificate included the home address of the parents—a street in a town called Atherton; and the occupation of the father (but only the father, of course, because patriarchy )—computer scientist. Esme Nowak had been born seven pounds, eleven ounces, on February 12, 1979. Exactly nine months to the day beforeme.

I sifted through the pile of documents again, more carefully this time. And now that I knew what to look for, the evidence was everywhere. The deed to the truck? Sold to Adam Nowak, back in 1983. The ancient prescription for Valium? Adam Nowak. Finally, I found incontrovertible proof sandwiched between the pages of an old copy of Reason: an expired U.S. passport that had been issued, back in 1975, to Adam Nowak of Boston, Massachusetts. The Adam Nowak in the government photo had short hair and pale, lineless skin, and was squinting at the camera with his teeth slightly bared in annoyance.

It was unmistakably my father.

So there it was. I wasn’t seventeen-year-old Jane Williams, daughter of Jennifer and Saul; I was eighteen-year-old Esme Nowak, daughter of Adam and Theresa.

“Fuck you, Dad,” I whispered.

On cue, the phone in the other room started to ring.

The sound shot through me. I gripped the birth certificate and froze in place—as if by staying motionless I was somehow rendering myself invisible to the person on the other end of the line. The phone rang and rang and rang until my teeth were vibrating from the racket and I thought I would have to answer it just to make the terrible sound go away.

And then it stopped. Silence descended on the cabin again.

I could feel the passing minutes pressing down now, an anvil hanging just over my head. I’d been back at the cabin at least an hour, maybe more. Maybe no one was coming; but maybe everyone was. Whatever I was going to do, I needed to do it immediately.

The phone started ringing again.

I imagined my father on the other end of the line, perhaps in a phone booth in Seattle, or maybe already at his friend’s safe house in North Dakota. I could envision the frustration settling into the furrows of his face with each unanswered ring. (Frustration, or concern, or—even—anger?) I felt a familiar tug of subservience, compelling me toward the receiver. Thinking of my father’s words: Deep inside you’re just like me. You can see things, understand them, the way I do. Isn’t that what I’d always wanted, to be just like him?

And yet. Something vital had shifted in me, giving birth to something new and electric and terrifying. My father was not the man I’d always thought he was. I didn’t know what it meant to be “like him,” but I was pretty sure that I didn’t want it, whatever it was. Not anymore.

I ran into the living room and yanked the ringing phone out of the wall. It died with a metallic bleat of surprise.

I plugged the modem back in and logged on to the internet one last time. This time, when I clicked over to AltaVista, I plugged in a new, more accurate name: Theresa Nowak death car accident.

Exactly one link popped up. Worst Car Accidents in California History, Ranked.

The feeling was like when I licked my fingers to snuff out a candle: an acrid sizzle, a dying ember. So there it was: She was dead. My father hadn’t been lying about that at all.

I scrolled down the page—a macabre fan page of sorts, documenting bus crashes and multicar pileups, a driver who crashed through three entire restaurants and another who drove the wrong way down an interstate, killing fourteen—before I finally landed on a familiar name. And then I paused, surprised, because it wasn’t my mother’s name linked to the accident.

It was my own.

On September 18, 1983, prominent computer scientist Adam Nowak was driving with his young daughter Esme on the Pacific Coast Highway after a weekend, father-daughter camping trip in Big Sur. It was a foggy night, with incoming storms, and visibility was poor. We can only surmise what drove their Volkswagen convertible off the road—a deer? a slick of oil? or was it intentionally steered off the cliff?—because there were no witnesses. All we know is that the car dropped nearly four hundred feet down a sheer cliff to the rocky shoreline below, and blew up on impact. Theresa Nowak reported her husband and child missing twenty-four hours later, but it took over a week to find the wreck, due to its remote location. By then, powerful waves had already dragged the contents of the car out to sea, leaving only the incinerated chassis. The bodies of the father and child were never recovered.

—

Wait— I was dead?

Frantically, I tried a few more searches. Esme Adam Nowak car accident Big Sur. Theresa Nowak obituary. Theresa Nowak current whereabouts. But there were no more results to be found. My family’s story had, apparently, been relegated to history, and the internet was still too fresh to have any documentation of the world before its invention.

So that was all I had, barely anything at all; but it was enough for me to deduce the rest. The truth about me. The truth about what my father had done to me. He had, for some reason, faked our deaths. It was the only logical explanation, wasn’t it? But why ?

I would have thrown up again, but I had nothing left in my stomach except a sour acid stir.

Meanwhile my heart was racing so fast that it felt like my pulse was a blur, because on the flip side of this horrible revelation was the thrilling realization that my mother wasn’t dead. There was no longer any question. She was alive, she had to be. And, thanks to the birth certificate, I even had her address.

So now what?

I jumped up and went to grab the world atlas from where I’d placed it on the bookshelf, after looking up the entry for Seattle. I flipped through the pages until I found a map of San Mateo County, and then ran my finger down the page until it connected with a dot: Atherton. A small town, south of San Francisco.

San Francisco.

I sat back down at the laptop and clicked over to the chat room where I’d always found Lionel, in what felt like a lifetime ago.

WolfGirl96 Lionel? You here?

WolfGirl96 It’s Jane. The girl with the dead wolf. In Montana. Rememberme?

WolfGirl96 You told me to get in touch if I ever needed help.

WolfGirl96 Hello?

The cursor blinked. I waited, longer than I should have, for a reply. But no one was there. Maybe Lionel had moved on to a different chat room. Clearly he wasn’t sitting around waiting for me to show up all these months later. Quite possibly he’d forgotten about me altogether.

I was about to log off when one last thought occurred to me. I reopened my Web browser and directed it to the Luddite Manifesto .

A few days earlier, the counter had stood at 0012.

Now, it was at 33,257.

There were hundreds of comments in the guest book now, too, most of them filled with loathing— Psychopath. / This is utter garbage. / You deserve to die. But scattered in there, too, were words of admiration: Truth. / I’m glad someone had the guts to say these things. / Revolution is here!

I watched in disbelief as the number ticked up in real time: 33,258…33,259…33,262. And it finally dawned on me that this had been my father’s endgame from the very beginning; that this was what the Seattle trip was all about. A stunt, a statement, a bloody advertisement for his belief system. A bid for fame. A bid for respect. He wanted The Luddite Manifesto to be taken seriously, to be talked about, to become gospel.

For that, he had murdered a man.

And I had volunteered to help him doit.

A gust of wind raked against the windows. Was that another spatter of hail, or was it the sound of footsteps moving through the rocks in the drive? I peered out the window: The moon was new, the sky dark, everything in shadow. But there was a flicker of light, somewhere deep inside the tree line—a faint glow, quickly snuffed out. Like a car door closing. Someone was out there.

Panic kicked in. I grabbed my go bag from where it hung on the back of the door to my bedroom. I emptied out all the survival gear that had been so carefully packed inside: the camp stove, the water purifier, the emergency ponchos, the crank flashlight, and the AM/FM radio. In their place, I shoved the money from my father’s desk. I threw in the passport and the birth certificate and the Social Security card, and all the old photos I could find—my mother, my father as a child, the group of men in front of the building. I shoved in the manila folder with my father’s hand-scrawled cipher pages. The backpack’s zipper strained but managed to close.

Then I pushed aside the coffee table in the living room, threw back the rug, and climbed through the hatch.

There, in the dark, in the damp, in the dust, I extracted the lighter and lit the fuse on the carefully constructed pile of explosives that my father and I had been living on top of for the last four years. The fuse sizzled and sparked, and I turned and scuttled down the tunnel as fast as I could, knowing that this time, it wasn’t a drill, and my life was actually on the line.

The dynamite blew up just as I closed the hatch at the far end of the tunnel; the force of the explosion flattened me and filled my mouth with fine particulate. By the time I got to the dusty window of the storage shed, the entire cabin was engulfed in flames. A column of fire shot up at least twenty feet in the air. We’d been living in a tinderbox all along; it was a miracle, really, that we hadn’t blown ourselves up years ago.

I watched, hypnotized, panting, as everything I’d believed about myself got burned to a crisp. Bawling like a baby, of course—I couldn’t help it. But underneath those tears was a curious new feeling, something thrilling and wild and free. I’d been given a phoenix-like opportunity to reinvent myself from the ashes of a life that had never, it turned out, been mine at all.

If I wasn’t Jane Williams, who was I going to be now?

Only then did I realize that, by instinctually following my father’s final command— Get the go bag, light the fuse, run —I’d just helped him destroy every last shred of evidence that he might have left behind.

And there was this, too: If it was true that I was Esme Nowak and not Jane Williams, it meant that I was eighteen, not seventeen. Legally an adult. Eligible for real jail time.

Like it or not, my father and I were still utterly entangled. His fate was doomed to be mine, too.

I could hear voices in the distance now, calling out through the dark. Time had run out. I crept out the back door of the shed, and then raced blindly through the forest, soaked to the bone, listening for footsteps behind me, until I made it out to the old logging road and the truck I’d left parked there. Starting the engine, I set the car on a path west, toward California.

Toward—I hoped—my mother.