Auggie made himself say it: “I’m here to see Theo’s daughter. Lana. I guess I don’t know if she has Stratford or Moore as her last name. I never asked.”
“Mmhmm.”
The next part was the hardest: waiting, letting the lie float.
“All right, Mr. Lopez,” the man said, passing him the clipboard. “I just need you to sign in here.”
Auggie scribbled his information; his hand was shaking so badly that it was mostly illegible, but the man behind the desk barely glanced at it. He passed Auggie a name tag with the word VISITOR printed clearly at the top, and then he pointed. “Lana is in Ridley, which is down that hall. Follow it to the end. You’ll have to get buzzed in; just tell them who you are and who you’re there to see, and they’ll get you the rest of the way.”
Nodding, Auggie pasted the name tag onto his chest. Then he headed down the hall that the man had indicated. The building was silent aside from the squeak of Auggie’s wet high-tops. Inside Downing, the same effort had been made to soften the aesthetic: brightly painted walls interrupted by murals that had been attributed to Westcott Boys 1997, Cavendish 2002-2003, and so on. The murals looked like they’d just let some toddlers attack the walls with paint and brushes. In other places, framed artwork by children hung on display: Candice Evans had done stick figures, the lines zigging and zagging as she tried to control the pencil; Amber Hamm had painted the sky, powder blue, and clouds; Shaniqua Proctor had traced her hand. But bright paint and children’s art couldn’t distract from the speckled linoleum, the fire doors, the security cameras, the wire mesh of the safety glass.
At the end of the hall, Auggie stopped at a pair of glass security doors; on the wall next to them was an intercom. Auggie didn’t press the button. He just looked through the doors.
On the other side of the glass, a large rec room held chairs and couches upholstered in microfiber, plush rugs patterned with blocks of primary colors, a massive television that was showing The Land Before Time, balls and dollhouses and a green John Deere play tractor and a firetruck and a Lincoln Logs set that had been scattered to kingdom come. Children, too. Many of them obviously with disabilities or developmental delays. Some of the children seemed alert and active—a girl with a mass of blond ringlets and no legs was acting out a tea party between two dolls; a black boy with scars from burns over most of his face had one foot on the John Deere tractor, and he was rolling it back and forth with one foot while he watched the movie—but many of the children were strapped into wheelchairs or were propped up on the couches with pillows.
Theo sat with a girl on his lap; he was talking to her, his finger marking his place in a picture book. Next to them was a child-sized wheelchair. The girl was wearing what looked to Auggie like a bike helmet; her dark eyes stared off into the distance, and she didn’t seem to register anything Theo was saying to her.
Auggie wasn’t sure how long he stood there. He only knew that at some point his legs jerked into motion, and he staggered out of Downing. The wind was still cutting the January day, but he barely felt it. He dropped into a squat at the edge of the cement apron outside the building, and he washed his face with snow while he sobbed. When his hands and face were numb, he called an Uber and took it back to campus.
He thought about Theo. He tried not to think about Theo. He thought about all the ways people hold secret the things they love. He thought about Robert, and something cold and hateful worked through Auggie. He opened the cloud backup webpage and tried Robert’s password again.
This time, it worked.
The password for an abysmally selfish fucker like Robert McDonald had been his own name.
14
Theo got home from Downing exhausted; he was always exhausted after visiting Lana, but today was worse because of the cold, because the bus had been late again, because of the flash drive that Orlando was blackmailing him with. In the small brick house in the boonies, Theo messed with the thermostat, which was on the fritz, until he heard the furnace kick to life. He picked up some of the books in the living room, and then he called the whole thing a wash and dropped them back onto the couch. He went upstairs and changed into sweats and a hoodie. He found himself in the kitchen, staring at the two six-packs of Great Lakes Christmas Ale. Or the joint in the nightstand upstairs, he thought. Or the Percocet, and the clarity of that idea was like broken glass.
A knock at the front door interrupted him. Maybe it was Cart again; in just a week, Cart had managed to do some amazing work. The walls were insulated and had drywall in place, although they still needed to be taped and mudded and painted. And the floors were back in usable condition—Cart had replaced some of the broken boards, but most he’d been able to salvage. If it was Cart, Theo thought, maybe tonight they’d drink their way through both six packs. If it was Cart, maybe he’d tell Cart he wanted to get his opinion on something upstairs. Why not, Theo thought, trying to muddle his way through the logic. Why not, when everything else was already so fucked up?
Limping, Theo made his way to answer the door. Instead of Cart, Auggie stood there, his cheeks red with the cold, his eyes red too, shivering with his hands stuck in his pockets.
“We need to talk,” Theo said.
The look on Auggie’s face was pure panic.
“Come inside,” Theo said. “It’s freezing.”
Auggie followed him into the house, kicking off
