“Golden Heart of the North Senior Services,” Pandora corrected. “And you’re wrong. This is real.”
Roger struck a contemplative pose. “We could probably FOIA her service records,” he said, making it sound like a vague threat. “If she has any, that is.”
“Or you could talk to her yourself,” Pandora suggested. “Christmas miracles are in season.”
But her father laughed instead. “Sounds like you’ve got our family covered,” he said.
“Ooo, cute . . .”
That’s what the voice had said, and it had sounded like a boy’s, up-talking occasionally, signaling a certain uncertainty she found endearing compared to the usual smug snarkiness her dad’s clients usually adopted. Her father had turned his laptop away from facing him, switching to a shot of his desk, its knickknacks, pens, sticky notes, and . . . a framed photo of Pandora!
“Ooo, cute . . .”
Pandora lay awake, staring at her ceiling, unable to get the words out of her head. For the record, it was the first time anyone outside of family had even hinted she might be attractive. And against all her better-thinking parts, her heart filled with a delicious anxiety, full of terror and possibilities, all because of two stupid syllables uttered by a boy destined for psychiatric processing by her dad.
Frankly, it was a little hard to fathom, knowing what she knew about the gene that turned Lynches into self-caricatures. But CSI-ing the whole sequence of events, recalling where she was, where her dad was, where the laptop and its camera were, mentally tacking up strings from point A to point B like some blood-spatter expert, the living room now a cat’s cradle of intersecting lines with the conclusion that, no, he’d not seen her or her cartoon face in person. No. He’d heard her, certainly—as intended, given how pissed she was—but there was no line of sight that would have resulted in his seeing the actual, living Pandora Lynch in Technicolor and CinemaScope.
But he couldn’t have missed the picture of her on her father’s desk. It would have practically filled his screen, a static snapshot of Pandora. And it made sense, kind of. The framed photo on her dad’s desk showed her face in the best possible light, meaning stilled and lacking color, thus minimizing the effect of any blemishes.
Pandora wondered whether it was possible to have a relationship without ever letting the other person see beyond an initial good impression. A blind date, say, where her first move was to actually blind the poor guy.
“You look better in dark glasses,” she’d say in lieu of an apology. “They suit you. Trust me.”
“I guess I’ll have to,” she imagined him saying back, her imaginary boyfriend destined to share her dark sense of humor. “In more ways than one,” she imagined him adding.
It should be stipulated that Pandora did not make a practice of eavesdropping on her father’s sessions with his clients—not while they were happening live. Despite their cabin’s privacy-deficient floor plan, the fiction of client-therapist confidentiality was maintained through Pandora’s use of headphones that created an inverted signal based upon ambient noise levels—including human speech—so that the hills of one soundwave became the valleys of the antisignal, thus canceling each other out. Plus, she could play music on the other side of the noise-canceling filter, which she usually did, and loudly. All of this was standard operating procedure whenever Roger was with a client.
What Roger wasn’t aware of was that his curious daughter, the hacker, had hacked his laptop years ago, giving her access to all his recorded sessions. She preferred the recordings to listening live because it was more efficient. What she was interested in was any inside intel a client might spill that would be of use to her for future hacks. Recorded, she could speed through the sessions in chipmunk mode, alert for keywords. And once speech recognition software came of age, she let her own computer comb for keywords. Not that she ever got much, especially not any intellectual property in actionable detail. Turned out, her father’s clients were justifiably paranoid, alluding to “some major disrupting” as a result of whatever they were working on or some “paradigm shifting algo,” blah, blah, blah. And so into the trash icon these MP3s went.
But even over the grainy speaker of her father’s laptop, there was something in this latest client’s voice that had caught her attention—a certain youthful enthusiasm absent in her father’s usual twentysomethings. She made a mental bet with herself about whether the voice’s owner was old enough to shave, crossed her fingers, and then reviewed what had been recorded prior to Roger’s cutting it short, to handle a “family crisis.”
Bingo!
The “ooo, cute” boy was, indeed, a boy but also old enough to shave, if barely. Dark down shadowed his upper lip, while filaments were scattered in wisp patches here and there across his cheeks and chin. She hoped he’d shave, as opposed to growing some hipster chin bush. She already lived among a predominately male population who’d earned the right to their plaid and Sasquatchery; anyone caught playing that game south of Alaska was, well, pretty much a poseur by definition.
And while unflattering facial hair might seem trivial, Pandora had noticed a trend among her father’s clients: personal grooming was often a Rubicon they couldn’t or wouldn’t cross. Call it the Einstein Hair Effect, a lack of vanity, studied slovenliness, or maybe not so studied. Whatever they were going for (or choosing by default), she’d found their relationship to the razor was nevertheless correlated to a certain snappishness she could live without. So: to shave or not, that was the question she sent out into the universe, her terms for what to consider a signal versus the usual noise.
PART TWO
22
Later, during World War II, the rerun: “I remember one of the boys who was fighting the war like us girls, but he was doing it in England,” Gladys recalled. “He was a big deal. Not too old or too broken to fight the usual way, but too smart to waste his brain stopping some Nazi’s bullet. He visited us girls ‘in the colonies’ once.” She paused, and Pandora could see it: she was remembering, not hallucinating. Gladys continued. “The rumor mill had it that he was overseeing the installation of something called ‘the widget.’ That’s what they called it, always in whispers, these fast-walking men we’d never seen around there before. The most we could figure out was that ‘ours’ was going to be a backup, in case the one in England succumbed to enemy attack.”
Pandora could feel her heart race. Could it be? “What was his name?” she asked hastily. “Tell me you remember his name, Gram.”
“They only ever called him ‘Alan from England,’” Gladys said as her granddaughter repeated the words, “‘Alan from England . . .’”
“He was such a handsome man,” Gladys continued. “Such a dark, serious face, his temples shaved all round to the thinnest stubble, the hair on top always flopping in his eyes.”
“Did you talk to him?” Pandora asked. “Did he say anything?”
Gladys giggled, turning suddenly girlish, despite all appearances to the contrary. “I touched him,” she said.
“What did he do,” Pandora asked, “when you touched him?”