The Cipher Read online

  With a monumental effort, he forced himself out of the car and headed for the hospital.

  This was it. This was his eighteenth birthday.

  3

  SMILES ELBOWED OPEN the door to the neuro-oncology unit.

  He was double-fisting the coffee order he picked up at the café downstairs every time he visited: a small black in his left, a large decaf with light cream and cinnamon in his right. Shanti liked the way he did the cinnamon. She was his favorite nurse, with her smooth caramel skin and sexy ropes of bronze hair. There was something graceful in her walk, and Smiles believed he had detected, beneath the shapeless cover of her hospital blues, a magnificent rack.

  Smiles may not have been Brad Pitt in the looks department—he was a gangly six foot one with a washed-out complexion and hair the color of a sun-faded paper bag—but he didn’t care about that. If you had half a personality, he had found, you did just fine with the ladies. Not that he’d cheat on Melanie or anything. It wasn’t even an issue, anyway, since Melanie had told him she needed a “break.” Just another thing that had gone wrong in the last year.

  The door sighed closed behind him, leaving Smiles alone in the sterile fluorescence of the waiting area. The long curve of the reception desk was vacant, the air heavy with carpet cleaner and the general sense of doom that clung to Smiles here. He put Shanti’s coffee on the ledge and checked his phone for procrastination material. It offered only a text from Darby Fisher (“IPO baby!!! Is it a buy at $35 or what?”) and two calls he’d slept through from a 510 number he didn’t recognize. Silence on the Melanie front.

  The coffee wasn’t helping the knot in his stomach. Smiles tossed it and lurched down the hallway to the whiteboard that said Ro er Sm l e.

  They wrote the patients’ names outside the rooms. His dad had been admitted two months ago, and bits of purple ink had come off in the meantime, leaving his name like a half-completed crossword answer. Everyone knew who he was, of course. They probably wanted to install a plaque: DISTINGUISHED PATIENT ROBERT SMYLIE: FOUNDER OF ALYCE SYSTEMS, HARVARD PROFESSOR OF MATHEMATICS, PHILANTHROPIST, TWO-TIME PEOPLE MAGAZINE TOP-100 SEXIEST MAN ALIVE.

  True, all of it. They probably wanted to feed him grapes by hand. He had asked for no special treatment, though, so he just got the whiteboard. He hadn’t been able to stop them from putting him in a private room that happened to be the biggest on the floor.

  Smiles hesitated at the entrance, stopped by a cascade of familiar thoughts.

  Robert Smylie: It was his own name, too. But to think of himself accomplishing what his father had . . .

  To think of himself being worthy of such respect . . .

  Being half the man who lay inside, dying . . .

  “Robert?”

  His dad had seen him.

  Smiles steeled himself. He forced some energy into his voice as he entered the room. “Hey, Dad.”

  “Ahhh, he appears at last. Happy birthday, son.” The hospital bed hummed as he raised it to a sitting position. He still had the runner’s body, the lean face, the crystal-blue eyes. That was the freaky part—when you couldn’t even tell.

  “Yeah, thanks,” Smiles said as his dad beckoned him for a hug. Smiles dipped in, forgetting for a moment that the last seizure had left him paralyzed on one side. Now Smiles had pinned his dad’s good arm awkwardly beneath him. He pulled away quickly, embarrassed.

  They had found a second tumor after his last seizure, one they couldn’t remove without touching parts of the brain that control, like, breathing and other stuff you don’t want to be screwing with. Then the paralysis set in. The doctors had given Smiles plenty of updates, their coats as white and blank as his shock-numbed mind. He couldn’t keep up with all the technicalities, didn’t really want to, but he got the basic vibe: This train’s a-rollin’, and it ain’t stoppin’.

  His dad motioned to a speaker on his nightstand, which as usual was playing some obscure classical number. “Turn that down, will you?”

  The iPod docking gizmo was the only luxury his dad had allowed himself. He didn’t even keep the gifts that arrived—he had them distributed to other patients. (When the diagnosis first became public, Smiles had seen flower arrangements from the Kennedys, the mayor, and Bill Gates. Bono had probably paid off Equatorial Guinea’s national debt in his name or something.) Even after two months in the place, the room was still a spare white space—all blank walls and utilitarian furniture. It fit him all the same. Smiles could hear his dad’s mantras in his head: Live simply, stay humble, take no shortcuts, etc. etc. When Smiles had brought the Infiniti back from the lot, his dad had eyeballed it coolly. “Flashy,” was all he’d said, but the bite in the single word could have broken skin.

  The only hint of personality in the entire room came from the framed picture of his mom on the nightstand. There was something new today, though. A green screen had been erected at the front of the room, blocking out the window to the hallway. Beneath the screen, black boxes with metal closures lay on the floor, all marked with the logo of a video production company. Maybe his dad was spending his off-hours starring in an action movie.

  Smiles turned the iPod thing down, but not too much. His dad loved his classical music.

  “That’s better,” his dad said as Smiles dragged a chair to the side of the bed. He always sat in the same spot, near the picture of his mom. As if she could still break the tension between Smiles and his dad.

  Smiles nodded to the screen. “Filming something?”

  “Oh, that. For the IPO.” His dad rolled his eyes. “They tell me I should make an address to the troops on Tuesday.”

  Alyce Systems was going public that day. If you had a pulse and lived in Boston, you’d heard about it in a thousand breathless news reports, with countdown clocks in the corner and interviews with working stiffs ready to bank their life savings on Alyce. All the stories were the same. Each one contrasted his wise and mature dad with all the Internet phenoms from Silicon Valley who’d reached too far, too fast, or whatever. The IPO seemed to consume everyone these days, even his old Kingsley friends like Darby Fisher, who were all suddenly talking like CNBC anchors. Smiles tried to ignore it as much as he could.

  “So what’s this I hear about you and Melanie?”

  Oh, that. Smiles hadn’t said anything about it. But of course his dad had found out anyway. Perfect.

  “Oh, you know, she’s just got a lot going on right now. It’ll be fine.”

  It was hardly fine. Melanie had told him she needed “some space,” that she wanted to “take a break,” and several other code phrases for the fact that she’d be dumping Smiles for good any minute now. When he thought about it, he felt like his heart was being sledgehammered by one of those guys in the made-for-cable strong-man competitions he sometimes flipped past in the middle of the day. He didn’t see the point of talking about Melanie, though—it hardly seemed like a big deal next to a case of brain cancer.

  Up close, Smiles could see now that his dad was looking weak. His eyes fell shut while the piano tinkled on, driving Smiles slightly mad. Why couldn’t he ever think of anything interesting to say? Why couldn’t he keep his dad entertained, for just five minutes a day?

  His dad smiled lethargically. “Is that GED prep boring you to death?”

  The GED stuff. This is what hurt.

  “It’s not so bad,” Smiles said, although he had spent much of the last few months coming up with excuses to cancel his tutoring sessions for the test. He had barely opened the prep manual. Actually, he didn’t even know where it was anymore. The cover was green, he knew that much. Meanwhile, his old friends, perched safely in the high thin air of Kingsley Prep, were going to Yale and Harvard and Brown—maybe Duke if they were dumb.

  “It can’t be much of a challenge.”

  “No, it’s not,” Smiles said sharply.

  He couldn’t keep his voice smooth, couldn’t ke
ep the raw edge of his anger tucked away. Talking about the GED with his dad. His dad, the genius. The math professor who, fifteen years ago, had revolutionized computer technology and turned Alyce Systems into a Fortune 500 company.

  “Well, what subjects are you—”

  “It’s for idiots, Dad. It’s stupid stuff.”

  His dad’s face settled into a familiar cast of tested patience. “Just push through it, then.”

  “That’s what I’m doing.” Although, of course, it wasn’t.

  He was being sucked into the black hole of shame that gobbled him up whenever he entered this room. His dad had toiled for years coming up with his breakthrough on computer encryption. What had Smiles ever pushed himself at? Getting Melanie to go out with him the first time, that chain email scam that backfired, and, briefly, Call of Duty. That was about it.

  And now, as his dad patted his arm, Smiles felt Phase Two of the black-hole syndrome. It was a reflex by now: a sudden urge to be serious. To be diligent. To get passionate and work hard at a subject he found interesting. It would be a subject that was mildly cool and could lead to a fortune like his dad had made if he applied himself for a while. But . . . what?

  Smiles never knew, and after a while the feeling would pass.

  He was staring at the floor tiles, losing himself in a vision of Shanti’s rack, when he felt his dad grasp his arm.

  “Robert, we need to talk about something.”

  The trust fund, Smiles thought immediately. This was going to be about the money. A responsibility talk about what it meant to have $7 million. It was only a fraction of his dad’s fortune, but he’d always been big on Smiles “finding his own way.” Be honest, take no shortcuts, find your own way.

  Then a cloud passed over his dad’s face and he said, “We have to be realistic about this.”

  Oh. This wasn’t about money at all.

  “Yeah, Dad,” Smiles said in a soft scratch of a voice.

  His dad held his gaze. “Things aren’t getting any better.”

  He never talked like that, and Smiles knew right then that he’d be dead within a month. It should have floored him. It should have hit him like a car going seventy. But all Smiles felt was a vaguely embarrassed feeling.

  “You . . . you’re a fighter, Dad.”

  You’re a fighter? Did I really just say that? Smiles wished someone would punch him in the face.

  “Yes, I am. But listen. There’s something else, and it’s important.” His voice had gone thin and pained. “You’ve been through too much for a young person, Robert. Far too much.”

  His dad’s eyes slipped over to the picture of his mom. Smiles swallowed hard, feeling ambushed, wishing he could be somewhere else.

  The picture had been taken at their wedding—an artsy black-and-white shot with flower girls dancing at her feet, her head tossed back in laughter. She was his stepmom, if you wanted to get biological about it. Smiles didn’t think of her like that. His “real” mother had abandoned him when he was two. Fine. He’d gotten something better in the deal. Her name was Rose Carlisle, and she was his favorite person in the world. She had lazy blonde curls and big green eyes like life on fire. She looked like fun, and she was. And Smiles could seriously relate to her. And now she was gone.

  She had died almost a year ago. In the crazy year of things going wrong, nothing else could compare; it sat at the very top of his top-ten list of bad things, and it would sit there forever. The accident just happened—a freak thing with her car. No warning, no good reason for it, no good-byes. She just . . . died. Tough luck. Sorry, Smiles.

  “Your mother,” his dad said, “she wanted you to have something when you turned eighteen.”

  Smiles had gone dizzy with the memory of his mom, but he didn’t want to miss this. “She what?”

  “She left you a letter. And . . .”

  His dad’s hand fidgeted with the sheet—his good hand, on his left side. Watching it tremble turned Smiles cold. The whole time he’d been sick, Smiles had never seen him crack. Now this. This was what it had been like when she died, when his dad had wept for a week.

  “And what?” Smiles prodded gently. He needed to know what his mom had left for him.

  His dad shut his eyes, his brow furrowing with some kind of memory. Finally, just when Smiles began to wonder if he’d nodded off, he spoke.

  “There’s a package.”

  “A package? Like . . . a gift?”

  “You could say that. But not a regular gift. It’s a notebook.”

  His dad pressed the button for the nurse then. Smiles wondered if he was getting a migraine from the swelling and needed morphine.

  He was reeling with questions—What was in this notebook? Why did she leave it for me? And what’s with the letter?—but his dad raised his good hand, fending him off.

  “That’s all I want to say about it, I’m afraid. Ask Marshall for the letter, okay? He has it.”

  Marshall Hunt, his dad’s lawyer and business partner since forever. He was Melanie’s father, and also the trustee of Smiles’s trust. Smiles remembered now that they had a meeting about the trust today—it was the thing he’d forgotten that morning.

  “Yeah, Dad. I’ll ask him.”

  “Okay,” his dad said firmly. “We’re done with that now.”

  Shanti appeared at the door then. She raised her coffee in thanks to Smiles, but then turned quickly to his dad, giving him an aren’t-we-clever look.

  “Ready anytime,” his dad said with a wink, and Shanti disappeared happily back into the hallway. There was something going on that Smiles wasn’t grasping, but he wasn’t sure he cared.

  “Just give her a minute,” his dad said.

  Smiles nodded as a delicate silence fogged the room, his mind still spiraling with questions about his mom’s letter. Staring at the green screen, he flashed on a memory of his once-firm plan to become a movie director. He’d gotten the idea after seeing this cool Italian suspense flick at Darby Fisher’s one night, and he knew instantly that it would be his own way. But by the time the camera he ordered arrived in the mail, he was pretty much over it.

  There’d been a time, before the phrase had been pounded into his head, when Smiles thought finding his own way would mean running Alyce Systems itself. Bouncing down the executive floor at Alyce as a kid, he’d taken it for granted that one of the silver nameplates would eventually say ROBERT SMYLIE JR. It was a stupid thought even before he got kicked out of high school. But sitting here with his cancer-stricken dad, their uncertain futures clouding the air, Smiles found himself strangely warm to the topic of Alyce.

  “So Tuesday’s the big day,” he said. “Is there, like, a time I need to be here?”

  He was going to ask if he had to wear a tie or anything when his dad chuckled. “Oh, God no. No reason to drag you over here for that.”

  Smiles nodded calmly, all the while feeling a fresh tide of shame wash over him. He’d thought he should support his dad on his big day, but of course there was no reason for him to come. He had nothing to do with his dad’s company. He was going to be lucky to get a GED. He was an embarrassment. He was a fool.

  “Yeah, okay, thanks. I’m late to Mr. Hunt’s though, so . . .”

  Smiles patted his dad’s shoulder—the numb one, he realized too late again—and shoved the chair back into the corner. It banged against the wall, legs clattering on the linoleum floor.

  “Robert, wait for—”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said over his dad’s protest, and escaped into the hall.

  He took a single breath of relief before seeing Shanti headed his way, pushing a cart with a huge birthday cake on it. Half the floor staff trailed behind her. They were just starting up with the first bars of the Happy Birthday song.

  Smiles avoided their eyes. “Sorry, gotta go,” he said, slicing sideways through the nurses. The s
ong petered out in confusion as he rushed forward and out to the parking structure. He drove away from it all as fast as he could.

  5

  SHE HAD BEEN scrutinizing the list so intently she didn’t notice Jenna over her shoulder.

  The list said this:

  * * SMILES * *

  Pro

  Con

  1. Fun

  1. Never on time

  2. Good heart 2. Doesn’t make plans

  3. Tells me I’m hot

  3. Tells me I’m hot

  (affection)

  (objectification)

  4. ???

  4. ISSUES w/ his dad

  5. Bad communicator

  6. Drinks too often

  7. Aquariums—weird??

  8. ((school situation))

  Melanie had forced herself to stop at number eight. She’d been disturbed to find herself racking up cons with ease and unable to think of any more pros. Better to just stop there, at the bottom of the page.

  This project had been a total, total bust.

  It was the seventh such list she had made during trigonometry, and the seventh commitment in her life in which the negatives won out. The tally for “Volleyball Team” was five to six, but none of the others was even close. (Her upcoming visit to Smith College had scored exactly zero positives.)