CORY DOCTOROW · 204
Now Mom was crying. She didn’t cry easily. It was a British thing. It made her little hiccoughing sobs much worse to hear. “You will tell him,” she managed. “You will.” “I will.” “But first we have to tell your father.” Dad no longer had any regular time when he came home. Between his consulting clients — who had lots of work now that the DHS was shopping for data-mining startups on the peninsula — and the long commute to Berkeley, he might get home any time between 6PM and midnight. Tonight Mom called him and told him he was coming home right now. He said something and she just repeated it: right now. When he got there, we had arranged ourselves in the living room with the note between us on the coffee table. It was easier to tell, the second time. The secret was getting lighter. I didn’t embellish, I didn’t hide anything. I came clean. I’d heard of coming clean before but I’d never understood what it meant until I did it. Holding in the secret had dirtied me, soiled my spirit. It had made me afraid and ashamed. It had made me into all the things that Ange said I was. Dad sat stiff as a ramrod the whole time, his face carved of stone. When I handed him the note, he read it twice and then set it down carefully. He shook his head and stood up and headed for the front door. “Where are you going?” Mom asked, alarmed. “I need a walk,” was all he managed to gasp, his voice breaking. We stared awkwardly at each other, Mom and me, and waited for him to come home. I tried to imagine what was going on in his head. He’d been such a different man after the bombings and I knew from Mom that what had changed him were the days of thinking I was dead. He’d come to believe that the terrorists had nearly killed his son and it had made him crazy. Crazy enough to do whatever the DHS asked, to line up like a good little sheep and let them control him, drive him. Now he knew that it was the DHS that had imprisoned me, the DHS that had taken San Francisco’s children hostage in Gitmo-by-the-Bay. It made perfect sense, now that I thought of it. Of course it had been Treasure Island where I’d been kept. Where else was a ten-minute boat-ride from San Francisco?