“You don’t mind?” she said. He shook his head. So she opened the door to every room. In some ways, she thought, it had been her house, too. There was Liston’s room; there, Matty and Gregory’s room; there, William’s; there, Ada’s. She had spent over four years in that room. She thought of taking a picture, decided against it. It had been redone completely according to Kathryn’s taste. It was better as a memory, she thought.
“Want to see something else?” said Gregory. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
He opened the door in the hallway that led to the attic, flicked a switch at the bottom of the stairs that sent bright light down toward them from the ceiling under the roof. Ada followed him up the stairs and looked over the half wall at the top.
The attic was a time machine: not a thing had changed.
The posters on the walls, the orange shag carpeting, the tattered couches, the boxes in the corner: all of it was there.
“It was the deal I made with Kathryn,” said Gregory, ruefully. “I told her she could do whatever she wanted with the rest of the house.”
There, on the desk, was the same computer that had been there since their childhood: the 128K Macintosh. Ada walked toward it.
“Does it still work?” she asked.
“I haven’t tried it in years,” said Gregory. “But let’s see.” And he waved her toward it with a nod of his head.
She put a hand on it. The top of it was a beige square of hard plastic with an indentation, like a fontanelle, along the back. The smallness of the screen surprised her: she had remembered it being larger. There, in the front, was a built-in disk drive; and attached by cords were an external disk drive, a stout keyboard with fat little keys and a number pad, and a boxy mouse. The wires themselves were thick and gray. One was corkscrewed, like an old-fashioned telephone cord.
She had forgotten how shaky these computers felt, how much they rattled, like brains in skulls. The keyboard, when she touched it, sent a shock of nostalgia through her. She was thrilled by the familiarity of it, the feel of it when she touched any letter. Ada Sibelius, she typed, and the keyboard clacked like teeth. It sounded as if it were loaded with springs. She missed buttons like these, fat hearty ones, buttons it took real intention to depress.
She turned on the power switch and held her breath for a moment. Nothing happened. And then a tone sounded, and it whirred satisfyingly to life. A little floppy disk icon with a question mark appeared in the center of the gray screen. Its mind was missing from its body, as David used to say.
“Here,” Gregory said, reaching into the case next to the computer, pulling out for her the floppy that contained the operating system.
She fed the disk into its mouth as if it were a child, and reflexively it swallowed, and she paused to register a sound she had not heard in decades: the loud shuddering scratch of a thinking machine. Machines thought so quietly now.
The question mark turned into a smiling computer. Slowly it woke from its long dreamless sleep. And in its waking Ada, too, was roused by memories: of Liston, of David, of Hayato and Charles-Robert and Frank Halbert. Only the latter three were still alive; the machine had outlived the rest.
The funny thing about early home computers, she thought, was that they really did nothing. The main disk contained a calculator, a notepad, some other silly small applications that took up little memory. The only icon on the desktop she didn’t recognize belonged to whatever disk was in the external hard drive, which someone had titled Dontlook12.
Gregory began to laugh. He put a hand over his eyes. “Oh, God,” he said.
“What?” asked Ada.
He waved a finger toward the icon. “Just reliving my most humiliating childhood memory,” he said. “Of many,” he added.
Ada raised her eyebrows, shook her head.
“You don’t remember?” said Gregory. “Really?”
She looked back at the desktop, and then finally a vague memory came back to her: something about a long string of encrypted text, most likely created by Gregory.
“Oh,” said Ada. “The encryption you made when we were kids?”
Gregory was still shaking his head, laughing. “I don’t know how you ever looked at me again,” he said, “after you read that. I wanted to die. You were nice not to tease me about it.”
And then it all came back: she had told him once she’d decrypted it, she realized.
“I never read it!” she said. “I saw it, but William interrupted me before I’d finished.”
“You’re kidding,” said Gregory. “Are you kidding?”
“No,” said Ada. “I promise. I think I was just trying to make you feel bad when I found you in David’s house later.”
Gregory dropped his hands to his sides. “I spent years and years being embarrassed about that. I can’t believe it.”
“What did it say?” said Ada.
Gregory paused. He turned toward her. His face was kind, familiar and unfamiliar all at once, uncanny, a time traveler’s face. It tugged at her. It rang a bell someplace deep in her abdomen.
“Never mind,” said Gregory.
“I have to tell you something now,” he said.
“What?”
“Two things, actually.”
“What are they?”
“You’ll hate me for them.”
“No, I won’t,” said Ada, and she meant it; in that moment it didn’t seem possible.
“I took the disk,” said Gregory. “I took David’s disk, the original copy. I was seventeen. You had just left for college.”
She paused, regarded him. He looked solemn, his head lowered, as if waiting for a blow.
“Why?” she asked him.
“I wanted to solve it. I wanted to be the one to solve it for you,” said Gregory.
“I could have solved it myself,” said Ada. “I think I would have, eventually.”
“I know you would have,” said Gregory. “It made no sense. It was wrong. When I was a kid,” he began, but then he shook his head. “I meant to put it back before you noticed it was gone, but I forgot to. And then my mother told you she must have thrown it out, and then I was too embarrassed to confess.”
Gregory darted a glance at her. Looked down again.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. It was incredibly wrong of me. I’ve thought for years about returning it to you, but instead I’ve just been avoiding the issue altogether.”
“Well,” said Ada. “Thank you for returning it now.”
She thought for a moment. She remembered the other times that Gregory had apologized to her, as a boy, in this attic: for the mistakes he had made. Once, for using a terrible word about her father.
“What was the other thing?” she asked.
He hesitated. “I didn’t really have a meeting in San Francisco,” he said.
She smiled, finally. “I probably could have guessed that one.”
“I really did find the disk when I was going through my things to move out,” said Gregory. “I hadn’t looked at it in years. I was afraid to. I even forgot where it was. And as soon as I came across it and saw the inscription on it—I knew.”
“I can’t believe I gave everyone copies to work from,” said Ada. “Of course we needed the original. I should have known better, even as a kid. David would have been so disappointed.”