The handful of people Chloe had been able to find connected to the institute were either dead, completely detached from the world of social media, or both.
We were just about to take a break and get something to eat when Chloe showed me a photo on her phone—a picture of a narrow red-brick-and-glass building with long uniform rows of birch trees running along concrete pathways on either side of it.
“Where is this?” I asked, my mouth suddenly dry, my breathing slightly shallow and labored.
“San Francisco. One of a small cluster of buildings that belonged to the Gatewick Institute in 1982.”
“Where did you get it?”
“Darknet forum.”
“Is there any other information?” I tried to focus on the moment, to anchor myself next to Chloe on the couch, but I could feel my heart beginning to race in my chest. I took a deep breath and held it for a few seconds before exhaling.
“You recognize this place,” she said.
Forty-thirty.
“Maybe,” I lied. “I’m not sure.” I was having trouble keeping my voice level.
“Are you okay?”
Deuce.
“I’m fine.”
But my stomach felt light and empty. A few glittering stars danced around the edges of my eyes as my peripheral vision threatened to tunnel.
Advantage, McEnroe.
I looked at Chloe and followed her eyes. She was staring down at my legs where I’d been tapping out the 1992 U.S. Open fourth-round match between John McEnroe and Jim Courier.
“K, you need to tell me what the hell is going on.”
I tried to force a smile, act like everything was fine. I took four or five slow deep breaths, then got up and walked over to the closet. I reached up and removed a black-and-brown banker’s box from the top shelf.
“I’ve seen that building before,” I said as I sat back down on the couch beside Chloe and opened the box.
“What is this?” she asked.
“It’s everything I have left of my parents.”
* * *
—
Chloe and I had spoken about our families countless times over the years. She was aware of the ferry accident that had killed my parents, and I knew about her experiences with an alcoholic mother and a sister who was constantly on the verge of being institutionalized for an extreme personality disorder. But I’d never taken Chloe through the contents of the box. It was one thing to talk about this stuff; it was quite another to see it staring back at you in full color.
Although I hadn’t opened the box in years, my mind had cataloged everything in significant detail.
Chloe’s eyes scanned each item as I pulled it out and set it down on the coffee table. There were a number of worn, old file folders filled with papers—including birth, marriage, and death certificates—a couple of baseball and hockey trophies, Ruby’s leash and collar, a large stack of old photographs, and a bunch of other distant memories in physical form.
“Oh my god. You dress exactly the same.” She held up a picture of me in jeans and a David Bowie T-shirt.
“Settle down,” I said. I was starting to feel a bit better. Having Chloe with me as I went through this stuff helped a lot.
I opened one of the folders and flipped through a bunch of pages until I found what I was looking for. It was a picture that had been paper-clipped to a photocopy of the deed to our old house in Olympia.
“Holy shit,” Chloe said.
“Yeah. I don’t know what’s happening.”
The photograph Chloe had picked up featured my parents and their best friends, Bill and Madeline Connors, standing with a few other people in front of a brick building. She held up that picture and the photo from the darknet forum, side by side. The buildings were identical. The birch trees, the concrete paths, everything.
“It’s the same place,” Chloe said.
Even though the angles were slightly different, it was clearly the same building. I knew it the moment I’d seen it on Chloe’s phone earlier.
Maybe Crow was right.
Maybe my parents hadn’t actually been accountants after all.
“I have something else,” Chloe said as she swiped away the image and started searching through the darknet forum again.
“Wait,” I said, “go back.”
She returned to the photograph. “What?”
“Can you zoom in on the doorway?”
Chloe zoomed in, framing the door of the building in the center of her screen.
There on the wall, just next to the door, was a thin, dusty silver sign. A small circle atop a triangle—the symbol from my elevator dream.