Issue #142 : Hail Mary
“Can you trace it?”
Devin didn’t answer and instead, tapped away at the keyboard, trying to ignore Kathryn’s restless shifting back and forth, behind him. He could actually see her, with his back turned, raising the hand to her mouth, and inserting the gnarled thumb, chewing as she waited impatiently for him to answer. He knew that she had no patience, but something like this couldn’t be rushed. He had to give it its due time, and not take the risk of misidentifying someone with a false positive. She would never understand the value of that, but he would never forget.
“Can you trace it?”
This was what she did. If she got tired of waiting, she just repeated the question, as if he hadn’t heard it the first time.
“For fuck’s sake, would you get a snack or something? I’m working on it, I can’t make it go faster just because you want it to.”
He heard her grunt in frustration and she resumed her pacing behind him. Shaking his head, he resumed the keystrokes.
“You know, not for nothing, but I would probably have an easier time at this if you would stop distracting me with all the hand wringing. Can you just give me some space?”
He heard the grunt again, but she actually acquiesced, stalking away from the workstation, and dropping down into one of the over sized. He thought that he had bought himself a brief reprieve, but he soon picked up on her impatient shifting in the seat, causing the leather to protest and groan as she moved. Denying himself the retort he wanted to hurl at her, he instead focused on the screen, trying to follow where it was going to lead, until he saw it.
“No,” he said, pushing back somewhat from the desk. “This isn’t going to give us what we need.”
“I don’t understand.” She was staying in the seat but he could hear the edges of hysteria in her voice. “I thought this one was a solid lead.”
“Yeah, well I thought so too. Turns out, it wasn’t. There isn’t enough residual data for me to track down where the transaction could have originated from, and without that, we’ve got nothing.”
He heard the indignant sniff from behind him, and once again, his blood flash-boiled.
“Look,” he said, “I told you when we started this that our chances were not good. You have too little data to go on, I told you that you needed to prepare yourself for the good chance that we might not find anything. You just need to be a little more patient with me and—”
He stopped short, as he finally identified the sound that was now coming from behind her. The shortness of her breath, the hitching, as she tried to find more air, the suppressed sobs. He turned to look.
She was crying.
It just wasn’t something that he had seen from her before, he hadn’t actually ever acknowledged the possibility that she was even been capable of it. And this wasn’t just a few tears, sneaking loose from her fraying self-control. This was an all out, body-racking sobbing as she grabbed at the sides of her head, almost trying to take physical hold of the emotions that had broken out, and shove them back inside.
He felt his mouth gaping open, he was so taken aback and with a conscious effort, managed to close it before she saw.
“What…I mean, what’s—” he tried to ask.
“You. Don’t. Understand.”
Each word came out as a separate sentence, requiring her to take in an entire breath in order to say them clearly.
“What do you mean, what don’t I—”
“You can never know what it feels like.” She was getting her breathing under control, at least, but he could still barely understand her.
“Know what…what feels like?”
It was a long time before she answered. He sat there patiently, knowing how volatile her temper could be, and how little he would accomplish by prodding her. She sat there, the sharp intakes of breath slowly coming back down to a more normal pace. The spasms that seemed to be rocketing up her back, from the force of her crying finally died down, and she was left sitting there, slumped over in the wake of what she had just experienced.
“You don’t understand,” she said again. “You grew up in a foster home, right?” She didn’t wait, or even look up to see him nodding. She took in a long slow breath. “I wasn’t completely honest with you. I’m not trying to track down an old friend from high school.”
He frowned, not connecting the dots. “So who is this?
She went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “You don’t understand what it feels like to have a bond with someone, something so close, and so tight that when you aren’t in the room with them, you feel like you’re missing a body part. Whenever anything happened to either one of us, the other was immediately on the phone, to see if they could help, before anyone else knew. We knew what we were thinking, sometimes to the point where I thought both of our brains were having the same thoughts, at the same time.”
Regardless of whether or not he understood, he thought it would be better to just let her go on this rant.
“Do you have any idea what it feels like to lose an essential part of yourself? One day, poof, it’s just gone. No explanation, nothing. Just gone. What are you supposed to do when that happens? She was gone. We grew up together. We spent nine months in the same womb together, and just like that, she’s gone. How am I supposed to react to that? What am I supposed to do when I reach for the most essential part of myself, and it just isn’t there anymore?”
He listened to the CPU behind him, processing some worthless loop, and waiting for him to input something new. He didn’t feel right, turning away from her though. A sister. The picture seemed so much clearer to him.
“Do you know what the last thing I ever said to her was?” she asked, finally looking up at him again. He shook his head. “I told her to go fuck herself. Those were the last words she heard from me and if there’s anything I can do to fix that, I have to try!” She stood up and walked to the computer, smacking an open palm down on the top of the flat-screen. “She is out there somewhere. I know she is. I just need to find her.”
“But how do you know?” He finally added to the conversation.
“How do I know? The same way I knew that she had been in a car accident, coming home from a camping trip, even though she didn’t have her phone with her, and was still an unconscious Jane Doe in a hospital bed. The same way I knew when, a year later, her fiance had been killed in a mugging, less than five minutes after it had actually happened and the same way that—” She broke off suddenly, clearly trying to keep her emotions from breaking loose again. Pointing a wavering finger at the screen, she spoke again.
“I can feel her out there. I know that she’s still alive. I don’t think it. I know that she’s still alive. And there’s no way you can ever feel it for yourself, so you just have to trust me. She is out there and, you are the only person left who can help us. I need your help.”
He looked up into those eyes, the pleading he saw there, the need for that which was no longer present, and in that moment, for the first time, he felt like he was in the presence of two people, calling out to him for the same purpose. Pulling himself back up to the computer, he nodded slowly.
“Let’s get back to work, then.”
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