Matt Richtel - The Cloud

“She walked into the street.”

I don’t respond. It’s one of the hardest skills to learn in journalism: waiting through the moment a source wants to be prodded to the more important moment when they start to express themselves on their own terms.

“Volvo,” she finally whispers. “I never cared about cars. I could barely tell one from the next. But I had this idea that I’d like a black Volvo. They looked so sleek with a spaceship dashboard and they have this reputation for being so safe, so heavy, filled up with air bags. But that was the catch, I guess.”

I wait.

“It came around the corner. It wasn’t even going that fast.” She swallows hard. “They’re just so heavy.”

“Volvos.”

“This wasn’t a school then. It was a private home. Kathryn’s girlfriend lived here. They were playing. They weren’t chaperoned but the mom was inside, generally keeping tabs, and they were plenty old enough to know not to run into the street.”

The picture starts to form in my head and I’m both fascinated and desperate to push it away. As if she’s at a far distance, I hear Jill’s voice, faint, describe how seven-year-old Kathryn opened the swinging gate of the white picket fence, then ran into the street. A witness on the corner said the girl was laughing, carefree.

“As near as we could figure out, it was a totally impulsive act, like Kathryn was a baby again.” Jill looks at me. “You know how little kids can be, just acting on a whim, exploring their space, totally unaware of the consequences. They can take on the most terrible risks with such complete innocence.”

I feel a terrible weight on my chest, like I could suffocate. I see the phosphenes-dancing static.

“I got to talk to her before she died,” I hear Jill say. “I mean, she was alive in the hospital, but not conscious. I’m sure she heard me.”

I feel a tear slide down my right cheek, then one on my left, and I let them be.

“Are you okay?”

“I haven’t been getting much sleep.”

“There wasn’t anyone to blame. The family who lived here was so devastated and apologetic they moved to the East Coast, their own penance. The Volvo driver, a nice young man studying engineering at Stanford, refused to drive for years. There wasn’t a bad actor. Maybe that’s why my marriage fell apart; Hank and I had no common enemy, no proverbial fall guy.”

“I’m sorry.” I look down and see my fists balled tightly.

“Maybe some good came of it. This school, after all.”

“School?”

“It’s done wonders helping kids in this area who don’t have the same resources as the ritzy set. I’ll put a fine point on it: the children from East Menlo and East Palo Alto get world-class instruction, generally a free ride, and the first batch have gone on to colleges. It’s been a success story. We all couldn’t be more thankful to Andrew.”

“Andrew. Sorry, I’m having trouble keeping up.”

“I thought that’s why you were here.”

“Sorry, I’m. .”

“Oh,” she says with some recognition. “Maybe you don’t realize the connection. I’d been working for Andy, Andrew, about two years when Kathryn was killed.”

She studies me and can see I’m still lost. A look crosses her face that suggests she’s getting lost too. My lack of comprehension is starting to unnerve her.

“Andrew Leviathan.”

“Andrew,” I repeat. “You worked for him when Kathryn. . when it all happened.”

“I was an executive assistant. Maybe overqualified for the job. But he paid so well. He became a mentor to me, really to all of us.”

I’m swimming, the miasma of concussion mixed with shock. How did Andrew Leviathan become part of this mystery? How does the magnate who just gave me a magazine award connect to a woman and her run-down daughter and to a dead man who nearly shoved me in front of a subway?

My phone rings, a timely interruption. I look at the screen; it’s a number in the 650 area code, nearby.

“Go ahead.” Jill waves a hand.

“Hello, this is Nat.”

“Hi, this is Andrew. Leviathan. Sorry for the delay in getting back to you.”

I hold my breath, miasma swirling.

“Nathaniel?”

“Hi, Andrew.” I look at Jill as if to say speak of the devil. “This is a long shot, but I’m in the area and I’m wondering if I might have a few minutes of your time.”

“Everything okay?”

“Just ten minutes would be great.”

He pauses. “I get my afternoon mocha at Peet’s on University. I’ll be there a little after three. What’s it about? Did my check bounce?”

I force a thin laugh. “I just need to pick your brain for a story. It’ll be quick and painless and you’ll feel like your brain was hardly picked.”

“That’s remarkably vague.”

I laugh again, this time genuinely. “Being obtuse is part of my award-winning technique.”

“See you there.”

I turn to Jill. She looks at me with concern. “I hope you won’t make a big deal of this with him, with Andrew. He’s built a half dozen schools but he’s modest about his work. So if you wind up writing about his contributions, please don’t make him out to be a hero. He hates that kind of thing. Is that what you’re writing about?”

I nod, albeit absently. I look across the street. Faith sits in the Audi, reading something in her lap. I glance at my clock phone. It’s 2:15. Plenty of time to get to Andrew but there’s a stop we need to make first.

I stand. “Can we play the name game?”

She shrugs, not sure what I mean.

“Alan Parsons. Know him?”

She blinks twice, rapidly. She scratches her right shoulder. She bites the inside of her cheek.

“It rang a bell for a second but I can’t place it.” She cocks her head. “Maybe it’ll come to me. When I start talking about what happened here-the accident-it tends to override the rest of my brain.”

“Totally understandable. May I contact you again?”

“Of course.”

I turn to her, as she stands. “Can you remind me when Kathryn died?”

“Two thousand. March eleventh.”

“And how long after that did the school open?”

“In the fall. Remarkable, right? Andrew makes up his mind and he can change the world.”

She takes a few steps and opens the gate for me. “You never quite feel like you’re out of the woods-with kids.”

“How so?”

She’s distant and doesn’t respond.

“Jill?”

“Those suicides-over at Los Altos High School.”

“I don’t know about. .”

“Three kids last year-copycats, I guess. They stepped in front of trains.”

I remember reading the speculation that the children, coming from highly educated upper-middle-class families, couldn’t cope with the intense pressure to succeed.

She says: “When I saw it, I thought: as a parent, you can never pause to celebrate. You never know when they’ll do something. . childlike.”

She looks away. This is too much for her.

I turn back to Faith. She glances up, catches my eye, then looks down herself. I’m surrounded by people who cannot look me in my darkening, purplish eye. I doubt it’s because of the oddity I’ve become, with the swelling.

It’s because too many people in my life are lying to me, and not for the first time.

My first true love, Annie, was an illusion. I met her just after medical school. She professed to cherish me with abandon, to get lost in me the same way she became overcome with emotion when she saw a puppy on the street or a baby elephant at the zoo. She hooked me completely. But true connection petrified her and she made a folly of it. She left me without even saying goodbye.

Then along came Polly. Unlike Annie, her self-confidence and zeal for life were real. She could be vulnerable but she ran her relationships with the same efficiency she ran her start-ups with, things mapped out and executed. Life was an exciting enterprise, growing quarter after quarter. Until it didn’t.