Melvin Brown’s death had been lost in the hype of the opening and had barely made the news the next day. Prescott tried to convince himself that a known sex offender committing suicide outside his window couldn’t have had anything to do with him, and he didn’t bother to ask any questions.
Meanwhile at the orphanage a man giving the name of Daryl Washington dropped in, looking to pick up anything J’Quarius may have left behind.
“Just one letter that came in today’s mail,” the headmistress said, handing over the envelope.
“Thanks.” Daryl said, his eyes darting nervously for the return address. Then with a suddenly relieved smile he added, “For what it’s worth J’Quarius is really happy.”
Strolling through the parking lot back to his car “Daryl Washington” placed a call to Aaron Bradford. “You were right. I got the letter. Our source at The Times intercepted the other one earlier this morning.”
“Perfect. Bring them to me unopened,” Bradford said appreciatively. He wanted to be the one to destroy the letters personally, to know for sure it was done.
He still had a scout in Mississippi watching J’Quarius’s great-grandparents’ mailbox for a potential third letter, and he’d had Melvin Brown’s apartment thoroughly searched – before the police had even positively identified his body. A healthy paranoia pervaded all of Bradford’s actions, and it had served him well throughout his career.
A week passed and no third letter was ever delivered. As a token of his appreciation, Prescott had bequeathed the chairmanship of the board of J, along with a 5% ownership stake, to Bradford. J was his now.
CHAPTER 4
Ryan found himself standing in the pouring rain at the rear bumper of the Chevy Suburban that had forever changed his life. Knowing what was coming next, he quickly ducked and looked back over his shoulder, expecting to see his daycare teacher lunging for him.
But she was nowhere to be found.
The facility wasn’t there either.
Behind him was only a long, empty road with no clear beginning. On the other side of the tangled mess of metal and glass, the road stretched on beyond the horizon with no turns and no perceptible end.
He straightened up his posture, bit down on his lower lip and, with as much courage as he could muster,
finally
stepped around the back end of the Chevy Suburban. Just as he did, the rain stopped – as if a faucet had been turned off – and the storm clouds melted into a star-filled sky, unobscured by the new moon.
His parent’s Honda Civic was tilted grotesquely forward with all four wheels off the ground, effectively molded to the front of the Suburban, the front windshields of the two vehicles nearly touching. Ryan bit down a little harder on his lip and concentrated on the sound of his breathing, shallow and rapid through his nose, trying to stay composed. Nerves taut, he wrapped his fingers over the passenger-side window frame, pulled himself up onto his tiptoes and stretched his neck to try and see inside.
“Ryan?”
Any other sound would have startled him. But this soft, comforting, familiar voice was instantly soothing. Ryan immediately let go – of the car door he was holding on to, of the confidence he was trying to project, of the emotions he’d been trying to suppress, of everything. He ran to his mother, standing at the side of the road with his father, and collapsed into her open arms. Sobbing, with his head still buried in his mother’s side, he reached out an arm to embrace his father as well.
“You are our everything, Ryan. You always were – but now more than ever,” Ryan’s dad said quietly, ruffling his hair the way he had every time he’d said goodbye to Ryan.
His mom gently nudged his quivering chin upward with the side of her finger to look him in his tear-filled eyes. “Make a difference,” she said. “Love. Be loved. And be happy.” She leaned down and gave him a kiss goodbye on the forehead just like she had everyday she'd dropped him off at school.
Ryan knew he couldn’t stop them, but as the tears trickled continuously down his cheeks, one by one, he bit back down on his lip and managed to whisper, “Please, don’t go.” For the first time, he felt a twinge of real pain in his lower lip. “Don’t go,” he whispered again. He could feel himself waking, and the harder he fought it, the shallower his sleep became. “Don’t go,” he heard himself whisper aloud. He was awake.
“You okay?” Sara asked, peeking her head in the door.
“Yeah,” Ryan answered, his voice cracking just slightly.
Pretty sure everything was not okay, Sara cautiously entered his room and knelt at the edge of his bed. “Honey, your lip is bleeding,” she said worriedly.
“I was just having a realistic dream, and I bit down on it. It’s ok.”
“Are you sure?” she said reaching for a tissue. “Let me see.”
He studied her face as she stared down at his lip with genuine concern, tenderly dabbing it with the tissue. “I’m sure,” he answered.
Once she was satisfied with her nursing job, Sara glanced back up to find Ryan looking her directly in the eye. “You sure you’re ok?” she asked with a confused, almost self-conscious expression.
Then Ryan did something he’d never done before in his four weeks at the Ewing household. He wrapped his arms around her and gave her an unreserved hug, resting his head on her shoulder.
“Finally,”
she thought as she hugged him back, her heart soaring inside her chest. She had been so sure for so long that it would happen, but she’d just started to allow herself to question,
“What if it didn’t?”
Ryan loosened his embrace, but Sara wasn’t ready yet. She continued squeezing him, blotting the corner of her eye with the tissue she still held in her hand.
For the past month she’d stood up to the Avillage board. He wasn’t ready to start his education, she’d told them. They couldn’t push him.
Over the last several days her stand had only gotten harder, as she’d felt even more alone in her fight. Thomas, frustrated by their lack of progress, had begun to make the argument that maybe they should consider starting the board’s plan. They couldn’t possibly start making
less
headway with him. “Do you want them to take him?” he warned. “They can. And they will.” Thomas had slept on the couch that night.
But on this nondescript Tuesday morning, when she’d least expected it, Ryan had proven her right. In every way this was a breakthrough.
~~~
“Welcome, everyone. I’d like to call to order the first meeting of the board of directors of RTJ,” Prescott announced formally at precisely eight o’clock, the history of the moment not escaping him.
The first meeting was held in the Avillage board room two doors down from the office of James Prescott, who now stood at the head of a long, sturdy oak table with a panoramic view of the financial district as his backdrop. Seated around the table were the nine other board members. Six were early investors in Avillage – business executives mostly in their sixties and seventies. Two were chief executives of mid-sized companies. And the last was a baby-faced cardiologist in his first year out of fellowship, who looked almost as out of place in a suit as he did among the company he currently kept.
“The purpose of today’s meeting,” Prescott continued, speaking without notes, “is to go over some early financial estimates, discuss some of the progress we’ve made in the six weeks since open, and, hopefully, come up with some strategies to get things headed in the right direction before we release our first quarterly report.
“I‘ve been in communication with the adoptive parents on a weekly basis. Unfortunately, we lost about four weeks in the transition from orphanage to home, but we’ve now started most of the educational programs we’d prioritized the highest. Our boy’s actually already well ahead of where we thought he’d be in math despite the setback – he’s picking up concepts amazingly quickly.
“His tutor is billing out at 45 dollars an hour for 10 hours a week, and we’re picking that up. We’ve also got him working with an English tutor for 4 hours a week, primarily working on writing. That seems to be paying early dividends also, and she bills at the same rate.
“His mom is out of the house for four hours a day, leaving him with a Mexican-American nanny we’ve chosen, who’s got an exceptional track record for teaching conversational Spanish. He’s doing very well with that, and she only costs us 20 dollars an hour for 20 hours a week. We’ll keep the nanny until he’s fluent, but we won’t need the math or English tutors during the school year.
“His adoptive mother is playing games of strategy with him for about an hour a night, which I’m told he enjoys, and his dad is introducing him to the basics of the financial markets, obviously avoiding AVEX. Those services are of course free to us, and his parents have waived the parental stipend.
“We’re picking up the family’s healthcare by contractual obligation, which is about 900 a month, and he’ll be starting school at the Hunting Valley Academy for Math, Science and the Arts, which is clearly the top primary school in Cleveland and one of the best in the country – really a bargain at $24,000 annually.
“That puts our annual expenditures somewhere in the neighborhood of $60,000. Any questions or comments on any of that?”
“Any word yet on grade placement?” one of the executives asked. “60,000 times nine sounds a lot more palatable than 60,000 times eleven.”
“Hmm. What you’re proposing is a bit of a gamble,” Prescott said flatly, trying to conceal his delight that someone else was suggesting a course he fully supported. “Kids don’t immediately gain maturity by virtue of skipping a grade. Now of course, RTJ is slightly taller than average for his grade, and believe it or not, that’s an independent predictor for success in skipping grades – we have data on that.
“What’s harder to predict is how he’d do emotionally. Initially, it’s hard on all kids who skip ahead. Then, down the road, some kids have trouble building relationships with their peers, who are all a year or two older, especially around adolescence, but I don’t have any numbers to give you on that.”
“If we can save 120,000 bucks, I say we do it,” J.R. said casually, as nine heads turned in his direction. “Look, more than the $120,000, it’s the extra years of productivity, while we still have a high percentage of ownership. We have a very fixed time period during which we can extract a profit. If he gets out of college at 18 or 19 instead of 22, that could be a huge difference in lifetime earnings. Yeah, maybe it’ll be a little hard for him to adjust at first, but he’s a tough kid. I say we push for 3rd or even 4th grade this year – unless you have good evidence to say that these kids don’t do as well financially in adulthood.”
All eyes turned back to Prescott. “No,” he said pensively. “The data show that the vast majority of these kids do very well financially. The only gamble is that a small percentage – around nine percent – crumble emotionally and end up utter failures. And the majority of those kids who do fail are boys. We could always consider skipping a grade
after
we see how this year plays out.”
“He’ll be fine!” J.R. blurted out, unaccustomed to the standard decorum of a board meeting. “His dad skipped first grade.” Aside from Prescott, no one else in the room was aware that J.R. knew Ryan personally.
“Dr. Ralston had a close relationship with RTJ’s birth family,” Prescott quickly interjected, not entirely pleased that the information was now public. “And he maintains a close relationship with the boy, which is one reason we extended him the invitation to participate on the board.
“I really don’t think there’s a clear ‘right’ answer on this one,” Prescott said in a feigned conciliatory tone. “We’ll put it to a vote. All in favor of pursuing a higher grade placement?”
After 7 ayes, the matter was settled.
~~~
By the time Thomas finally built up the nerve to broach the subject, Sara was already convinced. Neither Thomas nor Sara had wanted the other to think that they were giving up on conceiving a child, so they had never discussed adoption. But almost instantaneously, after building for three years, a pressure valve seemed to have been released. Suddenly, neither felt inadequate any longer or wondered if that’s how they were perceived by their spouse. Intimacy once again was about making love instead of the emotionally-distant act of “trying to get pregnant.” No more charting temperatures; no more doctors; no more “expert” advice from friends; no more procedures. But they still didn’t have a child.
From the day of their engagement, they had been subjected to friends’ and family’s gushing about how adorable and smart and athletic their children would be, which had only served to create a picture in their minds of what
their
child’s potential would be. So, in addition to desperately wanting a child to love, they‘d cultivated a strong desire to guide this extraordinary child they’d both been imagining toward realizing his or her potential.
Consequently, they wound up registering with the most restrictive adoption agency they could find, which meant that while they would be required to provide more information about themselves, they would also have access to more information about the prospective child.
Reams of paper documenting every year of their lives pre- and post-marriage were notarized and mailed and faxed back and forth. Rigorous background checks, including fingerprinting, reviews of tax returns, and detailed interviews with contacts from different points in their lives, took them six weeks to complete.
At the end of it all, they were presented with a local boy, who had already significantly separated himself from his peers academically, with biological parents who had both earned doctoral degrees. He had been reading books since age 3, they learned. In kindergarten, he’d been referred to a neuropsychologist and had maxed out the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, the most commonly administered IQ test for kids, after which he was labeled by his public school as “gifted.” Sara, a gifted teacher herself, chuckled when she’d read that. “That’s like labeling Wilt Chamberlain tall,” she’d told Thomas. Then of course there was the Initial Aptitude Test he’d aced in September of first grade. The only concern they had left was whether or not this savant could function in a social setting.
A review of his teacher’s report had revealed that toward the end of first grade he had withdrawn socially, but prior to his parents’ deaths, the only negative comments he’d ever received were that he was at times too social and could be a distraction to the other kids – the hallmark of an unchallenged gifted student.
All of Ryan’s information was delivered to the Ewings piecemeal over a three-week period with his name withheld until the end of his third month in the orphanage. One new tidbit of information would arrive one day without another word for two or three days, followed by three emails in one day. The "Ryan emails" became an obsession. Sara and Thomas both found themselves checking their messages first thing in the morning, all throughout the day, during meals, and even in the middle of the night if they had to get up for one reason or another. The fit seemed perfect, and by the end of the three weeks, they were committed – ready to do whatever it took to bring this incredible boy home with them.