for Sophia. And, possibly, to make an executive decision to pull the plug on the man who was the closest thing she had to a father. Merely being in proximity to someone going through all of that was enough to put Corvallis into a cold sweat.
Tracking down a legal document seemed light duty.
Zula nodded and spared him a little smile. “Thank you, C-plus.” She looked at Dr. Trinh. “I would like to see him, if that is okay.”
In the college town that was his namesake, Corvallis had been raised by a father who was clearly on the autism spectrum and a mother who was within spitting distance of it. He was an only child. The household was stable and drama-free. They read books and played board games. Emotional matters were outsourced to relatives, who were all rather far away. From time to time Mom or Dad would be called upon to offer support to a relative or a family member in distress, which they generally did by wiring money, solving a logistical problem, or making a donation to an apposite charity. They didn’t go to church, which—never mind what you actually believed, or didn’t—inoculated children with a steady low-level exposure to christenings, bar mitzvahs, weddings, and funerals. While in middle school Corvallis had started to become aware that he was not much good, compared to other people, at situations where he was called upon to express his emotions. Like the early warning signs of a dread disease, this had first surfaced when he had found himself at a party and discovered that he couldn’t dance. Movement per se he was good at—he already had a brown belt in tae kwon do—but movement expressive of feelings was impossible for him. Since then the condition had only become more pronounced.
This lack of surefootedness extended to simple matters such as talking to strangers on the telephone and complimenting female friends on their new haircuts—two things, among many, that he would cross the street to avoid doing. The mere thought of all the telephone calls that Zula was about to have to make, the crying, the hugging, the writing of notes, tear-soaked airport pickups, long wrenching heart-to-hearts with third cousins twice removed—merely being in proximity to it, with no real expectations or responsibilities at all, was nearly enough to send Corvallis into a panic attack.
But there was always a way out. Corvallis’s dad was the designated photographer at family reunions. He was not a hugger, but he did a dynamite job of taking pictures of people hugging; no hug could escape the sleepless gaze of his bleeding-edge Nikon. Corvallis was enormously relieved now to have a specific task in which expressing emotions was not merely unnecessary but actually somewhat counterproductive. He opened his laptop. He figured out how to get on the hospital’s guest Wi-Fi network. He forced himself to ignore all of the email that had piled up during the hour or so since he had last checked it and went to the website for Argenbright Vail. This was a Seattle-based law firm with branches in San Jose and a few other centers of the tech economy. Formerly a small, white-shoe sort of practice, it had, during the decades since Microsoft had taken root in this area, grown to the point where it now had something like a thousand lawyers. Argenbright Vail had helped Dodge form Corporation 9592, accepting payment in the form of an envelope of twenty-dollar bills, and had represented both him personally and his company ever since. Corvallis didn’t know whether Dodge even had a will, or, if he did, where it might be found, but this was an obvious place to start looking.
Argenbright Vail occupied ten floors of an office tower that was directly visible out the window of this very room. When Corvallis dialed the extension of Stan Peterson, the partner there whom he deemed most likely to know the answer to his question, he could almost imagine that Stan was visible through one of those windows, the white French cuff of his shirt flashing as he reached out to pick up his handset. For once, the telephone gods were smiling upon Corvallis, and he was able to get through on the second ring. It probably helped that he was the CTO of a hot startup, his name, title, and photograph enshrined in Argenbright Vail’s awesome high-tech phone system and displayed on the screen of Stan’s computer at the same time the phone rang.
“Corvallis Kawasaki, as I live