shrugged. âIâm probably thinking of something else.â
Â
Â
That night I went home and fired up the computer, logged on, brought up the screen with the baby pictures on it.
My son. The boy on the screen was my son.
I tried not to think of him that way. Before he was born, Iâd met the couple who adopted him, David and Nancy No-Last-Name-As-Per-Written-Agreement-With-The-Adoption-Agency, and Iâd told them, âYouâre his parents now.â I had tried to believe that, to convince myself that I could cauterize that connection, ease the hurt of giving away my own child.
They seemed like nice people, a little stiff, a little earnest, a little . . . well . . . white . They seemed very David-and-Nancy. But I can read people, and I knew they were good people, that they could love that boy and take care of him in a way that I just wasnât prepared for, not right then. Not with all my problems.
The adoption agency required the parents to send periodic letters and pictures to me in care of the agency, letters that would tell how Kevin was doing, pictures that would show him as he grew. In the first letter they sent, Nancy had said they would put up a Web site with pictures and some information about him, that I could check it any time I wanted. She had also said that if I didnât want the Web site there, that if I didnât want to be reminded, or that if it would cause too much pain, theyâd take the Web site down. I had almost told the agency that I didnât think the site was a good idea, that I didnât want that site to become a habit for me. But I didnât.
And once Iâd gotten a taste of it, I couldnât let go. Iâd go through the day, and by nighttime Iâd be jonesing for pictures of my boy. Their boy, I should say.
But tonight when I got home, the pictures just didnât satisfy. It gave me a bad feeling, because I knew the pattern: all my life Iâd find something, get a taste of it, and then Iâd want more. A boy, a job, an experienceâit could be anything. Crank just happened to have been the last, worst thing.
I had minored in computer science during my abortive college career, and I know my way around them. So when I needed another taste of my little boy, I was able to figure out pretty quickly how to go beyond the one page that David and Nancy had provided for me.
Web addresses, like everything else in computers, are structured like trees, with branches coming off of branches, which eventually work back to a root. It doesnât take much work to get from an address like http://www.massivenet.com/~an11490/kevin/kevin.html back to the root directory. In this case, they had built some firewalls into the system to make it harder to get back to the root. But Iâve been through two FBI courses on computer crime. This was a piece of cake.
I managed to find the root directory in about five minutes. I understood why theyâd put the firewall in there. After all, it was all part of the adoption arrangements that everything was first-name basis only. Of course, when David and Nancy came to the hospital to get their son, it had only taken a glance at his medical records for them to find out my last name. But their last name had remained behind a cloak. I guess every adoptive parent is afraid of crazy birth mothers, mothers trying to steal their children back, extort money, or God knows what. But still, it bugged me a little that they knew all about me and who I was, while I knew practically nothing about them. Not their last names, not where they lived, what they did for a living, where they went to church, nothing.
The root directory of my sonâs Web page was for a company called MassiveNet.com. The address for the company was in an industrial park in Alpharetta, a rich white suburb north of the city. I pulled up the âOur Managementâ page, found that the president of the company was named David Drobysch. It kind
Â
Â
That night I went home and fired up the computer, logged on, brought up the screen with the baby pictures on it.
My son. The boy on the screen was my son.
I tried not to think of him that way. Before he was born, Iâd met the couple who adopted him, David and Nancy No-Last-Name-As-Per-Written-Agreement-With-The-Adoption-Agency, and Iâd told them, âYouâre his parents now.â I had tried to believe that, to convince myself that I could cauterize that connection, ease the hurt of giving away my own child.
They seemed like nice people, a little stiff, a little earnest, a little . . . well . . . white . They seemed very David-and-Nancy. But I can read people, and I knew they were good people, that they could love that boy and take care of him in a way that I just wasnât prepared for, not right then. Not with all my problems.
The adoption agency required the parents to send periodic letters and pictures to me in care of the agency, letters that would tell how Kevin was doing, pictures that would show him as he grew. In the first letter they sent, Nancy had said they would put up a Web site with pictures and some information about him, that I could check it any time I wanted. She had also said that if I didnât want the Web site there, that if I didnât want to be reminded, or that if it would cause too much pain, theyâd take the Web site down. I had almost told the agency that I didnât think the site was a good idea, that I didnât want that site to become a habit for me. But I didnât.
And once Iâd gotten a taste of it, I couldnât let go. Iâd go through the day, and by nighttime Iâd be jonesing for pictures of my boy. Their boy, I should say.
But tonight when I got home, the pictures just didnât satisfy. It gave me a bad feeling, because I knew the pattern: all my life Iâd find something, get a taste of it, and then Iâd want more. A boy, a job, an experienceâit could be anything. Crank just happened to have been the last, worst thing.
I had minored in computer science during my abortive college career, and I know my way around them. So when I needed another taste of my little boy, I was able to figure out pretty quickly how to go beyond the one page that David and Nancy had provided for me.
Web addresses, like everything else in computers, are structured like trees, with branches coming off of branches, which eventually work back to a root. It doesnât take much work to get from an address like http://www.massivenet.com/~an11490/kevin/kevin.html back to the root directory. In this case, they had built some firewalls into the system to make it harder to get back to the root. But Iâve been through two FBI courses on computer crime. This was a piece of cake.
I managed to find the root directory in about five minutes. I understood why theyâd put the firewall in there. After all, it was all part of the adoption arrangements that everything was first-name basis only. Of course, when David and Nancy came to the hospital to get their son, it had only taken a glance at his medical records for them to find out my last name. But their last name had remained behind a cloak. I guess every adoptive parent is afraid of crazy birth mothers, mothers trying to steal their children back, extort money, or God knows what. But still, it bugged me a little that they knew all about me and who I was, while I knew practically nothing about them. Not their last names, not where they lived, what they did for a living, where they went to church, nothing.
The root directory of my sonâs Web page was for a company called MassiveNet.com. The address for the company was in an industrial park in Alpharetta, a rich white suburb north of the city. I pulled up the âOur Managementâ page, found that the president of the company was named David Drobysch. It kind
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