Page 75 of Penny for Your Saints

Frank paces back and forth behind Caz, who is doing his best to try to revive the ailing laptop from the storage unit with a large portable battery and a litany of different cables and electronic accessories while I begin to scrape together a dinner for us.

Tin-tin and Loulu finish their task; Q bundling himself in a large quilt at the edge of the bed-nest—Louise poised at the very edge of the metal frame—crouched on her heels, ready to spring forward at any moment.

Frank is about to light up a cigarette when Louise screams at him.

“Not inside! Go outside with that shit!”

She’s so sudden and intense that even Frank freezes, lighter in hand—before seeing himself out.

I turn my back on the hurry-up-and-wait drama of the laptop and do my best to focus on fashioning something edible out of our non-perishable delicacies. So far I have opted to prepare a combination of freeze-dried packets of camping pasta with the little bits dried mushrooms and a few ‘holiday eggnog’ pop-tarts lightly grilled over the open gas flame—accompanied by some freshly mixed lemon-lime sports drink passed around in the new metal water bottle Tin Tin scored earlier.

It’s not going to earn me my Michelin star, but it isn’t bad for a shack out amongst the waves in New England midwinter.

Frank has just slipped back inside the cottage, and I am about to announce that dinner is served when Caz yells. “Oh-oh-oh! We’ve got power! The aging laptop wheezes to life, its screen flickering slightly.

Everyone’s eyes turn to the laptop as its old fan motors whir and cough, the screen—an older but still familiar operating system; presents a login screen—a square photo of a family of three stands out on a plain cornflower blue background. Beneath the square image reads ‘Penny Fam PC,’ a small fillable box for a password with a green check mark button beside it.

The irony is not lost on me. With my wealth of hacking skills and computer security knowledge—I have most likely been made obsolete by Louise’s presence when it comes to penetrating this device and unraveling its secrets.

That’s when I notice Louise is shaking so badly she looks as if she might fall off of her chair.

“Hey, you ok?” I reach up from my place on the floor in front of the wooden trunk that’s been re-fashioned as first a coffee table, and now my temporary desk—placing a hand over one of Louise’s furiously bouncing kneecaps.

“No, I’m really not.” She shakes her head solemnly. “I’m not sure I wanna know what’s on this thing… I’ll never be able to unsee what I’m about to look at,” Louise breathes hoarsely.

I let her make the next move, scooting back from the keyboard to allow her access.

Louise eyes the keyboard warily before cautiously rising from her chair and taking her place, kneeling before the machine. She stops and starts a few times before ultimately deciding on her first password attempt.

She holds her breath. And presses the enter key. All of us wait as the screen turns over. Processing her entered password. You could hear a pin drop, but within another few seconds the screen cycles back to the login, a message in red informing Louise that the password was incorrect.

“Let me try something else,” she says before moving on to another attempt.

As she types, we sit in silence. Louise rounds through several guesses unsuccessfully until she blows an exasperated sigh and sits back on her heels, shaking her head and muttering to herself.

“It wouldn't be something that stupid, would it?” she mumbles under her breath. Hands flying to the keyboard. “It wouldn't have been something that stupid if anything was important on it,” she says aloud to herself as she strikes the enter key. There's only a brief moment to processing before the crunchy, distorted sound of the startup tone crackles through the old speakers.

“That was it! The fucking name of my first gerbil—Sugar, that was it!” she shouts, momentarily delighted by her success. The computer screen loads in, the standard cornflower blue in an abstract geometric pattern background turning over into a photo of Louise and her parents at what I’m guessing was Louise's high school graduation.

We stop and stare silently at the photo that takes up the entire desktop background, Landon and Margot Penny dressed smartly in khaki, seersucker, and pastels—the two of them perched behind a teenage Louise.

She’s smiling, tall, lean but still girlish and green–fresh faced and grinning in a shiny white mortarboard cap and gown—her high school yearbook clutched against her chest along with her diploma.

The family resemblance is striking. Both Landon and Margo share different shades of red hair mirrored by their daughter—open expressions with bright smiles highlighting Landon’s thin, upturned nose, Margo’s full lips, Landon’s constellation of freckles—but it's Margo's beautiful red-brown eyes, nearly perfectly replicated in Louise’s own face that are the most arresting.

“Oh god,” she chokes. “I remember seeing my dad on this computer the last time I came home from grad school.” Louise lets go a captive sob before clapping a hand over her mouth.

I can tell by the tense, loaded way that Frank sits at the edge of his chair that it's taking all of his power not to urge Louise to begin exploring the machine immediately.

Even I have to sit on my hands to keep myself from pouncing on the free keyboard and trackpad mouse—desperate to see what is inside after such a long time searching for the secrets it may hold.

Though Louise is going through an entire range of emotions in this moment, so are we. I’ve been looking for the answers inside this laptop almost as long as I’ve been with the Saints.

When Sébastien and I first met, it hadn't been under the pretenses of working together for the vigilante group known as the Saints. In fact, when he initially offered me an opportunity to collaborate, Seb sold me on the notion that there was somebodythat he really wanted me to meet; a man who had inspired him—who had changed the course of Sébastien’s life.

That man just so happened to be Francis Stone.

There was a job Seb had established as a good entry point for me to prove myself to the group—a small one; the retrieval of some records for sigmas and omegas who had gone missing; all of them not-so-coincidentally from a pool of substance users and other marginalized groups who had received care from large, mostly urban clinics. Frank wanted me to help, to follow up on where, if anywhere, these people existed in the system after such a point that they attempted to get treatment or were admitted to various rehab programs post incarceration or overdose.

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