Chapter 16 Reece
SIXTEEN
REECE
I look at the text for a minute. I write back okay. Look at it. Send it. He doesn’t respond.
I get to his apartment at eight-oh-two. I know better than to be on time — he’s someone who would notice.
He’d remember it later. I’m two minutes late on purpose and he’ll know that too.
He opens the door. He is in a sweater I do not know.
He does not say anything for a second. He looks at me.
He’s been thinking about this for an hour, I can see, the way I have.
Been standing in this apartment thinking about whether to open the door this way or another way.
He’s chosen this way — without speaking.
I take my cue from this. I do not speak either.
I come in. The apartment looks the way it looked the night I sat on his couch and he stood with his hand on the chair and I said the wrong things.
The chair has the sweatshirt on it. The kitchen has the small coffee pot on the counter.
There’s a glass of water on the desk that wasn’t there last time — half-finished, thumbprint on it. I notice it and don’t address it.
He closes the door behind me. He locks it. He does not invite me to sit.
“I have been thinking,” he says.
“Okay.”
“For three days.”
“Okay.”
“And I have a question.”
“Okay.”
“And I am going to ask the question, and you are going to answer it, and then we are going to talk about what comes next.”
I look at him.
“Okay,” I say.
He looks at me.
“Why did you have to disappear.”
The question lands. I’d known it was coming.
I’ve been writing the answer in my head for three weeks, since the night on his couch when I gave him the worst version of the answer.
The version that was I had no choice. He asked me no choice not to call, and I said no, and he said no choice for two years, and I said no.
The answer fell apart there because the answer had been a wall and not an answer.
I have a different answer now. I’ve spent three days deciding to give it.
Not for him exactly — for me. I can’t keep being a person who hasn’t said it.
I have to be in a room with him as someone who has.
I have not said it in two years, not to anyone — only pieces, to Mendez and to one therapist for three sessions.
I had stopped going to the therapist because she had been the wrong therapist. I have not said it to a person who knew me before, anyone who would know what they were hearing.
I sit down on the couch. I sit down on the couch without being invited and he looks at me and he does not say anything. After a second he sits down at the desk chair, the one with the sweatshirt, after moving the sweatshirt to the back of the chair. He turns the chair so it is facing the couch.
“Okay,” I say.
I take a breath.
“There were people I had information on,” I say.
“I worked at a… I was working at a place. A nonprofit. The nonprofit did things that brushed up against a different group of people. The group of people did things that were illegal. I had… through my work. I had documentation. Of the things they were doing. I had not known I had documentation until… there was a thing that happened, and I went back through the records, and I figured out what I had. And once I had figured it out, I went to the FBI.”
He is looking at me.
“It was a financial operation. The kind that moves money for people who do not move it themselves. The names in the documentation were not the people who answered phones. They were the people who answered to. Mendez told me later that the federal sentencing exposure on what I had was something the people I was naming would, in his words, retire the source over. Not retaliate. Retire.”
“It wasn’t… there’s a version of this story where it sounds like a movie.
It wasn’t that. I went in once. I went in and I told them what I had.
They told me I would need to come back. I came back.
I came back four times over a month. I gave them the documentation.
They told me they were going to use it. They told me…
they did not tell me I would have to disappear.
They did not tell me at first. They told me they were going to consider something. ”
“Okay.”
“I came home from the fourth meeting and my apartment had been entered.”
He does not move.
“Not… they did not take anything. They moved things.
I came home and the things were not where they were.
I stood in the middle of my apartment, with my keys in my hand, and I knew.
I knew without knowing what to call what I knew.
I called the FBI. The FBI said do not stay in your apartment tonight.
I left. I went to a hotel. I called them again the next day.
They told me they were going to put me into a program.
They told me the program had limits. They told me the limits and I… “
I stop. I stop because I don’t have a way to say the next sentence that isn’t the sentence as I’ve been carrying it. The sentence as I’ve been carrying it is bad. I’ve been afraid to say it for two years. Tonight I’m going to.
“They told me,” I say, “that I would have to leave everyone I knew. No telling anyone. No calls. No letters. New name, new city, new job, and the people from my old life would be told I had… that I was…“
He waits.
“That I was dead. They were not going to literally tell anyone I was dead. They were going to give me a new identity and the old identity would just… there would be a story. The story would be that I had… you know what the story was. You were there. You went to the funeral.”
I stop. I look at him.
“My mother sat in the front row,” I say.
“My mother. Marisol. Was told the same story you were told. By the same people. She buried me too. She’d buried my father when I was sixteen and she’d been alone since, and now I’d given her the second one.
She’s — somewhere, two years older. Same address.
The program tells me that much. She doesn’t know I’m alive. She’s going to die not knowing.”
His hand is on the arm of the chair. It has gone white at the knuckles, the way it went white a month ago.
“It wasn’t that I… they did not want to do this version.
They had wanted to do a different version.
The version they wanted had me leave for six months and come back after the case had been built.
I had said yes to that version. I had said yes to that version on a Wednesday.
On the Friday I went home and the apartment had been entered, and the version started to come apart.
They put me in a hotel. I went back to the office the next week and the next, and the version kept getting worse.
On a Wednesday eleven days after the first one, Mendez closed the folder and said the math had changed.
I left that night. The version became we cannot bring you back.
The people looking for you do not forget.
They’re the kind of people who, if they figured out who you were, would also start looking for the people you knew. “
“The people I knew.”
“Yes.”
“Me.”
“Yes.”
He looks at me. He looks at me for a long time. His face has stopped moving. It has gone still. He is sitting in the chair and his face is the face from the seminar table. The face he wears when he is processing. The face that does not give anything away because everything is going on behind it.
“You,” he says. “And my sister. And my mother. And anyone else who would have been visibly affected. The list of people they would have looked at was the list of people who would have been visibly grieving.”
“Yes.”
“That is what the program told you.”
“Yes.”
“And the program told you the version where I was told you were dead was the version where I was safer.”
“Yes.”
“Because if I was visibly grieving I was credible. As a person who actually thought you were dead.”
“Yes.”
He doesn’t say anything. The radiator has been hissing all evening; I hear it now. The silence is the kind where you start to hear radiators. I sit on the couch and don’t move. Neither does he. The radiator hisses for what feels like a long time.
“Did they,” he says, “did they give you any way.”
“Any way what.”
“To tell me. Even, even one piece of information. To leave a note. To… anything.”
“No.”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing.”
“You did not…“
“Griffin.”
“You did not even try.”
I look at him.
“There was… I almost…“
“Almost what.”
“I had… there was a window. Before the second meeting.
Before the apartment. There was a window where I had been told the version where I came back in six months.
In that window… there was a night where I almost wrote you a letter.
I sat at the kitchen table at three in the morning and I wrote the letter.
I wrote it twice. I crossed both out. I… “
“You did not send it.”
“No.”
“Right. Reed. I get it. I get the math.”
“Okay.”
He looks at the floor, and looks at it for a long time.
I sit on the couch. The light from the desk lamp is on the side of his face and on the back of his hand on the arm of the chair and on the half-glass of water on the desk with the thumbprint.
I am looking at the thumbprint because I cannot look at his face.
Whatever his face is doing I do not get to see, and I do not get to ask.
“Okay,” he says.
He says it quiet.
“Okay,” he says again. “Okay. Reed.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you…“
He stops.
“Did I what.”
“Did you, when you sat in that apartment, in the new city, in the new… Reed. Did you ever try.”
“Try what.”
“To find me. To send something. A postcard with no name. Anything. In two years. Did you ever try.”
I look at him. I do not say anything for a second.
“I tried twice,” I say.
He looks at me.
“Twice.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”