Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Harriet
I’m at work when the call comes: the ceiling’s caved in.
“It’s only a third-story issue,” Granabelle assures me. “Just the storage space.”
In other words, the massive, flat, rubber-coated roof now needs replacing. Plus, if my luck holds, a few rotted beams for good measure.
I track down Serena, who owns a big old house herself, and always has the best advice.
She winces when I tell her. “Ouch.”
“I know,” I say.
“I’ve got a guy.” She’s already scrolling through her phone for his contact, mercifully skipping her usual lecture about how I shouldn’t be single-handedly bankrolling that money-sponge of an antique store—on top of supporting Mom and Granabelle.
Serena doesn’t get it; I owe them.
She’ll never understand.
“Here it is.” She sends it over. “I hate to say it, but a new rubber roof on a building that large and old is going to cost you well into the five figures.”
“Well into the five figures?”
“I hope I’m wrong, but I know I’m not,” she says.
“Gulp,” I whisper.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m guessing there was nothing from your father?”
I tell her about the demand that I turn up in Karsovia if I want further details.
“Well... obviously you should go,” she says.
“I can’t drop everything and jet off. We’re so busy here!”
Serena sniffs. “We’re talking... what? A long weekend? You never use your vacation days, and we’re swimming in frequent flier miles.”
“Fly to Eastern Europe on the chance that my father left me something? Seriously, if he left me anything, it’s probably a scary horsehair trinket soaked in bug juice or a cursed doily or something.”
“I can’t imagine any kind of legit law firm requesting your in-person presence for a trinket.”
“But the launch...”
“We can survive a couple of days without our brain trust. The team can text you and loop you in if needed,” she says. “And hey, what if it’s your lucky break?”
I roll my eyes. I’m not a lucky-break girl. I’m not a fly-halfway-off-across-the-world-on-a-whim girl.
But what if there’s money there?
I’m so tired of fighting. Tired of calculating what groceries I can skip this week. This roof is going to sink us. If it’s money, it would make all the difference in the world.
“You can’t go to Romania!” Mom says, shocked, over dinner the following evening.
“It’s not Romania, it’s Karsovia,” I say. “And it’ll just be a long weekend away. One day over, two days there, and one day back.”
“And Serena is allowing this?”
“I have a zillion vacation days, and I’ll be a click away. For Serena, and for you.”
Mom furrows her brow. “How the hell did they even find you? It doesn’t matter. Your sperm donor dad sucked, and his relatives will be worse.”
“I’m going. And hey, obviously he didn’t completely suck because he left something for me. Maybe it’s some money that would help the store! I doubt they’d have me fly halfway across the world for nothing.”
Or at least Serena doubts it.
I tear off a piece of dinner roll.
“Whatever that man’s got for you, I don’t think you want it,” Mom says.
“Even if it’s money to fix the roof?”
“We do need to fix that roof,” Granabelle interjects.
Mom lodges a few more protests, all of which I’ve anticipated and prepared answers for.
It’s unlike me to leap into the unknown like this. I’m a look-really-hard-and-calculate-the-prevailing-winds-before-you-leap kind of gal.
But what if?
I slather butter on another dinner roll. “It’s just one of those things a person has to do, and I’m doing it.”
Mom and Granabelle reluctantly let the subject drop.
Tracking down my father a dozen years ago was an odyssey of searching through visa records, border crossings, and Slavic family records. I was like a data-mining silverfish, using every organizational trick I knew, and I did it.
He was impossible to contact directly, but somebody at the town post office directed me to a little café on a cobblestone street with a view of the Southern Carpathian Mountains. I spotted him instantly, hunched at a corner table: a male version of myself if I’d aged up and seen some shit.
His thick raven hair was shot through with silver, and his deep-set brown eyes were fixed on some sort of old-fashioned spiral-bound ledger that he held in his trembling hands.
“Mr. Renfield?” I stammered. “My name is Harriet Morgan. Do you mind if I sit?”
He mumbled something.
I took it as a yes and sat. “I believe you met my mother on a train from Bra?ov to Lviv thirty-two years ago.”
He didn’t look up.
Heart banging in my chest, I set a picture of Mom from when she was in her twenties on the cover of the ledger in front of him. “Do you remember her?”
He examined it briefly. “Goth girl in car seventeen, seat 42B,” he recited with mechanical precision. “Purple Doc Martens with silver laces, fishnet stockings.”
“Yes, yes!” I’ve seen enough old photos of Mom to know that’s spot-on for her as a travelling twenty-year-old. “I have reason to believe that you’re my father.”
He didn’t have much of a reaction to this; he just fussed with his ledgers and supplied more details. “Dried peaches in granola. Three spoon rings. Five Kurt Cobain opinions. Going on to Kraków.”
“Okayyyy... she does like peaches.”
“Transfer in Ko?ice. Backpack with a pink ribbon.”
“I remember weird things like that, too,” I said to him, going for some bonding. “Little details like that.”
He flipped a page on the ledger.
“And you guys had sex... and nine months later I was born.”
At this, he looked up, eyes strangely piercing. “The master will be pleased.” With that, he went back to his work.
What?
I pressed him about his own family, about where he was born, and if he had other kids or siblings. I tried for some semblance of a medical history, but he was evasive, uttering things like “really can’t say” and “entirely immaterial.” The only thing that seemed real to him was these ledgers.
Some of the ledgers were the traditional accounting kind, with neat columns for dates, numbers, and notes—plain old office-supply stuff. But others were tall and slender, their pages filled with columns headed by handwritten symbols or clusters of numbers and marks, like cryptic codes.
Something about these tall ledgers felt darkly compelling—the kind of thing you know you shouldn’t touch but can’t make yourself walk away from.
Finally, I pulled one to my side of the table and studied a page. His notations made sense in a strange, almost ethereal way that’s hard to explain. I had the feeling he was trying to organize something vast and mysterious, driven by an internal logic I could sense but not quite name.
“No good, no good.” He snatched it back.
“Okay,” I said. “But look—see this column?” I suggested a cleaner way to arrange the symbols so they’d be easier to scan.
His eyes lit up with a desperate kind of joy, and for a moment, he seemed to really see me. He rumbled incoherently and pointed out various figures that clearly made a lot of sense to him.
“So what’s it all mean?” I asked. “What are you tracking in these ledgers with the symbols? You’re tracking something here, right?”
He shook his head vigorously.
I pointed to a circle with a squiggle. “This shows up a lot. What does it mean?”
Mutter, mutter.
He became increasingly agitated as dusk approached, constantly checking his watch. He started grumbling about “duties” and “punishments,” which alarmed me.
“Are you in trouble?” I asked carefully. “If you need help, I could see about sponsoring you in the United States. I bet I could figure out how to get you back with me.”
His face transformed into a mask of horror at this, like I’d suggested we go sacrifice a kitten. “Can’t. Impossible!”
“Okay, okay!” I said reassuringly.
He went back to his work and once again seemed to forget I was there.
I asked him more about the ledgers, but he wouldn’t reply. At one point, he snatched a fly out of the air and ate it. Just popped it in his mouth like a Chiclet and returned to his work.
I left soon after.
I’ve regretted a lot about that meeting in the years since.
I regretted not being more forceful with my questions about what was going on with him, his medical history, and what he meant by “the master.”
But if I’m being perfectly honest, my biggest regret is paying so much attention to those ledgers, because now and then they show up in my dreams—or more like nightmares—and I’ll wake up feeling like they’re calling to me in a way that isn’t right.
Sometimes I tell myself that I was only drawn in because I like data organization, and the nonsense structure of the ledgers got under my skin.
I can’t stand messy information, that’s all.
I’ve always been this way.
My mother doesn’t get my intense relationship to data and the organization thereof, sometimes calling it my “Rain Man” stuff.
My grandmother thinks it’s adorable.
Serena benefits from it, but even she treats it like a quirk.
No one else has ever seemed to feel the same passion for systems that I do.
Except my dear old dad, Mr. R.M. Renfield.