3. Storage Room #2
The tape on his knuckles caught in my hair.
He swore, softly, in Spanish, the single word one has for when a thing you wanted to avoid has happened anyway, and worked his hand free carefully, and the care of it was the most intimate thing that had happened.
More intimate than anything else. The pause and the attention and the working free.
Afterward he stepped back.
Not far. Three feet, one controlled exhale, his hands falling to his sides.
We looked at each other in the low light of the storage room while our breath steadied.
His shirt was damp. The tape on his knuckles had held.
The bruise on his cheekbone had gone dark with his blood pressure and was already returning to its sullen yellow-green.
He looked like a man who had done something he'd known was coming and had run out of ways to prevent.
The room around us was my father's archive.
Boxes of his handwriting. Receipts from the first years.
The grant applications for the gym permits.
The freight invoices I'd put in my research bag.
All the evidence of a man who had built something and died for it and had trusted the evidence to survive him.
I was sitting on his desk.
I thought about that for a moment, what he would have said, and then I decided that he would have said something I wasn't prepared to hear, so I let it go.
"Nova." Just my name. A door closing, or a door opening. I couldn't tell which.
"I know," I said.
And I did know. I knew that this room was full of my father's files.
I knew that these men had been keeping things from me for a decade and that I had come here specifically to find out what.
I knew that Diego Moreno's hands on my hips had felt like something I'd been waiting for without having the name for it, and that the ten years between twelve and twenty-two were a distance that had just been crossed in one direction and could not be uncrossed.
He nodded. Once. Turned for the door.
"Diego." He stopped. "What are those freight invoices?"
He didn't turn around. A pause that lasted three seconds.
"Ask Bishop," he said. And left.
I waited until his footsteps were gone. Then I turned back to the box and found the invoice folder I'd set face-down and opened it again.
The numbers still didn't match. But now I had a direction.
I sat in the storage room for another twenty minutes.
I wasn't cataloguing. I was letting it be what it was, the specific disarray of a person who had just done something irreversible in a room full of her father's files and was now required to decide what version of herself got up and walked back into the building.
The academic version was still available.
She was still standing at the edge of the room, the IRB approval in her folder, the methodology intact.
She could still do the dissertation and only the dissertation and leave when it was finished.
I looked at the archive boxes.
I looked at the freight folder in my hand.
I looked at the water ring on my father's desk.
The academic version had been what I'd told Dr. Rivera. It was the version I'd filed the ethics board paperwork for. It was the version my mother thought I was doing.
I stayed there longer than I should have.
The storage room had a particular quality after, the quality of a space where something real had happened, the molecules of the place rearranged by the fact of it.
The boxes of Eduardo's archive. The water ring on the desk I'd sat on.
My own disarrangement. Diego's voice somewhere in the main gym telling the kids the afternoon session was done, go home, see you tomorrow.
I thought about the academic version.
The academic version was: I had come back to the compound as a researcher.
I had access to the archive because Eduardo's daughter requesting access to her father's business papers was a request that couldn't reasonably be refused.
I was documenting an organizational structure.
I was building the academic case for the founding vision.
I was not entangled with three men who had known my father.
I was not in the storage room of an MC bar in North Dallas having just made a decision about my own body that I had not made in advance of the moment.
The academic version had been a working version until approximately forty minutes ago.
What remained of it was still viable. The thesis was still the thesis. The archive was still the archive. Dr. Rivera's ethics clearance was still valid. The research was still research.
What had changed was the relationship between the researcher and the material.
I was inside the material now. Inside the organization, inside the compound, inside what my father had built and what had been done to it and what three men had been doing in the decade since.
And I was inside something else too, something that did not have an academic frame and that did not need one.
I had made a choice.
I would keep making it.
I picked up the folder and folded it into my jacket, not my research folder, my jacket, against my body, and went back to my father's room to think about what I was actually going to do with what I'd found.