7. A Reason to Stay
Seven
A Reason to Stay
Evelyn
Daisy picks up on the fourth ring with the specific rasp of a woman who fell asleep with the television on.
“Someone better be dead.”
“Nobody’s dead.” I roll onto my side, phone hot against my ear, staring at a ceiling that belongs to a man whose family was destroyed with money my father moved. “Recently.”
“Evie.”
So I tell her. All of it, in the flat voice I use for reporting a broken dish.
The lunch with a polished man named Yuri who ordered for both of us and talked about my father like they were fishing buddies.
The envelope. The key in my coat pocket that I did not mention to Andrei, which I am aware is its own small crime.
The hand on my arm in the lobby and the sound Gregor made when Andrei took his wrist, which was not a scream—more like the noise a chair makes when you drag it.
The file on the desk. Page twelve. A date in Zurich and a date in Moscow with one day between them.
Daisy does not interrupt once, which frightens me more than anything else tonight.
“Okay,” she says finally. “Get out.”
“Daisy.”
“No, I’m serious, I’m not doing the bit.
No salary is worth this. There’s not a number.
” I hear her sit up, hear springs, hear her cat complain.
“You know what powerful men do with the people closest to them? They put them in front. Not because they hate them. Because they’re the closest thing to hand. ”
“I know.”
“You don’t know, because you’re still there.”
“I’m still here.”
“Pack the bag. I’ll leave the key under the ugly frog.”
The radiator in her apartment ticks in the background, three floors of Lincoln Park breathing behind her voice, and it is such a specific sound that for a second I can smell that stairwell—old paint and someone’s curry.
I do not sit up. I do not move toward the closet.
I lie there with the phone against my ear and listen to my best friend give me the correct advice for ten straight minutes, and my body stays exactly where it is, like a rented mule.
“You’re not packing,” she says.
“I’m not packing.”
“Cool. Great. Love that for us.” A pause. “Call me tomorrow so I know you’re vertical.”
There is a knock at my door forty seconds after I hang up. Two knocks, low down, at hip height.
Misha stands in the hallway in his too-large pajamas with the firebird book pressed to his chest like a hot water bottle. His hair is doing something structural on the left side.
“I heard voices,” he says.
“That was me. Being an idiot on the phone.”
He considers this and files it away, and then he walks past me and climbs onto my bed and arranges himself against the pillows with the confidence of a landlord.
He holds the book out. I take it. The cover is soft at the corners from being held by two sets of hands, and only one of those hands is still alive.
“I can’t read Russian,” I say.
“You can read the letters.”
“I can read approximately four of the letters.”
“Then read them,” Misha says, and I have never once won an argument with a seven-year-old, so I begin.
It is a massacre. Every third word I produce a sound that does not exist in any human language, and Misha corrects me with the patience of a monk—unhurried, no laughing, just: no, softer, like the middle of a bee.
He makes me say one word four times. The fifth time he says, good, and pats the page.
His hair smells like the pear shampoo I bought because he refused the other kind on the grounds that it smelled like a hospital.
Somewhere around the fourth page his corrections get slower and then stop, and his weight goes heavy against my shoulder, and I sit in a rented bed in a locked building holding another woman’s book and her son’s whole warm sleeping body, and I understand, with a clarity that is deeply inconvenient at two in the morning, that I cannot make a single decision tonight that doesn’t have him in it.
Which tells me something uncomfortable about how far in I already am.
I carry him back down the hall. He weighs more than he did three weeks ago. Everything here weighs more than it did three weeks ago.
The next morning, I head to the storage facility, which is on the west side, past two viaducts—a low orange building with a corrugated fence and a man at the desk eating a breakfast sandwich who does not look up from his phone when I say the unit number.
The hallway smells like concrete dust and cold rubber.
My footsteps go flat and dead in it, no echo at all, which is somehow worse than an echo.
Unit 214. The brass key turns hard, then all at once.
There is no furniture. No dust sheets, no lamp, no dead man’s overcoat waiting to say something meaningful. Two cardboard boxes sit in the middle of an empty concrete floor under a light that hums.
Cheap. He could have paid for years of this with one lunch and he bought a room the size of a closet and put two boxes in it.
I sit down on the floor because my legs make that decision for me.
The first box is ledgers. Handwritten, spiral-bound, fifteen years of them, in my father’s slanted capitals with the little hook on the D.
I know that hook. I know it from two birthday cards.
Columns of numbers, initials instead of names, city codes, dates.
The second box is photographs, and I recognize half of them before I understand why: warehouses, a marina, a brick building on Ashland with a green door.
I saw these addresses two nights ago on page nine of Andrei’s file, listed under Vashenko holdings, and here they are in my father’s own careful amateur photography, slightly crooked, taken from across the street like a man who did not want to stand too close.
I sit with the ledgers on my knees in the humming light and I do the thing I do, which is put it in order. In, out. In, out. Money going both directions. He wasn’t just washing it. He was taking from it.
And then I find the two entries I would give a great deal to unfind.
March 1996. Then a second, eleven days later. Both after the date on page twelve. Both in his handwriting, both signed with the same fussy little flourish he used on the two checks he ever sent me.
Which means he did not stop. Which means he took the next payment, and the one after that, knowing what the first one had bought. There is no version of this where he didn’t know. A man does not photograph a building from across the street if he thinks he’s in the import business.
I sit on the concrete for a long time. My hands are steady, which annoys me. Somewhere in the building a rolling door goes up and slams down.
I take both boxes. They are heavier than they look, and I have to set them down twice to reshuffle my grip, and when I finally get out onto the street I stand on the sidewalk with them stacked in my arms while a bus grinds past and coats me in diesel, and I understand that I am holding the complete account of what my father was.
Not a rumor. Not a polished man’s warm lunchtime hints.
The whole ledger, in his own hand, which I would recognize anywhere.
The doorman would have carried them for me. Ruslan actually starts around the desk. I say no thank you and take them up in the service elevator myself, because they are mine, and because I have this stupid old habit where I would rather dislocate a shoulder than let someone see me need help.
Then I sit at the kitchen counter with my coat still on and my arms aching and I make a decision.
Here is what it is not: it is not the salary, although the salary is real and my debt is real and I have never in my life been able to pretend otherwise. It is not sacrifice, either, which is the story I’d tell Daisy because it’s the one she’d buy.
It’s this. I walked into something I do not understand yet.
I have half a file, two boxes, and a man’s careful non-answers.
If I leave now, someone else finishes the sentence about who I am.
My father wrote fifteen years of it already without asking me.
Yuri Vashenko is out there right now shaping the rest of it over lunch, and I would be walking out the door and letting him.
I have spent my whole life letting other people decide where I fit in the paragraph.
Not this time. I need to know what the ledgers mean before I decide what to do with them. And once I know, whatever I do with them will be mine.
I take the boxes to my room and slide them under the bed, and the cardboard makes a long dragging sound against the floor that sounds like exactly what it is: a woman hiding something.
Misha finds me at the counter with my coat still on.
“You’re wearing your coat inside.”
“I’m making a statement.”
He looks at me for a second too long, the way he does, and then he asks, “Can we make the complicated pancakes? The ones with too many steps?”
The ones where you separate the eggs and beat the whites and fold them in and get flour on the ceiling for reasons nobody has ever been able to explain to me.
“Yes,” I say.
He gets the bowl. He needs both arms for it.
Andrei is quieter than usual at dinner.
Not the ordinary quiet, which is a texture I know now, the kind that fills a room like water finding its level.
This is the other one. He answers Misha, properly, twice, and asks about the flag of Vostrogradnaya Slavikamir, which apparently now has a moon on it for administrative reasons.
But between the questions he looks at his plate and does not eat much and does not touch the ring.
I pass him the salt before he asks for it. He takes it without comment.
Halfway through the meal I realize what the room is doing.
He is waiting for me to say whether I’m staying.
I am waiting for him to ask. Neither of us moves, and the ordinary business of a table—forks, water glass, the whale on the bottom of Misha’s cup showing as he drains it—goes on around a space in the middle that both of us are being extremely careful not to walk through.
Misha talks about the moon. Andrei’s hand rests flat beside his plate, absolutely still.
I set my fork down and reach for my water and my sleeve knocks the salt over instead, and it goes everywhere, and Misha shrieks with delight and throws a pinch over his left shoulder like a tiny superstitious accountant, and Andrei looks up at me for the first time in ten minutes, and the look holds two seconds past anything I could explain to Daisy.
“There are two boxes under my bed,” I say. “We should probably talk about them.”