I Was the Payment for My Brother's Debt · Nadia Voss

Chapter 2: What a Payment Is For

Nine knocks.

I counted those too. Not fast, not frantic — spaced out, four or five seconds between each one, the way you knock when you have all night and you know somebody's awake in there.

I sat up in a bed I'd never slept in, in a room the size of my whole apartment, with my heart going so hard I could feel it in my teeth.

You do not answer a door.

On the fourth knock I stood up.

On the sixth I was at my bedroom door with my hand flat on the wood.

On the ninth I heard, very distinctly, a man on the other side of the house say one word — not loud, not angry, just a word — and then the knocking stopped.

Nobody came down the hall. Nobody said anything to me. At some point I got back into the bed and lay on top of the covers with my shoes still on, and the last time I looked at the clock it said 4:40.

* * *

In the morning the front door was standing open and two men were washing the step.

Not sweeping. Washing. One with a hose on a low trickle, one with a stiff brush, working from the threshold outward in half circles, and the water running off the flagstones into the gravel was the colour of weak tea.

I stopped in the hall.

"Miss Ashby." Yelena came out of the kitchen with a cup in each hand. "Coffee's in the morning room."

"What happened?"

"Somebody came to the door."

"Yes. I heard."

"Then you know as much as I do." She handed me a cup. "Don't stand in the doorway, it's cold."

She was lying, and she wasn't hiding that she was lying, and there is something about a person who lies to you without bothering to be good at it. It tells you exactly how much room you have.

I looked once more at the step.

Then I went and drank my coffee in the morning room, at a table set for one, with a view of six acres of wet lawn and a wall at the end of it.

* * *

The new phone was on the tray next to the coffee. A cheap one, the kind you buy in a supermarket.

There was one contact in it. Yelena.

I typed my own number in from memory and called it and my old phone rang somewhere in the back of the house, twice, and then stopped.

Then I called Halloran Medical Billing.

Renata in HR picked up on the second ring, and her voice did a thing when she heard my name — a small drop, the sound a person makes when they've been told something about you.

"Nora. Hi. Hi, sweetheart."

"Renata, I need to explain about yesterday—"

"We got your resignation. It's all been processed, your last day's the eleventh, and Ken said to tell you there's no hard feelings about the notice."

The room went a long way away.

"My what?"

"Your email. Yesterday, four-twelve." A pause. Keys clicking. "It came from your work address. It says family reasons."

Four-twelve. I was in a truck yard at four-twelve, standing in front of a closed gate, watching a man eat a sandwich.

"Renata," I said. "I didn't write that."

There was a silence on that phone line that I will be hearing for a long time. Because she believed me. I could hear that she believed me. And I could also hear her deciding, in about a second and a half, that believing me was going to cost more than not believing me.

"Well," Renata said brightly, "you take care of yourself, honey."

* * *

I called my brother eleven times that day.

It rang. Every time, it rang, all the way through, and then his voicemail said hey it's Ted, do the thing in a voice from four years ago when our mother was still alive and he had a job and I still thought he was better than me.

I left one message. I'm not proud of it. I said please.

* * *

Around two I went out to the garage because nobody had told me not to.

There were four cars and a man in a puffer jacket with the hood of a black sedan up, doing nothing to it that I could see.

"Hey," he said. "You're the one from yesterday."

"Nora."

"Wes." He wiped his hand on his jeans before he shook mine, which nobody else in that house had done, and I nearly cried, which tells you where I was by two o'clock on day one. "You want a coffee? There's a machine, it's rough, but it's coffee."

He talked for forty minutes. He talked about the roads out here in winter, and his ex-wife, and a dog named Bishop.

Then he said: "You'll be all right. He's not—" Wes tipped his head toward the house. "People say things. He's not like that."

"Like what?"

"Just, people say things." He shut the hood. "You're in the blue room?"

"Yes."

Something crossed his face, and he turned it into a shrug, badly.

"What?"

"Nothin'."

"Wes."

He looked at the house for a second and then back at me, and he dropped his voice, and he said it fast like a man getting rid of something hot.

"You're not the first one they brought here, is all."

Then he said he had to move a car, and he moved a car, and he did not look at me again.

* * *

Andrei Koss came home at ten past seven and I was told we were eating together, in the way that you are told the time of a hospital appointment.

The dining room had a table for fourteen and two places set at one end.

He came in still in his coat, took it off, sat down, and started eating. No greeting. No apology for the hour. It took me most of that meal to understand that he wasn't being rude to me — that this was simply how a man behaves in a house where nobody has ever required anything of him.

"You have questions," he said.

"I have about forty."

"Six."

I put my fork down. "What?"

"You get six. I'll answer them straight or I'll tell you I won't answer. I don't lie in my own house, it's a bad habit to start." He didn't look up. "Go."

I sat there with my hands in my lap for a long moment, because the worst thing about a man like that is that he makes you careful.

"How long am I here?"

"Until it's settled."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the true one." He reached for the water. "Two."

"Then let me pay it. I have eleven thousand dollars and a car. I can work. I can sign whatever a court needs, I'll take the whole four million as a judgment against me, I'll pay it for the rest of my life—"

"You can't pay it."

"I can pay something—"

"You're not listening." He looked up then. Grey eyes, absolutely level, no heat in them anywhere. "The four million is not the debt. The four million is the receipt."

Something in the room got colder.

"I don't understand that."

"No," he agreed. "Three."

"Am I allowed to leave the grounds?"

"No."

"Ever?"

"Not yet. Four."

I made myself breathe.

"What did my brother sign?"

"I won't answer that tonight."

"Why not?"

"Because you'll want to see it, and it isn't in this house." He went back to his plate. "Five."

My hands had started shaking, so I put them under the table like a child.

"Are you going to touch me?"

He stopped.

He set the glass down and turned his head and looked at me properly for the first time since the cold storage, and I watched a man I could not read decide how to say something.

"No," he said.

"You understand why I'm asking."

"I do." A pause. "Nobody in this house touches you. Not me. Not the men. If somebody puts a hand on you, you tell Yelena, and he doesn't come back."

"That's a strange promise to make about your own people."

"It isn't a promise," Koss said. "It's a description."

* * *

I had one question left and I sat on it through the rest of the meal, turning it over, and in the end I didn't get to spend it.

Because he asked me one first.

"When did your brother say my name to you?" he said. "The first time. What day."

"Yesterday. In the car, on the way out west. He never said it before yesterday, he never once—"

I stopped, because his face had changed.

It was very small. A tightening at the corner of the mouth, and gone.

He folded his napkin and set it on the table and stood up.

"He said yours to me in October," said Andrei Koss.