My Father Sold Me to the Man This City Fears · Nadia Voss

Chapter 3: Sixty-Eight Cents

I went to see my father on Saturday.

I took the car and I let the man follow me, and I called ahead so he couldn't run, and I sat in the kitchen I grew up in while he stood by the sink and did not offer me anything.

He looked terrible. That was the first surprise. My father is a man who has stayed handsome through two bankruptcies and a divorce, and in four days he had gone grey around the mouth.

"You have to come home," he said.

"Which part of Thursday night do you think entitles you to that sentence?"

"Clara—"

"Four hundred people, Dad." My voice didn't shake, which was a small private triumph. "You looked past Cecily. You looked past everyone. It took you about one second."

"Because he'd have taken you anyway!" He turned around, and there it was — the flash of the real thing, the panic under the charm. "You don't understand what he is. You've been in that house four days, has he been charming? Has he been reasonable? That's how it works. Vera thought he was—"

He stopped.

The refrigerator hummed. Outside, a neighbour's mower started up.

"Say the rest," I said.

"Nothing. Nothing, I'm not doing this."

"You said Vera thought he was. Thought he was what?"

"He was twenty-two years old and she treated him like a son and he stood in that doorway and did nothing." My father's hands were shaking. "That's what he is. Whatever he's telling you, whatever he's got on that desk of his—"

I hadn't told anyone about the desk.

I hadn't told one living person about the photograph in the steel frame, not Cecily, not Danuta, nobody.

And my father, standing at his own sink in a house I grew up in, had just told me he knew what was on it.

Something went through me that was not fear, exactly. It was more like a floor giving way somewhere far below, in a part of the house you never go into.

"How do you know what's on his desk," I said.

My father's face did a thing I have never seen it do. It emptied.

"Get out," he said.

"Dad—"

"Get out of my house, Clara."

I got as far as the hallway. And then, because I am my mother's daughter and because I have been the good, quiet, easy one for seventeen years, I turned around and asked the only question that had ever mattered.

"Why did you honk twice?"

He stood in the kitchen doorway.

"What?"

"That night. You honked twice, two short taps, the way you always did. But I was already in the car, Dad. You told me I was asleep in the car the whole time." I heard my own voice go strange and flat. "So who were you calling out to?"

He didn't answer.

I sat in my car outside my childhood home for eleven minutes and did not manage to start it, and the thing I kept seeing, over and over, was a dish of coins on a counter.

Sixty-eight cents.

I had counted them. You cannot count coins from the back seat of a car.

* * *

Danuta was waiting in the courtyard when I got back, which meant somebody had called ahead.

"He's in the office," she said. "Miss — before you go in. There's a man been at the gate twice today asking for you by name. Not police. Not one of ours."

"What did he look like?"

"Sixty. Heavy. Grey hair cut very short." She hesitated. "He asked for you as Vera's girl."

* * *

Sokolov was at the desk with three phones in front of him and the laptop open, and when I came in he closed it, and stood up, and did not say a single thing about where I'd been.

"I counted sixty-eight cents in a dish," I said. "On a counter, in a laundry, seventeen years ago. I've been able to see that dish my whole life and I've never known why."

He went very still.

"You were at the counter," he said.

"I was at the counter." My legs went and I sat down on the arm of a chair. "Which means I wasn't in the car. Which means every sentence my father has said to me since I was nine years old is a lie, and he's said them in the same order every time, and I think he rehearsed them—"

"Clara."

"Don't tell me to breathe."

"I wasn't going to. I was going to say your mother had a red chair for you," he said. "Behind the counter, out of the way of the drums. Plastic. It had a crack in one arm and she taped it, badly."

I put my hand over my mouth.

"I sat in it," I said, through my fingers. "It scratched."

"Yes."

"There was hot linen. And the machine was going. And she was talking to somebody in the back office and I wasn't supposed to hear, and I was counting the coins because she'd told me to count the coins—"

I stopped, because that was where the wall came down. It has always come down at exactly the same place, and it came down that afternoon in a stranger's office and I heard myself make a noise I hate.

He didn't touch me. He crouched down in front of the chair with his forearms on his knees so that he'd be lower than me, and he waited.

"There were two men in the back office," I said at last. "Weren't there."

"I don't know," Ilya said. "I've had seventeen years to want to tell you what to remember, and I've never let myself build it, because a memory somebody hands you isn't worth anything in a room with a jury and it isn't worth anything to you."

"And if I remember two?"

"Then one of them is in Panama," he said, "and one of them honked twice."

* * *

The man at the gate came back at six.

I watched him on the monitor in the hall: sixty, heavy, grey hair cut very short, standing in the road with his hands loose at his sides where the cameras could see them. He looked exactly like what he was.

He held up a badge to the intercom, and then a card, and then — when nobody answered — a photograph.

It was a picture of a woman in a green coat outside a shop with a bell over the door.

The intercom crackled.

"Miss Ward," he said, "my name's Ray Okafor, I'm with the U.S. Attorney's office, and I've been looking for you since you were nine years old." A pause. "Before you decide whether to open this gate, you should know one thing. He's told you the file's sealed. It isn't anymore. It was unsealed on Tuesday morning."

Behind me, at the end of the hall, I heard Ilya's office door open.

"And you should ask him," Okafor said, "why the first person notified was him."