Chapter 4: What His Father Left Behind

He was awake before six. Hadn't needed an alarm clock since he was nineteen.

The apartment was dim. Early morning light coming in thin and grey through the kitchen window. He moved quietly. Made coffee. Stood at the counter. I looked at Dani's neat little pile of bank statements on the table. She had collected them. Squared the edges. Placed the final notice on top like the icing on a cake.

He took his coffee with him to his room.

The shoebox was under the bed. He already knew she'd put it back because Dani was the kind of person who put things back. So he knelt on the floor and pulled it out and put it on the bed beside him and looked at it.

It was just an ordinary shoebox. A brand he didn't recognize anymore because the label was worn away. His father had kept it under his bed for years. He'd found it two weeks after the funeral. He was going through the apartment with his mother. She was very precise and very silent about the whole process in the way she handled things she didn't want to fall apart over.

He'd taken the box without opening it in front of her.

There was a ledger inside. The kind you buy at the stationery store. Handwritten. Navy blue cover. Soft with handling. A photograph. Face down. And a letter from the lender. The original contract. Four years ago. Which meant his father had been carrying this for two years before he died. And Elijah had had it for two years since. And not once in all of that time had either of them said anything to the other.

He didn't open the ledger. He knew what was in it; he'd read it the first night, when the grief was still fresh enough that facts were easier to deal with than feelings, and he'd read enough of it to realize that his father had made a series of decisions that had probably seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, decisions that collectively created the picture of someone drowning slowly. He didn't need to read it again.

He didn't read the letter. He already knew the terms.

He handed over the photograph.

His father, when he was maybe forty. Younger than Elijah had ever known him, but also not so different from the face Elijah had grown up with in his mind. Same jawline, same gap in the front teeth, same posture, forward and slightly leaning, as if always on the verge of saying something. He was outside in the picture, in the sun, and laughing at something off to the side and out of the camera's view, and in the context of the moment, in the context of the picture, he was a man who had yet to find out what was coming.

None of them ever did. That was the thing.

Elijah's father had been a good man. This was a thing Elijah wanted to remember, to cling to when the anger rose up, and it did, the way anger did when it had nowhere to go. Elijah's father had been a good father in the ways he had been able to be a father. He had been a poor father in the ways he had been unable to ask for help. He had been a father who had made decisions in private and had those decisions have consequences in public. He had died before they had been able to sit down and talk about any of it. Elijah was on the floor in his bedroom in Brooklyn. He was holding a photograph. He was holding the sum total of all of the above. He was holding twelve thousand, four hundred and seventeen dollars and thirty-some hours and a business card from a man with grey eyes.

He placed the photo back in the box, face up.

He closed the box.

He placed it back under the bed.

He sat there for a moment on the floor, back against the bed frame, knees up, coffee growing cold in his hand. There was a crack in the wall across from him that had been there since he'd moved in. It was a hairline fracture in the plaster, something he'd meant to fix and hadn't gotten around to. He'd lived here two years. Before that, the apartment where his father's boxes had sat for six months before his lease expired. Before that, the place in Bushwick. You learned things about rooms without even trying: that crack, that window, where the light came from and when.

His phone was on the nightstand. Alexander Reed's card was beside it.

He picked his phone up. He looked at the number on the card for a moment. I really looked at it. The way you looked at something before you decided on it, giving it the weight it deserved.

He opened his phone and added the name and typed out a text.

This is Elijah Collins. I'm free this morning.

He placed his phone face down on the bed and headed for the kitchen to make fresh coffee.

When he came back into his bedroom, there was a reply.

Nine o'clock. Address below.

And then there was an address in Midtown that, when Elijah looked it up on his phone, turned out to be the ground floor of a building with its own Wikipedia page.

He stood there in his bedroom doorway, his coffee in hand, looking at the address for what seemed like a long time. Outside, the city was coming to life – the first buses, someone's music coming from the building across the street, the way the light was changing that told him the day was starting for real.

He thought about his father, laughing at something off camera, unaware.

He thought about the ledger, the long columns of a problem that had just grown bigger.

He thought about thirty-four hours, give or take.

He went to get dressed.