Chapter 6: Unit 14

I did not take the bus. After what Daniel had said about the grey Land Cruiser, I didn’t trust anything that ran on a schedule. Natalie paid for an Uber with her card and stood on the kerb outside the bank with her arms wrapped around herself, looking at me as if I were stepping onto a plane with a broken wing.

“You’re not going alone,” she said.

“Dad said alone.”

“Your dad also threw you out of the house, Amelia.”

“I know.” I held on to the car door. “But if he’s lying again, I would rather be the only one who gets hurt.”

“That’s not a thing you get to decide.”

“Natalie. Please go home and lock the door. I’ll call you the second I’m out.”

She hugged me hard enough to bruise my ribs. Then she let go, and I climbed into the back seat with the key burning a hole in my palm.

San Pedro was forty minutes south of Baldwin Hills. We took the 110 past the oil derricks and the long, tilted shipping cranes, and I watched the container stacks slide by, blue, red and rust-orange, thousands of steel boxes stacked to the sky with no one outside them knowing what they held.

Like me, I thought, and hated myself a little for thinking it.

The driver, a quiet man with a rosary swinging from his mirror, let me out behind a chain-link fence. A sign read HARBOR SELF-STORAGE — CLIMATE CONTROLLED — 24 HOUR ACCESS. An attendant sat in a glass booth scrolling on his phone. He didn’t look up when I held the brass key against the window. He only jerked his thumb toward the second row.

The air smelled of salt and diesel. Gulls screamed somewhere beyond the fence. I walked past door after door of dented orange metal, counting numbers under my breath, until I reached the one marked 14. The padlock was already hanging open on its hasp.

That frightened me more than a locked door would have. I stood there for a long moment with my heart knocking against my ribs. Then I told myself that Dad had been here recently, that he’d forgotten to lock it, that he was a nervous man in a hurry. I pushed the door up and it rattled all the way to the ceiling.

Inside it was small and cold. A single bulb hung from a cord, and I tugged the string. The light was yellow and weak.

A grey filing cabinet. A folding chair. Three cardboard boxes taped shut. Nothing else.

I had expected more. I could not have said what. Maybe I had expected a ghost.

I opened the first box. It held ordinary things, the kind of papers a family keeps without ever deciding to: tax returns held together with rusty clips, my parents’ wedding photographs, a christening gown, a baby blanket gone soft and pink with age. I lifted the blanket and held it against my face. It smelled of cedar and dust and something sweeter underneath, like talcum powder.

Was this mine? Or had it belonged to the daughter who never opened her Eyes? I thought but for a moment, and put it down very carefully then opened the second box.

On top lay a folded newspaper, brown at the creases. The Los Angeles Times, October 12, twenty-two years old. A short article had been circled in red ink, pressed so hard the pen had nearly gone through the page.

BEL AIR COUPLE MOURNS LOSS OF NEWBORN DAUGHTER.

I read it standing up, and then I read it again sitting down on the folding chair.

The names had been withheld “at the family’s request.” The baby girl had been born at St. Anne’s hospital on October 11 and had “passed away within hours of complications.” A hospital spokesperson had “extended the institution’s deepest sympathies to the family during this difficult time.”

October 11.

It was the same date as the cracked plastic bracelet in Grace’s tissue paper. It was also my birthday. Every year, Mum had baked my cake herself, even the year I had chickenpox, even the year Dad forgot. Even then, she’d say, and press a kiss to my hair. I had never for once, wondered why she cried a little when she lit the candles.

Beneath the newspaper were more papers: bank statements, receipts, a small notebook with my father’s neat handwriting. I flipped through it. Dates, and amounts, and one initial, over and over. B. The most recent entries were only weeks old. He had been paying someone, in cash and in installments, for a very long time. I counted the entries with my finger, forty, fifty, more, until the numbers stopped meaning anything. He had worked weekends for years. I had thought it was ambition. I had resented the empty chair at dinner, and all that time he’d been quietly bleeding himself dry to keep a secret I’d never known I was part of.

Then my fingers found the heavy manila folder at the bottom of the box, and inside it, a single sheet torn from a ledger.

The page was brittle and yellow. Columns had been ruled by hand, and the entries were scrawled in blue ballpoint. I ran my finger down the date until I found October 11.

3:42 a.m. — Baby girl — Rm 412.

The mother’s name had been blacked out with a marker, thick and angry, over and over, until the nib had torn the paper. Beneath the blackout, in a different pen, someone had written one word.

“Moved”.

Stapled to the corner was a business card, its edges soft as cloth.

PETERSON WATSON, M.D. Chief of OBSTETRICS, St. Anne’s HOSPITAL. 

And paper-clipped behind it, the photocopy of a cheque stub. $40,000. Paid to the order of P. Watson. The signature was my father’s, young and bold, from a year when he’d had a mortgage and a pregnant wife and nothing in the bank.

I sat very still. Forty thousand dollars. I knew what he had earned back then, because he had never let us forget it.

He bought me, I thought. He paid for me like a used car.

Something small slid out of the folder and landed in my lap with a tiny click. A silver USB drive. A strip of masking tape wrapped around it, and on the tape, in my father’s block capitals:

IF SOMETHING HAPPENS TO ME.

My hands shook so badly that I dropped it. I scrambled on the concrete to pick it up and closed my fist around it, and that was when I realised the sunlight had changed.

A moment ago the doorway had been a bright rectangle, full of gulls and sky. Now it was narrowing. A strip. A band. A thin bar of white along the floor.

Somebody was pulling the door down.

“Hello?” My voice cracked. “I’m in here! Hello!”

The door struck the concrete with a boom that I felt in my teeth. The bulb swung, flickered, and went out.

The dark was complete. I pressed my back to the filing cabinet and held my breath, clutching the drive until the edges bit into my skin. Somewhere in the blackness, a shoe scraped. A breath that was not mine moved through the cold.

Then a voice spoke, low and ca

lm and horribly familiar.

“Hello, Amelia.”