Page 53 of What You left in Me

“Hello, little bird.”

The way he says it is a greasy thumbprint left on glass. He doesn’t aim it at me. He’s looking at Mom.

My mother goes perfectly still, and in that stillness I recognize something I haven’t seen since the weeks after my father’s funeral—the way fear taught her to become a statue. She dyed her hair then, from warm brown to ice blonde. Changed her wardrobe to hard lines and high collars. Tossed the house and her perfume and the kitchen towels as if grief lived in fabric. We packed our lives into boxes and fled a state like it was a house fire. I told myself she was being sensible. I told myself it was about “a fresh start.” Now, I know what I knew even then but refused to acknowledge. She was hiding.

“You’ve got the wrong room,” I say, voice steady, body not. “Cardiology is left, radiology is down, and the gift shop sells gum that tastes like lies.”

He smiles at me like I’m a puppy barking at a truck. “Funny.”

Then he steps into my mother’s space as if he owns the rent and the deed. His hand comes up fast, fingertips grimy, a tattoo of a toothpick-thin cross pressed into the web of his thumb and takes Mom’s chin like he’s testing the hinge of her jaw. He tips her face back and forth, admiring his find.

“There you are,” he says softly, almost pleased. “Where had you been hiding, little bird?”

“Let her go,” I say, and I move before I can think not to, catching his wrist, heat and grit and a pulse that moves like an argument under my fingers. “Now.”

He lifts his gaze to me, inch by inch, as if I’m a short sentence he’s decided to read twice. Up close his eyes are the washed-out color of pool water in winter, all the fun gone. “You look like him,” he says, and it feels like he’s flicked a cigarette butt at my shoes. “Same mouth. Same temper.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I tell him.

“No?” he says. “Your eyes do.”

I squeeze his wrist, not hard enough to be brave, just hard enough to be stupid. “Let. Her. Go.”

He releases my mother’s chin with a small flourish, the way a magician reveals the coin was never behind your ear, just inside his palm the whole time. He turns the hand I’m holding so his fingers can settle, almost politely, around my wrist in return. His grip is not tight. It doesn’t have to be. The threat sits in it like a favorite knife.

“You know how much that bastard owed me?” he asks conversationally, as if we are discussing parking. His breath smells like mint trying to cover rot. “You know how muchyourbastard owed when his heart decided to take a walk without him?”

My father’s heart didn’t take a walk. It stopped in a bathroom with the fan running and the water scalding and a towel under the door, and I am fourteen again, standing outside it with my ear pressed to the wood, counting the seconds between what I hear and what I don’t.

“Let’s not do this here,” I say, because the room is spinning and a nurse is pushing a cart past us, studiously looking anywhere but here, and Eleanor’s hand has moved to the sheet, fist clenched so hard the IV tape puckers.

He laughs, a low ugly sound that belongs in alleys. “Here’s just fine. After all, I traveled for this reunion. Would’ve sent a postcard, but you two were very hard to find.” He glances at my mother, letting go of me so he can wag a chastising finger. “Ran right after the funeral. New zip code, new hair, new face. Very tidy. Almost like you were afraid.”

Eleanor says nothing. Her eyes are glassy and huge. The pulse in her throat is a small pounding bird.

“What do you want,” I say, not a question.

“An apology,” he suggests, delighted with himself. “Oh, and my fuckin’ money.”

“You got paid,” Eleanor says, voice piercing enough to cut the air between us. The queen is back; she is shaky, but she is here. “You got paid plenty.”

He tilts his head, smile widening. “For the goods, sure. Not for the loans. Not for the courtesy. Your late lamented had expensive tastes and a talent for falling behind. I’m a businessman. I kept him supplied. I floated him when he promised the world on Monday and showed up with lint on Friday. I was very patient.” He leans closer, hands on his knees, like he’s squatting to speak to a child. “And then, poof… dead, and my little nest egg flies the coop.”

“We had nothing,” Eleanor says. “We sold the house to pay the…” She stops, like she has walked too close to a cliff and seen the drop.

“What?” His eyebrows lift. “The respectable debts? The ones you sign at a desk with a pen that works?”

“You are not getting another cent,” I say. “Leave.”

“Another cent,” he repeats, tasting the words. “This is why I like you already. You make it sound like we had a first cent. We didn’t. So, I’ll takeallthe cents you’ve been saving up.”

He straightens, the humor draining out, the hunger showing. “See, I lost track of you. For years. Bad luck. New names. Pretty dye job, by the way, Mrs. Vale. Oh sorry, Mrs. Wagner. But then,” he spreads his hands, a showman bowing to his audience, “then life provides. I’m flipping channels and there you are on the local news, screaming your head off on a hospital curb. Big man goes down, heart trouble, every camera in the county shows up, and look who’s grieving in the background.My little bird, right there in pearls and designer wear. The name banner did the rest.”

The heat leaves my face all at once. Finn’s father. The sidewalk. Eleanor shouting at a nurse to move the barricade. Me holding her elbow. The way the world narrowed to two syllables:please, please.We were on TV. Of course we were on TV. And of course a man like this watches the news like it’s a shopping channel.

“You followed us here,” I say.

“I came to collect,” he says simply. “With interest. And not the boring kind.”