At the end I asked: what do I need to do to support the investigation?
She told me. I took notes.
My father called twelve times in the three hours after the creditor contacted him. Kayla sent messages through a mutual friend. My mother appeared in my lobby on a Wednesday evening, stood in my hallway, and said the things I expected her to say: family first, Kayla had made mistakes, my father wasn’t sleeping, there were options that didn’t have to end the way things were going.
She said it with genuine distress. I want to be accurate about that. She was not performing. She was frightened. And somewhere inside the fear, I believe, there was something that deserved to be called love. The particular love of a person who cannot imagine choosing between her children, and so has, without quite admitting it, already chosen.
I waited until she finished.
Then I asked: how long have you known?
Her hands moved. Not toward anyone. Just moved, the way hands move when the person they belong to is trying to find the right shape for what they’re about to say.
She looked at me.
“Two years ago,” she said. “When I found out about the refinancing, I knew it wasn’t right. I told myself it wasn’t that serious. I told myself she was going to pay it back.”
She stopped.
“I should have told you. I’m sorry.”
I believed her. I want to be precise about that because it matters. I believed the sorry was real.
It did not change anything.
“I need you to leave,” I said.
She cried in the hallway after the door closed. I stood on my side and listened until it stopped, then listened to her footsteps going down the hall, then the elevator. Then the building was quiet.
I walked to the living room, sat down on the couch, and breathed.
Day seven.
My building’s intercom buzzed at a time I was not expecting it. I called the desk. Jerome, the attendant who worked Mondays and Thursdays, described the people in the lobby.
An older man. An older woman. A younger woman who had been crying, and a man holding her arm. An older woman at the edge of the group who had said she was there to help.
Five people.
All of them mine.
I said: send them up.
I opened the door before they knocked.
They were standing in the hallway the way people stand when they have arrived somewhere together and are not entirely certain they should have: Kayla at the front, her husband Derek just behind her, my father to the left, my mother behind him, and Aunt Patricia at the margin the way people stand when they have come to help and are beginning to regret it.
