Chapter 28: Unpaid
On the twenty-first I sat on the floor of my room with my phone and did the arithmetic.
Nine hundred and forty dollars.
That was the account after the pharmacy and the twenty I send my sister every fortnight for our father’s prescription.
Suspension without pay.
Mr. Foyle said it on Wednesday with genuine regret, like a man reading a weather forecast that affected him too.
He also said my accommodation was not affected at this time.
I heard the last four words of that sentence very clearly.
I could have gone to my sister in Milwaukee. Three hours on the bus, a couch, and a nine-year-old, and she would not have asked me one question.
I did that sum too. Bus, forty-two dollars. Rent, three hundred. Time until I worked again, unknown, because the reference I had earned in thirteen months now had a police report attached.
None of that was the reason I stayed.
The reason was that on the twentieth Ethan had a bad night and nobody wrote down when it started.
I heard it on the Monday, secondhand. The baby had been chesty in the night.
Chesty.
I asked what time. She did not know. I asked how long. She said a while.
That is the whole of my case for staying, and I have never had a better one.
For six months I had produced a document with a time of onset accurate to the minute. I slept eleven feet from his cot with a recorder on the shelf.
Now there was a gap in the record, and the gap was shaped like me.
You cannot see anything in a document with holes in it.
I did not yet know I was looking for a pattern. I only knew, the way a bookkeeper knows, that the run was broken.
So I stayed, and did the maths, and began to sell things.
I sold my bicycle for two hundred and twenty dollars to a man who came to the service gate and would not come in.
I sold my winter coat, which was a mistake I paid for in November.
I did not sell the recorder. Eighty-nine dollars in 2024, the only expensive thing I have ever bought myself.
It had spent three days in an evidence bag and come back with a sticker on it.
The police copied the foyer file and returned the device.
I want to be accurate about that. They returned it.
They did not take the other three hundred and eleven files off it. I still do not know whether that was procedure or inattention.
Three hundred and eleven files. Six months of a child’s nights.
Most of them are twenty minutes of nothing. A boiler. A truck on Lake Shore. A baby turning over.
Nineteen of them are not.
On the twenty-second I went to the bank, to test how far suspended staff may go.
The gate opened. Marco Ruiz raised two fingers off the desk, which was the most security had said to me in a week.
I asked for a printed statement and the woman printed six months of it because I asked wrong.
It cost nothing. I put it in my bag.
A bank statement has dates on it. That is how it became one of the four documents I had.
On the way back I stopped at the stationer’s on Clark.
A pad of A3 graph paper, eleven dollars and forty cents. A ruler. Four pens.
Eleven forty out of nine hundred and forty. I stood there working out whether I could justify it.
The library card had made my columns crooked, and crooked columns make you doubt yourself.
That is not a noble motive. It is stationery.
When I got back, Serena was on the drive with a man holding a folder, walking the line for the marquee.
She saw the bag. She looked at it for perhaps a second and a half.
“Doing something nice for yourself?” she said. Warmly. There were three witnesses.
I said it was paper.
“Good,” she said, and turned back to the man with the folder.
I went up fifty-two stairs and sat on the floor with the graph paper across my knees.
Here I record something I am not proud of, because this account is worth nothing if I tidy myself up.
I did not open the pad that night.
I lay on the bed with my shoes on and thought about the twelfth of October.
A child of fifteen months forgets a person in about six weeks.
I thought about Milwaukee.
At ten past two I woke for no reason, the way I had woken every night for thirteen months.
Two floors down, a child I was not permitted to touch after six was asleep with his left foot out of the blanket.
Mr. Blackwood had come back from Houston that afternoon.
I lay there and heard nothing, and thought: he is home tonight.
And then, with no drama at all, in the flat voice you use for a shopping list, some part of my brain said: he was away on the eleventh of March.