THE PLATE ON THE FLOOR
THE PLATE ON THE FLOOR
Chapter 4 — My Brother's Shadow
CHAPTER 4 — My Brother's Shadow
I did not sleep that night.
I sat at my mother's kitchen table with Danny's old phone in my hand and a mug of coffee I never drank, and I did what anybody in my family would have done.
I scrolled through everything.
There were only eleven contacts saved in that phone.
Nine of them were people I knew.
One was a pizza place in Bay Ridge that had been closed for six years.
And one was Carla.
No last name, no address, nothing to tell me who she was.
But there was a text thread, and it was short.
Danny had written, "I need you to keep the door locked.
If he comes around, don't answer.
I'll figure this out."
And Carla had written back, just three words.
"He already knows."
That was the last message in the thread.
Danny disappeared nine days later.
I read those words maybe thirty times.
I still did not know what they meant, but I knew they were not about a family dinner.
In the morning I called in sick to work, which I almost never do, and I drove back to the building on Staten Island.
Mrs. Karpov's daughter was there, which was lucky, because it meant I could stand in the lobby and watch the mail arrive without anyone asking why I was not upstairs taking a blood pressure.
I watched the mailman put a stack of envelopes into the box for 4C.
The top envelope had the name CARLA on it.
The envelope underneath it had a different name, a name I did not recognize, but the address was the same, and it was addressed to a law office.
I wrote the name on the back of my hand with the pen from my purse, the way you write down something you are not supposed to see.
Then I went back upstairs to Mrs. Karpov and did my job and smiled at her, and I did not mention any of it, because she was ninety-two and she did not need my problems.
That night I went to my mother's house again.
This time she was awake.
She was sitting in her chair with the television on low, and she looked at me the way mothers do when they already know their child is about to ask them something they have spent years trying to forget.
"Nina," she said.
"Sit down."
I sat down.
"Who is Carla?"
I asked.
My mother did not answer right away.
She picked up her tea and put it down again and pressed her lips together.
"She was a girl Danny knew," she said.
"A long time ago."
"Was she his girlfriend?"
"She was something," my mother said.
"I never met her.
I only know that after he started seeing her, he started coming home with cash he wouldn't explain, and he'd disappear for days, and when I asked him what he was doing, he told me not to worry about it."
"And then he vanished," I said.
"And then he vanished," she said.
"And you never told me any of this."
"What good would it have done?" she asked me.
"What good would it have done for you to know your brother was mixed up with someone you could not help?"
I stood up.
I walked out of her living room and I stood in the hallway outside her bedroom because that was where I could still think.
I pulled up the law office name from my hand and I looked it up on my phone.
It was a firm in Manhattan.
One of their practice areas was listed on their website: criminal defense.
I called the number, even though it was almost ten o'clock at night, and of course no one answered, but there was a voicemail, and I left a message with my number and my name and I said I was calling about a client named Carla.
Then I put my phone down and I looked around my mother's hallway, at the framed photographs of me and Danny when we were kids, and I realized I had been wrong about something.
I had spent five years believing that Danny abandoned us.
But the last call he ever made on that phone was to a woman he told to lock her door, and he wrote that she should not answer if a man came around.
He was not running away from us.
He was hiding from someone who already knew where he was.
I went back into the living room and I stood in front of my mother.
"Mom," I said.
"Did Danny ever mention a man named Victor?"
My mother's face changed.
It was a small change, just the mouth, just the eyes.
But I have been a nurse for twelve years, and I have seen that same look on the faces of people who are trying not to say something.
"Where did you hear that name?" she asked.
"I heard it in a hallway," I said.
"Where?"
"In Staten Island," I said.
"There's a little girl in that building who is not allowed to eat at the table."
My mother put her hands in her lap.
"Then you should leave it alone," she said.
"Nina, if Danny wanted us to know, he would have told us."
"Somebody has to find him," I said.
"And it is not going to be you," she said.
"It is going to be me," I said.
"Because I am the one who saw her."
My mother did not say another word to me that night.
I drove home, and I sat in my car outside my apartment, and I made a decision.
The next morning I would go back to that building, and this time I would not stand in the hallway.
This time I would knock on the door of 4C.
I would not do it as a nurse.
I would not do it as a neighbor.
I would do it as the sister of Danny Reyes, who was last seen five years ago after a phone call to a woman named Carla.
I had no plan.
I had no proof.
I had a dead phone and an old message and the look on my mother's face.
But I knew one thing.
Whoever that man Victor was, he had said my brother's name out loud, and he had said it like a warning.
Warnings only work on people who are afraid.
May you like
And I had stopped being afraid the moment I saw that little girl eating her rice on the floor.
Chapter 4 of 8
