Numbered Account by Christopher Reich Read Free Book Online Page A

He had come in a spirit of reconciliation. He would see her buried. He would forgive her her lapses as a parent and as a self-respecting adult — if only to gild his tarnished memory of her.
    His childhood had been a record of sudden disappointments, his father’s death being the first and of course the greatest. But others had followed, their arrival as regular as the change of seasons. Nick recalled them all — low points of a peripatetic adolescence flickering through his mind like an old, scratched film. His mother’s remarriage to a larcenous real-estate developer; his stepfather’s frittering away the insurance settlement, but not before delivering the family a financial coup de grace — losing Alex Neumann’s dream house at 805 Alpine Drive to repay a litigious investor; the Haitian divorce that followed.
    Then came the “Fall”: a downward spiral through the curdled underside of southern California: Redondo Beach, El Segundo, Hawthorne. Another marriage came and went, this one briefer, less expensive — by then there was nothing left to split, settle, or divide. And finally, mercifully, at seventeen, the split from his mother. His own “new beginning.”
    The day after the funeral, Nick drove downtown to a storage facility his mother had filled with reminders of her past. It was a grim task, sorting through her affairs. Box after box filled with souvenirs of a mundane and failed existence. A chipped piece of china he recognized as his grandmother’s gift to the newlyweds; a manila envelope stuffed with grade cards from elementary school; and a box of record albums containing such gems as
Burl Ives’ Christmas Favorites, Dean Martin Loves Somebody
, and
Von Karajan Conducts Beethoven —
the scratched soundtrack of his early childhood.
    At day’s end, Nick came upon two sturdy cartons well sealed with brown electrical tape and marked “A. Neumann. USB — L.A.” Inside were his father’s effects taken from his office in Los Angeles days after his death: a few paperweights, a Rolodex, a calendar showing scenes of Switzerland, and two calfskin agendas for the years 1978 and 1979. Half the agendas’ pages were stained a muddy brown, swollen with the Mississippi floodwater that on two occasions had risen high inside the corrugated tin shed. But half were unharmed. And his father’s looping script was easily legible almost twenty years after he had written it.
    Nick stared, transfixed, at the agendas. He opened a cover and skimmed through the entries. Nervous energy coursed through his body like a weak current. Hands that had mastered the buck of a sawed-off twelve gauge trembled like a schoolboy’s at his first communion. And for one quicksilver flash, his father was alive again, holding him on his lap in the downstairs study while a fire burned in the grate and a November rain pelted the windows. Nick had been crying, as he often did after hearing his parents argue, and father had taken his son aside to console him. Nick laid his head on his father’s chest and, hearing the heart beating too fast, knew that his father was also upset. His father hugged him tightly and caressed his hair. “Nicholas,” he said, his voice barely a whisper, “promise me that you’ll remember me all of your life.”
    Nick stood motionless in the dank shed. The words echoed in his ears and for a second longer he swore he was staring into those cold blue eyes. He blinked, and the apparition, if it had been one, faded.
    Once, that memory had been an important component of his daily life. For a year after his father’s death, he had replayed it endlessly, hour after hour, day after day, trying to assign some deeper meaning to the words. Tortured by his futile curiosity, he had arrived at the conclusion that his father had been asking for his help, and that somehow he had failed him and was thus himself responsible for his murder. Sometime in his teens, the memory had faded and he had forgotten it. But he never quite