Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 926 & 927, November/December 2018

Open House by Reed Johnson

Reed Johnson has a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literature and teaches expository writing at Harvard University. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Meridian, New England Review, Narrative, and The New Yorker online. His noir mystery novel in progress, set in St. Petersburg, Russia, came second for the 2015 James Jones First Novel Fellowship.

Today her father’s name is Ismail, and he will be second cousin to a Saudi prince. Her name, the one she picked out for herself earlier that morning at the breakfast table as they read over the real-estate circulars, is Scheherazade. She likes the sound it makes. Her real name is Nino, plain Nino, and she is twelve years old, dark-haired, and wears flecked nail polish and low-top canvas sneakers that she’s decorated with a blue ballpoint pen.

The two of them, father and daughter, are on their way to an open house across town. It’s the first Saturday in March, the weather warm for Massachusetts, and the sun dazzles through the leafless trees. The smell of wet grass and pavement warms the air, and overhead, swallows fly by them, their wings making the sound of cards being shuffled.

“This one,” her father says, stopping on the sidewalk.

The house, a brick-fronted federal with a three-car garage, is flanked by ornamental shrubs that are bound up in burlap for the winter. Two balloons are tethered to the For Sale sign out front, bumping and twirling in the spring breeze. As they turn up the walk, Nino’s father seems for a moment to consider taking her hand, then doesn’t. He’s been more tentative than usual with her lately, more uncertain of her likes and dislikes. He only sees her on the weekends, and then not all of them, and she’s grown this year like a time-lapse seedling before his eyes. The days she is with him seem to be a source of both anticipation and anxiety for him. Each Saturday morning, he worries the events section of the local paper like a Talmudic scholar, looking for activities to pass the time with her, various fun things they can do together without spending any money, and this gives their time together a certain desperation, as if their only goal is to avoid becoming washed up on the shoals of late afternoon with the two of them sitting on the couch in his efficiency apartment, looking at each other with panicked blankness. It’s not that father and daughter have nothing to say to each other. But these exchanges, when they occur, tend to have an excruciating artificiality, like the questioning of a prisoner by an awkward and unwilling interrogator. Fun activities are better; on this they are both agreed.

Inside the house, father and daughter are greeted by the real-estate agent, a large woman with black curly hair who wears a necklace made of flat gold links fitted together like vertebrae. She chats brightly as she shows them through the rooms — the sweep of living room, the Italian marble countertops of the kitchen, the “solahrium” — and Nino’s father casually manages to drop a word or two about his cousins, the Saudi royals, with a sly look in Nino’s direction. In actual fact, he’s from outside Tbilisi, capital of the Republic of Georgia, and most of his relatives are farmers and shopkeepers. But something about him makes the story believable: his accent, maybe, the soft-spoken schoolbook English he speaks, or the suit and tie he’s wearing, his dark hair and skin and eyes, which are cupped in mournful circles. He emanates quiet respectability. He’s in the market for a house, he tells the agent, where he can stay when he’s visiting his daughter, Scheherazade, who will be attending a private school in Boston in the fall.

“Wonderful,” the agent says, then turns to Nino. “Which school is it?”

Nino stares at her for a second or two, her mind empty.

“Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters,” she says at last.

The agent makes an impressed sound. Which means she must never have had stepbrothers who kept her supplied with X-Men comic books, as Nino does, otherwise she’d know that Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters is an institution for mutant superheroes. Nino feels pleased with her little lie. It gives her a guilty feeling of superiority, the thought that she is smarter for having deceived an adult.

But it’s not deception, her father would tell her. It’s pretending. Nobody is hurt by make-believe. He makes it seem like a lark, like they are going to these open houses for free entertainment, but Nino understands that they fill some deeper need in him. Back in Tbilisi, before she was born, before he and her mother came to the U.S., he was a cardiologist, a respected man, someone to whom patients came for advice and treatment. Here, he works weekday nights as a home nurse for an elderly Dominican woman named Elvira, whose son pays him in cash and doesn’t ask for a Social Security number. All week long he attends to her wants and needs, and when the weekend comes, he wants someone to attend to his. He likes being courted by the real-estate agents, enjoys their hovering attentions.

The real-estate agent excuses herself to go and greet a young couple who have just come inside. Nino heads for the refreshment table, always the best part of these open houses. She peels back the cling wrap tented over the food trays and eyes the block of marble-veined blue cheese and browning apple slices. She helps herself to a gherkin. Her hunger has lately become bottomless. As she eats, she’s listening to the conversation across the room between the agent and the young couple. The wife, mishearing the agent, wants to know what a Finnish basement is. Does it have a sauna? The man interrupts to ask about a sump pump. Nino doesn’t know what a sump pump is, but she likes the sound of it. She tries it out in her mouth: sump pump, sump pump. One of those mechanical objects whose name is also the sound it makes while operating. What are some others? She’s concentrating on coming up with more, and so she doesn’t hear the lull in the conversation across the room, and that the real-estate agent is now addressing her. She wants to know if Nino and her father have signed the guest book. Nino looks around. Her father is nowhere in sight.

“Not yet,” Nino answers, spotting the guest book on the table. She sticks a wedge of apple she’s holding into her mouth — it’s too big, and hurts the roof of her mouth when she bites down — and signs their made-up names in the book. Over the column marked Address, she pauses, pen hovering, then writes down the first address that comes into her mind, which is her father’s. Where is he, anyway? She ducks into the living room. The husband of the couple is inspecting a closet. “Hollow-core doors,” he says to himself, rapping on it with his knuckles in the confident manner of a male evaluating something outside his area of expertise.

Nino grabs another apple slice from the tray on her way through the dining room, then wanders upstairs to look for her father. She has this habit that she can’t help, this way of moving soundlessly from one place to another. If she had any superpower, it would be this — the ability to creep up on people in total silence. It makes adults nervous. Shane, her stepfather, calls it skulking. But she doesn’t mean to; it’s just the way that she moves.

She finds her father in the master bedroom. He’s standing in front of the mirror over the room’s dresser.

“Hi,” she says.

Her father jumps in surprise at her voice. There’s a strange expression on his face, a flushing of his cheeks, as if she’s caught him doing something he shouldn’t be.

He opens his mouth to say something, but at this moment the real-estate agent comes into the room, out of breath from the stairs.

“Here you are,” she says. “Have you seen the his-and-hers sinks?”

The following afternoon, Nino is sitting in her father’s galley kitchen and reading a Piers Anthony novel, her socked feet propped up on the hot radiator, when the doorbell rings. “Door,” she says.

“What?” her father calls from the bathroom.

“Nothing, I’ll get it,” she says, getting up from her chair and unfastening the door chain. Standing in the spring sunshine outside are two police officers. One is an older white man with a graying moustache and heavy jowls, the other is a small and smooth-faced Latina with her hair pulled back into a bun.

“Is Mr. Gelashvili in?” the woman asks.

“He’s in the bathroom,” Nino says.

“Are you his daughter?” the older man asks her.

Nino nods. And, because she doesn’t know what else to do, and because the outside air is cold against her ankles, she opens the door wider and silently stands aside to let them in. The two officers stand awkwardly in the tiny kitchen, their boots leaking puddles on the yellowing linoleum, their jackets brushing against each other with a rustling sound.

“Did you say something, Nanuka?” her father calls from the hallway. He comes into the kitchen with shaving cream on his neck and stops short in the doorway.

“Can I help you?” he says to the officers.

“Mr. Gelashvili? Were you at an open house the other day?”

Her father doesn’t move from the doorway. “Why?”

The woman officer explains. There was a theft during the open house. Some valuable personal items, including heirloom jewelry, were taken from the owners’ bedroom during the day. The police are questioning everyone who was at the event. “We have a search warrant for your home,” she says, unfolding a piece of paper and putting it on the counter.

“You are searching everyone’s home?” her father asks.

The two officers shift uncomfortably.

“Mr. Gelashvili, would you mind telling us what you were doing at the open house?” the older officer says, looking around the kitchen, taking it all in: the ancient refrigerator chugging to itself in the corner, the contact paper on the countertops, the water stains on the ceiling. “Are you in the market for an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar home?”

“I’m studying for my real-estate license,” he says.

“Then would you care to explain why you are in the guest book under a false name?”

Her father stares at the woman for a moment before speaking. His face is pale. Nino can tell he’s afraid of the officers. Back in the Soviet Union you were afraid of the police, he’s told her. But not here. Americans are honest people. This is why he left Tbilisi and came to this country.

“It was a game,” he says, and then, when this seems insufficient, he tries to explain their Saturday-morning tradition. His voice is shaky, and nervousness makes his accent stronger. The story comes out sounding absurd; even her father seems to hear how improbable it all sounds, and his voice grows fainter and more halting. A police radio suddenly burbles, something about a child reported missing but now found. The older officer unclips the radio from his belt, still looking at her father, and turns down the volume. After a moment, the woman speaks.

“Mr. Gelashvili, have you been in touch with ICE?” she says. “Your visa expired some time ago.”

Her father sags against the doorframe. “I am currently working with an immigration lawyer,” he says in a voice that sounds as though he is reciting the words from an index card. “You may contact the offices of S. Ramachandran in Somerville, Massachusetts.”

“Okay,” the older officer says. “We’re going to have to conduct a search. And get a record of your prints.”

“The Saudi prince was a joke,” her father says, visibly floundering. He looks to Nino, who is still standing near the outside door, for help.

“Your fingerprints,” she says, in a voice hardly above a whisper.

The woman, Officer Laramie, tells her father to take a seat. When he does, she sets a briefcase on the kitchen table and takes out a photocopied form and an ink pad. The older officer snaps on a pair of blue latex gloves and starts opening cupboards and drawers. Her father watches him as Officer Laramie takes his hand and moves it from ink pad to paper and back again, one finger at a time, as if he were a child. He does not resist. When all fingers have been inked, he stares at the record of them on the paper with seeming disbelief, as if these marks could not have been made by his hands. He looks up at the officer.

“If the names in the book were false,” he says, “then how did you know who I am? How did you know where I live?”

The policewoman puts the sheet of paper in the briefcase, then snaps the ink pad shut. “You wrote your address in the book,” she says.

Nino, hovering uncertainly near the door, makes a sound in her throat. Her father looks up at her.

“Nanuka, go home,” he says. “Go to your mother’s.” He turns to the police officer. “Can she?”

The officer waves to show she has no objection.

“Don’t say anything to your mother, she will worry,” her father says to her. “Everything will be all right. This is nothing,” he says, waving his hand to show how little it all means.

Nino puts on her coat and boots. She looks back in the kitchen before she steps outside. The officer in the latex gloves is digging through the kitchen trash, while her father sits in his chair with his eyes closed. He’s touched his forehead and left a smudged fingerprint above his left eyebrow, as if a gray moth has settled lightly onto his forehead without him noticing.

“You’re home early,” Shane, her stepfather, says from the couch when she comes in from riding her bike home. He’s got a towel around his shoulders and his dark hair is spiky from the shower.

“Yes,” she says, unwinding the scarf from around her neck and taking off her jacket.

Shane tosses the running magazine he’s reading onto the coffee table.

“How’s your father?”

“Good,” Nino says. Shane always asks her this when she gets home, and her answer is always the same. She knows he’s only asking because he doesn’t really care that much. Her father rarely asks anything about Shane — the name sounds like “Shame” when he says it — because he actually does care. Shane married her mother when Nino was six, which is how her mother got herself legalized in the U.S. Shane is the owner of three mall stores that sell nothing but vitamins, and drives a white Lincoln Navigator with “The Vitamax Emporium” stenciled on the back window. In her conversations with her father, she tries never to mention Shane, but then she worries that he might notice that she never mentions her stepfather and decide that she is protecting his feelings by never bringing him up, which could then make her father think that she actually believes that he has something to feel bad about in regard to Shane, which he doesn’t.

“Your mother’s out shopping for dinner,” he says. He stands up and cracks his back. He turns and sees her in the hallway, standing frozen at the door, and notices for the first time the look of distress on her face.

“Everything okay?” She looks at him, a feeling of panic hollowing her stomach. She wants to tell someone what she’s done, but can’t bring herself to open her mouth. He’s good to her, Shane is, and even loves her in his Shane way, but he isn’t her father.

“Yes,” she says.

“Where are you going now?” he says, when he sees her putting on her coat again. “You just got in.”

“Something I forgot to do,” she says, and goes out.

But she doesn’t go to her father’s house. Instead, she cuts through the park and heads toward the west end of town, where the open house was the previous day. She’s going there because she already knows that her father took the things from the bureau in the upstairs bedroom. She also understands why he did it. She knows that he needs money to pay his debt to the immigration lawyer. He needs money to pay her child support to Shane and her mother, even though they told him it was okay if things were tight, they could wait. No, it was a matter of pride for him. Better to take something from someone wealthy, who didn’t need the money. He didn’t think he would get caught.

And maybe he wouldn’t have, if she hadn’t put down his address in the guest book.

Outside the house, a group of boys is playing street hockey with a tennis ball. They pause to let a car pass by, then resume their game, not paying her any attention. The sun is setting through the trees, casting long shadows across the lawns, which are spongy and still matted down from last week’s snow. She goes up the walk. Lights are on inside. She hesitates for a few seconds, then rings the bell.

The door is answered by a woman. She’s trim, late forties, maybe, with variegated blond hair. “Yes?” she says, looking down at Nino with surprise. Nino’s legs are shaking, and her voice breaks as she starts to explain: the police, her father, the fact that he would be sent away from her if they didn’t do something to help. Hearing this, the woman’s tanned face registers distress. “Come on inside,” she tells Nino, ushering her through the door.

Inside, the house smells of fish sticks and baked potatoes. A dishwasher rumbles in the kitchen. The woman, who introduces herself as Jan, gets her a Diet Coke and pours it in a tall glass for her, and Nino sits at the barstools at the stone counter. Jan’s husband, a big man with a rosaceous bloom on his cheeks and a dark beard that looks somehow out of place on his face, comes into the kitchen and Nino tells the story all over again. “I was thinking that maybe if he returned everything and apologized, you would tell the police to stop,” she tells Jan.

“Oh my,” Jan says. She looks at her husband.

“What are you looking at me for?” her husband says.

“Come on, sweetie,” Jan says to Nino, after a moment of strained silence. “I think you should call your father and tell him where you are, he’s probably worried.”

Nino doesn’t dare ask if this means they have agreed to her plan. Instead, she dials her father. He picks up on the fifth ring. She tells him she’s at the open house. “Where?” her father says. She tells him again. “Oh, Nino,” he says, but then, after making a muffled sound of cupping the phone with his hand, he tells her that he’s on his way.

While they are waiting for Nino’s father to come, Jan cracks and pours herself a can of Diet Coke and starts talking about the house, about the problems with trying to sell it in this market. Their property, Jan tells her, is underwater. For a moment, Nino has an image of a wave engulfing the house, and them all having to fight against the rush of water to get out, rise up to the surface. But now Jan is telling her all the details of their finances, speaking in a defensive tone that Nino doesn’t understand. Until recently, Jan tells her, Richard — that’s her husband, Richard — was the owner of a small business that designed and manufactured safety equipment for lacrosse players. The business went bust after a high-schooler was injured wearing a helmet made by their company and they were sued by a personal-injuries lawyer. Richard has tried to start a new company, one that is now filing for bankruptcy protection, and Jan herself, who has a degree in sociology from Stetson University in Florida but has no professional experience, now has a job as a cashier at the Shaw’s in neighboring Newton, where she’s working for minimum wage under the keen-eyed supervision of her son’s ex-girlfriend from high school, a young woman named Summer.

“I had a friend in first grade named Summer,” Nino says, unsure of what she should say. “She was nice.”

“Not this one,” Jan says. “This one is a real piece of work.”

The doorbell rings. Jan goes to get it. Nino’s father comes into the kitchen. She sees his mournful face, his weary eyes, the shaving cream on his collar, and she feels such an intense surge of love, the feeling pressing against the inside of her chest like a balloon, that she starts shaking all over.

“Nino,” he says. “What are you doing here? I told you to go to your mother’s.”

Nino gestures helplessly at the kitchen, the house. “I came here.”

Her father nods to Richard, who is standing with a drink in his hand against the stove. “Well, now we can go,” he says to Nino. “I’ll walk you back. Thank you for calling,” he says to Jan.

“Wait,” Nino says. They can’t go yet; now that she’s gotten her father together with the owners of the house, they need to discuss what they can do. But first, she knows, her father has to tell them that he did it, and ask them for forgiveness. That’s how it works. “Don’t you have something you want to say to them?” she says.

Her father looks at her. His eyes are meshed with capillaries. He is breathing through his nose.

“Yes, I do,” he says. He turns to Richard. “Why do you leave jewelry lying around during an open house?”

Richard sets down his glass.

“Why did you write a fake name with a real address in our book?” he says.

Nino feels the situation slipping out of her grasp. In a moment, any hope of reconciliation will be gone. Richard’s face is already brightening with anger. She knows that she has to act. She has no choice but to rescue this situation in any way that she can.

“I did it,” she says. “I stole your things.”

All three of them now turn to her.

Her father is the first to speak. “You?” he says.

She looks at him in confusion. There’s unfeigned surprise in his voice, as if he actually might believe she’s telling the truth. For a moment, no one says anything. The ice in Richard’s glass groans and cracks.

“No, you didn’t,” Jan says.

“Jan,” her husband says.

“What? She didn’t do it, so why is she telling us she did?” Jan says.

Now her father turns his bloodshot gaze to Jan.

“How do you know?”

Jan glances away, looking out the window. The streetlights have just flickered on outside.

“I see,” her father says.

“We are good people,” Jan says.

“Maybe you should explain that to the police officers at my home,” her father says, taking Nino’s arm. “Or allow me to explain it to your insurance company. Can a person go to jail for this, writing a false claim?”

“Hold up there,” Richard says. He moves quickly to stand between them and the exit.

Her father and Richard face each other in the narrow doorway of the kitchen. Nino can smell sweat and alcohol on the man’s body. “Hey Jan, you see what you’ve done?” Richard says over their heads. “Any more great ideas?”

Jan uses the side of her finger to wipe mascara from her eyes. “Maybe they’ll take money,” she says, sniffing and then digging in her purse to pull out a checkbook.

“Of course,” Richard says to his wife. “I thought you might say something like that.” He turns to Nino and her father. “So you want a piece of the action?” It’s an absurdly gangsterish thing to say, and he says it with all the awkwardness you might expect of a man in his late forties who has weathered two bankruptcies and fears losing his home.

Her father looks at Richard and says nothing, just holds the man’s gaze for a drawn-out moment, jaw muscle pulsing. And then Richard turns to the side, waves his hand in the air, lets them through. “Go on then, screw it, whatever,” he says. “What makes you think they’ll believe you?”

Father and daughter go out. The neighborhood is quiet. When they reach the sidewalk, her father almost trips on something in the dusky light. A tennis ball. He bends down, picks it up. Then he turns around and hurls it with all his strength at the house, letting out a strangled sound. The tennis ball bounces off the brick facade, then rolls into the ornamental shrubs at the edge of the lawn.

“Come on,” Nino says, and takes his hand, leading him along the sidewalk. They cross the street and continue on to the next intersection, heading for home.

Suddenly her father stops short. “Stupid, stupid,” he says, hitting his head.

He sits down abruptly on the curb. Nino sits down beside him. “I should have taken the money.”

The pavement still retains faint heat from the day’s sun. Overhead, bats fly past, emitting faint cries. Her father hides his head in his hands.

Nino stands up and starts walking back to the house. It feels like a long way — somehow longer returning than going. She rings the doorbell, surprised how suddenly calm she’s feeling, and when Jan opens the door, she tells her that she’s come for the money.

Jan goes to get her checkbook while Nino waits silently in the kitchen. Returning, Jan fumbles the checkbook open, presses it flat against the counter, uncaps a pen; Nino observes that her hands are trembling, and she experiences an odd satisfaction in the woman’s discomposure. “How much?” Jan says.

“Five hundred dollars,” Nino says. It’s a number that she plucks from the air, one that sounds large to her ears. She watches as Jan writes the amount, leaving the “pay to” field blank, then signs it and tears it out of the book. When she hands the check to Nino, the woman avoids making eye contact.

“Was that the doorbell?” Richard calls to his wife from the other room.

Nino goes out the door, holding the check in a damp hand. Her father won’t want to take it from her at first, she knows, but he will eventually; what else can he do? It might be enough to cover the costs of the immigration lawyer.

She turns onto the sidewalk. A breeze stirs the tops of the trees. Transformers hum on telephone poles. A few stars shine dimly overhead. When was the last time she’d actually stared up at the night sky? She’s remembering how her father had bought her a telescope for her tenth birthday, how impatient he’d been for darkness to try it out. He’d spent almost an hour getting it set up for her, slapping mosquitoes, making tiny adjustments of the lenses, while she’d read a book on the couch. Come quick, he’d said, running back into the apartment. So she’d followed him outside, into the narrow gravel lot at the rear of the building beside the trash bins. Look, he’d said: Jupiter. She bent down and put her eye to the lens, but saw only darkness. In the time between them, the earth had kept turning, and the planet had fallen away from view. But she’d kept looking through the lens, imagining it hanging like an earring in the velvet of outer space. Do you see it? he’d asked. I do, she’d told him. I see it.

© 2018 by Reed Johnson