"Alana."
She stops.
"Thank you for covering for me," I say. "Get some sleep."
I end the call before she can find her next sentence.
I set the phone face down on the nightstand and lie back against the pillows and stare at the ceiling for a moment as I finger the little crystal in my hand. A small ornament that is strangely comforting.
The truth was that my father wouldn't notice I was gone even if a week passed. I knew that. I had known it since I was twelve years old and I had learned to stop expecting anything different at around sixteen.
But knowing something and being willing to risk it were two separate things, and I couldn't afford for him to find out about this before tomorrow evening.
That was why I had told Alana. Not because I trusted her, I didn't, not particularly, but because she was the most reliable liar I knew when properly motivated. I had promised her the limited edition Bottega bag she had been trying to source for three months. Nobody else had been able to get their hands on it. I had found one through a contact of a contact and I had held onto it for exactly this kind of occasion.
She had asked, before agreeing, what I was actually doing in Las Vegas.
I had told her vaguely that I was representing my father in an interview. That was what the email had said, more or less. Alana knew immediately that I was doing something I shouldn't.
"Does Uncle know?" she asked, "You know what, don't even bother answering, I know he doesn't. What is wrong with you, Nat? Why are you always doing this?"
Dad was running for Mayor of New York now. The City Comptroller race felt like a long time ago, though it had only been a couple of years. He had won it and used it as exactly the stepping stone he had always intended it to be, and now his name was on billboards and his face was on morning television and his schedule was so dense that Gerald, his right-hand man, carried it on a printed sheet that he updated twice daily.
My father didn't glance in my direction anymore. He barely had before, but now even the occasional acknowledgement had dried up completely.
I decided, somewhere around month three of watching him from across rooms he didn't know I was in, that I needed to be useful. Visibly useful in a way that could be dismissed or handed off to someone else. Useful in a way that made him have to look at me.
It took me two months to convince Gerald to let me help with the correspondence. He refused the first four times I asked, politely and then less politely, and had only agreed when I pointed out that the volume of mail coming into the campaign office had tripled since the mayoral announcement and that his secretary, Mrs. Park, was visibly drowning in it. I would help sort and draft responses. Supervised by Mrs. Park. Nothing would go out without her approval.
He agreed, reluctantly, and I was careful and I did it well.
Then one afternoon my father had come into the office while I was there with Mrs. Park organizing his filing system and he had paused in the doorway and said, not quite looking at me, "I heard you're managing the correspondence. You don't have to do that."
It was the first thing he said to me directly in over a month.
"I want to," I had told him.
He nodded and returned to whatever he had come in for and that was the end of it. Twelve seconds, maybe fifteen. But I had carried it around for days afterward.
I wanted to do more. I knew I could do more.
Then came the email that had been sitting in the trash folder of the campaign account, already marked for deletion. I had been clearing out the backlog with Mrs. Park when the subject line caught my eye: Interview — Purple Horizon Media.
I asked Mrs. Park about it and she said she had run it past Gerald and he had told her to delete it. She hadn't asked why. That was how things worked in my father's office.
But I read it before she could close the tab.
It was an interview invitation from a television production company in Las Vegas. Small outfit, local reach, the kind of station that covered regional politics and human interest stories,and occasionally picked up by larger networks when something caught. They were producing a segment on the mayoral race and wanted a representative from the Keller campaign to come in and discuss his platform, his vision, and his plans for the city.
My father was in Chicago for the week. Gerald was stretched thin managing three simultaneous events. Nobody was available and evidently nobody had considered it worth rearranging for.
I considered it worth rearranging for.
A television interview, even a small one, was visible. It was his name said out in a room with cameras. I had watched every recorded interview my father had ever given, some of them multiple times, studying his cadence and the way he framed his answers and the particular brand of assured warmth he projected when the lights came on. I knew his platform better than some of the people being paid to know it. I had asked Mrs. Park, telling her I was compiling a prep document for an upcoming press briefing, for a list of the most common interview questions the campaign had fielded over the last six months.
She gave me the list without suspicion.
I spent three evenings preparing answers.
