She said: He wasn’t paying me to watch you. He was paying me to make sure nobody else was. Her name is Carol and she was a licensed investigator in Sacramento in 1984, and my father hired her in March of that year — the same month, it turns out, that a man was released in Nevada whose name my father never once said out loud in my hearing. One photograph a year was the invoice. The actual work was checking, quarterly, that a particular person was still where the state said he was, and that nobody had turned up at a school, or a graduation, or a wedding. She’d been at all of it. My eighth-grade concert, my sister’s funeral in 2003, my own wedding, standing at the back near the doors with a camera and a visitor’s badge and a story ready if anyone asked. Nobody ever did. She said the photographs were her idea after the first year — she’d taken one to prove she’d been there, and my father had called her and asked, in a voice she’d never heard him use, whether she could do that every year.
The man died in 2011. She told my father, and my father said keep going. Thirteen more years, one envelope each, for a threat that no longer existed. She said she’d asked him twice why and he’d said something different both times, and she’d eventually understood he didn’t want it to be over, because being over meant he’d have to explain the previous twenty-seven years to me and he’d never worked out how.
I’ve been to see her twice. She’s seventy-nine, she lives outside Carson City, and she has a second box she didn’t put in the storage unit — the negatives, and a file. I’ve looked at the file once. What I keep going back to is that my father never came to any of it. Not my graduation, not the wedding. I spent thirty years building a case about a man who didn’t show up, and he was nine hours away paying somebody to stand across the street with a camera so that I’d never have a reason to know why he couldn’t.
