What would you do if someone knocked on your door and handed you a black armored box full of cash? And what if you knew—with certainty—that the money was stolen? That your father had killed himself to protect it? If you suspected at least one other man was dead because of it? What if you sought legal counsel and were told it was too dangerous to come forward? Would you take the high road? Or would take the money and run? Or, would you do as I have done—vying, trying to heal and reveal and conceal a lifetime of crime?

***

“It sounds like a fairytale,” the new therapist said when I told her about the knock on the door, the black box full of cash, and the key hidden away in a teacup. She leaned back in her chair and looked at me expectantly. She was a small, plain woman with straight, colorless hair, perfectly unassuming, except for the fact she was named after a tropical purple flower I had seen only in the pictures. I averted my gaze to a puddle of sunlight on the floor. 

“This isn’t a fairytale,” I mumbled. “This was my life.”

“You’re right. This is your life, and you can decide what to do.”

 “What would you do?” I said plaintively, willing her to give me the answers. 

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. From the look on her face, I wasn’t sure she believed my story at all. Then she asked, “The most important question is: what do you want to do?” 

I didn’t want to do anything. I wanted to wake up one morning and realize it had all—the front page exposés, the federal investigation, my father’s suicide, the indictments, the black box—all of it had just been a bad dream, but instead, the waking nightmare persisted—concrete and immovable—and no matter where I looked, I saw only shadows of my dark inheritance.

“I want to do the right thing. I want to give it back, but I talked to a lawyer, and she says I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m implicated,” I said and drew a breath. “And because she says if I come forward, it would endanger my mother.”

The therapist looked surprised.

“What else did the lawyer say?”

“She told me to put on gloves and count the money.”

The therapist’s eyes widened. She leaned forward and asked, “Did you do it?”

“No,” I shook my head firmly and looked at her with derision.

“I want to give the money back, but I don’t know how. I’ve thought about leaving the box in the lobby of the school, but there are cameras everywhere. It’s too dangerous.”

“Well, if you can’t give it back, have you thought about what are you going to do with it?”

Of course, I’d thought about it. I had spent months imagining every possibility and every possible consequence. I imagined carrying the money into an unknown wood, burying it off the beaten path,  and walking away as if it had never existed.  I imagined leaving it anonymously in the poor box at church. I imagined taking the money to Times Square, opening the black box, and watching the bills scatter like birds in the wind.

“Well, have you thought about keeping it?” The therapist asked. 

Of course, I had imagined keeping the money. I had imagined holding the money in a safe for seventeen years and then giving it to my baby sister Leah to pay for college. I was my father’s daughter and had thought strategically about how to launder the cash into a bank account or investment portfolio. 

“What would I do with it?” I asked.

“Well, you could use it to buy a house,” she said pragmatically. 

“Of course, I could use the money,” I said. “But I would never be able to enjoy anything I bought with it.” 

“What do you mean?”

“The money is not mine,” I said slowly and deliberately as if I were talking to a small child. “It’s stolen—from school children. It taints everything it touches.” 

There was a long pause. 

“So if I used it for a downpayment on a house, I would first have to create a front to get it into an account, meaning that I would have to commit a crime in order to use it, and then I’d always be looking over my shoulder, wondering when and if someone was coming for it, coming after me.”

“I don’t think anyone is coming after you,” she said.

“But they might,” I said. My voice was an acerbic flame. “They came for my father. He’s dead. They came for Kevin O’Shea and Rose DiLacqua. They are in federal prison.”

She shrugged and changed the subject. “Are you still taking your medication?” she asked.

“No,” I said. 

I stared her down for a long moment.

“Listen,” I said. “Let’s say I did use the money to buy a house. Then, for the rest of my life, I’d be physically living within my father’s crimes. I would be walled in by his lies. I can’t live like that,” I said. “I won’t live like that.”

Talking to this therapist was like talking to a pleasant, well-intentioned wall. 

Still, I told her almost everything. 

I told her the black box was still in a closet in the guest room of my childhood home, wrapped in blankets and stuffed in a pillowcase. 

“Don’t you think you should put the money in a safe deposit box?” she asked.

“I don’t want to disturb the evidence,” I sighed.  

I told her that even though the money was a thousand miles away, it was with me wherever I went, and I carried it around like a heavy astral chain. 

I told her when I had received a call from an insurance agent, explaining that my father had taken out a life insurance policy that listed me as a beneficiary. The paperwork had never been updated, so although my father had named his new wife Darlene as next of kin in his last will and testament, the money would be paid out to my brother and me in the amount of $75,000 each. 

I told her about my reliable car with a clear title that my father bought for me with stolen funds. I showed her my diamond ring and told her about diamond earrings, black pearls, and the solid gold bracelet as thick as a shackle. 

But I didn’t tell her about Jon—not because I was consciously withholding it from her—but because I had banished his death from my mind. I couldn’t admit that fear, even to myself—much less commit it to words.

***

When I told my friend Mariam the story of the black box, she was pragmatic. “Money is freedom,” she said simply as she poured two shots of whiskey into a glass filled with ice. Mariam was my closest friend in the English department. She studied Holocaust literature and wrote scathing lyric prose. Mariam was brilliant, and she trusted her intuition above all else, which I admired but could not understand. 

Mariam and I were from different places. She immigrated to this country from Egypt when she was eight years old. As a Coptic Christian growing up in a Muslim country, she was an ethnic minority even before coming to the States, where she grew up in a working-class family in LA County. She knew that when you leave everything else behind, all you carry forward is the truth. 

“It doesn’t feel like freedom to me,” I said.  

“Money is just a currency, an energy,” she explained. “It’s not good or bad in itself. Its value lies in how you use it.”

Mariam topped the drink with Diet Coke and squeezed a few lime wedges into the concoction. She moved slowly but deliberately through her tiny—and immaculate—studio apartment. Mariam was a minimalist. There were a few illuminated icons on the walls—Orthodox saints—and she slept on a twin mattress on the floor in the corner. Normally, we sat on the floor, gossiping and poring through books, but today, we settled into two chairs by the window in her tiny kitchen, where we flicked cigarette ashes into the heart-shaped porcelain bowl. 

“This barely takes the edge off anymore,” Mariam said, gesturing toward her drink.

“If you want a real drug…” My voice trailed off. I hesitated. “Well, I shouldn’t say it.”

“Shouldn’t say what?” She asked.

“I don’t want to tell you.”

“Tell me what?” She was curious, her eyes dancing, her mouth caught in a playful half-smile. 

“TV,” I said.

“What about it?”

“It’s the best drug,” I said. “You can exist without having to exist.”

“I don’t have a TV.”

I laughed. “You can stream everything on your laptop.”

“What would I watch?” she asked.

“Well, I’d start with the Sopranos,” I said. For years, I studied Tony Soprano’s character to better understand how my father operated. “It’s the best.”

***

I was addicted to the television and its endless array of streaming images.

My father had been the same way. After dinner, he lay comatose in front of the TV. His eyes were closed, the sound was loud, and the flashing images washed over the room. He was not exactly asleep, but he was divorced from his body, and his mind was far away. After his death, I made an altar on the top of a bookshelf and placed his photograph between two white candles. My father’s image gazed down on me as I rolled a tight little joint, took a puff, and opened my laptop.

I spent my evenings alone in my apartment, floating just south of sober, streaming. My life was populated by tiny, beautiful people reciting their lines. I knew it was all an illusion, but I was entranced, caught in the thrall. 

Most nights, I fell asleep on the love sleep and woke up with a stiff neck. I spent my days hung over and hungry for more. I longed to be home, studying the costume and set design. I knew that watching was a sickness—a disease—and I was sick of myself.

I couldn’t stop watching, but one night, I did start to take notes. I opened my notebook and began plucking lines and images from dialogue, advertisements, and newsfeeds. It was a poetic exercise in delusion. I copied down what I saw, but my reading of the television was simply a reflection, a mirror of my own internal strife, and I eventually began assembling the fragmented lines and images—divorced from their original context—into poems.

I compiled the poems into a manuscript, tentatively entitled As Seen on TV, and submitted it to a committee for consideration. This was the work for which I was awarded a dissertation fellowship: $20,000 to read and write about television. 

The poems were voyeuristic and written in arch, fluid rhyme. They reeked of sexual violence and seemed to know something I did not:

He sits across the street

and watches as she looks

into the window

of a store she can’t afford.

He peers into the camera 

as if it opened

to the empty ballroom 

of her soul. Greenish,

atmospheric. His eyes 

like headlights, veering 

down a gravel road

that leads to her home,

where she waits in the glow 

of the TV, alone.

***

My handsome boyfriend Burkan was coming to visit, and I was hyperventilating. I couldn’t get out of bed because I was shaking so hard. Outside, the sky was too blue, the light crystal clear. Little succulents flowered in the cracks in the sidewalk, and the mountains rose like high, white-capped waves along the western horizon. Everything was beautiful. The sunflowers. The foxes. The aspen. I was a beautiful forgery: tall and thin with streaming red-gold hair. I focused on my breath, staggered to the bathroom, and got dressed. 

Burkan was now a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, studying biomedical engineering and nanotechnology. I spent academic breaks with him back east, and every month or so, he flew out to Denver for a weekend visit. During this visit, he would make passionate love to me and feed me fruit with his hands. However, he couldn’t be away from the lab for more than a few days, so as soon as I had reacclimatized to his presence, he would again disappear. 

I was late picking him up at the airport, and Burkan was hungry and irritable from waiting at the curb.  He wanted to go out for lunch, so we stopped for sushi and then spent the afternoon shopping at Cherry Creek Mall. Burkan liked to choose clothes and watch me try them on. He selected a blue minidress with embroidery around the natural waist and brass detailing. He looked at me approvingly in the mirror and told me to wear it home so he could take it off. 

That night, he presented me with a marquisette pendant shaped like a teardrop that hung from a delicate silver chain. I put it on, and he took off my dress. 

In the low light of the bedroom, he looked at me and said, “Your body is changing, CG.”

“What do you mean?”

“You used to look like a girl,” he explained. “Now you have a woman’s body.”

Then he leaned in to kiss me.

When he was finished, he patted me on the ass and went to the bathroom.  

I stood up to examine my body in the mirror. My hips did look thicker. 

The diamond ring my father had given to me flashed in the mirror when my reflection gave me the finger. 

“Fuck you,” she said. 

I grew up arguing with the face in the mirror. She was ugly and disgusting. She accused and berated me, and I learned to paint my face so no one would know she was there. Most of the time, I kept her masked under the surface, but as much as I tried to cover her up, she would lash out with cruel, sinister comments, and I could never control her when I was alone with myself. 

It was like I was split in half, living two lives. 

When I heard Burkan turn off the shower, I left the girl in the mirror and climbed back into bed. He lay beside me, his skin damp and smelling of soap. 

“I got that dissertation fellowship,” I told him.

Burkan held me in his arms.

“Congratulations, CG,” he murmured.

“And I’m done with my coursework at the end of this semester,” I continued. “After that, I won’t need to stay here. I’ll be able to live anywhere. Maybe I’ll move to Boston.”

We’d been planning for this moment for almost two years. 

“That would be great,” he said, “But where will you live?”

“Well, I guess we can stay in your apartment while we’re looking for a new place.” 

Burkan loosened his embrace.

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea, CG,” he said. 

“I thought this was what you wanted.” 

“I just don’t think we should live together—right away.”

“We’ve been together four years,” I said. 

“That’s why we should wait. Take our time.”

“But the only reason I would come to Boston would be to be with you.”

“You know you need your own space, CG, to write.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “This was your idea. You’ve been asking me to move to Boston for years.”

“You’ve been through a lot. I don’t want to put too much pressure on you,” he said, drawing me closer, but I pushed him away and stormed into the bathroom, where the hateful girl was waiting for me in the mirror. 

***

Delilah’s apartment was filled with statues of saints: the Virgin of Guadalupe, San Sebastián, and Saint Michael Archangel. There was a green divan in the living room, and every corner was filled with artifacts: a beaded Mexican skull, a bottle of Chanel No. 5, candles, altars, flowers, and incense. There was a small kitchen and an adjacent dining room, where we sat at a long table—Mariam and I in regular wooden chairs—Delilah on a throne.

“Reading the cards is storytelling,” she explained, then paused for effect. “But fortune telling is theatre.” 

Delilah was the youngest professor in the English department, and Mariam and I were taking a directed study with her called “Divinatory Poetics,” which was an elevated way of saying TAROT. As a confirmed Roman Catholic, I had been raised to believe that fortune-telling was the devil’s work, but Delilah made it seem literary rather than sinister. She was well-read and well-spoken, with glowing golden hair that fell thick over her shoulders and fine elven features. Her apartment was a collection of curiosities, and she was a living repository of adventure stories about motorcycling through the jungle with a foreign lover, conducting primary research in Amsterdam’s Red Light District, and her mother—a small town seer who read fortunes from playing cards. In addition to teaching fiction and narrative theory, Delilah had built a cottage industry selling honey pots, salt baths, and love spells. 

Delilah began shuffling cards and gestured that we each pick up our decks. Mine was a Rider-Waite deck with blue plaid backing. Delilah said, “Keep shuffling. Good. Now take a deep breath and formulate a question.” 

When I closed my eyes, all I could see was my father.  

“Now stop,” she said, “And draw a card.”

Everything in the room grew very still, and my breath caught in my throat as I looked down at the hard in my hand: JUSTICE—with her pointed sword and balancing scales. 

Justice was what I wanted most and what I was most denied. My first thought was, There’s no such thing as Justice. 

“Your homework is to meditate on that card every day for a week,” Delilah said. “Research all its meanings. Write out all your personal associations. Learn the card inside and out.”

Delilah had assigned only one book for the course, a primer called 78 Degrees of Wisdom: A Book of Tarot” by Rachel Pollock. When I got home that night, I opened the book and read the entry on Justice: 

“Throughout the Western world, legal Justicia was depicted blindfolded to demonstrate that the law does not discriminate and applies to the weak and the powerful alike… The perfectly balanced scales point to a balance between understanding and action… The sword represents the idea that wisdom pierces through illusion to reveal the truth… Life requires us to make decisions; at the same time, each decision, once made, cannot be revoked. We are formed by the actions we have taken in the past; we form ourselves by the actions we take in the present.

“The way to understanding lies in responsibility… At the crucial moment, the candidate must make a response. Only by seeing and accepting the past can we be free of it… In a tarot reading, one should always pay careful attention to the card of Justice… It indicates, first of all, that events have worked out exactly as they were “meant” to; that is, what is happening to you comes from situations and decisions in the past. You have what you deserve.” 

I drew a sharp breath. I was sure I did not deserve a stolen fortune, but I continued reading, “Secondly, the card indicates a need and possibility for seeing the truth of this outcome. The card signifies the need for absolute honesty.”

***

“I think Delilah is lying,” Mariam’s face fell. She looked devastated. 

“Lying about what?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” Mariam said. “Maybe everything.”

I laughed.

She frowned and took a sip of her drink. “I’m serious,” she said. 

Mariam always told the truth, which was noble in theory, but I could see how this got her in trouble. Mariam was an open book—sometimes as open as a wound. There was no limit to her capacity to listen and bear witness to the deepest human tragedies. She also had no internal filter and frequently interjected with personal anecdotes about poverty, prejudice, and abuse. I liked her stories, which always had a clear moral, but I also noticed that most people didn’t want to hear what she had to say. I was the favorite in our department, but Mariam was much smarter than I was. She could read and speak the truth in four languages—Arabic, English, Spanish, and Korean—but it seemed like nobody could hear her, and she was often embroiled in some level of conflict for having said something that was politically inexpedient.

“There’s something wrong with the storyline.” Mariam was very astute. “I can’t figure out the order of events, and every time I ask her a question, her timeline keeps changing.” 

She continued, “There’s just no through-line. It’s not one thing leading to another—like with you and your Dad.” Mariam held a soft spot for my father, whom she believed understood the indignities of poverty and had done everything in his power to protect me from that humiliation. 

“It doesn’t make sense,” Mariam said. “And the saddest part is that Delilah doesn’t need to lie. She is amazing, just as she is.” 

I took a moment to consider her point, but it wasn’t for me to stand in judgment because even if Delilah was embellishing her stories, I was omitting great swaths of the plot. 

It was unbearable to keep so many secrets, but whenever I started to tell the truth, it felt like no one understood what I was trying to say. 

My friends and confidants were universally loving, forgiving, and filled with gentle misunderstandings. 

They said, “We all take what our parents can give us.” 

And, “It’s not that much money.” 

And, “You’re so lucky.”

They could also sense that my story was dangerous, and most people knew when to stop asking questions. There was an invisible boundary—a limit—to what people wanted to know, but Mariam never stopped asking questions, so I told her—not everything, of course, but mostly everything: that I felt cursed like I was living under a spell. That I was sure someone—or something—was after the money and coming for me.  I was always looking over my shoulder. Sometimes, I saw the ghost of my father, and sometimes, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the window and was shocked by my own sinister glimmer. 

Thus, I performed my day-to-day (dys)functions. Wherever I was, whatever else I was doing, my thoughts were stuck in a loop: black box, money, handgun, black box. Daddy. His crimes loomed in the forefront. Whether I was reading or writing or teaching or walking or washing the dishes, I was there, but I wasn’t there—half of me was hiding in a closet, clutching a key—locked into and locked out of life. 

***

Mariam had defended her dissertation and was teaching composition at a local community college. Her courses were not going well, so to take the edge off, she was rewatching Sex and the City. 

“New York is so photogenic,” she said like a woman in love. Mariam yearned for Manhattan beyond the cosmopolitan yen of young, ambitious women in the early 2000s. She loved the crumbling infrastructure and human landscape of the city, all the lonely people from all over the world, all perilously living their lives. “But I’d never be able to afford living there.”

“Someday, we’ll move there together,” I said dreamily.

I was a month into my dissertation fellowship, which would disperse $20,000 over three fiscal quarters. I spent most of my time reading and “writing” in front of the television. I also practiced yoga religiously, training my body and mind to sit for long, torturous hours in meditation—and judging myself because I never could stand on my hands. I had just finished yoga teacher training and taken a part-time job at the studio, checking in students, cleaning the bathrooms, and sweeping the floors. My days were great swaths of time, grainy like film.

There was nothing to ground me in Denver, and I was floating on the surface of life. My heart was back east, and Burkan kept encouraging me to move to Boston so we could be together while insisting we live separate lives for the health of our relationship.

I had work—real work—to do in Philadelphia, but I couldn’t possibly show my face back home. Philadelphia was the scene of the crime. 

Then, one evening, as I lay in savasana under the prayer flags with tears seeping from the corners of my eyes, I realized that I could move to New York. My dissertation fellowship would pay the rent, and I had $75,000 in untouched insurance money in a holding account. 

Burkan was hurt and relieved when I told him I had chosen myself over him.

Mariam, on the other hand, was devastated. When I told her my decision, her face collapsed, and she blinked back tears.

“Now you see what I mean,” she whispered and looked away. “Money is freedom.” 

I was surprised. She had ties in Denver—a job and a best friend. 

“You can come when you’re ready,” I said.

Mariam glared at me, then softened. “It’s your life and your decision,” she said magnanimously. “The only thing you did wrong was tell me we would go together.” 

Within a few weeks, everything was in motion. 

I boxed up my books and packed my possessions into the luggage my father had given me for his last Christmas on earth. It was a set of luxury travel bags comprised of three rolling suitcases of various sizes that fit one inside the other like Russian nesting dolls. I loaded everything into my getaway car—a little black hatchback with a manual transmission and a skull-and-bones front license plate to scare off the devil. 

I took one last look at the empty apartment to make sure I had left no trace of myself, and I took to the open road.

***

The Brooklyn apartment was a spacious, second-floor studio on the Red Hook side of the BQE and the Carroll Gardens side of the Battery Tunnel. It was a warm, quiet room with southern exposure and three windows that looked into a verdant, double-lot garden. There were wood floors and beautiful, floor-to-ceiling built-in shelves upon which I arranged my books, first by genre, then by alphabetical order. A hollow book filled with jewels was nestled among the classics; from a distance, it looked almost, but not quite, real.

My physical circumstances had changed, but I remained the same, only somewhat more lonely and afraid. My poems were getting darker and more desperate. 

I dreamed I breathed a secret 

in a bottle, and it floated 

for a moment before sinking 

to the bottom of Gowanus. 

More than anything, I was afraid of myself. 

***

I was in Philadelphia, visiting my mother for Christmas, when Mariam called to tell me her best friend was sick. She needed a biopsy and didn’t have any money. I almost laughed. I had a box full of money that was eating away at me like cancer. It was a perfect match. 

I went to the closet and pulled the black box down off the shelf. My hands trembled as I put it down on the desk in the backroom and handled the key. The box groaned open, and I gagged on the closed, musty smell of money and death.  

I touched the money gingerly. Stacks of cash—mostly $100 bills—banded together by denomination. The work was sloppy with my father’s signature touch. Some stacks were bound in paper straps. Others were held together with paperclips and desiccated rubber bands. Some of the bills were tattered and marked. Some bills were brand new. All were non-sequential. Daddy had hoarded and handled this money over the course of many years. I could feel his hands moving through mine as I removed the first handful. 

I counted out $8000, put it in an envelope, put the envelope in a little paper box marked with a cross, put the box in a padded envelope, and addressed the envelope to Mariam. Later that day, I took the package to the post office and mailed it across the country without registration or insurance. 

I was operating on faith.  

I believed the money would be delivered safely, and it was. 

As with most things, facing the money was easier than avoiding it. At first, I felt satisfied with myself, but then I took the rest of the money out of the box to repackage it neatly and discovered the paperwork. 

At the bottom of the box was a manila envelope that contained a notice on my father’s company letterhead. I read it carefully. The documents indicated the money was a loan from my father’s business associate, Kevin O’Shea, that had been repaid in cash. By my estimation, the papers were obvious forgeries. 

Below that was another envelope addressed to Christine and Michael. Inside was a greeting card. On the front was one of those black and white photographs that had been touched up and tinted with color. The photograph was of two little children—a boy and a girl—dressed in oversized adult clothing. The boy was kissing the girl on the cheek, handing her flowers. 

Inside was a death note, written in my father’s looping, impulsive half-script: 

Dear Christine & Michael,

I’m so proud of you both. No matter what happens, I promise to always watch over and protect you.

Love, Dad

It was sentimental and read like a threat.

My brother and I were both home for the holidays, so I took the card to his room, where Michael was lying with his feet and ankles dangling off the end of the narrow twin-bed bed of his childhood. His high school medals hung around the mirror. In the closet, there was a set of pine drawers filled with his childhood toys. 

“I just found this.” I handed him the note. “It’s from Dad.”

His blue eyes glazed over, and his chest hollowed inward as he read it. The letter dropped out of his hand and into my lap. “Where did you find this?” 

I reminded him about the black box on the other side of the wall. I had told him about the money in broad strokes after the funeral, but we didn’t go into great detail. What mattered was that he didn’t want the money, and I didn’t want to burden him. He was young—four years younger than me. He was still in school, his father was dead, and he had his own complex inheritance with which to contend. The box had come to me. It was my responsibility. 

“How much money?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I lost count.”

“Enough money that someone would kill for it?” His eyes looked far away and very afraid.  

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”

“How?” 

“No one else will die for this money.”

“You can’t know that,” he said. 

“I promise,” I said.

***

Burkan and I had played the breakup and makeup game many times in the past, but this time, it was real. I knew it was over when he said, “CG, there’s someone else.” Those were the magic words. 

After five years, the romance was over. 

Three weeks later, I met a mutual friend on the Coney Island boardwalk. Levi and I walked to the end of the pier. The gulls swarmed, and fishermen cast their lines into the turbulent waters below. It was bright and cool. I told Levi about the breakup, and he told me what he knew about Burkan’s many, many affairs. 

The years have blotted out most of the salacious details, but the truth stunned me: Burkan had been cheating on me for years—and our friends knew about it. 

I was furious and disgusted and enraged—with Burkan, with myself, with the world because I had known. Call it intuition or gut instinct, but I had always known in my heart that there were other women. This knowing was more than subconscious. I had been open about my suspicions. I had asked him. Towards the end of our relationship, I would get so nervous before seeing him that I would shake and take salt baths and walk through thresholds flanked by white candles in an attempt to cleanse my body and soul. 

It wasn’t the sex act that hurt; it was the lie. For years, I had been living a lie. I had known the truth, but I chose to believe the lie. Why? Because it was convenient? Because I wanted to be the type of woman who was tagged next to a handsome man? I was furious with him and with myself—and I also knew in my gut that I had just scratched the surface, that I was sick with some deeper, untapped level of dread. 

When I got home from the beach, I called Burkan, and he answered. Burkan always picked up the phone when I called.

My voice was dead cold.

“Levi told me everything.”

“What do you mean, CG?”

“He told me about Elsie, about Tisha, about Sigrid and the raspberries.”

I could hear Burkan’s breath catch in his throat.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, CG.” 

“Yes, you do.”

“Why would you believe him over me?”

“Because he is telling the truth.” 

“How dare you talk about me behind my

back!” 

“Please,” I begged him. “Just tell me the truth.”

Time had stopped. I wasn’t angry. I was on another plane of understanding, and the words that came out of my mouth surprised me.

“The truth will set you free,” I said softly. 

It was like I was intoning something ancient and primal. It was me, and it wasn’t me speaking. I said it over and over. “Just tell the truth, B. The truth will set you free.”

Then, something had changed in the tone of his voice. He didn’t sound like himself. His voice was deeper, more guttural. He sounded like an animal. His breath went ragged as he confessed everything: dozens of women, the compulsion of it, and the shame. The words poured out, but what I remember most was what happened between the words. He was grunting, snorting like a pig. And through it all, I kept repeating, “The truth will set you free.” I held the space while he released and relinquished this part of himself that he had been hiding, that he had never revealed to anyone. It was him, but it wasn’t him. “The truth will set you free. The truth will set you free.” Between his animal wailing, he told me the truth, and afterward, he was a man again. 

“I’m sorry, CG,” he said. 

It was an exorcism. 

***

It was June. Brooklyn was sweltering, and my father had been dead for three years.

I just defended my doctoral dissertation. I was finalizing revisions and interviewing for a full-time position at a small liberal arts college. On paper, I seemed to function, but just below the surface, I was unraveling. 

I had tried everything: years of talk therapy, antidepressants, diet, and exercise, but there was no relief. I studied yoga, practiced meditation, and read metaphysical texts, but I could not find the answers. I took blood tests to see if I was suffering from anemia or an autoimmune disorder. The tests always came back normal, but I didn’t feel normal. 

I felt sick. I felt cursed. I was desperate. 

I first saw the sign while walking home from the Lebanese grocery on Atlantic Avenue. I loved how brusquely the men called your number, how artfully they took your order—scooping lentils, coffee, and dry-roasted nuts from the gleaming glass barrels, how they weighed the food expertly on the scale, and how they spun the plastic bags back into your hands. 

I was walking home through the dusk, eating warm bread with my hands, when I saw a sandwich board on the corner: CRYSTAL HEALING. CHAKRA BALANCING. 

I took notice. All of my yogic posturing had led me to suspect that my root chakra was out of alignment. 

A few doors down, there was a blue neon light fixture in the window of a storefront psychic. I didn’t slow down when I passed by, but I read the signs through the corner of my eye.  SPECIAL PALM READING. I had always wondered what it would be like to turn up my palm and discover if my story were somehow inscribed in the lines of my body—and if anyone else could decipher its meaning.

I bent down to pick up a flyer that lay on the ground. It read, “FEELING LOST, HURT, AND CONFUSED? I CAN HELP IN ALL MATTERS OF LOVE AND MONEY.”

Of course, I felt deeply unloved—but I had a very unusual problem with money: I had too much of it—or not too much—just not the right kind.  

“RECONNECT WITH YOU’RE LOST LOVED ONES”

Daddy. 

I didn’t believe in ghosts, but I was haunted. Once, I was sure I heard my father whistling for me in the supermarket. More than once, I had seen his face in the mirror. 

Death was my inheritance. 

I didn’t belong to this world.  

I wasn’t planning to do it, but that night, I took the diamond ring off the middle finger of my left hand and put it away in a black velvet box. My father had given me that ring, and I never took it off, not even to bathe, but that day, I removed it—and all my disguises. I dressed in plain clothes: a hand-me-down tank top and cheap denim shorts. It was like I was trading in one costume for another. I couldn’t hide anymore, but I wasn’t ready to be seen. I put my phone and keys in a canvas bag and walked out into the night.  

The moon was full, and the streets were alive, but I was a phantom—adorned only in my blinding, pale goose flesh—my hair hanging long and heavy as a mourner’s veil—my breath ragged and my face run with tears—as I retraced my steps to Atlantic Avenue where I had first seen the sign: PSYCHIC READINGS.

I approached the blue neon lights but didn’t ring the bell. I kept walking—first down to Pier 6, where I stared into the dark, lapping waters—then through Brooklyn Heights Borough Hall, where the gold statue of Justice presided over the courthouses. I was magnetized by the sign, and I was circling something. I was desperate for someone to talk to, for someone to hear me, and for someone who would listen and hold space for even the darkest truths. 

I stood on the threshold of the storefront. 

I peered through the window.

I took a deep breath. 

I rang the bell, and the door opened.