All of Me

eighteen • father

I stare at the car as I pass. The wheel rims are scuffed and dirty; the windshield is splattered with a few bugs; the inside is nondescript. A coffee cup and scattered papers. Remnants of a life. I take a deep breath and let myself into the house. The front door is only ever locked at night.

My feet know where to go. I'm in the kitchen before I know it. Mom's sitting at the table with a cup of coffee in her hands, facing me. She gives me the slightest smile when she sees me, looking up from the man sitting opposite her. His back is to me, but my heart leaps to my throat when I see black hair and a brown hand wrapped around a coffee cup.

"Storie," Mom says, and she pats the seat next to her. "Come and sit down."

I can't. If I move, I'm going to collapse. My eyes are hot and my hands are shaking, and when the man in front of me turns to face me, I have to grab his chair to stop myself from falling.

It's not him. This man isn't my father. He has the same dark hair, the same weathered skin, but his face is all wrong. I don't recognize this man, but I don't need to. The badge on his chest tells me what I need to know. Officer Lopez.

Forever and a day drags itself by before I manage to sit down next to Mom and she clasps my hand in both of hers. Her grip is strong, but her voice is weak when she introduces the officer and asks him to tell me what he has already told her.

He has a kind face and his sympathetic smile is warm, but I feel as though I'm staring right through him when I try to look at him, like my eyes are refusing to focus because I don't want to see what's right in front of me. He takes a sip of his coffee and rolls his lips together before he speaks.

"This afternoon, human remains found on Tuesday evening were positively identified through dental records as Levente Sovany," he says, and as though I don't know my dad's name, he adds, "Your father."

There are a million ways my body seems to want to react but as the officer's words sink in, a sense of nothingness takes over, and my mouth clears enough for me to speak. I've been waiting for those words for two years now; I've practiced hearing them a million times, but that doesn't make it any easier to hear that my dad is dead.

"Where was he? What happened?" I ask at last. Mom squeezes my hand tighter but I can't look at her right now or I'll cry, and I need to know what happened before I can let my emotions ruin me.

Officer Lopez has done this before. His face is sincere and he isn't rushing to get through this. He sits with both hands around his mug as though he is an old friend, and it's the slightest comfort that he doesn't have the imposing presence I expected from a police officer.

"Your father's remains were found during the planned demolition of an abandoned building site in Jackson Heights," he says.

As soon as the words leave his mouth, I know exactly what he's talking about. Dad used to complain about that site all the time. It was two blocks from our apartment and for over a year, the noise drove us crazy. Then it stopped a few months before Dad disappeared when the project lost funding and left a shoddy half-finished building to gather dust.

He was there. He was there? Two blocks from home. If I wasn't sitting, I'd be on the floor right now and I'm trying to focus on Officer Lopez but it's getting harder and harder when I realize that the whole time Dad was gone, he was two blocks away and we never found him.

Mom's still holding my hand. I know from the quiet sniff beside me that she's crying but I can't look, not yet. There's a painful lump in my throat but my words cut through it when I ask, "Why was he there? How long?"

The officer sighs. "While it's difficult to say for certain, we can fairly safely assume that your father was killed the night that he disappeared," he says. "As you know, there was no CCTV footage to show what happened but an empty wallet was found alongside his remains."