3 a.m. (Henry Bins 1) (13 page)

So my dad, me, the President, and Red (the
head of the President’s Secret Service detail) played poker for
forty-nine minutes.

But I hadn’t heard from him in three
months.

Blasted Ukraine.

I decide to watch fifteen
more minutes of
Game of
Thrones
, then go for a short walk with
Lassie.

I am set to hit the play button, when an
alert comes in that I have a new email.

It is 3:10 a.m.

[email protected]
doesn’t get
much action, mostly from Amazon or the online-trading podcast I
subscribe to, and I’ve only received a handful of emails while I
was awake.

The email is from AST. Advanced Surveillance
and Tracking.  

The email is only three words.

We found her.

I take a deep breath.

They found my mother.

CH:02

The last memory I have of
my mother is on my sixth birthday.
I
remember being excited because she missed the previous two. The
moment I woke up, I searched the room for her, but it was only my
dad standing over me.

“
Where’s mom?”

“
She’s . . .”

This sentence always ended the same.

. . .
working.

My mom had the most boring
job in the world. Or at least, when I was little, I remember
thinking a
geologist
was the most boring job in the world. But that was because I
viewed her job — rocks — as competition. Why was sandstone more
important than me? What did quartzite have that I didn’t? It wasn’t
until I grew up, learned that my mother wasn’t spending those
three-week to three-month long stretches looking for rocks, that I
understood. She was looking for oil. Companies paid her a lot of
money to do this, which allowed my dad to stay home, earn a modest
living as a technical writer and care after me.

“
. . . right there,” he’d
finished.

My mother came into the room holding a
birthday cake. The cake was of Snoopy and it had a big blue number
six candle on it.

I can still see the look on my mother’s
face. Her sharp and angular features — nearly the opposite of my
father’s — were a billboard of her Czech heritage. She had piercing
green eyes — little pieces of jade, she’d called them — that must
be what mood rings were made of.  

Today, they were somber.

I wonder if she knew then that she was
leaving. Leaving us.

After I blew out the candles, and ate nearly
half the cake, my parents brought in my birthday present. Or should
I say, wheeled it in.

A bright red Huffy.

I couldn’t have been happier.

“
Dad,
can you teach me
now
?”

I just assumed my dad would teach me how to
ride a bike. He was the one who spent twenty minutes a day reading
history to me, or quizzing me on spelling, or making me practice my
cursive or long division. Then another twenty minutes teaching me
how to throw a baseball, swing a golf club, do a handstand, cook an
omelet, play Gin Rummy, and every other life lesson.

“
You know, your mom is the
bike riding expert in this family. Maybe she’ll teach
you.”

My dad must have already known.

If she didn’t already sit him down and say,
“Jerry, I can’t do this anymore. I can’t handle seeing my son only
awake for an hour a day. This isn’t what I signed up for. I’m
leaving,” then he’d read it in those jade eyes of hers.

“
I do ride a mean bike,”
my mother said with a smile.

My mom spent the next thirty minutes
teaching me how to ride a bike under the streetlights of the small
cul-de-sac where my dad still lives today.

I didn’t realize it then, but when my mother
let go of the seat of my red Huffy, let me balance all on my own,
it wasn’t just the bike she was letting go.

When I did a loop back around, it wasn’t my
mother, but my father waiting for me.

“
Where’s mom?”

“
She had to take a
call.”

I would never see my mother again.

::::

Over
the years, I asked my dad about my mother from time to time,
but nothing ever came of it.

“
She’s
gone. Don’t waste your time thinking about her,” is all he would
ever say. And he was right, because if I did start thinking about
her, I would be lost in a black hole, only to snap out of it and my
day, my
hour
, would be gone. If I were normal, I could have spent hours,
days, months, even years, pondering why my mother walked out on us.
But I wasn’t normal. I had sixty minutes a day and I wasn’t going
to let anyone dictate how I spent those minutes. So I built up a
wall. A wall that would make The Wall seem meek by comparison. A
wall my mother could never scale.

Or so I thought.

Five years ago, I was trading online. I was
looking into buying some oil futures and I came across a stock.

GGU.

Whenever I asked my mother
who she worked for, she would always say Global Geologist
Unlimited. I did some routine background on them. The company
was
started
in
1987.

My mother walked out on us in 1984.

After calling and emailing Global Geologist,
I firmly established Sally Bins was never associated with them.

Next, I contacted George Mason University,
where my mother attended under her maiden name, Sally Petrikova,
and received her degree in Earth Science.

They had no record of her.

My mother’s father was deceased, but her
mother still lived in Czechoslovakia. There were two Deniza
Petrikova’s. Neither had a daughter.

That’s when I first contacted AST and began
shelling out the 5k a month for them to find Sally Bins.

The first report, looking into both my
father and mother’s financials, marriage, birth certificates, and
credit reports, was jaw dropping.

Sally Bins never existed.

::::

My
dad met my mother at a coffee shop. Apparently, this is
cliché, though I wouldn’t know. The only women I’ve met were either
on Match.com — NIGHTOWL3AM — or in Ingrid’s case, a homicide
detective questioning me for murder.

The coffee shop was called the Mighty Bean.
The place was three miles from my dad’s apartment in Arlington,
just on the west side of the Potomac. He would frequent the
establishment, sitting in the corner, working on his latest project
while sipping on cup after cup of the house brew. Being so close to
D.C., much of his work had to do with the alphabet soup of
government agencies. 

I imagine my father hadn’t changed much in
the past forty years. I suppose he might have had a bit more hair,
a little less forehead, and maybe even a collared shirt on, but I
can’t imagine he would have made even a blip on the radar of the
brunette sitting at the table nearby. And equally so, I imagine my
father was so immersed in government jargon that he was unaware the
woman next to him was staring at him quizzically.

“
What are you working so
hard on?”

According to my mother, my father didn’t
react the first time and she had to repeat the question.

When he did look up, his large glasses fell
down his nose and he squinted at her through dark eyes under heavy
brows. Pushing his glasses back up, his eyes opened wide and he’d
said, “Holy moly.”

My mother was well aware of the power she
held over the opposite sex and hadn’t worn an ounce of makeup since
she was in her early-teens. Her hair in a tight bun, a business
suit designed to square off her naturally curvy frame, and glasses
— equal in thickness to my father’s — magnifying those green eyes
into two small planets, my mother was caught off-guard by my
father’s candid reaction.

Never having blushed a day in her life, my
mother’s cheeks grew warm.

“
Well, holy moly to you
too.”

They spent the next six hours chatting.

They were married three months later.

And a year after that, I arrived.

Babies sleep a lot, so neither of my parents
were overly concerned when I was only awake for an hour that first
night. In fact, for the first day, my parents were convinced they
gave birth to the easiest baby on the planet. I slept until 3:00
a.m., woke up crying, my mother nursed me, I goo-ed and gaa-ed for
a little while, and then boom, 4:00 a.m. hit and I was out like a
light. When my parents couldn’t get me to wake up the next morning,
they rushed me to the emergency room.

They ran a bunch of tests on me, and then at
3:00 a.m., I woke up with a loud cry and everyone celebrated. At
least for an hour.

I stayed at the hospital for the next four
months, until every test was run. I was fed intravenously during
the day, then nursed by my mother for the hour I was awake.
Finally, when I reached fourteen pounds and I was deemed as healthy
as any baby in existence, save for my peculiar sleeping schedule,
my parents took me home. They continued to feed me intravenously
and my mother continued to nurse me each night for the hour I was
awake. I can only imagine the stress and worry I caused them.

They waited and waited, hoped and prayed
that one day I would wake up like a normal baby, but it never
happened.

My father took me to see twenty specialists
in six different states and three different countries. No matter
what time zone I was in, I woke up at 3:00 a.m. and fell asleep at
4:00 a.m. After twelve years of tests and more tests, no one could
ever determine why I was only awake for this specified time. What
they did discover, was that I had an excess of melatonin in my
bloodstream. Melatonin is the hormone that regulates the body’s
sleep-wake cycle. My pineal gland, found in the center of the brain
and responsible for melatonin secretion and regulation, was three
times the normal size.

When I was fourteen, I had brain surgery and
the gland was removed.

Nothing changed.

The condition was thusly named Henry
Bins.

::::

There
is a file attached to the email and I click on it.

A PDF downloads.

It is the full report.

I read the small blurb prepared by the
co-founder of AST, Mike Lang.

Mr. Bins,

I am sorry to tell you that we matched the
fingerprints you provided us to a Jane Doe pulled from the Potomac
River on Monday, October 4th, 2014 in Alexandria, Virginia.

I want to be sad, but I’m not. I hardly knew
my mother. I had a basket full of dusty memories and everything
else I knew was second hand from my father. But it was a subject
he’d shied away from for the last thirty years. It’d been ten years
since I uttered the word, “Mom,” in his presence. I can’t remember
exactly what I said, or asked, but I do remember my father
shrugging. And that’s exactly what he’d done, he’d shrugged her off
long ago. Just like she’d shrugged us off.

For a quick moment, I feel a rush of, I
don’t want to say justice, that’s a bit macabre, but more like a
Karmic subpoena. Maybe falling into the Potomac River and drowning,
was, if not deserved, then an unintended consequence of a decision
made three decades earlier.

I imagine her standing near one of the
hundreds of guardrails, bridges, or platforms that escorted the
river through D.C, Virginia, and onward. Maybe a tear runs down her
cheek as she thinks of all those lost years with her baby boy.
Maybe her breath catches while she ponders what happened to him.
Did he grow into a man? Did his one-hour-a-day constraint hold him
back from living a normal life? From happiness? Was he still asleep
in the same room where she’d last seen him?

She jumps.

The report lists the contact information for
the morgue where my mother’s body is being held. Then he goes on to
say our contract has been fulfilled, he sends his deepest regrets,
and he will reimburse me a prorated amount for the month of
October. Signed, Mike Lang.

The next page is a screenshot of the
fingerprint database. The print I lifted off a vase in my parent’s
bedroom many years earlier is on the left. The print from the Jane
Doe is on the right. There are a bunch of numbers and words, but
the only ones that matter are near the bottom.

Positive match.

The next page takes me by surprise. AST must
have deep connections to have obtained the autopsy report this
quickly.

I scan the document for
cause of death, already penciling in the word
drowning
in my mind. Or maybe she
jumped from a bridge and hit the water and broke her neck. Either
way it will be judged an accidental death or a suicide.

But it’s not.

It’s a homicide.

My mother didn’t kill herself.

She was murdered.

CH:03

Meow
.

Lassie stares at me with his yellow
eyes.

“
I’m not gonna call
her.”

Meow
.

“
Yes, I know my mother was
found in Alexandria and that my girlfriend works for the Alexandria
Police Department.”

Meow
.

 “
Yes, I know she’s a
homicide detective, you moron.”

Meow
.

“
Yes,
thank you for pointing out that homicide detectives investigate
murders and that my mother was murdered. What did you do at your
last home, just sit around and watch
Law and Order
?”