“Did you say something, Nanuka?” her father calls from the hallway. He comes into the kitchen with shaving cream on his neck and stops short in the doorway.
“Can I help you?” he says to the officers.
“Mr. Gelashvili? Were you at an open house the other day?”
Her father doesn’t move from the doorway. “Why?”
The woman officer explains. There was a theft during the open house. Some valuable personal items, including heirloom jewelry, were taken from the owners’ bedroom during the day. The police are questioning everyone who was at the event. “We have a search warrant for your home,” she says, unfolding a piece of paper and putting it on the counter.
“You are searching everyone’s home?” her father asks.
The two officers shift uncomfortably.
“Mr. Gelashvili, would you mind telling us what you were doing at the open house?” the older officer says, looking around the kitchen, taking it all in: the ancient refrigerator chugging to itself in the corner, the contact paper on the countertops, the water stains on the ceiling. “Are you in the market for an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar home?”
“I’m studying for my real-estate license,” he says.
“Then would you care to explain why you are in the guest book under a false name?”
Her father stares at the woman for a moment before speaking. His face is pale. Nino can tell he’s afraid of the officers. Back in the Soviet Union you were afraid of the police, he’s told her. But not here. Americans are honest people. This is why he left Tbilisi and came to this country.
“It was a game,” he says, and then, when this seems insufficient, he tries to explain their Saturday-morning tradition. His voice is shaky, and nervousness makes his accent stronger. The story comes out sounding absurd; even her father seems to hear how improbable it all sounds, and his voice grows fainter and more halting. A police radio suddenly burbles, something about a child reported missing but now found. The older officer unclips the radio from his belt, still looking at her father, and turns down the volume. After a moment, the woman speaks.
“Mr. Gelashvili, have you been in touch with ICE?” she says. “Your visa expired some time ago.”
Her father sags against the doorframe. “I am currently working with an immigration lawyer,” he says in a voice that sounds as though he is reciting the words from an index card. “You may contact the offices of S. Ramachandran in Somerville, Massachusetts.”
“Okay,” the older officer says. “We’re going to have to conduct a search. And get a record of your prints.”
“The Saudi prince was a joke,” her father says, visibly floundering. He looks to Nino, who is still standing near the outside door, for help.
“Your fingerprints,” she says, in a voice hardly above a whisper.
The woman, Officer Laramie, tells her father to take a seat. When he does, she sets a briefcase on the kitchen table and takes out a photocopied form and an ink pad. The older officer snaps on a pair of blue latex gloves and starts opening cupboards and drawers. Her father watches him as Officer Laramie takes his hand and moves it from ink pad to paper and back again, one finger at a time, as if he were a child. He does not resist. When all fingers have been inked, he stares at the record of them on the paper with seeming disbelief, as if these marks could not have been made by his hands. He looks up at the officer.
“If the names in the book were false,” he says, “then how did you know who I am? How did you know where I live?”
The policewoman puts the sheet of paper in the briefcase, then snaps the ink pad shut. “You wrote your address in the book,” she says.
Nino, hovering uncertainly near the door, makes a sound in her throat. Her father looks up at her.
“Nanuka, go home,” he says. “Go to your mother’s.” He turns to the police officer. “Can she?”
The officer waves to show she has no objection.
“Don’t say anything to your mother, she will worry,” her father says to her. “Everything will be all right. This is nothing,” he says, waving his hand to show how little it all means.
Nino puts on her coat and boots. She looks back in the kitchen before she steps outside. The officer in the latex gloves is digging through the kitchen trash, while her father sits in his chair with his eyes closed. He’s touched his forehead and left a smudged fingerprint above his left eyebrow, as if a gray moth has settled lightly on his forehead without him noticing.
“You’re home early,” Shane, her stepfather, says from the couch when she comes in from riding her bike home. He’s got a towel around his shoulders and his dark hair is spiky from the shower.
“Yes,” she says, unwinding the scarf from around her neck and taking off her jacket.
Shane tosses the running magazine he’s reading onto the coffee table.
“How’s your father?”
“Good,” Nino says. Shane always asks her this when she gets home, and her answer is always the same. She knows he’s asking only because he doesn’t really care that much. Her father rarely asks anything about Shane — the name sounds like “Shame” when he says it — because he actually does care. Shane married her mother when Nino was six, which is how her mother got herself legalized in the U.S. Shane is the owner of three mall stores that sell nothing but vitamins, and drives a white Lincoln Navigator with THE VITAMAX EMPORIUM stenciled on the back window. In her conversations with her father, she tries never to mention Shane, but then she worries that he might notice that she never mentions her stepfather and decide that she is protecting his feelings by never bringing him up, which could then make her father think that she actually believes that he has something to feel bad about in regard to Shane, which he doesn’t.
“Your mother’s out shopping for dinner,” he says. He stands up and cracks his back. He turns and sees her in the hallway, standing frozen at the door, and notices for the first time the look of distress on her face.
“Everything okay?” She looks at him, a feeling of panic hollowing her stomach. She wants to tell someone what she’s done, but can’t bring herself to open her mouth. He’s good to her, Shane is, and even loves her in his Shane way, but he isn’t her father.
“Yes,” she says.
“Where are you going now?” he says, when he sees her putting on her coat again. “You just got in.”
“Something I forgot to do,” she says, and goes out.
But she doesn’t go to her father’s house. Instead she cuts through the park and heads toward the west end of town, where the open house was the previous day. She’s going there because she already knows that her father took the things from the bureau in the upstairs bedroom. She also understands why he did it. She knows that he needs money to pay his debt to the immigration lawyer. He needs money to pay her child support to Shane and her mother, even though they told him it was okay if things were tight, they could wait. No, it was a matter of pride for him. Better to take something from someone wealthy, who didn’t need the money. He didn’t think he would get caught.
And maybe he wouldn’t have, if she hadn’t put down his address in the guest book.
Outside the house a group of boys are playing street hockey with a tennis ball. They pause to let a car pass by, then resume their game, not paying her any attention. The sun is setting through the trees, casting long shadows across the lawns, which are spongy and still matted down from last week’s snow. She goes up the walk. Lights are on inside. She hesitates for a few seconds, then rings the bell.
The door is answered by a woman. She’s trim, late forties, maybe, with variegated blond hair. “Yes?” she says, looking down at Nino with surprise. Nino’s legs are shaking, and her voice breaks as she starts to explain: the police, her father, the fact that he would be sent away from her if they didn’t do something to help. Hearing this, the woman’s tanned face registers distress. “Come on inside,” she tells Nino, ushering her through the door.