On New Year’s Eve I Returned to an Empty Apartment, While My Mother’s Call Suddenly Made My Wife’s Face Go Pale

On New Year’s Eve, at almost half past ten, I opened the door of my apartment and was met by such silence as a person usually encounters only at funerals. I was supposed to be in Germany; the inspection at the Stuttgart factory was still continuing for several more days. In reality, I changed my flight and quietly returned to New York. I wanted to make Mariam happy and hug my eleven-day-old son, Luka, for the first time.

“Mariam? Where are you? Where is Luka?” I shouted.

In response, I heard the weak crying of a newborn from the kitchen. My hand tightened on the handle. Ice-cold air stood in the house. The Christmas tree was not lit. There was neither dinner nor a single glass of champagne on the table. Only dirty bottles, used diapers, and an almost empty box of cheap formula lay there.

Mariam was sitting on a folding chair. She was wearing thin pajamas, with a worn jacket wrapped over them, and was pressing a hand to her stomach as if she were holding a wound closed with her hand. A dark bloodstain could be seen on the fabric. Luka was trembling at her feet, in a small woven basket, wrapped in an excessively thin blanket.

“David… you really came back?” Mariam tried to stand.

“Don’t move. We are taking you to the doctor now.”

“Take care of Luka first. I am fine.”

“You have a fever.”

“Your mother said that this is how it happens. Women must not eat much after an operation.”

Her words broke something in my chest.

I opened the refrigerator. It was empty. There was no meat, no fruit, no milk, no vitamins, and no expensive formula for Luka. A paper had been attached to the door with a magnet: “We are celebrating the New Year in Miami. There will be something in the pantry. Don’t call David and don’t deceive him as if we are treating you badly.”

“Where are your mother and Chloe?” I asked.

Mariam lowered her eyes.

“They went to Miami with Chloe, Mark, and his family. They told me that they needed a rest.”

“And you?”

“I had to stay here. Someone had to look after Luka.”

Anger rose into my throat, but I did not raise my voice. Sometimes anger is so deep that it no longer resembles shouting.

I picked up Mariam in my arms. Her body was hot. I wrapped Luka in my heavy winter coat and carried him downstairs, toward a taxi. Outside, fireworks exploded, people laughed, and we were going toward the hospital.

In the emergency department, the nurse looked at Mariam and immediately opened the door.

“When did she have the operation?”

“Eleven days ago.”

“Who was taking care of her?”

Mariam looked toward me. I could not answer.

Before the doctors took her away, I opened the banking application on my phone and canceled all the additional cards of my mother, Chloe, and Mark. Then I turned on the recordings from the cameras at home.

In the first video, my mother was dragging bags. In the second, Chloe was packing the baby’s things into boxes. In the third, Mark was taking the groceries I had bought out of the kitchen.

But in the last recording they were not carrying only things. My mother came to the camera, put a finger on the lens, and told someone: “If David returned today, everything is over.”

I turned up the sound of the video. At that moment the phone rang. My mother’s name appeared on the screen. Instead of answering, I stopped the recording and held my breath, because on the screen Mark was reaching toward a new folder in front of the camera…

Mark opened the folder, but the papers were not visible in the camera. My mother’s voice was heard clearly.

“He must not have known that the money was with us.”

Chloe chuckled.

“If he asks, we will say that Mariam spent it.”

“And the baby’s formula?” Mark asked.

“We took everything. David will believe her word more than his own family.”

The phone rang again. This time Chloe was calling.

“Your mother told me not to let you overreact,” she said with a laugh when I answered. “Mariam is probably making drama.”

“Where are you?”

“In Miami. Why?”

“Because my son is in the hospital and you took his food.”

Silence fell.

“David, we will settle this as a family matter.”

“No. Now there is a recording.”

I ended the call and called the police. The detective asked me for the address, the name of the hotel, and the card payments. I sent him everything.

Then I received a message from an unknown number: “If you want Mariam and the child to be safe, do not oppose your mother.”

Below it lay one photograph. In the photograph, the door of Mariam’s hospital room could be seen.

Someone was close to us…

I immediately called the unknown number. The call did not go through. I enlarged the photo sent on the screen and noticed a small black mark on the wall beside the door. It was the mark of our hospital department.

“David, you have to see this,” Detective Nichols told me when he entered the room ten minutes later. “This message no longer resembles an ordinary family quarrel.”

“Who took the photograph?”

“We don’t know yet. But in the camera recording there is something that will connect this to your family.”

He placed the laptop on the table. In the recording, Mark could be seen. He was holding a folder and telling my mother: “David transferred the money for the child’s treatment. If we take it out today, he will never be able to get it back.”

Mariam’s brother, Mark, managed the money because I was in Germany. Six weeks earlier I had asked my mother to pay the expenses necessary for the family. I transferred the money into a special account. But they had spent all the money on their own vacation, the hotel, and expensive things.

But the recording did not end there. My mother placed a document on the table.

“Mariam signed it,” she said. “It says here that she herself asked her relatives to stop helping.”

“She did not sign this,” I said.

Nichols turned on the second video. Chloe was standing in Mariam’s room. She was holding a phone in her hand.

“If you don’t sign, we will tell David that you cannot take care of the baby,” she was telling her.

Mariam was trembling on the bed.

“I just want food.”

“Sign it.”

I stopped the recording. Mariam covered her face with her hand.

“David, I was afraid. I thought that you would believe them too.”

I sat beside her and enclosed her cold fingers in my hands.

“You are not alone anymore.”

The detective told me that the police were already going to the hotel in Miami. But before that, a new message arrived. This time in the photograph my mother was standing in the hotel corridor and beside her she was holding a photograph of my father, who had died six years earlier.

“The money was only the beginning,” it said. “In your father’s will there is a page that you must never see.”

I looked at my father’s face and for the first time thought that my family was hiding not only my money, but also my past. Just then the detective called me and said that at the hotel my mother had a stronger lawyer beside her than I did…