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  67. 3:46 a.m.

“The only reason she did it is because I told her that if she did, I would give you this.”

The President pulls a red folder from the back of his pants and hands it to me.

“This is your mother’s file.”

I stare at the folder in my hand.

“Before you open that, I have to warn you there are things in that file that you can’t unsee.”

He and Red open the door and leave.

I stare at the folder.

I think back to what the Director said, to what I’d been thinking about nonstop for the last week. How do you think you turned out like you did? Why you are only awake for an hour a day? You don’t really think it’s some medical disorder, do you? No, it’s classical conditioning. You were her first test subject.”

And not only that.

If the woman they pulled from the Potomac wasn’t my mother.

Then she is still alive.

:01

June 18th

Alexandria, Virginia

It had become part of my routine. Sometimes it was only a glance, other times I would pick it up, walk around the room with it, spend a couple minutes toying with the notion of opening it. But when you are only awake for sixty minutes a day, those couple minutes are a precious commodity. Those are two minutes I’m not kissing Ingrid or rubbing Lassie’s belly or playing cards with my father or making trades or running or showering. Two minutes I’m not living my life.

But I could never bear to open it. I could only postulate the words and images that lived inside the red folder.

“Honey, we need to go. It’s a twenty-minute drive to the airport!” Ingrid shouts from the living room.

I gaze down at my cell phone.

3:32 a.m.

The Potomac Airfield is located ten miles away, on the other side of the river. It would be much easier for everyone if we arrived before 4 a.m., though I am certain Ingrid made arrangements for a wheelchair to be waiting.

Just in case.

“I’m coming!” I yell, my eyes still locked on the folder lying on the middle shelf of the four-foot tall safe in my closet.

It had been eight months since the President of the United States handed me the red folder. When he handed it to me, he said, “I have to warn you, there are things in there you can’t unsee.”

He read it.

He knew.

Knew what my mother had done to me.

But it wasn’t my mother who concerned me.

It was my father.