THE ERASED DAUGHTER

CHAPTER TWO: The Office

Before the file, there was the office.

Whitfield Genealogical Services occupied the second floor of a converted brownstone on Elm Street in Somerville — three rooms, a shared bathroom, and a kitchen that was really just a counter with a coffee maker and a microwave. The firm's founder, David Whitfield, occupied the large office with the bay window. Janine, the administrator, occupied the small office by the stairs. And I occupied the middle office — the one with the radiator that clanked and the window that overlooked the parking lot and the filing cabinet that contained, at any given time, approximately forty active cases representing forty dead people whose money was waiting for someone to claim it.

I liked the work. Not in the passionate, all-consuming way that people in movies like their work — the way a surgeon likes surgery or a detective likes detecting. I liked it in the steady, reliable, undramatic way that a craftsperson likes their craft: because I was good at it, because it made sense, because every case had a beginning (a death, a probate filing) and a middle (research, documentation, verification) and an end (heirs found, assets distributed, case closed).

The work was orderly. The work was finite. The work did not require me to feel things I wasn't prepared to feel.

This was important because, in the three years since Margaret's death, I had become a person who organized her life around the avoidance of unprepared feeling. I ate the same breakfast every day (toast, peanut butter, coffee). I walked the same route to work (Elm Street to Highland to Davis Square). I called Ray at the same time every Sunday (10 AM, after his breakfast, before his nap). I went to bed at the same time every night (11 PM, with a book, with the lamp on Margaret's side still plugged in even though Margaret's side was empty, because unplugging it would mean acknowledging that it would never be used again and I was not prepared to acknowledge that).

I was not unhappy. I was something more precise and more insidious than unhappy: I was functional. I functioned. I worked, I ate, I slept, I visited Ray, I filed my taxes, I maintained my apartment. I functioned with the smooth, mechanical reliability of a system that has been designed to run without input, without interruption, without the destabilizing influence of surprise.

Surprise is what happens when a file lands on your desk and your name is in it.