“Where’s this airplane gonna go, daddy?” Penny looked up at me, hanging on to my arm, tired from the weight of her Dora backpack.

“Ukraine.”

“Where’s that? Is it in Africa, too?” The corners of her mouth drooped at the thought.

“No, it’s in Europe. It’s near where we lived when we had Bobby.” She didn’t look surprised or happy but she didn’t look pouty anymore. To be so young and so unexcited by such things. What had I done to my own kid? I hugged her to my leg and shook her slightly.


“Come on, it’ll be fun, no more hot weather and we might live in a cozy warm cottage like last time, when we were in Poland.” I was trying to get my hopes up as much as my eight-year-old daughter’s. “You loved Bobby, maybe we can get another cat, that’d be fun, wouldn’t it?” She nodded, puckering her lips.


“Can I get a dog instead? I want a little poodle like the one Adina told me about.” I felt a pang of guilt at tearing her away from her nanny, as I always got. I felt like I was taking her away from her mother every time we left somewhere for good. I suppose she was used to it but I always thought it was impossible to get used to saying goodbye, however many times I convinced myself otherwise.


“Yeah, sure thing. What do you want to name it?” She grew excited as she scolded me: “Poodles aren’t ‘its’! I want a girl dog named Candy who walks with me everywhere and sleeps on my lap.” I wanted that too. I wanted a best friend for her who would never have to be taken away.



We boarded the flight, showing our passports and tickets to the bored attendants, fingering their AKs and eyeing all the passengers. I wasn’t sad for a minute to leave Uganda: it was not exactly on my list of places to live, let alone go, but there was a strange feeling that came up as I stepped out of the unbearable heat and invasive sand, into the plane. I couldn’t keep myself from making each new country and town and community my home, though I desperately tried. Leaving took time to recover from and my daughter and I were both beat from this life.


I held Penny on my lap in the window seat as the plane took off, I doubted there was even a flight-attendant on this ten-people flight out of Kampala, though there were a few chickens, already stinking up the suffocating oxygen. We watched the gold sand drop away and I gazed across the horizon at the small and struggling capital and all its squalor. Onward we flew.
Three days later we pulled up beside the apartment complex where we would now be living, trudged up five smelly flights of stairs and fell into the bed, side by side and slept for a good six hours before I woke with a start at the ringing of the doorbell. The man looked like the last one and all the rest of them: stone cold and robotic. He handed me a folder without shaking hands, said “welcome to Ukraine Mr. Yatzov”, and marched off down the staircases. Did he notice the smell? Did he get tired after walking that many steps? Did he feel anything? I wondered, watching him until he disappeared, then shut the door and locked it.
For the first time, I looked around the apartment. The same as ever. Only the government could make apartments, cottages, houses, mansions, and bungalows look exactly the same and feel the same amount like a tiny prison cell. I left a note next to Penny’s peaceful, sleeping face on the bed, grabbed the keys and the folder, and walked downstairs to the city below. It was freezing night, and the moonlight reflected off the snow like metal. I walked beside yelling teenagers, intimate lovers, and weary old women, lugging plastic bags and walkers over the hard snow. Sitting in a cheap diner with coffee and a scone, I opened the folder and spread the papers over the table. In half an hour, the scone was gone and all the information about Victor and Tamara Yatzov was memorized. I sipped my coffee slowly as I glanced at the mission papers. They never got any more exciting or fun or even odd. Basically the same stupid job every time: deliver the such-and-such to such-and-such at such-and-such hundred hours. I doubt there was an office job out there less interesting than mine.
I picked up groceries on the way home and got lost getting back through the maze of identical street names and storefronts. When at last I found our gray apartment building and climbed the flights of stairs into our heated cave, I found Penny not like she did most of the time, watching the news and reading or writing in her pink spiral bound notebook, it was almost freaky how mature and smart she was, but she sat in a ball on an armchair next to the window, staring into the cold darkness outside, brows furrowed.
“What’s up?” I asked, unloading groceries into the tiny fridge. She continued to stare out the window.
“I miss Adina. I miss Mom.” I put down the bag. We looked at each other in the reflection of the window.
“You should close the curtain, who knows who’s out there looking in?” She ignored me, a tear rolling down her cheek. I was never good at this. I did what someone once taught me and opened my arms to her. She crawled into my lap, her face in my chest, sobbing quietly. My heart was breaking for her, her body shaking with a grief true and deep, not like a child crying for the cut on her knee. Above Penny’s head I saw the folder sitting on the counter and an idea crept into my head, an idea that would change everything.

“I want a meeting with Mr. Hal. This week.” There was silence on the other line. “Hello?” Static.
“That might be tricky. He’s abroad at the moment.” I almost wanted them to say that.
“You’re making a huge mistake. I’m at the Ukrainian press right now and sitting next to me is a New York Times correspondent. I want a meeting tonight.” I gripped the counter, trying to steady my breathing and sound confident.
“I’m sorry? Who is this, again?” The receptionist sounded irritated and distracted. I breathed slowly in through my teeth.
“This is Ben Phinn and I’m pissed.” I regretted that immediately after saying it. But it appeared to work on the receptionist who became dead silent before speaking again.
“Hang on a minute.”
“Wait—“but the phone clicked to some sappy classical music and I hit the cabinet in front of me with the phone. Penny, who had finally fallen asleep on the bed with the news flashing across the screen, turned over. I wondered how Penny watched the news when it was in so many different languages, but every country, no matter how third world, she watched. Maybe it was her last string to the world that we were so isolated from, though we probably saw more news firsthand from our travels than anyone else.
“Mr. Hal says he will meet you on Saturday at one o’ clock.” I was slow to process her information and I only started to demand a sooner meeting when the line went dead. These people sure were charming.

“Nice to see you again, my friend. It’s been so long.” I shook hands with Mr. Hal and he let me into his magnificent office. Flashbacks of similar meetings with this charming character sent a pulsating dread into my chest.
“Same to you.” I said, a little awkwardly. I didn’t know how to make small talk with the man who owned me or even if I should. He offered me coffee, I said no, thank you, and we sat down. He was quick to the point.
“What do you want?” My pulse quickened and my heart sank at the immediate tenseness in the room. “Do you want to go to jail for years and years? Just so you can hurt one or two of my guys for a very short time? Think about your daughter, what was her name again?” I didn’t reply but stared into his eyes for as long as I could sustain it.
“You know I could do more than that, Mr. Hal.” I said, slowly. His confidence didn’t falter. “But I haven’t even told you what I want.”
“Oh, I think I know what you want, but I don’t know if we can provide that at this time.” He took out a cigar, failing to offer me one. Typical.
“You’ve turned out to be a very valuable asset, Ben, and I don’t think it’s time you leave us. Your child is how old again?” He didn’t wait for me to answer this time. “Think about her, fatherless, at her young age.” It was a threat but it was also an honest reminder. I grinded my teeth.
“All I want is to live in one place for more than two months. Living on the move like this is no life. You, of all people, should know this, Hal.” He looked up from his lit match and raised his eyebrow. He was obviously not used to being addressed so disrespectfully. I blinked back at him.
“You gave up your right to live freely the day you gave up your freedom to me.” He smiled stiffly and blew out his match, puffing on his cigar.
“I never knew my daughter would be forced to move once a month, she has no stability in her life. Nothing to hang on to but myself, and what am I?” I struggled to keep my voice steady. He rolled his eyes.
“Don’t give me that. You will go where I send you, you won’t threaten my receptionist, and you will do the job that I have so graciously given you. This conversation is over.” He pointed to the door and I got up to leave. I knew an argument lost.

“How would you like to go to school here, instead of me teaching you?” We were walking through town as, seeing all the stores and mansions, parks and restaurants, and people.
“I don’t know Ukrainian, silly!” She giggled and skipped along the sidewalk, dragging me by the hand.
“They speak Russian here, Pen, and I’ve taught a lot of it to you.”
“I don’t remember that. Why do they speak Russian here if we’re not in Russia?” she was barely even listening, a poodle was being walked across the street. It had a sweater on and little dog shoes or something and it looked pretty ridiculous to me.
“Penny, listen, we should go check out the school here just to see, okay?” She suddenly stopped skipping and looked straight at me.
“I don’t want to go to school: I want to stay with you!” She looked pretty upset, catching me off guard. I was too guilty to upset her even more, given last night, so I dropped it.
“You like that poodle? Is that the kind you want?” I pointed at the waddling princess across the street and she yelped with laughter and hugged me as I led her into a pet store.
That night I stared at the TV blankly, thinking hard as Penny cooed over her new puppy. A news flash came up on the screen about a man who’d just been arrested after killing his wife’s murderer and I suddenly felt a jolt of guilt, realizing how small of a man I was, how weak I’d become. How pathetic could a man be? Not only letting my own wife’s killer live but even working for him? Shame overcame me and I felt dizzy with knowing this. I stumbled into the bathroom and bent over the sink, staring at my reflection in the mirror. A ball of hate twisted in my nauseous stomach, staring back at pale face; sweat beading above my trembling lip. I lit a cigarette that I had hidden under the sink, a habit I was trying to give up. Sitting on the floor, I sucked in smoke like sucking in oxygen after nearly drowning and tried to calm down, tried to save myself from losing all sense of pride as I hyperventilated like a little girl in the presence of her crush. I thought back to the night when the mother of my child and the love of my young-adult life was shot in a drive by, killed immediately and the night my life was flipped upside down and ripped apart forever.
I waited for the smoke to clear in the suffocating bathroom and returned to the living room where Candy, the newborn poodle, was sleeping, curled up in a miniature ball on Penny’s lap as she read a book on the floor in front of her.
“We’re leaving, Pen. Tomorrow.” Her brow furrowed when she looked up.
“Why? We’ve only been here a week!” She started to cry, waking Poodles up who started to whine, licking her hand eagerly. Even dogs had better people skills than I.
“No, this time will be our last, I promise. You can bring the dog. Pen, I’m getting out.” My voice broke when I said it and I had never felt such relief though this whole thing was still just a thought, born out of a desperate, weak man. Penny didn’t know what this meant but now that she knew she wouldn’t have to say goodbye to her puppy she stopped crying and got up to pat my arm, the highest point she could reach.
We packed out things that night, cleaned the unlived-in apartment and I booked a flight for a different airport than the one we had just arrived at a week ago. I didn’t sleep that night, planning and worrying and feeling exhilarated, all the same. The next morning we left the gray apartment building, this time feeling not sadness at this goodbye. As Penny and Poodles waited in the rental car on the street, the engine still running, I took the stair two at a time up to the domineering office building.
“Um, what do you think you’re doing Mr. Phinn?” The same receptionist stood up quickly. She looked ready to tackle me. “You can’t go in there! Mr. Hal! Mr. Hal!” I banged open the door to his office where he was sitting at his desk, smoking a cigar and talking angrily on the phone. He looked up and nodded at me, as if expecting me and held his hand over the phone.
“Please wait outside for a moment, Mr. Phinn. I’m almost done here.” I ignored him.
“I just wanted to say that I’m sorry for coming to you like that and being so ungrateful and disrespectful and I sincerely apologize.” I spoke fast, sounding like an eager student. Mr. Hal nodded, half listening to me and the telephone.
“Yeah, sure, Ben. I understand.” I paused than walked back towards the door.
“One more thing, Ben.” I turned around. He hung up the phone, shutting up the angry yelling with a click of finality. He held a pistol in the other hand and pointed it at me. The room erupted with noise as I leapt aside, sending a bullet from my own gun flying towards him. Somehow, it hit him in his fat neck, as glass shattered from the door behind me, piercing the air with flying bits of chaos and noise. He dropped back into his chair after that look of pure shock that she gave me. His chair rolled back and bounced off the wall and he slumped forward. I couldn’t believe it myself and it took a moment for me to move…and for the receptionist to start screaming. I pointed my gun at her all the way out the door and down the staircase as alarms went off all over the building. I stuffed the gun under my shirt and barely made it safely down the staircase, hanging on the railing, trying to jump down three steps at a time. Two guards pointed guns at me as I came into the lobby and I screamed at them to let me by.
“Please, I have a child!” I cried frantically. “There are men everywhere with machine guns and they’re shooting everyone and they’re going to kill us all!” They let me through and I laughed at the easiness of it all and threw myself into the car, gunning down the street, the car an extension of my adrenaline-filled body. Penny screamed, pointing to the cuts on my arms and face but I laughed and said it was alright. I felt great.
We ran through the airport, holding hands and our small bit of luggage. Our suitcases had gotten smaller and smaller through the years. I wiped the blood from my face and forced a sweatshirt over my head to cover the now stinging cuts on my arms. The guards and stewards stared at us suspiciously: a man and a child running with a crying puppy bouncing in Penny’s arms and gory cuts covering my flushed face. But we were let through without hesitation and we boarded the small plane along with about twenty other travelers. Penny slept and read and tickled the puppy through the hours-long flight while I stared out the window, barely able to sit until I was finally able to fall into a dream-filled sleep. Penny poked me in the ribs as the plane gave a jolt upon landing. We grabbed out bags and stepped out the air-conditioned airplane and into a gorgeous sunset.
Hailing a taxi, I directed the driver to the nearest restaurant and we ate in ravished silence as I shoveled food down my throat.
“Daddy, where are we now?” I smiled out the window at the cobbled street outside and chewed on the best piece of bread I’d ever had.
“Italy. Those people can’t even set foot in Italy anymore, Pen. How bout that?” She frowned and asked why.
“’Cause your mom came from a powerful family who lives around here and they made it so that, after she died, this was the one place in the whole world where Hal didn’t have eyes and ears. You want to finally meet your Grandma?” She nodded and fed a piece of meat to Poodles. I closed my eyes and leaned back and knew this wasn’t the end of our journey but, for the first time, I was in control and I was making a change in my daughter’s life. And if I was lucky, she would grow up to be a lot stronger than her old man was. But if she didn’t, I would still be proud because she’s my daughter. And I am Ben Phinn.