Chapter 12
The Kitchen
It was half past four on Thursday afternoon when they reached Ferris Street.
The light was already going. It was the first week of December, and the days had shrunk to a few thin gray hours, and a low sky pressed on the roofs like a lid. The shop windows were lit. A string of colored bulbs hung across the street from lamp-post to lamp-post, with a plastic star in the middle that someone had hung crooked. A man in a Santa hat stood outside the laundromat, smoking.
Tom parked at the curb across from number thirty-eight.
He turned off the engine. For a minute neither of them spoke. The car ticked as it cooled. Beside him, in the passenger seat, Anna sat with her hands folded in her lap, in her good coat, looking straight ahead at the windshield. She had put on lipstick. He did not think she knew she had.
"That's the one," he said.
"The second floor."
"Yes."
"The light's on."
"Yes."
She turned her head, and looked up at it, a square of yellow in the dusk. A curtain, half drawn. A plant on the sill. A shadow moved across it, once, and was gone.
"You don't have to do this today," she said.
"If I don't do it today, I won't do it."
"That isn't true."
"It is."
"Tom."
"I know myself." He tried to smile. "I'll find a reason. I'll say I should wait for the lawyer, and then for the Board, and then for after Christmas. And it'll be March, and she'll have read it in the paper."
She did not argue. She looked at him with a small steady tenderness, and then she put out her hand and straightened his collar, and smoothed down his tie, as she had done at his father's funeral.
"You look like a man going to a job interview," she said.
"I feel like one."
"Don't say sorry first."
"What?"
"It'll sound like you want something." She tucked the end of the tie into his jacket. "Say your name. Say what you did. And then wait."
"Wait for what?"
"For whatever she gives you."
He got out of the car.
It was very cold. The air stung his face. He stood on the pavement with his hands at his sides, and looked at the flight of concrete steps, and the green door at the top, and for a moment the whole street seemed to tilt and swim. He heard the traffic. He heard the man in the Santa hat cough. He heard, quite clearly, the flat dry tick of a key.
He did not look round.
He crossed the street, and climbed the stairs.
The bell was an old one, a round brass button. He pushed it, and somewhere in the apartment a buzzer sounded, low and harsh. He waited. He heard footsteps, light and quick, and a chain, and a bolt. A face appeared in the gap.
It was smaller than he had expected.
He had thought of her, for so long, as a kind of height. A pillar. A thing that stood over him. But the face in the doorway was narrow and tired and quite ordinary, with a pointed chin, and lines at the corners of the eyes, and gray in the dark hair at the temples. She was in a faded blue cardigan, with a dish towel over one shoulder. She had a small silver cross at her neck, and, beside it, a shoelace.
She was looking at him with great attention.
"Yes?" said Mary Carter.
"Mrs. Carter."
"It's Ms."
"I'm sorry. Ms. Carter. My name is Tom Walker."
She did not move.
The chain stayed on. In the narrow gap between the door and the frame, her face went through a number of changes, slowly, one after another, as the face of a person does who is reading a long sentence in a foreign language. Her eyes went to his uniform tie. To the jacket. To the swollen bruise along his jaw. They came back to his face.
He saw her know.
It was not a flash. It was a quiet, gradual, inward settling. Her mouth tightened a little. Her hand, on the edge of the door, closed, and the knuckles went white.
"Walker," she said.
"Yes."
"The officer."
"Yes, ma'am."
"You're the one."
"I am."
"You're the one who shot my son."
"Yes."
She looked at him.
It went on for a very long time. A door opened on the floor below, and music came up the stairwell, tinny and bright. A child laughed. A radiator hissed. Down in the street, a car drew away from the curb with a long soft sound like a sigh.
"I knew you'd come," said Mary.
"Did you?"
"I didn't know when. I didn't know it'd be you." She said it to herself, slowly. "I saw a man in a gray car. Twice. I thought, that's somebody from the department. Somebody's keeping an eye. I wrote it down." She gave a very small bitter smile. "I thought it was a spy."
"I'm sorry."
"You don't have to say that."
"I was told not to."
"By whom?"
"My wife. She's in the car." He glanced down the street. "She told me to say my name, and what I did, and then wait."
"She sounds sensible."
"She is."
"Did she tell you to come?"
"No. She told me not to." He drew a breath. "I'm not supposed to be here. I've been told by my lawyer, and by my chief, and by every person I know. I'm not allowed to contact the family. If you want me to go, I'll go."
"I don't want you to go."
He stared.
"I want to know why you're here," said Mary. "That's different. I want to hear what you've got to say, and then I'll decide." She took the chain off. "You've got ten minutes. I'm making dinner."
It was a small kitchen.
He would remember that, afterward. He would remember it more clearly than almost anything else in that long strange month: the little square room, with its yellow oilcloth and its chipped enamel stove, the shelf of mismatched cups, the window over the sink, the streetlight just coming on outside it, orange, flickering at the rim. A pot was steaming on the back burner. It smelled of rice and onions and something sharper, a thread of pepper. A radio on the windowsill played quietly, an old song, a woman's voice, low and sweet.
There was a table in the middle, with four chairs. Two of them were pushed in. One had a coat over it. The fourth was a little apart from the rest, turned slightly to face the window, with a cushion on the seat.
He did not sit in that one.
"Take that," said Mary, pointing to the chair with the coat. "Move it. It's only mine."
He moved the coat. He sat.
She did not sit. She went to the stove and stirred the pot. She did it quite steadily, with her back to him, in the glow of the little lamp over the cooker. A strand of hair had come loose and lay along her neck. Her shoulders under the cardigan were thin and square. She moved with the small economical grace of a woman who had been making dinner at that stove for twenty years.
Against the far wall, propped on the floor, he saw a long white board.
It was about four feet wide. It was painted in white enamel, and across the middle, in tall black letters, with thick careful outlines and a soft gray shadow, were the words MARY'S KITCHEN. The first five letters were smooth and sure. The last seven were a little different. They were bolder, and slightly uneven, as if done by someone else, with great care, and with a hand that was shaking.
"Ben finished it," said Mary, without turning.
"It's beautiful."
"It's not as good."
"No."
"But he tried." She tapped the spoon on the rim of the pot. "I told him he didn't have to. He did it anyway. He came on Saturday, with his uncle's paints, and he sat on my floor for three hours. He cried most of the time." She was silent. "I hung it on the wall. And then I took it down. I couldn't look at it."
"I understand."
"Do you?"
"No," said Tom. "I'm sorry."
She turned.
She leaned against the stove, with the spoon in her hand, and looked at him over the width of the little kitchen. It was a long look. It was neither hostile nor warm. It was a look of cool, patient, unhurried scrutiny, such as one gives to a thing found on a beach.
"You've been hit," she said.
"Yes."
"Who by?"
"Ben."
Her eyebrows rose a fraction.
"When?"
"Monday. In the tunnel."
"What were you doing in the tunnel?"
"I went to see the wall."
"Why?"
"I wanted to know what he made."
A silence.
"And what did you think?" she said.
He opened his mouth. He found, to his horror, that he could not speak. His throat had closed. He sat in the hard chair with his hands on his knees, and the radio went on playing, and in the lamplight she was watching his face, and he could not say a single word.
"I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen," he said.
It came out as a whisper.
"I don't know much about art. I've never been, I don't go to galleries. But I stood there. And I thought, somebody made this. With his hands. Slowly. For two months. In the dark. Because he wanted to say something." He dragged in a breath. "And I thought, I never even asked him what."
Mary did not move.
"I'm sorry," said Tom. "I told you I wouldn't say it first. I'm sorry."
"It's all right."
"No, I mean." He pressed the heel of his hand against one eye. "I mean, I came to tell you something. And I don't know how."
"Then tell me."
"I'm trying."
"Take your time."
"I don't have, I know I don't. You said ten minutes."
"I said that." She picked up the pot and set it on a cold ring. She turned off the gas. "I've changed my mind."
She took two plates from the shelf.
She served it without a word.
It was rice, and a spoon of beans, and a few strips of fried chicken. She put a plate in front of him, and a fork, and sat down across the table with the other. A small bowl stood between them, with a rooster on the side. It was hot sauce. She pushed it a few inches toward his hand.
"I made too much," she said. "I always do."
"I couldn't."
"Eat."
"Ms. Carter."
"I'm not asking you to like it." She picked up her own fork. "I'm asking you to sit in my kitchen and eat my food. It's how I do things. I can't talk to somebody who isn't eating. It makes me feel like a, like a policeman."
He looked at her.
She did not smile. Her face was quite grave. But there was something at the very corner of her mouth, so small that he might have imagined it, a faint dry tremor, and he understood that she had made a joke. Or that she had meant to. That she had, in the middle of the worst thing in her life, tried for one second to make it a little less terrible for the man who had caused it.
He picked up the fork.
The rice was hot, and plain, and soft. It tasted of onion and salt and steam. It was the best thing he had ever put in his mouth. He ate three forkfuls, slowly, with his eyes on the plate, and felt tears running down his face, and did not wipe them. They ran down his nose and fell into the rice.
She went on eating. She did not look at him. She ate as one eats in a hospital waiting room: steadily, without appetite, because it is what a body has to do.
When he had finished half, he put down the fork.
"Thank you," he said.
"You're welcome."
"My name's Thomas Walker. I'm forty-one years old. I've been a police officer for sixteen years. On the fourteenth of October, at about twenty to eleven at night, I shot your son."
She laid down her own fork.
"He was in the alley behind this street. I was chasing him. I'd been told he might have a gun. He ran to the fence. He stopped. He turned around, and he had his hands up, and he was holding a can of spray paint. He said something to me. I didn't hear it. I told him to drop it, and I fired twice."
She did not blink.
"I told everyone I thought my life was in danger. I told the review board. I told the chief. I told my wife. And for six weeks I believed it." His voice was steady. It was very flat, and clear, and did not seem to be coming from him. "But it wasn't true. Or it was, but only in the way a thing is true when you've made yourself believe it. I wasn't in danger. He was a sixteen-year-old boy. He was afraid. He was trying to get home."
"Yes."
"I don't know why I did it. I've asked myself every night. I think I'd been told a thing, and I couldn't unhear it. I think I was afraid of a gun that wasn't there. And I think a child died because of that. Because of my fear." He swallowed. "I'm not saying it to be forgiven. I know I can't be. I'm saying it because you're the first person who should hear it, and I couldn't stand for you to get it from a newspaper."
The kitchen was silent.
A bus went by in the street below, with a long deep hum. The radio had changed to a different song. On the windowsill, the little plant moved its leaves in the warm air from the stove.
Mary Carter folded her hands on the table.
"Thank you," she said.
It was so quiet that he wondered if he had imagined it.
"For what?"
"For saying it plainly." She was looking at her hands. "I've been waiting six weeks for somebody to say a plain thing. Everyone gives me, they say tragic, and unfortunate, and the incident. They say, we regret. They say it in the, in the passive voice." Her mouth moved. "Nobody says I shot your son."
"I shot your son."
"Yes."
"I'm sorry."
"I know." She lifted her eyes. They were dark and red-rimmed and perfectly dry. "What did he say?"
He did not need to ask which.
"I think he said, It's just paint," said Tom. "I couldn't hear him. I was shouting. But my partner heard. And an old man at his window, who saw his mouth. And I've listened to the tape forty times." He took a breath. "I think it's what he said."
"It's just paint."
"Yes."
"Three words."
"Yes."
She was silent.
"That sounds like him," she said.
"Does it?"
"He always said it like that. When he got caught. When he'd broken something. It's just whatever it was. It's just a glass, Mom. It's just a scratch. It's just paint." She almost laughed. "I used to say, Sam, nothing is just anything. And he'd roll his eyes."
Tom closed his eyes.
"Was it?" she said.
"What?"
"Paint."
He opened them.
"Yes."
"You're certain."
"The can's in evidence. I saw it in the, I saw the photographs. It was a can of black spray paint. It had a, a label with a flame." He heard his voice shake. "It was what he said it was. It was paint. It was only ever paint."
She nodded.
She sat quite still, with her hands folded and her head slightly bowed, like a woman listening to a distant bell. The light from the window lay on her hair. After a time she let out a long, slow, unsteady breath, and said, in a voice so low that he had to lean forward to hear it:
"I knew."
"I'm sorry?"
"I knew it. I've known it for weeks. Since the day the clerk told me. Since the man at the property window." Her face was calm. "I said to myself, he was killed over a can of paint. And I thought, no. That's just something you say. It can't be that stupid. There has to be a reason."
"There wasn't."
"No."
"There was only me."
"Yes."
He sat with his hands between his knees.
"You came here to be told something," said Mary Carter.
"Yes."
"You want me to tell you it's all right."
"No."
"Yes, you do. Everyone does." She looked at him steadily. "That's the thing I've learned. Everyone who comes through that door has come to be told it's all right. The priest. The mayor's man. Mrs. Lopez, in her way. They stand in my hall and look at me, and what they want is for me to say, it's all right. I know you meant well. So they can go home."
"I don't."
"Don't you?"
He thought about it.
"No," he said. "I think I came because I wanted you to see me. To know who did it. So it isn't just, a name in a report. So you could, I don't know. Hit me. Or throw me out. Or look at me. And know there's a person."
"There's a person."
"Yes."
"I can see that."
"Yes."
She was silent for a long time. Then she stood, and carried the plates to the sink, and ran the tap. She stood at the window with her back to him, looking down at the street. He could see only the outline of her head against the orange light, and her shoulders, and the shoelace at the back of her neck.
"I'm not going to forgive you," she said.
"I know."
"I want to say that clearly. I don't know if I can. I don't know if it's a thing a person is able to do. I've been to church. I've heard it said. And I sit in the pew, and I think, it must be nice to be so sure."
"I understand."
"Do you?"
"No."
"Good." She turned off the water. "Don't pretend."
He took the marker from his pocket.
He had not planned to. He had carried it for three days, in the inside pocket of his coat, under his hand. It was black, and thin, and nearly dry. It had a chewed plastic cap. When he laid it on the oilcloth, it made a small dry click.
She came back from the window. She looked at it.
For several seconds she did not move. Then she reached out, very slowly, and picked it up between her finger and thumb, and held it to the light.
"Where did you get this?"
"In the tunnel."
"When?"
"On Monday. After Ben left." He moistened his lips. "I don't know how it got there. I think it was lying on the ground. I picked it up."
"You think."
"I don't know."
She turned it over. She bent her head, and sniffed it. She ran her thumb across the cap, where the little half-moons of teeth had worn the plastic ragged.
"He chewed them," she said. "All the caps. I used to tell him, you'll get lead poisoning." Her voice had gone strange. "I've got one in a drawer. They gave it to me, with his things. It's the same. It's the same brand."
"I'm sorry."
"I'd like to keep it."
"Yes."
"I'd like to put it with the other."
"Of course."
She closed her hand round it. She held it against her chest, in her fist, over the cross and the shoelace and the key. She stood there in the lamplight with her eyes shut, and he saw her lips move, and heard no sound.
When she opened her eyes, they were quite clear.
"What are you going to do?" she said.
"Tell them."
"Who?"
"All of them. The Board. The District Attorney. The newspapers." He leaned forward. "There's a second call. A woman rang, forty seconds before. She said it wasn't a gun. It was in the system. It was left out of the report, by my sergeant, and my chief knew. My partner heard your son. He lied about it. I'm going to tell them all of it."
"You'll lose your job."
"Yes."
"They'll charge you."
"Probably."
"Why?"
He looked at her.
It was a simple question. It was the one Anna had asked, and Ross, and the chief. It was the one he had asked himself on the bus, and in the study, and at the foot of the stairs. He had a hundred answers. He had worked them out, one by one, like stones laid across a stream. He found now, sitting at the kitchen table in the light of the little lamp, that he could not use any of them.
"Because he said it," said Tom. "And no one heard."
She did not speak.
"Because that's all there was. A boy said three words. It was the last thing he ever said. And I want somebody to hear them." He drew a breath. "I know it won't. It doesn't bring him back. It doesn't change anything. But it's the only thing I can do. It's the only thing I've got."
Mary Carter looked at him.
There was a long, long pause. A clock ticked somewhere in the apartment. The radio had stopped. The refrigerator gave a sudden heave and shuddered into silence.
"Then say it," she said.
"I will."
"Say it somewhere that counts. Not to me. Not in my kitchen. Not in a church, or a diner, or a, a quiet room." Her voice was low and quite even. "Say it where it goes in a record. Where they can't pretend. Where there's a, a file, with his name on it, and your name, and your signature. Where someone has to read it."
"I will."
"Do it properly."
"I will."
"And don't come back here until you have."
He nodded.
"I'm not saying it as a punishment," she said. "I want you to understand that. I'm saying it because I can't stand it. I can't have you in my kitchen, eating my rice, and be, and still. Still be waiting." She lowered her head. "I'm very tired. I'm so tired, Mr. Walker. I'd like to go to sleep."
"Yes."
"You can see yourself out."
He rose.
He stood a moment by the table, looking down at the half-eaten plate, the little bowl with the rooster, the single dark thread of hot sauce along the edge of the rice. He wanted to say something. He wanted to say thank you. He wanted to say I'm sorry. He wanted, absurdly, to say it was very good.
He said none of it. He went to the door of the kitchen and out into the hall, and put his hand on the latch.
"Mr. Walker."
He turned.
She had followed him. She stood in the kitchen doorway with her arms wrapped round her, and the light behind her, and for a moment he did not see her face. Only the dark outline, small and straight, with the marker clutched against her chest.
"Did he look afraid?" said Mary.
It was a very small voice.
"At the end. When you. Did he look, was he." She stopped. "I keep thinking. I keep seeing it. I wake in the night. And I think, was he afraid?"
Tom did not answer at once.
He thought of a pale, thin, wet face under a single light. He thought of two enormous dark eyes, looking not at the gun but at the man behind it. He thought of the mouth, moving, patiently, as if the thing it had to say were quite simple and the world quite reasonable.
"No," he said. "I don't think he was."
"No?"
"I think he thought it was going to be all right."
She lowered her head.
"I think," said Tom, slowly, "that he thought if he just said it clearly, I would understand. I think he was sure. He looked at me as if I were going to help him." He swallowed. "He wasn't afraid of me. He was a, he was only waiting for me to listen."
She said nothing.
She stood there with her head bent, and her shoulders began to shake. It was a slow, dry, shuddering movement, quite silent, as of a tree in the wind. He wanted to go to her. He did not. He stood in the narrow hall with his hand on the latch and watched a woman weep for her child, and knew that it was not his to touch.
"Go," said Mary.
He opened the door.
The landing was dark.
The bulb in the stairwell had burned out. A little gray light came up from the street, and lay across the steps in a faint wavering stripe. He stood on the threshold and took a breath of cold air. He could hear, far below, the hum of traffic. He could hear a baby crying in the next flat.
He turned to close the door.
She was standing on the threshold of her kitchen, in the glow of the lamp, with the little black marker clutched in her fist. She was looking at him. And beside her, a foot away, so close that their shoulders almost touched, a boy was standing.
He was sixteen. He had a gray sweatshirt, and bare feet, and a smudge of black along his jaw. He was looking at his mother. He was looking at her as a child looks at a thing he is trying to memorize: her hair, her cardigan, the lines round her eyes, the key at her throat. He did not touch her. He stood with his hands loose at his sides and his head a little bent, and his lips slightly parted, as if there were a thing he wanted to say.
Then, slowly, he turned his head.
His eyes met Tom's across the length of the narrow hall.
They were very dark. They were very calm. And in them, for the first time, there was something that had not been there before. It was not forgiveness. It was not anything so large. It was only a small, tired, grave recognition, such as passes between two people who have been working on the same heavy task, from opposite ends, for a long time.
The boy nodded.
It was a single nod. Quite slight. A lowering of the chin, and a lifting. It said, as plainly as any words, yes. It said, that's the one. It said, go on.
The door closed.
He stood on the dark landing with his hand pressed against the wood, and listened to a bolt slide home, and a chain, and the soft click of a lock. Then he went down the stairs, one at a time, in the dark, into the street.
Anna was waiting in the car with the heater running. She did not say anything when he got in. She looked at his face, once, and put the car in gear, and drove away from the curb. They went a long way without speaking. The colored lights of the Christmas street slid over the windshield and went out. It began, very lightly, to snow.
"What did she say?" said Anna, at last.
"She said to say it."
"Say what?"
"All of it," said Tom. "Somewhere that counts."