Chapter 5
Ordinary Things
Four weeks after, Mary went back to work.
She did not feel ready. Nobody had told her she had to. Dr. Patel had said, kindly, on the phone, that she could have as long as she needed, and that her desk would be there. But the bills were not kind. The rent came on the first. The electricity company sent a pink slip. She had sat at her kitchen table one night with a calculator and a pen, and the numbers had said what numbers say, and on Monday morning she put on her blue cardigan and took the bus.
The office was on the ground floor of a brick building on Pine Street, between a bank and a shop that sold vitamins. It had a glass door, a fish tank, a rack of old magazines, and a smell she had stopped noticing years ago: clean teeth and mint and rubber gloves. It was exactly the same. She stood on the pavement outside and looked through the glass at the fish tank. A yellow fish. A blue one. The little plastic castle. She thought, how can it all be here?
Then she pushed the door and went in.
"Mary," said Janet.
Janet was the hygienist, a big warm woman of fifty who wore cartoon scrubs, ducks and teapots and tiny hearts. She had come out from behind the desk with her arms open. She was crying already. Mary let herself be held. She stood in the middle of the waiting room in Janet's embrace, with a cardigan button pressing into her cheek, and said, "It's all right. Don't. I'm fine."
"You're not."
"No."
"I'm sorry," said Janet. "I'm so sorry. We all signed a card."
"I know. I got it."
"Did you like it?"
"It was lovely." Mary stepped back. She wiped her face with her wrist. "Janet. I'd like to, could we just. Could we not, today? I think if everyone is kind to me I won't be able to stay."
Janet looked at her. She nodded slowly, with her hand over her mouth.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. Do you want a coffee?"
"I'd love one."
"Sit. I'll bring it."
So she sat. She sat behind her old desk, and turned on the computer, and the screen woke up with the schedule open from the day she left. Friday Oct 14. 9:00 Mr. Adams. 9:30 Ms. Wu. 10:00. She looked at it for a long time. Then she closed the window, and opened a new one, and began, with great care, to cancel everything that had been scheduled for the weeks that were over.
The phone rang at nine-fifteen.
"Dr. Patel's office," she said.
It was a woman wanting to move her son's cleaning. A boy of fourteen. Mary said she was sorry, there was nothing on Thursday, would the following Tuesday be all right? The woman said yes. She asked the boy's name. The woman said, "It's Daniel. Daniel Ruiz." Mary typed it in, and her fingers did not shake.
It's only work, she thought. It's what a hand does. It writes a name in a box.
The boys were the hard part.
She had not expected that. She had thought she would be afraid of the funeral. The day, the cake, the card. She had not thought she would be undone by teenagers in a waiting room.
They came in with their mothers. They were sixteen, seventeen, tall and awkward in their winter coats, with their earbuds in and their hoods up. They sat down heavily on the plastic chairs, spread their knees, and looked at their phones. They had long wrists. They had the same dark smudges under the eyes, the same bitten nails, the same slow dreamy slouch, the same way of saying yeah without moving their lips.
She watched them.
She could not help it. She sat at the front desk with a pen in her hand and watched every one. A boy with braces, who smiled at her and said, "Hi, ma'am," when she gave him a clipboard. A boy who ate a granola bar and put the wrapper in his pocket. A boy who laughed at something on his screen, and showed it to his mother, and she said, "That's not funny," and he said, "It is, though," and she laughed too.
He'd have been in here, she thought. In two years. For his wisdom teeth.
That was what hurt. Not the big losses. Not the wedding he would not have, the children, the old age. It was this: the boy with braces, the Tuesday appointment, an ordinary Tuesday in March. She had been counting on a thousand of them. She had not known she was counting.
On the third day a boy came in with a gray hoodie.
It was a plain one, a school one, with white letters on the chest. He was about sixteen, a skinny kid with red hair. He went to the water cooler and filled a paper cup. He stood with his back to her, drinking, with the hood bunched up round his neck.
She put down her pen.
She sat there and looked at the back of that gray sweatshirt for what felt like an hour. She was not thinking anything. She was only looking. She was looking at the way the fabric hung from the shoulders and made a long soft fold at the waist. She was looking at the way a boy stands when he thinks nobody is watching: weight on one leg, the other foot turned out, the free hand in his pouch.
His hand is in his pocket.
What's in it?
A can. A phone. A key. A piece of gum.
A gun.
The boy turned round.
He looked at her with a pale, freckled, ordinary face. He said, "Um. Are you okay?"
"Yes," said Mary. "I'm sorry."
"You were kind of looking."
"I know. I'm sorry, honey. You remind me of someone."
"Oh." He shifted. He crushed his paper cup in his fist, and looked at the floor. "My mom says I look like my cousin."
"That could be it."
"Do you want me to take the hood down?"
It was such a young question, and so gentle, and so stricken, that she felt something in her chest go soft and give way. She thought, he's afraid of me. She thought, what does he think I'm going to do?
"No," she said. "Please don't. It's a very nice hoodie."
"It's from my school."
"I can see."
"Okay."
He sat down. She went on looking at him, and a minute later she looked at her desk and found that she was crying, a thin steady line down each cheek, with no sound at all. She wiped her face with a tissue, and straightened her cardigan, and when the boy's mother came out from the back, she smiled and said, "All done! Let me just get your next appointment."
Only afterward, in the toilet, with the fan going and the door locked, did she put her hand over her mouth and let the other thing come.
Detective Bell came on the twentieth.
It was a Sunday. She rang the bell at ten in the morning, which seemed an odd time, and Mary opened the door in her dressing gown with a spoon in her hand. A tall narrow woman in a dark coat was standing on the landing. She had a long, plain, careful face and a folder under her arm, and under her eyes were shadows that looked like thumbprints.
"Ms. Carter. I'm Detective Sarah Bell. We met briefly at the hospital."
"Did we?"
"I was one of the people in the corridor." She gave a small, strained smile. "I wouldn't expect you to remember."
"I don't."
"May I come in?"
"I've got eggs on."
"I can wait."
"No." Mary stood back. "Come in."
They sat at the kitchen table. She turned off the stove, and put the pan in the sink, and made coffee in the little pot, because it seemed rude not to. The detective took off her coat and folded it over her knee, and put the folder on the table in front of her, and did not open it.
"I wanted to come in person," she said. "You've heard the chief's statement. But the written report hasn't been released yet, and I thought you ought to hear what's in it from someone who was in the room."
"What does it say?"
"That the shooting was within policy. That Officer Walker acted lawfully. That no charges will be brought."
Mary stirred her coffee.
"I see," she said.
"I'm very sorry."
"Is that your word?"
"Pardon?"
"Sorry. Everyone says it. The man at the property window, the woman at the funeral home, the mayor. I got an email." Mary tapped the spoon on the rim of her cup, twice, and laid it down. "I'm not being rude. I want to know what it means when a person says it. It seems to me it can mean different things."
Bell looked at her.
She was quiet for a moment. She looked at the table, the old oilcloth with its pattern of yellow lemons, the salt and pepper shakers shaped like chickens. She turned her cup a quarter turn.
"In my case," she said at last, "it means that I read everything. I read the report forty times, and I watched the footage, and I walked the alley by myself at the same hour, and I could not find a place where the officer's account was untrue. I believe he believed what he said. I believe he thought his life was in danger. And I think your son was killed, and that he should not have been, and that nobody did anything the law could punish." She stopped. "I'm sorry for all of those things. Separately."
It was the longest speech anyone had made to her in six weeks. She sat very still.
"Thank you," she said.
"For what?"
"For the separate parts."
Bell lowered her eyes. A small color had come into her face.
"I brought you a copy of the summary," she said. "It's public record. It'll be on the website tomorrow. I thought you'd rather see it first."
She opened the folder. Inside, there was a stapled document of eleven pages. She slid it across the oilcloth.
Mary picked it up.
She read it slowly, from the beginning, with her finger under the lines. She had always been a good reader. She read the case number, and the date, and the names of the officers, which were Walker and Dunn. She read a paragraph about a call. At approximately 2231 hours, Dispatch broadcast a report of a possible armed subject near the Dock Street underpass. She read a map reference. She read a long paragraph about lighting. The alley was dimly lit by a single sodium fixture approximately forty feet from the point of the incident.
Then she came to the part.
Subject came to a halt at the fence and turned to face the officers. Subject's right hand moved to the front pouch of his hooded sweatshirt and withdrew a dark cylindrical object. Officer Walker, believing the object to be a firearm, commanded the subject to drop it. Subject did not comply. Officer Walker discharged his service weapon twice.
She read it again.
Subject did not comply.
She laid her finger on the word. It was a small, pale, ordinary word, in small black type. It had no weight at all, and she felt it press on her like a hand.
"Detective," she said.
"Yes."
"How long was it? Between the, between when he turned round, and when."
"Less than two seconds."
"Less than two seconds."
"According to the camera."
"And in two seconds my son was supposed to understand what, what a, a stranger with a gun wanted from him? In the dark. After running. With his heart going." She heard her own voice, steady and flat. "He had a can. He was holding a can. Somebody told him to drop it. And he. Did not comply."
"That's what the report says."
"Is that what happened?"
"I don't know."
"You weren't there."
"No."
"But you listened. To the tape. You said you did."
"Yes."
"Did he say anything?"
The detective did not answer at once. It was a small pause. She looked at her own hands on the folder, and Mary saw her swallow.
"The audio is unclear," said Bell.
"That isn't what I asked."
"I know."
"Did he say anything?"
"There is a sound. There is a sound that might be speech." Bell's voice was very low. "It was analyzed by our lab. It was analyzed twice. They could not make out words. It could be a cry. It could be breathing. I want to be honest with you, Ms. Carter. I don't know."
"But you listened."
"I listened a hundred times."
"And what did you think?"
The detective lifted her head and looked at her. Her eyes were gray, bloodshot, steady, and very tired. She did not look away.
"I thought," she said, "that it sounded like a boy."
The kitchen was silent. Above the stove, the clock ticked. A radiator knocked twice behind the wall. Mary put the document down on the lemon oilcloth and flattened it with her hand.
"Thank you," she said. "For telling me."
"I shouldn't have."
"I'm glad you did."
"It's not in the report. It's nothing. I'm sure it's nothing." Bell took a card from her coat pocket and put it on the table. "If you think of anything. If anything occurs to you, or you find something of his, or hear from someone who was there. My cell number is on the back. You can call me any time."
"Is that allowed?"
"No," said Bell. She picked up her coat. "But I'd like you to."
On the Saturday after, Ben took her to the tunnel.
It was a gray cold day, near the end of November, with a low sky and a wind off the river that went through her coat like a wet sheet. They walked down from the bus stop together, through a part of Harlow that she had never had reason to visit: empty lots, fenced-off yards, a place where somebody had once tried to start a car wash and had given up. A freight line ran along the bottom of the hill, and at the end of the road, where the street met the tracks, there was a tunnel under the rails.
It was twenty feet high and sixty feet long. The brick was black with age. The floor was puddled and strewn with glass, and the air smelled of cold iron and old rain. A single bulb hung in a cage at the mouth. It was off.
She stopped at the entrance.
On the left-hand wall, running the whole length of the tunnel, at the height of a tall boy's reach, was a line of lettering.
She had never seen anything like it. It was enormous. The letters were two feet tall, and perfectly formed, with a thick bold black outline and a shadow of gray and a thin bright edge of white. They leaned a little, like men walking into wind. They did not say anything she had expected. Not a name. Not a gang. They said, in a long even line, from the entrance into the dark:
NOBODY'S LOOKING
And under it, in the same hand, a line half the size:
I'M H
The paint stopped there.
It stopped in the middle of the letter, with a single vertical stroke and the beginning of a crossbar, as if a man had been walking along a street and had been called away. Beyond it, the brick was bare. The last foot was a rough pale patch where the paint had never reached. There was a stain on the ground beneath it, black and dry, in the shape of a spilled can.
She stood there for a long time.
"That's his," said Ben. His voice was small. "That's what he was finishing."
"Yes."
"He was going to do the rest on Friday. He said it was nearly done. He said, 'Two more letters and I'm out.'" Ben sniffed. "He had it all planned. It was going to say, Nobody's looking. I'm here. He said it was for, for everybody. Not just him."
"Who was it for?"
"I think you." He looked at the ground. "I'm sorry. I think maybe, I think he was going to show you. After. When the hearing was over. When everything was fine. He said you'd never see it unless somebody made you."
She walked forward.
She went slowly along the wall, with her hand out, a few inches from the paint. She did not touch it. She read each letter as she passed, slowly, one at a time. She could see the places where he had gone over a curve three times. She could see where he had made a mistake and covered it. She could see the small neat X he had put at the bottom of every capital, as a signature, as an artist puts a mark on a plate.
NOBODY'S LOOKING.
Somebody had been here before them.
There was a row of things along the foot of the wall: a dozen candles in jars, gone out. A sunflower in a milk bottle, brown and bent. A teddy bear in a plastic bag. A handwritten card, curling with damp, that said, Rest easy, Sam. Your friends. A can of black spray paint, unopened, standing upright on a stone as if on an altar.
She picked up the can.
It was cold and heavy and slightly damp. She turned it round in her fingers. It had a black plastic cap, a rattle inside, a label with a cartoon flame. It was the commonest object in the world. She had seen a thousand. She had passed them in the hardware store on Alder Street, on the shelf by the paintbrushes, and never once looked.
This is the thing.
This is what they thought was a gun.
She held it in both hands. It sat in her palm like a small dark animal. She tried to imagine it in the dusk, in the dim of an alley, at the end of a run. She tried to see it as a man might see it, a policeman, twenty feet off with his heart going, a black shape lifting out of a boy's pocket.
She could see it.
That was what shocked her. She stood there in the wet tunnel with the can in her hands, and she could see it. She could see exactly how it would look. A cylinder. Dark. About a hand's length. A thing that rose in the half-light and caught the glint of a streetlamp. She understood how a man could be afraid.
I understand.
I understand how it happened.
And then, quick and bright, so that she almost dropped the can:
I do not accept it.
She set it down on the stone.
"Mrs. Carter?" said Ben.
"I'm all right."
"Do you want to go?"
"In a minute."
She turned and looked out of the tunnel. The mouth of it framed a patch of gray: a road, a fence, a long row of bare trees. Across the road, on the far side, a car was parked at the curb, a small dark-gray one, with its engine off. It was too far to see the plate. There was someone inside. She could see a head and the pale blur of a face, turned toward the tunnel.
She had seen that car before.
It had been on Ferris Street two Sundays ago, in front of the bakery. She had noticed it because it was parked, and the driver did not get out, and sat for a long while with his hands in his lap. She had noticed it, and put it away, and forgotten.
She did not look at it long. She looked away, quite calmly, and said to Ben, "Let's go. I'm cold."
They walked back up the hill in the wind. At the corner she turned and looked, once, over her shoulder. The car was still there. The head was still turned. And in the black arch of the tunnel behind it, so small and so far that she could not be sure, she thought she saw a shape. A slight one. Standing against the wall.
She blinked. It was gone.
That night, at the kitchen table, she took out the electric bill.
It was a long white envelope with a plastic window, and she had opened it three days ago and put it in the drawer. She smoothed it out. On the back, which was blank, she wrote with a ballpoint pen from the office, in a clear round hand she had learned at fourteen, a list.
1. What did my son say?
She looked at it.
She wrote:
2. Why was he alone with them? Where was the other officer?
3. Who called? Who said gun?
4. Why does the report say "did not comply" and not "did not have time"?
5. Who is the man in the gray car?
She read the list over twice. Then she folded the bill in half, and in half again, and put it under the salt shaker in the middle of the table, where she would see it every morning.
The kitchen was quiet. The streetlight outside the window threw a pale orange square on the lemons. She sat with her hands in her lap and her son's key on its shoelace round her neck, where she had worn it since the day she collected it, and listened to the building settle.
Somewhere in the walls, very faintly, a key tapped against a zipper.
She did not look up. She had been hearing that sound for weeks, and had decided, quietly, with the stubborn practical calm of a woman who has a rent to pay, that it was the pipes.
"I'm still here," she said.
The tapping stopped.
"I'm going to find out," said Mary. "Whatever it takes."
She put out the light, and sat in the dark a while longer, with the folded bill under the salt, and the key warm against her skin.