Chapter 6
The Bus
He started taking the bus because he could not trust his hands.
That was how he put it to himself. It was a small thing, a practical thing, a matter of safety. After the gas station he had sat in the car for twenty minutes with the engine off, and when he finally turned the key, his fingers had gone slick on the wheel. He had driven home at fifteen miles an hour with the hazards on. That night he told Anna that the car was making a noise. The next morning he put on his coat and walked to the corner of Maple and Third, where the number 9 stopped at ten past seven.
"The car's fine," said Anna, from the doorway. She was holding a mug in both hands. "I took it to the store yesterday. It's perfectly fine."
"I'd like to save the gas."
"Tom."
"It's good for the environment."
"You've never once said that sentence in your life."
"I'm trying new things." He kissed her cheek, quickly. She smelled of toothpaste and sleep. "I'll see you tonight."
She watched him go down the path. He could feel it between his shoulder blades all the way to the corner.
The number 9 was a long green bus with a wheelchair ramp and a driver who sang. It started at the retail park on the east side and wound slowly through the middle of Harlow, past the hospital, past the courthouse, past the river, to the foot of Pine Street. It took thirty-six minutes. He sat on the left, in the fourth row, with his bag on his knee and his forehead against the window, and watched the town go by.
He liked it. He had not expected to. There was something restful in being carried. A woman with a shopping cart. A man in a suit reading a paperback. Two girls in school uniform sharing a bag of chips. A very old lady who got on at the hospital every morning, with a stick and a plastic bag, and said "Morning, my love" to the driver, and "Morning, my love" to the seat she sat in. Nobody looked at him. He was a man in a coat. He was nobody.
On the fourth morning, he looked up from the window and saw a boy.
He was two rows ahead, on the right-hand side. He sat with one leg crossed over the other and his head turned toward the aisle. He was tall, taller than Tom had thought, and thin, with a long neck and big hands. He wore the same gray hooded sweatshirt. But the hood was down, and the face above it was not the face of a child. The jaw was heavier. The cheekbones had come in. There was a faint shadow along the lip, the beginning of a mustache that he had not been old enough to grow.
He was eighteen. Perhaps nineteen.
Tom did not move.
The boy was drawing. He had a small black sketchbook open on his knee, and a marker in his right hand, and he was working with the quick, hard, whispering strokes of a person who knows exactly what comes next. His tongue was between his teeth. His hand went up and across, down and round, and left a black shape on the page, and another, and another. A letter. A second. He leaned back and looked at it with his head tilted, and frowned, and made a face, and began again.
He was humming.
Tom could hear it above the engine. It was very faint, and flat, and tuneless: a boy's hum, three or four notes, going round and round. It was the sound a person makes when he is entirely absorbed. It filled the bus.
He's not real, thought Tom.
He thought it very clearly, in plain words, as one reads a sign. He's not here. This is what the doctor said. This is a thing the mind does. He sat in the fourth row with his bag on his knee, and every muscle in his body had gone as hard as a plank. He watched the back of that dark head. He watched the marker move.
If I look away, he'll go.
He did not look away.
The bus slowed. It drew in at the stop by the river, with a long hiss of brakes, and the doors folded back. A few people got off. The old lady with her stick. A man with a dog. The boy closed the sketchbook, and tucked it under his arm, and rose, and stepped into the aisle.
He walked slowly. He walked past Tom, close enough to touch, and Tom smelled it. A faint sharp smell of paint and warm cloth and the red sweetness of hot sauce. He did not turn his head. He went down the steps, and out onto the pavement, and stood with his hands in the pouch of the sweatshirt, looking at the river.
Tom stood up.
"Sir?" said the driver. "Is this your stop?"
"I'll get off here."
"It's not your stop."
"I know."
He got down onto the pavement. The doors shut behind him. The bus pulled away with a long heavy shudder, and it was a gray cold morning, with a wind off the water, and a gull standing on a post.
The boy was ten yards ahead.
He was walking along the river wall, with his sketchbook under his arm, and he did not look back. Tom followed. He went along the path in his good shoes with his bag banging against his leg. He did not know why. He did not know what he would say. He only knew that he could not let this one go without finding out. He kept his eyes on the gray back, the thin shoulders, the long confident stride.
The boy turned a corner.
It was an ordinary corner. A low wall, a lamp post, a bin. Tom came round it half-running, and stopped.
There was nobody there.
A paved walk, empty, wet with the night's rain. A bench. A spill of dead leaves. A single plastic bottle rolling slowly in the wind. At the end of the path a mother was pushing a pram, and she looked at him with a flat quick suspicion, a woman who has seen a man run.
He stood very still.
On the low wall, at about the height of his waist, there was a small black mark.
He went toward it. He bent. It was a letter, drawn in marker on the grey stone, no bigger than his palm. It was a capital S. It was very neat, with a thin line of shadow and a tiny cross at the bottom, and the black ink was wet. It came off on his finger.
He stared at the smear on his thumb.
Then he straightened up and walked, quite steadily, to the next stop, and took the next bus, and was forty minutes late to work.
That evening, for the first time, he looked for him.
He did it in the study, after dinner, with the door closed. It was a small room at the back of the house with a desk, a lamp, and a shelf of his father's books. He sat in the dark with the screen glowing in his face, and typed the name into the search bar with two fingers, one letter at a time.
Samuel Carter. Harlow.
There were nine hundred results. He did not need most of them. He scrolled through the news: Teen shot by police in Harlow alley. Family demands answers. Chief: "A tragic decision." He scrolled past the photographs, the vigil, the march. At the bottom of the third page, a small gray link, with a tiny round picture beside it.
@samletters. 318 followers.
It was an account. An ordinary one. It had not been touched in five weeks.
He clicked.
The picture at the top was a boy in a gray hooded sweatshirt, taken from behind, standing in front of a long brick wall with a can in his hand. It had been taken at dusk. The wall was covered in huge wet letters, red and black and white. The boy was looking up at them, with his head tipped back, like a man looking at the sky.
Under it, in small type: letters. mostly. hardware shop saturdays. not an artist.
He scrolled down.
There were a hundred and sixty posts. Almost all of them were photographs of lettering. Shop windows. A pizza box. A sign for a barber, in curling gold. A birthday card for Ben. A page of the alphabet in a hundred different styles, each one labeled with a name: Blade. Rope. Fat Albert. Sunday. An old door with a hand-painted PUSH, which he had photographed and then redrawn, with the caption: the original is better. i hate it.
Under every one, a few comments. sick. bro. so clean. teach me.
Under the most recent, a photograph of a long wall in the dusk, with the words NOBODY'S LOOKING in letters two feet tall, posted on the night of the thirteenth, there were four hundred. They were all from the last five weeks.
rip sam.
you were the best.
i never met you but i wish i did.
I'M HERE
We see you
They killed you for a CAN
say his name
SAM CARTER.
He read them all. It took an hour. He did not skip a line. He sat with his fist against his mouth and read each one, and then went back and read a hundred of the older posts, and then, at the very bottom of the account, below everything, he found a small gray square with a triangle in its center.
It was a video.
It was eleven seconds long. It had been posted in July. He did not want to press it. He sat with the cursor an inch above it for a full minute, with his heart going slow and heavy. Then he clicked.
The picture was shaky and bright. A back wall, in the afternoon sun. A pair of hands shaking a can, with a rattle, and then a thin fast hiss, and a line of black paint appeared on the brick, flowing, surprising, and turned into the curve of a letter. It was very beautiful. It had a rhythm to it. The hand moved like a hand writing in the air.
And over the sound of the spray, a voice said:
Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.
It was a boy's voice. It was breaking in the middle, going up and down, with a rough light edge to it, somewhere between a laugh and a whisper. It was very close to the microphone.
Okay. Okay. Look at that. Look at that. Oh, that's clean. Ben. Ben. Look.
The hand came away. The brick was wet and shining. The voice drew a breath, a long happy shuddering one, and burst out laughing: a big, loud, honking, ridiculous laugh, like a goose let loose from a box.
The video ended.
Tom sat quite still.
He had not known that he had a picture of what the voice would sound like. He had not known that he had imagined it. He had heard the boy's mouth moving, in an alley, under a light, in the half-second before the shots, and some dark deep part of him had been waiting, for six weeks, for it to make a sound. And now it had.
He played it again.
He played it eleven times. He sat in front of the screen with his elbows on the desk and his hands pressed flat against his face, and the laugh came out of the little speaker every time, enormous and silly and alive.
At half past eleven, the door opened.
"Tom?"
He closed the laptop so fast that the lamp rocked.
Anna stood in the door in her dressing gown, with her arms folded. The hall light shone behind her. She was looking at him with her nurse's face, the one that missed nothing.
"What are you doing?"
"Work."
"It's midnight."
"I had some things."
"In the dark?" She came in and flipped on the lamp. He blinked. "You've been in here since nine. Emma asked where you were. I said you had a headache."
"I did."
"Did you?"
"Yes."
"Tom." She put one hand on the desk. "You didn't come to bed on Sunday till four. You've been taking the bus for a week. You told me the car was making a noise, and it isn't. The phone says you were on Ferris Street on Sunday for an hour."
He stared at her.
"The what?"
"The map. On the phone. The one we share, the family one. Emma set it up. I wasn't checking." She flushed. "I was looking for Emma's friend's house. And I saw a little blue dot, in the middle of Ferris Street. And I thought, what's Tom doing there?"
"I was getting bread."
"You went to the bakery on Ferris Street."
"It's a good bakery."
"For an hour."
He opened his mouth. He did not know what was going to come out. Anna was standing very straight, with her hand on the desk and her jaw set. She was a small woman, but she had stood at beds with people dying in them, and she had a way of waiting that made every excuse feel like a coin dropped down a well.
"I wanted to see it," he said.
"See what?"
"The street."
"Why?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know."
"I don't know, Anna. I just." He rubbed his face. "I wanted to see where he lived."
For a moment she did not say anything. The lamp hummed. Out in the hall the clock struck the half-hour, one thin chime. She sat down very slowly on the arm of the old leather chair, and folded her hands in her lap, and looked at him.
"Okay," she said. "That's honest."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't. I'm not angry. I'm, I'm trying to work out what I am." She took a breath. "Is that where you've been going? In the evenings?"
"Sometimes."
"What do you do?"
"I sit in the car."
"And look at the house."
"And look at the house."
"Have you spoken to her?"
"No!" The word came out hard. "No. God. Of course not. Anna, I wouldn't. I couldn't. I just." He shook his head. "I see her. Sometimes. She goes to the shop, and comes back. She's got a gray coat. She carries one bag. She always carries one bag."
"And what do you want?"
"I don't know."
"Do you want to say sorry?"
"I don't know."
"Because you can't."
"I know that."
"John Price told us. Not a word. Not a letter. Not a card. You can't go near her, Tom, it'd look like. It would look."
"I know."
"Then what are you doing?"
He did not answer.
She watched him for a while. Then she stood up, and crossed the room, and sat on the edge of the desk with her knee against his arm. She took his hand. He let her. Her fingers were cold and strong.
"I'm worried," she said, quietly. "I'm going to say that. I'm not saying you did anything wrong. I don't believe you did. I believe you did what anyone would have done." She squeezed. "But something's happening to you, and you won't say what. You're sitting in the dark. You're jumping at the phone. Emma asked me yesterday why Daddy doesn't turn the lights on. She's eleven. She notices everything."
"I know."
"I think you should see Dr. Evans again."
"I did. On Tuesday."
"What did you say?"
"That I was fine."
"Were you lying?"
He looked at the closed laptop.
"Yes," he said.
She did not flinch. She looked at him a long moment, with tears standing in her eyes, and gave a small tired nod, as if he had told her a result.
"All right," she said. "That's a start."
"I just need some time."
"How much?"
"I don't know."
"Tom." She lifted his hand and pressed it to her cheek. It was wet. "Whatever it is. You don't have to be the strong one. You can say it to me. You could say anything. I'm not going to leave."
He wanted to.
He wanted to say it with such force that it burned in his throat, like a swallowed coal. He wanted to say, I saw him on the bus. He was eighteen. He had a sketchbook. He was drawing a letter. I followed him down the river, and he wasn't there. He wanted to say, I think he's following me. He wanted to say, I think I'm losing my mind. He wanted to put his head in her lap and be forgiven.
And behind the wanting, cool and flat and perfectly clear, he heard a voice say: If you say that, she'll call Evans. Evans will call Hall. You'll be on medical leave in two days, and they'll take your badge.
You'll never be a policeman again.
He swallowed.
"I'm just tired," he said. "I'll sleep it off."
She let go of his hand.
She did it gently, one finger at a time. Her face did not change. She simply stood, and smoothed her dressing gown, and walked to the door, and turned, with the light behind her.
"Okay," said Anna. "Come to bed soon."
"I will."
"I mean it."
"I know."
"I love you."
"I love you too."
She went out.
He sat in the dark of his father's room, with the lamp on and the cold screen under his hand, and listened to her footsteps going away up the stairs.
The next day was Thursday. At eleven in the morning, he was alone in Records.
Lorraine had gone to the dentist. The room was warm and still. The radiator ticked. On his desk lay a stack of old traffic accidents waiting to be scanned, with a yellow sticky note on top that said, in her round hand, Thank you, dear. A mug of tea was going cold at his elbow.
He logged into the system.
He had access to everything. That was the joke of it. In a department of eight hundred, he was a man at a gray desk in a back room, a guy with a clipboard, who for the next three weeks was the only person with permission to run any case number on request. He could pull a parking ticket from 1998. He could pull a homicide. It was only a matter of typing.
He typed a number he knew by heart.
It was fourteen digits, with two dashes and a letter. He had written it on a hundred forms. He had seen it in his sleep. It was the number of the night, and the case, and a sixteen-year-old boy, and the cursor blinked after it, steady and patient, a small white bar.
ACCESS: RESTRICTED. OFFICER-INVOLVED INCIDENT.
REQUESTOR: WALKER, THOMAS J. — INVOLVED PARTY.
PLEASE CONFIRM THAT YOU HAVE AUTHORIZATION TO VIEW.
He read it twice.
He knew the rule. An involved officer could not review his own footage without a supervisor's approval, a Use of Force counsel, and a written request. It was meant to keep him from rewriting his memory. It was meant to protect him.
His hand was on the mouse. It was perfectly steady.
I'm not going to do it.
Beside the keyboard, in the corner of the desk, in a small plastic frame, there was a photograph. It was Emma, at six, on a beach, in a yellow swimsuit, holding a bucket. She was laughing with her whole face. He had put it there the first day, so that it would be the first thing he saw.
He looked at it for a while.
She asked me why I don't turn the lights on.
He thought of the boy on the bus, with the marker in his hand, and the nineteen-year-old face above the gray collar. He thought of the video, and the honking laugh. He thought of the S on the wall, still wet.
I have to know.
I have to see what he did with his hands.
He moved the cursor to the box that said, YES.
His finger hung over the button for a long time. In the next room a printer started up, and ran, and stopped. Somewhere in the building, a door shut.
He clicked.