Epilogue
Your Name
She read it on Monday night, at the kitchen table, with the lamp on.
She had found the envelope when she came home from work. It was lying on the mat, a little damp at one corner, with her name on the front in square upright letters. She had stood on the landing with her bag on her shoulder and looked at it for a long time. Then she had bent, and picked it up, and carried it in, and put it on the table, and made herself a cup of tea.
She did not open it until the tea was gone.
It was forty-one pages. It was written in pencil, in a small neat hand, on yellow paper that had been photocopied and stapled at the corner. She read it slowly, from the first line to the last, with her finger under the words, as she had read the report. It took two hours. She did not stop. She read the part about the car and the tunnel and the alley. She read the part about the frame. She read the part about the second call, and the old man at the window, and her son's three words. She read the name of the woman at the bus stop. Linda. She said please.
She read it all, and when she came to the end, she turned back to the first page, and read the first line again.
His name was Samuel James Carter. He was sixteen years old.
She had not expected that.
She had expected, she thought, a defense. A long cold list of reasons. She had expected the man at the kitchen table to have gone home, and thought it over, and put on his lawyer's face. She had expected regret and circumstances and the situation as it appeared. She had braced for it. She had her answers ready.
But it said his name.
It said it in the first line, and again in the second paragraph, and on every page after that: Samuel. Sam. Mr. Carter. The boy. It said it as though it mattered. It said it the way you say the name of someone you have been told to forget. And somewhere about the middle of the thirtieth page, as she turned it over, she found that she had begun to cry, quite quietly, with her hand over her mouth, for no reason she could name.
It was only that no one had said it. Not like that. Not plainly. Not as though it were a name.
She sat with the pages in her lap until the clock in the hall struck one.
Detective Bell called on Wednesday morning.
Mary was at work. She was at the front desk of Dr. Patel's office, with the phone against her ear and a patient's chart in her hand, and when she heard the voice, she knew. She did not know how. It was a trick of the line, a small hesitation before the greeting.
"Ms. Carter," said Bell. "It's Sarah Bell. Is this a bad time?"
"No."
"I wanted to call you myself. Before you saw it."
"Saw what?"
There was a pause.
"Officer Walker died early this morning," said Bell.
She did not say anything.
The waiting room was empty. The fish tank bubbled. In the back, a drill began to whine, and stopped. She stood at the desk with the chart in her hand and looked at the yellow fish, which was turning slowly in the green water with its mouth opening and closing.
"His wife found him," said Bell. "I'm very sorry. I thought you ought to hear it from someone who."
"Who was there."
"Who has read it."
"Yes."
"I don't have many details. It isn't, I don't think it would be right, to say more." The detective's voice was low and roughened, with a catch in it. "I'm told that he left a note. It's with the family. I understand that it says very little. It asks for you to be told that, that he hoped it was enough."
"Enough."
"The statement."
Mary put down the chart.
She put it down very gently on the desk, and laid her hand flat on top of it, and found that her fingers had gone white. She stood quite still. She felt something rise in her, not grief, and not pity. It was a hot, tight, upward pressure, like steam in a closed pot, and for a moment she thought she was going to scream.
"It isn't," she said.
"I'm sorry?"
"It isn't enough. It's not. Tell them that." Her voice shook. "He doesn't get to say that. He doesn't get to leave a note, and go, and say, I hope it's enough. It's not his to say. I'm the one who says."
"Ms. Carter."
"He sat in my kitchen. He ate my rice. He said he'd do it properly. And he did, and I read it, and I thought, all right, he's a man. I thought, he's going to stand up in court, and look at me, and let them do what they do. I thought he was going to stay."
"I know."
"He's not allowed to go."
"I know."
"What am I supposed to do with it?" She was weeping now, openly, in the quiet waiting room, with the drill whining in the distance and the fish turning in the tank. "I've got his, his paper. I've got forty-one pages. And a man who isn't there. Who's going to answer? Who's going to stand there and, and be asked?"
"I don't know."
"It's not fair."
"No."
"I wanted him to look at me. In a courtroom. With everyone watching. I wanted him to say it to my face, with the lights on, and not be able to leave."
"I know. I know." Bell was crying too. Mary could hear it, small and smothered, far off. "I wanted that too."
The line was silent.
"He didn't pay," said Mary, at last. It came out very low. "That's what nobody understands. They'll say it's, that he paid. They'll say, well, at least he. But he didn't. Nothing's paid. A boy's still dead. I'm still sitting here."
"Yes."
"It's the same."
"Yes."
"It's exactly the same as it was on Friday."
"Yes," said Bell. "I think that's right."
Mary took a long breath. She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. Then she did something that surprised her. She picked up the chart again, and straightened it, and set it neatly in the tray.
"But he said it," she said.
"Yes."
"He did say it."
"Yes. He did."
"That's the thing I can't," said Mary. "I can't make him into one or the other. He's not a, he's not a, I want him to be bad. I'd like it very much. I'd like him to have been a monster. And he wasn't, and he said it, and he's gone, and I'm so angry I can't breathe." She laughed, a small ugly sound. "And I'm sorry for his wife."
"So am I."
"I'm sorry for the little girl."
"Yes."
"Both of those things."
"Yes," said Bell, in a whisper. "I think that's how it is."
It came apart in the spring.
It did not happen quickly. It was a slow, grinding, expensive business, with a great many lawyers, and it moved at the pace of paper. But it moved. The Harlow Journal ran the statement in full on the Thursday, over four pages, under the headline "IT'S JUST PAINT," with a photograph of a boy in a gray hooded sweatshirt, standing in front of a wall of enormous letters, looking up. It ran a second piece on the Friday. By the Monday there were cameras on Ferris Street, and a van from a national network, and a woman with a microphone who asked Mrs. Lopez, at the foot of the steps, how she felt.
Tired, said Mrs. Lopez. Very tired. Go away.
The Board met in emergency session on the ninth of December. It vacated its finding. The District Attorney convened a grand jury. A special prosecutor was appointed from the state capital, a gray, careful, unhurried man who said very little to the press and read every page.
Michael Dunn was the first to testify.
He did it on a cold morning in January, in a gray suit that did not fit, with his hands folded on the rail of the witness box and his voice quite steady. He said what he had heard. He said it in plain words, to a room of strangers, without looking away. When they asked him why he had lied, he said, Because I was afraid. And because someone I trusted told me it was kind. When they asked if he was sorry, he said, I'm sorry every day. It doesn't help. I'm saying it anyway. He was suspended without pay. He pleaded guilty to a charge of false statement and was given a year of probation and eight hundred hours of community service. He spent a good part of them, it was said, at a youth center on Marsh Road, teaching boys to fish.
Pam Hollis testified. Detective Bell testified, for six hours, with her hands in her lap, and did not once stop to rest. Linda Hayes testified, with her baby in the corridor and a woman from her church holding her hand, and said, I called back. I said please. She wept. The room was silent. A juror, a heavy man in a plaid shirt, got up from his seat and brought her a glass of water.
Walter Green testified last. He wore a brown suit, and carpet slippers, because his feet hurt. He sat in the witness box, very small, and held up his old spotted hand, in front of his chest, with the palm turned out, and said, Like this. He held it like this. And a hundred people looked at the hand.
Sergeant Ross was indicted in March.
He was charged with obstruction of justice, and with tampering with a public record. He did not fight it. He sat through the arraignment with his big gray head bowed and his hands clasped between his knees, and when the judge asked how he pleaded, he said, in a voice that was barely a breath, Guilty, Your Honor. He asked that he be allowed to say one thing. The judge allowed it. He stood, and turned his heavy kind tired face to the gallery, and said a name.
Raymond Mitchell.
He said it twice. Nobody understood. He sat down.
Chief James Hall resigned on the fourth of February, citing health. He did not give a press conference. He went out by the back door, in a gray coat, carrying a small cardboard box. In it, according to the Journal, were a framed photograph, a coffee mug, and a stuffed owl.
The finding came in April.
It was read in open court, on a bright cold Tuesday, in a long wood-paneled room with high windows and a flag. The judge was a woman of sixty with silver hair and a very quiet voice. She had a single sheet in front of her, and she read from it slowly, without notes, looking up now and then at the gallery.
Mary sat in the front row.
She had put on her good gray coat. Beside her sat Uncle Frank, with his big workman's hands folded between his knees, and Mrs. Lopez in her enormous cardigan, and Ben, in a suit, with his round pink face scrubbed raw. Ms. Hart, the lawyer, sat on the end, with a briefcase on her lap. Behind them, in rows, the room was full. There were people she knew. There were people she had never seen. A woman in a church hat. A young man in a green jacket. A very old man in a brown suit, with a stick.
The judge cleared her throat.
"This court has reviewed the findings of the special prosecutor," she said, "together with the sworn statements of the officers involved and the record of the investigation. It finds the following."
Mary did not breathe.
"One. That on the evening of October fourteenth, Samuel James Carter, a minor aged sixteen, was not armed with a weapon."
A rustle.
"Two. That he did not, at any time, present a threat of death or serious bodily harm to any officer or other person."
A sound, somewhere behind her. A woman's sob.
"Three. That he attempted, in the moments before his death, to surrender an object he had been carrying, and to communicate that it was harmless."
The judge looked up.
"Four. That this attempt was not heard, or was not acted upon, and that information available to the Department, which would have prevented his death, was withheld."
She lowered her eyes. She turned the page.
"This court therefore finds that Samuel James Carter was a victim of an unjustified use of force. His death was avoidable. His name, which has been wrongly associated in public record with the words suspect and armed subject, is cleared of any imputation of wrongdoing."
She stopped.
For a moment the room was quiet. It was a quiet Mary had never heard, vast and soft and deep, like the quiet after a bell. The sun came in at the high windows and lay in long pale bars across the floor. The dust turned in it. She heard, quite distinctly, her own heart.
"I would like to say one thing more," said the judge, "if the court will permit."
Nobody spoke.
"It is the practice of this court, in matters of this kind, to refer to the deceased by the initials of his given names, or as the decedent. It is thought to be more dignified. It spares the family. I have followed this practice for twenty-six years." She took off her glasses. She looked, for the first time, at the front row. "I think it is wrong."
She looked at Mary.
"His name was Samuel James Carter," said the judge. "He was sixteen years old. He lived on Ferris Street. He liked to draw. He had a mother who loved him very much. I would like it said aloud in this court, as often as it takes, until everyone in this room has heard it." She paused. "Samuel James Carter."
The silence went on.
"Samuel James Carter," said the judge again, more softly.
And then, from the back of the room, a single voice, an old man's, thin and cracked and quite clear:
"Samuel James Carter."
And another, a young woman's, near the door. And another. A boy's voice, high and breaking. A woman's. A deep man's voice, slow, like a prayer. She heard Uncle Frank beside her, hoarse. She heard Mrs. Lopez, in her little cracked whisper. She heard Ben, who was weeping and could not stop, and did not try. They said it, one by one, from the benches, in the long wood room, with the sun on the floor.
Samuel James Carter.
Sam Carter.
Sam.
She sat very still in the middle of it, with her hands in her lap, and her son's key against her skin, and listened to a hundred strangers say his name.
They went to the tunnel afterwards.
It was Ben's idea. He had asked, in the corridor, in a low voice, whether she would like to, and she had said yes before he had finished the question. They went on the bus, the two of them, down through the quiet end of town, past the lots and the fences and the empty car wash. It was a fine bright afternoon. There was a smell of wet earth. The trees on the hill had put out a faint green haze, and in the ditch beside the road a row of yellow crocuses had come up, very small, quite suddenly, as though someone had spilled them.
The tunnel stood at the foot of the road, black and wet, with the gold light slanting in.
She stopped at the mouth.
The wall ran away from her into the dark. It was just as she remembered it: the great leaning letters, black and gray and white, edged with their thin cold gleam. The candles were gone. There was a new row of things at the foot of it, a hundred of them, cards and flowers and little bottles and notes. She saw a baseball cap. She saw a drawing in crayon of a boy with a spray can and a halo. She saw a child's shoe.
NOBODY'S LOOKING, said the wall.
She walked slowly forward. She read it as she had read it before, letter by letter, from the N to the G. She came to the second line, the small one, beneath.
She stopped.
"Ben," she said.
"Yes?"
"Did you."
"What?"
"Did you finish it?"
He came up beside her. He looked where she was looking. For a long moment he did not say anything. His face, in the dim light, went slack and pale. His mouth opened.
The line read:
I'M HERE.
It was done. All of it. The H was whole. The crossbar, which she had last seen as a half-finished curl, was drawn clean and black across the upright. The E, the R, the E, followed it in a neat line, in the same bold hand, with the same heavy outline, and the same thin white edge, and the same soft gray shadow. At the foot of each letter, tiny and exact, was a little cross.
She put out her hand. She did not touch it.
"No," said Ben. His voice was a thread. "No. I didn't. I swear to God. I haven't been here in a week. I wasn't. I haven't, I didn't have the, I never."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure." He turned to her. His eyes were enormous. "I never touched it. I wanted to. I stood here every day. I said, it's not mine. I wouldn't. I'd never."
"Then who."
"I don't know."
"Someone from the school."
"No."
"One of the other boys. One of the, the kids who used to."
"They wouldn't." He was shaking his head, over and over. "They couldn't. It's not, look at it. Look at the, it's the same. It's exactly the same. Nobody can do his hand."
She looked.
It was true. She could see it. She had looked at that wall a dozen times, and she knew it as she knew the back of her own hand. She knew the small hesitations. She knew the way the lines swelled, and the way a curve came round. And she saw that the new letters had them all. The slight flick at the end of the R. The drip, the one small drip, at the foot of the M. The little place where the shading went from black to gray, and paused, as if the hand had stopped to let a train go by overhead.
The paint was dry.
She touched it, then. She laid her fingers lightly against the E. The brick was cold. The paint was smooth and cool and hard as enamel. It had been there some time. Weeks, perhaps. Months.
"Mrs. Carter?" said Ben.
"Yes."
"Are you."
"I'm all right."
"Do you want to go?"
"No." She did not take her hand away. "No. I want to stand here."
They stood there.
The light moved along the wall. A pigeon came into the tunnel, and walked a few steps, and flew out again. Somewhere, a long way off, a train was coming, and the ground began to shake very faintly under their feet. She stood with her hand on the brick and felt it rise through her palm: the thin deep tremor, and the roar, and the iron thunder going over their heads. The whole tunnel sang. Dust fell. The great black letters seemed to move.
And when it had passed, and the silence came back, she found that she was smiling.
She did not know why. She stood in the tunnel with her son's wall under her hand, and tears running down her face, and smiled.
"Okay," she said, to the wall. "Okay. I see you."
She went to the cemetery on a Sunday in May.
It was a small one, on a hill on the east side of town, behind a church. It had a stone wall, and a gate, and a row of old maples, and a gravel path that ran along the top in a long slow curve. The grass had come up thick and green after the rain. The air smelled of cut hay and wet stone. Somewhere in the trees, a bird was trying out the first four notes of a song, and starting again, and trying again.
She had brought a flask of tea, and a small folding stool, and a paper bag. She walked up the path slowly. She knew the way. She had come every Sunday since the funeral, and she knew every stone: the old one with the angel, the little one with the lamb, the tall gray one with a name she could not pronounce. She stopped at the fourth row from the top.
It was plain. It was a flat gray slab, set in the grass, with the letters cut deep.
SAMUEL JAMES CARTER.
Beloved son.
Born March 3. Died October 14.
She had had them put the dates without the years. She had said she did not want people counting. She had said, he was exactly as old as he was.
She set up the stool, and sat down, and poured the tea. She drank a little. She watched the light on the grass. She did not say anything for a while. It was how she did it, now. She sat quietly for ten minutes, to let him know she had come, and then she spoke.
"Hi, baby," she said.
The bird tried its song again.
"I've got news. I wanted you to hear it from me. I've been saving it." She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. "I was going to tell you in March. On your birthday. But I thought, no. I'll wait for the right day."
She reached into the paper bag, and took out a small thing, and set it on the stone. It was a bottle. It had a red label, and a rooster, and a black cap. She put it down in front of the name, carefully, in the center, where the letters were deepest.
"It's from Frank. He got it special. It's the one you liked. He said it's got a, a ghost pepper in it. I said, do not give it to my son. And then I said, oh." She laughed. It broke. "I forget."
She turned the cup in her hands.
"They said your name," she said.
The grass moved in the breeze.
"In the court. In April. Did you hear? The judge said it. She said it three times. And then everybody did. A hundred people. They stood there in the room and said, Samuel James Carter. Like a, like they were calling you in for dinner." She stopped. She pressed her lips together. "I didn't know people could do that. I didn't know a room could."
She wiped her eyes.
"They've said it every day since. It's in the papers. It's on the radio. There's a man who reads it on the news. Samuel Carter, sixteen. They don't say the suspect. They say, the boy. And then they say your name." She breathed in. "I used to think, it doesn't matter what they call him. He's gone. But it does. I didn't know. It does. It's the whole thing."
A cloud passed over the sun. The light dimmed, and came back.
"I was so angry," said Mary. "I want you to know. I was so angry at him. I still am. He wasn't supposed to go. He was supposed to stay. He was supposed to sit in a chair and let them ask him." Her voice shook. "I think about that. I think, he got out. And you can't. And that's not."
She stopped.
She sat looking at the stone, with the cup in her hands, and the little gray bird in the maple above her singing four notes and four notes and four notes. She thought of a man in a gray coat at a kitchen table. A man with a bruise on his jaw, eating rice with tears running down his face. A man who had said I shot your son in a plain flat voice, without any adjectives.
He told the truth.
It was all he had left.
She could not make it be more than that. She had tried. She had sat with it for five months, turning it over, like a stone in her pocket. She had read the statement forty times. She had gone, once, to the house on Maple Street, and stood at the gate, and seen a small girl in a yellow raincoat in the front garden, feeding a gray cat. She had stood there for a long time. She had not gone in. She had not known what she would say.
I don't forgive him.
I don't not forgive him.
I'm a woman standing at a gate.
"I don't know what to do with it," she said. "I don't think I'm supposed to. I think I'm supposed to carry it. Like the rice. Like the bag of rice. It's very heavy, and I don't know where to put it, and I'll just, I'll just keep it in the cupboard. And I'll eat a little every day."
She smiled.
"That's a joke."
The bird stopped.
"Mrs. Lopez says to say hi. She says she's making tamales, and you'd better not be eating the leftovers. Uncle Frank says the shop's not the same. He says the paint mixer's broken and he's too proud to fix it. Ben's doing well. He's thinking of going to art school. He says it's your fault." She laughed again. "He's learning gilding. He found a man. A Mr. Park, on Edgewood. He wrote to him. And Mr. Park wrote back and said, come see me. Not when you're eighteen. Now."
She had to stop.
She sat for a time with her hand over her mouth. The wind was warm. In the long grass at the foot of the next grave, a dandelion had come up, bright yellow, entirely alone.
"I went to the tunnel," she said, when she could. "In April. After the court. And somebody's finished it."
She smiled.
"I don't know who. Ben says it wasn't him. I think he's telling the truth. I stood there for a long time, and I thought about it. And I thought, I'm not going to ask. It's yours. You made it. It's exactly the way it ought to be." Her voice dropped. "It's good. It's the best thing you ever did. I wish I'd said."
She bent forward. She laid her hand on the cold stone.
"I'm here," said Mary. "I want you to know. I'm looking. I'm looking at everything. I see you."
The sun came out.
It came all at once, from behind the cloud, and poured down over the hill. The grass was bright. The leaves of the maple went gold. A bee came and hung over the little bottle with its red label, and went away. She sat with her palm against the stone, in the warm light, listening to the long slow rush of the wind.
She sat there a long time.
When she stood, at last, she was stiff. She folded the stool. She screwed the cap on the flask, and put the paper bag in her pocket. She looked once at the name. Then she turned, and walked slowly down the gravel path, under the trees, toward the gate.
At the bend, she stopped.
Something had touched her.
It was nothing. It was a small cold weight against her breastbone, a gentle pressure, like the tap of a fingertip. She put up her hand. It was the key. It was hanging on its shoelace, outside her coat, where it had worked loose in the wind, and it had swung, and struck against the zipper.
Tink.
She stood still.
Tink-tink.
It was a small sound. It was quite ordinary. A bit of metal on a bit of metal, in a breeze. She had heard it a hundred times, in the kitchen, in the dark, in the walls. She had learned to live with it. She had said, I'm still here, and it had stopped.
She did not say it now.
She closed her hand round the key.
It was warm.
It was not warm from her skin. She knew that. It was the warmth of a thing that has just been held, by someone else, for a long time, and let go. She stood on the gravel path in the green light under the maples, with her fist against her heart, and did not turn round. She did not need to. She knew exactly how it would look. The long grass. The gray stone. The small red bottle, catching the sun.
"I'm going home," said Mary Carter.
She said it quite softly, to no one, and walked on.
At the gate, a light wind came up behind her, and went past, and lifted the dust of the path in a small bright spiral, and set it down again. She did not look back. She went out through the iron gate, and down the hill, and across the town, to Ferris Street, where on the second floor of number thirty-eight, in a small square kitchen, a lamp had been left burning in the hall.