4. Maryland
Maryland
We went because the tickets were bought in November and because Nate Corrigan does not cancel a thing he has promised, and because I said, in my kitchen, with a dead woman's chart on the counter between us: "She's been waiting twenty-eight years. She can wait nine days."
It was the wrong thing to say and the right thing to do, and I've never worked out how to hold both of those.
Marisol took the dogs. This was not negotiable; it was announced.
Floss and Bear spent nine days in a house on the Eastside with three grandchildren and a yard and a woman who pretends to disapprove of them, and there is a photograph on Marisol's refrigerator to this day of a hundred-pound Bernese mountain dog wearing a plastic tiara, and Nate has a framed copy.
Maryland in April is a different planet.
I had forgotten that trees do that — that there is a green in the world that is not olive or eucalyptus or the gray-blue of a dry hillside, a green that is almost yellow and lasts about nine days and smells like water.
It rained the first morning, warm rain, and I stood in the parking lot of a hotel in Silver Spring in it like a tourist.
He was quiet on the Monday. Not the old quiet — he told me he was going to be quiet, which is the entire difference between this book and the last one.
"I'm going to be bad company tonight and it isn't about you and I'm not going to be able to explain why until Wednesday.
" We ate in the hotel restaurant and watched a baseball game neither of us cared about and he held my hand on the table the whole time like a man holding a rail.
Tuesday he went to Elena Sela's house at ten in the morning and came out at six.
I want to say what I did with that Tuesday, because I think it's the most useful thing in this book for anybody who's ever loved a person with a locked room in them.
I did not sit in the hotel. I did not drive past the street.
I took the Metro into the city and I went to the Hirshhorn and then I walked the whole length of the Mall in the rain, four miles, badly dressed, and at two in the afternoon I sat on a wet bench in front of a museum with a cup of terrible coffee and called Tess.
"How are you doing," said Tess Okafor.
"I'm fine."
"Lila."
"I'm — Tess, I'm doing the thing where I want to help and there is no help. There's no version of this where I'm useful today." I watched a class of eleven-year-olds go by in matching shirts. "He's in a house with a woman whose husband died because of a decision he made, and I'm eating a pretzel."
"Yes," said Tess. "That's the job."
"That's not a job."
"That's the whole job," said Tess. "That's the actual entire job, and you've never done it before because you've never let anybody do it for you.
Sit on your bench. Be at the end of the day.
" A pause; her espresso grinder in the background, six thousand miles of morning behind her.
"He asked you to be the person he comes back to at six o'clock.
That's a real thing he asked for. Do that thing and stop trying to upgrade it. "
He came back at six o'clock.
He came into the hotel room and sat down on the end of the bed with his jacket still on and his hands hanging between his knees, and he looked about fifteen years older than he had that morning, and I sat down on the floor in front of him with my back against the dresser, and neither of us said anything for a long time.
"She made me lunch," he said finally.
"Oh, Nate."
"She made me *lunch*." His voice cracked straight down the middle on the word.
"Eight hours. I sat in that woman's kitchen for eight hours and she made me a sandwich and cut it in half and put it on a plate with a napkin folded under it, and I have been writing her letters for four years and not sending them because I couldn't stand the idea that she'd — " He stopped and put the heels of his hands against his eyes.
"That she'd hate me. That was it. That was the whole thing.
Four years of not writing because I couldn't take being hated by her. "
"And she doesn't."
"She doesn't." He laughed, terribly. "She said — Lila, she said she'd been trying to find me.
Since 2023. She wrote to the field office twice and they wouldn't pass it on, because of the litigation, because of course they wouldn't. She's been looking for me for three years to tell me that Arturo knew.
That he knew what he was doing, that he'd decided it before he ever came to us, that he told her in their kitchen in 2021 that he was going to do it and she could leave him if she wanted and she said no.
" His hands were shaking. "She said: 'You keep thinking my husband was a bird you dropped. '"
I got up off the floor and sat next to him on the end of the bed.
"Tell me the rest," I said. "The part that hurts. You said in November you'd give me the true version and I'd like it now, please."
And he gave it to me.
I'm not going to put all of it in this book. Some of it isn't mine — it belongs to a woman in Silver Spring who cut a sandwich in half — and some of it is the part Nate tells nobody, and I'm allowed to keep one thing back after three of these. But the shape of it was this:
Arturo Sela was forty-four and worked in a shipping brokerage in Baltimore and walked into a federal building on his own in 2021 with a folder.
He gave them eleven months. He was funny; that's the detail Nate kept coming back to, that the man was funny, that they'd spent four hours in a parking garage once laughing about a boat name.
In February 2022 he got frightened, and asked Nate to meet him somewhere other than the protocol location, because he could not face another parking garage, and Nate — twenty-nine years old in the job, and thirty-four in the body, and certain — said yes.
They met at a diner on New Hampshire Avenue for fifty minutes.
It was not observed. Nate has said that sentence in eleven meetings and two inquiries: *it was not observed.
* There is no evidence that the meeting was seen, no evidence it was connected, no evidence that the four days between the diner and the car in Anacostia are anything but four days.
"It probably wasn't the diner," I said.
"I know."
"The review said it wasn't the diner."
"The review said it *could not be established* that it was the diner," said Nate Corrigan, "which is the sentence I have lived inside for four years, and today a woman in Silver Spring told me that her husband had been getting calls at home since December and never told me, because he didn't want me to pull him out.
" He put his head back and stared at the ceiling.
"December. Two months before the diner."
"Nate."
"I know what that means. I know what it *means*, Lila, I'm not stupid — it means it almost certainly wasn't me.
It means the thing I've been carrying is probably not mine to carry and she came out to the car after me to make sure I understood that.
" He was crying now, without any sound, the way men of a certain kind do, which is the worst thing in the world to watch.
"But it doesn't — I said I could protect them.
I said that. Out loud, to his face, in a garage, because he asked me directly and I wanted him to feel better.
And he didn't get protected. And that part is mine and it doesn't matter whose fault the rest of it is. "
I didn't try to fix it. That's the second most useful thing in this book: I did not try to fix it.
I put my arms around him and he put his face against my neck and I held on, in a hotel in Silver Spring, Maryland, for a long time, and outside it got dark, and at about eight o'clock he said, into my shoulder, "I'm starving," and we ordered room service and ate it on the floor and watched forty minutes of a nature documentary about elephants and he fell asleep sitting up against the bed with his hand in mine.
And I sat there in the blue light with a man's whole weight on my shoulder and thought: *there it is. That's the door. It's open. That's all it was.*
I was wrong, incidentally. It wasn't all it was. There was one more room behind it and it took him until Thursday to find out about it himself, and it nearly cost us everything — but that's the next chapter.