Chapter Eighteen
Corinne Tate came up my outside stairs at four minutes to five on Wednesday.
She’s in her fifties. Gray cardigan, flat shoes, reading glasses on a cord, a spiral notebook and a pen she clicked exactly once at the door and never again.
“I’m not from the county and I’m not on anybody’s side,” she said, before her coat was off.
“The court appointed me for Jonah and Ruby. Not for you and not for their father. I’m going to form my own opinion and it is not going to be based on what either of you tells me about the other one. Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Then we can be efficient.”
She was in my apartment fifty-five minutes.
She opened my refrigerator. Not fast, not making a show of it. She stood there with the door open and looked at it the way you look at a page.
I had put sixty-one dollars of my remaining three hundred and eighty-nine into that refrigerator on Monday.
She wrote something down.
She went into the kids’ room and asked Ruby to show her which bed was hers, and Ruby took her by the hand and showed her the top bunk and the folding table by the window and the four markers standing up in a jelly jar, and told her, at length, about the maple in the back lot and how it was hers now.
Tate asked Jonah where his things were.
He pointed at the backpack against the wall by the kitchen door. Upright. Straps out.
She looked at it for a second and then wrote that down too, and I stood in my own kitchen and could not tell you to this day whether that went in the column for me or the column against me.
She asked me three questions.
Who watches the children when you work. What is your plan if the job at the Hollis Center doesn’t convert to a licensed position. And: if the court gave the children to their father tomorrow, what would you do the next day.
I said: the after-school program at Fenwick until five thirty, and Priya Raman on Wednesdays.
I said: then I find another job, because there are four pediatric practices in this county and all of them are short.
And I said: I would appeal, and I would be in the parking lot of that school at three ten every single afternoon whether or not I was allowed to speak to them.
She wrote all three down without any change in her face whatsoever.
At the door she took the folder with the rubber band around it, and she said, “Thank you for having this ready,” which was the only thing she said in fifty-five minutes that had any temperature in it at all.
Then she said, “Tomorrow. My office. Noon, both of them. And I want to be plain with you about this part. I will be talking to each of them alone, with the door shut, and you are not coming in, and I am not going to tell you afterward what they said.”
“I understand.”
“People say that and then they get in the car and ask.” She clicked the pen once. “Don’t ask them.”
Her office is on Delmar in a house that got turned into offices in the eighties, third door on the left past a bookkeeper and an orthodontist.
The waiting area is four chairs, a low table, a lamp, and a rack of pamphlets nobody has touched since 2019.
Ruby went in first.
She was in there twenty-two minutes. I sat eight feet from that door and I could hear the pitch of two voices and not one word, and I want to record that those twenty-two minutes were longer than the nine days in the motel.
Then the door opened and Ruby came out with her coat sleeves pushed up and marker on two fingers.
“Mom,” she said, “she has the kind with the smell.”
“The what?”
“The markers. The smelly kind. The purple one is grape and the orange one is not orange, it’s peach, which is wrong.”
“Okay.”
“I drawed our family.”
I did not ask her. Let that stand on the record. I sat in a plastic chair in a hallway on Delmar Street and I did not ask my six-year-old one single question.
She told me anyway, because she is six.
“She said draw whoever’s in your family and don’t leave anybody out.” Ruby got up on the chair next to me and sat on her feet. “So I did you and Jonah and me. And Mr. Dorsey’s dog, but she said dogs are extra and don’t count.”
“Okay.”
“And then she said is that everyone and I said yes.”
She said it perfectly cheerfully. She was thinking about the peach marker.
“She goes, what about your dad.”
Something in me got very quiet.
“What did you say, sweetheart?”
Ruby shrugged one shoulder, still looking at her fingers.
“I said he didn’t fit.”
Then, after a second, because she’d heard something in the pause and wanted to be helpful:
“There wasn’t room on the paper. I did the sun first.”
Then Jonah went in.
He was in there forty-one minutes.
I know because there is a clock on the wall in that hallway with a second hand and I watched all of it.
There is a specific kind of waiting that only exists in a hallway outside a room where somebody is deciding about your children, and I had never done it before and I have done it four times since and it does not improve.
You cannot read. You cannot look at your phone, because looking at your phone is a thing a person might come out and see you doing.
You cannot pace, for the same reason. So you sit up straight in a plastic chair with your hands in your lap like a woman in a job interview and you listen to two voices through a door with the words taken out.
Ruby fell asleep against my arm at minute nineteen with the marker still in her fist.
At some point around minute thirty the voices stopped for a long time. Thirty or forty seconds of nothing at all.
Then they started again, and the one that started was his, and it went on and on without any interruption from the other one, longer than my son has ever talked to me about anything in three years.
He came out gray around the mouth.
He walked over and sat down next to me and put both hands flat on his knees and looked at the pamphlet rack.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you want water?”
“No.”
That was all he had, and I did not push it, and it turned out I only had to wait ninety minutes anyway.
Wade got there at ten of two.
He came up that hallway in the charcoal suit, the good one, the one from the funeral and the promotion and two commendation dinners. Clean shave. A leather folio under his arm with a legal pad in it, because a man carrying a folio is a man who has come prepared.
He did not look at me.
He went straight to the office door and knocked twice, and when Tate opened it he put his hand out and said, “Ms. Tate. Wade Kessler. We’ve actually met, the Hollings matter, two years ago. I testified.”
“I remember.”
“I brought a few things you’ll want.” He tapped the folio.
“Pay stubs going back two years, the deed, my benefits statement, a letter from Deputy Chief Rennick, and photographs of the children’s rooms. Nothing’s been touched.
Their beds are made. Ruby’s dinosaurs are on her pillow the way she leaves them. ”
He said all of it in that even, warm, reasonable voice, and I sat eight feet away in a plastic chair and watched a professional do a thing he is extremely good at.
Then he turned around, and looked past Tate, and saw the children as though for the first time.
“Hey.”
Ruby looked at her fingers.
Jonah said nothing at all.
“Hey, buddy.”
Nothing.
Tate watched that. All four seconds of it. She had her hand on the doorframe and she did not move it and she did not write anything down, and I understood, sitting there, that a woman like that does most of her writing afterward.
“Mr. Kessler, come in, please. Two o’clock.”
He went in. The door shut.
He came out at twenty of three.
I had the kids’ coats on and I was standing by the stairwell door with Ruby’s hand in mine, because I had already decided we were going to be out of that building before he was.
He caught us anyway. He’d have caught us if I’d left at two fifteen.
“Nora.”
I turned around.
He came about six feet and stopped, which he did on purpose, because Tate’s door was open a crack and a man who comes closer than six feet is a man who has come closer than six feet.
“Filed this morning,” he said. “Amended motion. The temporary’s still on for Tuesday.”
“I know when it is.”
“Five days.” He shifted the folio to his other arm.
“I want you to understand something, because I’d rather you heard it from me.
My attorney’s going to ask for the transfer on Tuesday and he’s going to get it.
You’ve got a two-bedroom over an old man’s garage, you’ve got a job you can’t legally do yet, and you’ve got a bank account I could cover with what’s in my truck console. ”
“Okay.”
“I’m not being cruel about this.”
“I know you’re not,” I said. “That’s the whole problem with you.”
Something went across his face. Not much. He put it away.
Then he looked past me, at the two of them standing by the stairwell door in their coats, and he said it in exactly the same voice he’d used for the deputy chief’s letter and the photographs of the made beds.
“Pack their things.”