CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
He was standing at the front desk in a department polo and a jacket, with a visitor badge clipped to his collar.
“What happened to Danny.”
“Nothing. He’s fine.”
I stopped on the bottom stair.
“You told them it was about Danny.”
“I needed you to come down.”
There it is. There is the whole man in nine words, and he said them looking right at me, without one flicker of anything, because in his understanding of the world he had done a small necessary thing to achieve a reasonable outcome.
“Can we talk for a minute?”
“I’m in the middle of something.”
“I know what you’re in the middle of.” He put his hand on my elbow.
Not hard. He has never once done anything hard.
He put his hand on my elbow the way an usher does, and he turned slightly, and my feet went with him because they have been going with him for fifteen years, and there was a woman at the desk eight feet away who saw a husband and wife step aside to have a word.
He took me through a door into the back stairwell.
Concrete steps, a metal rail, a window with wire in the glass at the half landing, and that smell they all have. He let go of my elbow as soon as the door shut, and he stood on the landing between me and the way back up.
“How long have you got in there?”
“I don’t know.”
“What have they asked you?”
“Mike.”
“Ren, I’m asking what they’ve asked you.”
“Times,” I said. “Where the doors were. Whether the smoke detectors worked.”
Something in him came down about a quarter of an inch.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Good.”
He put his hands on his hips and looked at the wire glass for a second, and then he turned around and gave it to me, and I will say this for him: it was a good pitch. It was better than I expected. He had clearly worked on it.
“They’re going to ask you about the door,” he said. “About what you heard on the landing.”
“They already did.”
“What did you say?”
“That they were five.”
He nodded. He had known that was coming and he did not care about it, and I remember thinking, that’s interesting, that’s the part I would care about.
“Fine,” he said. “That’s fine. That’s a staffing issue and it’s a real one and I’ll take whatever comes on the log book. I’m not asking you to lie about any of that.”
“That’s generous.”
“Ren.” He held a hand up. “The other thing. Her name.”
“What about it.”
“Don’t put it in that room.”
He said it evenly. He wasn’t pleading and he wasn’t threatening. He was explaining a situation to somebody who he assumed had not thought it all the way through, which is the only mode that man has ever operated in with me.
“If her name goes in that statement, it stops being about a shift and it starts being about a woman. That’s how it works.
I’ve seen it. It’ll go from a discipline file to a personnel investigation because she’s department, and once it’s a personnel investigation it’s got a paper trail with her name on every page of it, and that stuff gets out. It always gets out.”
“And?”
“And then it’s not a fire anymore, it’s a story.
” He took a breath. “Ren. Ivy is ten. She has a phone in about two years. That thing is going to be sitting there forever with our last name on it. She’s going to type her own father’s name into a search bar someday and I would like her to find the medal. ”
I stood on a concrete step and looked at my husband.
It was a good argument. I want to be fair to it. Every part of it was true, including the part about Ivy, and I have thought about that part at two in the morning more than once.
And underneath every word of it, the whole way through, he was asking me to keep his secret for him and calling it protecting our daughter.
“You’re worried about what she’ll find,” I said.
“Yes.”
“You should have been worried in March.”
He didn’t say anything.
“What have you told them?”
“I haven’t gone in yet.”
“When?”
“Monday morning.”
And there it was.
He had not given his own statement. He was four days out from sitting in that same chair in front of that same recorder, and instead of spending this morning with a union rep going over his own answers, he had driven across the city and stood at a desk and had a woman come and get his wife out of a room.
He was not defending himself.
He was sequencing.
Find out what she says. Then decide what I say. It is exactly what he would have done at a fire, and he would have been right to do it there, and I stood on a concrete step and watched him run a scene on his own marriage.
“How did you know I was here today?”
“What?”
“My appointment was at ten. I got the voicemail Tuesday. I didn’t tell you, I didn’t tell Jess, I didn’t tell your mother, and you were standing at that desk at twenty past eleven.” I watched him. “Who told you?”
“It’s a small department.”
“Who told you?”
“Ren, that isn’t—”
“Have you done this before?”
The stairwell had a fluorescent tube in it that buzzed.
“Have people covered for you before? Not that night. Ever.”
He looked at the wire glass again.
“Once,” he said.
“Once.”
“Two years ago. It was nothing. Forty minutes at the end of a shift, I was already relieved, it was—” He stopped himself, and then he did the thing that I think about most out of everything that happened in that stairwell.
He got annoyed. Just for a second. A flash of it, at me, for making him say it. “It was nothing, Erin.”
Two years.
Which is not eight months.
Which meant that whatever the eight months was, it had a before, and the before had a shape, and men had been writing things in books for him for longer than I had a name for any of it.
I did the arithmetic standing on a stair.
Two years ago in November my mother had been dead eleven months and I had just gone back to full time. Two years ago I did the taxes at that kitchen table with him asleep on the couch and I remember being grateful he was home.
“Okay,” I said.
“It’s not what you’re—”
“I said okay.”
I stepped around him and went up two stairs.
He took my wrist.
He got it just below the hand, and he closed his fingers, and he did not pull. That is important and I have said it every time anybody has asked me. He did not pull and he did not twist and he did not raise his voice and there is no version of this in which anything happened.
He held on.
I stopped on the stair and looked down at his hand on my wrist and then up at his face, and neither of us moved for about three seconds.
He let go.
“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. I just need you to think about this.”
“I’m going back up now.”
“Ren.”
“I’m going back up.”
I found four small oval marks on the inside of that wrist at about eight o’clock that night, in a bathroom at Jess’s house, and I looked at them for a while and then I pulled my sleeve down over them, and I never mentioned them to a single living person until a lawyer asked me a direct question in February and I answered it.
I went up the stairs and down the hall and back into that room.
Ostrander stood up when I came in, which nobody does anymore.
“Everything all right?”
“Yes.”
I sat down and put my hands flat on the table, and the little silver recorder was still running because he had never turned it off.
“You asked me a question,” I said. “You asked if they said why they were five.”