CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Gus got up without being asked and took both mugs to the sink.
“I’m going to go check the rig,” he said, to nobody, and went.
Wes did not come into the kitchen.
He stood in the doorway with his coat on, and when Gus went past him he stepped sideways to let him through and then stayed exactly where he was.
“You got a minute?”
“I have to get back to the hospital.”
“Two minutes.”
We went out the side door.
There is a picnic table under the tree on the north side of that building with two inches of wet leaves sitting on it. He put his forearm on it and swept a strip clear, front to back, one pass, and then looked at his arm and wiped it on his jeans.
Neither of us sat down.
“I’m off today,” he said. “Somebody texted me you were here.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve had a thing in my truck for ten days,” he said. “I’ve been trying to decide the right way to do it and there isn’t one, so I’m just going to do it wrong.”
He took a folded piece of paper out of the inside of his coat.
It had been folded in quarters and it had been in a warm pocket and it opened stiff.
A photocopy. Lined paper, the ruled kind out of a bound book, photographed slightly crooked so there was a black wedge down one edge where the copier lid hadn’t shut flat.
The company journal. C shift. November twelve.
Somebody’s handwriting all the way down the page, small and cramped and leaning hard to the right. Vehicle check. A medical run at 1826. A lock-out at 2005. The kind of nothing that fills a Wednesday.
And then, about two-thirds down:
2340 Lt. M. Halloran off premises, meeting at HQ. Acting officer: HEO W. Nowak.
And under it, in the same hand, the same pen:
2351 Alarm, Box 3114, 1114 S Fenwick St. E24, L9, B6 responding.
Eleven minutes.
Eleven lines of space on a piece of ruled paper between the sentence that says my husband left and the sentence that says my building was on fire.
I stood in that lot in November and looked at those two entries sitting one on top of the other, in the same ink, and I could not get past the fact that they were adjacent.
It was not two different pages. It was not two different days.
Somebody wrote a lie, and then eleven minutes later, without lifting the pen out of the book, wrote down the address of my son.
“Is this your handwriting?” I said.
“Yes.”
I looked up at him.
He did not do any of the things I was ready for. He did not look away, he did not put his hands up, he did not start the sentence with look.
“Both lines?”
“Both lines.”
“Tell me how it happened.”
He put his hands in his coat pockets.
“He came out of the office about twenty of. He had his jacket on. He said they wanted him downtown, ninety minutes tops, and I had it, and to put it in the log. Meeting at headquarters.”
“And you wrote it.”
“I wrote it.”
“Did you believe him?”
Wes Nowak stood there and let that question sit for longer than a man does when he is going to lie.
“No,” he said.
The wind came around the corner of the building.
“So why did you write it?”
“Because he told me to, and he’s the officer, and that’s what goes in the book.
” He said it evenly, and then he shook his head once, at himself.
“That’s the answer I gave the first four people who asked me and it’s garbage, so here’s the real one.
I could have called downtown. There’s a number.
It’s on the wall in the office, it’s four digits, it’s an internal line, and you say is Halloran up there, and somebody says yes or no. Ten seconds.”
“You didn’t call.”
“I did not call.”
“Why?”
And he gave me the true one, and it cost him something to give it, and I watched it cost him.
“Because if they said no,” he said, “then I’d know.”
We stood there.
“And if I knew, I’d have to do something about it. And I’d been not doing something about it since about July, and I was fine, and everybody was fine, and I wanted to go one more shift being fine.”
“Okay.”
“That’s it. That’s the whole reason. It’s not a good one.”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”
He nodded. He didn’t argue and he didn’t flinch, and I understood, standing there, that he had gone over this by himself enough times that there was nothing left in it that could surprise him.
“Why are you giving me this?”
“Because it’s going to be in a report in about five weeks,” he said.
“And you’re going to open it and see my name in it, and you’re going to have a moment where you think, they all knew and none of them told me.
And that will be true. And I would rather you hear the part with my name on it from me standing here than read it off a page in your kitchen. ”
“I don’t have a kitchen.”
He shut his eyes for a second.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know. That was a stupid way to say it.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not.”
“Wes.”
“Yeah.”
“Is that everything?”
He looked out across the parking lot at the street for a second.
“That’s everything I can put in your hand,” he said.
“What’s that mean?”
“It means there’s a piece of it that isn’t mine to hand around. It goes to the board or it goes nowhere.” He looked back at me. “I’m not going to be cute about it with you. I’m just not going to give it to you in a parking lot.”
“Is it going to the board?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” I said.
And that was the entire conversation about it, and I did not find out what he was talking about until the nineteenth of December, in a room with a flag in it, and neither did anybody else.
I folded the photocopy back along its creases.
“Wes.”
“Yeah.”
“At the ambulance.” I got the paper into my coat pocket. “When they were closing the doors. You said you were sorry.”
He looked at the wet leaves on the table.
“Yeah.”
“I thought you meant the fire,” I said.
He didn’t say anything at all.
I looked at a forty-year-old man standing in a parking lot in the cold with his hands in his pockets, and I thought about my son sitting up in a bed on six eating red Jell-O, and about eleven lines of ruled paper.
“I’m going to say one thing,” I said, “and then I’m going to go, and I’d rather you didn’t answer it.”
“Okay.”
“Ten seconds,” I said. “That’s what you said. Ten seconds and four digits.”
“Yes.”
“He was out that door at twenty of. The call came in at eleven fifty-one.” I put my palm down on the wet table, on the strip he had cleared. “You had eleven minutes.”
Then I went to my car.
He did not follow me and he did not call after me, and when I got to the end of the block and looked in the mirror he was still standing at that picnic table with his coat on, in the dark, doing nothing at all.