CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Headquarters is a limestone building downtown with a flagpole out front and a lobby with a terrazzo floor that somebody polishes at six in the morning.
I have been in it twice.
The first time I wore a blue dress.
I got a visitor badge from a man behind glass and went up to four, to the Office of Professional Standards, which is three rooms and a copier at the end of a corridor, and a woman with a cardigan on the back of her chair had my statement printed and waiting in a folder.
“It’s just a transcript of what you told the bureau,” she said. “You read it, you make any corrections in the margin, you initial the corrections and sign the last page. Take as long as you want. Do you want coffee?”
“No, thank you.”
Nineteen pages.
It is a strange thing to read yourself typed out. All the ums are in there. All the places where I started a sentence and abandoned it. There is a whole paragraph where I say the word okay four times in a row while I am thinking.
On page eleven I found something.
And another one said, West, we’re five.
They had heard it as a name and put a T on the end of it.
I sat in a fluorescent room on the fourth floor with a pen in my hand and I crossed out one letter and wrote WES in block capitals in the margin, and put my initials next to it, and I sat there for a second afterward looking at what I had just done.
One letter.
Everything that happens after the nineteenth of December happens because a man’s name is spelled correctly on page eleven of a nineteen-page transcript.
I signed the last page and gave the folder back.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. You’ll get a notice if they need you for the hearing.” She clipped the folder shut. “Thank you for coming in. I know it’s a haul.”
I went back down to four’s elevator lobby and then, because I am a person who cannot leave things alone, I did not get in it. I walked the other way.
The auditorium is at the end of that corridor. Double doors with narrow windows in them, and above them a brass sign.
I looked in.
Rows of chairs with the little folding writing arms. A platform at the front with a lacquered table on it and a lectern and two flags on stands. Ceiling tiles. That smell of floor wax and coffee that has been on a burner too long.
Two Novembers ago I sat in the third row on the aisle.
I got there half an hour early because I was afraid of parking.
I had a program in my lap that they printed on cardstock and I folded it into quarters at some point without noticing, and when they said his name I clapped so hard my hands stung, and when he came down off that platform he looked for me first, before anybody, and found me, and did the thing with his eyebrows that means can you believe this.
I let the door go and it swung shut on its arm.
And when I turned around she was in the corridor.
I knew her immediately.
Not from a photograph. I have never seen a photograph of Tessa Vail. I have never gone looking, and I am putting that down here, because everybody assumes.
I knew her because she was walking toward me down a hallway on the fourth floor of headquarters with a laptop bag on her shoulder and a lanyard around her neck, and she was about thirty, and she had the exact posture of a woman who works in a building where she is the only person under fifty who understands what she does.
She was not what people want her to be.
I have been asked about this and I have watched the disappointment.
She is not gorgeous. She is not twenty-two.
She was wearing gray trousers and flat shoes and a coat over her arm and her hair was up in the way that takes four minutes, and she looked competent and tired and like she was on her way to something at two fifteen.
She could have been anybody in that building.
She got to about fifteen feet and she recognized me.
I watched it land. It came up through her face and stopped everything, and she took about half a step shorter than she had been taking.
She recognized me.
That is the part I did not expect and it took me a while afterward to work out why it hit the way it did.
She is the only person in that entire organization who has ever looked at my face through a lens.
She lined me up. She said you look nice together. She counted us down and took the picture that has been taped to the inside of a locker door for two years, and she knew my face before she knew what I was going to be to her.
I did not say anything.
I want to be very clear about that. I did not say one word. I did not move out of the middle of the corridor either, because I was standing where I was standing and there was no reason to go anywhere.
She came on. She had to. There was nowhere else for her to be.
At about six feet she took her eyes off me and put them somewhere over my left shoulder, and she went around me.
That is exactly what it looked like. A person going around a puddle. A little arc, taken early, executed smoothly, with the eyes somewhere else, and then back onto the original line and gone.
She did not say excuse me.
I stood in that corridor and listened to her flat shoes go down toward the elevators, and I found out what I actually had, which was not what I had been carrying around for a month.
I had been getting ready for hatred. I had rehearsed it. There is a version of me that had four different things to say and had said all of them in a car.
What I had was nothing.
Not forgiveness. Nothing. She went past me and the temperature did not change.
And underneath the nothing there was one small clear thought, and it was the only thing I took out of that building that day, and I have never been able to make it more generous than it is.
Nothing of hers burned.
That is not a crime. She did not set a fire and she did not turn off a phone and she is not responsible for one thing that happened in my apartment on the twelfth of November, and if she went home that night and cried about it that is her business and I hope she did.
But she walked down a corridor at two fifteen in the afternoon with a laptop bag, on her way to a two thirty, in a coat with nothing on it.
She has a kitchen. She has photographs of her family in whatever she keeps photographs in.
Her son does not read a battery percentage out loud at nine o’clock at night, because she does not have one.
Nothing of hers burned.
That is not a moral failing and it is not owed to me and there is no court that hears it.
It is just true.
I sat in the parking structure for about ten minutes and let it be true, and then I drove to Jess’s and made spaghetti for four people.