CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
MIKE
I drove from the gas station to her apartment.
It is a nine minute drive and I did not decide to do it, the same way I did not decide to open the thread. I got back on Locust and at some point I was in her lot.
I need to say something about Tessa before the rest of it, and I need to say it without the coat of paint.
It was not love. It was not a great passion and I was not swept up in anything. I have read that people say that afterward to make it smaller and I am not making it smaller, I am telling you what it was.
It was easy.
That is the only true word. Nothing in that apartment was ever heavy.
Nobody in it needed anything from me. I did not have to be anything in particular when I got there and nothing was waiting for me when I left.
Two hours, an hour and a half, whatever it was, and then I got in my truck and drove home and I was fine.
I have thought a lot about what it means that the best thing I could say about it was that it was light.
I knocked.
She opened the door in a bathrobe with her hair wet, and she had slippers on, the fabric kind with a rubber sole, and I remember looking at those slippers.
I had never seen her in slippers. That is the whole of it. In eight months I had never once seen that woman at a moment when she was not on her way somewhere or coming from somewhere.
“Mike.”
“Can I come in.”
“I don’t think so.”
She said it plainly. Not cruel. She did not do anything cruel, that night or ever, and I want that written down because people want her to be something and she was not.
“Okay,” I said, and stood in the corridor.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I am. But I don’t think this is a thing I can be in.”
“I’m not asking you to be in anything.”
“You’re standing in my hallway at nine o’clock at night.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I am.”
She held the door with one hand and put the other one in the pocket of the robe.
“There’s an investigation,” she said. “There’s an internal thing running and they have my name in it, or they will, and I have a job in that building and I have had it for six years and I built it myself.
There is a version of this where I have to go sit across from somebody and explain myself, and I did not do anything, Mike.
I want to be very clear. I did not do one thing. ”
“I know that.”
“I met a man at an event. That’s it. That is the whole of what I did.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t sign up for this,” she said.
I stood there in the corridor.
And then I asked her the thing, and I did not plan it and I have gone over it since and I still do not know whether I asked it to hurt her or to find out.
“Have you ever asked me how he is?”
She looked at me.
I watched her go back through it. Five weeks. I watched her actually do it, honestly, all the way through, which is more than most people would have done standing in a doorway at nine at night.
“I asked if he was okay,” she said. “On the thirteenth.”
“You asked if it was bad.”
“Mike—”
“You asked if it was bad, and I said he was in the ICU, and you said God, and that’s it. Five weeks.”
She did not argue with me.
“I’m sorry about your son,” she said. “I mean that. I don’t have any words for it that aren’t garbage.”
“Okay.”
“But I met you at a ceremony,” she said. “And I liked how you were at a ceremony.”
There is nothing wrong with that sentence. I have looked at it from every side and there is nothing in it that is not true and nothing in it she did not have a right to.
I said okay and I went down the stairs and got in the truck.
Zielke called me on the eighteenth and asked me to meet him at the diner on Greenfield.
He had coffee in front of him and he did not touch it the whole time.
“Tomorrow’s going to be what it’s going to be,” he said. “I’m not going to sit here and tell you what to do in that room and I’m not going to tell you it’s going to be fine.”
“I know.”
“Your rep’s got a statement for you. Read the statement.”
“Yeah.”
He turned his cup around on the saucer.
“I pulled you out of a jam in two thousand and nineteen,” he said. “You remember that.”
“I remember.”
“And in twenty-two with the thing on the report.”
“Frank—”
“I’m not doing it again.” He looked up. “I want you to hear me say it out loud so you’re not sitting in there tomorrow waiting on it. I’m not pulling you out again. I’ve got nowhere to pull you to.”
“Okay.”
“That’s it. That’s what I came to say.”
Then he did not get up, and I understood there was a second thing.
“Gus went in on his own,” he said.
“What?”
“On the fourth. He walked into professional standards on a Thursday morning on his own time, with no rep, and gave them a statement they had not asked him for.” Zielke was looking at his coffee. “About phone calls. About what he told a woman on the eighteenth of September about a training review.”
I sat in a booth on Greenfield Avenue.
“He didn’t have to do that,” I said.
“No.”
“Nobody had asked him.”
“Nobody had asked him,” Zielke said. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
I got back to the room at ten thirty and I did not read the statement my rep wrote.
I lay on that bed for about two hours with the lamp off and at one fifteen in the morning I got up and put my boots on and got in the truck and drove down to Fenwick.
I know where they put her. I have known since the eighteenth.
There is a lot in front of that building with the old motel striping still on it, and I pulled in at the far end by the fence and shut it off.
Room 118 is on the ground floor with a window on the lot.
The light was on.
Not a lamp. The overhead, the bare one, at half past one in the morning, in a room where a ten-year-old and a seven-year-old were supposed to be asleep.
I sat there and I could not work out why.
I want to be honest about how long it took me, because it is the thing I go back to.
It took me about ten minutes. Ten minutes of sitting in a truck in the cold coming up with reasons, and every reason I came up with was about the building or the wiring or the neighbors, and none of them were about my son.
I did not get it that night. I got it on Saturday, in a different room, when he asked me to leave a door alone.
At about twenty to two the curtain moved.
Ivy came to the window.
She had a blanket around her and she stood there with one hand on the glass and looked out at that parking lot for a while, and the light was behind her so I could see her clearly and she could not see anything except her own reflection and headlights.
Then a car went past on Fenwick and lit up the lot.
And she saw my truck.
I know she saw it. I know exactly what my truck looks like from a hundred feet in the dark and so does she, she has been getting in and out of it since she was four years old.
She stood there and looked at it.
She looked at it for a long time. Long enough that I got my hand on the door handle.
Then she let the curtain go and went back to bed.
She has never mentioned it. Not to me and not to her mother, and her mother does not know, and I have never told her, and I am not going to.
The hearing was Friday at nine.