CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
I wore a navy blouse I bought at Target on the eighteenth for nineteen ninety-nine, and a pair of Jess’s black pants that were an inch too long, and a pair of my own shoes that I got back out of my car, where they had been since October in a gym bag.
That is the entire outfit and I can give you the price of every piece of it.
Jess took the kids at seven forty. Ivy had one more day of school before break and Danny had nowhere to be, and Jess said she would take him to the library and then to lunch, and Danny said okay, and then said, at the door, “Is your phone charged?”
“Ninety-six,” Jess said, without missing a beat, and held it up.
She had been briefed. I had not asked her to be.
The hearing was in the auditorium.
I found that out in the corridor on the fourth floor from a man with a clipboard, and I asked him why, and he said because there were eleven witnesses and a court reporter and the union was sending three people, and it was the only room on that floor that would hold it.
So it was the auditorium.
Same doors. Same narrow windows. Same brass sign.
There were folding chairs out in the corridor along the wall, and by twenty to nine most of them had somebody in them.
Two men in uniform I did not know. A woman in a suit with a laptop bag who turned out to be from the dispatch center. Ray, in his dress uniform, sitting forward with his elbows on his knees looking at the floor tile between his shoes.
Gus, in a jacket and a tie that did not go with it, at the far end, by himself.
And Wes.
He was three chairs down from Gus with his coat folded over his knees and a manila envelope lying flat on top of the coat, and he had one hand resting on it, and he was looking straight ahead at the wall opposite.
He saw me come around the corner. He nodded, once, about an inch.
I nodded back.
There was one chair open, and it was next to a woman in a red coat, and she patted it before I got to it.
“Erin. Honey. Come here.”
Bonnie Duarte.
She is about thirty-five and she is very warm and she has always been perfectly nice to me. She brought a pan of something to Danny’s christening. She is the kind of woman who remembers the names of other people’s children.
I sat down.
She put her hand on my arm and left it there.
“How’s your boy?”
“He’s home.”
“Oh, thank God. Thank God.” She squeezed. “That poor baby. I’ve been praying every night, I really have.”
“Thank you.”
“And you? You holding up?”
“I’m all right.”
“You look thin.”
She kept her hand on my arm.
Then she leaned in, and her voice changed. It went down and it got confidential and it got kind, and that is the part I was not prepared for, because I had been braced for hostility and this was not hostility.
“Listen,” she said. “Can I say something to you? Woman to woman.”
“Okay.”
“They’re all like that, hon.”
She said it the way you tell somebody the price of a coat.
“Every one of them. Mine included. You think I don’t know?” She gave a little laugh with nothing in it. “You get to a certain point and you know. And you decide what you’re going to do about it, and I decided a long time ago, and I sleep just fine.”
“Okay.”
“And I’m not saying it’s right. It’s not right. It’s garbage.” She patted my arm twice. “But you’ve got two kids, Erin. Two. And a man loses a job like this one, he doesn’t get another one. Not in this. Not anywhere in the state, they all talk. He’s thirty-nine years old.”
“I know how old he is.”
“So what’s Danny going to have?” She said it gently. She meant it gently. “That’s all I’m saying. In fifteen years, when Danny wants to go somewhere, what’s he going to have? Because there’s a version of today where he gets a suspension and a letter and everybody goes home.”
I looked at the row of doors.
“And it’s not like he did it on purpose,” Bonnie said.
That is the sentence.
Out of all of it, out of every hour of that entire winter, that is the sentence I have carried around and taken out and looked at more than any other, because it is completely true and it is the exact size and shape of the hole that everything falls into.
He did not do it on purpose.
Nobody did. Nobody in that corridor did anything on purpose.
Gus did not lie to me on purpose, he had one second and a phone in his hand.
Wes did not write a false entry on purpose, he wrote what he was told and did not make a call he could have made.
Ray did not do anything at all. My husband did not set a fire and did not want anybody hurt and would have come, at speed, without thinking, if he had known.
Not one person did one thing on purpose.
And there is a rectangle of clean paint on a burnt refrigerator and a seven-year-old who reads a battery percentage out loud at nine o’clock at night.
I turned and looked at Bonnie Duarte.
“Bonnie,” I said. “Is Ray sleeping?”
Her hand came off my arm.
“What?”
“Is he sleeping? At night. Since November.”
She looked down the corridor at her husband, who was sitting forward with his elbows on his knees studying a floor tile in his dress uniform, and who had not looked up once in fifteen minutes, and who has not been able to say hello to me since he carried my son down a ladder.
She looked at him for a long moment.
Then she turned back around and faced the doors and put her hands in her lap.
“No,” she said.
We sat next to each other in that corridor for another ten minutes and neither of us said one other word, and when they opened the doors she got up and went to sit with Ray, and I have never once been angry at Bonnie Duarte either.
The auditorium had been rearranged.
The chairs with the little folding writing arms were still there in rows, but they had turned the front around.
The lectern was pushed to the side wall.
The lacquered table was still on the platform and there were three people behind it with folders and water glasses, and a court reporter at a small table below the platform with a machine on a tripod.
Down front on the left, at a long table, were three men from the union, one of whom was clearly a lawyer because he was the only person in that room in a suit that fit.
And at the end of that table, in dress uniform, with his hat on the table in front of him squared to the edge, was my husband.
He had lost weight in the face. His collar was correct.
I went up the aisle and sat down in the third row.
Not by accident. I have thought about whether to admit that and I am going to. I sat in the third row on purpose, on the aisle, in the same seat, and I have never told anybody that and I do not entirely know what I meant by it.
Deputy Chief Lawrence Bell read the charges in the voice of a man reading a weather report.
Absence from post without authorization.
Falsification of a department record.
Conduct unbecoming a member of the department.
Then he took his glasses off and looked out at the rows.
“The board calls Erin Halloran.”