Chapter 8 #2
I have never in my life been able to find those places while they were happening. Only after, in hallways, at ten at night, with a kid full of pins forty feet away asking about pancakes.
Judah found me out there.
"He's asleep."
"Good."
"You going to say anything?"
"About what."
"Raff." Judah leaned on the wall opposite and folded his arms. "I've known you since you were a prospect with a bad haircut. I'm going to say one thing and then I'm going to go get a vending machine sandwich and never bring it up again."
"Go."
"You stepped in."
"I know."
"I said his name twice."
"I know."
"And you heard me," Judah said, "which is the part I keep turning over, because you're not a man who loses his hearing.
You heard me and you went in anyway, and I have watched you do that exactly three times in twelve years, and all three times it was a day when something else had already gone wrong and it wasn't a fight. "
I didn't say anything.
"That's all," Judah said. "That's the whole speech. I'm not mad at you and neither's the kid, and Bishop's going to be, and he's supposed to be, and none of that's the point."
"What's the point?"
"The point is I'd like to know what went wrong before the yard," he said, "and you're not going to tell me, so I'm going to go get a sandwich."
And he went and got a sandwich, and it was the worst conversation of my adult life and it lasted ninety seconds.
Sunday came at eleven.
I heard her before I saw her — she'd argued with somebody at the desk about visiting hours and won — and she came down that hallway in the parka with her hair a mess and stopped about six feet short of me.
"Is he okay?"
"He'll walk."
"Rafferty—"
"How long have you known?" I said.
She stopped.
"Known what?"
"That it goes for the ones who look at it."
Her face did something.
"I—"
"Because I've been running it back all night," I said, "and there's a thing you said on the road at Mile 68 that I didn't hear right at the time.
You said the callers can't tell you the mile marker.
And you said the Buick guy put his hands up like something was coming through the glass.
And Nash walked toward an empty row and said it's right there.
" I was very calm. I get very calm. It's a defect.
"It doesn't take people who drive past it. It takes the ones who see it."
Sunday didn't say anything.
"You knew that."
"I suspected it."
"When."
"Since the second pass," she said. "Since I was on the ground at 68 and I saw the stack and one of them was a death that hasn't happened yet, and I couldn't tell you whose it was, and I have been trying to work out—"
"You saw it in the yard, didn't you. Not the yard. Earlier."
"Rafferty."
"Did you see it," I said. "Nash. On that trailer. Did you see it before it happened?"
And Sunday Marsh, who had never in her life told the truth about any of this to anybody, told the truth.
"Yes," she said.
The hallway had one of those lights that hums.
"When."
"Three days ago. When they brought him in to give his statement." Her voice was flat. "He came through the door and I looked up out of habit and I got a flatbed trailer and a bad leg and a hospital room, and I thought—"
"You thought what."
"I thought I was wrong," she said. "That's the thought.
That's the whole thought, Rafferty. I've been wrong exactly once in eighteen years and it was about a shirt, and I have built my entire life on being right, and four days ago I looked at a man's face and got nothing, and it broke the instrument.
I stopped trusting the instrument. So when I saw a kid with a broken leg I said, well, maybe that's not real either, maybe I'm reading things that aren't there now, and I said nothing. "
"You could have told me."
"And you'd have done what?"
"Kept him off the—"
"You'd have gone anyway," she said, "you'd have gone anyway and taken somebody else, and we both know it, and I would still have said nothing, because the version where I say don't take Nash, I saw him break is the version where you all look at me the way people have looked at me my entire life—"
"So it was easier."
"Yes," she said. "It was easier. That's what I am.
That's the thing I've been trying to warn you about since the first night and you kept not listening.
I'm the woman who knows and doesn't say.
I've been doing it since I was twelve years old and I did it to my cousin and I did it to my father and I did it to a twenty-four-year-old kid in a hallway three days ago. "
I looked at her for a long time.
"You lied to me in the lot too," I said. "About the permit."
She went white.
"There's a name on it, isn't there."
"Rafferty—"
"Yeah," I said. "Okay."
"That's not — don't do that. Don't do the yeah, okay, that's worse than yelling—"
"I put my hands on a sixty-year-old man today because I couldn't ask you a question," I said.
That landed. I watched it land. I'd like to tell you I didn't aim it.
"I'm going to go sit with Nash," I said.
And I went and sat with Nash, and Sunday Marsh stood in that hallway under the humming light for about a minute and a half, and then I heard her walk away, and I didn't get up, because I am extremely good at ending things and terrible at absolutely everything else, and it has never once cost me this much.