Chapter 65 The True Account
BIRDIE had spent three years in Halford perfecting the art of leaving a room before anyone could look at me too hard, so it was a genuine shock to my whole nervous system to walk into the county sheriff’s conference room at nine on a Monday morning and decide, on purpose, to stay in it.
The old plan was so familiar I could have narrated it in my sleep, and in fact I mostly had, for a solid week.
There is a version of this morning where I don’t come here at all.
Where I let the report say “bystander assisted.” Where I let the town keep its jumpy little clerk, where I pack the two-flat quietly some Tuesday and text Earl that a cousin in Dayton needs me and the cousin’s back is bad.
I’ve done the disappearing before. I’m good at it.
It might genuinely be the only thing I’m as good at as the other thing, the thing I don’t say out loud, and I had lain awake three nights running with the duffel bag looking at me from the top of the closet like it was owed a decision.
But Theo was safe upstairs at my two-flat right this minute, alive and thirteen kinds of annoying about it, having asked me at breakfast whether the device had “a real countdown or a movie countdown,” and whether real ones beep, and if they don’t beep how does the bad guy hear it, and did I get to cut a wire and was it red.
Ren was alive. The block was still standing.
And not one single scrap of any of that had happened because Birdie Vance fluttered adorably at the far curb.
So I sat down in the plastic chair. I put both my hands flat on the cold laminate table so they’d stop doing the thing they do.
And when Detective Lorna Pike came in with a legal pad and a recorder and the flat crowbar stare she’d been using on me all summer, I said, before she could even pull out her own chair, “I’ll give you the real account.
All of it. On the record, in my own words.
And I’m not going to leave anything out to make it prettier, so you should get more coffee. ”
Pike stopped with her hand on the chair back. She looked at me for a long second, recalibrating, a summer of suspicion resettling into something new behind her eyes. Then she set the recorder down between us and sat, and she said, in a voice I had never once heard her use on me, “Sergeant Vance.”
I hadn’t heard the rank out loud from a stranger’s mouth in a long time. My eyes did an embarrassing thing that I chose not to hide, which was new for me and took some doing. “Retired,” I said. “But yeah. That’s the name it’s under.”
“Take your time,” Pike said.
Lorna Pike had not said “take your time” to me one single time all summer.
All summer she’d been fitting me for a suspect, the nervous woman who kept turning up at every scene, present at fire after fire, exactly the kind of pattern that hangs a person.
Now she was fitting me for something else and it was going to take her a minute, and she was giving both of us the minute.
I understood I had finally paid off the debt of her mistrust in a single sentence, and that it had cost me the exact thing I’d spent three years refusing to spend, which is the truth about my own hands.
So I told it, and I told it in order, because order is the only way I know how to hold a dangerous thing.
Eight years. Three deployments. EOD — explosive ordnance disposal, bomb tech, the person they send toward the thing when everyone with sense is moving the other way.
What render-safe means and, more important, what it does not mean, because the movies get it wrong and I didn’t want her building a fantasy out of me either.
My callsign, which I gave her because I was done keeping secrets in that room: Mother, because I checked everybody’s gear twice and made grown men drink water and got people home.
The call that went wrong — off the record of my own body, referenced and not relived, because I’ve learned I can say the shape of it without walking back into the room where it happened.
The secondary hazard I flagged and was overruled on.
The rushed clearance. The young man named Ellis who came home with one leg, a good wife, and a forgiveness I have never once in my life been able to make myself spend.
Why I left. Why I came to Halford, where my aunt had left me half a two-flat.
Why I built a woman entirely out of flinches and apologies and put her on over myself like a coat.