Chapter Thirty-Eight — Nora
I submitted the victim impact statement on a Friday.
Two pages. Precise language, no excess, every sentence doing exactly the work it needed to do. I had written seven drafts over four days and Wade had read the final two and said of the last one: That's it. That's the accurate version.
I submitted it and then I sat in the main building room at the desk under the east window and looked at the sent confirmation on my screen and thought about what it felt like to have said the accurate thing about the worst professional experience of my life and sent it into the official record where it would remain.
It felt like putting something down and watching it stay where you put it.
Rook came in and lay beside the desk. He'd started doing that in the main building room, different from the meeting room habit.
In the meeting room he lay in the doorway.
In this room he came all the way in and lay beside the desk as if the room was his room too.
Which it was, in the compound's way of things where the dog's domain was wherever the people he'd decided on were.
I put my hand down and he pressed his head against it.
I said: Okay, Rook.
He sighed.
I closed the laptop.
Wade came in at noon and looked at me and said: Done.
I said: Sent.
He said: How do you feel.
I said: Clean. The same word I keep coming back to. Clean.
He said: Good.
I said: I want to do something today that isn't work. I haven't done that in a while.
He said: What do you want to do.
I said: Show me something. Something about the valley I haven't seen yet. There's a lot I haven't seen yet.
He was quiet for a moment, thinking. Then he said: Get your jacket.
We drove east on roads I hadn't been on, out past the agricultural land into the foothills where the valley floor started to lift and the flat geometry of the farms gave way to the specific rough beauty of California foothill country, live oak and dry grass and granite outcroppings and the specific light that existed here and nowhere else, warm and angled and clear.
He parked on a dirt pullout and we walked a trail through the oaks for twenty minutes until we came out on a ridge that looked back west over the entire valley.
I stood there and looked at it.
The valley was enormous from here. Flat and organized and going on for what seemed like forever, the agricultural grid of it visible from above, the small towns strung along the highway and the foothills on the far side a blue line at the horizon.
I could see where the compound was, roughly, in the middle distance, a cluster of buildings among other clusters of buildings.
Wade stood beside me.
I said: You can see the whole thing from here.
He said: That's why I come here.
I said: You come here.
He said: Sometimes. When I need the scale.
I said: The scale.
He said: The compound is small when you're inside it. Everything is the meeting room and the kitchen and the gate rotation. Coming up here makes it large again. The compound inside the valley inside the state inside the country. Everything in its actual proportion.
I looked at the valley. Then at him.
I said: You've been coming up here since you were prospecting.
He said: Since about month six. When the gate rotation started feeling small.
I said: And now.
He said: Now it doesn't feel small anymore. The scale is just the scale. I come up here because I like the view.
I looked at the valley again. At the compound in the middle distance.
I said: I can see why you come here.
He said: You can use it. Whenever you need it.
I said: The trail.
He said: The ridge. The view. The scale of it.
I said: I'll come here when the work gets too close. When I need to put it in proportion.
He said: That's what it's for.
We stood on the ridge for a while in the afternoon light and the valley was what it was below us, everything in its actual size, and I thought about scale and proportion and the specific clarity of seeing something from the right distance.
I had been inside the work for nine years. Inside the numbers and the cases and the investigations and the careful professional distance that I had used to substitute for everything the work wasn't supposed to substitute for.
From here I could see all of it. The work in its proportion. The compound in its proportion. The life I was building in its proportion.
It was the right size.
Everything in it was the right size.
I took a breath of the foothill air, which smelled different from the valley floor, and I said: Thank you for this.
He said: You would have found it eventually.
I said: Maybe. It would have taken longer without you.
He said: Some things take longer without someone who knows where to go.
I looked at him.
He said: That's not a metaphor. I literally know where the trail is.
I laughed. Fully, the way I laughed now, and he looked at me with the expression he had when I laughed, the one that was entirely unguarded.
I said: I know it's not a metaphor. It's also a metaphor.
He said: Both things.
I said: Both things.
We walked back down the trail through the oaks in the late afternoon and drove back to the compound on the valley roads and the blossoms were still on the trees, and I thought about both things being true simultaneously and how that was the most accurate description of everything about this life that I could find.
Both things at once.
All of it real.
The Teller sentencing was the following Tuesday.
I didn't go. I hadn't been asked to testify and my statement had been submitted and my presence wasn't required. I read the outcome in the news coverage at the kitchen table on Wednesday morning over coffee.
Eight years. Multiple counts of financial fraud, breach of fiduciary duty, obstruction.
Eight years was correct. Eight years was the accurate number for what had been done across multiple cases to multiple people, of which I was one.
I read the article twice. Then I put the phone down.
Wade was across the table.
I said: Eight years.
He said: Is that right.
I said: Yes. That's accurate for what he did.
He said: Okay.
I said: I feel something I don't have a word for.
He said: Take your time.
I said: It's not closure exactly. It's more like. She paused. The weight I was carrying was mine to carry regardless of what happened to him. The weight doesn't disappear because he was sentenced. But the record now accurately describes what he did. That's different from the weight.
He said: Separate things.
I said: Separate things. The weight is mine. The record is the record. They're not the same.
He held my eyes. You're going to keep carrying some of it.
I said: Yes. Less than before. But some of it, yes.
He said: That's accurate.
I said: I know. I'm not trying to get rid of all of it. I'm trying to carry what's actually mine to carry and nothing that isn't.
He said: How much is actually yours.
I thought about that carefully. I said: The fact that I trusted him. That's mine. The way he used what I trusted him with, that's his. I've been carrying both for three years and I'm working on putting down the second one.
He said: How's that going.
I said: Better than it was. The statement helped. The ridge helped. Being here helps.
He said: Being here specifically.
I said: You specifically. The compound. Darren's files. Kale's table. Garrett's food. All of it.
He said: All of it.
I said: All of it.
He reached across the table and put his hand over mine.
I turned my hand over and held his and we sat at the kitchen table in the April morning with Rook at my feet and Garrett in the kitchen and the compound going about its day around us, and I thought about what was mine to carry and what wasn't and the specific relief of being able to tell the difference.
I was getting better at the difference.
Every day a little better at it.