Chapter 10: Who’s Going to Believe You
I kept my thumb on the button.
I didn’t get up. I couldn’t have; there were eleven staples under the blanket and a drip in my arm and I’d been awake for about four seconds. But I kept my thumb on the call button, and I kept my eyes on him, and I didn’t say anything, because I had learned something in the last eleven days that had taken me three years to learn, which was that Grant Whitlock could not stand a silence he hadn’t made.
He stood in it for maybe ten seconds. Then he filled it.
“They let me in,” he said. “Downstairs. I want you to know how easy that was. I walked up to the desk and I said I’m the father and a girl who’s been working there about a month looked at the board and found a Whitlock and buzzed me through. That’s all it takes, Lena. That’s all it’s ever taken, anywhere. A name and a shirt with a collar.”
“You’re inside a thousand feet.”
“I’m inside twelve. I counted.” He smiled, a little, not the whole thing. “There’s a monitor on my ankle that’s going to tell somebody that eventually, and when they come I’m going to say exactly what I said downstairs, which is that I’m a father who hasn’t been allowed to see his daughter, and some of them are going to feel sorry for me. You’d be surprised how many. You wouldn’t, actually. You’ve watched.”
I had watched.
“I’m not here to fight with you,” he said. “I’m done with that. I was angry, on the steps, and I was wrong, and I’ve said so, and I’ll say so again in front of anyone you like. What I’m here for is a form. There’s a form in an office on the first floor with a line on it for the father’s name, and the law says that line gets my name whether you want it there or not, because we’re married, and I’d like it filled in tonight, by me, with my own pen, so that whatever happens next, whatever you and your lawyer with the raincoat have planned, there is one piece of paper in this county that says what’s true.” He spread his hands. “That’s all. A signature. You of all people know how much one of those is worth.”
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“Then—”
“I’m a bookkeeper, Grant.”
He stopped.
I don’t think he’d ever heard me say it in the present tense. In three years I’d said I used to and before we were married and at the feed store, and he’d nodded through all of it the way he nodded through weather, and now I said it flat, from a chair, with my hand on a button, and something in his face went a quarter inch to one side.
“I’m a bookkeeper. I sat at a desk by a door for seven years. I can read a column. So let me read you one.” I didn’t raise my voice. I’d learned that from someone too. “Deputy Okoro’s statement, written before he spoke to anyone. The camera on the portico, which is always on. A judge who watched you do it from one step down. Another judge who watched it on a screen with his lunch. Dr. Anand’s note. Nurse Patrice’s log, which says nobody called. The release form that says you faxed yourself my hospital record the day after you used my license. The admission record that puts me in bed four at eleven forty. Eleven sheets of my signature on yellow paper, getting better, and the eleventh one dated the eighth of March. My license, photocopied, both sides, stapled to a blank deed. Dana Keel’s journal, in a different pen. A cassette of your father telling my mother that little girls walk home from school. And a banker’s box your mother carried into the State’s Attorney’s office on Thursday morning with her own two hands.”
The room was very quiet. The machine beside me squeezed, and sighed.
“You asked a staircase full of people who was going to believe me,” I said. “Count.”
He didn’t move.
I’ll say this for him. He didn’t argue with the arithmetic. He’d never been a stupid man; that had been the whole problem. He stood there in his pale blue shirt with his empty hands and I watched him go down the column the way I’d gone down it, line by line, and get to the bottom, and foot it, and I watched his face do what it had done on the steps when the judge said witness and in the courtroom when Alder said then you’ll agree, except that this time it didn’t come back. The smile didn’t fill the glass. There was just the glass.
“She’s still mine,” he said. Quietly.
“She’s three pounds and eleven ounces and she’s downstairs in a box with a tube in her nose because of a Monday morning you built,” I said. “Put your name on whatever you like. I’ve learned what names on paper are worth.”
Behind him, in the doorway, someone cleared his throat.
It wasn’t a nurse. The nurse was behind him, and the night supervisor behind her, with her hand over her mouth, but the man in front of them in the doorway was in a plain shirt and jeans with a hospital visitor’s sticker on his chest that said OKORO, S. in a nurse’s handwriting, and he’d been, I found out later, downstairs in the unit for twenty minutes with Mrs. Pruitt, looking at a creature in a pink hat through the glass, because he’d wanted to see her once before his shift and nobody had thought to stop him.
“Mr. Whitlock,” he said. “Your monitor’s been talking to my dispatcher for nine minutes. There are two deputies in the elevator. I’d rather you walked out to meet them than made them walk in.”
Grant turned around.
He looked at Okoro for a long moment. Then he looked back at me, over his shoulder, and ran two fingers down the front of his shirt where the tie would have been, out of habit, I think, the way you’d reach for a light switch in a house you’d moved out of.
“Think about what you want her to know about this,” he said. “Someday. When she asks.”
“I will,” I said.
He went.
* * *
They revoked his bail on Saturday morning.
Teddy told me on the end of the bed with a banana bread she had not baked, and she told it in order. Alder had been called at home, and had said three words that Teddy wouldn’t repeat in a hospital, and had signed the order in his kitchen. The thousand feet had become a cell on the second floor of the county building, the new one, the one that wasn’t a parking structure, and it would stay a cell until a trial that Natarajan said would be in the spring and Parrish said nothing about at all, because Parrish had withdrawn as counsel on Friday afternoon, citing a conflict he declined to describe.
“He put his client at the bedside under oath,” Teddy said. “In front of Alder. He’s a witness now. He did it to himself.” She chewed. “I’d feel sorry for him if he hadn’t been at your wedding.”
“What about Constance?”
“Constance is going to plead to something with a long name and a short sentence, and she’s going to sit in a courtroom in the spring and say the word farm a great deal, and I think half the county is going to end up feeling sorry for her, and I’ve decided I don’t mind. The company’s in receivership. The sign’s coming down Monday.” She looked at me over the glasses. “She wrote you a letter. It came to my office. I haven’t opened it. I’ll give it to you when you ask and not before.”
“Not yet.”
“Not yet,” Teddy agreed, and put it back in the satchel.
* * *
The form came on Tuesday.
A woman from the records office brought it up herself, a careful woman in a cardigan who had clearly been told the whole story by somebody and had decided to pretend she hadn’t. She sat in the chair by the window and went through it with me line by line, and when we got to the line, she stopped, and her pen stopped, and she looked at me with an apology already on her face.
“You were married at the time of the birth,” she said. “So by law—”
“I know.”
“Unless a court—”
“I know. Put it on.”
She looked at me.
“It’s ink,” I said. “I’ve learned about ink. Put his name on the line the law says it goes on, and I’ll let the courts have that column, and in the meantime she’ll be called what the people holding her call her. Which is a different thing, and I’m starting to think it’s the only one that counts.”
She put it on. She wrote it very small.
Then she turned the form around, and showed me the line above it, the one that said Mother, and I took the pen and wrote Lena Cole in my own hand with the L too far left, and for the first time in three years it didn’t run downhill.
Downstairs, on the whiteboard above the box, Mrs. Pruitt had already taken the blue marker and crossed out one word and written another, in a hand nobody in that unit had the nerve to argue with.
RUTH COLE. (for now — ask the lady with the spoon)
* * *
Six weeks is a long time and no time at all.
That’s the only true thing anybody told me about it. Ruth came off the tube in the second week and out of the box in the fourth and into a plastic bassinet with sides you could reach over, and in the fifth she took a whole bottle without stopping to complain, and in the sixth Dr. Anand came down to the unit in person, which the nurses said she never did, and stood over the bassinet with her cold hands in her coat pockets and looked at a five-pound, two-ounce person asleep with her fist up by her ear, and said, “There. I told you. Go home.”
I learned the unit the way you learn a street. Which nurse let you hold her longer. Which chair didn’t squeak. How to pump at four in the morning in a room with a sign on the door and a photograph of her taped to the wall above the machine because somebody had told me it helped and it did. Teddy came on Wednesdays with papers: the divorce, filed; the name, filed; a motion with a long title that meant Grant would see his daughter, if he ever saw her, in a room with a social worker and a window. I signed what she put in front of me after I’d read every line of it, and she waited while I read, every time, without once looking at her watch.
Constance’s letter went on Mrs. Pruitt’s refrigerator under a magnet shaped like a tomato. Unopened. I looked at it every morning on my way to the car. I didn’t take it down and I didn’t open it, and I came to think of it as a kind of column too, one I hadn’t decided where to post yet.
Home was Juniper Lane.
I’d decided that in the second week and I hadn’t let anyone argue. Mrs. Pruitt’s nephew had come with two men and a truck and done the porch in a weekend, grey paint, the boards that had given way for twenty years finally pulled and replaced, and the sign had gone out of the lawn on a Monday morning with a crane, and I had asked Teddy to be there for it, and she had been, in the red raincoat, and had taken a photograph of the hole in the grass where the posts had been and sent it to me with no words.
The men with the van brought everything back from the east side. Every box. The grey filing cabinet with the fern-ring, which I put in the corner by the window where it had been, and bought a fern for. The bed. The chairs for the table that was bolted to the wall. The picture of my grandparents went back on its nail. The lemon curtains had never left.
I kept the flour tin on the counter. Flour and all.
The first night in the house I didn’t sleep either, but it was a different not sleeping. I lay in my mother’s room, in my mother’s bed, with Ruth in the bassinet beside me breathing her fast determined breath, and I listened to the house. It didn’t tick like Mrs. Pruitt’s. It settled. The porch boards, new, finding their places. The refrigerator, old, remembering how. Somewhere around two I got up and went to the kitchen in the dark and stood at the table that was bolted to the wall and put both hands flat on it, the way my mother had sat at it with a green book at eleven o’clock at night for a year while a neighbor took out the trash, and I thought: she sat here and decided. Right here. With the radio on.
I didn’t cry. I’d thought I might, in this house, finally. I just stood there with my hands on the wood until they were warm, and then I went back to bed.
And on the morning we came home, before Mrs. Pruitt’s station wagon had even stopped ticking in the drive, before I’d carried Ruth across the new porch in her car seat with her hat over one eye, I went up the attic ladder myself, slowly, with one hand on the rail, and pressed the near end of the short board behind the chimney, and put an envelope in the space under it. Two hundred dollars. It was all I had. It was the only secret in the house, and now it was hers.
* * *
She came on the third afternoon.
I heard the gate first; the porch had a gate now, Mrs. Pruitt’s nephew’s idea, a low one that didn’t lock, that you could open with your hip while carrying a baby. Then flat shoes on the new boards. Then nothing. No knock. I came out of the kitchen with Ruth on my shoulder and there was a small grey-haired woman standing on my mother’s porch with two paper coffee cups, one in each hand, and her glasses in her hair, and the left toe of her left shoe scuffed pale.
“Ms. Whitlock.”
“Cole,” I said. “I filed. Teddy says it’ll take till spring. I’ve decided not to wait for the paper.”
“Ms. Cole.” She didn’t smile, exactly. Something near it. “I’m not going to come in. I’m a witness until the trial’s over and I’d like to stay one. I’m allowed to stand on a porch.” She held out one of the cups. “Black. I didn’t know how you took it, so I didn’t let them do anything to it.”
I took it. It was hot. There was a lipstick mark on the lid of the other one.
She set hers down on the porch rail. Carefully. Lid up. The way she’d set it on the stone ledge by the brass rail with my husband’s hand on my elbow, and I watched her do it, and she watched me watch, and neither of us said anything about it.
“I’d like to tell you something,” she said, “and then I’d like to go, because I’ve got a docket at two and I walked.”
“All right.”
“I turned my cart around once. In a grocery store, in 2006, with your mother thirty feet away and you reading a cereal box.” She looked at Ruth, who had woken, and was looking back at her with the total gravity of a person six weeks old. “I’ve thought about that cart for twenty years. I’m not turning it around twice. That’s all. That’s the whole thing. If you ever need a witness, for anything, for the rest of your life, I’m three miles down that road at the top of thirteen steps, and I don’t raise my voice, and I don’t look away.”
“You asked me on the steps if I could walk,” I said. “I couldn’t.”
“I know.”
“I did anyway.”
“That’s generally how it’s done.” She picked up the cup. She looked at it, and then at the porch rail, and left it there. “Keep that one. I’ll come back for it.”
She went down the new steps and out the gate that didn’t lock and up Juniper Lane toward town, in the flat brown shoes, not hurrying, and I stood on my mother’s porch with my daughter on my shoulder and a cup of coffee going cold on the rail and watched her all the way to the corner.
Ruth made the sound. The creak, the hinge. Her opinion.
“I know,” I told her. “I know. Me too.”
I went in and got the button jar down off Mrs. Pruitt’s windowsill, where she’d left it for me on the first day with a note that said yours now, I never liked buttons, and I took the ring out from between the brass one and the blue one and looked at it in the kitchen light for a while, and then I put it back, exactly where it had been, and put the jar on the shelf above the flour tin. Teddy would want it, in the spring. Evidence of something. I’d let her have that column too.
The coffee cup stayed on the porch rail until it rained.
* * *
She cried at three in the morning.
She did every night, that first week, in the room at the back that had been mine, with the dark square on the carpet where my bed had stood and a new crib in it that Mrs. Pruitt’s nephew had put together wrong and I’d put together right. I’d been asleep. I’d been so far down that there weren’t dreams, only dark, and then I was standing in the hall with my hand on the wall and my feet already moving, and the sound hadn’t reached me yet.
That’s the thing nobody tells you. There’s a gap.
Half a second, where your body is already up and going down a hall in the dark toward the only thing in the world that matters, and the sound is still out there somewhere, on its way, and you haven’t caught up to it yet.
Then it caught up.
I’d heard that sound once before in my life, in a different order. Eight weeks ago, on a hot white staircase, with my cheek still cold and a folder leaving my hands. Sound, then sting. The sting had been the thing I remembered.
This time I was on the right side of it.
The End.
