The Longest Night

They sealed the film before the sun came up.

I want to tell it exactly, because the night after the tunnel was longer than any of the nights that went before it, and a great deal of what I am now was decided in the hours when nothing was happening. Nobody ran. Nobody shot at anything. We sat in a room, in the old Vital Records annex, under a buzzing light, and the thing that was happening was done to a small silver cartridge on a steel table.

Dunleavy did not follow procedure. He told me later he had never in thirty-seven years skipped a form, and that he skipped them all that night, one at a time, as a man throws ballast from a balloon. He did not take the cartridge to the property room. He did not log it with the Fourth District. He called a number from the pay phone in the hall, and an hour later a woman in a gray raincoat walked into the annex with two federal marshals, a camera, a plastic evidence bag, and a pen.

Her name was Carla Whitcomb. She was an assistant United States attorney, small and quick, with a cloud of gray-streaked hair and the tired, sharp, humorous eyes of a person who has had her heart broken by institutions and has gone on reading their fine print. She shook my hand. She looked at my bandage. She said, "You must be June," in a voice with no pity in it at all, and I liked her at once.

They numbered the cartridge on the spot. They photographed it from six sides. Every one of us who had touched it signed a form: Dunleavy, Ansel, my mother, me. The roll went into a bag, and the bag into a steel case, and the case was locked with a key that Whitcomb hung round her neck. Two marshals stood on either side of the door.

"I'm not developing it tonight," she said. "Not until I know who's in the room when I do."

"How long?" said Dunleavy.

"Days."

"Voss?"

"Voss is in a cell with a broken wrist and a bad temper, and a lawyer has been sitting outside for forty minutes who says he's never met the man." She almost smiled. "He's a very clean man, your Mr. Voss. I suspect he'll be cleaner by morning."

…

They gave us the annex's staff lounge: a sagging couch, a card table, a coffee maker and a radiator knocking like a child. My mother sat in a blanket with her wrists wrapped in gauze, and she held my hand. She did not let go of it. Not when the paramedic tied off my ribs. Not when she was asked to sign, and signed left-handed. My hand was bandaged too, so we sat there, two mummies holding each other, and neither of us laughed.

I was so tired I felt transparent. Every time I shut my eyes I saw a black stairwell and a wall of smoke, and I counted, in the dark, one, two, three, four. So I kept them open, and watched a crack in the ceiling, while a man of thirty-four by the door held a cup of hot water and did not drink it.

…

"Why did my mother trust you?" said Maren.

It was a quarter past three. Ansel looked up. They'd given him a dry sweater of Dunleavy's, three sizes too big, and a plaster for his split lip. He looked like a schoolteacher, I thought, the kind who stays late. He said nothing for so long that I thought he hadn't heard.

"Because she saved me," he said.

"How?"

"Twenty-one years ago I was the thirteenth child." His voice was very quiet. "I was thirteen years old. They'd changed my name, they'd changed my age. They'd put me in a house on the west side with a woman who called me Daniel. I didn't know why. I only knew that when I said Ansel the lady cried." He turned the cup. "I ran away when I was fourteen. I ran back to the county building. I thought I could find my file. I thought if I could just see it, I'd know who I was."

"The annex," said my mother.

"The annex. I walked in through the loading dock at four in the afternoon, in a stolen coat, and I asked a woman at a desk where they kept the old records." A crooked smile. "She was sixty. She wore a green cardigan. She looked at me for a long time, and then she took my hand, and she walked me to the back, and she hid me in a drawer."

I held my breath.

"For nine days," said Ansel. "In a filing room. She brought me soup in a thermos. She brought me comic books. She sat on a crate in the dark and talked to me about birds." He swallowed. "She said, Ansel, I'm going to tell you something, and you're not to tell anybody. I am going to hide who you are. I'm going to hide it so well that nobody finds it for twenty years. And when it's time, somebody is going to come and ask for it. And you will know that person."

"Who?" said my mother.

"She never said."

…

"But I was a coward," said Ansel.

The words were flat. He looked at the floor.

"Voss came. Not in person. A man with a briefcase, a county ID, a soft voice. He asked for the Ostrander woman. He sat in the front office for an hour. I could hear him through the vent. I was fourteen and I was in a drawer, and I heard a man ask for my friend by name, and I ran." His fingers whitened on the paper. "I went out the back and over the fence. I didn't look. I didn't stop. I didn't go back. I've been running for twenty years."

"You were fourteen," said Dunleavy gently.

"I owe her a life."

"You sent the photograph," I said.

It came out before I had decided to say it.

He turned his head.

"The one under the door. At the hotel." I swallowed. "Room 1207. A picture of the number. And words on the back. Don't let the child die for you again."

Ansel looked at me for a long moment. His gray eyes were quite steady.

"Last night someone had to warn you," he said, "without being seen."

"You were in the hotel?"

"I was in the stairwell for three hours. I had a Polaroid and a pen and a sandwich bag, and I slid it under the door and ran down eleven flights." A breath of a laugh. "It was the only time in my life I did something brave."

My mother had gone very still.

"How did you know?" she said.

"Know what?"

"That my daughter had died."

…

The radiator knocked. Out in the hall a phone rang and was picked up.

Ansel did not answer at once. He set his cup carefully on the card table. He took a long breath, in, out, with the quiet deliberate air of a man stepping off a ledge. And then he looked at me. Not at Maren. At me.

"Because I did too," he said.

I felt my mother's hand go rigid in mine.

"I was thirteen. There was a fire. A rooming house, on Fulton Road, in the middle of the night." He spoke slowly, and each word seemed to cost him. "I was living in a foster home, with a lot of kids. There was a girl, Nell. Six years old. Not my sister by blood. She slept in the bunk under mine. When the smoke came up the stairs, she wouldn't wake. I couldn't carry her. I laid on top of her."

I couldn't breathe.

"I lay on her to keep the smoke off. I lay there until I couldn't feel my hands. And then I felt a hand on my face, and a very bright light." He paused. "I woke in my bed. The clock said eleven-fifty-one. There was no smoke. Nell was snoring. I could taste the fire in my mouth, and I could see the man's face, a big man in a coat, with a can in his hand, on the stairs. I knew exactly where he was going to be."

"You got out," I whispered.

"We both did."

"There's a rule," said Ansel. He looked at my mother, then at Dunleavy, then back at me. "I didn't find it out for years. I didn't know a thing about it. But I've since met others, a handful, in nursing homes and bus stations and, once, in a church. There's a rule, and it's very simple. Whoever dies in the place of someone they love comes back. Once. To the minute before. Remembering the face of the man who killed them."

Nobody spoke.

"Voss knows it," said Ansel. "He's known for decades. That's why he hunts us. We aren't threats, in the ordinary way; we don't have weapons or money or friends. But we are the only witnesses he can't buy. We're the only ones who know. You can bribe a clerk or a juror. You can't bribe a girl who watched you set the fire."

…

My mother turned.

She turned her whole body on the couch, slowly, and took my face in her bandaged hands. She did it carefully, as one handles a cup that has been cracked and mended. Her eyes were enormous and wet. In the cold light they were almost gray.

"June," she said. "You died for me."

I opened my mouth to say it wasn't like that.

"In that apartment." Her thumbs moved on my cheeks. "That's what you've been carrying. All night. All day. That's what you've been looking at, when you looked at me like that. You weren't remembering a nightmare. You were remembering a death. You came out of a bathroom, and you walked into the smoke, and you died. And you woke up, and you came and got me, and you never said a word."

"I did say."

"You said Mom, we have to go."

"It was true."

She made a sound, a small broken one. She drew me in against her shoulder, and I smelled lavender soap and tar and cold smoke, and I put my arms around her and held on. I held on with every bone I had. I felt her breath shudder against my hair.

"I came back for you," I said into her coat.

…

The door opened.

Dunleavy had been gone half an hour. We hadn't noticed. He came in quietly, shutting it behind him with his shoulder, and I saw at once that he had news, because he walked like a man carrying a plate that is too full. He had washed his face. He had a fresh toothpick. He did not sit down.

"Gordon Ashby," he said, "is in custody."

Maren raised her head.

"They got him an hour ago. In the basement of the Brightpath building, under the old boiler room. He had a gas can and a book of matches. He'd been sitting there two hours, in the dark, looking at a stack of boxes." Dunleavy let out a breath. "He was going to burn it all. He'd come to the end of his rope. He told the officers he was sorry. He told them he'd been sorry for twenty years."

"Rhonda?" said my mother.

"Rhonda Tillis walked into the Fourth District at half past one on her own two feet and asked for a lawyer and a priest." He shook his head. "She's talking. She's been talking for an hour. Her mother is on the list, Maren. She was one of the thirteen's mothers. She made a deal with Voss to protect her, and he made her open the vault boxes, and look at files, and call the people he told her to call, and every time she did it she told herself it was the last."

"And Dreyer?"

"Hal Dreyer was taken at a fishing camp on Lake Erie, in his undershirt, and cried when they put the cuffs on. Lyle Cobb was stopped at the foot of the tunnel stairs with a broken wrist, trying to climb out on his hands and knees. He bit a deputy."

"So it's over," said my mother.

"No," said a voice from the door.

Carla Whitcomb had come in behind him with the steel case in one hand and her coat over her arm.

"It isn't over," she said. "I want to be honest about that. I have a roll of film, a confession that will take a week to type, and a county government with a hole in the middle of it twenty-one years deep. And thirteen people, grown now, in thirteen cities, who have lived their whole lives under names they didn't choose." She looked at my mother. "The film will be developed. They'll be called, one by one, and told who they are. That is what the law does. It tells the truth in public." A pause. "Or we can ask a different question. Whether it's ours to tell. I'm not saying it. I'm saying someone should."

"There's a tape," said Dunleavy.

…

It was Ida's.

The little black cassette had gone in a bag with the rest, and a technician in a basement lab had played it all the way through, twice. On the first pass it had given us nothing new. We'd heard it already. The scrape of the chair, the voice, the long hush, the knock, and Old woman. Enough. And a dull thud, and the hiss of an empty tape.

"There's more," said Dunleavy. "He didn't hear it. It was at the end. After the hiss."

"What end?"

"It's on a loop." He took a small flat recorder from his pocket and set it on the card table. "The machine is a two-track. Your grandmother recorded the whole of it going one way. But there was something already on the tape. She'd put it there months before. She'd recorded over the front and left the end. The thud and the hiss, and then, at the tail, nine seconds."

He pressed the key.

The hiss rose in the room, thin and dry. A clock somewhere ticked. A chair creaked. And then, from a great distance, from twenty years away, rough and warm and tired, my grandmother spoke.

"Maren," said Ida. "If you're hearing this, it means they got to me, or I got to you first. I don't know which. I don't know what you'll have found." A pause. A dry breath. "I have made a great many roads. I'm sorry for every one. I tried to hide it so well that no one could use it, not them, not me. But I've come to think that's the wrong way to be sure."

My mother had stopped breathing.

"It's yours to decide," said Ida. "Not mine. Not theirs."

The tape clicked. The hiss resumed, and went on, and went on, and Dunleavy reached out and turned it off.

…

The room was quiet.

The radiator knocked. A siren moved somewhere, a long way off, down by the lake, and faded. My mother sat with her bandaged hands in her lap and her face turned to the little machine, her lips parted. Ansel had his eyes shut. Whitcomb stood with her coat over her arm and her face unreadable.

I looked at the steel case on the table.

It was just a box. It was plain gray, with a hasp and a lock. It was the size of a toolkit. There was a label on it in Whitcomb's neat hand: EXHIBIT 1. 13 FRAMES. It looked like nothing at all.

And inside it, in the dark, wound tight on a spool, were thirteen children, who were not children anymore. Thirteen people, each with a mother somewhere, and a bed, and a birthday, who had been given other names and told to be quiet. Thirteen people who might be sleeping now, in thirteen cities, in the last quiet hour before the news.

Everyone in the room looked at my mother.

She took a long breath.

…

WHAT DO YOU DO?

You have the film, the tape, and the whole of the night in your hands. In the morning it will be too late to ask again. You can give the names to the world, all of them, at once, to a courtroom, to the press, to the record that nobody can bury. Or you can seal the film and write to each of the thirteen yourself, and let them decide whether they wish to know.