Thirteen Letters

It was June who said it first.

I had been sitting on the couch in the green lounge for most of an hour with my hands in my lap and my mother's voice still going round in my head. It's yours to decide. Not mine. Not theirs. The radiator knocked. A window somewhere in the building was rattling in the wind. Whitcomb stood at the card table with her fingers resting on the steel case and her eyes on me, and Dunleavy had gone very still by the door, and Ansel, in the armchair, looked at the floor.

I had my mouth open to speak. I did not know what was going to come out.

"Mom."

I turned.

My daughter was sitting up beside me with the blanket pulled around her shoulders. She had not slept. I understood that now. She had been lying there with her eyes shut and her breathing steady, pretending, listening to every word, and she was very pale. There was a smear of tar on her cheek. Her hair stood up in tufts. She looked about nine years old, and when she spoke it was in the voice of a woman of ninety.

"Can I say something?"

"Of course."

"I don't think we get to tell them."

…

Nobody said anything.

June did not look at the room. She looked at her bandaged hand, lying in her lap on the blanket, and turned it over slowly, palm up and palm down, like a thing she had found on a beach.

"I keep thinking about the night," she said. "About what it was like. I was in that bathroom, and I had the cloth over my face, and I knew. I knew exactly what was going to happen. Somebody'd told me. Or something had. It came in my head, like a voice in a dream. And I thought: there's a right way to do this. I thought, if I just do everything right, if I'm smart and fast and don't make a mistake, I can fix it."

"You did," said my mother's voice, in my head, and my own mouth said, "You did, honey."

"I did. But nobody asked me." She lifted her eyes. "Nobody asked me if I wanted to come back. It just happened. I woke up with the alarm in my hand and I had to carry it. All of it. Every night. I couldn't put it down, and I couldn't give it to anyone, because nobody believed me." She breathed. "That's what it's like, Mom. When somebody hands you your whole life and says, here, this is yours now. You didn't get to say yes."

I could not speak.

"They're thirteen people," said June. "They're asleep right now. They don't know. And we're going to wake them up."

"They're owed the truth," said Whitcomb quietly.

"They're owed the choice."

…

I have sometimes wondered what the room looked like to an outsider.

A woman in a gray raincoat, with a federal badge on her belt and a steel case on a table. A big man with a toothpick, leaning on a door. A tired thin stranger in a borrowed sweater, with a split lip. A mother in a blanket, with her wrists in gauze. And in the middle of them, a thirteen-year-old girl with ash in her hair and her bandaged hand held up like a witness, speaking in a voice so level that no one dared to break it.

"Here's what I think," she said. "I think we should seal it."

"The film?"

"The names. The film's evidence, it's got to be, it's the only thing we have against him. Use it. Put him away." Her chin came up. "But the names are theirs. Whoever's in the picture, they're the only ones who get to decide what happens to them. Not the paper. Not the TV. Not us."

"And how do we tell them?" said Whitcomb.

"We ask."

"Ask?"

"We write them each a letter. By hand. Not an email, not a call. A person brings it, a real one, who sits down and stays." She turned to Ansel. "Someone who knows. And a person from a hospital, or a church. Somebody whose job is to sit with people."

"A victim advocate," said Whitcomb slowly.

"And in the letter we don't say anything. Not their name, not who they were. Only that there's something to know, and that they can know it if they want." She held up one finger. "Choice one. You want the truth: who you were, what they did, all of it. Two." The second finger. "You want to meet your family, the real one, if it's still there. Three." She held up the third finger, and looked at it, and her voice shook for the first time. "You want to be left alone. You want everything to stay the way it is. And we do that, too. We write it down, and we seal it, and nobody ever tells you."

The radiator knocked.

"Names only go to the people who ask," said June.

…

Carla Whitcomb looked at her for a long time.

It was a look I had seen on her face only once before, in the corridor of the annex, when she'd told me that the truth could be given only once. It was grave, intent, almost grieving. She took her glasses off and folded them. She laid them on the steel case.

"I've been a prosecutor for twenty-six years," she said.

"Yes, ma'am."

"In all that time no one has ever asked me to put the victims in charge." Her mouth twitched. "It's not how it's done. It's very hard to try a case that way. Every witness is a volunteer. You can't compel them. You can't hold up a victim in a courtroom and say, this is the proof. You've got the film and your own statements and whoever happens to say yes."

"It's enough."

"Is it?"

"You have Ashby," June said. "You have Dreyer. You have Rhonda, and Cobb. You have the tape and the tunnel and a man in a coat who tried to kill my mother." She ticked them off on her fingers. "And you have me. I'll say it all. I'll say everything I saw. I'll stand up in front of a judge and say it to his face."

"June—" I began.

"I will, Mom."

Whitcomb let out a long breath.

"It's a weaker case," she said. "It might not convict on all counts."

"It might not," June agreed.

"He might serve fewer years."

"He might."

"And you'd still do it."

"Yes."

"Why?"

June thought about it. She took her time. She looked down at her hand, and then at the black cassette recorder on the card table, and then, last of all, at me.

"Because if we did it the other way," she said, "he would have won. He wants to take people's names. We'd be doing it for him."

…

I heard the sound before I understood it. It was a small dry noise, a creak, a scratch. Whitcomb had picked up a pen. She had a legal pad on her knee, and she was writing, in a hand as quick and neat as a typist's, a single paragraph, and at the foot of it she drew a line.

She turned the pad around and held it out.

It was a memorandum. It said, in the flat language of her office, that the undersigned, Carla R. Whitcomb, Assistant United States Attorney, in consultation with Maren Ostrander and with the consent of the principal witness, hereby ordered that the roll of film recovered at 4:20 a.m. be sealed under the authority of the court; that the identities contained therein be disclosed only to individuals who requested their own; that a letter of notification be prepared, in a form to be approved, offering each of thirteen persons three options.

At the bottom there was a space for a signature.

"I'd like the two of you to read it," said Whitcomb, "and sign as witnesses."

I read it twice. My hand shook. I took the pen.

I looked at June, and she looked at me, and I saw in her face a thing I had not seen since the stairs. It was not triumph. It was not fear. It was a calm, bone-deep tiredness, and under the tiredness, very small and bright, a kind of peace.

She's put it down, I thought. For the first time.

I signed.

…

It took nine days.

I will not describe them all, because they were mostly paper. Aldrich drafted the letter, and Whitcomb rewrote it, and June rewrote it again, and we argued over whether to use the word stolen. We settled on taken. It was one page, in plain type, with a blank at the top for the name and a line at the bottom for a signature, and in between there were three short paragraphs and three boxes to tick. At the very end, in smaller print, there was a sentence that June had written herself, sitting cross-legged on the floor of Dunleavy's study with a pencil.

Whatever you decide, you did nothing wrong. This was done to you, not by you.

A victim-services specialist named Dr. Priya Raman, a brisk, soft-voiced woman with a silver ring on every finger, was found by the U.S. Attorney's office. She had spent a lifetime sitting with people who had just been told something that could not be unsaid. She agreed to carry the letters. She was to sit with each recipient as long as was needed, in the home or elsewhere, and not leave until the person asked her to.

Ansel went with her.

He had insisted. He sat across from me at Colleen's kitchen table on the second night, with a cup of coffee going cold, and said, "I'll do all thirteen. I'll sit there. I'll be what I'm for." He turned his cup. "I'd like them to see a face. Somebody who's been where they are."

"You don't have to."

"I know."

"It'll be hard."

"I'd like it to be hard," said Ansel, "in the right way."

He left on the tenth morning, in a rented car, with a leather satchel on the seat and a map on the dash. Priya Raman rode beside him, in a long gray coat, with her hands folded in her lap. They would start in Cleveland and go outward. They would be gone for three weeks.

…

I did not hear anything for six days.

I sat in the new apartment, the little one, on the second floor, with the windows open a crack and a pot of coffee on the stove, and I did not hear a word. I did not turn on the television. There was nothing to see. I watched June go back to school on a Monday, in a plain gray hoodie, without a camera in sight. I watched her come home. She did her homework on the kitchen table and ate a sandwich and went to bed at ten, and the clock on her nightstand said 3:07 every morning, and I lay in the next room and counted.

On the seventh day the mail came.

I heard the flap of the slot. I was standing in the kitchen with a dish towel in my hand. I did not move for a moment. And then I walked down the hall, slowly, as one walks toward a sleeping animal, and bent, and picked up a single cream envelope off the mat.

It was addressed in a small neat hand. It had a stamp. The postmark said Akron.

I stood there with it for a long time.

I did not open it. It wasn't to me. It was a reply, forwarded by Whitcomb's office with a paper clip and a yellow sticky note, and the note said only: This came for June. I took it into the kitchen. I laid it on the table in front of the empty chair, and sat down opposite, and waited.

She came in at four with her backpack.

She saw it. She stopped in the doorway with one strap still on her shoulder. She looked at the envelope, and then at me, and I saw her go white to the lips.

"It's the first one," I said.

"I know."

She sat. She picked it up. She slit it with her thumbnail, and drew out a single sheet of plain white paper, folded once. I could see through the back of it the ghost of a ballpoint line. She unfolded it. She read it. And I watched her face change, slowly, from the center outward, as ice changes on a pond in the spring.

She handed it across.

It was our own letter, the one we had written. At the top, in the blank, someone had written a name that I knew. In the middle, beside the first of three small boxes, someone had put a mark, a careful firm black tick. And across the bottom, below the sentence about doing nothing wrong, in a small steady script that did not shake, were four words.

Yes. Tell me. — C.