Thirteen Names

The verdict came on the last Friday in May, at ten past eleven in the morning, in a room that smelled of floor wax and rain.

I was not in it. I had been told I could be, and I had said no. I sat instead on a bench in the corridor outside, between Dunleavy and Colleen, with my hands folded on my knees and a paper cup of cocoa going cold beside me. Colleen held my elbow. She had held it since nine. Down the hall a vending machine hummed. A pigeon walked along the outside of the high window, stopping, starting, turning its head.

The doors opened at eleven-ten.

My mother came out first. She walked slowly. She was wearing the gray suit, the one she had bought for the trial, and her hair was pinned back, and her face had no expression at all. She crossed the marble floor to the bench. She stopped in front of me. She looked at my face for a long moment, with her head a little on one side, as if she were reading small print.

"Life," she said.

I breathed out.

"Without parole. Every count. Arson, kidnapping, the murder of the man in the hat." She wet her lips. "And my father."

I nodded. It was all I could do.

"Dreyer's testimony. And the ledger. It was the ledger, June. Mr. Lund stood in front of the jury for two hours and went through it line by line. 'Doesn't reconcile.' 'Doesn't reconcile.' And at the end, the judge asked the foreman to say it, and she stood up, and she said it in a voice I could hardly hear. 'Guilty.'" She sat down beside me, suddenly, as though her legs had given out. "Twelve times. She said it twelve times."

I took her hand.

…

The others went in the weeks after.

I have the list somewhere. It is in a drawer in my room, written on the back of an envelope in my own handwriting, because I wanted to keep it myself. Gordon Ashby got twenty-two years, which at his age was the same as life, and wept in the dock. Hal Dreyer, who had given testimony for the prosecution for eleven days, got six. Lyle Cobb, whom the court described as a willing instrument of a sustained criminal enterprise, got thirty, and on the day of sentencing he turned to the gallery and gave me a cheerful wink. Troy Haskell, who had been twenty-four and frightened and had run into a drain, got five, and was seen to cry. Rhonda Tillis walked into the courtroom on her own two feet and pleaded guilty to everything, and was given three years and a recommendation of mercy, and when the judge asked if she had anything to say she said, in a very small voice, "My mother's name was Eileen."

I think that was the only time I ever felt sorry for any of them.

Voss said nothing.

He sat through the whole of it with his hands folded and his glasses on, composed, courteous, attentive, like a man at a lecture he had heard before. When the judge read the sentence he nodded once, as a man nods at a waiter. And on the way out, between two marshals, he passed within six feet of where I stood, and I saw him lift his head and look straight at me for the first time in all those months.

I looked back.

His eyes were pale and blank. There was no anger in them. There was no triumph either. They were the eyes of a man looking at a clock. And I saw, to my astonishment, that he was afraid. It was a very small fear, deep down, like a stone at the bottom of a well. It was not of me. It was of the light in the corridor, which came through the tall window and fell across his shoulder.

He lowered his lashes.

They took him down the stairs.

…

In June there was a hearing.

It was closed. No reporters, no cameras, no gallery. It was held in a small paneled room on the ninth floor, with a long table and a pitcher of water, and Judge Harlan presided. I wasn't to be there. But Dr. Raman, with her silver rings, put her head into the hall and said, "June? They've asked if you'd like to come."

I looked at my mother. She nodded.

There were twenty people in the room.

I counted. I always count. There were four marshals along the walls, and Whitcomb in her gray raincoat, and Dunleavy in a suit that did not fit, and a stenographer. And around the long table, in a ring of folding chairs, sat eleven strangers.

They did not look like anything. That was what I noticed. A tall man in a navy T-shirt, with big scarred hands. A small neat woman with a pharmacy badge, sitting very straight. A boy in a paper hat. An older man, in a cardigan, with a newspaper under his arm, who had been asked to come and had said he would, for the pleasure of the company. A woman in a blue scarf with the red eyes of someone who had not slept. Nobody spoke to anyone. Nobody looked at the others, quite. They sat there, side by side, at a table, in the pale light, nine who had asked to be told and two who had asked to be found, and I thought: they've been here all along.

They just didn't know the others were in the room.

Ansel stood by the window. He wore a gray coat. He met my eyes and gave the smallest of nods.

The clerk, a plump young man with a nervous cough, read from a card.

"The court will now enter into the record," he said, "the names of those who have chosen to have them entered. No others will be read. No others will be recorded. This is the sole entry in the sealed file."

He cleared his throat.

…

I will tell you the names, because they were read aloud and cannot be unsaid. But I will not tell you who they belonged to. That is theirs.

He read eleven.

He read them one at a time, slowly, with a pause between each, in a voice that was not quite steady. Each was a first name and a last, and a second one, in brackets, a name that had been given and a name that had been taken. At each, somebody at the table made a small sound. A sharp breath. A laugh. A sob. One of them said, quite loudly, in the stillness, "Yes."

When he reached the eleventh, he stopped. He looked up. He said, "Is that all?"

"That's all," said Whitcomb.

"Then—" The clerk blinked. "That's eleven, Your Honor. There were thirteen on the roll."

"The other two," said Judge Harlan, "have elected to remain as they are."

He looked down at the table.

"And that," he said gently, "is also a name."

Nobody moved.

I sat in my folding chair at the back with my hands clenched in my lap, and I felt something go through the room. It was not a sound. It was a change in the air, as when a window is opened in a close room and the curtains stir. Eleven people sat very still. The woman in the blue scarf was crying openly. The old man had put down his newspaper. And at the end of the table, a tall man with scarred hands slowly turned his head and looked at the man next to him, a stranger, and held out his hand.

The other man took it.

That was all. That was the whole of the ceremony. Nobody gave a speech. Nobody cheered. They sat there, joined across a table, and held on, and the stenographer's machine went on ticking, and rain began to fall outside the windows, a thin silver rain, and ran down the glass.

I looked at my mother.

She was crying too. But she was smiling. I had not seen her smile in so long that I almost didn't know it.

…

We moved in July.

It was a small apartment on the second floor of a building on a quiet street on the West Side, with a magnolia in the yard and a porch swing the landlady had left behind. The rooms were low and square, with painted floors. The kitchen had a window onto the tree. The bedroom had two beds, mine under the eave, hers by the door, and between them, on a rag rug, a table with a lamp.

We left the window open.

It was the first thing my mother did. She dragged a chair across the floor, and climbed up on it in her bare feet, and shoved up the sash as far as it would go, and stood there with her hand on the frame and the warm night coming in. The curtains stirred. A moth blundered about the lamp. From far away, a long way down the street, came the sound of a radio playing somewhere, and a dog barking, and the thin sweet whistle of a freight train.

"Are you sure?" I said.

"I'm sure."

"Anyone could climb up."

"They could." She turned and smiled at me. "I'd hear them."

"Would you?"

"I'd hear a mouse," said my mother. "I've been listening for a year."

I laughed. It surprised me. I stood in the middle of the room with a pillow in my arms, and laughed, and she got down off the chair and came over, and put her forehead against mine. We stood like that for a long moment, in the light of the lamp.

"You don't have to count," she said.

"I know."

"Not tonight."

"I know, Mom."

"I'll count for both of us."

I did not argue.

…

I did not see the night. I want to say that plainly. I was asleep. But I have heard it told so many times, so exactly, that I can see it as clearly as if I'd lain awake and watched.

My mother told me. She told me in the morning and she has told me since, in the kitchen, on the porch, on the long drives. I have asked her to. She does not mind. It is, I think, a kind of prayer.

It was 3:07.

The apartment was quiet. The air conditioner in the window gave a soft rattle and a sigh. The refrigerator hummed to itself in the kitchen, and now and again, from somewhere in its depths, there came the small clunk of an ice-maker dropping a cube. On the shelf by the door, the router glowed, a little green eye, steady, patient, blinking. A bar of yellow light from the street lamp lay across the ceiling. In the hall outside, once, a neighbor went by in slippers, and a key turned in a lock, and a door closed.

She woke.

She did not know why. She never does. She lay on her back in the dark with her eyes open and her heart quiet, and the first thing she did, before she looked at the clock, before she listened for footsteps or checked the window, was turn her head.

I was there.

I was asleep in the other bed, on my side, with one arm flung out and the blanket kicked to my knees. My mouth was a little open. My hair was over my face. My breath went in and out, in and out, slow and even and deep, like a tide. And on the table, between us, the little clock said 3:07, and nothing happened.

Nothing at all.

She watched me for a long time. She watched the rise and fall of my ribs. She listened to the air conditioner, and the refrigerator, and the freight train, far off, going away. And then she did a thing I know she has never told anyone but me. She reached out in the dark, and laid two fingers on the wall beside her bed, and tapped.

Tap, tap, tap. Tap.

Three short and one long.

She waited.

Nobody answered. The wall was just a wall. It was plaster and paint and a century of quiet. And she lay there with her hand against it, smiling in the dark, and thought, good.

Nobody needs to.

…

I woke at six.

The sun was coming in at the window, a long low slant, pale gold, with the dust turning in it. The curtains stirred. A bird was singing in the magnolia, a thin bright repeating phrase, over and over, like a child learning a tune. I lay for a moment with my face in the pillow, not knowing where I was.

Then I rolled over and rubbed my eyes.

She was sitting up in her bed with her knees drawn up and her arms around them. She was in her nightgown, with her hair loose over her shoulders. She had her chin on her knees. She was looking at me. Her face in the early light was pale, and there were gray smudges under her eyes, and she looked tired and thin and about a hundred years old, and perfectly, completely at peace.

"Mom," I said. "You didn't sleep again?"

"A little."

"You didn't."

"I wasn't tired."

"Mom."

"I'm afraid you'll dream," she said.

She said it lightly. She said it with a smile. But I heard what was underneath it, the whole long year, the smoke and the bridge and the dark tunnel, all of it balanced on the edge of a word. I sat up. I pushed back the blanket. I swung my legs out and crossed the rag rug in my bare feet and went to the window, and stood there with my hands on the sill.

The street was empty. The sky above the roofs was the color of the inside of a shell. A paper boy went by on a bicycle. A woman in a bathrobe came out onto a porch to fetch the milk. The magnolia was in bloom, big white cups on glossy leaves, and the light came through them and fell on my face, warm and bright and golden, and I stood in it and closed my eyes.

I felt the sun on my eyelids. I felt the wind, soft and cool, come through the open window and lift the hair off my forehead. I smelled magnolia, and toast, and the wet green smell of the yard.

I opened my eyes.

"I won't dream," I said.

"June—"

"I won't." I turned. I looked at my mother across the little room, and she looked at me, and I smiled. I smiled all the way. "Because this time, Mom, we didn't leave the door open for them."

She stared.

Then she began, very slowly, to laugh.

It was a low sound at first, almost a sob. It grew. It filled the little room. She put her face in her hands and laughed until the tears ran down between her fingers, and the bed shook, and the bird in the magnolia stopped singing, as if to listen. And I crossed the room and climbed into the bed beside her and put my arms around her, and we laughed together, the two of us, under the gold slanting light, with the window open and the curtains blowing, and the whole bright morning coming in.

…

THE END — Ending 5 of 5: Thirteen Names.

You did not take the names. You did not hide them either. You gave thirteen people the one thing that had been stolen from each of them: the right to choose what to do with the truth. Two kept the lives they had. Eleven took back their names. And a girl who had died once, alone, learned that she did not have to carry it alone, and that a door, once, was left unlocked only because someone finally knew who was meant to open it.

This is the true ending.