Chapter 10: Lock the Gates
I have been asked what I felt when he said that.
The honest answer is that I felt seen and I felt it about eight months too late to be any use to anybody.
Somebody in that house had finally understood what I had been doing at a quarter past six every night, and it was the wrong somebody and it was the wrong night.
Dr. Elias Moreno had understood it since March. He was the one who had asked me to do it.
But Dr. Moreno was fifty-four years old and forty minutes away in Evanston and he had never once stood in that foyer.
Serena spoke.
I will give her this: her timing was superb.
She said, “Victor. That recording was made in a private house without anybody’s consent.”
He did not answer.
“Two-party state,” she said. “I don’t say that to be difficult. I say it because someone will.”
And she was right. She was absolutely right, and it cost me the better part of the following year.
I did not know it then. I learned it in a room with gray carpet in March of the next year from a woman who was on my side.
Serena Montigue understood the law of the state of Illinois on the fourteenth of September, 2026, at four minutes past eight in the evening, standing in a foyer with place cards in her hand.
I have never decided what to do with that fact. I only know where I file it.
There is a version of her in which that sentence is only a rich woman’s reflex.
There is another version in which somebody had told her the law of this state before she ever moved into that house.
I have no evidence for the second one and I have never stopped thinking about it.
Victor put the recorder into the inside pocket of his jacket.
That is the detail Marco would not let go of afterwards. Not into evidence. Into a coat.
He was not concealing anything. I do not believe that and I have never believed it.
He simply did not think of his own hall as a place where evidence happened.
Marco said, “Sir, the car’s at the door.”
Victor said, “Is the seat in it?”
“No, sir.”
“Then put one in it.”
It took Marco four minutes to fit a car seat in the rain, and for four minutes the rest of us stood in that hall not speaking.
Ethan slept for about ninety seconds of it, which is what shock does, and woke up when the door opened again.
Marco went out. The rain came in through the open door for a moment and then went away again.
Victor turned round and looked at me on the floor.
“Can you carry him?”
“Yes.”
“All the way? Nobody’s taking him off you at the door?”
I said, “Nobody’s taking him off me anywhere.”
I did not plan that sentence. It came out flat and rude and it was the first honest thing I had said all evening.
He looked at me for about two seconds.
Then he said, “Good.”
That is the entire conversation, and I have thought about it more than any speech anybody ever made to me.
I got up. It took two attempts and I did it without using my right hand, because my right hand was under a child.
The uniform tore another two centimetres at the seam when I stood and I did not care.
My stomach had gone hard on the right side, below the ribs, and it stayed hard for nine days.
I did not have it looked at for six weeks, and when I did, the doctor asked me twice why I had waited.
There is a photograph of me in that uniform in a newspaper eleven weeks later, taken outside a courthouse, and the tear is in it.
Somebody wrote nine hundred words about the tear.
Nobody wrote anything at all about the boy’s arm, because by then there was nothing available to write.
Serena said, “I’ll come.”
Victor said, “No.”
Third time. Same word.
She said, “Victor, if I don’t come, that is what it will look like.”
“Yes,” he said. “It will.”
That was the only thing he said to her, from the moment he came out of the west corridor to the moment we drove away.
She did not say anything after that. She put the nine place cards down on the console table, squared them with two fingers, and stood there.
He walked me out to the door with his hand not quite touching my back, about a centimetre off it, all the way.
Marco was at the car with the seat in and the door open and the rain coming down hard on the granite.
Victor stopped under the portico and turned round to him.
He said, “Marco.”
“Sir.”
“Lock the gates.”