Chapter 13: Four Hours
I stood in that corridor from 10:04 in the evening until 2:11 in the morning.
Four hours and seven minutes. There were chairs.
I want to explain about the chairs, because it comes up.
There were eleven of them along the wall, moulded plastic.
I did not sit in any of them.
Two reasons, and again only one of them is respectable.
If I sat down I would have slept. I had been awake since half past five that morning.
And if I had been asleep in a chair when somebody came out of that door, I would have been a girl asleep in a chair.
Standing up, I was staff. Sitting down, I was a problem that had been left in a corridor.
The second reason is that nobody tells a person who is standing to go home.
So I stood, mostly against the wall between the second and third doors, and I moved my weight from one foot to the other about every two minutes.
Nobody spoke to me.
I am not saying it for effect. I counted, because by then counting was all I had left.
In four hours and seven minutes, three people spoke to me.
At 11:20 a man came past with a floor machine and said, “Mind your feet, sweetheart.”
At about a quarter past one a nurse I never saw again put a paper cup of water on the ledge beside me and walked off without a word, which is not speaking, but I am counting it.
And at 2:11 a police officer said my name.
That is the whole list. Victor Blackwood was through that door with his son and he did not come out once.
I do not blame him for that. I want it noted that I do not blame him for that.
He was where he should have been, which was the first time in two years, and it happened to leave me in a corridor.
At twenty to one a man in a gray overcoat came out of the lift with a briefcase.
Sixty-odd, very clean, wet at the shoulders like everybody else that night.
He went past me to the door and he looked at me on the way. Not long. Perhaps a second.
He read the tear in my hem, the state of my shoes, and the child’s cardigan over my arm.
That was Marvin Aaronson.
By the following Thursday I would know his name better than my own mother’s telephone number.
He did not say anything either.
What I did for four hours was write.
I had no notebook. My notebook was in the nursery, in the drawer under the changing table, where it always was.
What I had in my apron was a pen and a parking receipt from the garage on Clark Street, where I had taken Ethan to Dr. Moreno’s on the second of September.
The receipt is eight centimetres by fifteen and it is printed on one side.
I wrote on the back of it in the smallest hand I have ever written in.
I started with 19:38, which was the stairs, and I went forward.
19:38 down, twenty-two stairs. 19:39 box down, four hundred cards.
19:40 wrist, left. 19:40 taken off her. 19:41 floor.
19:41 to 19:45, crying, high, then flat. Not using L arm. Guarding. Colour good. Resp 44.
19:52 lights W corridor. 19:52 no car on drive. No chime.
20:04 camera indicator off. Marco: no maintenance scheduled, not this week.
20:07 recorder found under console. Still running.
20:11 gates locked. 20:12 R.A. on fourth stair.
I did not write down what Roz said. I could not make myself put those six words on a parking receipt.
I have that receipt. It is in a plastic sleeve in a box in my apartment and it has been through two law firms and a courtroom.
A man in a suit once held it up in front of twelve people and said, “This is what the witness calls contemporaneous.”
He said it the way you say it about a shopping list. One of the twelve was watching me, and she did not smile.
When I ran out of receipt I turned it over and wrote in the white space around the printing.
Fee $14.00. Entry 09:52. Exit 11:47.
And in the margin, in blue: he stopped crying when he heard footsteps.
At about half past midnight I did the sum.
Two hundred and eleven dollars in my account. Rent on a room in Rockford, three hundred and forty a month, because my mother lived in it.
Everything else I owned was in a room on the third floor of that house.
I worked out that I could survive eleven days, and then I stopped, because it was not useful to know.
At 2:11 the lift opened and two people came out of it who were not doctors.
One was a uniformed officer, very young, with his hat under his arm.
The other one was a woman of about forty-five in a wet raincoat, carrying nothing at all.
She looked down the corridor at eleven empty chairs and one girl standing up, and she came straight to me.
She said, “Lily Carter?”