Chapter 31: What I Sent
I photographed the sheet at twenty past six in the morning, on the counter, under the one light that stays on.
Four photographs, because A3 does not fit in a phone.
Then I wrote the email standing up, and it took fifty minutes to write ninety-one words.
I kept every version, which tells you something about the state I was in.
Version one had the word deliberate in it. I deleted the paragraph.
Version four had the word Serena in it. I deleted that too.
What went out at 07:11 said this.
Dear Dr. Moreno. Attached are the nineteen episodes I have sent you since 11 March, sorted by date.
I have also attached a column showing whether Ethan’s father slept in the house on each of those nights. Seventeen of the nineteen, he did not.
I am not making an allegation. I do not know what it means. I thought you should see it in one place.
Lily Carter.
Then I put the phone face down on the drainer and scrubbed a sink that did not need it, and then the one beside it, which did not need it either.
It is a strange thing to send a document and then have to have a day.
At half past nine the marquee company came.
Nine men and a flatbed, and by eleven there were poles laid out on the north lawn like something being assembled for surgery.
Serena walked the line with a clipboard and a woman in a green coat, and stopped twice to have a peg moved eighteen inches, and was thanked for it both times.
The wedding was thirty days away.
Nobody had been charged with anything, and I will keep saying it, because it is the whole architecture of that month.
A suspension is an internal matter. A police report is not a charge.
The State’s Attorney had looked at nothing. The camera in the foyer had been off.
There was a recording, and I had made it, in a state of Illinois I had never once thought about as a jurisdiction, and I did not yet know what that was going to cost me.
At noon I had my two hours in the nursery.
Ethan had learned in ten days to hold the cast up when he wanted it looked at.
He brought it to you like a document.
He had also learned that if he says ba and points at the door, an adult’s face changes, and he had begun doing it experimentally.
That is fourteen months. They are running tests on us the entire time.
We built a tower of six blocks and he knocked it down eleven times, and eleven times he waited, with his good hand up, for me to start it again.
On the eleventh he did not knock it down. He put a seventh block on top and looked at me.
I want that in this account somewhere, and this is where it goes.
At two o’clock Mrs. Alden took him, and I went up and looked at my phone.
Nothing.
At half past three I called the office on Wabash, standing in the boot room with the door shut, because the third-floor signal is one bar and the boot room is two.
The woman is called Ms. Pryor and she has been on that desk for nineteen years.
“Are you the parent or the legal guardian?”
“No. I’m the child’s nanny.”
“Then I can’t discuss the patient.”
I said I did not want to discuss the patient. I wanted to know whether an email had been opened.
There was a pause of about four seconds.
“I can’t discuss the patient,” she said again, but differently, and that is how I knew he had read it.
I have thought about Ms. Pryor a good deal since. She followed her rule exactly and she told me anyway.
At ten to five the phone rang with a number I did not have.
“Miss Carter. Elias Moreno.”
He has a very quiet voice on the telephone, lower than in the room.
I said good afternoon and heard my own voice do something I had not authorized.
“I have your table.”
Then nothing, for long enough that I said his name.
“Are you able to come to Wabash at seven forty on Friday morning? Before clinic.”
I said yes.
“Bring the original. Not a photograph. The sheet you wrote on.”
I said I would.
“And Miss Carter.”
“Yes.”
“Do not send this to anybody else between now and Friday. Not to the family. Not to anyone.”
I asked him why.
He was quiet again, and when he answered he sounded like a man reading his own words back to himself before he let them go.
“Because if you are right, the value of this document depends entirely on nobody having had time to think about it.”
Then he said goodnight, at ten to five in the afternoon, and hung up.