The Ledger

Chapter 10: Not From Me

Chapter 10: Not From Me

10

Nothing happened.

I'm putting that first because everything anybody says about it afterward is either a lie or a poem. There was a light on the wall across from the bed and then there wasn't, and in between there's nothing I can report back to you. I was there for all of it.

What I have is after. Most of after was paper.

For a while I stayed with Tommy, on the theory that he was the only person in the city doing anything.

He signed whatever they put in front of him and he didn't read any of it. Funeral home, bank, county: three counters in one week, three pens, and his name on every line they handed him. I watched him do that. I couldn't do a thing about it, and that's the whole of what I am now — a witness with no hands.

The wallet stayed in his jacket and the ticket stayed in the wallet. He didn't take it out and he didn't hand it to anybody.

The boxes stayed in the closet and he kept the door shut on them. If you asked him why, he'd have told you it was being organized.

It took him a month to hire a lawyer. He'd already turned down two, and I never found out what was wrong with them. The third one had his name on the wall next to the elevator, and Tommy rode up to it twice on two different days before he went in and sat down.

The lawyer had a letterhead and a phone number you could look up. That was the entire specification I'd given.

They were in there an hour. The lawyer said what kind of case it was. It had the word death in it, and another word in front of it, and in a working life of drawing the insides of buildings I had never needed either one.

What I understood was that the money was a page in the middle and not the point. Tommy read to the end anyway, and then he asked the lawyer to say the whole thing again from the top.

The lawyer asked him what I did for a living.

"He designed things," Tommy said. "Buildings, on the inside of them. He was good at it."

"Okay," the lawyer said, and wrote something down.

He was right.

A folder of my drawings was in with the rest of it, copies of copies. I looked at those longer than I looked at anything else in that room.

The money part wasn't hard. The account had her name on it next to mine — we'd been putting money into it for a house — and it had one line in it that mattered: thirty thousand dollars, out, to a club, on her signature and not mine. The lawyer knew the name of the club. I knew the name of the club.

Court dates get set and moved. Two of them came and went before the one that mattered, and nobody had to ask me about either one.

The thirty thousand came back from the club, in a letter with a case number at the top of it. There wasn't room anywhere on the page for an apology.

A check came with Tommy's name on it for ten thousand dollars. Tommy said no. He signed it anyway, and I was around him a long time after that and I never saw him spend a dollar of it.

The other twenty went to a place that puts kids in houses. I didn't pick it. It had a door with a name on it, which was the part I cared about.

There was a service. She wasn't at it. Tommy never said how he kept her out, and I never asked.

The post he wrote about the two of us stayed up. Nobody took it down.

The third thing was the one I'd put last, in case I only got two.

Larkspur. Suite 355 in that building isn't a suite, it's a business. There's a server over there who'd been keeping copies of the paper that moved through that room — the quotes, the contracts, the names on the invoices — because he didn't like carrying it, and I'd told Tommy to go ask the man a straight question.

He came back with a folder and never said what it cost him to get it. I couldn't have asked.

It went to the lawyer, and the lawyer read it standing up. Then it went to the club, which is how paper moves in a place like that. A week later a paragraph came back, three sentences long. It didn't use the word investigation and it didn't have to.

The man who kept the copies isn't named in anything I saw. I'd like to keep it that way.

Then there was a hearing.

Tommy emptied his pockets into a plastic bin at the door. Keys, phone, change, and the wallet with the ticket in it. The wrist with the plate in it doesn't bend all the way anymore, so he did it with the other hand, and the bin went through the machine and the ticket came out the other side fine.

She was on the steps when we came out, and she'd been out there a while, from the look of her. Tommy had said she'd aged ten years. He was right, and I had almost no eyes left by then, and I spent what I had on her anyway.

Two people had cameras. Neither of them asked her anything.

"Where is he," she said.

"No."

"Tommy."

He didn't turn around. "Not from me," he said. "You don't get to know where he is. Not ever."

She stayed down on the steps and said please, and she only got to say it once, because he was already walking.

"Get up," he said. "People can see you. Let them."

They could. He walks away slow when a conversation is over, and I went with him. It's the only way I go anywhere.

The picture ran the next day. The paper used the word grief in the caption. The comments under the picture used other words. I'd had most of them aimed at me first.

She was on the steps and I went by her.

There's another date on the calendar. Tommy's name is on it. Mine isn't.

Author’s Note

There's a line in this chapter I keep coming back to: "a witness with no hands." He says it about himself, flatly, in the middle of a page of paperwork, and I think it's the truest thing he says all chapter. Everything he does here is watch other people sign things he can't touch. Does that read to you as guilt, or just as a fact he's stating?

For anyone who wants to read further ahead, the next chapters are already posted on my p*****n: https://www.patreon.com/c/TranKhang