The Ledger

Chapter 11: One Way

Chapter 11: One Way

11

Hale's stock went first, and it went quiet.

That was the part I wasn't ready for. A number in a column that people look at got smaller for nine days running, and while that was happening nobody on the news said her name. Then it was a smaller number that stayed smaller, and the flowers quit coming to her building, and the reporters went back to whatever they go back to.

There's a room on the executive floor with a long table in it and blinds that don't go up more than a foot. She got called into it on a Thursday and was in there forty minutes. When she came out she wasn't over West Harbor anymore. Forty minutes after that the announcement went out, and it was about the project, and her name wasn't anywhere in it.

She kept the office through Friday. On Monday there was a rug in it and somebody else's chair, and her name was off the door.

Marcus got West Harbor. He was in the building that week and she wasn't, and that was most of it. The title came with the project and he took both. She found out from an email somebody forwarded, which is how everybody finds out everything.

She left four messages in one afternoon, and by the fourth one she sounded like somebody else. Nobody called her back.

A car came for her at six in the morning before the end of that month and her bags were already in it. Somebody had arranged it so that nobody would ever have to say the word running.

She made it as far as the airport where she had to change planes. She didn't sit down. She went out a door that wasn't the door to the gate, and out there is a road, and a road like that doesn't have anything on it to stop somebody who's decided to walk.

The car that hit her was gray and it was going too fast for that road. It hit her and then the wheels went over both legs. It stopped about sixty feet past where she was.

The man driving it was Julian Vance.

He'd been out of the country since the summer and the car wasn't his. Two days later they picked him up, and when they did he was talking, and he didn't quit talking, and none of it was in order. The paper said he was in custody. Everything after that is paper, and I never saw it.

His family put out a statement. His name wasn't in it. Nobody in that house has said anything about him since, at least not where I could hear it.

His name came off the list at Larkspur. That's all the paper out of Suite 355 ever turned into, in the end.

She doesn't walk anymore. There's a house in another country with a ramp built onto the side of it. The last picture of her that anybody printed is the one from the courthouse steps. The word under it is grief.

Tommy's had the plate in his wrist since spring. It clicks when it's cold.

He kept the box on the shelf in the closet next to the boxes he never opened. I was in that apartment a long time and I never saw him touch any of them except to move them out of his way.

Then one morning he took the wallet out of his jacket and the ticket out of the wallet. One way, and the date printed on the front of it was a Thursday in a month that had already ended. He took it down to the station and handed it to the man at the window and asked if it was still good. The man looked at it longer than he had to and said yes.

The bus goes north out of the city and then east, and it's a little over four hours to the town I'm from. Tommy had a duffel bag and the box and the wallet. He put the box on the seat beside him and put his hand on top of it and left it there the whole way.

The bus stopped behind a gas station with two pumps and let him off. He walked from there. There's a road on the north side of town that goes past the last house and over a creek, and there's a bridge on that road, and he stopped in the middle of it with everything he'd brought and stood there until the sun was down behind the trees on the far side.

I don't know what he was doing. I know he stayed, and then he walked on. I went too.

The ten thousand is still in the bank with his name on it. The ones he never opened are still in the closet. There was a hearing date on a calendar for the case, and it came and went. I wasn't watching that one. I was on a bridge in Indiana with the only person who ever came to get me.

That's the whole of it.

Next time, I want a home.

Author’s Note

This one stays quiet on purpose. A number stops moving, the flowers stop, and nobody ever says the word running out loud. What I can't get past is Tommy — four hours on a bus with one hand flat on a box he never opens, then standing on a bridge until the sun's behind the trees. He has no speech prepared for any of it, and neither does the narrator. She just goes where he goes, which is the whole chapter, really.

If you want to keep going past this chapter, the ones after it are already up on my p*****n: https://www.patreon.com/c/TranKhang