Chapter 10: My Own Name
The Dunmore branch library is on Halloran, four doors down from the recorder's office, in a brick building with a book drop shaped like a mouth.
Public computers are in the back, six of them, in two rows of three.
You need a card. A card needs proof of address.
Ivy typed a letter on house stationery saying I resided at 41 Anselm Street, and signed it, and did not ask what I wanted it for.
The librarian read the letter, made a card, and handed it to me still warm from the machine.
Sessions are forty-five minutes. There is a timer in the corner of the screen that counts down in white numbers.
I had not touched a computer in six years and my hands were slow on the keys for the first two minutes.
Then they were not slow, because it turns out that goes back fast.
I typed my own name.
Cass Mercer.
Then I sat with my hand off the mouse for about twenty seconds before I pressed the key.
The first result was a news item from six years earlier.
Local paper. Four hundred words. A headline with my age in it.
There was a photograph.
It was me on the courthouse steps, in a grey coat I do not own anymore.
Looking down at the second step. Not at the camera.
Twenty-four years old. My hair was longer. My hands were in front of me because they had put them in front of me.
I looked at that photograph for a while, and what I felt was not what people expect.
What I felt was that I did not recognize the coat.
The article said what the record says.
It said a woman of twenty-four had entered a guilty plea in the death of a cyclist on Corvin Road. It said the vehicle had crossed the fog line. It said the blood alcohol figure.
It said the victim was Nadine Okoro, forty-one.
A night-shift care worker at a residential facility on Barrow, riding home at the end of a shift.
It said she is survived by a son, sixteen.
Here is the part of the record that is not in that article.
Dean was driving.
I signed a statement that said I was.
That is all of it. I have never found a way to tell it that makes it sound like anything other than what it is.
I did not have a record. He had two prior offenses.
Renata worked it out in a kitchen in about four minutes and it held up for six years.
I scrolled down.
There were forty-one comments under the article. I read all of them. That took eleven minutes of my forty-five.
I am not going to repeat any of them. They were not wrong.
Then I did the thing I had come to do and had not admitted to myself on the bus.
I searched her name.
Nadine Okoro.
There were nine results. A memorial ride, held every year in October, thirty-one miles, starting at a church on Barrow Street.
A fundraising page from the first year, closed, that had raised eleven thousand four hundred dollars.
An obituary.
And a photograph.
She was standing in front of a sheet cake with her arms crossed, laughing at somebody off to the left, in scrubs with a cardigan over them.
That was the first time I ever saw her face.
I want that understood, because people assume there is a place in the process where they show you the face.
There is not. There is no requirement anywhere in the entire machine that you be shown the face.
There is a victim impact statement and it is read out loud, and I stood there for that, and I looked at a spot on the wall paneling nine inches to the left of the judge's head, because that is what my lawyer told me to do.
Her son read it. He was sixteen. It was four paragraphs.
I remember three sentences from it exactly. I will not write them here.
The timer said eleven minutes remaining.
I clicked back to the photograph with the sheet cake and I looked at it until the timer said two.
Then I logged off, and the screen went back to the library wallpaper, which is a picture of the library.
I walked out past the book drop shaped like a mouth and I stood on Halloran Street with my card in my hand.
I have been asked whether that was the day I decided anything.
It was not. I did not decide anything for another five months.
What happened that day is smaller and it is the only honest version.
I found out that everything anybody could learn about me in forty-five minutes was four hundred words long, six years old, and had my age in the headline.
And that her face was on the internet, at a party, in a cardigan, and I had had to go looking for it.