Chapter 11: The Number
There is a landline in the front hall at Bertrand House, on a shelf, under a sign-up sheet on a clipboard.
Ten minutes per person per day.
You write your name, the time, and the number you are calling.
The number you are calling. In writing. On a clipboard anybody can read.
I had not written a phone number down in six years.
I did not need to. Inside, you carry them in your head, because paper moves and your head does not.
I could still say Dean's number out loud. Ten digits.
I had been able to say it every day for six years and I had used it eleven times.
Eleven collect calls, all in the first year. Four accepted.
He visited twice.
The first was month four. He wore a shirt with a collar.
He cried in the second half of it, and I spent the last six minutes telling him it was going to be fine.
I want that noted. I comforted him. Month four.
The second was year three. Thirty-one minutes.
He spent nine of them on his phone, which you are not supposed to have in there, and nobody said one word to him about it.
At minute twenty-eight he said the only sentence I kept.
Renata says don't make it worse.
I asked him what worse would look like. He looked at the clock on the wall behind my head.
Then a guard said time, and he was standing before she finished the word.
I stood in the hall on day nineteen at 7:40 in the evening with the receiver in my left hand.
The cord was coiled and had been stretched out of true, so it hung crooked.
I dialed nine digits.
Then I stopped with my finger over the last one.
I stood there long enough that Roxy came down the stairs, looked at me, and went back up.
I want to explain what I was actually going to say, because it was not a speech.
I was going to say: where is the shoebox.
That is it. That is the entire call I had planned. Six words.
Not why did you marry my cousin. Not why did you sell my mother's house. Not six years, Dean.
Where is the shoebox.
Because the shoebox is a thing that either exists in a place or does not, and after six years of a place where nothing you own is in a place, that is the only kind of question I could hold.
I did not press the last digit.
I put the receiver down on the cradle, and it made the noise those make.
Here is why, and it is not dignity.
If he answered, I would have to hear what he sounded like now, and I had a version of his voice in my head from a visiting room, and that version was six years old and I had built things on top of it.
And if she answered, my cousin, on his phone, in a house, at 7:40 in the evening, then that would be the whole answer to every question I had, delivered in one syllable, and I was not ready to be finished.
So I hung up and I wrote the number down instead.
On the back of the commissary receipt, under the eleven job names, in the last clear space.
That was the first time Dean Mercer's phone number existed on paper in my handwriting.
Then I wrote a second number under it.
Renata Halloway. Landline, Cortlandt Avenue.
Unchanged since I was a child, because my aunt has never changed anything that saves her money.
I sat down on the second stair with the receipt on my knee.
My aunt Renata is fifty-eight.
She was in the kitchen at Pell Street eleven days after that October, with a folder, and she is the reason for all of it.
She said it in four sentences and I can still put them in order.
You have no record. He has two.
They will give you probation and they will give him seven years.
You take it, you are out in two.
Then she put her hand flat on the folder and said, we are family and this is what family is for.
That last one is the one that worked. Not the arithmetic. The arithmetic was wrong, and I found out how wrong it was in a courtroom eleven days later, when the number came back six.
The arithmetic being wrong is not the interesting part.
The interesting part is that I checked her arithmetic and I did not check anything else.
I sat on that stair for maybe twenty minutes with two phone numbers on a receipt.
Then Ivy came through with the key on the coiled bracelet, and I got up, and I signed the book, and I went to bed.
I did not call either of those numbers for eleven months.
When I finally did, it was not the one anybody would have guessed.