Chapter 52: Two Days
The signature block on page 118 has four elements, in the bottom fifth of the page.
A line for the signature of the declarant.
Under it, printed: PRINT NAME.
To the right, a short line with the printed word DATE under it.
Below both, a witness block with two lines: WITNESSED BY and TITLE.
My signature is on the first line. It is my signature. I have never believed otherwise and do not now.
It is not a good one. It runs downhill and the second S is a loop with no crossing. That is what my hand does on a clipboard somebody is holding up to me.
Under it, in block capitals, in the same pen: CASSANDRA A. MERCER.
On the short line, in the same pen, in my own hand, the date.
03/09.
I read it.
I read it the way you read a number you already know, which is to say I did not read it. Twenty-two months earlier I had seen that same line under the forty-watt bulb. I had seen 03/09 and it stopped short of the place where things mean something.
That is what I have to explain. I saw it in the first winter. I understood it in the second.
There is no excuse for that and I am not offering one.
A date beside your own signature is the most invisible thing on a document, because you are looking at your name. Your name is a hook. It catches the eye.
And because I knew, the way you know the sun came up, that I had signed that page on the day they brought me in.
Which was the eleventh.
I sat there with my finger on the line.
03/09.
And to my left, four inches away, squared to the edge of the desk under the same sixty-watt bulb:
DATE OF CRASH: 03/11.
DATE REPORT COMPLETED: 03/11.
I looked from one to the other.
Then I did it again, left to right, right to left, four times, the way you check a total.
Then I heard my mother.
She has been dead eleven years. She says one thing to me, and has since I was nine, at a kitchen table with a library card application in front of me.
Before you sign anything, read the date three times.
So I read it three times.
03/09.
03/09.
03/09.
Then I said it out loud, in an empty office at 10:52 at night, in a flat voice, to nobody:
“I signed it two days before it happened.”
That is all. That is the whole thing. It is nine words.
I did not stand up.
I want to be precise here, because people have asked and they expect something else.
I did not cry. I did not shout. Nothing in me broke in a way I could have pointed to.
What happened is that my legs stopped being available.
I put my hands on the arms of the chair and pushed. My arms worked. My legs did not participate. I sat back down.
I tried again about a minute later and the same thing happened.
So I stopped trying.
I sat in that chair from 10:52 until, by the scanner clock, 1:19.
Two hours and twenty-seven minutes.
I did not think in sentences for most of it. That is not how people describe such moments. It is what occurred.
I counted things. Ceiling tiles, forty-eight. Drawer handles on the filing cabinets, sixteen. Days between the ninth and the day they took my plea, two hundred and eleven.
After midnight I started thinking again, and the first thought was not about myself.
The first thought was: somebody typed that page.
Page 118 is typed. It is not a transcript of an interview. It is a first-person narrative in language I did not use then and do not use now, on a form with a firm's footer along the bottom edge.
Somebody typed the words “I was operating the vehicle” before there was a vehicle to operate, before there was a woman in the road, before any of it.
Two days before.
The second thought came around one o'clock. The Mercers.
Dean's mother. Dean's uncle, who is a district something. The lawyer with the fine blue pen who initialed sixty-one pages and never wrote to me.
They had it ready.
That was as far as I could go that night. It was not far enough. I did not know that for another year.
At 1:19 my legs came back. I know because I looked at the scanner display when I stood up.
I put page 118 in a plastic sleeve. I put the crash report in another. Both went in the cat bag.
I turned the lamp off with the little chain, which sounds like a coin dropped on a table.
Then I locked the door and walked the nine blocks home. The buses had stopped. It was twenty-six degrees. I did not feel it.