Chapter 66: The Blue Box
There is a mailbox on the corner of Delacy and Third, outside the pharmacy where I bought the paper.
Blue. Dented on the left side where somebody backed into it.
Collection at 9:00 and 4:30 on weekdays, 11:00 on Saturday.
I stood in front of it on the seventh of April at 4:11 in the afternoon, with the envelope in my hand and my hand in my pocket.
Here is what I thought about for nineteen minutes on a street corner.
Certified mail costs four dollars and eighty-five cents plus postage and gives you a green card with his signature on it.
I wanted that card.
I want to be honest about how much I wanted it.
Not for him. For the file.
Because eighteen months from now, in front of a judge, “I wrote to the victim's son” is a sentence a felon says.
A green card with a signature on it is a document.
That is the machinery I have been living in for two years.
Everything becomes a document or it did not happen.
And Marisol was right, and I had already known she was right the second she said it.
I had known it and I had been going to do it anyway, which is what wanting something does to procedure.
A certified letter is delivered by a man who stands there holding a pen out.
The last piece of paper anybody in this story signed with a stranger holding the pen out was mine.
I put sixty-eight cents of ordinary postage on it, which is one cent a word.
Then I did one more thing.
It is small and I have never told anybody about it until now.
I photocopied the letter before I sealed it.
On the copy, in the corner, I wrote: MAILED 04/07, FIRST CLASS, DELACY & 3RD, 4:30 COLLECTION. NO RETURN RECEIPT REQUESTED. NO RESPONSE EXPECTED OR SOUGHT.
Then I put the copy in the folder.
That is what I could have instead of the green card.
My own note, made at the time, about a thing I did.
It is worth about a tenth as much, and it does not put a pen in his hand.
At 4:22 I opened the flap on the box, put the envelope halfway in, and let it go.
You cannot hear a letter land.
There is a felt strip inside and it makes almost no noise, and then the flap comes back and there is nothing.
I stood there for a second.
Then I went and bought a bag of onions, because I was already out of onions.
Then I counted days.
Day one. Day two.
Delivery on a two-year-old address takes three days at the outside. If it fails, it comes back to me in ten to fourteen.
Day ten. Nothing came back.
Day fourteen. Nothing came back.
That is when I knew he had it.
Or that somebody at 208 Kell Avenue had it and had thrown it away. Either was possible.
Day fifteen, the twenty-second of April, I stopped watching the mail.
I want to be accurate about the next three weeks because it is not what people expect.
I was not waiting.
Waiting is something you can only afford if you have somewhere to put the time. I had two jobs of my own and one of them was unpaid.
I scanned. I filed.
I paid two hundred dollars to the clerk on the first of May for restitution, got a receipt, and put it in the folder with the others, which is now four inches thick.
I filled out a second records request, this one to the county attorney's office, for the transmittal record on a written statement in case 19-04477.
I priced a transcript of my own plea hearing.
One hundred and ninety-two pages at three dollars and twenty-five cents a page. Six hundred and twenty-four dollars, which is more than I have ever spent on anything except rent.
I put 624 on the pad next to 7500 and 18.5 and 12, and I looked at the four numbers for a while.
On the second of May Marisol asked me if I had heard anything and I said no.
She said, “Good.” I asked her why good.
She said, “Because if he comes it means he decided. If he wrote back it'd just be another letter.”
On the fourth of May, a Friday, I stayed late.
I had two bond files to close out.
I did them at the counter, standing, because sitting down at 5:30 is how you end up staying until ten.
At 5:41 the light coming through the front glass changed.
Not dimmed. Blocked.
I looked up and there was a man in the doorway.
He was so wide across the shoulders that he had turned slightly to get through it, and he was holding a rubber band around a stack of envelopes.