Chapter 71: The Card in His Pocket
He had gone on the Wednesday, after his shift, at eight in the evening.
He told me that standing up, in the front room, with his hat in his hand.
He said Sylvia Reyes made him sit down and gave him a plate of rice he did not want.
She would not let him leave until he ate it.
He said she cried and he did not.
He said she has a photograph of her own son on the wall.
Her son is dead too, of something else, in 2011.
He said she remembered the bathrobe and the boots.
She remembered that it was cold enough that her hands hurt.
He said she remembered the color of the bicycle.
Then he stopped talking for a while and looked at the rack of forms.
I did not fill the silence. I have learned that much.
Then he said, “You want to know about her.”
I said, “Only if you want to say it.”
And he talked for twenty-six minutes, and I am going to put down what I can.
For six years I had a woman in my head who was a set of coded boxes on a state form. He gave her back.
Nadine Adaeze Okoro.
She came here from Port Harcourt at nineteen, to a cousin who lived four blocks from where the office is now.
Sixteen years at Bellhaven Care Home. Nights, eleven to seven.
She did not like days. She said days were all meetings.
She was three exams short of her RN.
She paid two hundred and nineteen dollars a course out of a coffee tin on the shelf above the sink, and she had paid for two of them already.
She could not stand grapefruit. Theo says she said it tasted like an apology.
She sang along to the radio and got the words deliberately wrong to make him laugh, and kept doing it after he was too old for it, which is why it worked.
She cut his hair herself until he was fifteen and she was bad at it.
She had a rule that she did not wake him when she came in at half past seven, so for most of his childhood he saw her at four in the afternoon and not in the mornings.
She had a yellow reflective vest from the care home that she wore over her coat, over everything, all year.
And then he told me why she was on a bicycle.
The county cut the number 9 evening route in 2017.
The last bus out to that end of Route 9 used to be at 11:40 at night. After the cut, the last one was 9:15.
She bought the Raleigh in the spring of 2018 for a hundred and forty dollars and she rode it home four nights a week for eleven months.
Eleven months.
He said, “She wasn't a cyclist. She was a woman with no bus.”
Then he took the laminated card out of his shirt pocket and put it on the counter.
He turned it around so it faced me, which is the thing I had done to him with page 207 four days earlier.
Shift card. Bellhaven Care Home. 2300–0700. Her name printed. On the back, in ballpoint, in a small forward hand, bus times worked out in a column with two of them crossed out.
I did not touch it. I read it where it lay.
Then he said the thing he had come to say.
He said, “They told us she had no lights.”
I said, “Who told you that.”
He said, “The lawyer. The insurance one. He said she was in dark clothes with no lights and that it affected what they'd pay.”
He said, “We got eleven thousand dollars. That was all of it.”
I asked him to wait.
I went into the back room and got the crash report out of the sleeve.
I brought it out, put it on the counter, and turned it around.
I did not say anything first. I put my finger under box 61 and left it there.
LIGHTING ON UNIT: YES — FRONT AND REAR, OPERATIONAL AT SCENE.
Then I moved my finger up two boxes.
REFLECTIVE CLOTHING: YES.
He read it.
He read it the way I read things, with a finger, moving his lips slightly, which I had not noticed before.
He said, “Say what that means.”
I said, “It means the trooper who wrote this report, at the scene, that night, coded her lights as working and her clothing as reflective. Those are boxes on a state form. They go into a database.”
He said, “In this. The whole time.”
I said, “Since the eleventh of March that year.”
He put both hands flat on the counter.
He was not shaking this time.
He said, “What else did they tell us that isn't in there?”