Page 105 of Soft Erasure

“There was a name on your collar Wednesday. I didn’t read it.”

“Wednesday I wasn’t here to give one.” She sat, and waited for me to sit across from her, the small table and the two chairs the room always kept for this. Whatever this was, it had not been built to end in a dose.

I sat.

“I read your file before Wednesday,” she said. “I read a number of files before Wednesday. Yours was not the first name I recognized.”

“Whose was.”

She didn’t answer that directly.

She opened the folder, angled so the room’s one camera, high in the corner where the light met the molding, could see paper turning and nothing on it.

A woman who knew exactly where the lens sat.

She had made me look at it, so I looked. A sliver of green sat in the housing. The foil green.

The green that ran the seam of his ring.

Four floors under my apartment, the same green in the same place.

He didn’t have to be in the building.

“My niece speaks of you,” she said. “Carefully. She speaks carefully about everything now. But she speaks of you.”

The room didn’t move under me.

It only went very quiet, the particular quiet of a fact arriving somewhere it had already been expected. I understood, in the space of one breath, why a stranger had been handed a name and a Friday and an empty table.

“Cora,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You treated me Wednesday and said nothing.”

“Wednesday I was reading a protocol I did not write, in a room I had not stood in for eight years, to see if I still could.” Her hands stayed folded.

“I could. Every question came out in the order the form wanted it, and none of it cost me anything, and a woman who can do that to a stranger without it costing her anything should not be trusted with the truth about herself. So I came back. Friday. On my own request, not the building’s, though the building thinks the request was theirs.”

“What were you, before Wednesday.”

“Phase Two. Eight years ago, and for ten before that.” She said it like a debt already paid before anyone heard the amount.

“I treated the women in this program before I stopped recognizing what it had become. I treated the ones who came before you were old enough to be one of them.”

I sat very still.

I’d learned, in this building, to hold that stillness for numbers I didn’t want to move.

“How many.”

“I am not going to give you a number today. A number is a thing you can be wrong about, and I intend never to be wrong about this again.” She unfolded her hands and refolded them the other way.

“I will tell you there was a woman. Ten years ago. Discharged at ninety-five. I signed the discharge myself, because I believed, then, that ninety-five meant a life handed back. Two years afterward, her car went into water close enough to home that the responding officer knew her by sight, and she did not come back out of it.”

The window went very bright behind her.

“Detective Willson,” I said.