Page 51 of Soft Erasure

I don’t know which of us was more surprised that he did.

I opened the paper low, at my side, out of the camera’s angle. Two lines.

Ask the room how many of them remember signing their own consent. Don’t confront. Let the room confess.

I refolded it. I lifted my eyes.

“How many of you,” I said, “remember signing your own consent.”

The room held. Twenty-six women. For three seconds no hand went up.

Then a hand went up in the first row.

Then one in the back. Then a third, the woman in the salmon sweater. Her hand went up. Her face went with it, and what was on it was not the face she had worn for the clip.

Then more.

Twelve hands. Out of twenty-six.

I turned away from the hands and looked for Matthew. He had not moved. He was watching the hands go up, and then it was me he watched, and me he counted, not the room. My body had gone looking for him in the one minute I needed it to be mine.

Penelope’s eyes went to the tablet. Her thumb tapped.

The alarm went off, the soft chime of an expensive building, a chime that climbs only if it is ignored, the one her tablet had triggered.

“Please remain seated,” Penelope said. “We’ll resume after a brief safety check.”

The women didn’t remain seated. The twelve, and three more who had kept their hands down, moved toward the glass. Not toward the door. Toward the wall of glass, because they had been in this room before and had learned where the witness stood.

I went with them.

The window faced the circle. It was five-oh-six.

Three women were on the circle, walking the way women walk who have walked the same path long past feeling it.

One of them was small. Her hair had been let go gray.

She wore a coat the color of one my mother had worn the year I was eleven.

That year had been taken out of me. I shouldn’t have had the color. The body handed it up anyway.

She was looking up at the building. At six.

At the window she had been given, four floors above the glass I stood behind, because she had been told where to look and no one had told her I was not there.

I didn’t lift my hand.

I stood, and the body stood, and the body did the thing it had done in the SUV when Caleb said Hey, Amb. Family, the body had said then, and the count went off low and early and held a name just under the place I could reach it. This time the name came up whole.

The body said mother.

The woman on the circle stopped walking. She didn’t take her eyes off six. Then she looked, for half a second, at her wrist. She had a band. Smaller than mine. Older. The same shape.

At five-oh-eight she lifted the wrist to her collarbone and held it there two seconds.

My band had nothing to put that in. It logged cortisol, spiked at five-oh-six, down by five-oh-seven, filed the spike as a visual stimulus event, and asked nothing else.

She put the wrist down. She walked on. The other two walked with her. The alarm cut. The glass went back to glass.