In truth, it’s the kind of story that fades after a few months, after the bang, after the headlines, after the trial. She’s just the answer to a trivia question now. Of course, she told a different story at the time, but no one listened. And then she disappeared into the bowels of the penal system. And her memories of the whole event—of the man, of the night, of the shot, of the different story she once told—all that disappeared, too.
She remembers a book she’d been reading at the time, after the bang, after the headlines, after the trial. A book she brought with her to prison. A collection of journals by a woman with a faraway look and a strident mind. What was she looking for in it: strength, wisdom, succor, something? But she read it every day. She remembers scribbling and highlighting and underlining each page, the book marked up like a treasure map that refuses to yield its treasure. As though every line contained some secret coded message just for her. She sat in her cell and read and scribbled all over it. She slept with that book under her pillow every night.
It’s not even a process of remembering, she thinks. Memories are something you recall. You recollect them—you literally recollect them. Dredge them up from some secret hollow where they’ve been lying in wait to be rediscovered.
They took her to a room.
Explained how it would go.
You won’t remember any of this, they said, and she immediately thought of the book back in her cell.
The clatter of prison. The tang of antiseptic. The sharp steely pain of the homemade needle in the skin of her arm.
She looks down at her tattoo now. Rubs it.
12500241214911
Then keeps reading. The article continues:
Vincent, having amazed his doctors and defied all expectations, would now run unopposed for his party’s nomination. His replacement stepped aside willingly. “Honestly, I was just keeping the seat warm,” he joked stiffly at the press conference. [Laughter.] After all, who stands in the way of this kind of story?
The article continues:
“If I learned one thing during my recovery, it’s the importance of taking life one step at a time,” Vincent said.
The article continues:
Vincent is newly engaged to be remarried. “My past is my past,” he said. “And that’s that. Some things are better left forgotten.”
He has no children.
The article ends.
The night before they were to come and give her the procedure, she found someone in the prison, a heavyset woman with kind eyes, she remembers now, who knew how to do it. It took hours, and it was painful, she remembers.
The woman said to her, You really want this whole thing? and she said to the woman, Yes, and the woman said, Right arm or left arm? and she looked down at her two bare arms and the flesh of her wrist and said, Left.
The clatter of prison. The tang of antiseptic. She can smell it, in the library, right now.
She remembers a circle of women formed around them in the cell to block what they were doing from the sight lines of the guards, and she remembers she turned the paperback book over in her hand and searched for numbers on the back and said, Here, and pointed out the numbers to the woman and the woman said, You sure? and she said, Yes, I’m sure.
She remembers the pain of the needle. She feels it, right now, on her wrist, like an itch, like a burn, like the tattoo is re-etching itself.
She remembers that she held out her pale left arm and, as the woman started to etch in the numbers painfully over her wrist, she said to the woman, Sinister, and the woman said, Sister what? and she said to the woman, No, sinister, that’s from the Latin word for “left,” and the woman nodded and got back to work with the needle. She remembers the ballpoint pen with a sewing needle taped to it, dipped rhythmically in an overturned cap filled with homemade ink. She remembers wondering halfway through the procedure if the ink would hurt the baby, but it was too late. The baby that no one knew about but her. The baby so young and her not even showing. She said nothing about it, and at some point she remembers the woman while she worked said, You’re new here aren’t you? like she was trying to distract her from the pain, and she answered, Yes, and the woman said, It’s painful but it will all be over soon, and she said, It’s okay, I won’t remember any of this, that’s what they told me, and the woman shrugged, and as she worked with the needle the woman said, Well, this you’ll have forever, like a keepsake of this place, like a souvenir, and she said to the woman, Do you know what “souvenir” means? and the woman shook her head and kept working and she said to the woman, “souvenir” is the French word for memory, it literally means “to remember,” and the woman nodded and said, Don’t worry, you’ll remember this, and got back to her work and to the pain until she finished.
12500241214911
On her left wrist.
Her sinister souvenir.
God may forgive, but He rarely exonerates.
Something to remember him by.
25.
I WANT HIM GONE,” says Cooper.
“Who gone?” says Rigo.
“Dick Dietrich. I want him out of here.”
“I have no idea who that is,” says Rigo, barely glancing up from his tablet’s screen. Behind him, the intake trailer is jittery with activity: two of the muscular, black-suited agents, Corey and Bigelow, sort through boxes full of files, all lifted from Cooper’s office. When Cooper entered the trailer, shouldering past Burly, the goon outside, the door opened and Walt Robinson exited, giving Cooper a funny look as he passed, Cooper’s sure of it. He might even interpret the look as a warning. Cooper watches now as one of the agents hoists the 9 mm pistol he confiscated from Gerald Dean and left in his desk drawer—it’s wrapped in an evidence bag. The agent tags it and tosses it in a box.
“You can’t just barge in here, Sheriff,” says Rigo. “I know you’re used to having the run of this town, but we’re trying to conduct an investigation.” He keeps swiping at his tablet with a long white finger, like a tree branch scratching at a window. Cooper wonders how Rigo’s even getting a signal out here.
Another agent hoists a long black case onto a desk, then with two sharp clicks opens it, and when he lifts the lid, Cooper spots an AR-15 rifle nestled in egg-carton foam inside the case.
“You expecting a war?” says Cooper.
Rigo just smiles, distracted.
“You do realize no one in this town has a gun, right?” says Cooper.
“And yet people keep getting shot.”
“Dietrich is the menace, I’m telling you. Do you know what he did to our pack of coydogs? He set them on fire.”
“Wait—what’s a coydog?” says Rigo.
“Dietrich’s unhinged.”
“All due respect, Sheriff, my mandate here is to get answers, not settle old grudges.”
“He’s a danger. To all of us.”
Rigo glances around at the agents in the room, unpacking their weapons, then says to Cooper: “I think we can handle him. In the meantime, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got interviews to conduct.” He nods toward the doorway of the trailer, where Dawes is now standing and waiting. Cooper spies her, too: Sidney Dawes, watching the action in silence, avoiding his eyes, or so it seems to Cooper. Rigo waves her in, and she sits down at a school desk without so much as a word to Cooper.