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two bedrooms with dormer windows that made the rooms feel smaller than their dimensions but comfortable nonetheless. She'd always pictured moving into such a place with a husband, but with Aunt Verna's encouragement, she hadn't allowed that image to stop her.
On the new commute home, she passed a video store and often stopped to pick up a DVD, a comedy or romance, which she'd watch with dinner.
Years before, in college, she'd taken a literature course and they had read a lot of James Baldwin, among others. Though she couldn't remember what book it came from, one line in particular had always stuck with her. People pay for what they do, Baldwin had written, and more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply, with the lives they lead.
On the one hand, this sounded harsh, as if people were forever letting themselves go, as Aunt Verna would say, and being punished for it with their own misery. That was one way to hear it. But there was a democratic spirit to it as well, a sense that life consisted of the distance traveled, for good or ill. In which case, her guilt at having all that she did while her brother had got nothing lacked a purpose. Experience provided its own justice. From where it would come, no one could predict.
Two weeks ago at church, she'd stayed after for coffee. There, she'd seen a boy of nine or ten, thin with a high forehead, whom she had noticed back in June passing out programs at Carson's funeral. She'd noted him at the time because she didn't recognize him and she'd wondered who had placed him there at the door if not a member of the family. He appeared afraid when she approached him and said it wasn't the minister who had invited him to help that day.
"I came on my own," he said. "Did I do something wrong?"
She assured him that he hadn't. She was just curious, she said. Had he known Carson?
"He used to let me hang out with him. When he had calls to make in the park. He'd ride my scooter sometimes. The thing is ... see ... the thing is, I seen him shot. I was across the street when they did it. There was two of them. And then quick-like, there was people calling the ambulance and all that. But I seen him lying up in there before they came, his face all shot up, and all these bills on the floor, I don't know why they hadn't taken the money or nothing, but there was all this cash, his I guess. But when I came back a couple minutes later it was gone, so I guess someone musta took it."
Yanked from the dimensionless efficiency in which she'd dwelt since the day her brother died, Evelyn had seen vividly for the first time the image of her brother's corpse, of his shot brain smeared on the tile.
The next day she didn't go to work. In fact, she ended up staying out half the week, in that new house of hers, in which she suddenly felt herself to be a stranger.
Coming to see Henry Graves, she'd known that eventually he would ask her why. Why was she telling him what she knew?
He put the question to her once they had ridden the elevator back upstairs and returned to his office.
"I must tell you," he said, "in all my years here I've never had someone come through the door to report their own institution. I confess I'm curious."
Evelyn drew herself up to deliver her piece. But what came to mind were not the words she'd prepared but the look on her aunt Verna's face when she'd told her about her latest promotion, how her eyebrows had risen, her eyes brimming, her whole face opening up as her shoulders let go, as if for all the world she'd been told, as in a dream, that she were free from a burden she'd never thought to imagine gone. It was a look Evelyn had seen before, at each stage of her accomplishments, and each time it nearly broke her. She could never tell Verna how routine her job was, how bureaucratic and spiritually thin. That would be cruel. But then so, in its way, was coming here to blow the whistle. Once the lawyers got involved, who knew what would count for the truth? She had pieces of evidence about what McTeague and Fanning