Chapter 26: Property
They gave me a plastic tray with a number in the corner. 0447.
Into the tray went one wedding ring. Plain, yellow gold, size seven.
I had to work it over the knuckle. My hands were swollen from the cold in the car.
One earring. The other was somewhere on a dining room floor I would not stand on again for four months.
One pair of shoes, dark green suede, two-inch heel. They took them because of the heel.
One phone, bagged separately and sealed, because the phone was evidence in something now.
That was the whole inventory. I had walked to dinner from a house on the same property. No bag, no coat, no key, no money.
He read the list back and asked me to confirm it was complete and accurate.
“That's everything,” I said.
I signed the form Nadia Ashford, because that is the name on the licence, and then I looked at the signature a second longer than I should have.
They gave me foam slippers with a rubber sole. One size. Too small. I walked on the backs of them.
The cell had a bench, a toilet, a light behind a steel grille, and a window of laminated glass in the door.
Eleven by seven and a half. Painted cinder block, four courses to my shoulder. The paint was cream, with a patch by the door repainted a slightly different cream.
There was another woman in there. Fifty, maybe. Sitting sideways with her legs along the bench.
Reyna. She told me her name inside a minute, and that it was her third time this year.
“Christmas is always like this,” she said.
“What'd you do?”
“I threw my brother-in-law.”
She thought about that. “Threw him where?”
“On the floor.”
“Was he a big guy?”
“Six one. Two hundred pounds.”
“And you're what, one seventy?”
“Eighty.”
She laughed once, not unkindly. Then she asked the thing everybody asks.
“How'd you learn to do that?”
I said I used to compete. She asked in what. I said judo.
She said, “Like the Olympics?” I said, “Not quite.” That is always where the conversation ends.
Then she went to sleep sitting upright, which is a skill.
I did not sleep. I sat with my back on the block and my hands on my knees and ran the list.
Eleven times in three years. I know every date.
I have never written them down. A thing written down is a document, and documents can be found.
The eleventh was the fourteenth of October. Salt.
I had put the fine salt out instead of the flaked, and Margot noticed it before the soup came.
Twenty minutes on the hardwood between the sideboard and the window.
Oak, four-inch boards, running north to south, so the seams sit under the shins if you kneel square.
You learn where to put your weight. You do not sit back on your heels for twenty minutes unless you want your feet to go.
So you carry it forward, on the tops of the thighs, and you keep the spine long.
Slumping is what they are watching for.
That is not defiance. It is what a body does after ten years of holding a shape under load.
Julian cut his steak. I remember the sound of the knife better than anything anybody said.
At three in the morning a guard looked through the glass and moved on.
I realised I was sitting in exactly the posture I sit in when I kneel.
I made myself change it. Palms down on the bench, either side of my hips.
It is a slouch, and it felt obscene.
At four I lay down on the concrete, because the bench was too short.
I put myself down the way I was taught to, which is the last thing my body still does perfectly.
Ukemi. You never lose it.
You can lose grip, wind, hip speed and nerve, and you will still know how to arrive at a floor.
I have arrived at floors ten thousand times and I have never once been hurt by the ground.
Everything wrong with me came from holding on to somebody who was already falling.
Near five, Reyna woke and asked if I had anybody coming, and I did not answer, because I was doing the arithmetic honestly for the first time.
Julian had been four feet away when his mother made the call. He did not move. He did not speak.
Margot dialled from the table without standing up. I keep coming back to that.
You have to be very sure of a room to make that call sitting down.
Damon had gone to the hospital with a wrist already swelling and a story already forming.
Twenty-two guests in that house. I could not name one who would say the words in the right order.
“No,” I said. “I don't think so.”
Reyna nodded. At that hour, in that room, it was the normal answer.