The room we’re sitting in could use a makeover. There’s a table with plastic chairs like from a school, where Joe and I sit on one side and a man with brown-gray hair wearing wire-rim glasses and a brown suit jacket sits on the other. His tie is crooked, off-center and twisted, and I keep getting the urge to reach across the table and fix it for him. He introduced himself with a couple of letters, followed by what was obviously a last name, but I missed it.
There are no pictures on the walls. But the paint is fading in sections, like something must’ve hung there once.
“Thanks for coming in today,” Crooked Tie says, drawing my focus from the lack of décor to the state of the tabletop (old, worn, in need of a polish). “Kennedy, you’ve probably heard that we’ve been preparing for the upcoming trial.”
There’s this crack running through the surface of the table in front of me, dips and valleys, and I trace my nail through it.
“Kennedy?” Joe says, and then he sighs. “Yes, she knows.”
“Okay.” Crooked Tie stacks a pile of papers on the table. For a moment, I think the crack in this table must come from him, from doing this day after day. He lays the papers in front of him so I can see a few notes in scribble, in his own handwriting.
“Today we’re just going to walk through how the questions will go. It’s nothing you’re not expecting. It’s basically everything you’ve already said.”
I see the shadow house again for a moment, and then it’s gone. Replaced by fresh paint, fresh carpet.
“Then why do you need me to repeat it?” I ask.
Joe sighs again, but the other man smiles.
“Kennedy, the timing is important,” he explains. “You are important.”
“The police have my statement,” I say.
“Yes, they do,” he says, nodding. He looks down at the papers, readjusting his glasses. “So let’s go over the statement. Can you tell us, once more, where you were on the night of December third and the early morning of December fourth?”
I sigh. “I was at Marco’s house.”
“Marco Saliano,” he says, as if correcting me, or asking.
Then I realize he’s waiting for me. “Marco Saliano. Yeah,” I say.
“Great,” he says, making a check mark, like I’ve just given the correct answer on a pop quiz. “And would that be Marco Saliano at Fifteen Vail Road?”
“Yes.” At least, I was pretty sure that was his address. Since I cut through the fields to meet up with him there, I never really noticed the street signs. I described his house to the police as third on the right from the fields.
Another check mark. “Okay, so, on the early morning of December fourth, you left your boyfriend Marco Saliano’s house, located at Fifteen Vail Road, sometime after one a.m.”
He pauses, looks up at me, raises his eyebrows.
Apparently, that was a question. “Oh, I guess. I don’t know.”
He frowns, then looks at the paper. “That’s what you said.”
“Exactly, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. You have the statement. The person who made it remembers more than I do by now.”
He blinks slowly, his eyes looking unnaturally large behind his glasses. The pen hovers over the paper. He doesn’t make a mark. “You’re the same person.”
I mentally roll my eyes. “I know.”
He’s getting frustrated, and Joe is fidgeting beside me.
“We need you to confirm it, Kennedy. The timing. On the stand. It’s important. You have to confirm it.”
“I’m sure I meant it back when I said it—isn’t that good enough? I can’t exactly remember now. It was over six months ago.” Just barely. Almost six months, to the day. “Do you remember what time you got home six months ago?”
He sighs and twists in his chair, leaning for his briefcase, and I’m momentarily hopeful that this interview is over. But it turns out he was only rummaging through his bag, because he pulls out a small recording device.
“What’s this?” Joe asks, sitting straighter.
Joe seems to understand something I don’t, and a sliver of panic works its way through me, from his body language.
Crooked Tie presses a small button with a thick finger. “Sometimes this helps, to listen. To remember,” he says, not looking directly at either of us.
Joe holds out a hand as if to stop him, but it just hovers there, unsure.
A small, robotic voice speaks first, in stilted syllables: December fourth. One-eighteen a.m.
I sit straight, my shoulders rigid. And then Joe’s hand comes down over the device, hitting the button. “Is this really necessary?”
I’m not breathing. There’s not enough oxygen in the room.
Crooked Tie frowns at both of us. “If she can’t remember, then yes, it is.”
He presses the button again, and this time, Joe doesn’t stop it. Suddenly it’s a woman’s voice and not a robot. “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”
The room is silent except for the sound of breathing on the tape. Until suddenly, it’s my voice, filling the room. “Something happened. Something terrible.”
And I’m there again, at the shadow house—
“Ma’am? Can you tell me your name and location?”
More breathing, until I speak again, ignoring her question. “Something happened in the hallway…”
“Miss? Are you in immediate danger?”
“He’s gone. I saw him. He’s gone.”
“Stay on the line. We’ve got officers out to your location right now.”
Suddenly, the sound of Joe’s chair scratching against the floor cuts through the static of the recording as we wait for someone to speak. The wait is infinite, then and now.
Eventually, the doorbell will ring, and the woman on the line will instruct me to open the front door. I won’t look as I follow her orders.
Joe hits the button again, and the room falls to silence.
“You know what,” Joe says, “I don’t think now’s the best time after all. Why don’t you wait for me in the hall while we finish up here, Kenny.” Which is something he called me when I was much younger. Much, much younger.
Still, I take the gift I am presented with. He gives me a few dollars, tells me to get myself something from the vending machine we saw on the way in, and to get him a soda, too. Something with caffeine, for the love of all that is holy, is what he actually says.
The door shuts behind me, and the hall feels overexposed, fluorescent-lit.
A man in uniform passes by and nods in my direction. I trail my fingers against the grooves in the wall as I make my way back to the vending machine at the entrance, near the double front doors.
I stare at the options. Paper and aluminum and chemicals. My reflection in the glass. The buzzing of the light inside. Another crack in the glass at the upper right-hand corner. I get two Cokes, and I wait outside.
“So,” Joe begins, when we’re in the car, on the highway. My soda is beside his in the cup holder, and at this point I’ve forgotten which one is mine.
“He’s sort of obtuse,” I say, peeling the visitor label from my shirt. It’s got my name, a time stamp, a grainy black-and-white picture with only the top half of my face in the frame, taken at the front desk. I look like a ghost.
“Kennedy, he’s on your side.”
“I didn’t know I had a side.” I shove the crumpled label into my pocket. “If they have the nine-one-one recording, they don’t really need me to remember.”
He sighs, just faintly, and I assume that’s the end of it. Until he adds, “You’re the only witness, Kennedy.”
I don’t understand how that’s possible, standing as I was underneath a dark sky, full of a thousand stars. But that’s what they keep telling me. The night hid us from sight. The storm concealed the noise.
Joe reaches an arm across the console, but I look out the window and he picks up one of the Cokes instead. There’s a white line zigzagging across the sky, the trail of an airplane.
But I’m starting to think there’s a crack running through the whole universe and I’m the only one who sees it.
Lydia hasn’t texted or called by the time we arrive back at Joe’s, so I log on to the computer to see if I have any more messages about my question on the forum.
But the only thing in my inbox is a message from Visitor357. There’s also a video attachment, which I immediately open.
The camera is trained on the dial of some device pressed up against a blue wall, and I watch as the dial dives below zero, back to neutral, over and over. You can’t see what’s out of frame, and I know anything could be causing this. This guy could be causing this. Faking this. But I watch it again. And again and again. I pull up my own readout from the radio telescope on the computer screen, and I set it to run in real time. The two images are side by side; I’ve stopped breathing.
Spike. Pause. Spike. Pause.
They line up completely.
I was wrong. There’s not something wrong with the computer program, or the satellite dish.
I lean closer to the screen, goose bumps rising across my arms.
I think: The timing is important.