"Derek handled all that. The insurance and everything, I was in the hospital, I couldn't — he did all of it. I asked him once if I should read it and he said it would just upset me, it's just diagrams and a lot of jargon. And he's right, I don't want to see diagrams of my car in the pond." Another pause. "He gets so weird when I bring it up. Not mad. Just — sad. Like I'm saying he wasn't enough. So I stopped bringing it up." And then, quieter, so that I almost didn't hear it: "I just want to know I'm not crazy."
I filled my water bottle. I went back to my desk. I sat down and looked at my screen, where an aging report was open, ninety-day past-dues highlighted in yellow, and I did not see a single number on it for the rest of the morning.
That evening, at home, I took out the folder.
I had requested my own copy of the crash report from the Highway Patrol a month after it happened. As a witness I was entitled to it, and I had wanted, I think, some proof outside my own head that it had happened as I remembered it — which, I realized, sitting at my kitchen table that September night, was exactly what Talia wanted, too, and had been denied. The report is eleven pages. There's the standard state form, the OH-1, with its boxes and codes and the little diagram the sergeant drew of the ramp and the guardrail and an arrow showing the car's path into the pond. There's his supplemental narrative, three pages typed. There's my statement, in his handwriting, with my bad left-handed signature at the bottom. And there's the statement of the other witness, the man in the navy parka, written in his own hand on a lined form in the back of the cruiser at seven-oh-two that morning, signed Derek A. Lockhart.
I had read it many times. I read it again.
Then I took an index card from the drawer where I keep my mother's recipe box, and on it I wrote, in block capitals: SHE REMEMBERS MY VOICE. SHE THINKS SHE IS LOSING HER MIND. TELL HER, OR I WILL. E. COYLE, A.P., 3RD FL. The next morning I sent it to him by interoffice mail.
He came down at two-fifteen.