"I told her," she said, quietly, "if she ever saw me with a police officer, she was supposed to go to the office and stay with the secretary. Not run. Not shout. Not say any names out loud, not mine, not hers. We practiced. We practiced it at the kitchen table with salt shakers." She made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "She did every single thing I told her never to do."
"She could have yelled anything," Rodney said. "Stop. No. Leave her alone. She yelled Mom. Why that?"
Brooke looked at him for a long time. When she spoke, it was slow, as though she were working it out as she went, and maybe she was.
"Every name we have," she said, "came from somebody else. Mine came from a magistrate in September. Hers did too; she picked it, out of a library book about a girl who lived on an island, but a judge had to sign it before it was real. Our address is a post office box in Columbus. My license is a piece of paper. Everything about us that's written down anywhere is something we had to go and ask for, and stand in line for, and have stamped." She looked down at the top of Juno's head. "You said it yourself. It could belong to anybody. And you were right. It could. That's what it's for. It's supposed to be able to belong to anybody, so nobody can find the person it actually belongs to."
She was quiet for a moment.
"That word is the only one nobody gave us," she said. "Nobody issued it. Nobody can look it up. It's the one name I've had for her whole life that never changed, and that nobody up north can type into a computer. She didn't say it to tell you who I am." Her voice went, for a moment, and came back. "She said it to tell you I'm hers."
Rodney did not say anything for a while. Down at the gate the walker parents were collecting their children and going off down Cordell Street in twos and threes, and the grandfather with the cane had a small boy by the hand and was looking back up the sidewalk at them, and then he lifted his cane an inch off the ground at Brooke, a tiny salute, and went on.
Rodney took his wallet out of his back pocket and found one of his cards, the cheap white kind the city printed for them, with the department's number on it and his name and badge number, and he wrote his cell number on the back with the pen from his breast pocket, pressing hard against the roof of the cruiser.
"You don't have to take this," he said. "I won't be offended. But if anybody from up north ever comes down this way asking questions, or if anything ever happens and you need a police officer in this town who already knows the story, or knows as much of it as you want him to, you can call that." He held it out. "And I'll call the Secretary of State on Monday and find out about that program. I should know about it. That's on me."
She looked at the card for a long moment. Then she took it. She did not put it away. She held it in her fingers, with the corner bent where he'd pressed on it.