A week later, Daniel Soto came to the center with a folder under his good arm. He asked at reception about the recordings from Mercer Court. Maya heard he was there and checked with Imani before going out on her break.
The records clerk had a form for him. He was waiting in the public area, flexing the fingers of his injured hand and stopping when it hurt.
“Hello,” Maya said.
He recognized her. “The dispatcher.”
“One of them.”
He moved the folder from the chair beside him. She sat.
“The company paid the clinic bill,” he said. “That's done. The missed work is still something somebody's checking.”
Maya nodded.
“My manager wants a date for when I can lift properly. The clinic says ask after the next check. Everybody wants a number. I'd like one too.”
She looked at the folder. An invoice corner showed beneath a page of shifts.
“Mrs. Malik?” she asked.
“With her nephew. She's asking him when she can go home, and he's asking the landlord.” Daniel smiled without amusement. “We have a whole chain.”
He looked at the form in his lap.
“I wanted to hear what Elias said before the fire. Not because I think that'll fix it.”
“I understand.”
“He told you I'd help her?”
“He said you'd hurt your hand helping the woman upstairs.”
Daniel looked toward the reception door. A person came in carrying a bicycle helmet and asked a question quietly.
“If somebody had told me that exact thing, I don't know whether I'd have stayed downstairs,” he said. “I hear her shout in my head and I think I'd still go. Then I get angry that he knew anything and wouldn't tell me.”
Maya let the sentence remain where he'd put it.
“I'm not asking you to explain it,” he added.
“I'm glad. I can't.”
He gave a small nod. The honesty didn't seem to disappoint him.
The records clerk returned and explained what could be requested, what would take time, and how he could get an incident confirmation sooner for his employer. Daniel asked her to repeat an address. He wrote it down slowly with his injured hand.
Maya stayed until he finished. He thanked the clerk for the pen. At the door he turned back to Maya.
“I am glad the crew was there,” he said. “I don't want you thinking I wasn't.”
“I don't.”
“All right.”
He left with the folder held against his side.
Maya went back to the floor. Rae had sent a message while she was out: Trial day Tuesday. Not a job yet. Don't tell everybody.
Maya started to type a question about the hours. She stopped and wrote, I hope it goes well.
Rae answered: I know where their shop is. You don't have to look it up.
Maya laughed. Luis glanced across at her.
“My daughter,” she said.
“I guessed.”
Rae had called the contractor from the school job. There was no immediate promise. He wanted to meet her, see her work, and talk about the investigation she had told him about herself. A trial day was a beginning she could use. She'd arranged for her personal tools to remain in her van, and had sent Elias a message confirming she wouldn't return to the firm's on-call schedule.
Elias was home from the hospital with dressings, appointments, a hand he couldn't yet use to grip a mug, and people asking for records he could no longer tidy into a single convenient answer. Rae had taken him food and left before he could make her organize the office. His foreman and his insurer would have to speak to him. The investigation had no final outcome Maya could announce.
Maya's own conduct was still under review. She'd given the times. It would be easy, years later, to remember only the moments when she hadn't waited. She wanted the written account to keep the rest.
That night she was off duty and sat in her kitchen with the house heater still off. A blanket covered her knees. A temporary safe heat source had made the room usable, but the cold floor remained cold. Rae had joked that this was what Maya got for calling the blanket with holes good enough.
At eleven seventeen, Maya noticed the time on the oven.
No direct line rang here. Her cell phone remained quiet. The sound of a bus came through the window, stopped, moved on.
She had looked at the time every night since Calder's. Elias had told them there had been no new file. None of them knew what that meant beyond the nights that had passed. The saved voices remained copied and preserved. They hadn't become ordinary just because nobody was playing them.
Maya took her gaze off the clock and opened her book. She read the same paragraph twice, then once properly.
At eleven twenty-eight she was still reading.
The next afternoon Rae arrived with a grocery bag and two boxes of cereal.
“You bought the wrong one,” she told Maya.
“I bought a kind you used to like.”
“I was fourteen.”
“It was a very good year for cereal.”
Rae put the boxes away herself. Maya stood aside, then went to the kettle.
The beach photograph was back on the dresser. Rae had brought Elias's bent glasses to him; he had put them in a drawer rather than throwing them away. Maya knew that because Rae told her. She hadn't asked to hear every part of the visit.
They ate at the kitchen table. Rae was hungry and impatient with the bread knife, and Maya took it from her to cut the loaf before her daughter tried to make a tool out of something unsuitable.
“I can cut bread,” Rae said.
“I know. You can pour the soup too.”
Rae did. She sat and told Maya about the interview. Some questions were easy. Some weren't. She'd been asked what she knew, when she knew it, and why she hadn't checked every page of her own notebook until after the office sent the invoice roster. Maya listened without trying to improve the answers she'd already given.
After a while Rae asked, “How was yours?”
“Not finished. I told them the same times.”
“Good.”
Maya looked up. “It didn't feel good.”
“I know.”
They ate another spoonful in silence. Rae passed her the butter.
When Rae left, Maya didn't ask her to text from the driveway. Her daughter came back through the door for the grocery bag she'd forgotten, kissed her cheek and said, “I'll call Wednesday. After the trial day.”
“I'd like that.”
“Even if I hate it.”
“Especially if you have a good story.”
Rae smiled and went out. Maya watched from the window because she was her mother and because she wanted to. She waved once when Rae looked back. Then she let the van turn out of sight.
At her next shift, the first call came from a man whose mother had fallen against a kitchen cupboard. She was conscious and cross with him for calling. He said he didn't know if he should have done it.
“You did,” Maya said. “Tell me what you see.”
He gave her the address, his mother's name, then his own. The woman corrected him from the floor about which side hurt. Maya heard the correction, asked the next question, and passed the information to the assigned responder.
The man stayed on the line. Maya stayed with him while they waited.