Somebody had walked my lot before me. It snowed three inches overnight, the light dry kind that comes off the lake and doesn't pack, and at ten past five in the morning the Glenwood lot is supposed to be mine. My tire tracks, my boots, nobody else's. That's half of why I like the early shift. But there was a line of footprints coming in off Thirty-Eighth, straight as a ruler, to the skate-return slot by the front doors. From the slot they went along the lobby glass, past the trophy case window, past the poster window, and stopped at the last window, the one by the snack bar. Two flat ovals, packed hard, toes against the glass. Whoever it was had stood there a long time. Then the prints went back out to the street the way they came, every step landing in the step before it.
There was an envelope in the skate-return slot. I knew it was bad before I touched it, because nobody writes to me.
People text me. People leave notes under my wiper that say MOVE IT NELL with no comma. The gas company writes to me, but the gas company knows where I live, and it doesn't use a blue ballpoint pressed so hard the letters come through on the back like Braille. This one was printed in capitals, every letter the same height: NELL DORSEY, THE ICE, GLENWOOD RINK. Under that, smaller, as if he'd thought about it: PERSONAL.
I put it on the rental counter next to the size chart and went and did the boards first. That's the deal. You do the boards, you do the lights, you fill the machine, and if the envelope's still there when you come back, it's yours. My mother says I bargain with God like he runs a flea market. I just like to think somebody's keeping score, because the alternative is nobody is, and I can't drive a seven-ton machine in circles at five in the morning with that in my head.
Everybody calls her the Zamboni. She isn't. She's an Olympia, and Benny will tell you so if you stand near him long enough, the way some men will tell you about the war. I call her Big Sue. She smells like propane and wet wool and something sweet, like a burnt pancake, that nobody's ever found. I filled her from the hose and climbed up and took her out.
There's a sound the ice makes under fresh water, a long hiss and then a kind of sigh, like the rink's been holding its breath all night. The blade shaves off yesterday, every hockey stop and every kid's fall, and the conditioner lays hot water down behind you, and for about ten minutes, until it freezes, the whole surface is a black mirror with the roof lights in it. Nothing's happened on it yet. Nobody's been anywhere. I want you to understand what he took when he put that envelope in the slot.
Every time I came around the south end, I could see the lobby through the glass behind the boards, and the last window, and the dark lot past it. From out there you'd look straight in past the pretzel warmer to the ice door, to whoever was coming through it on the machine. I made myself look at my lines instead. Left blade didn't chatter the whole way around, and I took that as a sign and then felt stupid, because I'd already decided it was bad, so what was it a sign of. When I came back in, the envelope was still on the counter.
\ \ \*
I opened it with a skate blade guard, because it was the closest thing.
One sheet of lined paper folded in three. The same capitals, neat and equal, like somebody had learned to write all over again and been strict with himself about it.
Dear Nell,
I hope it's all right I call you Nell. I've been thinking of you as Nell for twelve years.
I don't blame you. I want that to be the first thing. It was dark and it was snowing and you were nineteen and somebody told you the man was in that room. I'd have picked somebody too.
I've had a long time to think about what happened to your sister. Longer than anybody. The police stopped thinking about it the day you said my number. I didn't get to stop.
I know who really did it.
Come with me and I'll show you. I can't do it on my own and I can't do it on paper. You'll understand why when you see.
I know where you work because it was in the Times-News, the piece about the rink's fiftieth birthday. There was a picture of you on the machine. You looked happy. I'm sorry to bring this to you there.
Garrett
No phone number. No address. I turned it over twice like there'd be a little map.
The third time through, something in my chest went hot and loose. I'd have picked somebody too. Like a game show. Like I'd picked a door. The fourth time, it was the kindest thing anybody had ever written to me, and I put my forehead down on the counter, on the cold laminate next to the size chart, and stayed there until Benny came in at six with his coffee.
"You sick?" he said.
"No."
"You look sick."
"Benny, if somebody you sent to prison wrote you a letter, would you call the cops?"
Benny thought about it, slow and in a straight line. "Depends what's in the letter," he said. "Who'd I send to prison?"
I didn't answer him. I was already out the front door in my rink shoes.
The prints were bigger than mine. Work boots, a deep tread. I put my feet in the two flat ovals at the last window and the snow came in over my socks, and I put my face where his face had been and looked in. The pretzel warmer, dark. The counter. The corner table under the poster about no skates on the carpet, where Owen does his homework every day from three o'clock on. The ice door, and past it, through the glass, the black mirror going gray as it set.
I'm not a noticer. I'd better say that now, because everything that came after is about it. I walk into a room and miss the new haircut. I drove past a blue house on Cherry Street for six years before I found out it's got a concrete chicken on the porch the size of a dog. Birdie used to test me. She'd swap a poster in our room, or take the bulb out of the lamp, and wait. Once it took me three days. She laughed so hard she got the hiccups and had to drink water upside down. So I don't know why I was sure.
I was supposed to pick her up from a party on West Eleventh at midnight. I got there at twenty to one, because I was nineteen and somebody had a boat and I forgot I had a sister. I came down Cascade with the radio up and she was at the bus shelter on the corner, in her white puffer coat, snow coming sideways under the streetlight, and there was a man with her. His hand was on her arm. Not hard. Not soft. Just on it.
I honked. She turned and saw it was me, finally, forty minutes late, and she put up her middle finger and held it there. Her face did something. I've had twelve years to decide what. Some days she's laughing. Some days she isn't.
I drove off. I thought, fine, walk, it's six blocks. I thought, let him have you, whoever he is. I didn't think that exactly. I thought something close enough that I can't tell the difference anymore.
They found her the next afternoon in Cascade Creek, below the railroad trestle, under a crust of ice.
"Nell," Benny said from the door. "Your feet."
\ \ \*
I called the police. Of course I called the police. I'm not stupid, I'm just bad at noticing things.
The number on the card in my wallet was Lou Moynihan's old desk line, and a woman picked up and said Detective Moynihan had retired in twenty twenty-one and could she help me. Detective Kovach. She sounded like she was eating cereal. I told her who I was, and there was the kind of pause where somebody puts the spoon down.
"Okay," she said. "I know the case."
Everybody in Erie knows the case. A week ago it was on every channel, the same piece of tape over and over: Garrett Rudnicki walking out of the prison in Albion in a gray sweatshirt with a lawyer holding his elbow, squinting like the sky was too much for him. I turned it off every time. My mother's TV is never off, so I'd stopped going to my mother's.
I read Detective Kovach the letter. My voice did a thing on I'd have picked somebody too and I had to start the line over.
"Is there a threat in it?" she said.
"He says come with me."
"That's an invitation, hon. I'm not saying it's a nice one."
"He was here. He walked up to the building and stood at the window. His footprints are still out there."
"At a public rink." She crunched something. "Look. Nell. I'll be straight with you, because I think you'd rather. Mister Rudnicki's conviction was vacated. He's not on parole. He's not on anything. He's a free man who wrote a polite letter and stood outside a city building. If he comes to your house, if he follows you, if he says one word that sounds like harm, you call me, this number, and I'll come myself. But I can't arrest somebody for saying sorry for something he didn't do."
"He didn't say sorry," I said. "He said he doesn't blame me."
She didn't have anything for that.
Then I called Lou. I had his cell off a Christmas card from years back, him and Peg in matching reindeer sweaters on a dock at Presque Isle. He picked up on the first ring, like he'd been holding the phone.
"Nellie," he said. Nobody else calls me that.
I read it to him too. He didn't interrupt. At the end he made a sound like he was lifting something heavy.
"Throw it out," he said.
"Lou."
"Throw it in the trash. And don't you dare go anywhere with that man."
"They said the DNA wasn't his."
"They said somebody else's DNA was on her. That's all they said. A sixteen-year-old girl at a party with forty kids, you think nobody else touched her that night? Nobody bumped her coat?" His voice went down. "You saw him. You saw him with his hand on her, and you picked him out of six in nine seconds."
And I was back in the room.
Second floor of the police station on State Street, too warm, the radiators knocking like somebody wanted out. They'd had me wait in an office first, twenty minutes, a radiator and a cup of pencils, and then they walked me down the hall. A window with the blind half down. Lou raised it on the cord slowly, like there was something in there that might spook.
Six men against a wall with height lines painted on it, each with a white card and a black number. Number two was chewing gum. Number six had a cast on his wrist. I had Birdie's hair tie on my own wrist, a green cloth one with gold thread through it. I'd taken it off her dresser that morning and I didn't know why. I kept snapping it. It stung, and I'd look, and snap it again.
"Take your time," Lou said. "He may or may not be here."
I looked at every one of them. I did. Then I got to number four and the cold went through me like stepping off a curb you didn't see. My knees went. My mouth filled with spit, that sour flood right before you throw up. My body knew him before I did.
"Four," I said.
"Take your time, Nell."
"Four. I'm sure." He didn't move, and I needed him to move, I needed somebody in that room to do something. "I'm sure it's him. I was sure it was him the second I saw him."
The lawyer at the trial made a point of the time. Nine seconds, he said, like you'd say a number of dollars somebody stole.
I threw up in the ladies' room after. Lou waited in the hall with a can of ginger ale from the machine, and when I came out he handed it to me and said, "You did good," and squeezed my shoulder, and I have never been so grateful to anybody in my life.
"I've worked a lot of lineups, honey," Lou was saying in my ear, "and I never saw anybody so sure."
I wanted that to help. It helped like a heating pad helps a broken leg.
"He says he knows who did it."
"Course he does. He had twelve years with nothing to do but write the version where it's somebody else. And now the one person on God's earth who can put him back is a girl who feels bad about it." He let that sit. "Don't be the girl who feels bad about it, Nellie. Be the one who saw."
Number four's name was Garrett Rudnicki. He was twenty-four. He washed dishes at a diner on Peach Street and he lived in a room above a tire place two blocks from the bus shelter. He said he'd been home asleep. He said he'd never met my sister.
After I hung up I stood in the sharpening room with the letter in my hand. The wheel was still warm from Benny. There were silver filings all over the bench, and I pressed my thumb into them and looked at the pattern they left, and tried to remember the man at the shelter. Not Garrett Rudnicki. The man.
I couldn't. Every time I got close it was number four, holding his card, the way he looked at me once at the trial when I stood up and said it again, and his face not doing anything at all.
I snapped that hair tie so many times that week I wore a red line into my wrist. The line's gone. The hair tie lives in my glove box. There's nobody to give it back to. I put the letter in my back pocket.
\ \ \*
By noon the lunch skaters had walked the lot to slush. I went out once and couldn't find the prints. I couldn't even find the window. They all looked the same from outside, and I stood there in my coat like an idiot until a man with a hockey bag asked if I was locked out.
The school bus drops Owen at two fifty. He's nine. His dad lives in Ohio and sends money when the Browns win. Owen came through the lobby doors pink in the face and put his worksheet on the snack counter before he even took his hat off, because Dolores gives him a free pretzel for a page with no eraser holes.
Dolores held the page up to the fluorescent light. She found two. She tore the pretzel in half, slid him one half on a napkin, and dropped the other back in the warmer.
"Two holes, half a pretzel," she said. "You want the whole thing, don't erase."
Owen took it like a man paying a parking ticket. It's not a perfect setup. It's what there is.
At three I took Big Sue out between the lunch skate and toddler hour, and I was going too fast. Benny says you can read somebody's day in their lines, and mine were a mess, wobbly, crossing at the turns. Every time I shifted on the seat I could feel the letter in my pocket, a stiff little square, like a card with a number on it.
On the far side the bleachers go up six rows, gray aluminum, cold to sit on even in July. Parents sit there in the afternoons with phones and travel mugs. I don't look at them. I look at the ice. That's the job.
I came around the north end and Owen was standing on the bottom bleacher, waving both arms over his head like he was trying to land a plane.
He's not supposed to be in the bleachers. He's supposed to be at the corner table. I was already making the face, the one he calls the Mom Look, when I saw somebody sitting on the row behind him, holding out a red-and-white-striped bag of popcorn from Dolores's counter, tipped down so Owen could reach.
Gray sweatshirt. Big hands, very clean. Work boots, wet to the laces. His hair was shorter than on the news and his face was heavier, and he sat very still, the way somebody sits when he's had a lot of practice taking up no room. He'd taken the end seat, the one that looks back at the lobby.
Big Sue kept going. You can't just stop her. Seven tons, and the water still coming out the back, laying the black mirror down behind me, everything wiped clean.
Owen cupped his hands around his mouth. His voice came across the ice, high and delighted, bouncing off the roof.
"Mom! He says he knew Aunt Birdie!"