Everyone told me not to.
Nate told me not to. Priya told me not to, twice, and then a third time by text at eleven o’clock that night, which I did not answer. My mother, who I had told a heavily edited version, told me not to without knowing what she was telling me not to.
The consensus was: write a note. Leave it at the corner. Or go to the police liaison, or find an address and send something, or — Priya’s suggestion — do absolutely nothing at all, because a man who has arranged his grief into a nineteen-night routine does not necessarily want a stranger inside it.
They were all right. I want to say that clearly before I tell you what I did. Every single person who told me not to go out at three in the morning to speak to an unknown man on a dark street was giving me correct advice, and if my daughter ever tells me she did what I did I will lose my mind.
I went out at three in the morning to speak to an unknown man on a dark street.
I did take precautions, which at the time felt like a lot and which I can now see were mostly theatre.
I told Nate I was doing it and I called him at 3:00 and left the line open in my coat pocket. I turned every light in the front of the house on. I stayed on my own property — I stood at the top of my driveway, forty feet back, and did not walk down to him. And I put my keys in my hand the way every woman in America has been taught to.
He arrived at 3:06.
I heard him before the camera caught him, which I had not expected. Footsteps on a quiet street in November carry a long way, and I stood in my own front yard in the cold and listened to a man walk towards my house for about twenty seconds before I could see him, and that was the worst part of the whole night and I very nearly went back inside.
He came into the streetlight. He turned to face the pole. He put his feet together.
And I said, “Mr. Vance?”
He did not run. He did not shout. He turned around, slowly, and he looked up the driveway at a woman standing in a lit yard in a coat over pyjamas, and the first thing he said was:
“I’m on the sidewalk.”
Flat. Defensive. Rehearsed, obviously rehearsed, the way you rehearse a sentence you have expected to have to say for six years.
I said, “I know. I’m not — I know.”
And then neither of us said anything for what was probably four seconds and felt like a great deal longer.
Then he said, “You have a camera.”
I said yes.
He said, “I know. I’ve seen it. It’s crooked.”
And I laughed — I actually laughed, out loud, in my front yard at three in the morning at a stranger — and something in the whole night came down about six inches, and he sort of half-smiled, and that was how I met Ray.
We talked for about twenty minutes at forty feet, which is a stupid distance to talk at, and eventually I said did he want to come up and he said no, thank you, and I understood that and did not ask again.
I’m going to tell it plainly.
He had been coming for six years. Not every night — that came later, and it was the part he was most embarrassed about. For the first four years it was the fourteenth of November and Delia’s birthday in June. Then his wife died in the spring of the fifth year, and after that it became most weeks, and then in the last twelve months it became every night.
He said, “It got away from me.”
He said it like a man describing a leak he should have fixed.
He walked. Eleven minutes each way, from a house on Corliss, which is two streets over and which I have driven past a hundred times. He came at 3:07 because that was the minute on the call log the county gave him, and he had that piece of paper, and he had read it enough times to know.
He stood facing the pole because of the plaque. He put it up himself in the third year, and he asked the power company first and they said no, and he did it anyway, and nobody has ever taken it down.
And he had known that the house behind him changed hands. He’d known someone new had moved in. He said he’d thought about that a lot, and that he’d tried standing further along the sidewalk for a while, but that from further along you can’t see the plaque, and that he was sorry.
He said: “I know what I look like out here. I’ve always known what I look like out here.”
I asked him the only question I actually needed answered, and I asked it badly.
I said: “Are you okay? Like — is this okay? Is somebody —”
And Ray Vance said, “There isn’t anybody. That’s sort of the situation.”
Which is, I think, the loneliest sentence I have ever had said to me, delivered by a sixty-six-year-old man standing under a streetlight at three in the morning forty feet from my front door.
I said, “Do you want a coffee?”
And he said no. And then he stood there for a second, and he said, “Not tonight.”
Which is not a no.