Part Six: Theresa
Theresa Callahan found them four minutes after the police arrived. She came around the corner from frozen foods with a bag of peas and a confused expression and then saw the police officers and the man in the leather jacket and her niece held close against his side, and the bag of peas hit the floor and she crossed the distance in seconds.
Maggie signed to her immediately. Fast, insistent. I saw him. He was here. I told him. He knows.
Theresa looked at Ray.
“What did she say?”
He told her.
Theresa Callahan was thirty-four, a small woman with her sister’s eyes and dark circles under them. She sat down on the floor of the grocery store — just sat, directly on the linoleum, with the bag of peas somewhere behind her — and she pressed her face into her hands.
“She told me,” she said, and her voice was the kind of broken that came from discovering, simultaneously, that something terrible had been real and that you had not known it. “She tried to tell me. She showed me on her tablet, she was writing something, and I thought it was — I told her I was busy, I’d look later—”
Her voice stopped.
She looked at Maggie. Maggie was watching her.
Theresa reached out and put her hand on her niece’s face. She signed something, just a few words. Maggie signed back. Then Maggie, who had been calm since she found Ray, since she gave her fear to someone who could hold it, began to cry for the first time. Not silently. Real tears, real sound, the particular release of someone who has been holding something enormous and is finally, finally, allowed to set it down.
Ray Kowalski put his hand on the top of Maggie’s head, very gently, the way you touched something that was precious.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Around us — and I say us because I was still there, still in the cereal aisle, unable to have left if I’d tried — the other customers stood in their improbable positions, baskets held, hands at their sides, watching the floor of a grocery store hold a moment that none of us had any business witnessing and all of us would carry home.
