Part Nine: What I Told My Sister
My sister Carolyn called me the evening of the incident, when the story had begun to circulate in the way that stories with video evidence circulated. She had seen the footage on two different news platforms before she called me.
“Are you all right?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Your wrists.”
“Fine.”
“Tell me what happened.”
I told her. I told her in the way I told her most things — directly, in sequence, with the specific and the general. She listened the way she had always listened, which was with the full attention of a person who was not preparing her response while you spoke but was actually hearing what you were saying.
When I finished, she was quiet for a moment.
“You know what gets me,” she said.
“What?”
“You spent the whole morning thinking about protocol. Thinking about what the law demands. Thinking about following the procedure correctly.” She paused. “And the whole morning, you did. You followed every procedure. And it didn’t matter.”
“It mattered,” I said. “It’s what let everything else work. The recording worked because I was documented as compliant. The testimony works because the behavior was unambiguous. The procedure mattered.”
“But it didn’t protect you in the moment.”
“No,” I said. “It didn’t.”
She was quiet again.
“Are you angry?” she said.
I thought about the question.
“I’m clear,” I said. “I know what happened and why and what it means. Whether that’s anger or something else, I’m not sure the distinction matters right now.”
“It might matter later,” she said.
“Maybe,” I said. “I’ll let you know.”
She laughed — the laugh that had been her way of diffusing things since we were girls.
“You were going to a police misconduct hearing,” she said.
“I know.”
“The day you get handcuffed, you’re going to a police misconduct hearing.”
“I know.”
“The universe,” she said, “has a sense of timing.”
“An unfortunately precise one,” I said.
