Page 33 of Tempted By the Safety

A court officer looks at him, looks away, and then does the whole thing again slower, the moment the file loads. Behind us a phone comes up over a shoulder, held at that angle people think is subtle. Spencer turns a quarter turn so his back is to the room and reads the signage on the wall like it’s interesting, and he doesn’t say a word about it.

If I’d been alone I’d have stood in the wrong line twice by now, and he asks a woman behind glass where cash bail gets posted and what they need in hand, and we’re on the third floor at a window with a different sign on it.

“It matters that we got here today,” he says while we wait. “Once they transfer him, it’s a bus ride out to the island and then it’s tomorrow, maybe the day after, and your mother’s making two trips instead of none.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I’ve had teammates go through it.” He doesn’t elaborate, and I don’t push, because the line moves.

At the window I pull my phone out and start doing the thing I’ve been doing in the back of my head since the tunnel, which is opening every account I have in sequence, looking, and opening the next one, as if money is going to have crawled in overnight. Checking. Savings, which is a joke, forty-one dollars. The card with the limit I already ate through. I’m still scrolling when I see the black rectangle come past my elbow and land on the counter.

“Absolutely not.” I put my hand on it. “No. Spencer. This is my family. This is not a work expense, you can’t expense my brother, that’s not a line item.”

“I know it isn’t.”

“So then—”

“Move your hand, Milo.”

“You don’t get it, this is ten thousand dollars, this is a car, this is somebody’s whole—”

“I know what it is.” He looks at me then, and there’s nothing kind in his face, which is how I know he isn’t doing pity. “Move your hand.”

I move it.

The woman behind the glass takes the card without any ceremony at all, which strikes me as insane, that a thing this large gets processed the same way as a parking ticket.

He handles the rest of it, and I stand there and watch. He asks what the return date is and gets it written down. He asks what happens to the money when Dean shows up, and how long that takes, and who it comes back to, and confirms it comes back to him, and I feel the top of my ears go hot. He asks what happens if Dean doesn’t show, and when the clerk tells him, he repeats it back so my mother hears it in plain words, and he asks whether anything gets mailed and to which address, and takes a photo of the receipt before he folds it into his wallet.

Every one of those questions is a question I would not have known to ask. I’d have paid the money and walked out feeling accomplished and then panicked in three weeks and had no idea who to call.

Then we wait, because it turns out that paying ten thousand dollars purchases exactly no speed.

Two hours on a bench with a metal edge that finds the same spot on my back no matter how I sit. Mom on my left, working through her whole repertoire, first the crying, then the plans, then a long stretch of telling Spencer about my sixth-grade science fair for reasons I will never understand. Spencer on my right, forearms on his knees, answering emails with his thumbs.

I sit between them and feel nine years old. On a bench, with somebody else handling it. I haven’t been the smallest person in a room since I was a kid, and I don’t know what to do with my hands.

Spencer gets up once and comes back with a Sprite for my mother, and a water and a bag of pretzels I didn’t ask for, and puts them in my lap and sits back down without comment. I look at those pretzels for a long time.

Somewhere in the second hour, a guy in a windbreaker takes a picture of Spencer from across the hall. Spencer’s knee iswarm against mine and he doesn’t move it, and I think about how tomorrow there might be a photo online of him sitting in a criminal courthouse, and nobody who sees it will know it’s because of me, and everybody in his life will get to guess.

Dean comes out at ten past four with his shirt untucked and both hands out like he’s arriving at a party.

“There he is.” He gets me around the neck and squeezes and I get a faceful of holding-cell smell and sweat. His knuckles are scraped raw across two fingers and one eyebrow’s split. “There’s my guy. My lifesaver. You’re a lifesaver, you know that? Ma, look at him, look at his shirt, who dressed you?”

“Dean,” Mom says, and starts up again.

“I’m fine, I’m fine, it was nothing, it was a misunderstanding.” He’s already turning, scanning the hall, and then he stops.

I watch him spot Spencer, and his whole face reorganizes.

“No,” He points. “No. Get out. Spencer Rhodes?” He says the name at a volume that turns four heads in the hallway. “In here? Are you seeing this? Milo. Milo. Do you know who this is?”

“I’m aware, Dean.”

“I watched you take Callahan’s head off in November.” He’s got Spencer’s hand in both of his now, pumping it. “Fourth quarter, third and eight, you came off the edge and put him in the turf. I stood up on my couch—”

I look at the floor and I ask it, sincerely, to open.