Testimony

It wasn’t much of a street, so compact that a single streetlight in the middle kept it cowled in rusty amber from one end to the other. Barely a couple of dozen houses all told, in unbroken terraced lines.

Living on Sermon Street meant living beneath notice, in uneasy truce with the light. Ada grew up at the aura’s edge and she’d be lying if she claimed it hadn’t affected her. Not that she lied frequently, but she liked to maintain some semblance of free will, if she could call it that.

The locals rarely ventured outside. Visitors were vanishingly few. This street, Ada’s world, was less a vital artery than a dead suburban nerve, connecting anonymity to inconsequence. And when visitors did come, it wasn’t for Ada – not at first. It was for the readings.

Erratic and often unrecordable, these were taken by itinerant investigators on hasty in-out visits, spiking so hard the needle would shred the cheap paper. And they centered, of course, on the streetlight, that immovable stranger on its raised concrete island, parting the road like a river.

Ada knew all this. Born on the street and unlikely to leave, she knew what was expected of her around the light. But her experience and wariness were filtered through youth in ways her neighbours’ weren’t. The Johnsons, for example, had been living under the light since before she was born, and through diligence and insularity had done so unscathed.

Mr. Johnson, who taught in the local elementary school, warned her: “If you don’t bother it, it won’t bother you. It can just be what it always wanted to be: a streetlight on an unassuming street. Nothing more.”

Still, that sentiment only existed before Marty Dyer was caught and it would be a long time before it was restored.

#

After the first quiet flurry of stories, the rumours and the readings, Ada’s knack for being in the right place at the right time began to attract attention in itself. She couldn’t help what she saw. She didn’t control it.

The simple fact was that anyone passing under that streetlight in the middle of the road – or drawn to it by some need to bask in its full actinic blush – would feel things. Some of them would hear or see things. And a few would be forced to give up secrets they’d intended to take to the grave.

Ada was always there to bear witness.

Barbara Lilinger, about her grandmother’s necklace. Carl Cantington, about the cat, and Carl’s dark-eyed father, about Carl, which until Marty was the saddest of the epiphanies. But Marty Dyer, gentle Marty Dyer: he’d given it all away.

People hoped that Ada wasn’t waiting around for something deeper still, something climactic. They trusted it was just coincidence. She never gave them a reason to believe otherwise, though her description in the papers in conjunction with the smaller confessions was becoming difficult to ignore.

Herald reporter Peter Condon was the latest to follow the breadcrumbs. That description of the girl lurking by the lamp. Her name. A quote about what she’d seen. He’d studied her account of how Marty had stepped under the light, as if he knew what he was doing. And how after the full, unfettered confession, his wife in the bath as they’d all suspected, Marty had turned toward the end of the street and the fringes where she waited. Put out his arms.

Whispered, “Thank God, Ada. It’s over now.”

#

“I feel like she just knows it’s about to happen,” Peter told his boss.

“Being near the scene isn’t a crime,” was the retort, but Peter wasn’t so sure. It felt too convenient. Too many scenes.

And so his superior, like many before, dispatched Peter to take a look, in no small part to get him off his back.

For all the strain it put on his credibility, Peter had it right. Ada knew all those people, those who had their sins hauled to the surface as if drawn up in buckets from a well. She’d known Mrs. Dyer too. There were few children on the street, and little reason for them to think kindly of the adults, but Mrs. Dyer had tried. When Ada’s parents were absent long into the night, she’d taken her in without a word. Ada remembered the Snickerdoodle cookies always waiting on the table, sprinkled with cinnamon. Mrs. Dyer had deserved something other than what she got.

A few weeks after the confession and the conviction, Peter knocked on Ada’s door. She was taller than he pictured for a ten year old, weedy legs sprouting from pink Converse. They faced one another on the porch, Peter a couple of steps down so they were the same height. They talked briefly, or rather, he talked. Ada was less forthcoming.

“Do you regret any of it?” he asked at last.

Ada looked down at her fingernails. “Regret means I did something wrong,” she said.

“Well. Did you?” He found himself beginning to feel troubled, unsure what he was driving at.

“I didn’t put it there, you know,” she said, inclining her head down the street. In fading daylight, the lamp’s glow was becoming visible, palpable. “And there’s nothing else to do around here. I can go stand under it if you don’t believe me.”

A chill ran up Peter’s spine; the knowledge of what Ada had or hadn’t done suddenly felt like a weight too heavy to take on. But still he found himself quick-stepping down the street alongside her. They were there in seconds. She strode deep into the lamplight. Closed her eyes.

Even in the winter haze, he could see the yellow dusk sparkle across her fingers.

“Everyone is guilty of something,” she began. “It’s just about the degree.”

Peter felt a chasm opening up inside him.