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“Is this true?”
“Yeah,” she says with a shrug. “I changed my name a while back.”
“So your name is really Tina Stone?”
“Now it is. Legally. You know, just because.”
I do know. I thought about doing the same thing a year after Pine Cottage, for the same reasons Sam has no need to articulate. Because I was tired of strangers vaguely recognizing it when I was introduced to them. Because I hated the way their features froze, if only for a second, when their memories clicked. Because it made me sick knowing my name and His will forever be associated.
Coop ultimately talked me out of it. He said I should hold on to my name as a stubborn point of pride. Changing it wouldn’t separate the name Quincy Carpenter from the horrors of Pine Cottage. Keeping it could, if I moved on and made something of myself. Something beyond being the lucky one who lived when so many others had not.
“Now that we’ve got the name thing cleared up,” Jeff says, “can someone tell me what she’s been accused of?”
“Are you her attorney?” the cop asks.
Jeff sighs. “I guess.”
“Miss Stone,” the cop says, “faces charges of third-degree assault on a police officer and resisting arrest.”
•••
The details come in pieces, from both Sam and the booking officer. Jeff, calm and collected, asks the questions. I struggle to keep up, head pivoting between the three of them, my brain buzzing from lack of sleep. From what I’m able to gather, Sam, now also known as Tina Stone, went to a bar on the Upper West Side after leaving my apartment. After a few drinks, she went outside for a smoke, encountering a husband and wife in mid-argument. It was heated, according to Sam. Things got physical. When the man shoved the woman, she stepped in.
“I was breaking up a fight,” she tells us.
“You attacked him,” the cop counters.
Both agree on one thing—that Sam ultimately punched the man. He called the police while Sam asked the woman if she was okay, if fights like this were a regular thing, if the man had ever hit her. When a pair of cops arrived, Sam bolted across Central Park West, vanishing into the park itself.
The cops followed, caught up, brought out the cuffs. That’s when Sam resisted.
“They were arresting me for no goddamn reason,” she says.
“You hit a man,” the cop says.
She sniffs. “I was trying to help. He looked like he was about to beat the shit out of that woman. He probably would have too, if I hadn’t done something about it.”
Frustrated by the injustice of it all—Sam’s words, not mine—she took a swing at one of the cops, knocking off his hat and prompting her arrest.
“It was only his hat, for God’s sake,” she mutters in conclusion. “It’s not like I hurt him or anything.”
“It appeared to him like you wanted to,” the booking officer says. “That harm certainly seemed to be your intent.”
“Let’s talk this through,” Jeff says. “She’s only being charged with what happened in the park, correct?”
The cop nods. “The man she punched declined to press charges.”
“Then clearly we can work something out.”
Jeff pulls the cop aside. They confer by the wall, their voices low but still loud enough for me to hear. I stand next to Sam, my hand on her shoulder, fingers digging into the soft leather of her jacket. She doesn’t bother trying to listen in. She simply stares straight ahead, grinding her teeth.
“This all sounds to me like a big misunderstanding,” Jeff tells the cop.
“Not to me,” the cop replies.
“It’s clear she shouldn’t have done what she did. But she was trying to help that woman and emotions were high and she got a little wild.”
“You’re saying the charges should be dropped?”