I drove out to Lenora's place on a Thursday with a folder of proposed quotations and a plan I'd been turning over since the check cleared, and I laid it out before I lost my nerve. "I want to hold something the same night as the premiere. Not across town trying to pull their audience away — here, at the archive, open doors, free admission. Not a rebuttal screening. Just the actual record, laid out so people can see it for themselves."
Lenora sat with her coffee going cold, listening the way she always did, like she was weighing each word for load before she'd stand on it. "You're not trying to win an argument with them."
"I'm trying to stop needing to win one," I said. "If people want the film, they can go see the film. I just want there to be somewhere else to go afterward, with the parts they left out."
She nodded slowly and reached for the folder, and I understood I was about to be edited myself, fairly this time. She went through the quotations I'd pulled from our recorded sessions, approving most, crossing out two with a single firm line. One was a sentence I'd shaped from something she'd said about the night descent, where I'd written that she'd watched him go, and she tapped it hard with one finger.
"I never watched anyone go anywhere," she said. "The aft door was sealed off from where I was sitting. I heard the pressure change, I heard the stair mechanism, and then I heard nothing, and that's the whole of what I witnessed. You wrote 'she watched him jump.' I didn't. Take it out."
"I thought that's what you meant when you described the moment the plane felt different."
"It's what you inferred. There's a difference between the feeling of a plane and the sight of a man in the dark, and if I let that stand because it reads better, I'm doing exactly what that film did to you. I won't do that to myself, and you shouldn't want me to." She crossed it out and wrote above it, in her small precise hand, felt the cabin pressure shift, heard the stairway mechanism operate, saw nothing. "That's what I'll say, if I say anything at all."
I sat with the correction a moment, feeling the particular sting of being caught doing, in miniature, the thing I'd spent three weeks being furious about. "You're right. I'm sorry. I should have asked you to write that line instead of writing it for you."
"You should have," she agreed, not unkindly, "but you came out here and let me fix it instead of defending it, which is more than I got from anyone with a camera in 1998. That counts for something." She closed the folder and looked at me for a long moment, the kind of look that was doing its own private arithmetic. "I've spent forty-five years being somebody's evidence. Somebody's color footage, somebody's chapter title. I don't especially want to be yours either, if it comes to that."
"Then don't be. Come and talk about what actually happened to you, on your own terms, and if a reporter asks you something you don't want to answer, you don't answer it. I'm not asking for a performance. I'm asking for a room where nobody edits you afterward."
She was quiet long enough that I thought she might refuse outright, and I made myself not fill the silence. Finally she said, "You lost that money yesterday, didn't you. The grant. And came here today anyway." I hadn't told her the number, but she'd clearly guessed its shape from the set of my shoulders when I'd walked in. "You gave up something real so you wouldn't have to lie by omission in a theater. I've met very few people who'd do that." She set her cup down with a small decisive click. "All right. I'll come. I'll talk about that single frightened flight, wondering if we'd get home. That's the part nobody's ever asked me about anyway. The jump, they can read about in a book. I lived the part before it."
I thanked her, and meant it more than I had any word yet that week, and drove home with the folder on the seat beside me, half its sentences now in her handwriting instead of mine, which was exactly as it should have been.