The thing about Pamela's filing system is that it makes complete sense once you understand it, and understanding it took me three weeks.
Not because it's complicated. Because it assumes a level of familiarity with the sites that I don't have yet. She labeled everything by location first, date second, contaminant third, which is the right order if you've been to every site fourteen times and can picture the drainage slope from memory. I've been to most of them twice. I keep the map open on my second monitor now, the one she drew by hand on the back of a grant application envelope and taped above the desk, so I can cross-reference while I'm reading. It helps.
Her handwriting is everywhere in this office. On the map. On the folder tabs. On a note stuck to the sample refrigerator that says check iron baseline before running anything else in letters small enough that I have to lean in to read it every time, which I do every time, because I keep forgetting it's there.
I've been in this office for four years. It stopped feeling like mine about six weeks ago.
The city environmental review office is on the eighth floor of a building on Breckenridge Avenue that was designed to feel permanent and has achieved instead the specific institutional drabness of somewhere that processes things. I've been here three times in the past month. The elevator is slow. I've started taking the stairs.
The officer assigned to the Narrows contamination cluster is named Weller. Mid-fifties, the particular careful affect of someone who has learned that the gap between what a report says and what you say about a report is where your career lives. He reviews submissions. He asks clarifying questions. He schedules follow-up reviews for things that should have been escalated to remediation orders six months ago.
Today's meeting is about site seven. A residential block in the East End, twenty-two units, iron and lead content in the soil running at three times acceptable levels for at least five years. Pamela's data is clean. The submission is clean. I spent two weeks making sure of it because I knew what was coming and I wanted to have nothing he could point at.
"The baseline methodology," Weller says, turning a page. He has the submission open on the desk between us but he's been looking at the wall above my head for most of the meeting.
"It follows the same protocol as the Mooney Street submission," I say. "Which the panel approved."
"Mooney Street had a longer data collection window."
"Fourteen months versus eleven. The contaminant levels are higher here."
He turns another page. Outside his window, Gotham is doing its March thing: gray, wet, not quite cold enough to explain why everything feels like it's contracting.
"The panel's concern," he says, and stops.
I wait.
"The panel's concern is establishing clear causation between the drainage failure and the current readings. Correlation isn't sufficient for a remediation order of this scope."
I look at the submission. Page twelve has the causation chain. Pamela built it across four columns of data going back eight years. I know page twelve well enough to recite it. I also know that what Weller is describing isn't a methodological concern. It's a reason.
"What would establish clear causation to the panel's satisfaction," I say.
He looks at the wall. "An additional independent assessment might strengthen the submission considerably."
An independent assessment takes three months and costs money the grant doesn't have. He knows that. I know that he knows that.
"I'll note the panel's concern," I say.
I write it down in the notebook I've started carrying to these meetings because Pamela always carried one and I didn't understand why until I needed to document something that wasn't going in any official record.
On the way out I pass a woman in the corridor outside Weller's office. She's waiting for the next meeting, a folder on her lap, the look of someone who has been waiting in this corridor before and has decided what she thinks about it. She glances up when I come through the door and I nod and keep moving.
I take the stairs.
The site seven data goes back into the folder.
I put the folder in the cabinet under the window, in the section Pamela labeled pending — panel, which has been growing steadily since January. Fourteen sites. Three with active remediation orders. Eleven waiting on something: a panel review, an independent assessment, a clarifying question that leads to another clarifying question that leads to a six-month delay in a neighborhood where children are playing on soil that's been compromised since before I started my undergraduate degree.
I sit at the desk and look at the map above the monitor.
Pamela drew it in two sessions, I know because the ink changes color slightly in the middle of the East End section where she must have switched pens. The sites are marked with circles. The remediation orders are crossed through. Three crossed through. Eleven circles still open.
She'd been working through them in order of contamination severity. Site seven should have been second, after Mooney Street. It's been three months.
I open the panel correspondence folder and start drafting a response to Weller's concern.
I write: The methodology employed in this submission follows established protocol as approved by this panel in the Mooney Street case (ref: January decision). The additional data collection window cited as insufficient represents eleven months of consistent readings across multiple sampling points, all of which demonstrate contamination levels in excess of acceptable thresholds. We respectfully note that an independent assessment requirement has not previously been applied to submissions from this research program.
I look at that for a while.
Pamela would have written it differently. More precisely, with less of the passive voice she always told me was where arguments went to die. I delete we respectfully note and replace it with this requirement has not previously been applied, which is the same information without the apology built into it.
It's still not as good as what she would have written.
I send it anyway because the alternative is not sending it, and the site is still there, and the children are still on it.
Detective Voss calls on a Thursday afternoon.
I know who she is. Pamela mentioned her, not often but specifically, which was how Pamela mentioned the things that mattered to her. She said: a detective I've been working with. She said it looking at the laptop rather than at me, which I'd come to understand meant the information was real rather than conversational.
She says she needs the contamination spreadsheet. The full one, not the panel submission version. The working file.
"Can I ask what for," I say.
A pause. Not long. "I'm following something."
It's not an answer. It's also not nothing. I think about what Pamela said about her, the detective who read the map when she showed it to her. I think about the missing persons report sitting in the department's administrative file, still open, no new information in six weeks.
"I'll need to make a copy," I say. "The original stays here."
"That's fine."
I copy the file to a drive and print the map, the hand-drawn one from above the desk, because the digital version doesn't have the annotations Pamela added in the margins over two years. Small things. Arrows and question marks and one notation in the bottom left corner that says check Crane St drainage — something wrong with flow rate in handwriting smaller than the rest, like she wrote it fast, like it was a thought she was catching before it got away.
I put both in an envelope.
She comes the next morning. Early, before anyone else is in. She has her coat on and her gloves and the particular quality of someone moving through a task they've already completed in their head. She takes the envelope. She looks at it for a moment, the way you look at something you've been building toward.
"The work is continuing," I say.
She looks at me.
"I thought you should know. The grant is still active. Site seven is going back to the panel next month." I pause. "The work is continuing."
She holds my eyes for a moment. Something registers in her face that I don't have a name for. Not quite acknowledgment. More like she's filing something away in a place she keeps things she isn't ready for yet.
"I know," she says.
She puts the envelope in her bag and leaves.
I go back to the desk. The map above the monitor has a blank rectangle above the East End section where the copy was. I can still see the ghost of the tape marks.
I take the site seven folder out of the cabinet and open the panel correspondence and start reading Weller's response, which arrived this morning and which I already know is going to give me something new to write back to.
Fourteen sites.
Three down.
Eleven waiting.
I start writing.