The Body in Question

by Jill Ciment

  Next, Graham, or one of his students, will roll her husband supine and make a series of lateral incisions, lifting off the rib cage, including the deformed rib. Graham will then explain to his students that the rib was deformed by a childhood case of rickets.

  At some point, Graham will reach into her husband’s chest, into the mediastinum, to unleash the veins and aortas from the posterior sac, and hold up the organ to demonstrate to the students how her husband’s heart once beat.

  She will never let those hands touch her again.

  In days of the weeks that are indistinguishable to Hannah, the television remains on as a reminder that the world continues on the far side of the lake. Television voices are more comforting than music. Music makes Hannah feel. Music makes her want to dance.

  The restlessness that had contributed to her ridding the house of all her husband’s things—his suits, his shoes, his reading glasses, his lucky pebble, his hearing aids, his hearing aid batteries, his collection of Ace bandages, his electric toothbrush, his ointments, his compression socks, his inventory of vitamins in which he placed so much hope, the gallons of leftover Ensure—has been replaced by frenetic stasis. She doesn’t suffer the panic of a trapped animal. The experience is closer to a person told to wait at a specific spot for someone who is late.

  Who is she waiting for?

  The only time her attention is able to assemble the world on the far side of the lake is when she reads or watches anything to do with the Anca Butler trial. Courtesy of YouTube, she has seen Anca’s sentence hearing four times. While the sentencing is under way, Hannah is back in the courtroom, not here in the silent house.

  “I would like to apologize to Mom and Dad for all this.” Anca reads a handwritten statement on a folded piece of paper. “I only wanted to prove to you how much I loved Caleb. I still have no idea how this happened, and I really wish I did. I go to sleep every night and wake up every morning and wish I could change what happened.”

  Hannah doesn’t believe that Anca wrote the note by herself. The word “prove” doesn’t appear natural in the teenager’s mumbled allocution. Who helped her write it? Her lawyer? Her mother? Her twin? The second paragraph is what interests Hannah.

  “I destroyed two lives that day, Caleb’s and my sister Stephana’s. No one believes she is innocent. I want to say to my parents, and the court, that Stephana never told me to start the fire and she never told me to confess. My lawyer didn’t want me to write this last line but it is true. I am a monster and I deserve to rot in jail.”

  To counter Anca’s locking herself inside a cell and throwing away the key, her defense counsel calls character witnesses to the stand—Anca’s teacher, Anca’s maternal grandmother, Anca’s former psychiatrist, and, finally, the parents.

  The father goes first. He chokes out his words. He can barely suppress his rage. “I knew something was wrong the next day. We spent the night after the fire at my mother-in-law’s. My wife and I took the sleeper sofa. When I woke up, Anca was standing over me. Usually when she would wake me up she would stand at the foot of the bed and shake my foot. But that morning she was standing by my waist, staring down at me and her mother…kind of creeped me out.”

  “Did she leave?” the defense counsel asks.

  “Yeah, she walked out, said she needed to feed her dogs. We stuck them in my mother-in-law’s garage.”

  “Did you see Anca any other time that day?”

  “No. I think she stayed in the garage. I don’t know. We were making funeral arrangements for my son.”

  “Would you say you and Anca are close?”

  “She killed my son. I only want to talk about that. I only want to talk about Caleb.”

  The mother goes next. She tells the court that Anca was a quiet child who loved animals. The emotional contortions her features assume are too complex to register. Hannah is reminded of the animal faces she once captured at the moment when the animal realized that nothing more could be done for her offspring.

  But Hannah isn’t behind a camera now. There is no manipulating this next memory. She is standing over her husband with the last syringe of morphine. Before dosing him, she rests her head on his chest to listen to his life one last time before she takes it.

  She becomes aware of the hearing again. The judge is pronouncing the sentence. Anca’s features may look expressionless to the judge and the media, but Hannah can see the quiet child who loved animals. She still doesn’t know what happened on the afternoon of the fire, and she will never know.

  A letter arrives from Beverly—Cornrows—the last person on the jury who Hannah would have ever imagined writing to her. A belated condolence letter? They still trickle in after four months. Hannah normally throws them away unread. It isn’t out of disrespect for the sender, quite the opposite. She imagines too deeply what he or she went through trying to articulate what is beyond language before finally resigning themselves to a string of clichés.

  But the peculiarity of hearing from one of the jurors makes her open this one.

  It isn’t a condolence card, but an invitation to a reunion of the jurors to mark six months since the trial ended. The restaurant’s location will remain secret until the last minute, in case the media gets wind of it. The invitation includes a letter from Beverly, who is organizing the reunion. The letter mentions “closure,” a word antithetical to Hannah’s lexicon, unless it is applied to physical wounds or men’s flies.

  Hannah has no intention of going.

  On the way back to the house, she finds a dead raccoon by the pool. How did she not notice it on the way to the mailbox? It lies in a rocky drainage ditch by the fence. Giving it a wide berth, she circles the body, which to her shock opens its right eye. The eye orbits heavenward to take in the cloudless sky before noticing Hannah. The raccoon doesn’t look rabid, it looks as bewildered by its own mortality as her husband was. In evident discomfort, the creature rolls onto its back, shuts its eyes. She knows it is close to death because she recognizes the signs from the hospice manual.

  Long breaks between breaths.

  Eyelids won’t close all the way.

  She phones Animal Control, then returns to the raccoon with a bowl of water and a bowl of potato chips. Setting the bowls down on the deck, she then pushes them closer with the pool skimmer.

  The raccoon doesn’t want food or water. It keeps switching positions, back to left side, left side to right side, sitting up, without any success in finding comfort.

  Then, to Hannah’s astonishment, the raccoon drags itself to the edge of the pool and slides in, headfirst. It swims in circles, almost joyous—the dying may experience a sudden burst of energy—until it can swim no longer. Using the skimmer and pole, Hannah helps it out of the pool.

  They wait together for Animal Control.

  The officer is a woman, wearing only garden gloves for protection.

  “He won’t eat,” Hannah tells her as she removes a cage from the rear of the van.

  Slumped against the fence, the raccoon is licking pool water from its lips.

  “I wouldn’t think so,” the woman says.

  After assessing the situation, she angles the cage so that the raccoon has nowhere else to go, and begins pushing the weak, bewildered animal inside with the handy pool skimmer.

  “What will happen to him?” Hannah asks.

  “He’ll be euthanized, the poor creature.”

  After the van drives off with the dying raccoon, Hannah rereads Beverly’s letter.

  Save the date!!

  Hello Fellow Jurors!!

  I don’t know about you all but I never in my lifetime thought I would experience something like it. We were all called to do our duty by the court and that is what we did. We each gave so much of ourselves during the trial. And after we did our duty, we were treated with hatred and lost our right to privacy. It is time we get to
gether and have closure.

  Had the raccoon not chosen to die by her pool, Hannah might not have gone.

  * * *

  · · ·

  She follows the Red Lobster hostess to a back room reserved for private parties.

  Graham is already at the table, flanked by Beverly, who has gotten rid of her cornrows, and Amanda, the schoolteacher, who sports a new engagement ring. Hannah has only spoken to Graham once since that night he posed as the night nurse, a condolence call he made shortly after her husband’s obituary appeared in the paper. During the call, it had taken all of Hannah’s reserve not to ask him directly if her husband was in his lab.

  How are you? he mouths as the others make room for her. His hair has grown out: each strand is long enough to coil and spring.

  “If the George Zimmerman jurors can have a reunion, why not us?” Beverly says to no one in particular.

  Hannah takes a seat between Jerry, the alternate, who is studying the cocktail menu, and Lana, the chemical engineer, who is checking her phone.

  “Maybe we should have met at Nic and Gladys?” Jerry says.

  “I still haven’t lost the weight I put on during the trial,” Beverly says. “Did you ever sell your story to the Globe?” she asks Jerry.

  “My literary agent dumped me.”

  “Who’s the lucky man?” Beverly asks Amanda, admiring the schoolteacher’s ring.

  “Joseph, the policeman assigned to protect me after I got those death threats. We fell in love.”

  Graham is staring at Hannah as if he doesn’t entirely recognize her. And he doesn’t. She no longer recognizes herself.

  “Maybe we should go around the table and each say something about our reflections on the experience,” Beverly says after they order drinks.

  No one volunteers, so she says, “I guess I’ll start first. Except for raising my kids, being on the jury was the most important job I ever did. I just don’t get it. Why did people hate us so much? A couple of weeks after the judge released our names, I was eating with my kids at Burrito Boys and the manager asked me to leave. In front of my kids.”

  Lana speaks next. “It was a rewarding experience until I felt the judge undermined us. I thought fourteen years was too lenient. The crime was unspeakable.”

  “I still can’t get that picture of the crib out of my head,” Beverly says.

  “Yes, the crime was indefensible,” Graham says, “but sending her to prison was wrong. She should have been sentenced to a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane.”

  He looks at Hannah when he speaks.

  The waitress arrives.

  Beverly orders the Seaside Trio, Amanda the Shrimp Your Way, Graham the baked sole, Lana the salmon, Hannah a salad and baked potato, and Jerry the Admiral’s Feast and another mojito.

  “Is the court paying for this?” Jerry asks. “The trial cost me big-time. My landlord towed my trailer away. I came back to nothing. All I had was the Globe thing. I told my agent to try to get me five grand. I mean, that’s nothing to those tabloids. We were in negotiations. But then that girl texted her boyfriend to kill himself and I was old news. I’d rather go to jail than sit on a jury again.”

  The schoolteacher speaks next. “If it hadn’t been for my fiancé, I don’t know what would have happened. After I got the death threats, I took a leave of absence from teaching. I just couldn’t cope. Every Sunday, a crazy girl with ‘Silence for Caleb’ written on her forehead and masking tape over her mouth stood outside my church.”

  Hannah’s turn is next. She tells them that her husband died six weeks after the trial ended, and that for her the two experiences are forever melded. Hannah normally uses the word “passed” to signify what actually took place. His chemistry transformed into energy, and that energy passed out of his body. But today, she chooses to say “died.” These people have seen the melted crib; “passed” doesn’t cover it.

  She accepts their condolences as she accepted the casseroles neighbors brought over, with gratitude but with no intention of eating them.

  Graham goes last. “It took me a while to make peace with the verdict after learning what I did about the suppressed evidence, but I still believe that Anca is guilty. She may not have acted alone, but she started the fire.”

  “Was everyone as upset as me to learn that Tim had a record?” Beverly asks.

  “One of the charges was battery,” Amanda says. “The girlfriend before Stephana had a restraining order against him.”

  “I don’t see what beating up a girlfriend has to do with arson,” Jerry says.

  “Neither did the judge,” Lana says.

  “But if you had known that Tim was violent?” Amanda asks.

  “I don’t like where this is going,” Lana says.

  “We’re just talking,” Jerry says, looking around for the waitress. His glass contains only ice cubes.

  “How many want to take a re-vote?” Beverly says.

  “What would be the point?” Lana says. “It’s not legal.”

  “We would know our own hearts,” Beverly says.

  “I’m curious,” Amanda says.

  “Me too,” Jerry says.

  “As long as the votes remain anonymous,” Graham says.

  “I don’t see what this proves, but fine,” Lana says.

  Graham resumes his foreman role and hands out napkins for the vote.

  The jurors pass around a pen. When the pen reaches Hannah, she writes, “NOT GUILTY.”

  “Remember,” Graham says before tallying the votes, “we did our best with the evidence presented. It was never our job to second-guess the law.”

  He reads the votes to himself first as he did during deliberations. “Five guilty, one not guilty,” he says.

  “Can I change my vote to not guilty?” Beverly says.

  “Anca’s eyelashes were singed, for God’s sake,” Lana says.

  “Only a retard would use paint thinner,” Jerry says.

  “Please, can we eat our lunch in peace?” Amanda says.

  Jerry stands up and starts waving his napkin to attract the waitress. “Where’s our food?”

  “Cigarette?” Graham asks Hannah.

  He ushers her outside.

  “I wanted to call you so many times,” he says.

  Hannah taps her feet as she stands next to him. She now taps her feet habitually. The electricity that passed out of her husband’s body has been transferred to her. At first, she thought the impulse to never be still was the restlessness of grief, but over the past couple of months, she has come to accept that his energy is now hers. The ancient Greeks believed that the body was a wooden flute, the soul was the breath as it reverberated within the instrument, and the spirit was the music released from the wood.

  Her husband’s breath is inside her. It is his song that she is tapping her feet to.

  She takes the cigarette Graham offers, slants it between her lips, leans into the flame. The tip of her cigarette is unsteady, and she has to guide his hand to light it. His hand is the first living thing she has touched in months. She doesn’t want to let go.

  Acknowledgments

  I wish to thank the following people for their generous help with this book: Lisa Cohen, Amy Hempel, Nicole Holofcener, David Leavitt, and Ann Patty for reading early drafts. Victoria Wilson and Gail Hochman for their impeccable input and unwavering support. Terry Smiljanich for his legal advice. And my brother, Gary Ciment, for his anatomical expertise.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.

 

&nb
sp;