Analee asks a word with him outside the room and off the record. He consents. Patty and I are alone in the room with the court reporter, whose hands are now in her lap.
“That card tells me more about you than I wanted to know. Isn’t your own family enough without needing my child also? What’s wrong with you?”
At this moment, I hear Analee’s raised voice outside the door. That gives me strength. I trust she is making the same complaint.
“Dawn is as much part of our family as she is yours,” Patty answers coolly. She gets up and walks out of the room.
In a moment, Analee gestures me to join her outside the room, and we go into an adjacent smaller room where we can be alone. She explains that Stephen didn’t even know the card was there. He told her he would not have put it there had he known. He promised to give her a photocopy of the card at the end of the day. Staring at me pointedly, she tells me to stay present, give brief answers and leave the card alone. I agree.
He begins by asking how often I had allowed Patty to visit with Dawn since the guardianship was terminated.
“She hasn’t asked.”
“My question was: how many times?”
“Once, while we were in mediation, but Patty broke that off.”
“Before the guardianship was terminated, how often did Patty allow you to visit with Dawn?”
“Usually, it was every weekend, but Patty started interfering with that toward the end, and Patty wouldn’t even allow me to come to Ian’s birthday party.”
“Did she give you any explanation for the birthday party?”
“Yes. She told me it was for her family.”
For the first time, I see him shift in his chair and glance at Patty’s notecard, on which she has written nothing. She stares in another direction.
He shifts rapidly to another subject.
“On the day that Dawn fell into the river, what injuries did she sustain?”
“She had a big bruise on her head. We were worried about a concussion, but the doctor ruled that out.”
“Were you supposed to return Dawn to Patty at the end of that day?”
“Either the end of that day or the following morning, I can’t remember now.”
“Did you return her on time?”
“No, I called Patty and told her I would keep her some extra time because the doctor wanted me to keep watch on her to make sure she didn’t have a concussion.”
“How long after that accident did you return Dawn?”
“Three days. And then Patty told me I couldn’t have the next weekend because I had kept Dawn too long.”
He returns to the scene of the accident, asking me to describe the terrain in detail, as if I had decided to climb Everest with Dawn on my back. I stay calm. I describe accurately. I do not ramble. He seems to wind down a bit himself by the end of the afternoon. Finally, he calls a break and invites Patty out of the room. They come back in a few minutes and he declares the deposition over. I go outside to wait in the parking lot while Analee waits for the copy of the Christmas card.
She comes out with it and hands it to me. “I don’t think he knew about this before. He seemed pretty unhappy about it.”
I stare at the photocopy of the card. Sandra stands between her parents, their hands on her shoulders, while Ian and Dawn hold hands on the chair in front of them. It bears a current date and contains a note in Patty’s handwriting with her holiday wishes and thanks for his good work. I can’t tell when they had posed the picture, but it is less than a year old; that much I can tell from just looking at Dawn’s face and legs. I hand it back as if it were slime.
“Why does she think she needs my daughter?”
Analee sympathizes, tells me she has no answer. I’m eager to get into my car and drive home. The ride itself gives me a chance to think.
Until I was thirty-eight, I didn’t even know that every woman is born with all the eggs she will ever have, and, starting with her first menstrual cycle, she loses one every month until menstruation itself ends. Before I even had my first period, I expected it to be a nuisance. Aside from the welcome marker of growing up, which came late for me, it was always an unexpected handicap. All through my teen-aged years, I never had a regular period, and it always came at an inconvenient time, like just before swim class, when I worried I would leave a red trail behind me in the water. As a young woman, I gained a modicum of predictability by taking the pill. Along with the regularity, I could rely on not becoming pregnant. When Patty had Sandra, I was almost thirty. Though I was curious about having a niece, I was completely disinterested in ‘settling down,’ as my parents phrased it, or in having any children. I never even thought of menstruation as an accumulation of losses. Now that it has stopped for me altogether, and I realize how I wasted whatever fertile years I had, I feel the accumulation of losses.
I may have been peri-menopausal when the idea of having a child first occurred to me. I was having uncontainably heavy periods, which fooled me into thinking I might be especially fertile. My moods ranged dramatically, and I began to feel, for the first time, that I had wasted my life. Even though I would not have traded Patty’s husband or children or mode of life for my own, I began to envy her the surrounding of family. She’d married at twenty-seven, had Sandra immediately, and now had a yard full of swing sets and a pool full of floating children’s toys that made me sad in a way I could not describe. I found relief in my painting, in sitting at the easel totally focused on the colors I intended to create, but even reading my stories to an audience of children sometimes left me feeling I had lost something, something had washed out of me. I sometimes wonder how much my menopausal stage contributed to the depression that sent me to the hospital.
I know the difference between sadness and depression, and that itself gives me a measure of comfort. I’m sad that I never had my own biological child, if only because no one else could then have claimed her. But I have Dawn – she is her own, completely unique and wonderful self, regardless of whose genes combined to create her. Still, I profoundly regret having relied on Patty for her eggs. As much as I was grateful then, and for her saving Dawn and me when I was depressed, I resent her now. I hate her. I don’t know how to end this misery. I don’t want to destroy her; I just want her to leave us alone. She seems to want to destroy me, both financially and by taking Dawn from me. I don’t understand what propels her. Even if I did, it might not give me the tools to make this trouble end.
22
ANALEE
It’s a chilly Sunday in January a week before trial is scheduled to begin, and I have come to the office, where it is totally deserted, to complete my trial brief. Adam has taken the boys to Tahoe to play in the snow, which will occupy them all day. In theory, I could do the same work at home, but my office creates the mental space for me to get my work done.
I have finished my recitation of facts, after obsessing about how to designate Patty and Karen. Instead of genetic mother, Patty is the ‘ovum donor’ and Karen is simply ‘Dawn’s mother,’ not ‘birth mother.’ How many iterations have I written and deleted before landing on these simple descriptions? I am now trying to outline and prioritize the legal principles, borrowing partly from my earlier, unsuccessful motion to dismiss. I have got as far as articulating the state’s public policy of establishing a child’s parentage as early as possible, so as to provide stability and consistency for the child. But it is obvious to me that Dawn has had no consistency, through no one’s fault or neglect. She has spent the first twenty months of her life with Karen, then almost the same period of time with Patty and her family, first visiting her mother in the hospital and then on weekends. Remarkably, this child does not seem troubled or confused, and her first semester in school has been a happy one. The legal principles sound so cold and abstract. I have to bring them to life to compel a judgment for Karen.
I hear a key in the door and freeze. W
ho could be here at this hour? So far as I knew, the cleaning people come on Friday evenings. The door opens and closes loudly, without stealth. As soon as I hear the step, I know it is my dad. I fly up from my chair.
“Carter!” I fling my arms around him.
“How did I know where to find you,” he jokes, kissing me lightly on the forehead. “Are you ready?”
“I’m slogging through my trial brief,” I moan. “I can’t bring it to life.” It is a child’s voice inside me chanting I can’t, I can’t. He hears it too.
He doffs his jacket and sits down in the client’s chair facing my desk. He grabs a pen and tablet from my desk and looks at me fixedly.
“Why shouldn’t Dawn go back to live with Patty and her family? It’s part of what she knows as family, and she’s been well nurtured there.”
“She belongs with her mother,” I begin, but his skeptical look matches my own recognition that this isn’t even an adequate beginning. I begin again, and he keeps asking me hard questions, until I finally begin to weave together a more powerful beginning.
“Can I take you to lunch?” he asks, but my pleading look is his answer. “Okay, tell me what to bring back for you.”
By the time he returns with my tuna melt and coke, I am well into my legal argument.
“What would I do without you?” I look at his wiry frame. Still healthy and in full possession of his penetrating mind at seventy-four, he invigorates me every time he revisits what used to be his office. But someday he will be gone.
“You’ll figure it out,” he tells me with a grin and locks the door as he leaves.
With the ‘juice’ he has provided me, I finish the trial brief by four and have enough energy to concoct a robust chili and toasted cheese sandwiches for Adam and the boys when they tumble in after their day in the snow. Andy is so hungry he abandons his reservations about eating food that isn’t red or green. Their banter carries me through the evening, and I fall asleep curled around the sturdy warmth of Adam’s body.
I awake at six on Monday, fueled by the challenge of preparing Karen to testify. She will be in today for what I hope will be far better, more thorough preparation than I provided her for her deposition. Strange, how some witnesses rally under pressure, giving better answers than during prep sessions, and others seem to decompose, getting angry, forgetful or pre-occupied with spooling out their life story. Sitting beside her helplessly as Karen went into a kind of reverie as she pondered the questions at her deposition and then paused unnaturally long before answering, was a strange new experience for me. I felt that day that Karen had presented herself as a zombie to Stephen, who must have thought me inept. I must find out from Karen how she experienced that session and discover the clue to her becoming a good witness.
23
KAREN
Trial has completely disarranged what remains of my family, and it has not even yet begun. I awake at 6:13, just before the alarm is to go off at 6:15 on Monday morning. I turn it off. The day is not yet light, but raucous jays and a distant rooster have disturbed the silence.
Megan, amazing friend that she is, has spent the night on an air mattress in my living room. She will take Dawn to school this morning and will pick her up after school. Sam has remained at home to take her younger brother to school. And Jenny, my other best friend, will arrive at 7:00 sharp to drive me to Roseville, where I will meet Analee at 8:00 at the courthouse (never again to be late for Analee!), and trial will start this morning at 9:00 and go all this first week of February. Jenny will attend the whole trial with me.
A trial against my sister. Two practical orphans, she and I, now enemies in a courtroom. I cannot even comprehend this, although I have started to live this enmity in pieces, as we prepared for trial.
I am alert to the point of vigilance. At Analee’s instruction, I have purchased and put on a dress in a soft color, a blue the color of a lake with no sun shining on it, that the saleswoman called teal. Last night I bristled at having to put on a costume, but Megan stopped me cold.
“Why do you think we pay so much attention to costume in the theater? People get to see a character for only a couple of hours, at most, and I need to create an impression through costume. Don’t underestimate it.”
When I told her this isn’t theater, she practically shouted at me.
“Get real. This is theater – with consequences!”
When I go in to wake Dawn, she is on her back with her stuffed river otter under one arm, her halo of red curls splayed around her. Yes, I say to myself, this is why I must do this, so that she can remain at home here, where she belongs. I kiss her on the forehead, but this is not enough to wake her. “Wake up, my girl,” I say, and she opens her eyes.
“When do you have to go?” She knows I must spend the week in court, whatever that means to her, but she does not know why, has not asked.
“Soon, but if you get up now, we can have breakfast together.” She rolls out of bed quickly, asking for berries on her cereal. She saw me buy strawberries yesterday, out of season, for this week.
I leave the room, knowing she will insist on dressing herself anyway, in a colorful, mismatched fashion that makes sense only to her. I tell her to dress for a cold day.
Megan is up and dressed herself, making coffee in the kitchen. She glances at me approvingly, and notes I have put on the right ‘good mother costume’.
“It had better not last more than a week,” I tell her. “I have only four of these.”
“Well, you picked the right one to start.”
I pour two bowls of cheerios and cut bananas and strawberries for them. Megan, who hates cereal, has toasted two slices of bread for herself. Dawn bounds into the kitchen, wearing a bright red sweater, blue skirt and orange tights. She gives Megan a hug. Megan knows better than to comment on Dawn’s choice of clothes.
Jenny arrives right on time, announcing that it is cold and clear, no ice on the roads. She too gives Dawn a big hug, but she compliments Dawn on her beautiful red sweater. Dawn twirls, announcing that she will warm up the day.
“So you will,” Jenny says as we leave. I kiss Dawn goodbye as if it were just another school day.
When I see how crowded the highway is, I thank Jenny for driving, for “doing this,” which means much more than the driving. We are almost silent in the car on the way in, and she pulls up to the courthouse as if she drives this route every day. We find the meeting place in the cafeteria and arrive early. Analee, already seated at a table with a cup of coffee, glances at her watch and smiles approvingly at us both. I introduce her to Jenny, and Analee thanks her for driving me. As she gets up to get coffee for us both, I notice she wears a suit the color of some dark red wine, a white blouse with no collar, a single string of big pearls, and simple black heels. One day when we were preparing for trial, she told me she always wears ‘sincere pearls’.
“Remember that Patty, as the Petitioner, gets to go first in everything at trial, opening statements, witnesses…. She could call you first, though I doubt she will, but don’t be shocked if it happens. Just trust that you are ready.” She takes another sip of coffee, gulps it, and looks at me very closely.
“You will hear lots of things that are hard to listen to, that may be lies, but don’t react to them. Trust me that you will get your turn to set them right.”
“Yes,” I repeat obediently. We have spent many hours rehearsing for my testimony at trial, and I know it has helped me to stand here without my hands shaking. I show her the small tablet I have brought to write down reminders. She nods her approval.
When we enter the courtroom, Patty and her lawyer are already at their counsel table, notebooks arranged in front of them. The two lawyers shake hands and greet each other, but Patty and I do not. Patty is dressed almost identically to Analee, with her own ‘sincere pearls’ and gray suit. Her attorney keeps bobbing up, to re-arrange this or that, a man who seems mor
e at ease standing than in a chair. He is decked out in a charcoal suit with a white shirt and neat, small red bowtie. I don’t know whether it is Megan, the theater director, or Analee who has made me so conscious of everyone’s courtroom costumes, but I seem pre-occupied with these details today. It is not my world. I know performance counts here, and I will try to be attentive to every detail I can catch.
The judge’s nameplate sits atop the wall around the desk: Graciela Garcia. I lean over to Analee and whisper, “our judge is a woman?”
“Yes, and she’s a smart, no-nonsense judge. Also a single mother,” she whispers the last part very softly.
When the judge walks in, we all stand. Everyone in the courtroom is taller than she is, and slimmer by a significant margin. Judge Garcia has a double chin, round cheeks that have not yet begun to sink, and a smile that would calm a frightened child. And curly brown hair that falls forward over her face; she brushes it back behind her ears before she even sits down. I will see her do this many times over the course of this trial.
After the attorneys have announced their names and ours, the judge tells us all that she has read counsel’s ‘excellent’ briefs. Looking piercingly at Patty and me alternatively, she says, “this trial is about a small child who is lucky to have family members who care about her deeply, but unlucky to have family members who are fighting over her.” She asks if counsel wish to make opening statements, and Stephen Petrakis rises as if about to take the oath of office. His sense of control over the courtroom is palpable.
“This lucky/unlucky child to whom you refer,” he pauses for emphasis, “could not have been conceived or born without the two women in this courtroom. They are each, in their own way, this child’s mother. When one faltered, the other was able to take charge and rear this child. Each of her mothers has spent substantial time in her rearing, and each deserves to be recognized as one of Dawn’s parents.”
Raising Dawn Page 18