by Jodi Picoult
Oh, there you are, I think as I look into Edison's eyes. This is the boy I know. The boy I hooked my star on.
"It seems," I say lightly, "that I am in need of a date to my own trial."
Edison lets go of my wrist. He holds out his arm, crooked at the elbow, old-fashioned and courtly, even though he is still wearing his pajamas, even though I have a scarf wrapped around my hair, even though this is not a ball we are attending, but more of a gauntlet to run. "It would be my pleasure," he says.
--
LAST NIGHT, KENNEDY had showed up at my house unexpected. Her husband and daughter were with her; she had come straight from some town about two hours away and was bursting to share her news with me: MCADD had shown up in Davis Bauer's newborn screening.
I stared at the results she showed me, the same ones a doctor friend of her husband's had explained to her. "But that's...that's..."
"Lucky," she finished. "For you, anyway. I don't know if these results were missing from the file accidentally, or if someone tanked them purposely because they knew it would make you less culpable. But what's important is that we have the information now, and we're going to ride it to an acquittal."
MCADD is a much more dangerous medical condition than a grade one patent ductus, the heart ailment Kennedy had planned to raise. It is not a lie, anymore, to say that the Bauer baby had had a life-threatening disorder.
She wouldn't be lying in court. Just me.
I had tried a half dozen times to come clean to Kennedy, especially as our relationship shifted from a professional track into a personal one. But as it turned out, that just made it worse. At first I couldn't tell her that I had intervened and touched Davis Bauer when he was seizing because I didn't know if I could trust her, or how the truth would reflect on my case. But now, I couldn't tell her because I was ashamed to have ever lied in the first place.
I burst into tears.
"Those better be tears of happiness," she said. "Or gratitude for my remarkable legal talent."
"That poor baby," I managed. "It's so...arbitrary."
But I wasn't crying for Davis Bauer, and I wasn't crying because of my own dishonesty. I was crying because Kennedy had been right all along--it really didn't matter if the nurse attending to Davis Bauer was Black or white or purple. It didn't matter if I tried to resuscitate that baby or not. None of it would have made a difference.
She put her hand on my arm. "Ruth," Kennedy reminded me. "Bad things happen to good people every day."
--
MY CELLPHONE RINGS just as the bus pulls up to our stop downtown. Edison and I step off as Adisa's voice fills my ear. "Girl, you not gonna believe this. Where you at?"
I look at a sign. "College Street."
"Well, walk toward the green."
I get my bearings, turning with Edison in tow. The courthouse stands a block away from the public park, and Kennedy has given me express directions not to approach from this direction, because I will be bombarded by press.
But surely it can't hurt to see what's going on from a distance.
I hear them before I see them, their strong voices braided together in harmony and climbing to the sky like Jack's beanstalk, aimed for Heaven. It is a sea of faces, so many shades of brown, singing "Oh, Freedom." In the front, on a small makeshift dais with a network logo backdrop behind him, is Wallace Mercy. Police form a human barrier, their arms outstretched, as if they are trying to cast a spell to prevent violence. Meanwhile, Elm Street itself is lined with news vans, their dishes craned to the sun, while reporters clutch their microphones with their backs to the green and cameramen film a stream of footage.
"My God," I breathe.
"I didn't have anything to do with it, but that's for you," Adisa says proudly. "You should march right up those front steps with your head held high."
"I can't." Kennedy and I have a prearranged meeting spot.
"Okay," Adisa says, but I can hear the disappointment in her voice.
"I'll see you in there," I tell her. "And, Adisa? Thanks for coming."
She tsks. "Where else would I be?" she says, and then the line goes dead.
--
EDISON AND I wander past oblivious Yale students, wearing backpacks like tortoise shells; past the Gothic buildings of the residential colleges that are safely walled off behind black gates; past the Poetry Lady--the homeless woman who will recite a few lines for a donation. When we reach the parish house on Wall Street, we slip behind the building unnoticed, into an empty lot.
"Now what?" Edison asks. He is wearing the suit he wore to Mama's funeral. On any other day, he might be a boy going to a college interview.
"Now we wait," I tell him. Kennedy has a plan to sneak me into the back entrance, where I won't attract media attention. She's asked me to trust her.
Fool that I am, I do.
LAST NIGHT, WHEN I COULDN'T fall asleep, I watched some cable show that was on at 3:00 A.M. about how Indians used to live. They showed a reenactment, a dude in a loincloth, setting fire to a pile of leaves on the long line of a tree that had been split lengthwise. Then, after it burned, he scraped it out with what looked like a clamshell, repeating the process until the canoe was hollowed out. That's what I feel like, today. Like someone has rubbed me raw from the inside, until I'm empty.
It's kind of surprising, because I've been waiting so long for today. I thought for sure I'd have the energy of Superman. I was going to war for my son, and nothing was going to stop me.
But, strangely, I have a sense that I've reached the combat zone and found it deserted.
I'm tired. I'm twenty-five years old and I have lived enough for ten men.
Brit comes out of the bathroom. "All yours," she says. She is wearing a bra and her panty hose, which the prosecutor told her to wear, so that she looks conservative.
"And you," she suggested, "should wear a hat."
Fuck that.
As far as I'm concerned, this is the memorial my son deserves: if I cannot have him back, I will make sure the people responsible for it are punished, and that others like them are left trembling with fear.
I run the hot water and hold my hands under the faucet. Then I lather up with shaving cream. I rub this all over my scalp and start to use my straightedge to scrape my head smooth.
Maybe it's the fact that I could not sleep; or I suppose the crater that's taken up residence inside me is making me shaky--for whatever reason, I nick myself just above the left ear. It stings like a mother as the soap runs into the cut.
I press a washcloth against my head, but scalp wounds take a little while to clot. After a minute I just let go, watch the streak of blood run down my neck, under my collar.
It looks like a red flag, coming from my swastika tattoo. I'm mesmerized by the combination: the white soap, the pale skin, the vivid stain.
--
FIRST WE DRIVE in the opposite direction of the courthouse. There's frost on the front windshield of the pickup and it's sunny, the kind of day that looks perfect until you realize how cold it is when you step outside. We are dressed up--me in the suit jacket that Francis and I share, and Brit in a black dress that used to hug her body and that now hangs on it.
We're the only car in the lot. After I park, I get out and come around to Brit's side. This is not because I'm such a gentleman but because she won't get out. I kneel down beside her, put my hand on her knee. "It's okay," I say. "We can lean on each other."
She juts out her chin, like I've seen her do when she thinks someone is about to dismiss her as weak or ineffective. Then she unfolds herself from the truck. She is wearing flat shoes, the way Odette Lawton told her to, but her coat is short and only reaches to the hip, and I can tell the wind whips through the fabric of her dress fast. I try to stand between her and the gusts, as if I could change up the weather for her.
When we get there, the sun is just hitting the headstone in a way that makes it sparkle. It's white. Blinding white. Brit bends down and traces the letters of Davis's name. The day of his birth, the hop
scotch leap to his death. And just one word under that: LOVE.
Brit had wanted it to say LOVED. Those were the directions she gave me for the granite carver. But at the last minute I changed it. I was never going to stop, so why make it past tense?
I told Brit the carver had been the one to screw up. I didn't admit it had been my idea all along.
I like the idea that the word on my son's grave matches the tattoo on the knuckles of my left hand. It's like I carry him with me.
We stand at the grave until Brit gets too cold. There is a peach fuzz of lawn, seeded after the funeral, already brown. A second death.
--
THE FIRST THINGS I see at the courthouse are the niggers.
It's like the whole park in the middle of New Haven is covered with them. They're waving flags and singing hymns.
It's that asshole from television, Wallace Something. The one who thinks he's a reverend and probably got ordained online for five bucks. He's giving some kind of nigger history lesson, talking about Bacon's Rebellion. "In response, my brothers and sisters," he says, "Whites and blacks were separated. If they united, it was believed they could do too much damage together. And by 1705, indentured servants who were Christian--and White--were given land, guns, food, money. Those who were not were enslaved. Our land and livestock was taken. Our arms were taken. If we lifted a hand to a White man, our very lives could be taken." He raises his arms. "History is told by Americans of Anglo descent."
Damn straight. I look at the size of the crowd listening to him. I think of the Alamo, where a handful of Texans held off an army of spics for twelve days.
I mean, they lost, but still.
Suddenly, out of the sea of black, I see a White fist raised. A symbol.
The crowd shifts as the man walks toward me. A big dude, with a bald head and a long red beard. He stops in front of me and Brit and holds out his hand. "Carl Thorheldson," he says, introducing himself. "But you know me as Odin45."
It is the handle of a frequent poster on Lonewolf.org.
His companion shakes my hand, too. "Erich Duval. WhiteDevil."
They are joined by a woman with twins, little silver-haired toddlers each balanced on a hip. Then a dude in camo. Three girls with heavy black eyeliner. A tall man in combat boots with a toothpick clenched between his teeth. A young guy with thick-framed hipster glasses and a laptop in his arms.
A steady stream closes ranks around me--people I know by a shared interest in Lonewolf.org. They are tailors and accountants and teachers, they are Minutemen patrolling the borders in Arizona and militia in the hills of New Hampshire. They are neo-Nazis who never decredited. They have been anonymous, hiding behind the screens of usernames, until now.
For my son, they're willing to be outed once again.
ON THE MORNING OF THE trial, I oversleep. I shoot out of bed like a cannonball, throwing water on my face and yanking my hair into a bun at the nape and stuffing myself into my panty hose and my best navy trial suit. Literally three minutes of grooming, and I'm in the kitchen, where Micah is standing at the stove. "Why didn't you wake me up?" I demand.
He smiles and gives me a quick kiss. "I love you too, moon of my life," he says. "Go sit down next to Violet."
Our daughter is at the table, looking at me. "Mommy? You're wearing two different shoes."
"Oh, God," I mutter, pivoting to go back to the bedroom, but Micah grabs my shoulder and steers me to a seat.
"You're going to eat this while it's hot. You need energy to take down a skinhead and his wife. Otherwise, you're going to run out of steam, and I know from personal experience that the only option for food in that courthouse is something brown they are trying to pass off as coffee and a vending machine of granola bars from the Jurassic period." He puts down a plate--two fried eggs, toast with jam, even hash browns. I am so hungry that I've already finished the eggs before he can set down the last of my breakfast--a steaming latte in his old Harvard Med School mug. "Look," he jokes, "I even served you your coffee in the White Privilege cup."
I burst out laughing. "Then I'll take it with me in the car for luck. Or guilt. Or something."
I kiss Violet on the crown of her head and grab my matching shoe from the bedroom closet, along with my phone, charger, computer, and briefcase. Micah's waiting for me at the door with the mug of coffee. "In all seriousness? I'm proud of you."
I let myself have this one moment. "Thanks."
"Go forth and be Marcia Clark."
I wince. "She's a prosecutor. Can I be Gloria Allred?"
Micah shrugs. "Just knock 'em dead."
I am already walking toward the driveway. "Pretty sure that's the last thing you're supposed to say to someone who's about to try her first murder case," I reply, and I slip into the driver's seat without spilling a drop of my coffee.
I mean, that's got to be a sign, right?
--
I DRIVE AROUND the front of the courthouse just to see what's happening, even though I've arranged to meet Ruth somewhere I know she won't be accosted. A circus, that's really the only way to describe it. On one end of the green, Wallace Freaking Mercy is broadcasting live, preaching to a crowd through a megaphone. "In 1691 the word white was used in court for the first time. Back then, this nation went by the one-drop rule," I hear him say. "You needed only one drop of blood to be considered black in this country..."
On the other end of the green is a cluster of white people. At first I think they are watching Wallace's shenanigans, and then I see one hoisting the picture of the dead baby.
They begin to march through the group that is listening to Wallace. There are curses, shoving, a punch thrown. The police immediately join the fray, pushing the blacks and the whites apart.
It makes me think of a magic trick I did last year to impress Violet. I poured water into a pie pan and dusted the top with pepper. Then I told her the pepper was afraid of Ivory soap, and sure enough, when I dipped the bar of soap into the bowl, the pepper flew to the edges.
To Violet, it was magic. Of course I knew better--what caused the pepper to run from the soap was surface tension.
Which, really, is kind of what's going on here.
I drive around to the parish house on Wall Street. Immediately, I see Edison, standing lookout--but no Ruth. I get out of my car, feeling my heart sink. "Is she...?"
He points across the lot, to where Ruth is standing on the sidewalk, looking at the foot traffic across the street. So far, nobody has noticed her, but it's a risk. I go to drag her back, touching her arm, but she shakes me away. "I would like a moment," she says formally.
I back off.
Students and professors pass, their collars turned up against the wind. A bicycle whizzes by, and then the dinosaur bulk of a bus sighs at the curb, belching out a few passengers before moving away again. "I keep having these...thoughts," Ruth says. "You know, all weekend long. How many more times will I get to take the bus? Or cook breakfast? Is this the last time I'll write out a check for my electricity bill? Would I have paid more attention last April when the daffodils first came up, if I'd known I wasn't going to see them again?"
She takes a step toward a line of adolescent trees planted in a neat row. Her hands wrap around one narrow trunk as if she's throttling it, and she turns her face to the bare branches overhead.
"Look at that sky," Ruth says. "It's the kind of blue you find in tubes of oil paint. Like color, boiled down to its essence." Then she turns to me. "How long does it take to forget this?"
I put my arm around her shoulders. She's shaking, and I know it has nothing to do with the temperature. "If I have anything to say about it," I tell her, "you'll never find out."
WHEN EDISON WAS LITTLE, I always knew when he was getting up to no good. I could sense it, even if I couldn't see it. I've got eyes in the back of my head, I would tell him, when he was amazed that even if I turned away, I knew he was trying to steal a snack before dinner.
Maybe that is why, even though I am facing forward like Kennedy t
old me to, I can feel the stares of everyone sitting behind me in the gallery.
They feel like pinpricks, arrows, tiny bug bites. It takes all my concentration to not slap at the back of my neck, swat them away.
Who am I kidding? It takes all my concentration not to stand up and run down the aisle and out of this courtroom.
Kennedy and Howard are bent together, deep in a strategy session; they don't have time to talk me down from the ledge. The judge has made it clear that he won't tolerate disruption from the gallery, and that he has a zero tolerance policy--first strike, you're out. Certainly that is keeping the white supremacists in check. But they are not the only ones whose eyes are boring into me.
There are a whole host of Black people, many faces I recognize from my mother's funeral, who have come to lift me up on their prayers. Directly behind me are Edison and Adisa. They are holding hands on the armrest between their seats. I can feel the strength of that bond, like a force field. I listen to their breathing.
All of a sudden I'm back in the hospital, doing what I did best, my hand on the shoulder of a woman in labor and my eyes on the screen that monitors her vitals. "Inhale," I'd order. "Exhale. Deep breath in...deep breath out." And sure enough, the tension would leach out of her. Without that strain, progress could be made.
It's time to take my own advice.
I draw in all the air I can, nostrils flaring, breathing so deeply I envision the vacuum I create, the walls bending inward. My lungs swell in my chest, full to bursting. For a second I hold time still.
And then, I let go.
--
ODETTE LAWTON DOES not make eye contact with me. She is completely focused on the jury. She is one of them. Even the distance she puts between herself and the defense table is a way of reminding the people who will decide my fate that she and I have nothing in common. No matter what they see when they look at our skin.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury," she says, "the case you are about to hear is horrible and tragic. Turk and Brittany Bauer were, like many of us, excited to become parents. In fact the best day of their lives was October second, 2015. On that day, their son Davis was born." She rests her hand on the rail of the jury box. "Unlike all parents, however, the Bauers have some personal preferences that led them to feel uncomfortable with an African American nurse caring for their child. You may not like what they believe, you may not agree with them, but you cannot deny their just due as patients in the hospital to make decisions about the medical care of their baby. Exercising that privilege, Turk Bauer requested that only certain nurses attend to his infant. The defendant was not one of them--and, ladies and gentlemen, that was a slight she could not stomach."