Meanwhile, over in the corner, the aspirin-Tylenol-ibuprofen combination was beginning to work. Halfway into the visit, William’s prayers were finally answered, at least to the extent that a distinct snoring noise began resonating from beneath the washcloth. The sound was magnified several-fold by William’s alternately inhaling and then exhaling the water with which he’d soaked the filing.
If Stephen found the sound amusing, Penny seemed to take it as a cue to open up a bit.
“Daddy,” she said, “can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” he said without thinking. “Anything.”
“Did you ever hurt me? You know, do something really bad to me?”
Stephen hesitated. By nature, he was a follower of rules and didn’t want to risk jeopardizing his visits with his daughter. “You know I’m not allowed to talk to you about the case,” he told her.
Her eyes darted from him to the snoring William, and back to him. As so often happened, his daughter had been quicker to grasp the significance of things than he’d been. Now she sat waiting for his answer.
“Of course not,” Stephen said. “You know I could never hurt you, Cookie.”
“Then why do they keep telling me you did? And trying to get me to remember things I can’t remember?”
“Who’s doing that?” he asked.
“Everybody.”
“Who’s everybody?”
“Mommy. Mommy’s lawyer. Cathy. Mr. Hall. Mr. Hall’s assistant. All of them. They keep trying to wash my brain, Daddy.”
As if by their own volition, Stephen’s arms opened, and his daughter came up out of her chair and into them. He hugged her as tightly as he could without breaking her tiny bones. She was so thin, he thought, so terribly thin.
This wasn’t fair. When it came to him, they could do anything they wanted to. They could arrest him, they could take away his car, they could invade his home, they could put him in jail. He was an adult; he could handle it. But this was different. This was a child. His child. This they couldn’t do. He could feel her tears running down his face, mixing with his own, pooling in the hollow of his collarbone.
He heard her voice now, breathless between sobs. “Do you love me, Daddy?”
It hit him like a sucker punch in the gut delivered by some schoolyard bully, and it took him a beat to recover. “Of course I love you, Sweetie.” But even to himself, the words sounded silly, ineffective, detached. Here his only child - the love of his life, the stuff of his dreams, the single person in all of the universe he’d unflinchingly throw himself in front of a locomotive to save - was pleading for some proof that he loved her. And what did he have to answer her with? Words.
“Really love me?”
“More than anything,” he told her. “You know that.”
“Then take me away.”
Jim Hall slit open the envelope with a silver letter opener, a gift from some campaign contributor whose name he could no longer recall. Hall was used to getting mail from judges, and seeing Priscilla McGee’s name in the upper left-hand corner of the envelope didn’t surprise him.
But her letter sure did.
“Can you believe this shit?” he said to no one in particular.
Wendy Garafolo, the assistant who’d recently returned from maternity leave, rose from her chair, wandered over, and took a look. But she read too slowly for Hall.
“She’s changed her mind on the TV thing,” he said. “And she’s going to let Barrow have a jury trial.”
“Well, that she had to do,” said Garafolo.
“Yeah,” said Hall. “But she could have at least let him squirm awhile.”
“You still going to put the kid on?”
“Fuck, yes,” said Hall. “And I’m still gonna get me a conviction, too.”
As much as he believed in rules, Stephen Barrow believed even more that life was a series of tests. From the moment you came into the world, naked and helpless, you were tested. You took that first breath, or you died. It was that simple. You learned to suck at the breast, to crawl, to walk, to speak. It was an endless string of tests, one after another. Play, school, sports, work, all of it. You succeeded and went on to the next level, or you failed. Love was a test. Marriage was a test, one he’d failed badly at.
Fatherhood was a test.
So when his daughter, clinging to his chest, tears streaming down her face, begged him to take her away from the people who were doing these terrible things (interestingly enough, the word Stephen actually came up with in his mind, to describe what it was they were doing to her, was abusing), that, too, was a test.
And in that fraction of a second, that blink of the cosmos that was all the time Stephen had to decide what to do, he chose to think this: If I say no, I pass this test for William, snoring over there in the corner. I pass it for the evaluation, for the lawyers, for the judges, for the court case. I pass it for me. The only one I fail is my child. Years from now, she won’t remember the reasons I gave her, the explanations I made. For the rest of her life, all she’ll remember is that I said no.
It was at that moment that he rose from his chair and, with his daughter still wrapped tightly in his arms, walked out the door.
“Go find Hank,” Jim Hall told Wendy Garafolo.
In the two minutes it took for Hank Bournagan to appear in the doorway, Hall reread Justice McGee’s letter three times.
“Gutless wonder,” he muttered, along with a couple of other choice thoughts.
“What’s up, boss?” asked Bournagan.
“Nothing good. Get ahold of that Cathy Silverstein, and-”
“Silverman.”
“Silverstein, Silverman, whatever. Just get ahold of her, will you, for Chrissakes?”
“Yessir.”
“And tell her we need something good from that Barrow kid. Something that’ll stand up in open court, in front of a jury. Do you think you can do that?”
“You bet.”
“What happened to our Jeep?” was the first thing Penny asked as Stephen strapped her into the passenger seat of the Ford Fiesta.
“They took it away,” he said.
“This sure is a funny little car.”
“It sure is.”
He made a right turn out of the parking lot and found Route 20. “Where would you like to go?” he asked her.
“McDonald’s?”
“McDonald’s it is.”
At the drive-thru window, he ordered Big Macs, fries, and Cokes. They found a parking spot and ate in the front seat, Penny dismantling her Big Mac into its component parts so that she could dip each bite first into ketchup, then into special sauce. They ate slowly, savoring every mouthful. To Stephen, no steak, no lobster, no key lime pie ever tasted so good.
He felt like Steve McQueen. He figured if they drove all day and all night, they could reach the Mexican border before dark tomorrow. He was practicing his Spanish and thinking he’d look pretty good with a mustache when he heard his daughter’s voice from alongside him.
“You have to take me back now, don’t you?”
He looked down at her. The tears had dried, leaving barely perceptible vertical lines on her cheeks. There was a tiny drop of special sauce at one corner of her mouth. She was smiling.
If he spent the next fifteen years in prison, every day of it in solitary confinement, she would always know he loved her. If they chained him to the wall of some dungeon and beat him unmercifully, she would never have to ask him again. And in time, when she was old enough, she’d come to visit him, bringing along books and cookies, and maybe even a Big Mac, if they permitted that sort of thing.
He placed a hand on either side of her face, bent down, and kissed her on the forehead. “Yes,” he said, “I have to take you back now.”
Hank Bournagan decided against talking to Cathy Silverman on the phone. Hank had been a state trooper for two years before he’d gone to law school. He didn’t trust phones all that much. Besides which, the drive to Albany would get him out of the office for a
couple of hours and away from a smoldering Jim Hall.
He found Silverman at her computer.
“My boss is concerned about the Barrow kid,” he told her. “The judge is going to allow her to testify in open court, in front of a jury. The trial’s going to start Monday. We need to know if we can trust her.”
“To do what?”
“You know,” said Bournagan. They’d been through it before, five or six times. Without ever saying so in as many words, Bournagan had made it abundantly clear that if Silverman expected to continue getting referrals from the Columbia County courts, she’d have to deliver on this one. And delivering meant getting Penny Barrow to testify that her father had posed her, had done so on earlier occasions as well, had rewarded her each time she’d complied, and punished her each time she’d refused. And it also meant getting her to stick to her story and hold up under cross-examination.
“I’m seeing her tomorrow,” said Silverman. “I think she’ll do okay. I just wish that other judge hadn’t permitted her to have visits with her father. You never know what that could lead to.”
“Yeah,” Bournagan agreed. “Wainwright’s a real pain in the ass.”
“Maybe,” said Silverman, “I ought to give that social worker guy a call. You know, the one who monitors the visits?”
“Might be worth a try.”
Silverman flipped through her file until she found the number of the center. She dialed it and waited for an answer. “It’s Thursday,” she told Bournagan. “They’ve got a visit scheduled for today. C’mon, pick up.”
The aspirin, Tylenol, and ibuprofen that William had taken that morning had done more for him than at last bringing on the relief of sleep. They’d also produced a case of acute tinnitis, a constant, loud ringing sensation in his ears. Now, in the midst of his dream (he would forget the dream as soon as he awoke, except for the fact that he’d been inappropriately naked in it), the ringing suddenly changed from steady to intermittent, and got even louder. William opened his eyes on the third ring, but for some reason he still couldn’t see. He wondered momentarily if he’d finally gone blind from excessive masturbation. On the fourth ring, he discovered a wet washcloth on his face and removed it, trying to remember how it had gotten there in the first place. On the fifth ring, the pain returned, reminding him.
It wasn’t until the sixth ring that William spotted the phone, somehow connected the ringing sound to it, and picked up.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hi,” said a woman. William wondered briefly if she was naked. “This is Cathy Silverman, the therapist for Penny Barrow. Are you the one who supervises her visits with her father?”
William sat up straight. “Uh, yes,” he said, “I am.”
It was right about then that he noticed the two empty chairs across the room.
“Well,” the woman was saying, “I was wondering if you could tell me how the visits are going. I’m concerned that the child might be regressing as a result of them.”
Regressing? How about disappearing?
William rose to his feet, as though that might give him a better view of the room. But even from his improved vantage point, there was still no sign of either Stephen Barrow or his daughter.
Even in his state, William knew he was in big trouble. “Uh,” he said, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to get back to you on that.”
Stephen and Penny Barrow spoke very little on the drive back from McDonald’s. As far as Stephen was concerned, he’d done what he’d had to do, and was prepared to suffer the consequences. As for his daughter, she seemed at peace with things. After all, it had been her idea that they go back to the center.
Which was probably just as well. The $30 and change in Stephen’s pocket probably would have run out before they’d made it to the Mexican border. Besides which, what else was there to say? He’d already shown her how much he loved her, and she, in turn, had obviously gotten the message, as well as some food in her stomach. In the great scheme of things, those seemed like two pretty important developments, at least to Stephen.
After a quick check of the waiting room, the restrooms, and the cafeteria, William ran down the steps and out into the parking lot. Because Stephen always showed up absurdly early for his visits with his daughter, sitting in his car until William and Penny arrived, William had come to recognize Stephen’s car. It helped that it was easy to spot with its mismatched doors, dented hood, and cracked windshield.
Right now, it was nowhere in sight.
Had William only waited five minutes - four, in fact - Stephen and Penny would have driven right up to where he was standing, and he might have been able to overlook their departure. But William was an employee, and like most employees, he feared for his job. After one last look around the parking lot, he went back into the building and reported to his director.
“Whaddaya mean, they went AWOL?”
And to cover for his own supervisory lapse, William was compelled to make things sound just a little better for himself, and just a little worse for Stephen Barrow. The director thereupon demanded the file, located the original court order, and phoned the courthouse in Hudson.
“Judge Wainwright’s on the bench,” somebody told him. “Would you like me to transfer you over to Judge McGee?”
“Sure,” said the director.
Which explains how lunch at McDonald’s ended up costing Stephen Barrow $8.73, his visits with Penny, and his freedom.
Trial Begins Today in Child Porn Case
By Tom Grady Special to the Hudson Valley Herald
The trial of Stephen Barrow, the East Chatham man accused of taking pornographic photos of his six-year-old daughter, begins Monday in Hudson before Judge Priscilla McGee.
Barrow is being held without bail after briefly kidnapping his daughter Thursday from the center where he had been permitted to visit with her. But District Attorney Jim Hail is not expected to seek additional charges against him.
“He brought the child back shortly after he took her,” said Hall. “Besides, we have such a strong case against him already, we don’t need to worry.”
In a surprise move recently revealed exclusively to this reporter, Judge McGee has ordered that the daughter, whose name is being withheld because of her age, will testify on behalf of the prosecution in open court, rather than via closed-circuit television, as had previously been expected. Judge McGee is also expected to announce that, in spite of the fact that Barrow had earlier expressly waived his right to a jury trial, she will nevertheless permit him to withdraw the waiver.
While declining to confirm that it would now definitely be a jury trial, Judge McGee did tell the Herald, “I believe in being fair, and if the defendant wants to change his mind now and take his chances with a jury, my inclination would be to allow him, no matter how late the date or what the law says. These are very serious charges, after all, and I wouldn’t want to hear him complain afterward that he wasn’t treated fairly.”
The trial is expected to last a week to ten days. If convicted of the top count in the indictment, Barrow faces fifteen years in prison.
A trial, Stephen Barrow had often heard, was a search for the truth. Wasn’t that what the lawyer for that football player had said, before getting his client acquitted of two murders that everyone in America knew he’d committed?
Stephen had also heard it said that no system was perfect.
A trial, Flynt Adams reminded himself, was a roll of the dice, a court of last resort for those cases you’d been unable to resolve by civilized means.
It was a time when your relationship with your client tended to stretch to the breaking point, especially when he pulled some stupid stunt like running off with his daughter so he could get himself thrown in jail, making his lawyer’s job twice as difficult as it already had been.
It was also a time when your practice went to hell, you fought with your wife and kids, you became seriously sleep deprived, and your intestines more or less turned inside out.
A trial, Jim Hall knew, was a game. If you were better at it than your opponent, you won, nine times out of ten. The idea, of course, was to play as hard as you could, even if meant throwing an elbow or two along the way. As in most games, you were expected to step over the line now and then. Why else did they allow you five or six fouls in basketball before throwing you out, pace off a couple of yards against you in football, or banish you to a penalty box for two minutes in hockey?
It was all part of the game, that’s why.
A trial, Priscilla McGee had long felt, was a pain in the rear. It lasted forever, took you away from the rest of your work, destroyed your personal life, messed up your case disposition statistics, required your undivided attention, could get you reversed if you weren’t careful, and (in spite of your best efforts to shape the outcome) it didn’t always turn out the way you wanted it to.
Worst of all, you didn’t get paid one cent more than you would have if the defendant had only had the good sense to plead guilty in the first place and stop wasting your time.
A trial, Theresa Mulholland figured, was the only fitting way for the story to end. With her strict Catholic upbringing, Theresa had always tended to regard life as something of a morality play. For Stephen Barrow and his daughter, Penny, the trial would simply be the final act. So Theresa kept telling herself that, as unthinkable as it might seem to her, if a jury decided Stephen was guilty, he’d be convicted and sent off to prison, and his chances of ever being reunited with his daughter would come to an end. On the other hand, if he were found innocent (not being a lawyer herself, Theresa made the layman’s mistake of thinking that the opposite of being found guilty was being found innocent), he’d be acquitted and would regain custody of his daughter, and he and Penny would live happily ever after.
But either way, there’d be no place in Stephen’s life for Theresa. If he did go off to prison, as fond as she’d grown of him, she wasn’t about to spend the next ten years, or whatever, as his pen pal. The day after the McDonald’s fiasco, when Stephen had been remanded to the Columbia County Detention Facility, Theresa had moved her things out of his place and back into her own. She’d driven home in tears, telling herself that if things went well, she could always move back in with him.
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