Harper’s mother asked, “Where will I be sitting during the grand jury? Will I be close enough to hear everything?”
Ramona told her that she wouldn’t be allowed in the room at all.
“What are you talking about? Of course I’m going to be there.” Her mother looked at Harper as if she thought her daughter might be able to translate for her, as if she had misunderstood.
Ramona explained to them that in the grand jury room it was just the jury itself, the prosecutor, and the stenographer, along with any witnesses, who would enter one at a time.
“But I need to be there. She needs me.” Her mother cast an imploring look at Harper, asking her to confirm this, and Harper nodded. But when Ramona said that she was sorry, there was nothing she could do about the rules, she felt secretly elated that her mother wouldn’t be there when she told the lie again.
On Monday after Euro History, her mother picked her up from school to drive her to the courthouse. When Harper got in the car, she had to move the subpoena off the passenger seat. It was really little more than a letter; IN THE NAME OF THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK, it said, followed by
You are commanded to appear before the grand jury in this district court as a witness in a criminal action against Martin Willett.
Harper resisted the urge to crumple it and instead laid it on the backseat. She could hardly remember—as her mother drove toward the center of town—all those years that her mother refused to drive. She was adept at it now, even aggressive. She parallel parked with ease in a spot only a block from the courthouse, which was decorated with elaborate wreaths and ribbons to make up for the fact that the Town Board had voted to discontinue allowing the nativity scene that used to be displayed after every Thanksgiving. Walking into the courthouse, they encountered the tree that had been featured on the news the whole weekend because the board president had referred to it as a “holiday tree” instead of a “Christmas tree,” setting off a controversy that knocked the murder of Joy Enright down to second-headline status each night.
“If that isn’t a Christmas tree, then I’m Hillary Clinton,” Harper’s mother said to the guard who greeted them and checked their IDs before they could proceed. The guard looked as if he wasn’t sure how to respond, and Harper didn’t blame him. Her mother had been out of practice talking to strangers for so long that she was rusty; when she did it now, her comments often came out making only skewed sense, or no sense at all. For a moment Harper wanted her old, timid mother back, then felt guilty about the impulse and focused instead on the task before her, which she had avoided thinking about because she did not know how to get herself out of the hole she was in.
Her mother gave her a kiss for luck outside the grand jury room when the prosecutor came to get her. “Remember everything so you can tell me later,” she said, and Harper knew she meant for the book.
She nodded mutely, wriggling to put distance between them. She was wearing a skirt her mother had bought her for the occasion, and it made her waist itch, but her mother had told her not to scratch. The prosecutor came up to them and clapped his hands together, as if preparing to dig into a good meal. “Are we ready?” he asked, and Harper nodded again as her mother told him, “Absolutely we are.” Her mother asked him if there might not be some special allowance for her to accompany her daughter into the courtroom, “considering her age and what’s being asked of her.” Say no, Harper willed him, and when he did, making sure to sound apologetic as if he’d like nothing better, too, she muttered thanks as she followed him into the room.
When he’d come to interview her with his assistant, a woman who used a pink pen with a feather on the end, Mr. Kovak had worn black jeans and a sweater vest as he asked her the same questions, more or less, as the police and then Martin Willett’s attorney. He was a man who might have been her father’s age. He had less hair than her father, but his features moved in his face more, and she had no trouble hearing his voice, whereas she usually had to ask her father to repeat whatever he said. Today she saw that Mr. Kovak also seemed comfortable wearing a jacket and tie; the only time she’d ever seen her father in a jacket was at her grandmother’s funeral.
“Nothing to worry about. Honey,” Mr. Kovak whispered, the clumsy endearment an apparent afterthought. “It’s natural to feel nervous, but you’ll be fine.” The jurors were already seated, and she sensed them looking at her. “We’ll get started in a few minutes. I’ll say your name, you’ll come up, and we’ll establish who you are. Then just answer my questions. Tell me the same things you told me when we talked at your house, and you’ll be done in no time.”
Walking up to the stand, her legs trembled and she put a hand out to the railing to help herself into the seat. But Mr. Kovak asked her to stand to get sworn in. She had thought she’d need to put her hand on a Bible, so she felt momentary relief when all they wanted her to do was hold her hand up and say yes. A few feet away from her, the court reporter clicked quietly as Mr. Kovak asked Harper her name, her age, and a few questions about her friendship with Joy. There were more people in the jury box than Harper expected. A few of them took notes, but most merely stared at her.
Counting silently as a way of letting her mind do something other than recognize the impossible situation she was in, she felt a tightness in her chest and hoped she might be having a heart attack. If she went ahead and did what Mr. Kovak had said—answered his questions as she had when she was not under oath—she’d be helping to send to trial a man she believed had not been the one to kill Joy. (She’d thought this from the beginning, remembering how Martin Willett had smiled at her as she hung on the pay phone waiting for Truman to pick up. But then she convinced herself that it was stupid to think somebody might not murder somebody else, just because he had smiled at you. Who was she to say whether he was guilty or innocent? That was for a jury to decide.
But then she remembered that if she hadn’t agreed to say she’d seen him wearing a mask, he might not even have been arrested. But then she thought, Maybe they have other evidence I don’t know about. Maybe he really did do it, and I should play my part in punishing the man who killed my friend. This was the way her mind had been battling itself for weeks.)
Now here she was, a witness in a criminal action against Martin Willett. Beyond helping to ruin an innocent man’s life if she repeated the lie, she’d be setting herself up for perjury charges, which (she’d looked up online) meant they could send her to jail for three years.
If she didn’t give the answers they were expecting, the district attorney’s office would be mad at her. But that wasn’t the worst of it: the worst would be disappointing her mother. And she didn’t even want to think about what people would say at school.
“Let’s talk about the day Joy disappeared,” the prosecutor was saying suddenly, and she snapped back to attention. “I know it’s not easy, but we need you to describe what happened after you left Joy and the other girls on the ice and went up to the shack.”
She could do this without compromising herself. Almost eagerly she leaned forward and said, “I needed to use the phone. To call my brother.”
“Right. Okay. So you call him to come get you, and then what?” As he spoke he opened his hands in front of him, as if spreading the pages of a big book. The jurors who’d been taking notes stopped writing to look up in anticipation of her response.
Harper paused, manufacturing a lump of phlegm in her throat. “Could I get a drink of water?”
“Sure.” Mr. Kovak was doing his best not to appear annoyed, she could tell, though he didn’t succeed entirely. His assistant rummaged loudly in a bag at her feet, twisted open a bottle, then came forward to hand it to Harper. She took a long drink, her hands and mouth shaking, and water dripped down her chin.
The prosecutor gave her a tissue, waited for her to wipe her face. “Okay. You were about to tell us what you saw while you were outside the shack waiting for your brother.”
“I saw a man come out. He got in his car and made a pho
ne call.” Though she knew better, part of her thought that maybe if she said it all fast, nobody would notice what she’d left out.
“Okay. And you were able to identify this man when police interviewed you? The man was Martin Willett?” She nodded. “We need you to say it out loud,” he told her.
“Yes. I didn’t know his name then, but that’s who it was.”
“And after he made the phone call while sitting in his car, before he drove away, did he do something else?”
She pictured her mother shifting anxiously on the bench outside the grand jury room, and forgot the question.
“So what else did Martin Willett do before he started the car and drove off?” Now the prosecutor seemed less committed to concealing his impatience, as he took a step closer and tried to make eye contact with her.
“I can’t,” she whispered, looking down and twisting the skirt fabric in her hands. Then she gave up and pulled the waistband aside to dig at the itch with her fingernails. “I can’t do it.”
“It’s okay,” he told her, though clearly it was anything but. He made a calm down motion with his hands, and she sensed it was directed at himself as much as at her. He turned to the jury and said, “Just give us a minute, this is a hard thing for a child.” Then he moved right up to the stand so that only she could hear him. “What’s the matter?”
“I can’t,” she repeated. “I can’t say it, about the mask.”
“Why not?” The hiss got away from him, and she looked up to see that the jurors had heard.
She took care to keep her own voice to a whisper, a mighty task given what she felt as the words erupted and then emerged. “Because I lied! I didn’t see him. I mean, I saw him, but he wasn’t wearing a mask. He smiled at me, he got in his car, he made a phone call, and he drove away. I’m sorry, but that’s the real truth.”
Their eyes were locked now. His nostrils flared, and for a brief, panicked minute, she imagined him lifting a hand to slap her. Instead he only retreated a few steps, took a breath, and turned back to the jurors. “Okay, Miss Grove,” he said. “Let’s summarize your testimony. We’ve established that you saw Martin Willett at the scene of your friend Joy’s disappearance on November thirteenth. Is that right?”
“Yes.” She said it emphatically, an effort to redeem her failure to be the witness he’d counted on.
“Okay.” Mr. Kovak made a movement with his mouth that she couldn’t read—residual anger, or maybe just resignation. “With our thanks for your appearance today, you are excused.”
She left the stand and headed swiftly for the exit that would lead her back to the hall. She had no idea what she would tell her mother now, but she did not want to remain in this room a moment longer than was required.
Before she could reach the door, the clerk who’d admitted her came in and whispered something to Mr. Kovak’s assistant, who then stood to beckon the prosecutor over to confer.
Despite her eagerness to leave, Harper paused to watch. Did this have something to do with her? She heard the jurors murmuring, and then Mr. Kovak swore and rubbed at his forehead. He approached the jury box and said, “People, I’m sorry to have to inform you that due to an unforeseen development in this case, we are also excusing you from this proceeding. Sit tight for a moment, if you would. The clerk will let you know whether there’s another case for you today, or if you get to go finish your holiday shopping.” He tried to smile, but it didn’t come off because he was so obviously rattled by whatever he had just heard.
The murmurs were louder this time as the jurors looked at one another and then back at the prosecutor, appearing confused. Mr. Kovak packed his papers up and brushed past Harper into the hall. When she saw her mother rise and head toward him, she rushed toward the restroom in the other direction.
She returned ten minutes later. The hallway was empty except for the guard and her mother; the prosecutor was gone. Harper waited for her mother to say something, and when she didn’t, she followed her out to the perfectly parked car, no words passing between them.
They sat beside each other, the keys dangling from the ignition. “Aren’t we going to go home?” Harper asked.
Her mother shook her head, but she was not answering the question, Harper knew. “I don’t understand,” her mother said. “You lied about what you saw? You didn’t see that man that day?”
“No. I mean, yes. I saw him. The lie was about the mask—I didn’t see that. He didn’t have one.” She looked ahead through the windshield as she spoke. There was more relief to telling the truth than she had imagined.
“But I don’t understand.” Her mother’s hands remained folded in the lap of her coat. “Why would you do something like that?”
Harper shrugged. Was it possible she might get away with acting as if she didn’t know the answer herself?
Instead her mother said, “That’s not how we raised you. We didn’t raise you to be a liar.”
The relief and release Harper had felt dissolved in an instant, hot indignation taking their place. “I did it because I saw what it did to you!” For a moment, she worried that her words might strike her mother like a physical blow. But her mother only looked puzzled, her hands twitching in her lap. Before she could say again that she didn’t understand, Harper rode the force of her own fury and added, “This is the first time we’ve seen you like this—normal—since, I don’t know, years. Don’t you know I’d do anything I could to make that happen? So would Tru. So would Dad. There just hasn’t been a way, until now.” It all sped through her so fast, and took so much energy, that she thought she might have to lower her head to her knees.
“Oh. Oh,” her mother said. They were little expressions of pain, Harper realized.
She asked, “Should I drive?” She wanted nothing more than for the car to start and for them to be moving away from this place.
Her mother shook her head slowly and turned the key. They drove home in silence, except for the exclamation her mother made when the light turned green and someone beeped behind her. Harper was tempted to feel sorry for her, until she remembered being called a liar. What right did her mother have to be mad at her?
At the kitchen table, her mother dropped into a seat with her coat still on and cradled her forehead between her fingers. “You don’t understand. It’s not that easy,” she told Harper, who replied, “Yeah, well. Neither is this.” Without giving either of them a chance to define “it” or “this,” she left the room and, when that wasn’t far away enough, left the house. Only when she made it outside did she realize she’d been clenching her stomach from the moment she left her history classroom. She went back in long enough to rip off the itchy skirt and put on something that made it easier to breathe.
Quickening
The day the grand jury was scheduled to get Martin Willett’s case, Alison woke up moaning. For a moment, Tom thought that it was just her usual dread of the workweek. But when she sat up clutching her middle, he knew it was more than that, and fumbled frantically for his phone. A few hours later, after the emergency-room doctors had run their tests, he and Alison were told that her pain had nothing to do with the pregnancy. It was just indigestion, the doctor said, or possibly a trace of food poisoning.
“But the baby’s okay?” Alison asked, still lying on the exam table. Tom felt pierced by the measure of agitation in her face, and reached to brush a piece of stray hair from her forehead.
“He’s fine,” the doctor said. “You’ll start feeling him move soon, if you haven’t already.” He left the room brusquely, seeming not to notice the effect of his words. Their regular obstetrician knew they wanted to be surprised by the gender, but in the anxiety of what had brought them to the hospital, they’d forgotten to let this doctor know.
“Quickening,” the nurse explained, seeing their expressions. “That’s what it’s called when the baby moves.”
They were halfway home, both stunned by and savoring the news that they were going to have a son, when Alison’s cell phone rang, iden
tifying Helen as the caller. Tom felt a presentiment of what was to come—it announced itself in the form of a chill that began in his throat and threatened to choke him, but he managed to cough it away—and the next few moments played out exactly as he expected: Alison telling her mother to slow down, to calm down, to slow down again. Then listening without speaking, before she turned to Tom and held the phone away from her mouth long enough to whisper, “They arrested my father—go, go,” and him whispering back, “Where?” because she could have meant either her parents’ house or the police station, and she waved with alarmed fury in the direction of the house. He pulled a careful U-turn, pretending not to notice Alison’s next motion with her hands telling him to speed it up—now that he knew he was driving not only himself and his wife but the bundle of skin and cells that was growing into their son, it occurred to him as it never had before that every time he drove this truck, he operated a weapon potentially lethal not only to anyone in his path but to him and his passengers, as well.
Even with his caution, they arrived within minutes. Helen rushed out to meet them crying out, “You’re too late! They already took him!” and Tom did his best to look as if he had no idea what she might be talking about.
“Who?” Alison asked. “Who came, Mom? Who took him? What did they say?” They led her back into the house, each guiding her by an elbow. Tom had never seen his mother-in-law looking so—what was the word?—disheveled, he thought, for a perverse moment imagining that Alison would be proud of his vocabulary if she knew what was in his mind. The Helen he’d always known held things in: her breath and emotions both. Her hair and clothing were always in place, like her words and her actions. Aside from the night last summer when he’d walked in on her swigging wine straight from the bottle, Tom had never seen anything resembling fear in her face.
But there was fear now, beside the anger. “State guys,” she said, as Alison put water on for tea with unsteady hands. “Troopers. He’d come home for lunch early, we had the leftover ziti. He must have eaten too much because he lay down on the couch for a little nap, and that’s when they came to—arrest him.” She stumbled in saying “arrest.”
How Will I Know You? Page 28