The Brutal Heart

by Gail Bowen

  My recovery was slow and frustrating. Someone once told me that the greatest division of life is the one that exists between the world of the well and the world of the sick. After a lifetime of buoyant good health, I was suddenly on the other side of the chasm. Even after I was released from hospital, I lived in a grey world of doctors’ appointments, surgeries, and trips to the rehabilitation centre. Most days it seemed I took one step forward and two steps back. My body had always done what I wanted it to do. It was a gift I had taken for granted, revelling in its strength and its seemingly endless ability to bring me pleasure. Now, it was broken, and I was furious.

  Every morning I resolved to remain positive, but whenever I watched Ginny and her daughters running with my dogs, or found myself exhausted after swimming three laps in the pool, or was unable to embrace my husband, I raged.

  My family had always seen me as strong and capable. Now Zack hovered, and my granddaughters were tentative about proposing games or adventures. Taylor checked on me constantly. “Just making sure you’re still there,” she said once, then fled, horrified at the fear she had revealed. Whenever Peter and Dacia stopped by, I would see them laughing as they walked arm and arm up the street, but they would tamp down their joy as they approached our front door. I was, after all, an invalid. Even Angus became considerate – phoning every night – just to check in.

  The fact that three of the people I most loved felt guilty for what had happened made matters even worse. Zack was angry at himself for not calling Ed back, Ed was angry at himself for not pressing the issue, and Mieka believed herself directly responsible for Sean’s attack on me. The old playfulness between my daughter and me disappeared. She became obsessively solicitous, anticipating my every wish or impulse. She dropped by several times a day with something she thought I might like to eat or read or listen to. It was all too much.

  The morning before Taylor’s Farewell, I exploded. It was hot, I was in pain from my surgery, and the bandages on the wound made movement awkward. I was alone in the kitchen making a frittata for lunch when I dropped the bowl of eggs I was beating. The Pyrex bowl skittered across the floor unbroken, but the eggs spilled everywhere. The prospect of getting down on my hands and knees to clean them up with my useless right arm was too much. “Motherfuck!” I said. “I am so useless. I can’t even make a frittata.” The explosion brought Zack into the kitchen. I glared at him. “What am I supposed to do with this mess?”

  Zack picked up the Pyrex bowl, put it on the counter, looked at the eggs on the floor then at me. “Why don’t you call the dogs?” he said.

  So I did, and at that moment, my real recovery began.

  We ordered a feast from the Bamboo Gardens. It was an in-service day at Taylor’s school, so she and Gracie Falconer joined us for lunch. We all ate far too much and laughed hard. Even the dogs seemed to relax. That afternoon, we took the granddaughters to the playground, threw pennies into the waterfall at the park, and made wishes.

  The question of what I would wear to the Farewell had been vexing me. The only dress that fit over my surgical bandage was sleeveless, and the effect was not pleasant. When we got back from the park, Ginny met us at the front door. She’d been rummaging through her closet for an outfit to wear to a job interview and she’d found a lacy shawl that she thought might be the ticket. It was. The shawl not only covered the bandage but made my very simple shift look almost elegant. Clearly, my luck was changing.

  The gymnasium at Lakeview School was overheated and overcrowded, the parents were overdressed, and the kids were overstimulated. The girls giggled; the boys were loud. As Taylor had predicted, all the girls except her were wearing sparkly T-shirts, short ruffly skirts, and sandals with plastic flowers. To a man, the boys wore cargo shorts and open-necked shirts. Everybody had a fresh haircut. Taylor’s classmates looked exactly as boys and girls should look leaving Grade Eight, shiny and full of promise.

  The formal program was mercifully brief. Following Taylor’s orders, Zack and I had voted against a PowerPoint presentation of baby pictures, but we had been outnumbered. Since we didn’t have any baby pictures of Taylor, we chose a photo I’d taken the day she came to live with us. She was lying on her stomach on the kitchen floor, drawing an Amazon butterfly, and the electric-blue flash she had sketched with her marker seemed to fly off the page. She was four years old. There was no lame poetry, but the principal’s brief speech managed to embrace every cliché about graduation that had ever been uttered. The meal, served in the Resource Room by the Grade Sevens, featured ham, perogies, and cabbage rolls. For dessert there were butter tarts, peanut-butter marshmallow squares, and Nanaimo bars.

  No surprises except one. After we’d eaten, the principal announced that Taylor Love would offer the toast to the parents. We all picked up our plastic glasses of ginger ale and Taylor rose to her feet. As she stood gazing over the room, she looked so much like Sally that my eyes stung.

  “I’ve never done anything like this before,” she began, “but Ms. Jacobs said that all I have to do is speak from the heart. So that’s what I’m going to do, and I hope that what I say is what everyone else in the class would like to say to their parents. Before I start, I want to point out my mum and dad. They’re sitting over there: my dad’s the one in the wheelchair and my mum’s the one with her arm in a sling.” Someone laughed nervously. Taylor looked in the laugher’s direction. “That’s all right. You can laugh. We do.” This time the laughter was general. Zack and I exchanged glances and Taylor continued. “Anyway, I just want to say thanks to Mum and Dad for being there whenever I need you and whenever I think I don’t but I really do. Thanks for helping me with my homework and teaching me to swim and caring about my art. Thanks for driving me places and waiting for me when I’m not ready. Thanks for always making my friends feel they’re welcome in our home. Thanks for always making me feel I’m welcome in our home. I love you very much.” She raised her glass. “To my mum and dad. To all the mums and dads.”

  Zack raised his glass and cleared his throat. “That’s the first time she’s ever called me Dad,” he whispered.

  “First time she’s ever called me Mum,” I said.

  “Guess we finally made the grade,” Zack said. We touched glasses.

  “To Mum and Dad,” I said.

  “To Mum and Dad,” Zack replied.

  After that night, there were many good moments. Remembering a scene from an old movie he’d liked, Zack came home one night with a bottle of nail polish and an invitation to join him in the bedroom. There, for the first time but not the last, he painted my toenails. Mieka drove me to Bushwakkers for a Wakker Burger and a brew and by the end of the evening we were back to our old easy ways with each other. Angus called a lot either to talk law with Zack, explain law to me, or keep me au courant on life without Leah. She was letting her hair grow, and she was still seeing Mr. Empathy, but Angus was hopeful. The first asparagus appeared in the market and the first strawberries, and when I thought of the bounty the garden of earthly delights would produce before the frost, I felt a piercing joy. Peter and Dacia got a new puppy – another rescue dog. They named him Hugo. Dacia taught Maddy how to juggle.

  Sean Barton’s trial opened on a bracing October day. Zack watched as I got dressed for court. “Are you determined to do this?”

  “I have to see it through,” I said.

  He moved his chair closer. “Why?”

  I reached over and touched the vertical line on his cheek. Since the night Sean attacked me, it had grown deeper. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I just need to understand.”

  “Jo, there’s nothing to understand. The reasons a supposedly normal person does A rather than B are a mystery. Trying to figure Sean out is pointless. He’s a sociopath. Something in his wiring is twisted.”

  “Maybe I need to understand that.”

  Zack’s smile was weary. “Well, if it matters to you, it matters to me. I’m going with you.”

  I tied Taylor’s Paul Klee scarf and checke
d the result in the mirror. “I was counting on that,” I said.

  I hadn’t seen Sean Barton since the night of the attack. As I entered the courthouse and walked under the mosaic of the God of Laws holding aloft the balance of right and wrong, my pulse raced. Zack was beside me, and there were officers of the law and of the court everywhere, but I knew that the forces that drove Sean Barton had nothing to do with the law or even with knowing that right and wrong were opposing ends of a continuum. Sean was sui generis, and no system of laws could protect his fellow beings against his hungry amorality.

  He had elected to act as his own counsel. He had been disbarred, so as he walked into the courtroom and took his place at the counsel’s table, he wasn’t wearing the traditional barrister’s robes. His street clothes had been carefully chosen – a double-breasted charcoal suit, a slate shirt, and a tightly knotted striped silk tie in shades of eggplant and mauve – penitential but not confessional. His blond hair was freshly barbered, and as he walked past me, he flashed me his disarming crooked smile. Zack’s hand tightened on my arm.

  Linda Fritz was acting for the Crown. She was a tall, slim redhead. I’d seen her in action, and she was formidable: cool, prepared, and unflappable. Her opening address to the jury was a model of restraint and economy. She summarized the facts of the case and stated that the Crown would prove that Sean Barton had, with forethought and intent to kill, pushed Cristal Avilia from her balcony and stabbed Jason Brodnitz. Linda Fritz then gave a quick précis of the evidence the Crown would bring forth and identified her witnesses. Then, moving close to the jury box, she finished her opening statement with the assertion that the job of the Crown is simply to see that justice is done.

  Without witnesses and without evidence that would exonerate him, Sean Barton had nothing but his own story, and in his opening, he cited the metaphor that would inform his defence. He had taken it from Robert Frost’s much-anthologized poem, “The Road Not Taken.” Sean presented himself as a man who, like Frost’s narrator, was confronted with a fork in the road and made a choice that defined his life.

  He told his narrative compellingly, casting himself as the protagonist in a tragedy of passion doomed by forces beyond his control. When he met Cristal Avilia, Sean was in law school. She was a first-year student from a small town. They fell in love. They were both broke. After an evening of drinking and watching videos in the apartment of a well-heeled fellow student in the College of Law, Sean took his first wrong turn. One of the movies the group watched was Indecent Proposal, a film in which Robert Redford’s character offers a desperate young real estate speculator a million dollars to sleep with the realtor’s wife. The offer is accepted and a contract is signed.

  The student hosting the party had urged Sean and Cristal to stay behind until the others left, then he made them an offer: $1,000 for an hour in bed with Cristal. According to Sean, Cristal’s objections that she didn’t want to have sex with a stranger were just an act. Sean and Cristal went outside, discussed the proposition, and after a brief fight, she agreed.

  The rich young man liked what he paid for and there was a second tryst. The word got out, and Cristal’s career was launched. She was twenty years old.

  At this point in the opening, Mr. Justice Nathaniel Peters, an affable, heavy-set man, interjected. He was concerned, he said, that Sean was incriminating himself.

  Sean gave the judge his disarming smile. “Just do your job,” he said “And I’ll do mine.” At that point, Sean turned to the jury. “Cristal never looked back,” he said. I searched the faces of the jury members. They were clearly horrified, but Sean was oblivious.

  He went on to describe what he persisted in referring to as their “parallel careers”: his in law, Cristal’s in prostitution. He was factual and upbeat as he talked about their decision to move from Saskatoon to Regina. His experience at the law firm where he articled had not been a good one, and in his words, “Cristal and I both wanted a fresh start in our careers.” He was hired by Falconer Shreve. Cristal, whom Sean praised as “a good money manager,” bought a warehouse downtown, had it renovated, and set up shop. Two young people starting out on promising careers.

  According to Sean, Cristal liked her work. “She was a real people person,” he said. The gasp in the courtroom was audible, but Sean didn’t hear it. He was too busy spinning a tale of a life that was, in his telling, just a bowl of cherries until things started going wrong for him professionally. When he sensed that the people who mattered at Falconer Shreve no longer saw him as partnership material, his quarrels with Cristal became more serious. He felt that everything was slipping from his grasp. One of Cristal’s clients, an old lawyer who should have known better, started filling Cristal’s head with ideas that made her rebellious. She wanted to quit the business. At this point in his narrative, Sean approached the jury box, hands extended in a gesture that begged for empathy. “All of a sudden, it wasn’t the two of us against the world. After fourteen years with me, she wanted a different life. I had to get our relationship back on solid ground. I had to show her who was in charge.” As everyone in the courtroom waited for the sentence that would loop the noose around Sean’s neck, Mr. Justice Nathaniel Peters uttered his sternest warning against self-incrimination. Sean ignored him.

  As he described the last moments of Cristal’s life, Sean’s baritone was seductive. “She was going to leave,” he said. “And I couldn’t allow that to happen. She was my soulmate, and I couldn’t be separated from my soul.” At that point, he bowed his head – an actor, waiting for an ovation. The applause never came.

  Finally Sean straightened, squared his shoulders, strode back to his desk, and set about explaining the death of Jason Brodnitz.

  “The Ginny Monaghan case was make or break for me,” he said. “Winning that case was my last chance to be taken seriously at Falconer Shreve.” He smiled across at the Crown prosecutor. “My friend understands that sometimes we have to tighten a case to make sure we win. I had to do whatever it took to get Ginny custody of her girls. I’d learned from inside sources that Brodnitz’s professional rebirth had been financed by sex workers. I used that knowledge to win the Monaghan case.”

  He walked across to the jury. “By winning the Monaghan case, I had redeemed myself, but once again there was a fork in the road. This time I wasn’t the one who chose the direction that changed everything. If Jason Brodnitz had accepted his loss, he’d be alive today, but like Cristal, he pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed.” Sean paused dramatically. “Once again, I had no alternative but to push back.”

  As he took the measure of the jury, Sean’s head moved slowly, as if he was memorizing each of their faces. “So that’s it,” he said. “I stand before you today because fate led me down the wrong road. One day my life was full of promise; the next I met Cristal Avilia. We went to a party. We watched a video. A man made an offer. Cristal accepted, and my life was ruined.” He glanced at me. “There was collateral damage. Members of the jury. Judges of the facts. Ask yourselves whether, given the circumstances, you would have acted any differently than I did.”

  As Sean took his seat, the silence in the courtroom was absolute. Linda Fritz was slow to rise from her desk. Like any good actor, she knew the value of letting an audience absorb the implications of a powerful soliloquy before she moved along. When Linda asked that the boxes containing Cristal’s journals be brought in and admitted into evidence, the jurors were riveted. The sheer weight of the evidence was overwhelming. There were 168 journals. On the day she met Sean, Cristal began to record their life together: one journal a month, twelve months a year for fourteen years. The journals provided a dark counterbalance to Sean’s sunny account of two young people embarking on successful careers. As Linda read excerpts from the journals, Cristal’s obsessive longing for Sean Barton’s approval and love, and her pain at his continued manipulation and rejection, sucked the oxygen from the room. When Linda finished reading, there was a sob. Then there was silence. Linda had done her job. She had
made certain that Cristal Avilia’s voice was heard in the courtroom.

  A week later, when Sean finished his closing argument and the case went to the jury, Zack turned to me. “Well, the ship has sailed,” he said. “Let me go over to the office and pick up a couple of things, then we can spend the day doing whatever you want to do.”

  The weather had turned in the week since the trial began. The day was leaden, darkening, and the cold air smelled of dead foliage, long journeys, and winter. The trees in Victoria Park were leafless, stripped to the bare essentials. And although it was late morning, the lights in the office buildings were blazing.

  I hadn’t been to Falconer Shreve since the day I’d met Sean there and he’d shown me his new office. There were changes. Margot was settled in and there was another new partner. There were also a half-dozen new associates. When I passed the office that Sean had lusted after so fervently and planned for so long, there was a young man behind the glass desk. He leapt to his feet and came over to be introduced when he spotted me with Zack. The new associate’s name was Rick Warren. He was short and wiry, with a high forehead and slicked-back dark hair, and he was charmingly deferential to the wife of the senior partner. When he noticed that I was staring past him into his office, Rick stepped aside. “Come in and have a look around,” he said. The room was exactly as it had been on the day Sean showed it to me. Rick was watching me carefully, gauging my reaction. “What do you think?” he said finally.

  I took in the asparagus ceiling, the soft brown walls, and the café au lait reading chair. “It’s very handsome,” I said.

  Rick’s eyes met mine. “I haven’t changed a thing,” he said. “It’s perfect. The minute I walked in here I felt as if I’d come home.”

  Unexpectedly, I felt a chill. “Well, congratulations,” I said. “And good luck. I hope you’re happy in your work.”