Central Park Showdown

by Sheila Agnew

  ‘Are you ok?’ asked Scott when I returned.

  I nodded.

  ‘He’s here,’ I said.

  Scott turned to look. Michael walked up the middle aisle of the courtroom past our pew, and stood near the top of the courtroom talking with his lawyer, Mr Tully. Michael didn’t hire that guy based on his looks. Mr Tully was thin and scrawny with a face like a bat and an uncanny resemblance to Gollum. His loose, sloppy pinstriped suit hung off him as if he’d bought a size to match his ego instead of his body. He reeked of a very distinct oily cologne that hung in the air like incense.

  Mr Tully said something to Michael. If a rat could talk, it would sound like him, wheedling and greedy and self-satisfied. Rob sat down beside Scott and me and told us that Mr Tully was a heavy hitter in the world of New York family law.

  ‘He bills eight hundred dollars an hour,’ said Rob.

  ‘Nobody’s worth that kind of money,’ said Scott.

  ‘You can tell he hates kids,’ I piped up.

  ‘You can tell he hates women,’ said Marcy.

  ‘That guy just hates people, period,’ said Scott.

  Marcy said that Mr Tully was the one ‘driving’ the case. I didn’t say anything to that because well, Michael hired the guy.

  The security guard said, ‘All rise for the Honourable Justice Paul Hansen.’ We stood up and an irritated looking small man with lank grey hair and thick glasses marched into the room as if he owned the place (which I suppose he kind of does) and sat at his desk. He raised his right hand in the air and waved it wearily at us as if we were his subjects.

  ‘All sit,’ boomed the security guard.

  The judge leaned over his desk and began talking to the pretty blonde woman at the desk in front of him. She laughed politely at something he said. The clerk, a skinny black woman in a dishevelled black suit stood up and called out the names on the court calendar. When it came to our turn, the clerk said,

  ‘Number seven on the calendar, Carey and Brooks.’

  All the lawyers on the case stood up. Scott and I went to stand up as well, but Marcy motioned at us to remain sitting.

  ‘For the petitioner, Michael Carey,’ said Mr Tully.

  ‘For the respondent, Dr Scott Brooks,’ said Rob.

  ‘For the child,’ said Marcy.

  Mr Tully began talking to the judge about some fundraiser they had both been at the week before. They seemed like good buddies. Scott shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

  ‘Your Honour, I have a deposition in the Ordenez matter later today and I wonder if I might trouble you to take this case out of order,’ asked Mr Tully.

  ‘Certainly Mr Tully, I’m happy to accommodate your schedule,’ said the Judge.

  I’m not sure if I misheard the fleck of sarcasm.

  ‘Lawyers only on Carey and Brooks,’ said the judge. He didn’t look at us. The judge and the three lawyers trooped through a door into a room behind the judge’s desk. The door was left open a crack and we could hear the murmur of voices. There was a lot of laughter. I rigidly forced myself not to look at Michael sitting in a pew two rows in front and to the right of us although I could tell that he looked at me a lot. I shivered.

  ‘Cold?’ asked Scott.

  I shook my head and he put his arm around me for a minute.

  We waited for two thousand years for the lawyers to come out. Okay, it was more like half an hour but it felt like it took forever. The Judge came out first and returned to his chair and began looking through some papers on his desk. Marcy walked up to me, trailing pens and pieces of paper from her bulging briefcase onto the floor. I got up and picked them up.

  ‘Ok,’ she said breezily, ‘let’s go, we’re done here.’

  ‘What?’ Scott and I said in unison.

  ‘But nothing’s happened,’ added Scott. ‘Isn’t the Judge going to say something to us?’

  Marcy shrugged. He’s supposed to address the parties but usually he doesn’t bother. It’s more comfortable to deal just with the lawyers.

  ‘More comfortable for whom?’ snapped Scott.

  ‘So what happened?’ I asked.

  ‘We talked about the status of the case,’ said Rob. ‘The Judge wants the forensics finished by the end of the month and he also scheduled a date for a pre-trial conference.’

  Marcy interrupted. ‘I have to leave. I have to be in Family Court in the Bronx, I’ll call you,’ and after kissing the air beside my cheek, she sailed off.

  Scott turned to Rob. ‘What a ridiculous waste of time! So many lawyers here, most of whom seem to be getting paid by me, and for what?’

  ‘I hear you,’ said Rob, ‘I understand your frustration. The wheels of justice grind slowly.’

  ‘Grind slowly! That’s an understatement. Nothing happened!’

  Rob looked embarrassed.

  ‘We have a date for the pretrial conference,’ he pointed out.

  ‘And it takes a judge and an army of lawyers to pick a date,’ snapped Scott but then he ran his hand through his hair and added, ‘Sorry, Rob, not your fault. This whole thing is driving me crazy. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Come on, Evie, let’s go.’

  We went out to the hallway and squeezed into the elevator. It stopped on the floor below. An old man used his cane to shove his way inside the already packed elevator. Seeing Scott, he announced:

  ‘Jax didn’t make it Doctor.’

  ‘Umm, I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Scott.

  Everyone in the elevator perked up their ears.

  ‘He was only three years old. He should have had a long life in front of him,’ said the old man sadly.

  A hum of sympathetic mutterings fluttered around the elevator. A plump, middle-aged woman pulled a tissue out of her handbag and wiped her eyes.

  ‘You misdiagnosed it, Doc,’ the old man added.

  ‘I did?’ said Scott. I could tell he was scrambling frantically around his brain, trying to remember who this old man was and who Jax was.

  He had a stab at it.

  ‘Um, did you bring Jax into the clinic last fall?’ he asked.

  ‘Last Fall? I brought him in two years ago to see you and he died three days later! He was a son to me,’ said the old man contemptuously, waving his cane in the air with such force that it knocked off one of the passenger’s dangling silver earrings. I bent down to pick it up but a young man in a grey suit stepped on it and it shattered into little pieces.

  Everyone, except the woman, who had had the earring ripped from her ear, was now staring disapprovingly at Scott and shaking their heads.

  ‘Here’s my card,’ said the man in the grey suit to the old man. ‘I’m a lawyer. You might be entitled to compensation for medical negligence.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the old man, putting the business card in his pocket.

  We reached the ground floor and all the passengers streamed out.

  ‘Was Jax your cat?’ Scot asked the old man.

  ‘A cat!’ said the old man in a highly insulted tone. ‘Odious cold creatures. My Jax was the most affectionate pet I ever had, the star of my snail farm. He was destined for great things.’

  ‘Do you people hear that? Jax was a SNAIL!’ shouted Scott at the crowd heading out the main doors but they had already moved on with their lives.

  ‘A snail,’ he repeated shaking his head.

  ‘Scott, you might want to let it go now,’ I suggested gently, taking him by the arm.

  It was a lousy day all round.

  Chapter 16

  When Scott and my mum were kids, they spent most of their summers with their parents at a cabin in the woods close to Highland Lake. Mum often talked about those family vacations, but my geography was pretty bad then (and not much better now), and I assumed that anything with the name ‘Highland’ must be in Scotland. In fact, Highland Lake is near a town called Winsted in northern Connecticut and it takes two hours and twenty-five minutes of fast driving to get there from our apartment on the Upper West Side. The reason I know this is that Sco
tt took me, Kylie, Greg, Lorcan and Ben there this past weekend in his old Jeep. Lorcan was a last minute add-on after I begged Scott to invite him. Scott said Lorcan is too cocky. Joanna thinks that is ironic coming from Scott. Anyway, I thought Scott would like Lorcan if he got the chance to know him better. Scott thinks Lorcan is a bit phony. He said that Lorcan pretends to act like an adult.

  I told Scott, “That’s not Lorcan pretending. That is Lorcan.’

  Joanna rather reluctantly agreed to take care of my bird Persie for the weekend. I owe her big time.

  The wood cabin was built in the 1860s to store ice. During the Second World War, someone converted it into a place to live. It sits alone at the bottom of a little steep hill backing into the woods. It was dark when we arrived and the Jeep got stuck in a swampy mixture of snow and mud, which put Scott into a dark mood. But by using our combined weight, we managed to heave it out of the mud, only narrowly missing running Ben over. (Greg was steering).

  The trees are so close to the cabin that when the wind blows hard, the branches tap against the windows. It wasn’t a scary ghostly noise. It sounded like the trees reminding us that they were there, but Lorcan didn’t like it. He said it was weird and creepy and he’d prefer the sound of taxi horns any night of the week. Lorcan has an urban soul.

  There are two small rather musty bedrooms downstairs and a huge loft upstairs that can only be reached by climbing a wide wooden plank ladder. Kylie and I shared the loft. Ben drove us all crazy with his barking because he couldn’t climb the ladder. Greg spent ages on Friday night constructing a rope pulley system with a basin so we could haul Ben up and down. But when we tried to put Ben in the basin, he ran out the front door of the cabin and we didn’t see him again for two hours.

  Scott made a really big deal in the car on the way up here about how we were going to have a TV and gadget free weekend, the whole back-to-nature thing. We didn’t care so much about the TV but were definitely a bit freaked out by the thought of not having wi-fi. As it turned out, the summer tenants had left a TV in the cabin. Right after we arrived, Scott spent two and a half hours trying to make the TV work, without success.

  To me, America has always meant the skyscrapers of New York. I thought of the countryside as being something far away in the past, like Huckleberry Finn, but, Highland Lake is as rural as anywhere in the west of Ireland. There are no street lights and the closest neighbors are down by the lake except for Chet, an old man who lives in a nearby hut with Skully, his ginormous dog of indeterminate breed, a 52-inch plasma screen that is bigger than his bathroom, piles and piles of dusty issues of National Geographic magazine and a stockpile of cans of tuna to tide him over if he is snowed in.

  Skully is probably the friendliest dog in the world – at least that’s what Kylie said when, in his enthusiasm about greeting visitors, he knocked her to the floor with his rudder-like tail. Lorcan said,

  ‘That’s not a dog, it’s a bear.’

  I think Skully might be part-bear. Scott told us that there are real hibernating bears out there in the woods, but that seemed about as real to me as Yogi-Bear. We don’t have any remotely potentially frightening animals in Ireland. The only thing you have to be wary of when walking in the woods are the nettles.

  We had a lot of fun over the weekend. We skated on the frozen lake and later, we hiked the trails in the woods. We were all impressed that Greg could name so many of the different types of trees. He was modest, like he always is.

  ‘Finn taught me,’ he said. ‘It’s like he was born knowing that kind of stuff. My mom, I mean, my birth mom back in Wisconsin, used to say that I was born with a pencil in my hand and Finn was born with an axe.’

  Greg sounded a little wistful as he said this as if he wished he was more like Finn.

  ‘I think that you and Finn were both born with a pencil and an axe,’ said Kylie, who always wants her friends to feel good about ourselves. She was about to say something else, but Lorcan interrupted her.

  ‘When I was born, I was immediately wrapped in a cashmere blanket. I wish I had that blanket now. It is insanely freezing out here. Let’s haul it back to the cabin.’

  On Sunday morning, Scott pulled out his old sledge from underneath the cabin and suggested we go sleighing in nearby Burr Pond State Park. The sleigh was simple and light, made of wood and painted fire engine red. The paint had hardly peeled at all but Lorcan laughed when he saw it, and said it was a relic from the twentieth century.

  ‘So am I,’ said Scott, ‘a relic from the twentieth century. Feel free to stay behind.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ said Lorcan smoothly, ‘I have some stuff to take care of.’

  ‘Great,’ snapped Scott.

  I wished Scott and Lorcan got on together better. They have a persistent knack for rubbing each other up the wrong way.

  Closing my eyes, I ran my hand along the smooth warm nutty brown wood of the sleigh. For a brief moment, I could picture Mum and Scott as children sitting on the sleigh, Scott in front, her behind, clutching tightly to him, her long blonde hair streaming in the wind from under her yellow bobble hat. They were screaming with laughter.

  ‘I love this old sleigh,’ I said, ‘it’s perfect.’

  Later, as Kylie and I hurtled down a hill, we laughed hysterically with the whole wonderful whishing joy of it all, the sleet lightly spraying our faces, the roaring muffled sound of the wind in our ears and the blue tinged sparkles of the freshly fallen snow. I thought Lorcan was crazy to miss this. On our second last run of the day, the runners hit a hidden stone, tipping the sleigh so we landed in a heap, headfirst in a snow bank, screaming like crazy, with arms and legs flailing.

  ‘Wow, that felt like flying,’ I gulped, spitting a hard lump of icy snow out of my mouth.

  ‘The way an ostrich would fly,’ said Kylie.

  ‘I thought ostriches couldn’t fly,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Kylie, carefully dusting snow powder from her bomber jacket. I marveled at how her hat still sat perfectly jauntily on her head.

  ‘I can’t believe your hat didn’t even fall off,’ I said picking icy particles embedded in my hair.

  ‘Akono gave me this hat,’ she said in what I would call a meaningful voice.

  I stared at her. Why would Akono give her a hat? That didn’t make any sense. She looked back at me.

  ‘We’re kind of going out now.’

  ‘OMG,’ I said, ‘Greg was right! Why didn’t you tell me? And, I can’t believe this, I mean what about your preparation for your career, you know, the sacrifices you have to make.’

  ‘Akono isn’t going to interfere with any of that. He’s very supportive of my goals,’ Kylie assured me. ‘Aren’t you happy for me? Don’t you like him?’ and she looked disappointed.

  ‘Yes, of course I like him. Akono’s great,’ I stuttered, ‘I’m just surprised. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘It just sort of happened,’ said Kylie ‘and I was kind of embarrassed because I’ve always said that I wouldn’t waste my time on boys and I didn’t want you to feel left out because I have a boyfriend now. Nothing is going to change!’

  It will change, I thought. It already has. But I said,

  ‘Of course not,’ and I hugged her, ‘I’m happy for you silly,’ I said.

  ‘I knew you would be,’ she said. ‘I’m still kind of surprised myself. Akono is so not my type. But he’s very persistent and he does the cutest thing when he is distracted, he puts one hand behind his back, like this,’ and she demonstrated, giggling a little. Hmm, I didn’t really get what was cute about it but I smiled enthusiastically.

  ‘You have to get a boyfriend too so the four of us can hang out together,’ said Kylie, ‘oh, and with Greg of course.’

  ‘A boyfriend! Scott would have a total meltdown. He thinks that I will be ready to start exploring romantic relationships when I’m THIRTY,’ and I pulled a face.

  Kylie laughed as we trudged back up the hill pulling the sleigh behind us.

  ‘I m
iss Akono sooooo much,’ she said wistfully.

  We had only been gone for two days. People in like need a little indulging, I realised.

  Chapter 17

  That night, our last night at Highland Lake, Scott hooked up some outside heaters so we could have supper outside on the side porch under the stars. He even fired up the BBQ. Eating hamburgers outside with snow on the ground and the dark shadows of the trees was a pretty special experience. After we ate, I cleared up the table outside as everyone else went inside to help with the washing up. As I picked up a plate of pickles, I heard frantic hysterical barking. Ben shot out the door onto the porch, foam dripping down the sides of his mouth as he stared at something behind me. I’d never seen Ben like that before. Puzzled, I turned swiftly around. There, almost within touching distance, stood a gigantic brown bear on its hind legs, looking at me. I’d seen bears before in zoos of course but there’s a universe of difference between an animal the size of small car, behind iron bars and one out in the wild, with supper on his mind. He didn’t look cute or cuddly or friendly. He looked … REAL.

  I froze, rooted to the floorboard as if my legs were encased in cement, the plate of pickles still in my hand. Ben’s hoarse barking felt like it was coming from a long distance away.

  It was only later I learned that everything I did was wrong. I stared back at the bear, looking directly into his black eyes. What I should have done was wave my arms up and down to try and make myself look as big as possible while avoiding making eye contact. To say that I felt frightened is woefully inadequate. I felt terror unlike anything I’d ever experienced before, a primal fear of being eaten alive, like a prehistoric cave girl.

  Ben’s barking attracted attention and Scott strolled out onto the porch and came to an abrupt stop. In a low, quiet, calm voice, he said,

  ‘Evie, go into the cabin. Don’t run.’

  I have no idea how long I had been standing there, the bear and me, looking at one another. But Scott’s comforting voice penetrated through the layer of sludge that seemed to be wrapped around my brain. Bending down, I grabbed hold of Ben by his collar and dragged him with me into the cabin. Scott was right behind me. The sound of the bolt on the lock sliding home, was one of the sweetest sounds I have ever heard.