“In the morning.” Smythe’s voice was now a monotone. “When Tommy came to the door.
“He was shaking. Then I saw that the rear door of his car was open. Strands of Carrie’s long blond hair were spilling from the back seat to the floor …
“I ran past him …” Smythe bent forward, placing her fingertips to her forehead, then spoke in a choked but louder voice. “There was blood all over her dress, and the muffler was stuffed between her legs. Her eyes were wide, like she was in shock, but they fluttered when she saw me. All she could do was whisper, ‘I didn’t want to hurt you, Mommy. I didn’t want to hurt you …’
“She died in the hospital, a few hours later.”
Throat working, Smythe stopped. Softly, Sarah asked, “How did Carrie die, Mrs. Smythe?”
“From a ruptured uterus, at the hospital. I couldn’t comprehend it.” Now Smythe held fast to the same fixed stare, her voice flat, without inflection. “Frank lost his senses. He grabbed Tommy and slammed him against the wall until he told the truth.
“It was kind of a conspiracy. Beth covered for Carrie, and Tommy told his parents he was staying with his friend Ryan. Instead Tommy drove her across the border, to Newport, Kentucky. Somehow he’d found out about a woman who did abortions for girls in trouble.”
The sentence came to an abrupt, bitter end. Symthe’s sense of betrayal—of shock and disgust at the secret world of teenagers she had thought she knew—seemed to distract her from the drama’s central fact: her daughter’s pregnancy.
“How long,” Sarah asked, “had Carrie been pregnant?”
Smythe was quiet for a moment. “Two months.”
“Do you now know what happened after Carrie found out?”
Barry Saunders stood up heavily. “We all feel, Your Honor, great sympathy for a mother’s loss. But this testimony is objectionable on at least two grounds.
“First, it’s irrelevant—it relates to the Ohio parental consent statute, not this carefully crafted federal law which governs only late-term abortion.” Pausing, Saunders flavored his words with quiet disapproval. “Second, the witness is about to give us hearsay. If, as she concedes, she knew nothing about her daughter’s pregnancy, she has no firsthand knowledge of the events which caused her death.”
The first point was at least arguable, and the second technically correct. But Leary responded before Sarah could. “The court is sitting without a jury, and is well equipped to sort out wheat from chaff. I’d like Mrs. Smythe to answer.”
Leary, Sarah realized, did not wish to muzzle a grieving mother on television. Slowly sitting, Saunders assumed a studiedly blank expression, a contrast to Martin Tierney’s attentive stillness. At Sarah’s request, the reporter read from a piece of steno-tape: “‘Do you now know what happened after Carrie found out?’”
“She went to the county chapter of Planned Parenthood,” Smythe answered carefully. “When the test came back positive, she sat down with the counselor.”
Once more, her words and manner seemed mystified, as though still stunned by the vision of her loving and compliant daughter talking to a stranger about so intimate a thing. “After you learned that,” Sarah asked, “did you visit Planned Parenthood?”
“Yes. To meet with the woman who’d counseled Carrie.”
“What did she tell you?”
Smythe sat straighter, as if preparing herself, though her gaze was far away. “That Carrie was afraid to disappoint me. ‘It would kill my mother,’ she kept saying.”
“Did the counselor tell her she could go to court?”
“Yes.” The witness looked down. “She was afraid of that, too. You see, Judge Clausen goes to our church. So she went to Kentucky instead …”
With a painful effort, Smythe looked up again, tears streaming from her eyes. “I would have helped her,” she protested. “I’d have done anything for Carrie. An abortion, anything. But she didn’t know that, and I never had the chance to show how much I loved her.” Pausing, Smythe wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and spoke in a stronger voice. “But if a stranger had to be the one to care for her, better a doctor than a butcher.
“This law didn’t bring us closer. It didn’t protect Carrie Smythe.” Turning, Mrs. Smythe spoke to Martin Tierney. “Instead,” she finished quietly, “it killed her.”
TWELVE
TO SARAH’S SURPRISE, it was Tierney, not Saunders, who rose to cross-examine on behalf of the fetus: questioning Abby Smythe would not be a sympathetic business, and Tierney risked tarnishing his aura of aggrieved father. Beside her, Mary Ann spoke to him under her breath, “Why don’t you leave her alone.”
With an air of reluctance, Tierney faced the witness. “I don’t claim to know how you feel,” he began. “But Margaret and I feel for your loss.”
Mute, Smythe simply nodded: her air of reticence seemed to combine an acceptance of his statement with the caution of a witness toward a probable antagonist. Gently, Tierney asked, “Are you contending, Mrs. Smythe, that Carrie didn’t come to you because of the statute?”
Smythe looked away. “No.”
“Wouldn’t you like to have participated in your daughter’s decision instead of leaving it to an abortion counselor?”
“Of course.”
Tierney paused, gazing at her in apparent puzzlement. “And yet,” he asked, “your point seems to be that my wife and I should not exercise that same right.”
“No,” Smythe answered. “I’m saying that the parental consent law drove my daughter to an illegal abortion.”
“But that’s not the case here, is it? So suppose that Carrie had come to you as she should and could have. Would you have left the decision to her, or consulted as a family?”
Smythe stared at her lap. “As a family. We were her parents, after all.”
“And, as her parents, did you teach Carrie that abortion was morally wrong?”
“No.”
For a moment, Tierney regarded her. “Isn’t it conceivable that if Carrie believed that abortion was a sin, she’d still be alive?”
“Objection,” Sarah said angrily. “That question calls for speculation. Which makes its patent cruelty gratuitous.”
“Gratuitous?” Tierney responded in a mild tone. “Mrs. Smythe has suggested that a parental consent statute caused her daughter’s death. But the actual cause was an abortion.”
“An illegal abortion,” Sarah snapped.
“Enough,” Leary interrupted. “The question is out of bounds, Professor Tierney. Please take another tack.”
Glancing at a notepad, Tierney began anew. “Don’t you wish this counselor had told you that Carrie was pregnant?”
“Yes.” Smythe’s tone held fresh resentment, but not of Tierney. “Of course.”
“Then you could have counseled with Carrie. To try to assess all the circumstances, and decide what was best for her.”
“Yes.”
Torn by indecision, Sarah watched. She could see where Tierney was taking Smythe, and where it ended. But Smythe, imagining her involvement were Carrie still alive, was willing; Sarah’s intervention might cause resistance in her own witness.
“And if you and Carrie disagreed,” Tierney said, “you would have tried to protect her own best interests—in whatever way you, as parents, believed best.”
“That’s true.”
“Then why would you deprive us, as parents, of that same right?”
In pained silence, Smythe pondered her answer. “I don’t want to,” she said at last. “And I envy you that opportunity. For whatever reason, our daughter didn’t come to us.
“We were a good family, Professor Tierney. What happened to us can happen to other good families. Certainly, it can happen in bad ones. I worry about what happens when the only option for a girl afraid to tell her own parents is to go to court.”
The simple dignity of the answer seemed to give Tierney pause. Sarah saw Mary Ann turn to him, as though demanding an answer. “Are you willing to concede,” Tierney inquir
ed, “that under this statute a girl might well have second thoughts, and then turn to ‘good’ parents?”
Smythe hesitated. “In some cases, I suppose that could happen.”
Tierney stepped back, resting his palm against the defense table. “And yet you’ve made opposing parental consent laws somewhat of a cause, haven’t you?”
Smythe faced him with renewed calm: the question was expected, and Sarah had prepared her. “Carrie’s death,” she answered, “is not a cause. It’s something that happened to us, and I’ve tried to give it meaning.”
“So now you believe,” Tierney said, “that your inability to communicate with Carrie should dictate the relationship of other parents to their daughters.”
Wounded, Smythe stared at him, and then she shook her head. “No, Professor Tierney. Your relationship will be whatever it is. That, no law can change. Except to make it worse.”
Tierney paused, seemingly at war with himself, and then frustration won out. “But isn’t it true, Mrs. Smythe, that you’re attempting to rationalize your own failure, and salve your grief at Carrie’s death, by stripping other parents of their rights?”
The question was so lethal, and so insinuating, that letting Smythe respond was, for Sarah, an act of will. “Salve our grief,” Smythe repeated quietly, and Sarah sensed that Tierney, goaded by his own beliefs, had made a terrible mistake.
“Since we began sharing our experience,” the witness told him, “someone mailed us a fetus with a coat hanger wrapped around it. Someone else shot a hole in our car window.” Tears came to the witness’s eyes again. “But for us, the worst was when someone sent us Carrie’s picture from the local newspaper with ‘whore’ written across her face. And now you suggest that speaking out is helping to ‘salve our grief.’
“Nothing can do that. And nothing can lessen the anguish of what we learned.” Her voice, which had risen in anger, softened again. “It’s too late for us. But not for you. I didn’t come here to help myself, Professor. I came here to help you.”
During Sarah’s brief redirect, two harried associates from Kenyon & Walker filed an emergency motion in the Court of Appeals on behalf of Mary Ann, challenging Judge Leary’s permission for the media crowding his courtroom to publicly expose her identity. By five o’clock, without a hearing, the motions panel presided over by Judge Lane Steele had rejected the motion, along with that of Martin Tierney.
This was no surprise. For the next two hours, while Mary Ann ate with her parents, Sarah considered what that meant, and whether to rest her case tomorrow, or to ask Mary Ann to testify.
Once she returned, Mary Ann sat heavily in Sarah’s living room, legs parted to ease the burden of her pregnancy. Smoothing the shift she wore, she rested both hands on her swollen belly.
“Has he moved?” Sarah asked.
Mary Ann stared at her hands. “That’s what my father wanted to know. I said I thought I felt him today—a little.”
For a moment, Sarah considered how pivotal this inquiry was: for different reasons, the question of fetal movement, and what it signified, held legal and emotional meaning for both Sarah and the Tierneys. Looking at Mary Ann, who seemed weary and pensive, Sarah added another factor which weighed against calling her to testify—her father’s question; his daughter’s answer.
“You heard about the panel’s ruling, I guess.”
The girl nodded. “I’m going to be famous,” she said in a flat voice. “My parents asked me if I still wanted to go through with this.”
“Do they?”
“I asked them that.” Mary Ann’s voice held quiet anger. “He said yes, and begged me not to testify.”
Silent, Sarah wondered whether this was love, or tactics, and marveled at how this law, pitting parents against child, could complicate and pervert the most straightforward of emotions—a father’s instinct to protect his daughter.
“Will they testify?” Sarah asked. “They’ve listed themselves as potential witnesses.”
Mary Ann rubbed her temples. “They won’t tell me,” she said at last. “It’s like he’s playing with my head. Or yours.”
This perception, too, was curious: as if propelled into adulthood, Mary Ann had developed an interest, anxious but discerning, in the tactics of the trial. At length, Sarah said, “I don’t want to put you on tomorrow.”
Mary Ann looked up at her. “Why?”
Sarah could not give the most compelling reason: that she was afraid Martin Tierney, as questioner, would so erode his daughter’s confidence that, in the end, he would break her. And no amount of coaching could prepare a fifteen-year-old for a clever and subtle man who also, since her birth, had been the most important figure in her life. “I want to save you for rebuttal,” Sarah answered. “After we see what kind of case they put on, and whether your mother or father testifies, then we can decide.”
Mary Ann hesitated, as though torn between relief and worry. “What about our case?” she asked. “Have we done enough?”
“I think so.” Sarah paused, then admitted, “I don’t want to put you on television before we see what your parents do.”
This remark, though spoken with dispassion, seemed to renew Mary Ann’s disbelief. She was fifteen, and pregnant, and now was fighting her parents, in public, for the right to an abortion. Filled with pity, Sarah forced herself to say, “You don’t have to testify, Mary Ann. You don’t have to continue this at all.”
Mary Ann seemed to regard her stomach, and the fetus inside it, with a wistful tenderness. “No,” she answered. “I’ve seen the sonogram, and I do.”
THIRTEEN
“WHO’S CALLING?” Macdonald Gage asked again.
On the intercom, his receptionist enunciated carefully. “Judge Lane Steele. From the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.”
Repeating the name aloud, Gage raised his eyebrows at Mace Taylor and, after taking a hasty sip of his morning French roast, hit the button on his speakerphone. “Judge?” he asked.
“Good morning, Senator.” Beneath the tone of dry judicial dignity, Gage heard a veiled eagerness. “It’s good to talk with you again. You’ll remember we met late last summer, at Bohemian Grove.”
Glancing at Mace Taylor, Gage gave him a smile which was half grimace. Taylor leaned closer to the speaker box, eyes narrowing with a speculative shrewdness.
“Of course, Lane.” That Gage could modulate his southern baritone like a Stradivarius was part of his pride, and his voice infused this use of Steele’s given name with welcoming and warmth. “A pleasant respite from my many burdens. Including the chance to visit with you.”
“Yes.” The dry voice conveyed a guarded pleasure. “For me, as well.”
Glancing at Mace Taylor, Gage gave an even more cynical smile and mouthed “Masters” clearly enough for Taylor to nod. “So,” Gage said with a mixture of respect and jocularity, “you riding herd on that pack of visionaries out there, helping your brethren—and sistren—follow the tenets of our founding fathers?”
“Would that I could, Senator. With the people he put here, the last president didn’t make that easy. Neither, I fear, will this one.” There was a brief pause, and then Steele added with near reverence, “We could surely use more judges with Roger Bannon’s qualities of mind.”
Like you, Gage thought sardonically. Though Steele was edging toward his chosen subject, the Majority Leader decided not to help him; waiting was more decorous, and gave Macdonald Gage more leverage. “Judges like Roger Bannon are in short supply,” he answered pleasantly. “Except, I’m informed, for you.”
There was silence; the rote courtesy stalled conversation, pushing Steele into a corner. “Thank you,” Steele said at last. “I suppose, in a way, that Roger is what compelled me to call. I imagine you’ve begun to focus on his successor.”
With these words, Taylor’s expression, amused up to now, became keen. “We’ve been forced to,” Gage responded, “with indecent haste. Thanks to Kerry Kilcannon.”
“Yes.” There was anothe
r pause, and then Steele struck a note of candor and concern. “Frankly, that surprised me.”
Once more, Gage smiled at Taylor. “The haste?” he asked Steele with seeming innocence. “Or the appointment?”
“Both.” A brief cough echoed through the speakerphone. “Normally, I’d remain silent.”
“Of course. But this is Roger Bannon’s successor, and our next Chief. Unless the Senate decides otherwise.”
“Not a light responsibility.” This time Steele’s silence seemed deliberate, a signal of reluctance and propriety. “Your staff might want to stay alert to new decisions. Those not yet issued.”
Taylor was still, Gage noticed, except for his unconscious rubbing motion of the thumb and forefinger of one hand. “Is there a particular decision?” Gage asked.
He should use a watch, Gage reflected, to time Lane Steele’s silences. “There’s an en banc opinion coming next week,” Steele answered, “Snipes v. Garrett. The opinion broadens a prisoner’s right to sue beyond what, in my view, Congress intended in last year’s legislation. Its failings exemplify that a judge should interpret an act of Congress, not rewrite it.”
“Especially if the rewrite favors criminals.” Picking up a desk pen, Gage scrawled Snipes v. Garrett on a legal pad. “Still,” he added in a weary tone, “it’s the kind of adventurism we’ve come to expect from all too many judges on your circuit.”
“True.” Necessity seemed to make Steele less hesitant. “But not, one hopes, from the next Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.”
Taylor’s smile, more to himself than at Gage, suggested worldly amusement at an ambitious man’s pretence of reluctance. “Do tell,” Gage said in tones of wonderment. “Do tell, Lane.”
“She’s a protégé of Blair Montgomery’s, the most radical member of our court. Montgomery wrote the opinion, but she called for the rehearing and signed on. My dissent points out the manifest weaknesses of their reasoning.” Pausing, Steele said with measured sadness, “Some judges try to be scholarly; others lack the requisite detachment. Her first job was representing hard-core criminals, as a public defender, and that seems to have become her religion. She’s certainly cool toward religion as most of us understand it.”
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