“What happened after the twins were born?”
“Like with Merell, she wouldn’t take care of them. She started staying in bed most of the day.”
“A year and a half later, Olivia was born. She had infantile acid reflux. What was that like?”
“She screamed. At night especially. No one got any sleep.”
“What did you do then?”
“Walked her.”
“For how long?”
Johnny shrugged. “I don’t know. Hours. From one end of the hall to the other. Sometimes I fell asleep but I kept walking.”
“Did Simone walk the baby too?”
“She tried. At first. And then she got so she’d just cry every time Olivia started up. Sometimes I’d go downstairs and wake up the nanny but she had to be with the kids and Simone all day…. It was easier for me to do it.”
“Mr. Duran, is this what you heard?”
Cabot’s associate pressed a button on a tape recorder and a baby’s screams filled the courtroom. Johnny flinched. Inadvertently, Roxanne put her hands over her ears.
“All right, Counselor,” boomed the judge, “I said you could play it ten seconds. That’s it!” He rapped the gavel and declared to the noisy gallery, “I’ll clear the courtroom if I have to.”
“What did you do to help your wife cope?”
“I hired a nanny and a housekeeper, we got a vacation house where she could relax. I built an apartment for her mother so she’d be nearby. For a while I employed someone to cook for us, a personal chef. A whole week of meals was delivered every Monday morning when she was pregnant with Olivia. It wasn’t junk either. It was good food, lots of vegetables. Nutritious.”
Johnny glared at Cabot, daring him to contradict. Then he seemed to realize that he sounded defensive. He sat back and his voice cracked with weariness. “I let her stay in bed all day and I never said a word against it. I bought her two new cars because I thought it might make her want to go out. She used to have a few friends. But…”
“But what, Mr. Duran?”
“She was like one of those walking ghosts. A zombie. She didn’t care about anything, she didn’t do anything. Half the time I came home and she was still in her nightgown and she wouldn’t know what time it was. She wouldn’t even take a bath, for chrissake.”
“The night before the incident did you threaten to bring your sister Alicia into the home?”
“What was I supposed to do? I was at my wit’s end. The nanny was gone and my mother-in-law was off doing something. I couldn’t leave her alone with the children.”
“How did Simone respond to this idea?”
“She panicked. She didn’t like my sister.”
“Why not?”
“She said if Alicia stayed she’d never leave.”
Cabot turned to the jury and paused in his questioning, letting Johnny’s testimony take hold.
“Did you at any time seek advice regarding your wife?”
“I talked to her doctor and my mother and sisters and they told me a lot of women get depressed after miscarriages and babies. They all said the same thing. She’d get over it.”
“In fact Simone’s condition grew worse. But you still didn’t go to a psychiatrist or a therapist. Why is that?”
Johnny crossed and uncrossed his legs.
“When I was growing up we didn’t take our problems outside the family. If it was medical, that’s different. This was… personal.”
“Did you fear the doctor would make the situation worse?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Duran, I want you to tell the jury how you thought a doctor might make your family situation worse.”
A moment passed.
Johnny cleared his throat. “Way back, when she was having miscarriages, a doctor gave her some pills.”
“Did they make her less depressed?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your attention was focused somewhere else, wasn’t it?”
Johnny stared at the wall at the back of the gallery. Roxanne knew there was a clock over the door there. She imagined him watching the seconds tick by.
Cabot said, “Your Honor, will you instruct Mr. Duran—”
“You don’t have to instruct me about anything,” he said, straightening. “I’ll say it. I’m not a hero here. The pills made her cold in bed. I didn’t like it.”
Behind Roxanne a woman whispered something that sounded like “Bastard.”
Cabot had told the family that in a case involving violence to children, the jury needed to assign guilt but not necessarily to the defendant. They needed someone to blame and Johnny had been assigned that role.
“Did you ever think about not having any more kids? Using birth control?”
“I wanted a son.”
“Did Mrs. Duran object to the lack of birth control?”
“No.”
“She was compliant? Submissive?”
“I guess you could say that.”
“And you didn’t want that to change, did you?”
“No.”
Johnny sat before the jury, exposed as Roxanne had never seen him. The pride he had taken from his wealth and powerful friends seemed now like a pitiful attempt to compensate for a profound insecurity. From this day forward there would be no more invitations to golf and tennis with his pals in high places, and no seats reserved for him at the mayor’s table. The chief of police would not return his calls. He had answered David Cabot’s questions with unflinching honesty, and given the jury—the press and public—someone to despise instead of Simone.
Cabot sat down. “I have no further questions, Your Honor.”
During his cross-examination, Clark Jackson again brought up the 911 incident. “The attempted drowning of your infant daughter, Olivia.”
“Objection, Your Honor! The incident reports have been put into evidence. There’s no mention of an attempted drowning. Prosecution is trying to mislead the jury about what happened that day.”
“Sustained. Jury, you will disregard Mr. Jackson’s last question.”
Johnny blurted, “How many times do you have to hear this? Merell made that story up. She likes attention, she likes to try things out.”
“Come on, Mr. Duran, you weren’t there. You didn’t actually see what happened, did you?”
Johnny sighed. “No. I wasn’t there.”
“Does Merell love her mother, Mr. Duran?”
“Yes, of course.” He looked at Simone. “We all love her.”
“Have you talked with Merell about what will happen if her mother is found guilty?”
“No.”
“I’m going to ask you a question and I want your opinion as this girl’s father. Do you think it’s possible that she would lie to protect her mother?”
“Your Honor,” David Cabot said, “Merell Duran is not on trial and Johnny Duran has not been offered as an expert.”
“True.” Judge MacArthur removed his glasses, examined the lenses, and handed them off to his clerk to be wiped clean. “Nevertheless, he is the girl’s father and I’m going to allow the question.”
“Mr. Duran, would Merell lie to the court if she thought it would keep her mother out of jail?”
“No,” he said. “Of course not.”
Jackson didn’t move for a breath. Then, although addressing his comment to Johnny, he looked at the twelve men and women in the jury box. “Maybe you don’t know your daughter as well as you think you do.”
Chapter 18
Judge MacArthur recessed the trial until Monday morning, when the jury would hear summations.
Roxanne went straight home and locked the front door of the bungalow. She apologized to Chowder, but there would be no walk that day. Ty came home after dark and was accosted by a pair of reporters who leaped from their cars parked in front of the house, but on Saturday he and Roxanne avoided attention, sneaking away early. They drove to the Laguna Mountains and were rained on as they hiked the trail to the old mine. They lay in the
grass by the side of the trail and let the rain come down on them until they were soaked and chilled and ran the half mile back to the car, laughing, to warm themselves up. On Sunday Ty built a fire and came back from Theo’s Bakery with chocolate croissants and The New York Times. Between them they read every page, even the wedding announcements with their hopeful photos. That night they watched the entertainment channel and talked about celebrity shenanigans as if they were a couple with nothing more dramatic than Hollywood gossip to occupy their minds.
It seemed a long time ago that Roxanne and Ty had argued over Simone. Though she still felt close to her sister and during the trial she had sometimes experienced extraordinary waves of empathy, the calamitous truth exposed by Simone’s crime had severed the breathing line that had connected the sisters. It was no longer possible for any of the family to pretend that Simone’s meany-men were trivial. No matter how they might try, they could not be deluded into believing that she was like other harassed mothers, the women Roxanne saw pushing overloaded carts in supermarkets and shepherding children in and out of vans and cars.
There was nothing Roxanne could do for Simone now except love and stand by her. And yet she did not feel completely free, could not deny that she felt culpable. She had been her sister’s caretaker because, from the age of nine until she met Elizabeth, she believed she had no choice in the matter. Some responsibility for what happened in the garage belonged to her. The certain knowledge of this was a cramp in her heart that took her unexpectedly, cutting off her breath with its intensity. She didn’t bother complaining to a doctor. She never complained to Ty. She knew the cause.
On Monday Roxanne didn’t hear much of Jackson’s and Cabot’s summations. Sometimes a particular word or intonation snagged her attention, but she had been sitting in the same seat in the gallery long enough, heard enough to know that neither the most bumbling nor the most eloquent summation could save Simone.
However, near the end of David’s summation, his words finally managed to make her listen.
“Simone Duran did not hear voices. She did not suffer hallucinations. But at some point on that hot September day she became delusional in her conviction that the baby she was carrying, the twins and Olivia, were all doomed to be as helpless and profoundly unhappy as she was. She ‘knew’ the miserable destiny that lay ahead for her daughters and she ‘knew’ what she could do to stop it and she ‘knew’ it was the right thing to do.”
Roxanne held her breath.
“It wasn’t rational, this knowing. It was terribly wrong, but it couldn’t be debated because it filled her mind and there was no room for any other thought. When she turned the key in the ignition of the yellow Camaro, she could not distinguish right from wrong and under our system of laws, that inability makes her not guilty.”
Judge MacArthur scowled down on the murmuring gallery and tapped his gavel.
“No matter what you decide in this case, Simone Duran will not go free.
“Usually when a person is found not guilty, she can walk out of the courtroom and never look back, but this case is different. When you find Simone Duran not guilty by reason of insanity, she will not go free. She will immediately be incarcerated—locked up—in a hospital for the criminally insane. And she’ll have to stay there until a panel of doctors determines she is no longer a danger to herself or others.
“And, ladies and gentlemen, let’s be very clear. This might never happen. She might be locked up for the rest of her life.”
Cabot’s words grabbed Roxanne and shoved her against the chair back.
Cabot said, “So, let me remind you of the question I asked you to focus on when I made my introductory remarks. Why did Simone Duran try to kill herself and her daughters? I think you have your answer.”
Cabot stepped back from the jury box. For the first time Roxanne saw the toll the last two weeks had taken on him. On his drawn face he wore an expression of sadness and resignation as much as if Simone were his wife and he was about to say words that described her.
“Simone Duran tried to kill her daughters because she knew it was the right and loving thing to do.” He let the words sink in. “She did it because, at that moment, she was insane.”
The jury was out for four days. The call came from David Cabot’s office when Roxanne and her students were in the middle of a civics lesson. She went to the back of the room and called Ty. There was no point trying not to be heard. Every kid in the classroom had turned to watch and listen.
“They’ve decided.”
“I’m on my way,” he said.
She shut her cell phone and pressed the school intercom to contact the front office. Students, faculty, and staff at Balboa Middle School had been waiting and planning for this moment. The school’s head secretary had arranged for someone to be sent to substitute in Roxanne’s class at a moment’s notice.
Roxanne turned to tell her class she had to leave them and saw that every child’s eyes were fixed on her. She stared back at them, her mind just then a blank. She wasn’t going to pretend that nothing was going on. As Elizabeth had said, for her students the semester had been a long lesson in how the country’s legal system worked. They had their opinions, of course; and she had heard them discussing Simone’s guilt or innocence in the halls and huddled around their desks before class, going suddenly silent when she came near. Some claimed to be sympathetic although she never quite trusted declarations of support from children who depended on her to promote them from eighth to ninth grade. Other students—most, she suspected, though she did not know for sure—had strong feelings against Simone. They were young enough to imagine themselves as helpless victims. On the last day of the trial a girl had told her, “I like you, Ms. Callahan, but what your sister did was evil. She’s gotta go to jail or else every mother be killing their babies.”
As she gathered her purse, coat, and umbrella she heard a voice from the back of the room. It was Ryan.
“Good luck, Ms. Callahan.”
A girl in the front row smirked. “Yeah. Good luck.”
The rest of the class said nothing. The sub came to take over for Roxanne, and they watched her go.
On her way out of the school she stopped in Elizabeth’s classroom and they stepped into the hall to speak privately. On the other side of the room’s partly open door there was the kind of perfect and total silence that would normally mean trouble in a roomful of adolescents, but in this case meant that every child was listening hard.
“Are you going to be okay?” Elizabeth asked. “Do you need someone to drive you? If the taxi’s not here…”
“The office called one for me. It’s out front now. Ty’s meeting me in court.”
Elizabeth hugged her. “I’m praying for you, honey.”
“Not me. Simone.”
“Yeah,” Elizabeth said. “Her too.”
It was raining again and traffic downtown was backed up at all the lights. David Cabot had promised Roxanne that he and Simone wouldn’t go into the courtroom until she was in the gallery beside Johnny, but how long could he stall? A block from the courts she paid the driver and got out, running the rest of the way without opening her umbrella.
She found Ty in the crowd outside the courtroom and they entered together, taking their seats beside Johnny in the already full gallery. Looking down she saw that Johnny’s trousers were wet halfway to the knees as if he’d waded through a flood to reach the court in time. She grabbed his hand and held it as Ty was holding hers.
Roxanne heard the door behind her open, the voices of reporters calling out a gabble of questions. The door slammed shut, and as Elizabeth’s classroom had been preternaturally quiet, so was the gallery. Two sets of footsteps came down the center aisle. Simone and David stopped beside Johnny. Johnny stood and Simone automatically went to his embrace, neither of them making a sound.
Roxanne realized how much she had missed her sister. Her thoughts went back to the last time they’d had fun together, sprawled on the grass in the side yard. T
hey’d laughed about Shawn Hutton and talked about sailing. Perhaps that conversation marked the moment when the fatal shift began in Simone’s mind. She had reminisced about flying across the water and then she climbed a tree and for a few moments remembered how it felt to be brave and free.
“I love you,” Roxanne said, not caring who in the gallery heard her.
Simone’s eyes reddened but did not fill with tears as they once had so easily. She turned away and went with David Cabot to the front of the courtroom to await the verdict. Roxanne clutched Ty’s hand and held her breath.
The bailiff called the court to order and Judge MacArthur entered, his robes billowing behind him. He banged his gavel once and spoke to the gallery before he sat down. “Ladies and gentlemen, in a minute the jury will take its seats and the verdict will be read. I’m going to say something right now and I want you to hear me. Every one of you.”
For some reason his hair, his eyebrows, and his mustache looked more alarmingly bushy than ever.
He said, “I realize feelings run high in a case like this, and no matter how the verdict goes there are some among you who won’t be happy. I’m telling you right now, keep your opinions to yourself. This courtroom is not a circus tent and this trial is not an exhibit for your amusement.”
She wanted Judge MacArthur to stop talking; at the same time she hoped his harangue would go on, and they would never have to hear the verdict pronounced against Simone.
“I have directed the officers of this court that anyone who makes an inappropriate public display will not be permitted to leave the courtroom until I say they can go. I hope that’s clear because I’m not in the mood to be patient this afternoon.” He turned to the clerk of the jury. “Call them in, please.”
The jurors entered in the same order they always did, those seated at the far end of the jury box first. Roxanne scanned each one’s face, searching for some sign the verdict would be not guilty by reason of insanity. N.G.I., David Cabot always said. The copy-shop owner had chewed away her lipstick but the college student had taken the time to reapply hers. Bright red. The retired accountant had misbuttoned his jacket.
The Good Sister Page 22