by Jodi Picoult
She folds another cone of piki. "So Rabbit ran off to the edge of the world where every morning, Sun came up. He practiced with his bow and arrow the whole way. But when he got there, Sun had left the sky. Rabbit thought that was cowardly, but he decided to wait for Sun to return the next day. Sun, though, had seen Rabbit practicing and decided to have a little fun with him. Back in those days, you see, Sun didn't come up slowly like he does now. He'd burst into the sky with one leap. So the next day, Sun rolled far away from where he usually jumped into the sky and then leaped up. By the time Rabbit got his bow and arrow together, Sun was already so high he couldn't be touched. Rabbit stamped his foot and shouted, but Sun only laughed.
"One morning," Ruthann continues, "Sun got careless. He jumped more slowly than usual, and Rabbit's arrow plunged into his side. Rabbit was delighted! He'd shot the Sun! But when he looked up again he saw how flames bled from the wound. Suddenly the whole world seemed to be on fire."
She stands up. "Rabbit ran to a cottonwood, and a greasewood tree, but neither one would hide him--they were too afraid of being burned to a crisp. Suddenly he heard a voice calling to him: 'Sikyatavo! Under me! Hurry!' It was a small green bush with flowers like cotton. Rabbit ducked beneath it, just as the flames leaped over the bush. Everything crackled and hissed, and then went quiet." Ruthann looks at Sophie. "The earth all around was black and burnt, but the fire was gone. And the little bush that had saved Rabbit wasn't green anymore, but a deep yellow. Even today, that kind of bush grows green, and then turns yellow when it feels the sun."
"What happened to Rabbit?" Sophie asks.
"He was never the same. He has brown spots on his fur, from where the fire burned him. And he's not so tough anymore, you know. He runs away and hides, instead of putting up a fight. Sun isn't the same, either," Ruthann says. "He makes himself so bright that no one can look at him long enough to shoot straight."
Ruthann cracks her knuckles; silver and turquoise rings wink like fireflies. "Let's clean up," she says to Sophie, "and then if your dad says it's okay, you can come with me to the garage sale around the corner and scope out inventory."
Sophie runs into the house, leaving me alone with Ruthann. "You don't have to keep her with you."
"It's good to have a child to tell a story to."
"Do you have any of your own?"
The lines of Ruth's face carve deeper. "I had a daughter once."
Maybe we can all be divided along this rift: Those who have been lucky enough to keep our children, and those who have had them taken away from us. Before I can find the appropriate response, Sophie comes out of the house, dragging a bucket of sand behind her. She pours it onto the fire, banking the embers, a small cloud of soot sighing up around her knees.
"Soph," I say, "if you can be a good girl, you can stay with Ruthann a little longer."
"Of course she can be good," Ruthann says. "Where I come from, on Second Mesa, our grandmothers give us our names, and our grandfathers give us our manners. The ones who aren't good don't have grandfathers to tell them how to behave. And you have a grandfather, don't you, Siwa?" She hands Sophie the bowl of leftover batter. "Kitchen sink," she instructs.
The sun has risen high enough to gnaw on the back of my neck. I think of Rabbit, and his arrow. "Thanks, Ruthann."
She gives me a half smile. "Watch your aim, Sikyatavo," she warns, and she follows Sophie inside.
In 1977, in Arizona, a man could squirrel his daughter away to another part of the country and it was considered kidnapping. By 1978 the laws had changed, and that same man, for the same act, would be charged with custodial interference--a lesser felony. "Jesus, Andrew," I murmur, poring over the books in my borrowed conference room at Hamilton, Hamilton. "Couldn't you have waited a few months?" Frustrated, I pick up one of the law books and whip it across the room, narrowly missing Chris as he walks in.
"What's the matter with you?" he asks.
"My client is an idiot."
"Of course he is. If he wasn't, he wouldn't need a lawyer." Chris sits down and leans back in the chair across from me. "Boy, did you miss out last night, bud. Picture a natural redhead named Lotus, following me into the men's room at The Frantic Gecko to demonstrate how flexible a yoga instructor can actually be. And she had a friend who could lift her wineglass with her foot." He smiles. "I know, I know. You're practically married. But still. You got any Tylenol?"
I shake my head.
"Then I definitely need coffee. You take cream or sugar?"
"I don't drink--"
"Coming right up," he says, and he leaves.
I break out in a sweat, imagining already what it will be like to have a cup sitting on the table a few inches from me, steaming and fragrant. What most people don't understand is the interstitial space between lifting that mug and emptying its contents in the sink. In that instant, which is only as long as a thought, need can grow to such enormous proportions that it muscles reason out of the way, and before you know it, I am lifting the drink to my mouth.
To drive my mind away from this, I start to flip through the pages of Arizona statutes to see if there's an affirmative defense for kidnapping, and finally find the paragraph I am looking for.
SS13-417. Necessity defense. Conduct that would otherwise constitute an offense is justified if a reasonable person was compelled to engage in the proscribed conduct and the person had no reasonable alternative to avoid imminent public or private injury greater than the injury that might reasonably result from the person's own conduct.
Or in other words: I had to do it.
Having an alcoholic wife isn't a reason to steal a child. However, if I can prove that Elise was an alcoholic, that she couldn't care for the child, that a call was made to protective services or the police, and that they didn't respond adequately; well, then Andrew has a shot at acquittal. A jury might be convinced that Andrew had exhausted all other possible options, that he had no choice but to take his daughter and run ... provided, first, that Andrew can convince me.
Chris walks into the conference room. "Here you go," he says, sliding the mug across the table. "The breakfast of champions. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to find a physician to surgically remove my head."
After he leaves, I walk toward the steaming mug. It has been years since I've taken a sip, and I can still taste the beautiful bitter of it. I inhale deeply. Then I dump the coffee--china mug and all--into the trash.
The detention officer manning the visiting area at the jail nods at me. "Take any empty one," he says. It's a quiet morning; the doors are all shut, and the lights are off. I open the first door on the right and turn on the light--only to find an inmate with his striped pants down around his ankles, screwing his attorney on top of the Formica conference table. "Sonofabitch," the guy says, his hand reaching to pull up his shorts. The woman blinks in the sudden light and tugs her pencil skirt down, knocking over a box full of files.
"Let me guess," I say cheerfully to the lawyer. "Pro boner work?"
With an apology, I settle myself into the next room to wait for Andrew. He comes in as I'm still picturing the attorney next door--a pubic defender, I guess you'd call her--and smiling. "What's so funny?" Andrew asks.
It is the kind of story that, a week ago, I would have told him over dessert. But Andrew is dressed in the same stripes and pink thermals as the man next door, and that is sobering. "Nothing." I clear my throat. "Look, we need to talk about your case."
There is a right way and a wrong way to go about presenting an affirmative defense to a client. You basically explain where the escape hatch is and then say, "Hmm, if you had a ladder to get up there, you'd be home free"--hoping like hell that your client will be bright enough to then volunteer that he does indeed have a ladder hidden away in his breast pocket. The fact that a ladder can't possibly fit in his breast pocket or that he never in his life owned a ladder is not nearly as important as the fact that he tells you, flat out, that he is in possession of one. As the attorney, all you need to do
is hint to the jury about the ladder, you don't have to physically present it.
Sometimes the client gets what you're trying to do, sometimes he doesn't. At best, you are leading your star witness; at worst, you are suggesting that he lie to you so that you have some semblance of a defense.
"Andrew," I say carefully, "I've been looking at the charges that were filed against you, and there is a defense that we might be able to use. Basically, it means saying that things were so bad in the household that you had no other alternative but to do what you did, which is take Delia away. The thing is, for this defense to apply ... you also have to show that you had no alternative legal means of solving the problem." I give Andrew a moment to let this all sink in. "Delia told me that your ex-wife is an alcoholic. Maybe that impaired her ability to function as a good mother ... ?"
Slowly, Andrew nods.
"Maybe you felt you deserved custody of Delia, because of this ...?"
"Well, wouldn't you have--"
I hold up a hand. "Did you call the police? Or child protective services? A social worker? Did you try to get your custody agreement revisited in court?"
Andrew shifts in his seat. "I thought about it, but then I realized it wasn't a good idea."
My heart sinks. "Why not?"
"You saw that assault conviction the prosecutor had--"
"What the hell was that all about, anyway?"
He shrugs. "Nothing. A stupid bar fight. But I wound up in jail overnight because of it. Back then, the courts automatically gave custody to a mother even when the father had a spotless background. If you had a strike against you already, well, you might as well kiss your kid good-bye." He looks up at me. "I was scared that if I went to complain about Elise, they'd look up my record and decide I shouldn't even have visitation anymore, much less full custody."
The necessity defense implies there was no legal alternative remaining, but this is not the scenario Andrew's painted. He didn't even try a legal route before exacting his own vigilante justice. But instead of telling him how damaging this is to his case, I just nod. The first rule of defense law is to keep your client believing that there is always a light at the end of the tunnel, a slim possibility for a better outcome.
When you get right down to it, the relationship between a defendant and a lawyer is not all that different from the one between a child and an alcoholic parent.
"It's not like I didn't try," Andrew says. "I spent months following the rules. Even the day I left, I took her home first."
My head snaps up; this is news to me. "You what?"
"Beth had forgotten this blanket she used to take everywhere, and I knew she'd be miserable all weekend without it. So we went back. The place was a mess--the kitchen was piled high with dishes, and food was rotting on the counter; the refrigerator was empty."
"Where was Elise?"
"In the living room, out cold."
I have a sudden mental picture of the woman, lying facedown with her arm trailing off the couch and the sweet curl of bourbon soaking into the cushions where the bottle has spilled. But in my picture the woman doesn't have black hair, like Elise Vasquez did when I saw her in court. She is a blonde, and she is wearing a pair of orange Capri pants that were my mother's favorite.
All of the memories I have of my mother smell like alcohol--even the good ones, when she was bending down to kiss me good night, or straightening my tie before my high school graduation. Her disease was a perfume, one I used to lean into when I was a child and one I itched for when I was an adult. If you ask me for five concrete recollections from when I was a kid, chances are that three of them will involve some fiasco based on my mother's drinking: the time it was her turn to be Den Mother and the Boy Scout troop arrived to find her completely lit and dancing in her underwear; the track championship she slept through; the sting of her hand on my face when she actually wanted to punish herself.
These memories are the pillars I built my life on. But hiding behind them are the other memories, the ones that peek out only when I let down my guard: the hazy afternoon my mother and I sat with our heads bent over the sidewalk, watching ants construct a mobile city. Her voice, off-key, singing me awake in the morning. The summer days when she staked trash bags on the lawn and ran a hose, a makeshift Slip-N-Slide for the two of us. Her inconsistency, in a better light, became spontaneity. You cannot hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them.
Was having an occasional mother better than not having one at all?
Andrew has read my mind. "You know what that's like for a kid, Eric. If it had been up to you, would you have wanted a household like the one you grew up in?"
No. I didn't want to grow up in a household like mine, but I did. And I hadn't wanted to turn out just like my mother, either, but I had. "What did you do?" I ask.
"I took Delia, and left."
"I meant before that. Did you bother to see whether your ex-wife was all right? Did you call anyone to take care of her?"
"She wasn't my responsibility anymore."
"Why not? Because you had a piece of paper saying you'd gotten divorced?"
"Because I'd done it a thousand times before," Andrew says. "Are you defending me, or Elise? For God's sake, Delia was in the very same situation when she got pregnant, except you were the one lying drunk on the floor."
"But she didn't run away from me," I point out. "She waited for me to get my head straight. So don't even begin to compare your situation to hers, Andrew, because Delia's a better person than you ever were."
A muscle tics in Andrew's jaw. "Yeah. I guess whoever raised her must have really known what he was doing." He stands up and walks out of the conference room, beckoning to an officer to take him back to the safety of his cell.
Delia calls me on my cell phone while I am driving back to Hamilton, Hamilton. "Guess what," she says. "I got a phone call from that prosecutor, Ellen ..."
"Emma."
"Whatever." I can hear the smile in her voice. "She asked to meet with me, and I told her I had a spot in my calendar between Hell Freezing Over and Not in This Lifetime. Where are you, anyway?"
"I'm on my way back from the jail."
There is a silence. "So how is he?"
"Great," I say, adding a lift to my voice. "We've totally got this under control." My cell phone beeps, another incoming call. "Hang on, Dee," I tell her, and I switch over. "Talcott."
"It's Chris. Where are you?"
I look over my shoulder at the merging traffic. "Headed onto Route Ten."
"Well, get off it," he says. "You need to go back."
The hair stands up on the back of my neck. "What happened to Andrew?"
"Nothing that I know of. But you just got some mail from Emma Wasserstein. She's filed a motion to remove you as counsel."
"On what grounds?"
"Witness tampering," Chris says. "She thinks you're feeding information to Delia."
I slam down the phone, cursing, and it rings immediately; I've forgotten that Delia was on the other line. "What else did you say to the prosecutor?" I ask.
"Nothing. She was trying to do the buddy thing, you know, but I wasn't falling for it. She said she wanted to meet with me, and I refused. She pumped me for information about my father."
I swallow. "What did you say?"
"That it wasn't any of her business, and that if she was fishing for information about him she'd have to talk to you, just like I do."
Oh, shit.
"Who called?" Delia asks. "Who was on the other line?"
"A courtesy call from Verizon," I lie.
"You were on for a long time."
"Well, they were being very courteous."
"Eric," Delia asks, "did my father say anything else about me?"
Her question is clear as a bell; the cell phone reception is crystalline. But I hold the phone away from my ear. I make static noises. "Dee, can you hear me? I'm going under some power lines...."
"Eric?"
"I'm losing you," I say,
and I hang up while she is still talking.
In the motion filed by Emma Wasserstein, Delia is referred to as the victim. Every time I read the word, I think how much she would hate that. Chris, Emma, and I sit in Judge Noble's chambers, waiting for His Honor to speak. Massive and formidable, he is busy spreading peanut butter on a cheese sandwich. "Do I look fat to you, Counselor?" the judge asks, although the question is directed at none of us in particular.
"Robust," Emma answers.
"Healthy," Chris adds.
Judge Noble pauses his knife and looks up at me. "Generous," I suggest.
"You wish, Mr. Talcott," the judge says. "I don't understand this whole good cholesterol, bad cholesterol thing. And I sure as hell don't understand why, if I'm going to eat a sandwich, I have to have a quarter of a teaspoon of peanut butter to go with it." He takes a bite and grimaces. "You know why I'm going to lose weight on the Zone diet? Because no one in their right mind would eat any of this crap." He takes a deep, rumbling breath and shifts in his chair. "I don't normally hold hearings during my lunch hour, but I'm going to suggest to my wife that perhaps I should. Because frankly, I find the subject of this motion so unpalatable that it has nearly ruined my appetite entirely. Why, if I got a dozen motions like this a day, my abs would look like Brad Pitt's."
"Your Honor," Chris says quickly, intercepting.
"Sit down, Mr. Hamilton. This isn't about you, and much to my chagrin, Mr. Talcott apparently has a mind of his own." The judge levels his gaze at me. "Counselor, as I'm sure you're aware, witness tampering is one of the biggest ethical violations you can make as a defense attorney, one that will get your pro hac vice revoked and your ass kicked out of Arizona and most likely every other Bar association in this country."
"Absolutely, Judge Noble," I agree. "But Ms. Wasserstein's allegations are false."
The judge frowns. "Are you or are you not engaged to your client's daughter?"
"I am, Your Honor."
"Well, maybe in New Hampshire you've all intermarried so much that everyone's a cousin, and there aren't enough nonrelated attorneys to go around for your clients, but here in Arizona, we do things a little differently."