Trent said, “Fine. Brenda, you want any more of this pie?”
She shook her head.
We all settled at one end of a table in the private room. The room smelled of burnt toast. In the distance, some food-service workers were complaining about not getting their breaks.
I waited to see if either John or Brenda was eager to start. They weren’t. I said, “How’s your little one doing?”
Trent answered. “Chaney’s…all right. She’s resting now. She had a decent enough day today, wouldn’t you say, Bren?”
“Decent. Yes. A decent day. The pulmonary treatments went well. That’s something.”
“I’m glad to hear that. I’m looking forward to meeting her. Maybe tomorrow? I just came from the psychiatric unit where I saw Merritt. You saw her earlier, too?” The nurses on the unit had informed me that Merritt’s parents had stopped by.
Brenda said, “Yes. She looks fine to me. Totally recovered, I would say. Trent?”
“From the overdose, sure. She looks like herself. Still silent, though. She won’t talk to us at all, not a word. You either?”
“Nothing to me or the staff. She may be talking to the other kids, but if she is, we haven’t heard about it yet,” I said.
John’s eyes were warm as they held mine. “I think she realizes what’s at stake now, though. Brenda and I told her what we could, what we’ve learned from the lawyers and the police. She realizes how serious things are, how bad it looks with the clothes and the blood and everything.”
I assumed “everything” was a palatable euphemism for the gun.
Brenda stared at me, away, then she leaned forward, halfway across the table before words spilled from her mouth like ice from a bucket. “How could she do it? Kill that man? How could they accuse her of that? With a gun? How? She’s a child, she doesn’t know about guns, and, and…”
John took her hand across the table. “The situation is bad, Dr. Gregory. We talked to that lawyer, Mr. Maitlin, an hour ago. The evidence doesn’t look good for Merritt. When you found us, we were talking, trying to come up with some way to cope with the possibility that Merritt may have actually gone and…killed that man.”
“And what were you coming up with? Anything?”
John seemed prepared for the question. He didn’t hesitate. “If she did it-and I’m not convinced she did, despite how it looks-it was stupid, stupid, stupid. An awful tragedy for his family. And now another tragedy for ours. But for Merritt, right now, I-we, Brenda and I-we have to view whatever happened, if Merritt was involved, as an act of…for lack of a better word…honor. If she did it, it was like sticking up for her sister in a schoolyard fight-don’t get me wrong, this was much more serious. Twisted somehow, but honorable.”
I thought I could guess where John Trent was going, but I wanted him to finish, I wanted to hear the rationalization in his own words. “Go on.”
“For the sake of argument, let’s assume she was involved somehow. All I can think is that, that Merritt must have viewed him, Dr. Robilio, as a bully, a bully who was hurting Chaney, picking on Chaney. Merritt went over there, to his house, to stick up for her sister, to stand up to the bully, and something went terribly wrong. The shooting…was an aberration, an…accident, I’m absolutely sure of that. Merritt’s not an aggressive kid. It’s her biggest liability on the basketball court. She just isn’t aggressive enough, won’t play to her own advantage. So I don’t know what happened at his house with the gun, maybe no one does. I don’t think she could have shot him; I just can’t picture her…you know. But what drove her there in the first place was honorable, I’m sure of that. Merritt was trying to help her sister stay alive and she saw Dr. Robilio as the enemy.”
Brenda had started to cry and to make those little popping noises with her lips that I’d heard for the first time in Boulder.
Therapeutically, I had a half-dozen choices about which trail to follow. I didn’t take any of them.
Instead, I asked, “How did she know about Dr. Robilio’s relationship to Chaney’s medical care? It’s not the sort of information a typical teenager would understand or have access to.”
They looked at each other.
Brenda said, “We’ve wondered about that, too. And we’re not sure. We knew, of course, about Dr. Robilio, that he founded MedExcel. We’ve researched everything we could about MedExcel to try and get some leverage to get them to grant an exception for Chaney’s protocol and the transplant. We talked about it at home, Trent and I, openly. Our frustration, whatever. Merritt must have overheard us and remembered his name. That’s the best explanation we’ve been able to come up with.”
“You talked about it?”
Brenda answered, “You know that Dr. Robilio was a local doctor, that MedExcel was his company, that he could order them to approve the protocol Chaney needs if he wanted to. We were angry, bitter-especially after we appealed to their medical board. Half a million dollars is nothing to MedExcel. The head of the medical board,” she closed her eyes and shook her head, “his response to our appeal was so cold. He ignored Chaney, he focused on the danger of the precedent. They can’t go start approving risky experimental procedures, that’s what he said. We’re even more angry and bitter than we were at the beginning. What’s risky is doing nothing. If we do nothing, barring a miracle, Chaney is going to die, Dr. Gregory. The fund-raising that’s been going on is stalled. Merritt knew all that. Trent and I have been over this stuff a hundred times together. Merritt must have heard us once or twice.”
My eyes were on John as Brenda spoke about knowing about Dr. Robilio. His face betrayed nothing but compassion for his wife. I wanted to ask him about the custody situation he was evaluating that just happened to involve Mrs. Robilio’s sister and brother-in-law. I wanted to ask if he had received any feelers from the family about cutting a deal that would result in MedExcel granting approval for Chaney’s medical needs. I wanted to know if maybe Merritt had overheard any of that. But I couldn’t press him. I had no reason to know about any of those connections myself.
I asked about money instead. “Merritt knows how far short the family is of being able to pay for the protocol and transplant through fundraising?”
Brenda scoffed. “We don’t have a prayer of self-funding this, barring some benefactor stepping forward. My divorce and the move to Colorado killed us financially. Our total net worth isn’t even a hundred grand and most of that’s in the house. The Chaney Fund that Channel 7 organized has raised, what, honey, a little over thirty thousand? Which is great, we’re grateful, but most of that will go to cover expenses here in Denver. We won’t come up with the money we need to pay for Seattle in time.”
“There’s no family money?”
“No. They’ve offered everything they have. But we both come from blue-collar families. There’s no family wealth to tap, no rich aunts, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“And Merritt knows all this?”
John replied, “She asks us things. We tell her. She’s mature, responsible. We try to treat her that way; she’s earned it. Yes, although she may not know the details, she knows how gray things look for her sister.”
“Black,” corrected Brenda.
“Black,” said John.
“Does this make sense, though? Think about what you’re saying. Merritt heard the two of you talking about how desperate things are. And she hears you mention this local man, Dr. Robilio, who has the power to help her sister. And she felt she could influence his decision by going to his house, and what, threatening him with his own gun? Does that sound like something Merritt would do?”
Immediately, John said, “No.”
Brenda opened her mouth and then closed it.
John continued. “No, it doesn’t sound like Merritt at all. That part I don’t get. I told her today when we visited that I didn’t get it, why she went to his house on her own, what she was thinking. I said, ‘Merritt, how did you think this was going to help?’”