“You realize that wrongful birth suggests your daughter should never have been born. Do you wish that, Lieutenant O’Keefe?”
I shook my head. “Willow may not be perfect, but-well-neither am I. Neither are you. She may not be perfect,” I repeated, “but she’s one hundred percent right.”
“Your witness,” Booker said, and as Marin Gates got to her feet, I took a deep breath to galvanize myself, the same way I did before I ran into a building with the SWAT team.
“You say that this lawsuit has broken your family apart,” she said. “But the same could be said of the divorce proceedings you initiated, isn’t that true?”
I looked at Guy Booker. He’d anticipated this question; we’d practiced an answer. I was supposed to say something about how my actions had been a measure to protect the girls-not to drag them through the mud. But instead of saying that, I found myself looking at Charlotte. At that plaintiff’s table, she seemed so tiny. She was staring down at the wood grain, as if she didn’t trust herself to look me in the eye.
“Yes,” I said quietly. “It is.”
Booker stood up, and then figured he couldn’t object to his own witness, I guess, because he sat back down.
I turned to the judge. “Sir? Do you mind if I talk directly to my wife?”
Judge Gellar raised his brows. “It’s the jury that needs to hear you, son.”
“With all due respect, Your Honor…I don’t think that’s true.”
“Judge,” Booker said. “May I approach?”
“No, Mr. Booker, you may not,” the judge said. “This man’s got something to say.”
Marin Gates looked like she’d swallowed a firecracker. She didn’t know whether to ask me anything else or just let me hang myself. And maybe I was doing that; I didn’t really care. “Charlotte,” I said, “I don’t know what’s right anymore, except admitting that I don’t know that. No, we don’t have enough money. And no, we haven’t had it easy. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been worth the trip.”
Charlotte lifted her face. Her eyes were wide and still. “Some guys at the station, they said they knew what they were getting into when they got married. Well, I didn’t. It was an adventure, and I was okay with that. See, you’re it, for me. You let me take you skiing, and you never mentioned you were afraid of heights. You sleep curled up against me, no matter how far I move to my side of the bed. You let me eat the vanilla half of your Dixie Cup, and you take my chocolate. You tell me when my socks don’t match. You buy Lucky Charms, because you know I like the marshmallows. You gave me two beautiful girls.
“Maybe you expected marriage to be perfect-I guess that’s where you and I are different. See, I thought it would be all about making mistakes, but doing it with someone who’s there to remind you what you learned along the way. And I think we were both wrong about something. People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that’s not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more.”
Silence settled over the courtroom. “We’re going to adjourn for the day,” Judge Gellar announced.
“But I’m not finished-” Marin argued.
“Yes, you are,” the judge said. “For God’s sake, Ms. Gates, that’s why you’re still single. I want this courtroom cleared, except for Mr. and Mrs. O’Keefe.”
He banged his gavel, and there was a flurry of activity, and suddenly, I was sitting alone on the witness stand and Charlotte was standing behind the plaintiff’s table. She took a few steps forward, until she was standing level with me, her hands lightly resting on the wooden railing between us. “I don’t want to get a divorce,” she said.
“Neither do I.”
She shifted nervously from one foot to the other. “So what do we do?”
I leaned forward slowly, so that she could see me coming. I leaned forward, and touched my lips to hers, sweet and familiar, home. “Whatever comes next,” I whispered.
Amelia
My parents’ oh-so-touching reconciliation was the talk of the courtroom. You would have thought the news media was True Confessions the way the reporters all lined up talking about this great romantic moment. The jury would fall for it unless they were a bunch of cynics, like me; the way I saw it, Marin could practically go home and break open the champagne.
Which is exactly why I was a girl on a mission.
While they were all swooning and sighing over the melodrama, I was sitting in that gallery, embarrassed as hell, and learning something new about myself: I didn’t have to vomit for poison to come out of me. I could sweat it out, scream it out, and sometimes just whisper. If I was going to the bulimia camp in Boston, then I was going out with a bang.
I knew that the judge had deliberately played matchmaker and kept my mother and father in the courtroom together to work out Act Two of their drama, but that worked perfectly for me. I slipped out the back before Marin Gates could remember to come find me and ducked out of the courthouse without anyone noticing or caring who I was. I ran to the parking lot, to the mint green T-Bird.
When Guy Booker came out and found me leaning against his car, he scowled. “You scratch the paint job and you’ll be doing community service for the next five years,” he said.
“I’ll take my chances.”
“What are you doing here, anyway?”
“Waiting for you.”
He frowned. “How’d you know this was my car?”
“Because it’s so painfully subtle.”
Booker smirked. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”
“Long story.”
“Well, then, skip it. It’s been an even longer day,” he said, unlocking the driver’s side door. He opened it, hesitating. “Go home, Amelia. Your mother doesn’t need to be worrying about where you are right now. She’s got a lot on her plate.”
“Yeah,” I answered, folding my arms. “Which is why I figured you’d be interested in what I heard her say.”
Marin
I had Juliet Cooper’s address from the jury selection process. I knew that she lived in Epping, a tiny town to the west of Bankton. So as soon as court was adjourned for the day, I programmed the street into my GPS and started driving.
An hour later I pulled into a small cul-de-sac, a horseshoe of modified Capes. Number 22 was just to the right of the circle as you came into it. It had gray siding and black shutters, a red lacquered door. There was a van in the driveway. When I rang the doorbell, a dog started barking.
I could have lived here. This might have been my home. In another lifetime, I might have walked right through the door instead of approaching like a stranger; I might have had a room upstairs filled with horseback-riding ribbons and school yearbooks and the other detritus adults leave behind at their childhood residences. I could have told you where the silverware drawer was in the kitchen, where the vacuum cleaner was stashed, how to use the TV remote.
The door opened, and Juliet Cooper was standing in front of me. Dancing at her feet was a terrier. “Mom?” a girl’s voice called. “Is it for me?”
“No,” she said, her eyes never leaving my face.
“I know you don’t want to see me,” I said quickly, “and I promise that I will go away and never speak to you again. But first, you have to tell me why. What is it about me that makes me so…so repulsive?”