“Well, did you brush your teeth?” I asked, but then I remembered you had been trying to do just that when I was busy cutting. “Oh, forget your teeth. One night won’t make a difference.” I got out of bed and awkwardly leaned over yours. “Good night,” I said, and then I bobbed down like a pelican, fishing, and pecked your forehead.
“Mom tells me a story.”
“Then get Mom to tuck you in,” I said, throwing myself back on my own mattress. “I don’t have any stories.”
You were quiet for a second. “We could make one up together.”
“Whatever floats your boat,” I sighed.
“Once upon a time there were two sisters. One of them was really, really strong, and one of them wasn’t.” You looked at me. “Your turn.”
I rolled my eyes. “The strong sister went outside into the rain and realized the reason she was strong was because she was made out of iron, but it was raining and she rusted. The end.”
“No, because the sister who wasn’t strong went outside when it was raining, and hugged her really tight until the sun came out again.”
When we were little, we’d sometimes sleep in the same bed. It never started out that way, but in the middle of the night I’d wake up and find you vined around me. You gravitated toward warmth; me, I liked to seek out the cold spots in my sheets. I’d spend hours trying to move away from you in the little twin bed, but I never even thought of moving you back into your own. Polar north can’t get away from a magnet; the magnet finds it, no matter what.
“Then what happened?” I whispered, but you had already drifted off to sleep, and I was left to dream my own ending.
Sean
By unspoken arrangement, I slept on the couch that night. Except “sleep” was too optimistic an outcome. I basically tossed and turned. The one time I did nod off, I had a nightmare that I was on the witness stand and looked at Charlotte, and when I started to respond to Guy Booker’s question, black gnats poured out of my mouth.
Whatever wall Charlotte and I had broken down last night had been reconstructed twice as high and twice as thick. It was a strange thing, to still be in love with your wife and to not know if you liked her. What would happen when this was all over? Could you forgive someone if she hurt you and the people you love, if she truly believed she was only trying to help?
I had filed for divorce, but that wasn’t what I really wanted. What I really wanted was for all of us to go back two years, and start over.
Had I ever really told her that?
I threw off the blanket and sat up, rubbing my hands down my face. Wearing just my boxers and a police department tee, I padded upstairs and slipped into our bedroom. I sat down on the bed. “Charlotte,” I whispered, but there was no response.
I touched the bundle of quilts, only to realize it was a pillow trapped under the sheets. “Charlotte?” I said out loud. The bathroom door was wide open; I turned on the light, but she wasn’t inside. Starting to worry-Was she just as upset as I was about the trial? Had she been sleepwalking?-I walked down the hallway, checking your bathroom, the guest room, the narrow staircase that led to the attic.
The last door was your room. I stepped inside and immediately saw her. Charlotte was curled on your bed, her arm wrapped tight around you. Even in her sleep, she wasn’t willing to let you go.
I touched your hair, and then your mother’s. I brushed Amelia’s cheek. And then I lay down on the throw rug on the floor and pillowed my head on my arm. Go figure: with all of us together again, I fell asleep in a matter of minutes.
Marin
“Do you know what this is about?” I asked, as I hurried along the courthouse hallway beside Guy Booker.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” he said.
We had been called to chambers before the start of the second day of the trial. Being called to chambers, this early on, was not usually a good thing-particularly not if it was something Guy Booker didn’t know about, either. Whatever pressing issue Judge Gellar had to address most likely was not one I wanted to hear.
We were led in to find the judge sitting at his desk, his too-black hair a helmet. It reminded me of those old Superman action figures-you just knew that Superman’s coif never blew around in the wind when he flew, some marvel of physics and styling gel-and it was distracting enough for me not even to notice the second person in the room, who was sitting with her back to us.
“Counselors,” Judge Gellar said. “You both know Juliet Cooper, juror number six.”
The woman turned around. She was the one who-during voir dire-had been the target of Guy’s intrusive questions about abortion. Maybe the defense attorney’s hammering of Charlotte yesterday about the same issue had triggered a complaint. I stood up a little straighter, convinced that the reason the judge had convened us had little to do with me and much to do with Guy Booker’s questionable practice of the law.
“Ms. Cooper will be excused from the jury. Beginning immediately, the alternate juror will be rotated into the pool.”
No lawyer likes to have the jury change in the middle of a trial but neither do judges. If this woman was being excused, it must have been for a very good reason.
She was looking at Guy Booker, and very deliberately not looking at me. “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I didn’t know I had a conflict of interest.”
Conflict of interest? I had assumed it was a health issue, some emergency that required her to fly to the bedside of a dying relative or go immediately for chemo. A conflict of interest meant that she knew something about my client or Guy’s-but surely she would have realized this during jury selection.
Apparently, Guy Booker felt the same way. “Is it possible to hear what the conflict is, exactly?”
“Ms. Cooper is related to one of the parties in this case,” Judge Gellar said, and he met my gaze. “You, Ms. Gates.”
I used to imagine that I saw my birth mother everywhere and just didn’t know it. I’d smile an extra moment longer at the lady who handed me my ticket at the movie theater; I’d make conversation about the weather with my bank teller. I’d hear the cultured voice of a receptionist at a rival firm and imagine that it was her; I’d bump into a lady in a cashmere coat in the lobby downstairs and stare at her face as I apologized. There were any number of people I could cross paths with who might be my mother; I could run into her dozens of times each day without ever knowing.
And now she was sitting across from me, in Judge Gellar’s chambers.
He and Guy Booker had left us alone for a few minutes. And to my surprise, even with almost thirty-six years’ worth of questions, the dam didn’t break down easily. I found myself staring at her hair-which was a frizzy red. All my life, I’d looked different from the other people in my family, and I had always assumed that I was a carbon copy of my birth mother. But I didn’t resemble her, not at all.
She was holding on to her purse with a death grip. “A month ago I got a phone call from the courthouse,” Juliet Cooper said. “Saying that they had some information for me. I thought something like this might happen one day.”
“So,” I said, but my voice was wheezy, dry. “How long have you known?”