I flap my hands around uselessly. I'm always amazed how flattened and listless I feel when I leave my dad. Being around him requires everything I've got.
"You know," I say. "I heard it all laid out, and it's not like I can tell myself these guys, Molto and Brand, have just lost the thread, because it makes sense, what they're saying. But I still don't believe it," I tell her.
"You shouldn't." Always my dad's number one fan, Anna has been stalwart in his defense. "It's impossible."
"'Impossible'? Well, it's not like it would violate the rules of the physical world." Anna's green eyes slide my way. I never make points with her when I play philosopher.
"That's not your father."
I weigh that for a second. "I realize you worked for him, but up close and personal, my dad has actually got the cork in pretty tight." Anna and I have moments like this routinely, when I ventilate my doubts and she helps me see around them. "You know, once when I was a kid-I must have been twelve, because we'd moved back from Detroit and my dad was still sitting as a trial judge-me and him were driving somewhere. There was this big-publicity case he was presiding over. The wife of a local minister at one of these megachurches had murdered her husband. It turned out the minister was gay. She had no clue, and then she found out and she killed him by slicing off his you-know-what while he was asleep. He ended up bleeding to death."
"I guess that made the point," says Anna, and laughs a little. Girls always find that kind of thing more amusing than guys.
"Or unmade it," I answer. "Anyway, there was not much for the defense lawyers to do except claim she was insane. They called lots of witnesses to say this was completely unlike her. And I asked my dad what he thought. That was always sweet, because I knew he'd never answer those questions for anybody else, and I said, 'Do you believe she was insane?' and he just looked at me and said, 'Nat, you can never tell what can happen in this life, what people can do.' And don't ask me why, but I knew for sure he was talking about what had happened to him a couple years before."
"He wasn't saying he was a murderer."
"I don't know what he was saying. It was pretty strange. He seemed to be warning me about something."
We are stopped at the foot of the Nearing Bridge, where three lanes go to two and rush-hour traffic stands still every night. Years ago, I had a friend who claimed to know about the theory of relativity and who said that every living thing constantly sheds an image. If we could ever figure out how to get ahead of light, we could wind time back and witness any moment in the past, like viewing a three-dimensional silent movie. I often wonder how much I'd give to do that, to just watch what unfolded in my parents' house in the thirty-six hours after Anna and I left. I try to conjure it now and then, but the only thing that comes to me is the figure of him sitting on that bed.
"Sandy still thinks my dad is innocent," I tell her now.
"That's good. How do you know?"
"I asked him. We were prepping for my testimony and I asked what he thought. Of course, what else do you tell the client's son?"
"You don't tell him that if you don't believe it," she says. "You mush-mouth and avoid the question." Anna has been a practicing lawyer barely over two years, but I accept her authority on these matters as absolute. "It has to mean something to you that the people who know the evidence best still have faith in your father."
I shrug. "Sandy's got the same ideas as you about the DNA in the first case." I know from what I've heard previously that Ray Horgan, who was single at the time, was dating the woman who was killed. He has to be the logical suspect, if it's not my dad, especially when you consider that he turned on my father and testified for Molto back then. But you would think my dad would have realized that. Instead he patched it up with Ray, who's pretty much been my dad's bitch ever since, trying to make it up.
I keep all this to myself, though. It's never good when I mention Ray or what went on between Anna and him. Now and then I consider the fact that my dad was having his own fling during the same period. Along with all the other half-baked crap that floats through my brain, the timing has actually made me wonder once or twice if I missed the boat and it was my father Anna was seeing, until I sort of come to and realize Anna and I wouldn't be together, headed over this bridge or anywhere else, if that was what had happened. Instead, I simply try to fathom what happens to men in middle age. Apparently, their brains give out at the same time as their backs and prostates.
"Thanks for doing this," I tell Anna when we've arrived at the door of my parents' house.
In reply, she gives me a little hug. She has joined me on a number of these visits. Being here tends to creep me out totally-the scene of the alleged crime, where all the truth is somehow buried in the walls. The shades are drawn to hinder the prying cameras, and the air, once we are inside, smells like something was fried a few hours ago.
For Anna and me, the trial has been hard. In fact, everything has been hard in the last nine months, and sometimes I'm a little amazed we're still together. I drift off to never-never land with regularity and go through evenings when I can't or won't talk, and our frequent conversations about my dad and the trial often put us at odds. She is generally quicker to defend him, which means I sometimes end up pissed with her.
Not to mention the routine hindrances of life. Things are still slow at the firm, but she remains in high demand among the partners for what work there is. There are spells when days pass without my seeing her and I know she has been home only because I can see her form pressed into the bed and remember bumping up against her in the middle of the night. But she loves all that and tells me constantly that because of me, she is even clearer that she is doing what she wants. And you can tell. I cherish the moments when I'm going to meet her and catch sight of her before she sees me. She strides down the Center City streets with so much purpose, looking beautiful and brilliant and fully in charge.
I, on the other hand, am totally at sea. I don't know from one day to the next whether I will be working. I still sub now and then at Nearing High, but not while the trial is going, and I have been able to put off a number of decisions about my legal career, since I am a lot richer than I ever thought I'd be, with the bucks my Bernstein grandparents left behind having passed to me after my mom's death.
We mount the stairs and linger outside my parents' room, at the door to the little study where my dad's computer sat before it was captured by Tommy Molto.
"That sounded really bad today," I tell her, nodding inside. As happens frequently, I have been far too elliptical for her to get it, and I have to explain how the browser searches about phenelzine and the deleted e-mails played in the courtroom.
"I thought Hans and Franz are going to testify that maybe there weren't any e-mails deleted," she says.
'Hans and Franz' is our nickname for the two computer experts Stern hired to counter Dr. Gorvetich, the computer science prof who is working for the prosecution. Hans and Franz are Polish guys in their late twenties, one tall, one short, and both with hedgehog hairdos. They speak unbelievably fast and still have pretty strong accents and sometimes remind me of twins who are the only people on earth who can understand each other. They think Dr. Gorvetich, their former professor, is a total tool and take some relish in mocking his conclusions, which is apparently not hard to do. Nonetheless, from their offhand comments I get the feeling that Gorvetich is probably right that shredding software was downloaded to remove certain messages.
Anna shakes her head while I explain.
"I don't really believe any tests that come out of Molto's office," she says. "You know, it was pretty well established that he messed with the evidence in the first trial."