"Was it weird when you decided to practice with your father?" I ask her as we are watching the carafe fill. It's a question that's lingered with me for a couple of weeks now, but in the rush of trial there hasn't been much time to ask.
She laughs and admits she never quite made a decision. There was a family crisis years ago after her mother died-she does not mention it, but I am pretty sure that Clara, Marta's mom and Sandy's first wife, was a suicide, a weird thought this morning. Sandy, in her words, was "at sixes and sevens," and Marta slid into the role of her father's sidekick without a lot of thought.
"It's what people mean, though, when they say that things turn out for the best," she says. "I've loved practicing with my dad, and the truth is that if my mom hadn't died, it might not have happened. He's the best lawyer I've ever met, and we have this harmony in the office that we can't find anywhere else. I don't think we've ever raised our voices here. But if I bring him home for dinner when Helen is traveling, I'm screaming at him by the time he's through the door. He breaks every rule I have for the kids. I love my father," Marta adds then as a sudden afterthought, and flushes so quickly that I don't realize at first what's happened. It's the clearest declaration anybody has made yet that Sandy Stern is dying. She stares down into her coffee.
"I haven't recovered from my mother yet," she says, "and that's nearly twenty years."
"Really? I keep waiting to feel normal again."
"It's just a new normal," she says.
Whatever professional distance there is supposed to be between Marta and me has largely vanished. We just have too much in common. Both attorneys. With moms who met untimely deaths and these lawyer dads who seem big enough to block the sun but are each currently imperiled. We have, figuratively speaking, made it through this case holding hands, and I actually put my arm on her shoulder for a minute as we are walking back to the office. She is going to be one of those people I ask for advice the rest of my life.
We go over my testimony quickly. A lot of it is tender stuff after yesterday, but there is no debating the necessity.
"What's the deal with the computer?" I ask her.
"We're taking a little flyer. It was your dad's idea. He says there's no risk. We'll see. But I want you to be able to say in front of the jury that we didn't discuss that part in advance. So just follow my instructions. It won't be complicated."
The point is obvious anyway, to show how easy it would have been for my mom to have signed herself on to his machine.
When I head out to use the john before we go to court, I bump into my dad. He stayed clear of me yesterday, and even now there is, as usual, not a lot for either of us to say.
"I'm sorry, Nat."
My mom was short, so it seemed to surprise everyone, especially me, that I grew a couple inches taller than my father. For the longest time, I felt crazy weird about the fact that I was looking down at him, if just a bit. He grabs my shoulders and I stumble into some kind of hug, and then he goes off in his direction and I go in mine.
The first time I testified, I was an absolute mess. I had never seen a trial before, and here I was, the first witness in the case, called by the prosecution to give evidence against my father for murdering my mother. I just sat up there like a lump and answered as quickly as I could. Judge Yee kept telling me to keep my voice up. When Brand was done, Marta asked me a couple of questions designed to show that my dad seemed to be in a state of shock when he argued with me about calling the police. Then she told Yee she'd reserve any remaining examination until I was recalled in the defense case.
When I ascend this time to the chair under the walnut canopy, it's easier. I'll be seeing this courtroom in my dreams the rest of my life, but I am, in a very strange way, at home.
"Please state your name and spell the last name for the record."
"Nathaniel Sabich, S, A, B, I, C, H."
"You are the same Nathaniel Sabich who testified during the People's case?"
"Same guy." A young Latina in the front row of the jury smiles. She seemed to think I was cool when I was up here the first time.
"And since you testified, you have been present here in court each day, is that right?"
"I have. I'm the only family my dad has got, and Judge Yee said I could be in here to support him."
"But to be clear, Nat, have you discussed the evidence in this case with your father, or your testimony here today?"
"No. You know, he's told me he didn't do it and I've told him I believe him, but no, we don't talk about what the witnesses have said or what I'm going to say."
These last answers, which stray beyond the strict bounds of the rules of evidence, were worked out with Marta in advance. She would have been just as happy to see Brand object when I said I believed my dad, only to reemphasize that fact for the jurors, but I could see Molto touch Brand's wrist as he was about to spring up. By all accounts, Molto was kind of a hothead as a young guy, but time and responsibility have apparently chilled him out. He knows the jurors have seen me here day after day and have to realize whose side I'm on. The dude's my dad, after all. What else am I going to believe?
"And you are a licensed attorney?"
"That's right."
"And so you understand the consequence of being under oath."
"Of course."
"Nat, let me ask you first, about the case of John Harnason. Did you ever discuss that case with your mother?"
"My mom?"
"Well, were you ever present when your mother or your mother and father discussed the case?"
So I tell what happened during my dad's sixtieth birthday dinner, when it became clear that my mom had read about the case on her own. Then we go on to my dad's shopping trip the night my mom died. I explain how I've had this thing for salami and cheese since I was a kid, and yeah, my mom was like everybody's mom and liked to feed me the stuff I'd always craved, and yeah, my mom always sent my dad, or in earlier years me, to do those kinds of errands because she didn't like to leave the house and even did her weekly grocery shopping online. Then I tell the jury that it's true, my dad always picked up my mom's medications, and took them upstairs when he changed out of his suit, and very often put the bottles up on the shelf. Tap, tap, tap. My dad says that Sandy works like a jeweler with his little hammer. And so it's going now. I stand behind my dad's story, link by link.
It's all calm and easy until we get to my mom's suicide attempt when I was ten. The prosecutors raise hell before I can get into it, and the jury has to leave, which is pretty much ridiculous, because it all goes to back up what my dad said yesterday. But once the jury comes back, we don't get very far into what happened before I lose it. Prior to today, there may have been four people on earth I've told that story-even Anna didn't hear it until last night-and now I'm sitting here with reporters and sketch artists in the front row of this immense courtroom, confessing for the five o'clock news that my mom was totally out of control.
"And I walked into the bathroom," I say once I think I've regained composure, and start sobbing again immediately.
I try two or three more times but can't get through it.
"Was she trying to electrocute herself?" Marta finally asks.
I just nod.
Judge Yee intervenes then. "Record reflect witness nodded to mean yes. Think we all understand, Ms. Stern," he says, calling a halt on this subject. He recesses for ten minutes to give me a chance to pull myself together.
"I'm sorry," I tell him and then the jury before we adjourn.
"No 'sorry' needed," says Judge Yee.
I leave the courtroom and stand by myself at the end of the corridor, looking out the window at the highway. The truth is that talking about my mom has never been easy for me. I loved my mom, love her now, and always will. My dad was always floating at a distance, coming in and out, big and brilliant, sort of like the moon, but the gravity that held me to the earth was my mother, even though I seem to have struggled with her love all my life. There was a way I knew she loved me too much-that it wasn't good for me, that too much came with it-and as a result, I was always straining to escape the burden of her attention. When I was little, she was forever whispering to me-I'll eternally feel her breath on my neck as she spoke, and the hairs standing back there. She didn't want anyone else to hear what she was saying. And there was a message implicit in that: Only us. There was only us. She told me flat out, 'You are the world to me, you are the whole world, little boy.'