“Every time she’s ten minutes late I start to worry about her,” I say tentatively, hoping I’m not being presumptuous.
I know firsthand how meaningless words of sympathy are from most people. The pain from the death of someone you love can hardly be imagined by someone else. In an effort to establish my sincerity, I add, “My wife died of cancer, so I Spock pretty easily.”
I have pushed the right button. Olivia’s small bust rises and falls as she sighs, “How old is your daughter?” “Seventeen,” I say and, unable to stop myself, add, ‘she’s at the Governor’s School at Hendrix College for the Gifted and Talented this summer.”
Her smile is genuine.
“You must be very proud.”
“I am,” I say and stop. How callous can I be? Her child was born without a normal brain, the first words out of my mouth are how superior my child is.
Olivia’s gray eyes are warm with concern as she empathizes.
“I understand how you feel about your daughter. Unless she was in restraints or heavily drugged, there were times I couldn’t stop worrying about Pam, and then it was a different kind of worry. When you have a child who injures herself, for months every time the phone rings after it happens you think they’re calling you to tell you something new and even more horrible than before.”
I have begun to nod, but I can’t really even imagine what she has gone through. Almost every day with Sarah has been ajoy; has this woman even had one happy day with her child?
How has she endured it? As grotesque as shock sounds, a radical form of treatment at some point may seem unavoidable.
However, probably only the parent of the child can say that convincingly. For the next forty minutes Olivia Le Master tells me a story that I will remember the rest of my life, for it is impossible for me not to think of Sarah while she recounts her child’s tortured existence. While I listen to the predictable anguish and guilt all parents must feel upon learning their child is retarded, I think of how much I take my daughter’s normality for granted. Would I have deserted Rosa (as Olivia Le Master’s husband did) if Sarah had turned out to be profoundly retarded? Surely not, I tell myself, but the truth is that I would have been sorely tempted. As she speaks, I can hear my mother saying an hour before the wedding: God knows, Gideon, you don’t know a thing about her background. She, of course, was not so obliquely referring to my own father’s mental illness. Knowing myself, I would have tried to find a way to blame Rosa had Sarah been screwed up. How does a young mother have the strength by herself to raise a child like that at home? Incredibly, Olivia Le Master tried, but she found it was impossible alone. She had to work to support herself, and child care is difficult enough in Arkansas under the best of circumstances. For her, but perhaps not for others, she concedes, it was too much.
Certain she was abandoning her daughter when she began to abuse herself, Olivia placed Pam in the Blackwell County Human Development Center when she was ten.
“You can’t imagine the relief I felt when she was accepted,” Olivia says, her eyes filling with tears.
“I felt I could breathe for the first time since my husband ran off.”
Men are truly jerks, I think. What makes us weaker than women? Is it simply that they are the ones to have children and thus come by a sense of responsibility more naturally?
As I listen to her account, I imagine I am hearing the story of every women who has turned her child over to the state.
If she missed a weekly visit, she felt enormous guilt. In a kind of feeble way I try to identify with her. There have been more nights than I care to remember when I have come home much later than I promised Sarah. The look on her face (anger and relief) has, from time to time, haunted my dreams.
Still, time brings a measure of acceptance of events that cannot be reversed. A healthy sense of fatalism, Olivia calls it during the interview, and though I don’t believe in fate, I can understand how she does. Before Pam was born, David Le Master started a real estate business, and it was his gift to his wife when he decided he didn’t want to be around anymore.
“David was good at starting things,” she says, a wintry smile overtaking her face whenever she mentions her husband.
“I’ll give him that.”
Most men are, I think, glancing sideways to catch my client’s expression. He is watching her face with such sympathy I feel a twinge of guilt.
Olivia relates her daughter’s tragedy without another reference to her ex-husband. In a straightforward manner she tells me what it was like when the self-injurious behavior began. With no warning whatsoever one day, Pam began beating her head with her fists at first and then later against walls, even against her bed. Not so hard that one blow would cause injury by itself but hard enough to bruise her. Left alone, she would hit herself over one hundred times in an hour. I turn to Andy and ask why a child would do this, but he says that there are only theories for this behavior, not explanations, the latest one being that self-injurious behavior is actually a form of communication. More traditionally, Andy says, slipping into jargon, it is thought to be behavior that is reinforced by attention or is an attempt to avoid a task or is even somehow intrinsically reinforcing.
“The fact is,” Andy says, looking at Olivia, though I’m sure they have discussed this topic many times, “no one knows for sure what prompts a child to hurt herself.”
Olivia has begun to cry. Of course there is no box of tis sues for my clients in the conference room, but Olivia yanks a wad from her purse and begins to talk even while she wipes her face.
“When she first started hitting herself, I was told it might stop, but with time, it only got worse. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t care whether a person says they believe in God or not you think you’re being punished for something you did. Who knows? Maybe all of us were being punished I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to you that in some ways Pam’s death has been a relief.”
This last sentence, understandable, and not totally unexpected, is still jarring to me. Without this last addendum about death being a release, Olivia’s impact on a judge and jury will be favorable. And yet, maybe it, too, will be understood. This is not some highly emotional and distraught parent who has been overly influenced by a psychologist who wanted to use her daughter as a guinea pig for his own research. Rather, Olivia, assuming her testimony holds up, will come across as a strong, caring mother, who loved her daughter enough to inflict pain on her if that was what it took to help her.
I glance back at my client and am not surprised to find that his eyes are moist. But I do not want Olivia to admit in the witness chair that even for a moment she thought about the surcease from pain her child’s death would bring. With the acknowledgment of this all-too-human motive, it might be tempting for the prosecutor to try to convince a jury that a sympathetic and frustrated psychologist deliberately went too far in trying to end her child’s suffering. Waiting for her to finish wiping her eyes, I wonder how I can say this with out coming across as hideously manipulative. Lawyers are directors as well as actors in a play. If we forget that for one instant, we’re no longer doing the job we’re hired to do.
Just tell the truth, we tell our witnesses. What we mean is, just tell the truth in a way the judge or jury will believe you. I’m all for the truth, but if nobody believes it, what has the system accomplished? The trouble with being a public defender was that the witnesses for the defense were not credible even when they were telling the truth. Give me a good actor who can make the truth convincing, and I’ve got a chance. I don’t have to tell Olivia what I need from her today.