Darling? (23 page)

“Yes.”

“You were … unsettled … by something. There’d been an argument…”

“Yeah,” Dawn said, “Brad—this guy my daughter’s with—he came back. He hadn’t been around for months, and then he was outside screaming at five o’clock in the morning, waking up the baby … and Sherry locked the screen door and he tore it off the hinge and then he came in and lay down in the recliner and cried himself to sleep.”

“And…”

“Well they couldn’t close the door, see, and we made a run to the … We had to do some shopping, and a snake got in the trailer … into the bird cage, and ate my granddaughter’s parakeet.”

“What became of the snake?”

“Once it swallowed the bird it couldn’t get out of the cage.” Dawn said.

“So?…”

“So I cut it in half with the garden shears.” This with a gesture of Purmortese insouciance—
I took care of it.

“Actually, you cut it into six or eight pieces, am I correct?”

“Your Honor?” Dawn’s lawyer said, and the judge nodded, and the prosecutor desisted.

“Tiffany loved that bird,” Dawn said.

“And on the way home, at about—?”

“We left about eight.… Brad woke up and we wanted to give them some time alone.”

“You passed the Myles Standish Tap, and there you stopped in for … a beer, two … more?”

“I used to wait tables there,” the defendant explained. “All’s I had was two beers.”

“Two beers over four hours?…”

“For old times’ sake. And then Brad came in, to say he was sorry, and he bought us another round, and we couldn’t just go…”

“No, no. And you’d taken codeine for a back injury some time earlier…” Waiting tables is hell on the back, and bartending can be worse, if you have to drag the kegs up from the basement like my mother.

“Yes, six hours before, at three
P.M
.”

“Six hours? In
fact
it was nine hours earlier,” said the prosecutor, swooping in. One short step, apparently, between losing track of the hours and vehicular homicide, but I wondered how much effect a codeine tablet could have nine hours after it was swallowed. They hadn’t mentioned the Breathalyzer—had they forgotten?

“And the keys were in the ignition.”

“No ma’am,” Dawn’s boyfriend boomed out from the side. “The keys were on the dash.”

“I was questioning the defendant,” the prosecutor said.

“She doesn’t remember, but I do,” he said.

The judge shook his head and the boyfriend sat back in his chair.

“Your memory on this point is not clear?”

“No,” Dawn said meekly. She was guilty, that was the problem. She’d been drunk, she was old enough to know better, she was sitting in the driver’s seat because she had been and would be (if she could only find the keys and get them back in the ignition) driving the car—plus the codeine, flagrant misuse of garden shears, a daughter living in the Pilgrim Spring Trailers with a no-account guy like Brad, serving old-fashioneds at a barbecue—and this boyfriend with his belligerent belly and long ponytail …

She was guilty, but the prosecutor was mean.

And I myself, as it happens, can’t tell left from right, so could easily have made the same mistake with the nose test … and be found out and sentenced to return to Purmort where I belong. I felt dizzy and nauseated and wondered if I should have asked to be excused.

The foreman’s watch said two-thirty, and the arresting cop got on the stand. He was only a year on the force and looked so natty for his court appearance he seemed like a waxen statue.

“Did the defendant seem to you intoxicated, when you first saw her?” the prosecutor asked.

“I could not make a determination,” he said with a note of professional pride. The prosecutor’s eyes met mine for an instant, as if she recognized in me a fellow traveler. I always forget how Vassared up I am—how utterly incognito.

“When
did
you make a determination?”

“After the sobriety tests, ma’am.”

“I see.”

The defense lawyer had only one question: Had the cop discussed the case with his lieutenant as they drove to court that morning? No, he said—no, certainly not. But he squirmed a little, and with reason, because the lieutenant, interviewed earlier, had looked mystified by the same question and answered that of course they’d talked it over, it was part of their job.

“The police have no reason to lie,” the prosecutor said, opening her summation. She looked so terribly stingy, hardened from the kind of unhappiness that draws pity without sympathy, as if, having done without comfort and pleasure in her life, she was now dedicated to making sure others suffered the same. “The police are doing a job. Look into your hearts, jurors, ask yourselves—this woman was sitting in the driver’s seat, with her feet out the window, while her car blocked the southbound lane of Route 38, the Pilgrims Highway; she failed every test she was given. You have it by her own admission that she’d had a great deal of alcohol as well as codeine that afternoon, that her speech was slurred and her companion here taunted the police with a ribald song. I ask you to find her guilty of driving under the influence, a crime which took thousands of lives across this country in the last year and which often goes unprosecuted and unpunished.”

She was right, but she was mean.

“Jury,” the judge said quietly, “you must work until you reach a verdict, considering all the testimony
without
adding your own speculation. You may come back with any questions pertaining to the law, but I cannot answer questions about the facts.” And the bailiff escorted us to the jury room, with an air of respect and deference—our stature had risen now that the case was in our hands.

*   *   *

There was plenty of space in the jury room now that we were only six, and we ranged ourselves around the table, keeping as far from each other as we could and continuing silent, as if it would be embarrassing now to admit we knew how to talk. The foreman sat across from me, making notes on a legal pad, his arm curled protectively around it like it was a test and he was afraid I’d cheat. When had any of us ever held a serious discussion with a bunch of strangers? They say it happens all the time on Israeli public transportation, but this was Cape Cod in winter, a land where almost everyone is either comfortably retired (and therefore conservative Republican) or desperately unemployed (and therefore liberal Democrat). It works out fine as long as you only talk about the weather. Now we were supposed to talk about something with consequences—and we hadn’t yet summoned the courage to say hello to each other. The old man in mothballs was still there, and the man with the coveralls and a couple of others who looked to be carpenters or electricians. So the jury was a representative sample—three out of every six people on Cape Cod
are
builders, and they work all day every day squeezing “distinctive homes” where you wouldn’t think you could fit a chicken coop. They seemed too big for the room, and restive, like they needed to get out and tear off a roof or something to clear their heads.

At first we all looked at the foreman, but as he kept scribbling the gazes turned back to me until I felt responsible to do something.

“How should we go about this?” I asked finally, and he looked up with irritation as if I’d made a breach of etiquette.

“I just have a few questions before I make up my mind,” he said.

“What are they?”

“Well, I
don’t
think I should say,” he said with some severity. “We’re not supposed to talk.”

“No, that was on the lunch break. Now we can talk. We’re supposed to.” I meant this kindly—I knew I was wrong to despise him just because they’d set him above me. I should have been foreman—
I
won the scholarships,
my
glance has caused a knife-wielding hand to spring open, and I’m a
Director,
I’ve taken a sodden little village and made it pass as an Essential Historical Site. If it weren’t for jury duty I’d have been back in my office pacifying all the groups the mayor had offended: Wampanoag Nation, the Mayflower Society, and the B’nai B’rith, to name a few. But no, rather than a woman named Brandy, they’d put a guy who “didn’t think he should say,” a featureless representative of the great homogenous middle class, in charge. In charge of what?—I might have asked, but I didn’t care. It’s survivor’s bossiness, a Purmort thing—it starts when you’re eight or nine and you take over for your parents, realize you’re better at life than they. And ends when you become a ridiculous popinjay of self-sufficiency, someone like me.

“That’s what
deliberations
means—talking,” I said primly.

“He
told
us
not
to discuss the case,” the foreman snapped and looked back at his page.

“How are we going to come to a verdict without discussing the case?”

“She’s right—I, I think she’s right—,” said the guy in the coveralls. How had I just lumped him in with the others? Looking again I got my eyes full of his, which were dark and sparkling, as if he’d spied out all my weaknesses and found them endearing.

Hearing his deep voice the foreman looked up finally—gratefully—and turned, with the rest of them, to me.

“Maybe we should start with your questions,” I said. Foreman looked miserable again and I felt sympathy for a minute—suppose his opinions made everyone hate him? Would it be stodgy of him to think her guilty? Weak to acquit her? Better to just lie low.

“Well … like, what about the Breathalyzer? Why didn’t they give her one?” he asked. “And … why did it take so long to have the trial? I mean this happened almost two months ago.…”

It was January; the “crime” had taken place in August.

“Five months ago!” I said, relieved to find myself on his side, but he took it as disagreement.

“I don’t know, two whole months,” he said. “I don’t feel comfortable with this, I think I’m going to have to substain.”

“Me, too, I’m going to … substain … too,” said the guy on my other side, who had the sparse mustache and goatee of a consumptive poet and earnest, piercing eyes—he reminded me of a man I’d known who was “born again” suddenly in the middle of his motocross racing career and so radiated a strange blend of pious sincerity and full-throttled aggression. “I mean … she says she had a couple beers … The police quote her saying it was a six-pack and some old-fashioneds—who you gonna believe?”

“
Nobody
has
a couple of beers
at the Myles Standish. I mean, give me a break,” said the smart one—the one who’d told them to listen to me. “I mean, does anyone else here recall the size of the glasses at the Myles Standish?”

Born Again gave an obscene whinny, and the old man, who looked as if he’d been dozing so long that he now resided at some indefinite point on the continuum between sleep and death, came alive suddenly and chuckled to himself.

Foreman looked forlorn, as if we’d gone out partying without him. “Could somebody write down the questions?” he asked me. “My handwriting—”

My own handwriting is cramped and jerky—it’s obvious a pen is a weapon to me—but how would he have known? He saw a woman, an overspreading tree, who bends down to whisper truths into a child’s ear and then writes them out in a clear, round hand—and who hates to disappoint people and would naturally do as he said.

I did. “Why didn’t they give her the Breathalyzer?” he dictated, his voice sharp and confident now that he was telling me what to do. “How much had she really had to drink? Why did it take two months to bring to trial?”

“We’re not supposed to ask about the facts, only the law,” I said, thinking he’d wanted me to do the writing so he wouldn’t be blamed for his own stupidity.

“Well, these
are
about law,” Foreman said. “Aren’t they?” He looked sad and confused and I wondered what on earth he might do for a living—he wasn’t confident enough to be a real estate agent, or toughened like a fisherman.… His hands looked soft and white and useless—maybe he was a clerk at the Motor Vehicle Registry. “I mean, I’m just not comfortable about this—in the first place I
don’t
think we’re supposed to be talking to each other…”

I sighed, and when I called the bailiff he sighed, but carried the questions soberly out to the judge and returned to gather us up and lead us into the courtroom.

“Get back in the order you were seated in,” he told us, and we circled each other in a complicated do-si-do, trying to figure out which of us was who. I was aggrieved to find neither of the men who’d sat beside me recalled this, as if my femininity gave me no distinction. Finally I had to push the foreman to the front—he seemed to be trying to hide behind me.

“Try to stay in line, okay?” the bailiff asked—plaintive, wishing for at least a semblance of order, a few clear outlines or an impartial understanding or
something
of the sort one might have expected from a tall, authoritative deep-voiced judge and a group of jurors who knew men from women and were able to form a straight line.

“Jury,” the judge said, once we were settled. “I instructed you
not
to speculate and
not
to ask questions of fact. Yet I have received from you one speculative question and two questions about the facts. Jury, I am disappointed in you. Please return to your deliberations and do as you have been charged.”

He was looking straight at me, as if he knew the others were hopeless, but had expected I would do better. Even the bailiff, as he marched us back to our chamber, seemed to blame me. Well, they should have made me foreman.…

But no. We sat sheepishly around the table. “I’m just going to have to substain,” Foreman said again.

“It’s
abstain!
” I snapped, “and you can’t abstain, we have to be unanimous.”

“It’s the defendant who should have abstained,” opined the smart one, sadly.

“We have to know if she was really driving,” Foreman said, with his hand on his pocket again and a strange sound in his voice as if he was guilty of something, too. “The police say the car was running, her boyfriend says the keys were on the dash. I mean, it’s a big question!”