Authors: Emily Winslow
I think I've figured out what's so maddening about the cross-examination questions. The ones I got at the hearing, and the ones that Evan's practicing with me now, aren't logical. I'm not just reacting personally; I'm offended and insulted by their ridiculousness, by the smoke-blowing that's all their side has. I think I'll get less crazy about it if I treat each question as isolated, and answer each one without worrying about the implications of my answers linked together. Evan promises that he'll point out the holes in the defense's assertions on redirect or closing if there's need. I have to trust
him, which I do generally, but this specific trust is a new step: I have to live only from moment to moment and let him be in charge of the overall arc of my story. That's a particularly difficult thing to ask of specifically me.
At soccer-called-football coaching for W., I watch from a distance, enjoying the mix of happy homeschoolers kicking the ball around, from hippie kids to Muslims in modest dress. I don't sit with the other mothers. My oldest and therefore my closest homeschool friends are the parents of S.'s peers, not W.'s, so none of this specific group know about the case. Right now I can't really talk with people who don't. That isn't to say that I always make people talk about the case. I'm really good about talking about other things. I just need the knowing to be in the background, to be available for me to tap into in passing if it comes up.
Afterward, at choir, Alice takes me into John's rooms one last time before the new chaplain moves in. Some of John's books are still on the shelves. The clock hasn't been wound and the pendulum is still.
That was supposed to be my last self-indulgent peek. Still, the very next day, I continue in my grief routine and on my way to W.'s rehearsal walk straight through the college gate to John's wisteria-crowded window. I've been doing that every time I've entered the college since the funeral. I'm startled to see the Director of Music inside, presumably in a meeting with the new chaplain. I turn quickly away, embarrassed that Mark might have seen me, that he might have witnessed my stupid ritual, and also tearful that my stupid ritual of looking through that window is utterly, suddenly over. I go to East House, where the choristers play on the sports field until they're called in for rehearsal. I stand among little siblings and picnicking mothers at my feet. I make cheerful conversation, but I can't join them on the ground, can't relax. I blink fast and try not to cry visibly.
I feel jittery and breathless every day now. I think some people can tell. Sometimes I catch the way I'm looked at, or someone makes an assumption in conversation that reveals that they were reading subtext into whatever unrelated thing I was saying.
I'm relieved that people think about it. I think about it, too, now literally all the time.
I had expected that attending the trial would be a passive experience, that I would get to be its audience. Now, with being sequestered, I'll be forced to make more active use of my time. I'd like to smoothly change gears, make new plans, but because the timing is unpredictableâI don't know if I'll testify on the Tuesday or the Wednesday; I don't know if it will be one day or two or three from then to closing argumentsâI can't really plan what to do and will just have to wing it when I get there. I don't like that, but, actually, I could never have expected the experience to be controlled, not really. Better to learn that clearly, in advance, than to be suddenly disappointed when the unexpected happens anyway.
I look up the witness room that Evan mentioned. From references online, it doesn't seem to be a private space for our courtroom, but rather a shared space for all of the trials going on in all of the courtrooms that day. I was joking when I wondered if Bill and I should play a board game or what, but I decide to actually bring travel Scrabble. I also decide to be on the lookout for witnesses from the cyanide murder, the way that one keeps an eye out for celebrities in Los Angeles or for Kennedys on Cape Cod. Maybe some cyanide witnesses will want to play, too.
I also look up where Fryar will be.
There are three “Bridges of Sighs” that I know of: in Venice, here in Cambridge, and in Pittsburgh. All three are beautiful, and all three have been important to me.
Venice is where my only aunt has kept an apartment for as long as I've been alive. I've visited their family there some summers, and they've let me use the apartment myself for occasional little trips during the school year while they were at home in Berkeley. Venice's much-photographed Bridge of Sighs connects the Doge's Palace and the old prison, long-ago convicts presumably sighing as they were sent from court to their cells.
Cambridge's Bridge of Sighs is named as a bit of a joke. There are several college bridges crossing the River Cam. Only this one, particularly gorgeous and belonging to St. John's College, is enclosed like the one in Venice. The joke is that students sigh on their way to or from exams.
Pittsburgh's Bridge of Sighs connects the historic jail and the courthouse, looming above a street, not a waterway. The county's new jail is a half mile away, on the edge of the Monongahela River; so the old jail, attached to the bridge, has now become an extension of the courthouse, for family and juvenile cases, and is also where prisoners about to be tried are transported to “begin their day,” according to a narrated slide show called “Busted.”
Photos show a room with metal tables and attached metal seats, separated from open toilets by a wall of glass cubes that presumably obscure but don't appear to provide actual privacy. The pictured defendants are either in prison uniform or casual clothes. I don't see any suits. Maybe I was wrong about what Fryar will wear. WaitâI see a couple of ties, over untucked shirts, so that's something. And, eventually, two suits, out of the dozens of pictured prisoners. They're all shackled at the legs, even the dressed-up few, and handcuffed together in pairs.
A female guard narrates cheerfully, “The fear of God I think has been put into these guys since they saw us wearing Tasers!” [chuckles] “Nobody wants to get Tased.”
They're taken across the bridge in groups of eight, to the “bull
pen,” where they'll wait to be called to their courtrooms. It's “crowded and smelly,” the narrator says. “[They're] sitting or standing, whatever they want to do.” That really sums up jail for me, a place where a choice between sitting or standing is the full range of “whatever they want.”
While all of this is going on, I still have to look after upcoming writing and promotion obligations, including tending my online presence, which I have not been paying enough attention to. In my monthly check to see what my name brings up on Google, I also check on Fryar's name. To my surprise, images that I haven't seen before pop up.
It's a page from a casting site, with a collage of photos. Three of them I recognize; the others are surprises, but they're all from that after-he-was-young-but-before-he-was-old midlife phase that is viscerally familiar to me. In his “further information,” he claims to “sing, play Guitar and Bass, Dance, Rollerskate, Horseback ride and Bowl.”
It surprises me that he does these things, both because anything that he does up off of my apartment floor surprises me, and also because he doesn't seem like the roller-skating or horseback riding type. Roller-skating seems not stereotypically masculine enough for “Butch Johnson.” Horseback riding seems too expensive a pastime to be within his reach.
Mostly, though, it stirs memories of my own acting résumé from years and years ago. It was a desperate attempt to be everything, to prove useful to someone. If you could stay upright on ice, you could claim to skate. If you could do any stroke, claim to swim. You could always quickly learn more if they decide that they want you. Failing to embrace and announce every tenuous skill could lose you a commercial.
That aching desperation for validation feels terribly young and
long ago, and yet terribly present. I, too, want to be good enough by some external measure, though I'm less willing to pretzel myself into some unfamiliar version of myself to get it. That's partly why I left theater; or, more precisely, why I didn't get started in it after I graduated: I was tired of readying myself to fulfill every possible role. It was enough work just trying to be myself, never mind the “everyone else” I was supposed to be able to instantly turn into if casting required it.
This talent page leads to a reference to a play that Fryar had been cast in almost exactly a year ago. He mentioned on the talent site's Facebook page on August 31, 2013, that he was cast in a show to be performed in Harlem on September 21. September 12 is when he was arrested in his home at six in the morning, maybe dreaming of future fame which was then replaced by the reality of this prosecution.
His girlfriendâwell, I don't know for sure that she was his girlfriend but they shared a Brooklyn addressâhad shared the poster for this play on her Facebook wall on September 16. So, four days after arrest, he must have still had some hope of getting back to it, or at least she had hope for him.
Six months later, in March of this year, she posted a quote that “A relationship with God is the best relationship you can have.” Perhaps that was her solace after a decision to break up with him.
Fryar's sister is still going all-caps gangbusters on Facebook, wishing friends “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” and praising God. I'm equally opaque about the trial on my Facebook wall, posting about, for example, the wild neighborhood peacocks I'd like to tame.
This is what I mean about conversation. I can speak lightly about light things. I'm just relieved that some people see through it.
I save random people's Flickr photos of Pittsburgh's courthouse to my iPad. I can show them to people as conversation starters; they're not so off-putting as photos of Fryar. I still need excuses and prompts for talking about any of it.
It's a grand building. There are many, many tourist shots to choose from, of stairs and arches and elaborate interior streetlamps; of flags and a fountain. Tourists review the place, too, but it's not just tourists doing that. A court witness reports on Yelp that “despite the solemnity of the building itself, I was surprised at how friendly the staff was to me. Advocates, guards, and prosecutors alike greeted me with smiles and pats on the shoulder.” On TripAdvisor, someone at the courthouse for “work” describes it as “dated, but historical. clean, nice staff.” A Foursquare user advises, presumably regarding security, “Don't wear a belt.” Others add, “I hope you packed a lunch because the waiting game here is soo serious” and “Prepare to sit here all day.” One of the Flickr photos is, appropriately, an artistic close-up of a bench.
I've been practicing waiting all year. I'm ready.
The trial is imminent, but I have to get through John's memorial service first. Thanks to the college and the Church of England, there are systems in place, duties and milestones, that channel our emotions and energy. We're being let to come down from grief gently, rather than expecting the dramatic, near-immediate funeral to have ended it all.
The service is lovely, with a tone of gratitude for having known him instead of the shocked anguish of the funeral three months ago. It's good to have one more ceremony, one more significant moment. I would hate if we'd been expected to start the new term as if everything were all right again. John being gone is going to become normal, but it's never going to be all right.
At the gathering afterward, a sweet friend asks me, amid a buffet of sandwiches and tea, a question I've been asked before. Well, it's not really a question. It's a compliment, assuming an altruism on
my part that isn't true. She asks, rhetorically, if I'm going to trial to save all of the women who might have become Fryar's victims in the future.
Of course I'm pleased that he'll be stopped from having future chances to hurt anyone else. I'm glad for any women who'll never know that they were spared, and if I were faced with an opportunity that could stop any man like this, I would take it, for the sake of whoever would benefit. But that's not my first reason for doing this. My first reason is myself. Even without Georgia, even without any other victims at all, he deserves to be in court just for me. If I must justify myself by being a gift to others, perhaps setting an example and standard of valuing oneself is such a gift.
I suppose I could be accused of selfishness. That's what my friend was trying to spare me; she was framing my testimony as an act of generosity. Sometimes selfishness is part of survival, though, so I'm not sure I need saving from it. Besides that, how could anyone ever give if there were no one allowed to receive? Life would become one of those ridiculous, maddening pay-it-forward coffee chains where each person is obliged to pay not for themselves but for some random other, and no one, except the very, very last person, gets to actually accept a generosity. The corollary is that no one, except for the first, has really given.
Whenever I give, I want the gift to be embraced, not passed on thoughtlessly, automatically, as if truly accepting something were inherently crude. I want to create delight, not obligation. So, likewise, when I receive gifts, I take them with both hands. I show my gratitude by showing my pleasure. I hold tight and say,
“Mine.”
This friend tells me more, about how she's encouraging the young women in her life to listen to their instincts because of me, and to seek out public places when they don't feel safe. That's good advice, but it echoes the questions that Evan threw at me in the
cross-examination role-play:
Well, were you scared or not? Why did you go into the building if he made you uncomfortable? Why did you go up to your apartment? Why didn't you go back to the shops?
Of course, if I could live just that one night over, I would turn around, walk away, and stay on bright and busy Walnut Street. But in order to have made that choice that one night, I would have had to have been on high alert as a standard; I would have had to live like that all the time, and to be living like that now. Of course I would change that one night if I could, but I don't want to change every other night of my life, to live in a continual state of suspicion, which is what it would take. That's too high a price. Ultimately, I don't regret what I did on January 12, 1992. I'm not the one who I wish had done things differently that evening.
Gavin and I are among the last to leave the postmemorial reception. The catering staff have been tidying around us for a while already. It was too irresistible to talk and talk with John's family, with exâchoir parents whose boys are no longer trebles, with a previous organ scholar now moved to Oxford and about to get married. We exit with the chapel clerks who had been in the car with John when he died. I don't know them well, and it feels presumptuous to talk to them, but I remember how much it hurt when people thought it was too presumptuous to talk to me after the hearing. So we talk, and walk to evensong together.
I've made the decision to act as if we at the college all love each other. I could be wrong about that, but it turns out that, most of the time, people do care; they just need permission to show it, and sometimes instructions. I've figured Cambridge people out: I just have to go first.
I fly in four days.
I'm blanking. People are, exactly as I'd wished, bringing the trial up, and I'm so surprised that I just keep talking about whatever the
subject was a moment ago, or whatever I'd thought they were going to say. I'm incongruously cheerful, probably manic really. I send e-mails about the trial, yes, and also e-mails about parties and social arrangements, e-mails checking on other people's troubles, practical e-mails, congratulations, thanks, apologies, everything. Partly this can be explained as automatic behavior, my habitual way of being that's so ingrained that it can carry on even when my thoughts are elsewhere. But its excess at this time is perhaps a panic reflex, like some cats that strangely and desperately purr when they're frightened.
I post photos from my long-ago college performances on Facebook. All of them are from the eighteen months between the attack and graduation, because it was then that I was performing on the main stages, with full costumes and proper cast parties, and Mom and Dad bringing their camera. These were all taken years before digital cameras, way before smartphones and selfies, and I'd sentimentally scanned them into jpegs years later when I was pregnant with my first baby.
I'd sent Evan some questions from the friend who's kindly agreed to observe the trial for me. They're just practical questions, but there are a lot of them, and Evan asks me to Skype. I figure that it's just easier for him to talk than to write out the answers.
He looks serious on my little screen. I figure that he's had a long day in court. He prosecutes terrible things and it's to be expected that he'll look wrung out by them.
The background in his home is different from before, I notice: shelves this time. The ones on the right are full and the one on the left is empty. I wonder idly what's supposed to go there, or if the shelf itself, a neat square, might be decoration. I'm not worried about anything.
He starts with an apology. I think that he's going to tell me that my friend won't be allowed to sit in court, or won't be allowed to
take notes. I start to feel annoyance at whatever bureaucracy is getting in the way, but only annoyance. I'm not afraid.
Evan speaks respectfully, and regretfully, but he might as well have jumped out and said, “Boo!”
He tells me that it's over.
The defense has filed a motion regarding the statute of limitations, just dutiful make-work for Evan to answer efficiently, citing the DNA exception law and the convictions in several similar cases that have come before us. But Evan, while preparing his response, discovered a federal Supreme Court decision that changes everything, and overrides the state law on which our case depends.
Our entire prosecution hinges on an extension of the statute of limitations, allowing for an extra prosecution year because we have a new DNA match. But a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision,
Stogner v. California,
responding to a child-abuse case using a similar extension, declared that retroactive extension of a statute of limitations is unconstitutional. The extension laws can only be applied to crimes not yet past their limitations when the extension law itself was passed. Pennsylvania's DNA exception was made law in 2004. Any Pennsylvania crimes still within their limitations at that time can benefit from it. My statute of limitations had expired in 1997.
The defense doesn't know. Evan will be obliged to tell them.
How could this have been a surprise, when the Supreme Court decided this more than a decade ago? But it involved California, not Pennsylvania. It applied to child abuse, not rape. It applied to an exception for child victims, not an exception for DNA. So long as Pennsylvania law and Pennsylvania precedent were clear, in this area which is clearly a state's purview not a federal issue, Pittsburgh's lawyers had had no reason to go looking. But state laws, independent as they are, are not permitted to contradict the Constitution.
By making an issue of constitutionality, the Stogner case put a state law on federal trial. Now that this ruling's been noticed, and its applicability to our case recognized, Evan can't pretend that it hasn't been, tempting though that may be.
I go to Gavin. “What did Evan say?” he calls out as he hears my footsteps, expecting details of practicalities.
“What's the worst possible thing he could have said?” I ask in return. We're not even in the same room yet. I'm crossing the living room, entering the dining room, nearing the playroom where Gavin waits on the couch.
“Trial postponed again?” he asks. That's literally the worst thing he can imagine that Evan was capable of telling me, but Evan has a lot more power than that.
Gavin spends hours researching precedents. Everything he finds confirms what Evan has said. The Supreme Court vote was a close one, 5â4. Gavin says wryly, “Never thought I'd agree with Scalia,” one of the four dissenters. He and Evan Skype about it. I stay off camera, in tearful shock, but joke bleakly from the background to Evan: “Y'know, if you were a shitty lawyer this would never have happened.”
The first day that I wake up knowing it's over is staggering.
Did you know that the reason that carbon monoxide is poisonous is not because it actively hurts you, but because it fills the space where oxygen should go? Carbon monoxide doesn't do anything violent to the inside of your body; it doesn't burn, or eat like acid; it just squats there, keeping what you need from getting in. That's what this feels like. Not like an active attack, but as though something essential is being kept away.
This feels like I'm not breathing, not because he's pushing down on my face this time, but because there's suddenly no air at all.
Try it: Hold your breath. Longer; don't cheat.
That's what this
nothing
feels like. It feels like good air is locked out.
The second day improves.
I've been spending all of the daytime hours, yesterday and today, in a guest room, away from the kids, and from any obligations. Gavin takes care of everyday life for me. I e-mail friends, but can't bear to talk on the phone or to meet.
I read and reread kind replies, dozens of e-mails and even a handwritten letter. One friend had mailed a cheerful good-luck note the day before, and then, when he saw my news that the trial is off, had panicked to hand-deliver an apologetic new letter to beat the arrival of the first. I treasure both messages.
Contact from my old theater friends makes me smile. They habitually use the word “beautiful,” in a noun sort of way (“Hey, beautiful!” “Hello, gorgeous!”) whether it's actually true or not. To actors, it's a reassuring, comforting word more than an objective compliment of physical reality. It's just something that they say to each other out of love. It means,
You have value.
Georgia has asked Evan for my e-mail address. Our only contact so far had been at the January hearing, and I've agreed that he can give it to her. After all, without the trial to bring us together again, it's important to have some means of connection, to use now or maybe in the future.
Aprill is devastated. This affects not just our case, but, potentially, recent convictions of hers as well. She apologizes, not just for this abrupt end but for starting it at all, fearing that she has hurt me. I realize, in contrast, how truly grateful I am for what we've had at all: for the hearing, and even just for learning Fryar's name.
At one thirty in the afternoon in Pittsburgh, evening here, Evan formally withdraws the case.
On that first day hiding out in the guest room, when I'd sent emotional e-mails letting people know what had happened, I'd specifi
cally chosen the words “devastation” and “humiliation” to describe my state of mind. Several of the replies had quickly assured me that there was nothing to feel humiliated about, and I knew that. I was in fact puzzled that the word had seemed necessary, but it truly had.
It's only in retrospect that I think I figure it out. Humiliation is present because I was counting on the conviction and sentencing to speak for me. To say that the man has been put in prison for what he did to me would demonstrate the crime's severity, in fact define it as a crime at all. A significant sentence of, for example, several decades (which was a real possibility), would surely get an awed, low whistle. I wouldn't have had to say any longer what had specifically happened, just what it had been worth: “The crime against me was given twenty-five years.”
Now I'll never have that shorthand, or that objective, assigned value to present. Without that, everyone gets to make up their own minds about how much it matters. Everyone becomes a jury that I have to face separately, over and over.
Losing the conviction also means that I might lose the right to speak freely. I might now have to tack “allegedly” onto what I claim, or not say his name. Potentially having my truth filtered frightens me.
I haven't yet canceled the flights or hotel, because it feels like doing so would make me complicit in ending things. I decide to go anyway. As always, I feel the need to do something physical with my feelings. Yesterday, the urges were melodramatic:
Run away! Take pills!
That impulse has now homed in on a practical action: I must get to Pittsburgh.
The trial being canceled means that instead of going there to fulfill what Evan and the detectives needed me to do for the case, I'm the one asking for this to happen, for me. I'm hat-in-hand again. They don't need anything from me; I have to hope that they want to see me. It's daring and exhausting to honestly and directly say “I want” and “Please?”