Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) (14 page)

For the next few minutes Gerry, as had all the witnesses before him, established his professional credentials. He had been a pharmacist for thirty-three years. His degree was from the Mercer University College of Pharmacy. He was certified by the state board and was, of course, duly licensed to dispense drugs within the boundaries of the sovereign state of Georgia.

“This is a prescription from Dr. Ana Ortins,” Gerry told the court.

He kept his eyes on a small, square sheet of paper, one of several Mr. Singleton held in his right hand.

“Now, Mr. Wayland,” Singleton said, “can you tell us the date of that prescription?”

Gerry did so.

“And what is it a prescription for?”

“Demerol.”

“And for whom is this prescription written?”

Sandrine, of course.

“Do you recall who gave you this prescription?”

Here Gerry's eyes flashed over to me, then away.

“Sam Madison,” he said. “Her husband.”

Mr. Singleton let this sink in before asking his next question.

“Have you had occasion, Mr. Wayland, to go back over your files and see exactly how many prescriptions for Demerol you filled with the name of Sandrine Madison written as the patient?”

Gerry had done this, of course.

“How many did you find?” Singleton asked.

“Three. Each with two refills.”

“Now it's customary for anyone picking up a prescription to sign for it, isn't that correct?”

“Yes, that's correct.”

“And have you had occasion to review your records as to who picked up the prescriptions for Demerol that you filled for this patient?”

Yes, he had done this.

“Who signed for them, Mr. Wayland?”

This time, Gerry's gaze remained on Mr. Singleton.

“Sam Madison.”

“Was there any occasion when Mrs. Madison picked up her own prescriptions?”

“No.”

Mr. Singleton smiled mirthlessly, then turned to Morty. “Your witness.”

Morty rose but did not approach the witness stand. This gesture was meant to show that he didn't consider Gerry's testimony of sufficient weight to require him to press his mountainous bearing in upon the witness. His questions carried this purposeful trivialization a few steps further. They were quite similar to the ones he'd earlier asked Dr. Ortins, and in answer after answer Gerry affirmed that there was nothing unusual, or even of note, with regard to the fact that I was always the one who'd picked up and signed for Sandrine's prescriptions.

“In fact, isn't it true, Mr. Wayland, that had you detected anything of a suspicious nature with regard to the filling of these prescriptions you would have been required—by law—to notify authorities of that suspicion?”

“Yes, that's true,” Gerry answered.

“Well, did you notify any authority with regard to any matter having to do with Mrs. Madison?”

“No.”

“So, in fact, Mr. Wayland, you can say categorically that you had no reason whatsoever to suspect any unlawful activity on the part of Mr. Madison or anyone else with regard to the death of Mrs. Madison, isn't that true?”

“Yes, that is true,” Gerry answered.

It was the answer he had to give because he was an honest man who'd previously sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. For this reason he must tell the jury that nothing I did had raised the slightest suspicion in his mind. He declared this in a clear, strong voice, but as he did so his gaze returned to me, and I saw just how great the distance is between what a man must say as a matter of law and what he harbors in his heart.

It wasn't until the end of the day, however, long after Gerry had finished his testimony, then been followed by a few other “pointless fact witnesses,” that at last I'd gotten the chance to raise exactly that point with Morty.

By then court had adjourned for the day, and both Morty and I were standing in the nearly empty courtroom.

“Gerry Wayland thinks I killed Sandrine,” I told him. “But, of course, so does the whole town.”

“It's only what the twelve people on the jury will come to believe that matters now, Sam,” Morty said. He added nothing to this as he gathered up his things, then headed out of the courtroom, I at his side, keeping pace with him until we exited the building, at which time he stopped and said, “Well, good night, Sam.”

We were standing on the steps of the courthouse, the streets of neat little Coburn busy below us. I could see its shops, the park with its bandstand, the slides and swings and whirligig. Postcard America.

“I guess I thought I was trapped,” I said softly, a remark that had seeped from me like heating oil from a tiny crack.

Morty's eyes whipped over to me. “Trapped?”

“My life,” I explained. “The way it had turned out. Teaching at Coburn College, living here. It all felt like a vise. It was tightening every day. That's why I did it, Morty.”

My lawyer's eyes narrowed and everything in him, from the largest muscles in his body to the smallest capillary, tensed. “Did what, Sam?”

“That thing with April Blankenship,” I answered. “It was that I felt trapped in this little town and so—”

“Just don't show any of that to the jury,” Morty interrupted, his voice not at all stern this time but filled with a relief that the “what” I'd just confessed was not the murder of Sandrine. “They live in this town, and most of them, Sam, don't feel your contempt for it.”

Contempt seemed a harsh word, but I realized that contempt really was what I'd felt for this little town with its modest liberal arts college.

As if whispered by the air around me, I heard Sandrine's voice, repeating one of the many dreadful things she'd said to me on that last night:
Failure is a cold bedfellow, isn't it, Sam?

Trapped, I repeated in my mind as Morty lingered beside me on the courthouse steps, rifling through his briefcase. But this time, as if on the wings of that word, I suddenly flew back in time to find myself in the bedroom of 237 Crescent Road. Sandrine was reading in bed, the room very much as Officer Hill would later see it, scattered with learned detritus, piles of books and papers beside the bed, peeping out from under desks and chairs, rising in jagged towers from every available surface. We'd lived so much like a couple of scholarly vagabonds that Alexandria had kept her room sparkling clean and well ordered as a gesture of teenage rebellion. It was an erudite chaos I'd worn as a badge of distinction, a proud disorder that had let me feel that I was different from the rest of the faculty. I'd even referred to our colleagues as “the Republicans,” though few had ever voted for anything but the Democratic slate.

Sandrine had looked up from this literary dustbin, her head cocked slightly, so that I thought some phrase from the Pavarotti aria playing in the background had suddenly struck her. But the thought that had occurred to her had had to do with Pavarotti's person, rather than his song.

“It's said that Pavarotti once asked his teacher what it took to be a great singer,” Sandrine said. “The teacher answered that it was ninety percent great singing. But that the final ten percent, the part that lifted great competence to grandeur, was something else.”

“Really?” I said. “And what was this something else?”

“I don't know,” she said. “But I think it would still be there, even if he didn't sing.”

The topic of this conversation was way too abstract or magical or just plain
woo-woo
for my thinking, and more or less to bring it to its conclusion I said, “So it could never go missing, I suppose.”

“No, it could go missing,” Sandrine said. She leaned forward and snapped off the music. “The question is whether it could be gotten back.”

I quickly ran back the calendar, and it was clear that Sandrine and I had had this exchange only a few days after she'd gotten Dr. Ortins's diagnosis, obviously a time during which she'd been going through a very difficult time, the “thinking things through” she'd earlier spoken of.

The snap of Morty's briefcase brought me back to the present.

“Alexandria's waiting,” he said.

Dinner

I headed down the stairs and got into the car, but this time I made no effort to engage Alexandria in conversation and so we'd gone all the way home in near silence.

“Go in and relax,” she told me as she pulled into the driveway. “I'll bring in the groceries.”

I did as I was told, and to aid in the relaxation I opened a bottle of wine and walked into the kitchen, where for some minutes I was lost in undefined and inchoate thoughts, shards of memory whirling about like bits of paper in a mental storm.

“Drinking already?” Alexandria asked after she'd gotten a whiff of my breath. “You haven't even had dinner yet, Dad.”

“It was a stressful day,” I answered by way of explanation.

“There are going to be days a lot more stressful than today,” Alexandria responded.

She looked at me as if I were a shark fin she'd glimpsed in the distance, something scary moving slowly but inexorably toward her. I couldn't help but wonder if she were thinking that now might perhaps be a good time to get out of the water.

Rather than face so final an abandonment, I began to unpack one of the grocery bags she'd lugged in from the car. She'd bought fruit and vegetables and several salmon fillets, all very sensible. She'd obviously noticed that I had begun to go to seed, everything sagging as if invisible weights hung from my cheeks and jaw and eyebrows.

She made no comment about this, however, but simply and quite methodically began to put away the groceries.

“You can cut the zucchini,” she said.

I drew a kitchen knife from one of the drawers and went to work. For an instant she looked at the blade warily, as if it were the pistol introduced in Act I and thus must inevitably reappear before the curtain falls.

“Not too thick,” she instructed.

She is very methodical, my now half-orphaned daughter. The vege­tables go into the vegetable bin. The bread goes into the breadbox. Our domestic chaos taught her to value design, it would seem. She has seen the whirlwind that disorder sows, and she will have none of it in her life, not even in the buttons and the bread.

She is right, save in one thing, I decided, the fact that moderation is possible, even in disarray. One can know, as Jean Cocteau once noted—this yet another learned reference stolen from Sandrine—how far to go too far. But where along time's famed continuum, I asked myself, should I have reined in the tiny nipping angers and frustrations that were ceaselessly tearing at me? And had Sandrine seen that, although outwardly calm, on the inside I was a thrashing pool of piranha?

Time now hurtled backward, as it had when I'd stood on the courthouse steps with Morty, and I found myself in the NYU library reading, of all things, Paul Verlaine, no doubt to impress Sandrine.

She glanced at the book as she came toward me. “Paul Verlaine threw his three-year-son against a wall,” she said, “during an argument with his wife.”

I closed the book. “I didn't know that.”

Sandrine's dark eyes were motionless. “You would never get that angry with me, would you, Sam?”

“No,” I said. “There would have to be something missing in a man to do something as cruel as that.”

“Something missing, yes,” Sandrine said.

Had she sensed that missing thing in me, I wondered, sensed it or something worse, actually saw it with devastating clarity as I faced her in the scriptorium all those years later, casually brushing off an anecdote from the life of Pavarotti while the sword of Damocles swung closer to her by the day?

“Dad?”

Alexandria was looking at me oddly because the knife in my hand had suddenly gone deathly still.

“You've stopped cutting,” Alexandria said.

“Oh, sorry,” I explained. “Just thinking.”

“About what?”

“Your mother's mind,” I said with an infinitely fragile smile. “How knowing she was.”

She looked at me sourly. Such talk only irritated her now and in her eyes made me seem hopelessly oblivious to how things had turned out.

“Finish cutting the zucchini,” she told me.

I remembered the earlier conversation I'd had with Morty, his questions about Alexandria's whereabouts on the day Sandrine died, and particularly the nature of any conversation they might have had. For a moment, I thought of asking her outright about that conversation, but I stopped myself because I feared that Sandrine had, in fact, told her all the hateful things she'd said to me, and I was in no mood to hear them repeated.

A few minutes later we ate dinner in the same nearly unspeaking way in which we'd earlier driven home from the courthouse, and after that I retreated to the scriptorium with a glass of wine.

At around ten I returned to the kitchen and put the glass in the copper sink. It was an old sink, hand hammered, and it had the rough, uneven texture of things made by hand. I'd barely noticed it until the ­afternoon—this now two weeks after the consultation with Dr. Ortins—I'd come upon Sandrine standing before it, peering into its battered basin. She'd looked quite lovely, framed by the window, her dark hair flowing down her back. But I'd long ago gotten used to her beauty so that was not what stopped me. Rather, it was the way she'd reached down and run her fingertips over the pits and gouges as if she were seeking something precious within them, a tiny jewel of some sort, minuscule as gold dust.