Small Great Things (55 page)

F
REEDOM IS THE FRAGILE NECK
of a daffodil, after the longest of winters. It's the sound of your voice, without anyone drowning you out. It's having the grace to say yes, and more important, the right to say no. At the heart of freedom, hope beats: a pulse of possibility.

I am the same woman I was five minutes ago. I'm rooted to the same chair. My hands are flattened on the same scarred table. My lawyers are both still flanking me. That fluorescent light overhead is still spitting like a cockroach. Nothing has changed, and everything is different.

In a daze, I walk out of the courtroom. A bumper crop of microphones blooms in front of me. Kennedy instructs everyone that although her client is obviously delighted with the verdict, we will not be making any statements until we give an official press conference tomorrow.

That right now, her client has to get home to her son.

There are a few stragglers, hoping for a sound bite, but eventually they drift away. There is a professor being arraigned down the hall for possession of child pornography.

The world turns, and there's another victim, another bully. It's the arc of someone else's story now.

I text Edison, who calls me even though he has to leave class to do it, and I listen to the relief braided through his words. I call Adisa at work, and have to hold the phone away from my ear as she screams with joy. I'm interrupted by a text from Christina: a full row of smiling emojis, and then a hamburger and a glass of wine and a question mark.

Rain check?
I type back.

“Ruth,” Kennedy says, when she finds me standing with my phone in my hand, staring into space. “You all right?”

“I don't know,” I reply, completely honest. “It's really over?”

Howard smiles. “It is really, truly, unequivocally over.”

“Thank you,” I say. I embrace him, and then I face Kennedy. “And you…” I shake my head. “I don't even know what to say.”

“Think on it,” Kennedy says, hugging me. “You can tell me next week when we have lunch.”

I pull back, meeting her eyes. “I'd like that,” I say, and something shifts between us. It's power, I realize, and we are dead even.

Suddenly I realize that in my astonishment at the verdict, I left my mother's lucky scarf in the courtroom. “I forgot something. I'll meet you downstairs.”

When I reach the double doors, there's a bailiff stationed outside. “Ma'am?”

“I'm sorry—there was a scarf…? Can I…”

“Sure.” He waves me inside.

I'm alone in the courtroom. I walk down the aisle of the gallery, past the bar, to the spot where I was sitting. My mother's scarf is curled underneath the desk. I pick it up, feed it like a seam through my hands.

I look around the empty chamber. One day, Edison might be arguing a case here, instead of sitting next to a lawyer like I have been. One day he might even be on the judge's bench.

I close my eyes, so that I can keep this minute with me. I listen to the silence.

It feels like light-years since I was brought into another courtroom down the hall for my arraignment, wearing shackles and a nightgown and not allowed to speak for myself. It feels like forever since I was told what I could not do.

“Yes,” I say softly, because it is the opposite of restraint. Because it breaks chains. Because I
can
.

I ball my hands into fists and tilt back my head and let the word rip from my throat.
Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love.

—
N
ELSON
M
ANDELA,
L
ONG
W
ALK TO
F
REEDOM

I
N THE EXAMINATION ROOM AT
the clinic, I take a rubber glove out of the dispenser and blow it up, tying off the bottom. I take a pen and draw eyes, a beak. “Daddy,” my daughter says. “You made me a chicken.”

“Chicken?” I say. “I can't believe you think that's a chicken. That is
clearly
a rooster.”

She frowns. “What's the difference?”

Well, I walked right into that one, didn't I? But there's no way I'm going to describe the birds and the bees to my three-year-old while we're sitting waiting for her to get tested for strep. I'll let Deborah do that when she gets home from work.

Deborah, my wife, is a stockbroker. I took her last name when we got married, hoping to start over as someone new, someone better. She is the one with the nine-to-fiver, while I stay at home with Carys, and fit my speaking gigs around her playdates and her nursery school. I work with the local chapter of the Anti-Defamation League. I go to high schools and prisons and temples and churches, talking about hate.

I tell these groups about how I used to beat people up because I was hurting so bad, and either I was going to hurt them, or I was going to hurt myself. I explain that made me feel like I had a purpose. I tell them about the festivals I went to, where musicians sang about white supremacy and children played with racist games and toys. I describe my time in prison, and my work as a webmaster for a hate site. I talk about my first wife. I say that hate ate her from the inside out, but what really happened was more mundane: a bottle of pills, swallowed with a bottle of vodka. She could never handle seeing the world as it really is, and so finally, she found a way to keep her eyes closed forever.

I tell them that there is nothing more selfish than trying to change someone's mind because they don't think like you. Just because something is different does not mean it should not be respected.

I tell them this: the part of the brain, physiologically, that allows us to blame everything on people we do not really know is the same part of the brain that allows us to have compassion for strangers. Yes, the Nazis made Jews the scapegoats, to the point of near extinction. But that same bit of tissue in the mind is what led others to send money and supplies and relief, even when they were half a world away.

In my talk, I describe the long road to leaving. It started with a visit in the middle of the night—hooded, faceless individuals sent from others in power who broke down our door and beat us. Francis was thrown down a flight of stairs: me, I had three broken ribs. It was our bon voyage party, I suppose. I shut down Lonewolf.org the next day. Then there were the divorce papers I was having drawn up when Brit killed herself.

Even now, I make mistakes. I still feel the need to slam into something or someone from time to time, but now I do it on the rink in an ice hockey league. I'm probably more cautious than I should be around black dudes. But I'm even more cautious with the white ones in the pickup trucks with Confederate flags hanging in the back windows. Because I used to be who they are, and I know what they are capable of.

Many of the groups I meet with do not believe that I could possibly have changed so dramatically. That's when I tell them about my wife. Deborah knows everything about me, my past. She has managed to forgive me. And if she can forgive me, how could I not try to forgive myself?

I do penance. Three to four times a week, I relive my mistakes in front of an audience. I feel them hate me. I think I deserve it.

“Daddy,” Carys says, “my throat hurts.”

“I know, baby,” I tell her. I pull her onto my lap just as the door opens.

The nurse comes in scanning Carys's intake form at this walk-in clinic. “Hello,” she says. “My name is Ruth Walker.”

She looks up, a smile on her face.

“Walker,” I repeat, as she shakes my hand.

“Yes, as in the Walker Clinic. I own the place…but I also work here.” She grins. “Don't worry. I'm a much better nurse-practitioner than I am a bookkeeper.”

She doesn't recognize me. At least I don't
think
she does.

To be fair, it's Deborah's last name on the form on the clipboard. Plus, I look very different now. I've had all but one of my tattoos removed. My hair has grown out and is conservatively trimmed. I've lost about thirty pounds of muscle and brawn, ever since I've taken up running. And maybe whatever's inside me now is casting a different reflection, too, on the outside.

She turns to Carys. “So something doesn't feel good, huh? Can I take a look?”

She lets Carys sit on my lap as she runs gentle hands over my daughter's swollen glands and takes her temperature and teases her into opening her mouth by staging a singing contest that Carys, of course, wins. I let my gaze wander around the room, noticing things I hadn't seen before—the diploma on the wall with the name Ruth Jefferson written in calligraphy. The framed photo of a handsome black guy wearing a graduation cap and gown on the Yale campus.

She snaps off her gloves, drawing my attention. I notice that she is wearing a small diamond ring and wedding band on her left hand.

“I'm ninety-nine percent sure it's strep,” she tells me. “Is Carys allergic to any medications?”

I shake my head. I can't find my voice.

“I can take a swab of her throat, do a rapid strep culture, and based on those results, start a course of antibiotics,” she says. She tugs on Carys's braid. “You,” she promises, “are going to feel
excellent
in no time at all.”

Excusing herself, she walks toward the door to get whatever she needs to do the test. “Ruth,” I call out, just as she puts her hand on the knob.

She turns. For a moment, her eyes narrow the tiniest bit, and I wonder. I wonder. But she doesn't ask if we have met before; she doesn't acknowledge our history. She just waits for me to say whatever it is I feel the need to say.

“Thank you,” I tell her.

She nods, and slips out of the room. Carys twists on my lap. “It still hurts, Daddy.”

“The nurse is going to make it better.”

Satisfied with this, Carys points to the knuckles of my left hand, the only tattoo that remains on my body. “That's my name?” she asks.

“Kind of,” I answer. “Your name means the same thing, in a language called Welsh.”

She is just starting to learn her letters. So she points to each knuckle in turn: “L,” she reads. “O. V. E.”

“That's right,” I say proudly. We wait for Ruth to come back to us. I hold my daughter's hand, or maybe she holds mine, like we are at an intersection, and it's my job to take her safely to the other side.