My mother was the oldest of the three Bellini children. After she married, her room became the guest room, but they kept her things. The bed was white, with a dingy canopy I detested; a pair of ragged old dolls sat glumly against the pillows, yearning for affection and needing a bath. The lacy curtains she had sewn from an old tablecloth decorated the windows, and at the foot of the bed sat a pine hope chest filled with silly letters and pleated skirts and photographs of horses and kittens. It was a little girl’s room, and, in many ways, my mother remained a little girl all her life. Her room was way up high in the turret where a princess would sleep-an oval-shaped refuge protected from robbers and dragons with small windows facing the front and side of the house. Mom and I lived here for an entire year after she divorced my father; I slept next to her every night in the same bed. We ate popcorn and read books, and sometimes she cried herself to sleep. I was the grownup in that bed, and this made me feel safe. Grownups were always safe.
After my bath, I had intended to dress and go back downstairs to talk to Nana, but I suddenly felt drowsy and weak, as though I were descending within my dream into a deeper level of sleep. I succumbed to the urge, sliding with the dolls beneath the crisp cotton ticking of my mother’s bed and turning out the white unicorn lamp. I fell fast asleep. During this sleep, I began dreaming of my last day on earth.
3
It’s early morning and I’m nursing Sarah in bed with the television on. We’re watching her daddy in his first month as the new anchorman of the Channel 10 Morning News, trying to make cunning chit-chat with Piper Jackson, Channel 10’s incredibly dull but incredibly beautiful new weather girl. Regardless of atmospheric conditions, Piper’s tight skirts and blouses guarantee fair skies and high pressure. Bo and Piper make a picture-perfect couple on the set and smiling down together from the slick, new billboards along the highways that have helped increase ratings for the show ten-fold. I seethe with jealousy every morning-until Piper opens her mouth. Today, while talking with Bo about a tsunami that has just devastated the northern coast of Japan, she mispronounces it “samurai” and speculates that this must be how Japanese warriors got their name. Bo cringes.
“It’s pronounced sue-na-me, Piper,” he says, wincingly.
Piper looks bewildered, like a puppy hit with a newspaper for peeing on a rug.
“What is?” she asks.
“The Japanese word for tidal wave.”
“Oops,” she replies airily, her strawberry red lips ripening from scolded-girl pout into naughty-girl smile. “Well, I guess that explains why they call Japanese warriors tsunamis.”
The cameraman knows exactly what to do. The shot widens to take in her low-cut top and admittedly impressive cleavage. You can almost hear the spontaneous applause of men all over central Pennsylvania and the spontaneous groans of their wives, girlfriends, and mothers. I pleaded with Bo to stick to reporting the news, but Piper and her breasts were bigger and better than the news; advertising revenue at the station increased in direct proportion to the number of minutes she was on screen and the amount of chest she exposed.
Sarah finishes nursing, oblivious to TV ratings, tsunamis, and samurais, perfectly content to see a miniature of her father talking from a box on the dresser no matter what he says. Sometimes she tries to talk back, as though they’re having a conversation.
I shower quickly, planning as I scrub where to pick up with the summary judgment motion I’d been working on and sticking my head out to be sure Sarah’s still on the bed. When the network news replaces her daddy at seven, we switch to Big Bird and I finish applying my makeup and put on my cream silk blouse and black silk suit. I carry Sarah into the nursery and change her diaper, dressing her in a light cotton jumper before switching to pants and a sweatshirt after remembering Piper’s warning that a cold front will be moving through late in the day. Sarah’s hands swing over her head and she stares at them in astonishment, as though she’s seeing them for the first time, a pair of birds from nowhere, soaring and swooning to the music whispering through her tiny mind. With all my might I try to store this moment away-the wide fascination of her eyes and the delicate contractions of her fingers, the sunlight that celebrates her revelation, the polished perfection of skin on her belly-all locked up in my memory like a jewel in a safe deposit box to be taken out later and adored.
I drive Sarah to a daycare operated by Juniata College as a teaching practicum; it’s an excellent facility, bright, cheery, and clean, with bright professors and students eager to try the latest methods and techniques for developing infant minds. The classes are small and Sarah never lacks for stimulation or attention; she’s always laughing and playing and her pediatrician says her verbal and cognitive skills are advanced for her age (although I think he says this to every parent to keep them coming back). When I visit during the day, I’m convinced she’s better off here than if I cared for her at home; but when I kiss her goodbye in the morning and she waves her little hands and looks after me with those sad brown eyes, I wonder whether I’m fooling myself-or whether I’m worse off even if she isn’t. It’s a debate I have with myself in the parking lot every morning but that I always resolve in favor of her exposure to other children and adults instead of being trapped all alone with one crazy woman in the same house day after day the way I was raised. While unbuckling her from her car seat, she flips her bottle upside down and deliberately squirts formula on the shoulder and lapel of my jacket.
“Hey, stop that!” I say, pretending to be angry. “Nobody messes on mommy’s favorite suit, not even a cutie like you.”
I reach the office by eight-thirty and wave to frog-faced Bill Gwynne, who’s already on the phone with a client and whose desk, restored to order by his secretary last evening, is already a mess. Our offices occupy a historic red brick row house next to the county courthouse in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, used first as a blacksmith’s shop at the time the town was founded in the late 1700s and decorated with period antiques. I toss my briefcase and purse into my office on the second floor, pour a cup of coffee, and head up to our small law library on the third floor where I continue the legal research I’ve been working on for the past four weeks, trying to come up with a defense that will allow our very wealthy-and very lucrative-client, Alan Fleming, to avoid repaying the $500,000 he borrowed from a bank. This might seem like a fool’s errand, if not a little unscrupulous, but it’s actually my favorite part of legal practice: the intellectual challenge of winning a case that most lawyers would, and should, lose, by uncovering an overlooked fact, finding a forgotten law, or creating a novel legal argument from the thousands of statutes, regulations, and cases that constitute American jurisprudence-all to arrive at what we think of as justice-which, like it or not, has been defined for centuries not as the divine balancing of equities but as what the rule of law requires when applied, without bias, to the facts-and explains why the robed lady holding scales in front of the courthouse wears a blindfold. Otherwise, the theory holds, we would have favoritism and chaos rather than law and order.
This particular morning, the blind lady of justice bestows upon me a generous gift in the form of a little-known federal banking regulation from the Great Depression called Regulation U that forbids banks from making loans used to purchase securities if the securities pledged as collateral are worth less than fifty percent of the debt. The regulation was intended to prevent stock market crashes from taking the banking system down with them, but it catches my eye because Alan purchased stocks with the loan he’d defaulted on and, as I recall, pledged stocks worth only thirty-five percent of the debt-which is why the bank is now suing him for the balance. If the loan officer knew at the time he made the loan that Alan was using the proceeds to buy stocks, the bank violated the regulation by not demanding more collateral. I research further. The blind lady of justice bestows a second gift upon me in the form of a companion statute stating that if the bank violates Regulation U, it’s prohibited from suing the borrower to collect the debt. In other words, a bank error excuses Alan Fleming from repaying the half million dollars he borrowed, and the bank’s case against him must be dismissed. I slap the table with my hand in triumph and clench my fist. “Yes!” I shout. I feel like a football player stopped cold at the one yard line but who scores a touchdown anyway because he extends the tip of the ball across the front edge of the goal line. It’s a technical argument and arguably unfair-just as extending the tip of the ball across the goal line is only a technical touchdown and arguably unfair-but the rules of the game are the rules of the game and a touchdown is a touchdown. I race back down to my office for the transcript of the deposition I took of the bank’s loan officer, Jorge Mijares, to see whether he knew about Alan’s intention to buy stocks with the loan.