"No further questions," he says, and plunges with mortal weariness back to his seat.
My father's case is the first trial I've ever sat through end to end. The trial process has absorbed so much of my dad's life, as a prosecutor and a judge, that in spite of the indescribable heaviness of the whole business for me, I have found sitting here constantly informative. I finally have a clue what he was doing in the many hours he was gone from home and some sense of what he found so beguiling. And although the courtroom will never be the place for me, I have been fascinated by its little rituals and dramas, especially the moments too banal to be represented on TV or in the movies. The present instant, when the sides change, with one lawyer sitting and the opponent coming to his feet, is the law's equivalent of the time between innings, a moment of suspended animation. The court reporter's computer stops clicking. The jurors shift in their seats and scratch what itches, and the spectators clear their throats. Papers scrape across both tables as the lawyers gather their notes.
By whatever trick of fate, my dad's case is being heard in one of the four older courtrooms in this building, the Central Branch Courthouse, where the court of appeals is housed on the top floor. He arrives every day to stand trial for murder in a place where he remains, at least by title, the highest-ranking judicial official and next door to the courtroom where he was freed more than twenty years ago. All the old rooms, where serious felonies have been tried for seventy years now, are jewels of bygone architectural detail, with the jury boxes set off by these strings of walnut bubbles. The same kind of rail fronts the witness stand and the massive bench where Judge Yee looms over the courtroom. The spaces for the witness and the judge are each defined by red marble pillars that support a walnut canopy, decorated with more of those corny wooden balls.
Beneath that overhang, my dad sits impassively as he awaits the start of Tommy Molto's cross-examination. For the first time, he lets his blue eyes light on mine, and for a tiny instant, he squeezes them shut. Here we go, he seems to be saying. The wild rocket ship ride that has been life for both of us since my mother died nine months ago will end and allow us to parachute back to earth, where we will inhabit either some shrunken version of the life we had before or a new nightmare terrain, in which my weekly conversations with my father will be conducted for the rest of his life through a pane of bulletproof glass.
When a parent dies-everybody says this, so I know it isn't so totally original-but when you lose your mother or father, life is fundamentally different. One of the poles, north or south, has been wiped off the globe and will never rematerialize.
But my life was really different. I was sort of a kid for too long, and then suddenly I was where I was. I had fallen in love with Anna. My mom was dead. And my dad was indicted for killing her.
Because what happened to my parents was in each case so much worse for them than me, it sounds weak to say what I have gone through has been an ordeal. But it has. Of course, losing my mom so suddenly was the ultimate blow. But the charges against my dad have left me in a predicament few people can even begin to understand. My dad has been a public figure most of my life, meaning his shadow has frequently fallen across me. When I went to law school I knew I was only making that worse, that I was always going to be known as Rusty's kid and would be dragging his reputation and achievements along behind me like a bride trying to figure out how to get her train through a revolving door. But now he's infamous, not famous, an object of hatred and ridicule. When I see his picture on the Net or TV-or even on one national magazine cover-there's a way I feel he no longer quite belongs to me. And of course nobody knows how to treat me or what to say. It must be a little like being outed with HIV, where people know you haven't really done anything wrong but can't quite stifle an impulse to recoil.
But the worst part is what goes on inside of me, because from moment to moment I have no idea how I feel, or should feel for that matter. I guess parents are always moving objects. We grow up, and our perspectives constantly evolve. In this courtroom, there is just one question-did he or didn't he? But for me, for months now the issue has been far more complicated, trying to figure out what most kids get a lifetime to assess-namely, who my old man really is. Not who I thought. I've figured that much out already.
That process began on election day with an angry thumping on the door to Anna's condo. A small woman had her badge out.
'KCUPF.' Kindle County Unified Police Force. 'Do you have a second to talk?'
It was like TV and so I knew I was supposed to say, What is this about? But really, why would I care? She stepped into the apartment, strutted, really, without an invitation, a short, plump woman with her hat under her arm and her wiry, brass-colored hair drawn back in a pony tail.
'Debby Diaz.' Die As, she pronounced it. She offered a small, rough hand and sat down on a hassock covered in retro blue shag, which Anna had bought largely as a gag a couple of weeks before. 'Known your dad forever. I was a bailiff when he started in the superior court. Actually, I remember you.'
'Me?'
'Yeah, I was assigned to that courtroom a couple times when you come down. You used to sit up on his chair on the bench during recesses. Couldn't really see you from down in the courtroom, but nobody told you that. Young man, you could really pound that gavel. Act of God you didn't break it.' She was quite merry with the memory, and I suddenly remembered what she was describing, including the musical echo when I slammed the gavel on the oak block. 'I was young and slim in those days,' she said. 'Waiting to get on the force.'
'I guess you made it.' I said that only because I couldn't think of anything else, but she took it for a joke and smiled a little.
'It was what I wanted. What I thought I wanted.' She shook her head briefly at the follies of youth. Then she focused on me with disturbingly sudden intensity. 'We're trying to clear on your mother's death.'
'Clear?'
'Get some questions answered. You know how it is. Not a damn thing happens for a month, then all of a sudden it's gotta be wrapped up in a week. Guys on the scene took a long statement from your father, but nobody thought to talk to you. When I heard your name, I figured I'd stroll over and do it myself.'
There are people you meet who you know are used to not saying what they actually mean and Detective Diaz was one of them for sure. I wondered for a second how she'd found me, then realized I'd left this forwarding address when I finished at the court. All in all, I was happier to be talking to her at home on election day than I would have been if she'd shown up at school. There are still plenty of people on the faculty who remember my years at Nearing High and have a hard time believing I can set much of an example.
'I still don't understand what you want to ask about,' I told her, and she motioned as if it were all too vague, too cop, too bureaucratic, to explain.
'Sit down,' she said, 'and you'll find out.' From the seat on the hassock, she motioned me toward a chair in my own place. What I really needed to do, I realized, was call my father, or at least Anna. But the thought seemed mostly useless against the reality of Detective Diaz sitting there. Small as she was, there was an edge, that cop-thing, like, I'm in charge here, don't mess around.
'My mom died of heart failure,' I told her.
'True.'
'So. What is there to ask about?'
'Nat,' she said. 'I can call you "Nat," right? Somebody says we got to interview the kid to close this, so I'm here to interview you. That's all.' She picked up a magazine, a copy of People Anna had left there, and turned a few pages. 'Could I care less about Brad and Angie?' she asked before throwing it down. 'Things cool between your mom and dad around the time she passed?'