I leaned back in my chair and looked at her, shaking my head at how perfectly normal, how wonderfully well adjusted she seemed to be. “I used to worry about you. I wondered what was going to happen to you… after everything.”
A shadow crossed over her eyes, a hint of the secret I had once forced her to share with a courtroom full of strangers, and I wondered if it was a secret she had shared with anyone since. I did not ask.
“I’ve had a very good life,” she said.
Her smile was muted now, and for a while she did not say anything more. She let her eyes roam around the room, past the shelves filled with law books and the windows that gave a view of the city and the river and beyond that of the mountain that somehow gave a sense of permanence to all the transitory things that happened below it.
“It might not have been such a good life if you hadn’t saved my mother. She died two years ago, and I think I only started to realize then how much I owed her, and how much she went through because of me.”
“What happened to…?”
“My father? I don’t know. After the trial I never saw him again.
He moved away-somewhere-I don’t know.”
“And your brother?”
A faraway look came into her eyes. “It wasn’t true, you know: what he said about my mother. Poor Gerald. It was all he could think to do; the only way he thought he could get us all back together.” Her gaze came back into focus. “That was the worst part of all of it. He knew it was a lie, but he could never bring himself to admit it, and the longer he denied it, the more real it became for him until I think he actually believed it must have been true.”
Amy Larkin Lewis looked at me with the candid eyes of a woman who had learned more painfully than most that the past is never really gone. “Sometimes I think it was my fault; then I remember how young I was. It doesn’t seem fair, does it? That Gerald and my mother should have ended up paying the price for what my father did to me.”
It was not fair, but then, it was hard to think of many things that were.
We stood up and said goodbye. She noticed the photograph on the credenza, a picture of Jennifer and me, taken just a few weeks before. “Your wife? She’s very beautiful.”
There was no reason to correct her assumption. “Yes, she is.
I’ve known her since we were kids. The strange thing is,” I remarked as I walked her to the door, “that even though there were long periods of time when I didn’t remember her, I know now that even then I was still in love with her.”
I told her how glad I was she had come and watched her for a moment as she walked down the hallway to the elevator. When I closed the door and turned around, Helen was holding the phone, her hand cupped over the receiver, waiting.
“It’s the hospital,” she explained. “The doctor wants to talk to you.”
Thirty
Iwas at the courthouse a half hour early. An old man with sharp-edged shoulders and a sunken chest hobbled into the courtroom ahead of me, a newspaper folded under his arm. He sat on the aisle in the last row, just inside the door. He was a fairly frequent visitor, sometimes the only spectator in the routine trials no one remembered the moment they were over. I had never known his name, but I had been told that he had spent a long life as a lawyer and did not know what to do with himself after he retired.
“Interesting case,” he remarked as I went past him.
I kept going, pretending not to hear, but then, perhaps because I felt something-a memory of something that had not yet happened to me-I stopped and turned around.
“You were a lawyer, weren’t you?” I asked, trying to seem interested.
His gray wispy eyebrows uncovered clear, fully lucent eyes.
“Until I was seventy-five, when a cabal of notorious and incompetent doctors conspired to deprive me of the only reason I had left to live.” With a bony finger he tapped his chest. “Heart,” he explained. “That was ten years ago,” he said. “I think the doctors are all dead now.”
He got to his feet and leaned on the bench in front of him.
“Now I just come and watch. I like trials. Every one of them is a different story; every one of them has an ending and you find out what happened.”
He was eager to talk to someone, another lawyer, someone who knew what he meant.
“Life isn’t like that. You don’t know when it’s going to end, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. In the trial, you know if you’ve won or if you lost. How do you ever know that outside a courtroom?”
A troubled expression in his eyes, he thought about his own question. Then, pulling himself up, he patted my arm. “Better get ready,” he said with an encouraging smile. “Interesting trial,” he added as I turned away and walked to the front of the otherwise empty courtroom.
From my chair at the counsel table I glanced back over my shoulder, but the old man was lost in his newspaper, reading perhaps the obituaries of just a few of the people he had managed to outlive. He was right in what he had said: Trials were stories, stories about other people’s lives, told in a way that made each part fit with every other, as if they had from the very beginning followed a single design and had come at the end to form a single, coherent whole. That is what I was: a storyteller who made sense out of the lives of other people and could not make any sense out of his own. I was the storyteller who had no story of his own to tell.
The door at the back of the courtroom squeaked open and I heard the sound of shuffling feet as someone else found a place on the spectator benches. A few minutes later the door opened again. It was Harper Bryce, notebook in hand, getting ready to jot down anything he thought essential for the story he was going to write for the readers of tomorrow morning’s paper. Five minutes later, at twenty past one, the first juror, careful not to glance in my direction, made her way to the jury room. The bailiff, an amiable deputy sheriff with a gray mustache, caught up with her and opened the door. The courtroom began to fill up, and the court reporter, getting ready for the afternoon, put a new spool of paper into her machine.
My mind was a blank, and I felt nothing, not even a vague curiosity about what was going to happen. I listened to the sounds made by the courtroom as it gradually came back to life, and the only thought I had was that like the old man who sat watching somewhere behind me this was what my life had always been and would always be, the endless repetition of one trial, one story, over and over again.
The courtroom was full, and the last juror had returned. The defendant had been brought in and put in the chair next to me.
Cassandra Loescher was sitting at the other end of the long, mahogany table, busily making notes to herself. The clerk, a generous-hearted woman waiting for retirement, took the place she had filled for the last twenty years. Everyone was where they were supposed to be. Like an old soldier, the bailiff drew himself up straight and tall and then issued the only command he knew.
“All rise,” he said. Before the words were out of his mouth, everyone was on their feet, waiting while Morris Bingham, eyes straight ahead, walked to the bench. Calvin Jeffries had walked that way as well, never looking around, but he had moved more quickly, like someone always in a hurry, trying to do two things at once.
Bingham nodded at the jury. “Good afternoon,” he said in his pleasant, muted-tone voice.
“Is the defense ready to call its next witness, Mr. Antonelli?”
he asked, turning his attention to me.
“Yes, your honor,” I said as I stood up. “The defense calls Elliott Winston.”
I stared at the double doors at the back of the courtroom, wondering if they would open and whether, if they did, Elliott Winston would walk through them. I waited, and I kept waiting, but there was nothing, not a sound. He had escaped, just as I had thought he would, and was perhaps right now alone in the elevator, on his way up to where the woman he hated had lived with the man he had killed. I turned around, ready to explain that my witness was missing and that in his absence the defense would now call the defendant himself.