“Okay, well, then, here,” Alexa says. I turn back. She is fiddling in her purse, which rests on the elongated breakfast bar. She produces a tin of Altoids and places it on the counter. “You left these at my house the other night. Thought you might need them.”
Need them, she said. Not want them.
“What are those, mints?” I ask, a different kind of warmth passing through me.
“Sure. Fine. They’re mints,” she hisses, turning her back to me again, going to work with a little more fury on those eggs. They aren’t going to be scrambled; they’re going to be annihilated.
Finally, after an awkward silence of I don’t know how long, my chest burning, she spins back in my direction. “Look, I like you, Jason. I really do. But I had a guy I really liked and he burned me really bad because he kept secrets. I don’t need to know your life story, okay? But if there’s something that really affects you, yeah, I’d like to know about it.
“Sooo. . it seems to me, just sayin’,” she says, waving her hands with exaggerated caution, “that your knee still hurts you really badly, and for some reason I can’t figure out, you don’t want to admit that to me. So you’re hiding pills in an Altoids container and you’re getting out of bed every few hours at night, too.”
“So you’re checking up on me.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” She throws down the large wooden spoon she was using. It actually lands on the corner of the counter and snaps back at her. “I thought they were mints! I almost put one in my mouth! What are they? Vicodin? Something for pain.”
I look back at the window, at the treetops and the town houses across the street. I place my palm on the window and feel warmth.
“If something is hurting you that badly,” she says, “then it’s affecting you. And if we have some kind of a relationship, then that means it’s affecting me, too. And if we don’t have a relationship, then that’s fine, too, but then what the hell am I doing cooking you eggs?”
“Getting out your aggression, it looks like.” That’s me, when shoved into a corner. Start with sarcasm. If that doesn’t work, it can get uglier.
She leaves the kitchen without another word, heading upstairs. She is quiet up there, but I assume she’s gathering her things to leave. This is what they call the moment of truth. Cue the dramatic organ music.
“Okay,” she says when she comes back down the stairs, fully dressed, her purse slung over her shoulder. “You’re a nice guy, Jason. Maybe if we’d-”
“My knee hurts,” I say. “It hurts all the time. It should be better by now. It’s June. It’s been, like, six months. But it’s not. It’s not better.” The words just spill out, as if someone else were saying them. “My doctor doesn’t believe me so he stopped prescribing me OxyContin. So I have to buy these pills illegally.”
I’m looking out the window when I deliver this monologue. The fact that I ended with the truth seems, for some reason, to make the rest more palatable. There is a gentle but consistent ringing in my ears: Wrong, not right.
“He won’t give you pain medication?” she asks, her tone gentler now. Her guard still up, but not quite as high.
“What did I just fucking say?”
She doesn’t say anything. Neither of us does. Silence. The abrupt lurch of the fan, the air-conditioning kicking on. The smell of sweat on me, steamy and rancid. Then I hear her back at the stove, the wooden spoon on the pan, a cabinet closing, the freezer opening, bacon grease crackling in the pan.
Me, I don’t move, staring out the window, watching the slow movement of the elderly couple down the street, grateful that I can’t see my reflection.
27
Jason
Wednesday, June 19
I wake up alone on Wednesday morning, unless you consider the images possessing me throughout the night. Another shipwreck of a night, flipping all around my bed, retching into the toilet, thinking of serial murders, butcher knives, young women writhing in pain, their blood-soaked bangs stuck to their foreheads and cheeks.
Thinking of Alexa, too. How we left things yesterday morning after she made me breakfast, which we ate in relative silence, sticking to ridiculously safe topics like the weather and our schedules this week-depositions she’s working, court appearances I have-ignoring the bomb I’d dropped about my “Altoids” problem. Not that I exactly gave her the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. More like the partial truth with some lies mixed in. Doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as fluidly.
We said good-bye after breakfast; she didn’t even catch a ride with me downtown, walking to the train instead. A quick peck on the cheek, a curt “Bye,” and that was it. Not that I blame her. If I were Alexa, I’d run away from me like I was qualifying for the Summer Olympics.
So now. . Wednesday! I wipe the sweat off my forehead, make it to the bathroom, shower and shave and dress in my best monkey costume for court this morning. It’s in one of the regional branches, not the criminal courts, so I decide to go straight from home to court.
I get there early and meet my client, who is worried beyond belief. I calm her down and gently prepare her before we enter the cattle call of a courtroom. I fill out an appearance and tell the clerk we want a trial, which means we’ll go to the end of the pack. It’s not until after ten o’clock that they call our case.
It’s an attempted battery case that will be tried to a judge, not a jury. The husband says the wife tried to stab him during an argument over money. It’s a common tactic in a child custody case, one side accusing the other of assault or battery, hoping to use it as leverage to get the kid in the divorce. Everyone in the criminal justice system knows it-the cops, the judges, the prosecutors-but nobody wants to acknowledge it openly. Prosecutors aren’t allowed to drop the charges on a domestic battery, even if they suspect it’s one of these bullshit cases, because it only takes one mistake-that one case out of a thousand where the husband ends up killing the wife, or vice versa-and then everyone traces it back and finds that the county attorney’s office didn’t pursue charges when it had the chance, and someone has to lose his job.
So these cases go to trial, but the prosecutors don’t exactly put their best feet forward. They do their duty, putting on the allegedly aggrieved spouse, and rest. I have the additional advantage in this instance of representing the wife; most of these cases, it’s the wife accusing the husband, but in this case the roles are reversed. I’ve never been in front of Judge Oliver, but I can see the look on his face while he listens to the husband, a big meat-eating guy, give his version of how his wife lunged at him with a kitchen knife, and I’m pretty sure I can get a “not guilty” even if I don’t cross-examine the husband. But cross him I do, tying him in knots until he’s about to come out of his seat and do some lunging of his own.
The verdict isn’t a surprise or an accomplishment, but I savor it nonetheless. This, I’ve come to realize, is truly my best medicine, the only thing I know, the only time I’m not thinking about those Altoids in my pocket-the competition. Every time I lose a case, it haunts me. Every time I win, I drink it in. And I keep track. As a prosecutor, I won all but three of my cases, with the proviso that a plea bargain is considered a victory because, regardless of the reduced offense the descendants plead to, they are convicted of something, and a conviction is a win. As a defense lawyer, I lose more than I win, in part for the same reason about plea bargains, and in part because it’s not a fair fight. The prosecution gets to begin the lawsuit whenever they want, whenever they’re sure they have a rock-solid case, and only then does the defense attorney enter the arena. They also have a considerable advantage in resources compared to most defendants, who can’t afford fancy experts or investigators. I remind myself of all of that, but it still punches me in the gut every time a client goes to prison. I hate, hate, hate to lose, even more than I like to win.