Sisters on the Case

Hearing Her Name by Susan Dunlap

They didn’t look at her. Not one of them. ‘‘That’s a bad sign, right, Dennis?’’

‘‘Means zip. And anyway, it’ll all be over soon.’’ Dennis Haggarty flipped back the pages of his yellow lined notepad, dropped it in his briefcase and pushed himself up from the defense table. ‘‘Elizabeth-’’

‘‘Carla! Call me by my real name. Carla,’’ she snapped, then relented. ‘‘Despite everything, it’s just good to be called who I really am.’’ She looked over her too-thin, too-unkempt lawyer and wondered yet again if she had made a mistake hiring a man who couldn’t even remember her true name. When the media latched on to the breaking story it was FEDS CAPTURE FUGITIVE IN HIDING FOR 24 YEARS, and she was Elizabeth Amanda Creiss, her fugitive name. Carla Dreseldorf meant nothing to them or their readers. It was Elizabeth Amanda Creiss and her two decades on the run that made the front page. For the eight months run-up to this trial every shabby room Elizabeth Amanda Creiss had hidden in, every menial job, every guy she had spent a night with was a day’s hot story. It was impossible to turn on the radio or television without hearing ‘‘Elizabeth Amanda Creiss.’’ Even her high school graduation pictures had run over the caption ELIZABETH AMANDA CREISS 25 YEARS AGO. Carla Dreseldorf was merely a footnote. Before Carla went underground, no one bothered with her name. And when the other conspirators were caught and created their own rounds of publicity, the news stories often didn’t mention her. As Dennis repeated every time she worried aloud, she had been the most peripheral conspirator, present at only one meeting of the much-more-radical-than-she-realized group before they attacked the power plant. She hadn’t even known what kind of explosive they were using. They were making a statement with their smoke bombs, they had told her; never had they said they were trying to blow up the plant. ‘‘Everybody has endgames,’’ her mother would have told her. ‘‘You don’t pay enough attention to see them.’’ True. And way too late now to think about that. Better to remember what Dennis said, that to the conspirators, she was akin to the political campaign worker who dropped off the doughnuts and trotted on home. Besides, Dennis concluded every single time, no one had been killed, and all the evidence against her was circumstantial.

Still, when they filed out the jurors hadn’t looked at her.

Dennis turned to her. ‘‘Look, juries are ecstatic that testimony has finally ended and they will never have to sit in those chairs again. They’re like kids heading for the playground. They don’t waste time looking at you. They’ve had weeks of you. They’re sick of the sight of you, and me, and Jefferson K. Markoff over there, not to mention the judge. Trust me, I have never seen a jury pause for a last look.’’ He stood, yanked ineffectually at his ill-fitting tweed jacket and turned toward the door. ‘‘Come on, let’s get some coffee.’’

The speed with which the courtroom gallery emptied had increased with each week. Already, reporters would be outside calling in their updates. Lawyers who turned up for the summations and the judge’s final instructions fled as soon as the last word was out. The groupies knew the routine after these three weeks. Even the sensation junkies raced out. Carla was shocked at how much the trial, her every action, affected people. She would never have guessed.

She walked through the double door that Dennis always held open for her-‘‘to remind viewers that you are a person worthy of caring about’’-and to the kiosk. ‘‘Just juice, Dennis, I don’t think my stomach can handle coffee anymore.’’

‘‘Hang in there, Elizabeth, we’re coasting now.’’

She didn’t bother to correct him. Instead, she took the plastic bottle of orange juice and stood against the wall. Orange juice-that was an unfortunate color. How many years would she be wearing orange? Or do prisoners only wear those ugly-on-everyone jump-suits in court? Conspiracy for malicious explosion: fifteen to twenty years. She shivered so violently the orange juice shot over the side of the bottle and she just caught the flow with her napkin. In prison, would they call her Carla? Or Elizabeth? Or just seven nine nine oh four eight?

All the regulars had their spots in the gray marble hallway. This corner for defense. In the far corner Jeff Markoff angled his bald head to say something to his assistant, a newbie in the DA’s office who must have been a basketball star in college. From the near corner a blond woman in her early forties offered a timid smile. Carla sucked it in as if its hope could fill her. The blonde had been at trial almost every day. Carla felt a bond and wondered if the woman felt it, too. Sometimes out here when the wait went on and on, she made her eyes go blank like she had learned to do in the subway in New York, and fantasized about the woman’s life, a life that could have been hers if only she had said no to the seduction of saving the world. The woman’s blond hair fell just at her shoulders with the ease of alignment only a stylist could achieve. She wore a wedding ring, probably had children in college now, maybe one still in the last year of high school. She took notes every day on an unruled pad. Maybe she’d gone back to college herself now that her kids were older. Taking notes for a law class, or a journalism seminar? After court let out each day she could call her friends-she would have friends, old friends, friends she could speak to without monitoring every sentence lest something give her away. Or she could fly to Paris, London, Saigon, using her utterly legitimate passport in her real name. If Carla had ever imagined the last twenty-four years, she would never have guessed how important a name was, how much she would miss her own, how she would loathe hearing ‘‘Elizabeth Amanda Creiss.’’ She swallowed, and tried to smile back at the blond woman.

The defendant was looking at her! Laura Powley felt a tingle right down her spine. But she wouldn’t write that, not ‘‘tingle,’’ too trite. She was trying to be a writer; she needed to be able to come up with a more original word to describe emotion. Rush? Shiver? Quiver, maybe? No. Still trite. Besides, her reaction didn’t matter. What was important-key?- was to ‘‘get’’ Elizabeth Amanda Creiss now, because everything would be over so soon. She was a mere observer, not one who had joined the club of the brave, not like Elizabeth Creiss who had risked all because she believed in something so much. Her essay assignment merely allowed her to peek in the door.

Look at Elizabeth Creiss leaning against the dark wood panel, shoulders so straight she could be holding up the wall rather than vice versa-nice. Keep that. She wasn’t afraid to let gray muddy her brown hair, didn’t waste time on expensive cuts. Laura knew that her dark blue sweater, plaid wool skirt, and flesh-color stockings must have been chosen to give the appearance of wholesomeness. Bet she’d tear them off the minute she could. She was so strong on the stand, never made excuses for herself, but never let that slime of a DA twist her words either. It was her testimony that set the groundwork for her pound dog of a lawyer insisting that to even be called ‘‘circumstantial’’ the DA’s accusations had to have some relation to evidence. Look at her! Never once did she have family or friends to support her here; she stood tall on her own. Laura Powley tried to sip her orange juice, but she was too anxious, too excited. She just wished she could tell her how impressed she was.

The jury could be walking back to the court right now. It could end any minute. But Elizabeth Creiss wasn’t nervous; she was so cool. Look at her!

In the far corner Carla noted the older couple. They made no eye contact, not with her or anyone else. Some days they didn’t even speak to each other. There was a bench in the middle of the lobby, but they never used it, as if that would be an admission that they were part of the whole soap opera. Once, a week or so ago, Carla had caught the woman’s eye; the woman had jerked her head away before there was time for reaction. But there had been plenty of time after for Carla to wonder about them, if they were like her mother. How would it have been to telephone them whenever she wanted, to tell them what she was doing, where she was? Tell them she missed them so much she ached from the hollowness of it? They had winced with her when Dennis failed to remember her name, or maybe she just wanted to believe that.

That first night after the explosion, she got off the bus somewhere in Nevada by a thirty-dollar-a-room motel. She had been desperate to call home, just to tell them she was okay, alive, that it was all an awful mistake. But she didn’t dare, not then. She had thought she was just postponing the call, that she’d find a safe time. She hadn’t known the chance wouldn’t come for twenty-four years, that by then not only would she have created identities, one after another,but her mother had created one for her-the girl who had lied, abandoned her family and disgraced them. The girl who didn’t care.

‘‘Elizabeth, do you want to walk outside in the courtyard? The bailiff will call us.’’

She jerked back to the gray marble hallway. ‘‘That’s okay, Dennis. For now. How long do you think the jury will be out?’’

‘‘The longer the better. If they’re going against you, they’ve already decided. The vote will be a formality.’’

Icy cold shot down her spine. She stared at the juice, the orange. Years in prison. The rest of her life, till she was old, way older than the old couple, till no one at all remembered her real name. She had never, not once, allowed that thought in, but now it was smothering her. ‘‘How long, if they go… against me?’’

‘‘An hour, three hours. Like I say, it could go very fast. You should take that walk.’’

‘‘Then-’’ Her voice was a squeak. She had to swallow and start again. ‘‘Then you think it will go bad?’’

‘‘I’m not saying that. Just that a walk outside in the air, under the blue sky, would be a good idea.’’

A walk in a walled enclosure was worse than standing here. She wanted to run into the jury room and beg them to understand that she not was a conspirator. The guys who planned the explosion didn’t want her advice, didn’t tell her their plans; most of them didn’t even know her name.

After an hour she did go out, sat on the steps, looked up at the sky she might never see any other way. The courtyard reminded her not of the outdoors but of the motel rooms where she huddled time after time creating new identities, forcing herself to give up the things that could reveal her as her. Her streaked blond hair, her violet toenails, the silver snake bracelet the boy who could have become her boyfriend had just given her. She had watched her swimmer’s muscles go to flab as she avoided even motel pools. At the sight of a bookstore she had crossed the street to avoid the temptation of lingering in front of the window. Those abandonments were painful, but manageable. They were the top layer. She had ripped off the next layer like a bandage off too-raw skin: good coffee, marzipan, steak very rare. And the next: the way she automatically stood when waiting, arms crossed over her chest, her quick retorts that brought a laugh; that was the hardest, to never ever say anything that made her other than bland. To become next to nothing.

Each time she plunked down her duffle and watched the town she had called home for a year or for three months shrink to nothing outside a bus window, she had mourned her attachment to her life there. Each time she had sworn that her next identity would steer clear of the telltale link to Carla Dreseldorf that forced her to abandon this town and her few acquaintances who passed as friends.

The marble courtyard reminded her of the county record rooms and libraries she visited one after another, till she found the name of the dead baby who would have been about her age, born in the United States, died in another country. Elizabeth Amanda Creiss had allowed her to get a birth certificate, a driver’s license, a passport she hadn’t been quick enough to use. The legitimate name had made her a person again. A Frankenstein of herself. Still she had never dreamed she would come to hate it.

‘‘The jury, they’re coming back.’’

‘‘Omigod, Dennis. Is it too soon?’’

‘‘It’s okay. It’ll all be over in a minute. Come on.’’

Carla Dreseldorf walked stiff-legged up the steps. In the lobby she saw the blond woman start toward her, stop and just give her a thumbs-up, but she was too scared to respond. The old couple stepped back as she passed. It was them she felt the bond to, they who walked as tensely, stiffly as she. She passed through the bar. Dennis had to tell her twice to sit, and then pull her arm when the bailiff said, ‘‘All rise.’’

The judge spoke but his words didn’t penetrate her ears. The foreman spoke. She swallowed hard, forced herself to hear her future.

‘‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a decision?’’

‘‘We have, Your Honor. We find the defendant not guilty on charge number one, not guilty on charge number two, not guilty on charge number three.’’

Carla slumped into her chair, hearing nothing but her heart pounding. Dennis’ arms were around her. ‘‘Free! Free! We won! You’re free! Let’s go celebrate! Let’s have the most expensive meal two people have ever eaten. Come on, don’t you want to get out of here?’’

She let him pull her up and guide her through the bar, down the aisle toward the double doors. Free! To go anywhere, to call anyone, to answer the phone without fear, open the door without peering through the peephole. Free to say, ‘‘Hello, I’m Carla Dreseldorf.’’ Free to call Mom, to go to Mom’s house, make her listen to the real story. Free to ask, to demand why she hadn’t come to the trial, hadn’t done as much as the blond woman, the old couple, these strangers who supported her by their presence. She pushed through the double doors and walked across the lobby. ‘‘Free to-’’

Dennis opened the courthouse door.

She stood there, letting the sunlight coat her body, looking out past the reporters at the tiny green leaves of the live oaks, the deep green pine needles, the pale, soft green grass. The gray buildings sparkled silver; cars danced in jelly bean colors. A sweet breeze rippled her collar. Gray gulls rode the winds.

On the landing below, the blond woman threw her arms up in victory. ‘‘Oh, Elizabeth, you were so smart, so brave! I’ll always be so impressed by you, Elizabeth Amanda Creiss!’’

‘‘Don’t call me that name!’’

‘‘Don’t call her that name!’’

The shot knocked Carla onto the marble steps. Her chest burned; she was freezing. Blood was over everything, her blood. ‘‘Why?’’ she whispered. ‘‘Why?’’

The old couple was standing over her. The gun hung from the woman’s hand. As the bailiff reached in, the woman bent closer. ‘‘My baby died. We had nothing left of her, nothing but her name, Elizabeth Amanda Creiss. Every time we hear her name on the news, see her name in the papers under your picture, it tears us up. All we had left was her name. And you made a travesty of it.’’