Small Great Things

Ruth

WE ALL DO IT, YOU know. Distract ourselves from noticing how time’s passing. We throw ourselves into our jobs. We focus on keeping the blight off our tomato plants. We fill up our gas tanks and top off our Metro cards and do the grocery shopping so that the weeks look the same on the surface. And then one day, you turn around, and your baby is a man. One day, you look in the mirror, and see gray hair. One day, you realize there is less of your life left than what you’ve already lived. And you think, How did this happen so fast? It was only yesterday when I was having my first legal drink, when I was diapering him, when I was young.

When this realization hits, you start doing the math. How much time do I have left? How much can I fit into that small space?

Some of us let this realization guide us, I guess. We book trips to Tibet, we learn how to sculpt, we skydive. We try to pretend it’s not almost over.

But some of us just fill up our gas tanks and top off our Metro cards and do the grocery shopping, because if you only see the path that’s right ahead of you, you don’t obsess over when the cliff might drop off.

Some of us never learn.

And some of us learn earlier than others.

–

ON THE MORNING of the trial, I knock softly on Edison’s door. “You almost ready?” I ask, and when he doesn’t answer, I turn the knob and step inside. Edison is buried under a pile of quilts, his arm flung over his eyes. “Edison,” I say more loudly. “Come on! We can’t be late!”

He’s not asleep, I can tell by the depth of his breathing. “I’m not going,” he mutters.

Kennedy had requested that Edison miss school and attend the trial. I didn’t tell her that these days, going to school has been less of a priority for him, as evidenced by the number of times I’ve been called about him skipping class. I’ve pleaded, I’ve argued, but getting him to listen to me has become a Herculean task. My scholar, my serious, sweet boy, is now a rebel-holed up in his room listening to music so loud it makes the walls shake or texting friends I did not know he had; coming home past curfew smelling of hard liquor and weed. I have fought, I have cried, and now, I am not sure what else to do. The whole train of our lives is in the process of derailing; this is only one of the cars skidding off the tracks.

“We talked about this,” I tell him.

“No we didn’t.” He squints at me. “You talked at me.”

“Kennedy says that someone who’s seen as maternal is harder to picture as a murderer. She says that the picture you present to the jury is sometimes more important than the evidence.”

“Kennedy says. Kennedy says. You talk like she’s Jesus-”

“She is,” I interrupt. “At least, she is right now. All my prayers are going to her, because she is the only thing that stands between me and a conviction, Edison, which is why I’m asking-no, begging you to do this one thing for me.”

“I got stuff to do.”

I arch a brow. “Like what? Skip school?”

Edison rolls away from me. “Why don’t you just leave?”

“In about a week,” I snap, “your wish might just come true.”

The truth has teeth. I hold my hand over my mouth, like I could will back the words. Edison fights to blink back tears. “I didn’t mean that,” he mumbles.

“I know.”

“I don’t want to go to the trial because I don’t think I can listen to what they say about you,” he confesses.

I put my hands on either side of his face. “Edison, you know me. They don’t. No matter what you hear in that courtroom, no matter what lies they try to tell-you remember that everything I have ever done has been for you.” I cup his cheek, follow the track of a tear with the pad of my thumb. “You’re going to make something of yourself. People are going to know your name.”

I can hear the echo of my mama telling me the same thing. Be careful what you wish for, I think. After today, people will know my name. But not for the reasons she had hoped.

“What happens to you matters,” I tell Edison. “What happens to me doesn’t.”

His hand comes up, encircling my wrist. “It matters to me.”

Oh, there you are, I think as I look into Edison’s eyes. This is the boy I know. The boy I hooked my star on.

“It seems,” I say lightly, “that I am in need of a date to my own trial.”

Edison lets go of my wrist. He holds out his arm, crooked at the elbow, old-fashioned and courtly, even though he is still wearing his pajamas, even though I have a scarf wrapped around my hair, even though this is not a ball we are attending, but more of a gauntlet to run. “It would be my pleasure,” he says.

–

LAST NIGHT, KENNEDY had showed up at my house unexpected. Her husband and daughter were with her; she had come straight from some town about two hours away and was bursting to share her news with me: MCADD had shown up in Davis Bauer’s newborn screening.

I stared at the results she showed me, the same ones a doctor friend of her husband’s had explained to her. “But that’s…that’s…”

“Lucky,” she finished. “For you, anyway. I don’t know if these results were missing from the file accidentally, or if someone tanked them purposely because they knew it would make you less culpable. But what’s important is that we have the information now, and we’re going to ride it to an acquittal.”

MCADD is a much more dangerous medical condition than a grade one patent ductus, the heart ailment Kennedy had planned to raise. It is not a lie, anymore, to say that the Bauer baby had had a life-threatening disorder.

She wouldn’t be lying in court. Just me.

I had tried a half dozen times to come clean to Kennedy, especially as our relationship shifted from a professional track into a personal one. But as it turned out, that just made it worse. At first I couldn’t tell her that I had intervened and touched Davis Bauer when he was seizing because I didn’t know if I could trust her, or how the truth would reflect on my case. But now, I couldn’t tell her because I was ashamed to have ever lied in the first place.

I burst into tears.

“Those better be tears of happiness,” she said. “Or gratitude for my remarkable legal talent.”

“That poor baby,” I managed. “It’s so…arbitrary.”

But I wasn’t crying for Davis Bauer, and I wasn’t crying because of my own dishonesty. I was crying because Kennedy had been right all along-it really didn’t matter if the nurse attending to Davis Bauer was Black or white or purple. It didn’t matter if I tried to resuscitate that baby or not. None of it would have made a difference.

She put her hand on my arm. “Ruth,” Kennedy reminded me. “Bad things happen to good people every day.”

–

MY CELLPHONE RINGS just as the bus pulls up to our stop downtown. Edison and I step off as Adisa’s voice fills my ear. “Girl, you not gonna believe this. Where you at?”

I look at a sign. “College Street.”

“Well, walk toward the green.”

I get my bearings, turning with Edison in tow. The courthouse stands a block away from the public park, and Kennedy has given me express directions not to approach from this direction, because I will be bombarded by press.

But surely it can’t hurt to see what’s going on from a distance.

I hear them before I see them, their strong voices braided together in harmony and climbing to the sky like Jack’s beanstalk, aimed for Heaven. It is a sea of faces, so many shades of brown, singing “Oh, Freedom.” In the front, on a small makeshift dais with a network logo backdrop behind him, is Wallace Mercy. Police form a human barrier, their arms outstretched, as if they are trying to cast a spell to prevent violence. Meanwhile, Elm Street itself is lined with news vans, their dishes craned to the sun, while reporters clutch their microphones with their backs to the green and cameramen film a stream of footage.

“My God,” I breathe.

“I didn’t have anything to do with it, but that’s for you,” Adisa says proudly. “You should march right up those front steps with your head held high.”

“I can’t.” Kennedy and I have a prearranged meeting spot.

“Okay,” Adisa says, but I can hear the disappointment in her voice.

“I’ll see you in there,” I tell her. “And, Adisa? Thanks for coming.”

She tsks. “Where else would I be?” she says, and then the line goes dead.

–

EDISON AND I wander past oblivious Yale students, wearing backpacks like tortoise shells; past the Gothic buildings of the residential colleges that are safely walled off behind black gates; past the Poetry Lady-the homeless woman who will recite a few lines for a donation. When we reach the parish house on Wall Street, we slip behind the building unnoticed, into an empty lot.

“Now what?” Edison asks. He is wearing the suit he wore to Mama’s funeral. On any other day, he might be a boy going to a college interview.

“Now we wait,” I tell him. Kennedy has a plan to sneak me into the back entrance, where I won’t attract media attention. She’s asked me to trust her.

Fool that I am, I do.

Turk

LAST NIGHT, WHEN I COULDN’T fall asleep, I watched some cable show that was on at 3:00 A.M. about how Indians used to live. They showed a reenactment, a dude in a loincloth, setting fire to a pile of leaves on the long line of a tree that had been split lengthwise. Then, after it burned, he scraped it out with what looked like a clamshell, repeating the process until the canoe was hollowed out. That’s what I feel like, today. Like someone has rubbed me raw from the inside, until I’m empty.

It’s kind of surprising, because I’ve been waiting so long for today. I thought for sure I’d have the energy of Superman. I was going to war for my son, and nothing was going to stop me.

But, strangely, I have a sense that I’ve reached the combat zone and found it deserted.

I’m tired. I’m twenty-five years old and I have lived enough for ten men.

Brit comes out of the bathroom. “All yours,” she says. She is wearing a bra and her panty hose, which the prosecutor told her to wear, so that she looks conservative.

“And you,” she suggested, “should wear a hat.”

Fuck that.

As far as I’m concerned, this is the memorial my son deserves: if I cannot have him back, I will make sure the people responsible for it are punished, and that others like them are left trembling with fear.

I run the hot water and hold my hands under the faucet. Then I lather up with shaving cream. I rub this all over my scalp and start to use my straightedge to scrape my head smooth.

Maybe it’s the fact that I could not sleep; or I suppose the crater that’s taken up residence inside me is making me shaky-for whatever reason, I nick myself just above the left ear. It stings like a mother as the soap runs into the cut.

I press a washcloth against my head, but scalp wounds take a little while to clot. After a minute I just let go, watch the streak of blood run down my neck, under my collar.

It looks like a red flag, coming from my swastika tattoo. I’m mesmerized by the combination: the white soap, the pale skin, the vivid stain.

–

FIRST WE DRIVE in the opposite direction of the courthouse. There’s frost on the front windshield of the pickup and it’s sunny, the kind of day that looks perfect until you realize how cold it is when you step outside. We are dressed up-me in the suit jacket that Francis and I share, and Brit in a black dress that used to hug her body and that now hangs on it.

We’re the only car in the lot. After I park, I get out and come around to Brit’s side. This is not because I’m such a gentleman but because she won’t get out. I kneel down beside her, put my hand on her knee. “It’s okay,” I say. “We can lean on each other.”

She juts out her chin, like I’ve seen her do when she thinks someone is about to dismiss her as weak or ineffective. Then she unfolds herself from the truck. She is wearing flat shoes, the way Odette Lawton told her to, but her coat is short and only reaches to the hip, and I can tell the wind whips through the fabric of her dress fast. I try to stand between her and the gusts, as if I could change up the weather for her.

When we get there, the sun is just hitting the headstone in a way that makes it sparkle. It’s white. Blinding white. Brit bends down and traces the letters of Davis’s name. The day of his birth, the hopscotch leap to his death. And just one word under that: LOVE.

Brit had wanted it to say LOVED. Those were the directions she gave me for the granite carver. But at the last minute I changed it. I was never going to stop, so why make it past tense?

I told Brit the carver had been the one to screw up. I didn’t admit it had been my idea all along.

I like the idea that the word on my son’s grave matches the tattoo on the knuckles of my left hand. It’s like I carry him with me.

We stand at the grave until Brit gets too cold. There is a peach fuzz of lawn, seeded after the funeral, already brown. A second death.

–

THE FIRST THINGS I see at the courthouse are the niggers.

It’s like the whole park in the middle of New Haven is covered with them. They’re waving flags and singing hymns.

It’s that asshole from television, Wallace Something. The one who thinks he’s a reverend and probably got ordained online for five bucks. He’s giving some kind of nigger history lesson, talking about Bacon’s Rebellion. “In response, my brothers and sisters,” he says, “Whites and blacks were separated. If they united, it was believed they could do too much damage together. And by 1705, indentured servants who were Christian-and White-were given land, guns, food, money. Those who were not were enslaved. Our land and livestock was taken. Our arms were taken. If we lifted a hand to a White man, our very lives could be taken.” He raises his arms. “History is told by Americans of Anglo descent.”

Damn straight. I look at the size of the crowd listening to him. I think of the Alamo, where a handful of Texans held off an army of spics for twelve days.

I mean, they lost, but still.

Suddenly, out of the sea of black, I see a White fist raised. A symbol.

The crowd shifts as the man walks toward me. A big dude, with a bald head and a long red beard. He stops in front of me and Brit and holds out his hand. “Carl Thorheldson,” he says, introducing himself. “But you know me as Odin45.”

It is the handle of a frequent poster on Lonewolf.org.

His companion shakes my hand, too. “Erich Duval. WhiteDevil.”

They are joined by a woman with twins, little silver-haired toddlers each balanced on a hip. Then a dude in camo. Three girls with heavy black eyeliner. A tall man in combat boots with a toothpick clenched between his teeth. A young guy with thick-framed hipster glasses and a laptop in his arms.

A steady stream closes ranks around me-people I know by a shared interest in Lonewolf.org. They are tailors and accountants and teachers, they are Minutemen patrolling the borders in Arizona and militia in the hills of New Hampshire. They are neo-Nazis who never decredited. They have been anonymous, hiding behind the screens of usernames, until now.

For my son, they’re willing to be outed once again.

Kennedy

ON THE MORNING OF THE trial, I oversleep. I shoot out of bed like a cannonball, throwing water on my face and yanking my hair into a bun at the nape and stuffing myself into my panty hose and my best navy trial suit. Literally three minutes of grooming, and I’m in the kitchen, where Micah is standing at the stove. “Why didn’t you wake me up?” I demand.

He smiles and gives me a quick kiss. “I love you too, moon of my life,” he says. “Go sit down next to Violet.”

Our daughter is at the table, looking at me. “Mommy? You’re wearing two different shoes.”

“Oh, God,” I mutter, pivoting to go back to the bedroom, but Micah grabs my shoulder and steers me to a seat.

“You’re going to eat this while it’s hot. You need energy to take down a skinhead and his wife. Otherwise, you’re going to run out of steam, and I know from personal experience that the only option for food in that courthouse is something brown they are trying to pass off as coffee and a vending machine of granola bars from the Jurassic period.” He puts down a plate-two fried eggs, toast with jam, even hash browns. I am so hungry that I’ve already finished the eggs before he can set down the last of my breakfast-a steaming latte in his old Harvard Med School mug. “Look,” he jokes, “I even served you your coffee in the White Privilege cup.”

I burst out laughing. “Then I’ll take it with me in the car for luck. Or guilt. Or something.”

I kiss Violet on the crown of her head and grab my matching shoe from the bedroom closet, along with my phone, charger, computer, and briefcase. Micah’s waiting for me at the door with the mug of coffee. “In all seriousness? I’m proud of you.”

I let myself have this one moment. “Thanks.”

“Go forth and be Marcia Clark.”

I wince. “She’s a prosecutor. Can I be Gloria Allred?”

Micah shrugs. “Just knock ’em dead.”

I am already walking toward the driveway. “Pretty sure that’s the last thing you’re supposed to say to someone who’s about to try her first murder case,” I reply, and I slip into the driver’s seat without spilling a drop of my coffee.

I mean, that’s got to be a sign, right?

–

I DRIVE AROUND the front of the courthouse just to see what’s happening, even though I’ve arranged to meet Ruth somewhere I know she won’t be accosted. A circus, that’s really the only way to describe it. On one end of the green, Wallace Freaking Mercy is broadcasting live, preaching to a crowd through a megaphone. “In 1691 the word white was used in court for the first time. Back then, this nation went by the one-drop rule,” I hear him say. “You needed only one drop of blood to be considered black in this country…”

On the other end of the green is a cluster of white people. At first I think they are watching Wallace’s shenanigans, and then I see one hoisting the picture of the dead baby.

They begin to march through the group that is listening to Wallace. There are curses, shoving, a punch thrown. The police immediately join the fray, pushing the blacks and the whites apart.

It makes me think of a magic trick I did last year to impress Violet. I poured water into a pie pan and dusted the top with pepper. Then I told her the pepper was afraid of Ivory soap, and sure enough, when I dipped the bar of soap into the bowl, the pepper flew to the edges.

To Violet, it was magic. Of course I knew better-what caused the pepper to run from the soap was surface tension.

Which, really, is kind of what’s going on here.

I drive around to the parish house on Wall Street. Immediately, I see Edison, standing lookout-but no Ruth. I get out of my car, feeling my heart sink. “Is she…?”

He points across the lot, to where Ruth is standing on the sidewalk, looking at the foot traffic across the street. So far, nobody has noticed her, but it’s a risk. I go to drag her back, touching her arm, but she shakes me away. “I would like a moment,” she says formally.

I back off.

Students and professors pass, their collars turned up against the wind. A bicycle whizzes by, and then the dinosaur bulk of a bus sighs at the curb, belching out a few passengers before moving away again. “I keep having these…thoughts,” Ruth says. “You know, all weekend long. How many more times will I get to take the bus? Or cook breakfast? Is this the last time I’ll write out a check for my electricity bill? Would I have paid more attention last April when the daffodils first came up, if I’d known I wasn’t going to see them again?”

She takes a step toward a line of adolescent trees planted in a neat row. Her hands wrap around one narrow trunk as if she’s throttling it, and she turns her face to the bare branches overhead.

“Look at that sky,” Ruth says. “It’s the kind of blue you find in tubes of oil paint. Like color, boiled down to its essence.” Then she turns to me. “How long does it take to forget this?”

I put my arm around her shoulders. She’s shaking, and I know it has nothing to do with the temperature. “If I have anything to say about it,” I tell her, “you’ll never find out.”

Ruth

WHEN EDISON WAS LITTLE, I always knew when he was getting up to no good. I could sense it, even if I couldn’t see it. I’ve got eyes in the back of my head, I would tell him, when he was amazed that even if I turned away, I knew he was trying to steal a snack before dinner.

Maybe that is why, even though I am facing forward like Kennedy told me to, I can feel the stares of everyone sitting behind me in the gallery.

They feel like pinpricks, arrows, tiny bug bites. It takes all my concentration to not slap at the back of my neck, swat them away.

Who am I kidding? It takes all my concentration not to stand up and run down the aisle and out of this courtroom.

Kennedy and Howard are bent together, deep in a strategy session; they don’t have time to talk me down from the ledge. The judge has made it clear that he won’t tolerate disruption from the gallery, and that he has a zero tolerance policy-first strike, you’re out. Certainly that is keeping the white supremacists in check. But they are not the only ones whose eyes are boring into me.

There are a whole host of Black people, many faces I recognize from my mother’s funeral, who have come to lift me up on their prayers. Directly behind me are Edison and Adisa. They are holding hands on the armrest between their seats. I can feel the strength of that bond, like a force field. I listen to their breathing.

All of a sudden I’m back in the hospital, doing what I did best, my hand on the shoulder of a woman in labor and my eyes on the screen that monitors her vitals. “Inhale,” I’d order. “Exhale. Deep breath in…deep breath out.” And sure enough, the tension would leach out of her. Without that strain, progress could be made.

It’s time to take my own advice.

I draw in all the air I can, nostrils flaring, breathing so deeply I envision the vacuum I create, the walls bending inward. My lungs swell in my chest, full to bursting. For a second I hold time still.

And then, I let go.

–

ODETTE LAWTON DOES not make eye contact with me. She is completely focused on the jury. She is one of them. Even the distance she puts between herself and the defense table is a way of reminding the people who will decide my fate that she and I have nothing in common. No matter what they see when they look at our skin.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” she says, “the case you are about to hear is horrible and tragic. Turk and Brittany Bauer were, like many of us, excited to become parents. In fact the best day of their lives was October second, 2015. On that day, their son Davis was born.” She rests her hand on the rail of the jury box. “Unlike all parents, however, the Bauers have some personal preferences that led them to feel uncomfortable with an African American nurse caring for their child. You may not like what they believe, you may not agree with them, but you cannot deny their just due as patients in the hospital to make decisions about the medical care of their baby. Exercising that privilege, Turk Bauer requested that only certain nurses attend to his infant. The defendant was not one of them-and, ladies and gentlemen, that was a slight she could not stomach.”

If I weren’t so terrified, I would laugh. That’s it? That’s the way Odette glossed over the racism that led to that damn Post-it note on the file? It’s almost impressive, the way she so neatly flipped it so that before the jury got a glance at the ugliness, they were looking at something else entirely: patients’ rights. I glance at Kennedy, and she shrugs the tiniest bit. I told you so.

“On Saturday morning, little Davis Bauer was taken to the nursery for his circumcision. The defendant was alone in that room when the baby went into distress. So what did she do?” Odette hesitates. “Nothing. This nurse with over twenty years of experience, this woman who had taken an oath to administer care as best she could, just stood there.” Turning, she points to me. “The defendant stood there, and she watched that baby struggle to breathe, and she let that baby die.”

Now I can feel the jury picking me over, jackals at carrion. Some of them seem curious, some stare with revulsion. It makes me want to crawl under the defense table. Take a shower. But then I feel Kennedy squeeze my hand where it rests on my lap, and I lift my chin. Do not let them see you sweat, she’d said.

“Ruth Jefferson’s behavior was wanton, reckless, and intentional. Ruth Jefferson is a murderer.”

Hearing the word leveled at me, even though I have been expecting it, still takes me by surprise. I try to build a levee against the shock of it, by picturing in quick succession all the babies I have held in my arms, the first touch they’ve had for comfort in this world.

“The evidence will show that the defendant stood there doing nothing while that infant fought for his life. When other medical professionals came in and prodded her into action, she used more force than was necessary and violated all the professional standards of care. She was so violent to this little baby boy that you will see the bruising in his autopsy photos.”

She faces the jury once more. “We have all had our feelings hurt, ladies and gentlemen,” Odette says. “But even if you don’t feel that a choice was made correctly-even if you find it a moral affront-you don’t retaliate. You don’t cause harm to an innocent, to get back at the person who’s wronged you. And yet this is exactly what the defendant did. Had she acted in accordance with her training as a medical professional, instead of being motivated by rage and retaliation, Davis Bauer would be alive today. But with Ruth Jefferson on the job?” She looks me square in the eye. “That baby didn’t stand a chance.”

Beside me, Kennedy rises smoothly. She walks toward the jury, her heels clicking on the tile floor. “The prosecutor,” she says, “will have you believe this case is black and white. But not in the way that you think. I’m representing Ruth Jefferson. She is a graduate of SUNY Plattsburgh who went on to get a nursing degree at Yale. She has practiced as a labor and delivery nurse for over twenty years in the state of Connecticut. She was married to Wesley Jefferson, who died overseas serving in our military. By herself, she raised a son, Edison, an honor student who is applying to college. Ruth Jefferson is not a monster, ladies and gentlemen. She is a good mother, she was a good wife, and she is an exemplary nurse.”

She crosses back to the defense table and puts her hand on my shoulder. “The evidence is going to show that one day, a baby died during Ruth’s shift. Not just any baby, though. The infant was the child of Turk Bauer, a man who hated her because of her skin color. And what happened? When the baby died, he went to the police and blamed Ruth. In spite of the fact that the pediatrician-who you will hear from-commended Ruth for the way she fought to save that infant during his respiratory arrest. In spite of the fact that Ruth’s boss-who you will hear from-told Ruth not to touch this child, when the hospital had no right to tell her to abandon her duty as a nurse.”

Kennedy walks toward the jury again. “Here is what the evidence will show: Ruth was confronted with an impossible situation. Should she follow the orders of her supervisor, and the misguided wishes of the baby’s parents? Or should she do whatever she possibly could to save his life?

“Ms. Lawton said that this case was tragic, and she is right. But again, not for the reason you think. Because nothing Ruth Jefferson did or didn’t do would have made a difference for little Davis Bauer. What the Bauers-and the hospital-did not know at the time is that the baby had a life-threatening condition that had gone unidentified. And it wouldn’t have mattered if it were Ruth in the room with him, or Florence Nightingale. There is simply no way Davis Bauer would have survived.”

She spreads her hands, a concession. “The prosecutor would have you believe that the reason we are here today is negligence. But it was not Ruth who was inattentive-it was the hospital and the state lab, which failed to promptly flag a severe medical condition in the infant that, if diagnosed sooner, might have saved his life. The prosecutor would have you believe that the reason we are here today is rage and retaliation. That’s true. But it’s not Ruth who was consumed by anger. It was Turk and Brittany Bauer, who, lost in grief and pain, wanted to find a scapegoat. If they could not have their son, alive and healthy, they wanted someone else to suffer. And so, they targeted Ruth Jefferson.” She looks at the jury. “There has already been one innocent victim. I urge you to prevent there being a second.”

–

I HAVEN’T SEEN Corinne in months. She looks older, and there are circles under her eyes. I wonder if she is with the same boyfriend, if she’s been ill, what crisis has overtaken her life lately. I remember how when we got salads down in the cafeteria and ate them in the break room, she would give me her tomatoes and I would pass over my olives.

If the past few months have taught me anything, it’s that friendship is a smoke screen. The people you think are solid turn out to be mirrors and light; and then you look down and realize there are others you took for granted, those who are your foundation. A year ago, I would have told you that Corinne and I were close, but that turned out to be proximity instead of connection. We were default acquaintances, buying each other Christmas gifts and going out for tapas on Thursday nights not because we had so much in common, but because we worked so hard and so long that it was easier to continue our shorthand conversation than to branch out and teach someone else the language.

Odette asks Corinne to give her name, her address. Then she asks, “Are you employed?”

From the witness stand, Corinne makes eye contact with me, and then her gaze slides away. “Yes. At Mercy-West Haven Hospital.”

“Do you know the defendant in this matter?”

“Yes,” Corinne admits. “I do.”

But she doesn’t, not really. She never did.

To be fair, I guess, I didn’t really know who I was, either.

“How long have you known her?” Odette asks.

“Seven years. We worked together as nurses on the L and D ward.”

“I see,” the prosecutor says. “Were you both working on October second, 2015?”

“Yes. We started our shift at seven A.M.”

“Did you care for Davis Bauer that morning?”

“Yes,” Corinne says. “But I took over for Ruth.”

“Why?”

“Our supervisor, Marie Malone, asked me to.”

Odette makes a big to-do about entering a certified copy of the medical record into evidence. “I’d like to refer you to exhibit twenty-four, in front of you. Can you tell the jury what it is?”

“A medical records folder,” Corinne explains. “Davis Bauer was the patient.”

“Is there a note in the front of the file?”

“Yes,” Corinne says, and she reads it aloud. “No African American personnel to care for this patient.”

Each word, it’s a bullet.

“As a result of this, the patient was reassigned from the defendant to you, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Did you observe Ruth’s reaction to that note?” Odette asks.

“I did. She was angry and upset. She told me that Marie had taken her off the case because she’s Black, and I said that didn’t sound like Marie. You know, like, there must have been more going on. She didn’t want to hear it. She said, ‘That baby means nothing to me.’ And then she stormed off.”

Stormed off? I went down the staircase, instead of taking the elevator. It is remarkable how events and truths can be reshaped, like wax that’s sat too long in the sun. There is no such thing as a fact. There is only how you saw the fact, in a given moment. How you reported the fact. How your brain processed that fact. There is no extrication of the storyteller from the story.

“Was Davis Bauer a healthy baby?” the prosecutor continues.

“It seemed that way,” Corinne admits. “I mean, he wasn’t nursing a lot, but that wasn’t particularly significant. Lots of babies are logy at first.”

“Were you at work on Friday, October third?”

“Yes,” Corinne says.

“Was Ruth?”

“No. She wasn’t supposed to come in at all, but I’m pretty sure we were shorthanded and she got pulled in to do a double-seven P.M., running straight into Saturday.”

“So you were Davis’s nurse all day Friday?”

“Yes.”

“Did you perform any routine procedures on the infant?”

Corinne nods. “At around two-thirty I did the heel stick. It’s a standard blood test-it wasn’t done because the baby was sick or anything. All newborns get it, and it goes off to the state lab for analysis.”

“Did you have any concerns about your patient that day?”

“He was still having trouble latching on for breast feeding, but again, that’s not extraordinary for a first-time mom and a newborn.” She smiles at the jury. “Blind leading the blind, and all that.”

“Did you have any conversation with the defendant about Davis Bauer when she came on shift?”

“No. In fact she seemed to ignore him completely.”

It is like an out-of-body experience-sitting right here, in plain sight, and hearing these people discuss me as if I am not present.

“When did you next see Ruth?”

“Well, she was still on duty when I came back on shift at seven A.M. She’d pulled an all-nighter, and was scheduled to leave at eleven A.M.”

“What happened that morning?” Odette asks.

“The baby was being circumcised. Usually the parents don’t like to see that happen in front of them, so we take the infant to the nursery. We give them a little bit of sweeties-basically sugar water-to calm them down a little, and the pediatrician does the procedure. When I wheeled in the bassinet, Ruth was waiting in the nursery. It had been a crazy morning, and she was taking a breather.”

“Did the circumcision go as planned?”

“Yes, no complications. The protocol is to monitor the baby for ninety minutes to make sure there’s no bleeding, or any other sort of issue.”

“Is that what you did?”

“No,” Corinne admits. “I was called for an emergency C-section for one of my other patients. Our charge nurse, Marie, accompanied me to the OR, which is her job. That meant Ruth was the only nurse left on the floor. So I grabbed her and asked her to watch over Davis.” She hesitates. “You have to understand, we’re a tiny hospital. We have a skeletal staff. And when a medical emergency happens, decisions are made quickly.”

Beside me, Howard scribbles a note.

“A stat C-section takes twenty minutes, tops. I assumed I’d be back in that nursery before the infant even woke up.”

“Did you have any concern about leaving Davis in Ruth’s care?”

“No,” she says firmly. “Ruth’s the best nurse I’ve ever met.”

“How long were you gone?” Odette asks.

“Too long,” Corinne says softly. “By the time I got back, the baby was dead.”

The prosecutor turns to Kennedy. “Your witness.”

Kennedy smiles at Corinne as she walks toward the witness stand. “You say you worked with Ruth for seven years. Would you consider yourself friends?”

Corinne’s eyes dart to me. “Yes.”

“Have you ever doubted her commitment to her career?”

“No. She has pretty much been a role model for me.”

“Were you in the nursery for any of the time that a medical intervention was taking place with Davis Bauer?”

“No,” Corinne says. “I was with my other patient.”

“So you didn’t see Ruth take action.”

“No.”

“And,” Kennedy adds, “you didn’t see Ruth not take action.”

“No.”

She holds up the piece of paper Howard has passed to her. “You stated, and I quote, When a medical emergency happens, decisions are made quickly. Do you remember saying that?”

“Yes…”

“Your stat C-section was a medical emergency, right?”

“Yes.”

“Wouldn’t you also say that a newborn suffering a respiratory seizure qualifies as a medical emergency?”

“Um, yes, of course.”

“Were you aware that there was a note in the file that said Ruth was not to care for this baby?”

“Objection!” Odette says. “That’s not what the note said.”

“Sustained,” the judge pronounces. “Ms. McQuarrie, rephrase.”

“Were you aware that there was a note in the file that said no African American personnel could care for the baby?”

“Yes.”

“How many Black nurses work in your department?”

“Just Ruth.”

“Were you aware when you grabbed Ruth to fill in for you that the baby’s parents had expressed the desire to prohibit her from caring for their newborn?”

Corinne shifts on the wooden seat. “I didn’t think anything was going to happen. The baby was fine when I left.”

“The whole reason for monitoring a baby for ninety minutes after a circumcision is because with neonates, things can change on a dime, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“And the fact is, Corinne, you left that baby with a nurse who was forbidden from ministering to him, correct?”

“I had no other choice,” Corinne says, defensive.

“But you did leave that infant in Ruth’s care?”

“Yes.”

“And you did know that she wasn’t supposed to touch that baby?”

“Yes.”

“So you screwed up, essentially, two times over?”

“Well-”

“Funny,” Kennedy interrupts. “No one accused you of killing that baby.”

–

LAST NIGHT, I dreamed about Mama’s funeral. The pews were full, and it wasn’t winter, but summer. In spite of the air-conditioning and people waving fans and programs, we were all slick with sweat. The church wasn’t a church but a warehouse that looked like it had been repurposed after a fire. The cross behind the altar was made of two charred beams fitted together like a puzzle.

I was trying to cry, but I didn’t have any tears left. All the moisture in my body had become perspiration. I tried to fan myself, but I didn’t have a program.

Then the person sitting beside me handed me one. “Take mine,” she said.

I looked over to say thank you, and realized Mama was in the chair next to me.

Speechless, I staggered to my feet.

I peered into the coffin, to see who-instead-was inside.

It was full of dead babies.

–

MARIE WAS HIRED ten years after I was. Back then she was an L & D nurse, just like me. We suffered through double shifts and complained about the lousy benefits and survived the remodeling of the hospital. When the charge nurse retired, Marie and I both threw our names into the ring. When HR went with Marie, she came to me, devastated. She said that she was hoping I’d get the job, just so she didn’t have to apologize for being the one who was chosen. But really, I was okay with it. I had Edison to watch after, in the first place. And being charge nurse meant a lot more administrative work and less hands-on with patients. As I watched Marie settle into her new role, I thanked my lucky stars that it had worked out the way it had.

“The baby’s father, Turk Bauer, had asked to speak to a supervisor,” Marie says, replying to the prosecutor. “He had a concern about the care of his infant.”

“What were the contents of that conversation?”

She looks into her lap. “He did not want any Black people touching his baby. He told me that at the same time he revealed a tattoo of a Confederate flag on his forearm.”

There is actually a gasp from someone in the jury.

“Had you ever experienced a request like this from a parent?”

Marie hesitates. “We get patient requests all the time. Some women prefer female doctors to deliver their babies, or they don’t like being treated by a med student. We do our best to make our patients comfortable, whatever it takes.”

“In this case, what did you do?”

“I wrote a note and stuck it in the file.”

Odette asks her to examine the exhibit with the medical file, to read the note out loud. “Did you speak to your staff about this patient request?”

“I did. I explained to Ruth that there had been a request to have her step down, due to the father’s philosophical beliefs.”

“What was her reaction?”

“She took it as a personal affront,” Marie says evenly. “I didn’t mean it that way. I told her it was just a formality. But she walked out and slammed the door of my office.”

“When did you see the defendant again?” Odette asks.

“Saturday morning. I was in the ER with another patient, who had suffered a complication during delivery. As nurse supervisor, I’m required to make that transfer with the attending nurse, who happened to be Corinne. Corinne had left Ruth watching over her other patient-Davis Bauer-postcircumcision. So as soon as I possibly could, I ran back to the nursery.”

“Tell us what you saw, Marie.”

“Ruth was standing over the bassinet,” she says. “I asked her what she was doing, and she said, Nothing.”

The room closes in on me, and the muscles of my neck and arms tighten. I feel myself frozen again, mesmerized by the blue marble of the baby’s cheek, the stillness of his small body. I hear her instructions:

Ambu bag.

Call the code.

I am swimming, I am in over my head, I am wooden.

Start compressions.

Hammering with two fingers on the delicate spring of rib cage, attaching the leads with my other hand. The nursery too cramped for all the people suddenly inside. The needle inserted subcutaneous into the scalp, the blue barrage of swear words as it slips out before striking a vein. A vial rolling off the table. Atropine, squirted into the lungs, coating the plastic tube. The pediatrician, flying into the nursery. The sigh of the Ambu bag being tossed in the trash.

Time? 10:04.

“Ruth?” Kennedy whispers. “Are you all right?”

I cannot get my lips to move. I am in over my head. I am wooden. I am drowning.

“The patient developed wide complex bradycardia,” Marie says.

Tombstones.

“We were unable to oxygenate him. Finally, the pediatrician called the time of death. We didn’t realize that the parents were in the nursery. There was just so much going on…and…” She falters. “The father-Mr. Bauer-he ran to the trash can and took the Ambu bag out. He tried to put it on the tube that was still sticking out of the baby’s throat. He begged us to show him what to do.” She wipes a tear away. “I don’t mean to…I’m…I’m sorry.”

I manage to jerk my head a few degrees and see that there are several women in the jury box who are doing the same thing. But me, there are no tears left in me.

I am drowning in everyone else’s tears.

Odette walks toward Marie and hands her a box of tissues. The soft sound of sobs surrounds me, like cotton batting on all sides. “What happened next?” the prosecutor asks.

Marie dabs at her eyes. “I wrapped Davis Bauer in a blanket. I put his hat back on. And I gave him to his mother and father.”

I am wooden.

I close my eyes. And I sink, I sink.

–

IT TAKES ME a few minutes to focus on Kennedy, who has already started the cross-examination of Marie when I clear my head. “Did any patient ever complain to you about Ruth’s expertise as a nurse, prior to Turk Bauer?”

“No.”

“Did Ruth provide substandard care?”

“No.”

“When you wrote that note in the infant’s chart, you knew there would only be two nurses working at any given time, and that there might be a possibility the patient might be left without supervision at some point during his hospital stay?”

“That’s not true. The other nurse on duty would have covered.”

“And what if that nurse was busy? What if,” Kennedy says, “she got called away on an emergency C-section, for example, and the only nurse remaining on the floor was in fact African American?”

Marie’s mouth opens and closes, but no sound emerges.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Malone-I didn’t quite get that.”

“Davis Bauer was not left unsupervised at any point,” she insists. “Ruth was there.”

“But you-her supervisor-you had prohibited her from ministering to this particular patient, isn’t that right?”

“No, I-”

“Your note barred her from actively treating this particular patient-”

“In general,” Marie explains. “Obviously not in the case of emergency.”

Kennedy’s eyes flash. “Was that written in the patient’s chart?”

“No, but-”

“Was that written on your Post-it note?”

“No.”

“Did you advise Ruth that in certain circumstances her Nightingale pledge as a nurse should supersede what you’d ordered?”

“No,” Marie murmurs.

Kennedy folds her arms. “Then how,” she asks, “was Ruth supposed to know?”

–

WHEN COURT BREAKS for lunch, Kennedy offers to get us a bite to eat, so that Edison and I don’t have to run a gauntlet of press. I tell her I’m not hungry. “I know it doesn’t feel like it,” she tells me. “But this was a good start.”

I give her a look that tells her exactly what I’m thinking: there is no way that jury isn’t going to be thinking of Turk Bauer trying to resuscitate his own son.

After Kennedy leaves us, Edison sits down beside me. He loosens his tie. “You all right?” I ask him, squeezing his hand.

“I can’t believe you’re the one asking me that.”

A lady walks by us and sits beside Edison on the bench outside the courtroom. She is deeply involved in a text conversation on her phone. She laughs and frowns and tsks, a human opera of one. Then finally she looks up as if she’s just realized where she is.

She sees Edison beside her, and shifts just the tiniest bit, to put a hair of space between them. Then she smiles, as if this will make everything all right.

“You know,” I say, “I’m sort of hungry.”

Edison grins. “I’m always hungry.”

We rise in tandem and sneak out the back of the courthouse. I don’t even care at this point if I run into the entirety of the media, or Wallace Mercy himself. I wander down the street with my arm tucked into Edison’s until we find a pizza place.

We order slices and sit down, waiting to be called. In the booth, Edison hunches over his Coca-Cola, sucking hard on the straw until he reaches the bottom of the glass and slurps. I, too, am lost in my thoughts and my memories.

I guess I didn’t realize that a trial is not just a sanctioned character assassination. It is a mind game, so that the defendant’s armor is chipped away one scale at a time, until you can’t help but wonder if maybe what the prosecution is saying is true.

What if I had done it on purpose?

What if I’d hesitated not because of Marie’s Post-it note but because, deep down, I wanted to?

I am distracted by Edison’s voice. Blinking, I come back to center. “Did they call our name?”

He shakes his head. “Not yet. Mama, can I…can I ask you something?”

“Always.”

He mulls for a moment, as if he is sifting through words. “Was it…was it really like that?”

There is a bell at the front counter. Our food is ready.

I make no move to retrieve it. Instead I meet my son’s gaze. “It was worse,” I say.

–

THE ANESTHESIOLOGIST WHO is called that afternoon as a witness for the State is someone I do not know very well. Isaac Hager doesn’t work on my floor unless a code is called. Then, he arrives with the rest of the team. When he came to minister to Davis Bauer I did not even know his name.

“Prior to responding to the code,” Odette asks, “had you ever met this patient?”

“No,” Dr. Hager says.

“Had you ever met his parents?”

“No.”

“Can you tell us what you did when you reached the nursery?”

“I intubated the patient,” Dr. Hager replies. “And when my colleagues couldn’t get an IV in, I tried to help.”

“Did you make any comments to Ruth during this process?” Odette asks.

“Yes. She was doing compressions, and I instructed her at several times to stop so that we could see if the patient was responding. At one point, when I felt she was a little aggressive with her chest compressions, I told her so.”

“Can you describe what she was doing?”

“Chest compressions on an infant involve pressing the sternum down a half inch, about two hundred times a minute. The complexes on the monitor were too high; I thought Ruth was pushing down too hard.”

“Can you explain what that means to a layperson?”

Dr. Hager looks at the jury. “Chest compressions are the way we manually make a heart beat, if it’s not doing it by itself. The point is to physically push the cardiac output…but then let up on your thrust long enough to let blood fill the heart. It’s not unlike plunging a toilet. You have to push down, but if you keep doing that and don’t pull up, creating suction, the bowl won’t fill with water. Likewise, if you do compressions too fast or too hard, you’re pumping, pumping, pumping, but there’s no blood circulating in the body.”

“Do you remember what you said to Ruth, exactly?”

He clears his throat. “I told her to lighten up.”

“Is it unusual for an anesthesiologist to suggest a modification to the person who is doing compressions?”

“Not at all,” Dr. Hager says. “It’s a system of checks and balances. We’re all watching each other during a code. I might just as well have been watching to see if both sides of the chest were rising, and if they weren’t, I would have told Marie Malone to bag harder.”

“How long was Ruth overly aggressive?”

“Objection!” Kennedy says. “She’s putting words in the witness’s mouth.”

“I’ll rephrase. How long was the defendant aggressive with her chest compressions?”

“It was only slightly aggressive, and for less than a minute.”

“In your expert medical opinion, Doctor,” Odette asks, “could the defendant’s actions have caused harm to the patient?”

“The act of saving a life can look pretty violent, Ms. Lawton. We slice open skin, we crack ribs, we shock with extreme voltage.” Then he turns to me. “We do what we have to do, and when we are lucky, it works.”

“Nothing further,” the prosecutor says.

Kennedy approaches Dr. Hager. “Emotions were running very high in that nursery, weren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Those compressions that Ruth was doing-were they adversely affecting the infant’s life?”

“On the contrary. They were keeping him alive while we attempted medical intervention.”

“Were they contributory to the infant’s death?”

“No.”

Kennedy leans on the railing of the jury box. “Is it fair to say that in that nursery, everyone was trying to save that baby’s life?”

“Absolutely.”

“Even Ruth?”

Dr. Hager looks right at me. “Yes,” he says.

–

THERE IS A recess after the anesthesiologist’s testimony. The judge leaves, and the jury is removed from their box. Kennedy spirits me away to a conference room, where I am supposed to stay, so that I remain safely sequestered from the media.

I want to talk to Edison. I want a hug from Adisa. But instead I sit at a small table in a room with hissing fluorescent lights, trying to untangle this chess game in my head.

“You ever wonder?” I ask. “What you’d do, if you weren’t a lawyer?”

Kennedy glances at me. “Is this your way of telling me I’m doing a shitty job?”

“No, I’m just thinking. About…starting over.”

She unwraps a piece of gum and passes me the rest of the packet. “Don’t laugh, but I wanted to be a pastry chef once.”

“Really?”

“I went to culinary school for three weeks. I was eventually conquered by phyllo. I just don’t have the patience for it.”

A smile dances over my face. “Go figure.”

“What about you?” Kennedy asks.

I look up at her. “I don’t know,” I admit. “I’ve wanted to be a nurse since I was five. I feel like I’m too old to start over, and even if I had to, I wouldn’t know where else to go.”

“That’s the problem with having a calling,” Kennedy says. “It doesn’t just pay the rent.”

A calling. Is that why I unwrapped Davis Bauer’s blanket when he wasn’t breathing? “Kennedy,” I begin, “there’s something-”

But she interrupts. “You could go back to school. Get a medical degree or become a PA,” she suggests. “Or work as a private caregiver.”

Neither of us says the truth that squeezes into the small room with us: convicted felon doesn’t look good on a résumé.

When she sees my face, her eyes soften. “It’s going to work out, Ruth. There’s a grand plan.”

“What if?” I say softly. “What if the grand plan doesn’t come to pass?”

She sets her jaw. “Then I will do whatever I can to get your sentence minimized.”

“I’d have to go to prison?”

“Right now the State’s leveled several charges against you. At any time if they decide they don’t have the evidence to support them, they might drop a greater charge in favor of conviction on a lesser one. So if they can’t prove murder, but they think they have negligent homicide locked up, Odette may play it safe.” She meets my gaze. “Murder has a minimum sentence of twenty-five years. But negligent homicide? Less than a year. And to be honest, they’re going to have a very hard time proving intent. Odette’s going to have to tiptoe through her questioning of Turk Bauer or the jury’s going to hate him.”

“You mean as much as I do?”

Kennedy’s eyes sharpen. “Ruth,” she warns, “I never want to hear you say those words out loud again. Do you understand?”

In an instant, I realize Kennedy is not the only one thinking six moves ahead. So is Odette. She wants the jury to hate Turk Bauer. She wants them outraged, offended, morally disgusted.

And that’s exactly how she will prove motive.

–

I’VE ALWAYS ADMIRED Dr. Atkins, the pediatrician, but after hearing her list her credentials and rattle off her CV, I’m even more impressed. She is one of those rare individuals who has more awards and honors than you’d ever expect, because she’s humble enough to not mention it herself. She is also the first witness to take the stand who looks directly at me and smiles before turning her attention to the prosecutor.

“Ruth had already done the newborn exam,” Dr. Atkins says. “She was concerned about a potential heart murmur.”

“Was that a significant concern?” Odette asks.

“No. A lot of babies are born with an open patent ductus. A teensy little hole in the heart. It usually closes up by itself, the first year of life. However, to be safe, I scheduled a pediatric cardiology consult prior to patient discharge.”

I know, from Kennedy, that Odette will be assuming the medical issue Kennedy referenced in her opening statement is this heart murmur. That she’s downplaying it, already, for the jury.

“Dr. Atkins, were you working on Saturday, October third-the day of Davis Bauer’s death?”

“Yes. I came in to do the patient’s circumcision at nine A.M.”

“Can you explain that procedure?”

“Of course, it’s a very simple operation during which the foreskin of a male infant’s penis is removed. I was running a little late because I had another patient with an emergency.”

“Was anyone else present?”

“Yes, two nurses. Corinne and Ruth. I asked Ruth if the patient was ready, and she said she was no longer his nurse. Corinne confirmed that the infant was ready for the procedure, and I performed it without incident.”

“Did Ruth say anything to you about the circumcision?”

Dr. Atkins pauses. “She said maybe I should sterilize the baby.”

Behind me, in the gallery, someone whispers: Bitch.

“How did you respond?”

“I didn’t. I had work to do.”

“How did the procedure go?”

The pediatrician shrugs. “He was crying afterward, like all infants do. We swaddled him tight, and he drifted off.” She looks up. “When I left, he was sleeping…well…like a baby.”

“Your witness,” Odette says.

“Doctor, you’ve worked at the hospital for eight years?” Kennedy begins.

“Yes.” She laughs a little. “Wow. Time flies.”

“During that time, have you worked with Ruth before?”

“Frequently, and joyously,” Dr. Atkins says. “She is a terrific nurse who goes above and beyond for her patients.”

“When Ruth made the comment about sterilizing the infant, how did you perceive her statement?”

“As a joke,” Dr. Atkins says. “I knew she was kidding. Ruth isn’t the type to be malicious about patients.”

“After Davis Bauer’s circumcision, were you still working in the hospital?”

“Yes, on a different floor, in the pediatric clinic.”

“Were you made aware of an emergency in the nursery?”

“Yes. Marie had called the code. When I arrived, Ruth was compressing the chest.”

“Did Ruth do everything according to the highest standards of care?”

“As far as I could see, yes.”

“Did she indicate any animus or bias against this child?” Kennedy asks.

“No.”

“I’d like to jump back a bit,” Kennedy says. “Did you order any blood work to be done on Davis Bauer after his birth?”

“Yes, the newborn screening that’s done by the state of Connecticut.”

“Where does the blood work go?”

“The state lab in Rocky Hill tests it. We don’t do it in-house.”

“How is it transported to the state lab?”

“By courier,” Dr. Atkins says.

“When was Davis Bauer’s blood taken for the screening?”

“At two-thirty P.M., on Friday, October third.”

“Did you ever receive the results of the newborn screening test from the Connecticut state lab?”

Dr. Atkins frowns, considering this. “Actually, I don’t remember seeing them. But of course by then it was a moot point.”

“What is the purpose of the test?”

She lists a series of rare diseases. Some are caused by genetic mutation. Some are issues with not having enough of an enzyme or protein in the body. Others result from not being able to break down enzymes or proteins. “Most of you have never heard of these conditions,” Dr. Atkins says, “because most babies don’t have them. But the ones that do-well, some of the disorders are treatable if caught early. If we make accommodations through diet or medicine or hormone therapy, we can often prevent significant growth delays and cognitive impairment by starting immediate treatment.”

“Are any of these conditions fatal?”

“Some, if they’re left untreated.”

“You did not have the benefit of the results of this test when Davis Bauer had a seizure, did you?” Kennedy asks.

“No. The state lab is closed on weekends. We usually don’t get Friday’s results back until Tuesday.”

“What you’re saying,” Kennedy mulls, “is that it takes almost twice as long to get the test results back if the baby has the misfortune to be born at the end of the workweek.”

“That’s true, unfortunately.”

I can see the jury perking up, writing down notes, listening intently. Behind me, Edison shifts. Maybe Kennedy is right. Maybe all they need is science.

“Are you aware of a disorder called MCADD?” Kennedy asks.

“Yes. It’s a fatty acid oxidation disorder. Basically, an infant who has it will have trouble breaking down fats, and that means the blood sugar drops to dangerously low levels. It can be managed with early detection-a careful diet, frequent feedings.”

“Let’s say it isn’t detected. What happens?”

“Well, infants who have MCADD have a significant risk of death during the first clinical episode of hypoglycemia-when that blood sugar goes south.”

“What would that look like?”

“They’d be sleepy, logy. Irritable. They wouldn’t nurse well.”

“Let’s say, hypothetically, a baby with undiagnosed, untreated MCADD was about to be circumcised. Is there anything about that procedure that might have exacerbated the disease?”

The pediatrician nods. “Normally there would be fasting after six A.M., because of the upcoming surgery. For a baby with MCADD, that would lead to low blood sugar-a potential episode of hypoglycemia. Instead, ten percent dextrose would have been given to the baby prior and afterward.”

“You drew blood from Davis Bauer during the code, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell the jury the results of his blood sugar at that time?” Kennedy asks.

“Twenty.”

“At what level is a newborn considered hypoglycemic?”

“Forty.”

“So Davis Bauer’s blood sugar was dangerously low?”

“Yes.”

“Would it have been enough to cause a child with untreated, undiagnosed MCADD to go into respiratory failure?”

“I can’t say for sure. But it’s possible.”

Kennedy lifts a file. “I’d like to enter this as exhibit forty-two,” she says. “It’s the newborn screening result of Davis Bauer, which was subpoenaed by the defense.”

Odette stands like a shot. “Your Honor, what is this stunt? Defense hasn’t shared this with the prosecution-”

“That’s because I received these results just days ago. They were conveniently missing from the discovery, however, for months,” Kennedy replies. “Which I could claim as obstruction of justice…”

“Approach.” The judge calls both lawyers to the bench. A machine is turned on so that I cannot hear what they’re saying, and neither can the jury. When they finish, though, it’s after much hand waving and a dark flush on Kennedy’s face. But the record is handed to the clerk to be entered as evidence.

“Dr. Atkins, can you tell us what you’re looking at?” Kennedy asks.

“It’s a newborn screening test result,” the pediatrician says, sifting through the pages. Then she stops. “Oh, my God.”

“Is there any particular finding of interest in the results, Dr. Atkins? The results that didn’t get processed because the state lab was closed all weekend? The results you didn’t receive until after the death of Davis Bauer?”

The pediatrician looks up. “Yes. Davis Bauer screened positive for MCADD.”

–

KENNEDY IS HIGH on herself when court is dismissed that first day. She’s talking fast, like she’s had four big cups of coffee, and she seems to feel like we won our case, even though the prosecution has only just begun and we haven’t started the defense. She tells me I should drink a big glass of wine to celebrate a phenomenal day of testimony, but honestly, all I want to do is go home and crawl into bed.

My head is aching with images of Davis Bauer, and with the look on Dr. Atkins’s face when she realized what the test results said. True, Kennedy had shared them with me two nights ago, but this was even more devastating. To see someone else from the hospital-someone I liked and trusted-silently thinking, If only…It recentered me a little.

Yes, this is a trial against me.

Yes, I was blamed for something I shouldn’t have been blamed for.

But at the end of the day, there’s still a dead baby. There’s still a mama who doesn’t get to watch him grow up. I could be acquitted; I could become a shining light for Wallace Mercy’s message; I could sue in civil court for damages and get a payout that makes my nerves about Edison’s college bills disappear-and still, I would know that nobody had really won this case.

Because you can’t erase the colossal, tragic loss of a life at its very beginning.

That’s what’s running through my mind as I wait for the hallways to clear, so that Edison and I can go home without attracting attention. He is waiting for me on a bench outside the conference room. “Where’s your aunt?”

He shrugs. “She said she wanted to get home before the snow really started.”

I glance out the window, where flakes are falling. I’ve been turned inward so much, I hadn’t even noticed an oncoming storm. “Let me just use the restroom,” I tell Edison, and I walk down the empty hall.

I go into the stall and do my business, flush, and come out to wash my hands. Standing at the sink is Odette Lawton. She glances at me in the mirror, puts the cap on her lipstick. “Your lawyer had a good first day,” she concedes.

I don’t know what to say, so I just let the hot water run over my wrists.

“But if I were you, I wouldn’t get too complacent. You may be able to convince Kennedy McQuarrie you’re Clara Barton, but I know what you were thinking after that racist put you in your place. And they were not healing thoughts.”

It is too much. Something bubbles up inside me, a geyser, a realization. I shut the faucet, dry my hands, and face her. “You know, I have spent my life doing everything right. I have studied hard and smiled pretty and played by the rules to get where I am. And I know you have too. So it is really hard for me to understand why an intelligent, professional African American woman would go out of her way to put down another intelligent, professional African American woman.”

There is a flicker in Odette’s eyes, like a breath on a flame. Just as quickly, it’s gone, replaced by a steel stare. “This has nothing to do with race. I’m just doing my job.”

I throw my paper towel into the trash, put my hand on the door handle. “Aren’t you lucky?” I say. “No one told you you couldn’t.”

–

THAT NIGHT I am sitting at the kitchen table, just lost in my thoughts, when Edison brings me a cup of tea. “What’s this for, baby?” I say, smiling.

“I thought you could use it,” he tells me. “You look tired.”

“I am,” I confess. “I am so damn tired.”

We both know I’m not talking about the first two days of testimony, either.

Edison sits down beside me, and I squeeze his hand. “It’s exhausting, isn’t it? Trying so hard to prove that you’re better than they expect you to be?”

He nods, and I know he understands what I’m saying. “Court’s different than I thought it would be, from what I’ve seen on TV.”

“Longer,” I say, at the same time he says, “Boring.”

We both laugh.

“I was talking a little to that Howard dude, during one of the recesses,” Edison says. “It’s pretty cool, his job. And Kennedy’s. You know, the whole idea that everyone has the right to a good attorney, even if they can’t pay for it.” He looks at me, a question wreathed around his features. “You think I’d be a good lawyer, Mama?”

“Well, you’re smarter than me, and Lord knows you know how to argue,” I tease. “But, Edison, you’ll be a star at whatever you choose to do.”

“It’s funny,” he says. “I’d want to do what they do-work for people who can’t afford legal representation. But it’s kind of like my whole life has prepared me for the other side, instead-the prosecution.”

“How do you mean?”

He shrugs. “The State’s got the burden of proof,” Edison says. “Kind of like we do, every day.”

–

THE SNOW FALLS hard and fast that night, so that the plows can’t keep up, and the world becomes completely white. I wear my winter boots with the same skirt I’ve worn all week-I’ve been changing up the blouse-and stuff my dress shoes into a Stop & Shop bag. The radio is full of school closings, and the bus Edison and I have been taking breaks down, so we have to hurry to a different line and transfer twice. As a result, we reach the courthouse five minutes late. I’ve texted Kennedy, and know we don’t have time to sneak in through the back. Instead, she meets me on the steps of the courthouse, where immediately microphones are shoved at me and people call me a killer. Edison’s arm comes around me and I duck against his chest, letting him form a barrier.

“If we’re lucky Judge Thunder had trouble digging his car out today,” she mutters.

“It was the public transport sys-”

“I don’t care. You don’t give the court any extra reasons to dislike you.”

We race into the courtroom, where Odette is sitting smugly at the prosecution table, looking like she arrived at 6:00 A.M. For all I know, she sleeps here. Judge Thunder enters, bent at the waist, and we all rise. “I was rear-ended by a cretin on the way to work, and as a result, my back is officially out,” he says. “My apologies for the delay.”

“Are you all right, Your Honor?” Kennedy says. “Do you need to call a doctor?”

“As much as I appreciate your display of sympathy, Ms. McQuarrie, I imagine you’d prefer I was incapacitated somewhere in a hospital. Preferably without painkillers available. Ms. Lawton, call your witness before I forgo this judicial bravery and take a Vicodin.”

The first witness for the prosecution today is the detective who interviewed me after my arrest. “Detective MacDougall,” Odette begins, after walking him through his name and address, “where are you employed?”

“In the town of East End, Connecticut.”

“How did you become involved in the case we’re examining today?”

He leans back. He seems to spill over the chair, to fill the entire witness stand. “I got a call from Mr. Bauer, and I told him to come down to the station so I could take his complaint. He was pretty distraught at the time. He believed that the nurse who had been taking care of his son had intentionally withheld emergency care, which led to the baby’s death. I interviewed the medical personnel involved in the case, and had several meetings with the medical examiner…and with you, ma’am.”

“Did you interview the defendant?”

“Yes. After securing an arrest warrant, we went to Ms. Jefferson’s house and knocked on the door-loudly-but she didn’t come.”

At that, I nearly rise out of my chair. Howard and Kennedy each put a hand on my shoulder, holding me down. It was 3:00 A.M. They did not knock, they pounded until the doorjamb was busted. They held me at gunpoint.

I lean toward Kennedy, my nostrils flaring. “This is a lie. He is lying on the stand,” I whisper.

“Ssh,” she says.

“What happened next?” asks the prosecutor.

“No one answered the door.”

Kennedy’s hand clamps tighter on my shoulder.

“We were concerned that she might be fleeing through the back door. So I advised my team to use the battering ram to gain entrance to the home.”

“Did you in fact gain entrance and arrest Ms. Jefferson?”

“Yes,” the detective says, “but first we were confronted with a large Black subject-”

“No,” I say under my breath, and Howard kicks me under the table.

“-whom we later determined to be Ms. Jefferson’s son. We were also concerned about officer safety, so we conducted a cursory search of the bedroom, while we handcuffed Ms. Jefferson.”

They tossed aside my furniture. They broke my dishes. They pulled my clothes off hangers. They tackled my son.

“I advised her of her rights,” Detective MacDougall continues, “and read her the charges.”

“How did she react?”

He grimaces. “She was uncooperative.”

“What happened next?”

“We brought her to the East End station. She was fingerprinted and photographed and put in a holding cell. Then my colleague, Detective Leong, and I brought her into a conference room and again advised her she had the right to have her lawyer there, to not say anything, and that if she wanted to stop answering questions at any time she was free to do so. We told her that her responses could and would be used in court. And then I asked her if she understood all that. She initialed every paragraph, saying that she did.”

“Did the defendant request an attorney?”

“Not at that time. She was very willing to explain her version of events. She maintained that she did not touch the infant until he started to code. She also admitted that she and Mr. Bauer did not-how did she put it?-see eye to eye.”

“Then what happened?”

“Well, we wanted to let her know that we were looking out for her. If it was an accident, we said, just tell us, and then the judge would go easy on her and we could straighten out the mess and she could get on with raising her boy. But she clammed up and said she didn’t want to talk anymore.” He shrugs. “I guess it wasn’t an accident.”

“Objection,” Kennedy says.

Judge Thunder winces, trying to pivot toward the court reporter. “Sustained. Strike the witness’s last comment from the record.”

But it hangs in the space between us, like the glow of a neon sign after the plug has been pulled.

I feel negative pressure on my shoulder and realize Kennedy has released me. She stands in front of the detective. “You had a warrant?”

“Yes.”

“Did you call Ruth to tell her you’d be coming? Ask her to come voluntarily to the station?”

“That’s not what we do with murder warrants,” MacDougall says.

“What time was your warrant issued?”

“Five P.M. or so.”

“And what time did you actually get to Ruth’s house?”

“About three A.M.”

Kennedy looks at the jury as if to say, Can you believe this? “Any particular reason for the delay?”

“It was fully intentional. One of the tenets of law enforcement is to go when someone is least expecting you. That disarms the suspect and moves the process along.”

“When you knocked on Ruth’s door, then, and she didn’t immediately welcome you with a coffee cake and a big hug, is it possible that was because she was fast asleep at three in the morning?”

“I can’t speak to the defendant’s sleep habits.”

“The cursory search you did…in fact didn’t you actually empty the drawers and cabinets and knock over furniture and otherwise destroy Ms. Jefferson’s home when she was handcuffed and unable to access any weapon?”

“You never know when a weapon might be within someone’s reach, ma’am.”

“Isn’t it also true that you pushed her son to the ground and pulled his arms behind his back to subdue him?”

“That’s standard procedure for officer safety. We didn’t know that was Ms. Jefferson’s son. We saw a large, angry Black youth who was visibly upset.”

“Really?” Kennedy says. “Was he wearing a hoodie too?”

–

JUDGE THUNDER STRIKES that comment from the record, and when Kennedy sits down, she looks just as surprised by her outburst as I am. “Sorry,” she murmurs. “That just slipped out.” The judge, though, is furious. He calls counsel up for a sidebar. There is a noise machine again that prevents me from hearing what he says, but from the color of his face, and the full-throttle anger as he laces into my lawyer, I know he didn’t ask her up there to praise her.

“That,” Kennedy tells me, a little white around the gills when she returns, “is why you don’t bring up race in a courtroom.”

Judge Thunder decides that his back spasm merits adjournment for the rest of the day.

Because of the snow, it takes us longer to get home. When Edison and I turn the corner on our block, we are damp and exhausted. A man is trying to dig out his car using only his gloved hands. Two neighborhood boys are in the thick of a snowball fight; one missile smacks against Edison’s back.

There is a car sitting in front of our house. It’s a black sedan with a driver, which isn’t something you see very often around here, at least not once you get off the Yale campus. As I approach, the rear door opens and a woman stands up. She is wearing a ski parka and furry boots and is buried under a layer of wool-a hat, a scarf. It takes me a moment to realize that this is Christina.

“What are you doing here?” I ask, truly surprised. In all the years I’ve been in East End, Christina has not come to visit. In all the years, I haven’t invited her.

It’s not that I’m ashamed of my home. I love where I live, how I live. It’s that I did not think I could handle the excessive way she’d exclaim about how cute the space was, how cozy, how me.

“I’ve been in court for the last two days,” she admits, and I’m shocked. I’ve scanned that gallery. I haven’t noticed her there, and Christina is very hard to overlook.

She unzips her coat, revealing a ratty flannel shirt and baggy jeans, as far away from her couture sheaths as possible. “I wore camouflage,” she says, smiling shyly. She looks over my shoulder, to Edison. “Edison! My God, I haven’t seen you since you were shorter than your mother…”

He jerks his chin, an awkward hello.

“Edison, why don’t you go inside?” I suggest, and when he does, I meet Christina’s gaze. “I don’t understand. If the press found out that you were here-”

“Then I’d tell them to go screw themselves,” she says firmly. “The hell with Congress. I told Larry I was coming, and that it wasn’t negotiable. If anyone from the press asks, I’m just going to tell them the truth: that you and I go way back.”

“Christina,” I ask again, “what are you doing here?”

She could have texted. She could have called. She could have simply sat in the courtroom to lend moral support. But instead, she has been waiting in front of my door for God knows how long.

“I’m your friend,” she says quietly. “Believe it or not, Ruth, this is what friends do.” She looks up at me, and I realize she has tears in her eyes. “What they said happened to you-the police breaking in. The handcuffs. The way they attacked Edison. I never imagined…” She falters, then gathers up the weeds of her thoughts and offers me the saddest, truest bouquet. “I didn’t know.”

“Why would you?” I reply-not angry, not hurt, just stating a fact. “You’ll never have to.”

Christina wipes at her eyes, smearing her mascara. “I don’t know if I ever told you this story,” she says. “It’s about your mother. It was a long time ago, when I was in college. I was driving back home from Vassar for Thanksgiving break, and there was a hitchhiker on the side of the road on the Taconic Parkway. He was a Black man, and he had a bum leg. He was literally walking on crutches. So I pulled over and asked if he needed a ride. I took him all the way to Penn Station, so that he could get on a train to visit his family in D.C.” She folds her coat more tightly around her. “When I got home, and Lou came into my room to help me unpack, I told her what I’d done. I thought she’d be proud of me, being a Good Samaritan and all. Instead, she got so angry, Ruth! I swear, I’d never seen her like that. She grabbed my arms and shook me; she couldn’t even speak at first. Don’t you ever, ever do that again, she told me, and I was so shocked I promised I wouldn’t.” Christina looks at me. “Today I sat in that courtroom and I listened to that detective talk about how he busted in your door in the middle of the night and pushed you down and held back Edison and I kept hearing Lou’s voice in my head, after I told her about the Black hitchhiker. I knew your mama reacted that way to me because she was scared. But all these years, I thought she was trying to keep me safe. Now, I know she was trying to keep him safe.”

I realize that for years, I’ve made the assumption that Christina looks at me as someone from her past to be tolerated, an unfortunate to be helped. As children I felt like we were equals. But as we got older, as we became more aware of what was different about us, instead of what was similar, I felt a wedge drive between us. I secretly criticized her for making judgments about me and my life without asking me questions directly. She was the diva and I was the supporting player in her story. But I conveniently forgot to point out to myself that I was the one who’d cast her in that role. I’d blamed Christina for building that invisible wall without admitting I’d added a few bricks of my own.

“I left the money under your welcome mat,” I blurt out.

“I know,” Christina says. “I should have superglued it to your palm.”

There’s a foot of space, and a world of contrast, between Christina and me. Yet I, too, know how hard it is to peel back the veneer of your life, and to peek at the real. It’s like waking up in a room and getting out of bed and realizing the furniture has been completely rearranged. You will eventually find your way out, but it’s going to be slow going, and you’re bound to get some bruises along the way.

I reach out and squeeze Christina’s hand. “Why don’t you come inside?” I say.

–

THE NEXT DAY is frigid and clear. The memory of yesterday’s snowstorm has been scraped off the highways and the temperature keeps some of the crowd away from the front steps of the courthouse. Even Judge Thunder seems settled, made complacent by either whatever drugs he got for his sore back or the fact that we are nearing the end of the prosecution’s witnesses. Today, the first person called is the state medical examiner, Dr. Bill Binnie, who studied under the famous Henry Lee. He is younger than I would have imagined, with delicate hands that flutter during his responses, like trained birds sitting in his lap; and he has movie-star looks, so the ladies in the jury are hanging on his responses, even when they are simply the boring litany of all the accomplishments on his CV. “When did you first hear about Davis Bauer, Doctor?” the prosecutor asks.

“My office received a phone message from Corinne McAvoy, a nurse at Mercy-West Haven Hospital.”

“Did you respond?”

“Yes. After retrieving the infant’s body, we did an autopsy.”

“Can you tell the court what that entails?”

“Sure,” he says, turning to the jury. “I perform both an external and an internal examination. During the external exam, I look over the body for bruises and to see if there are any marks. I take measurements of the body, and the circumference of the head, and photograph the body. I take blood and bile samples. Then, to perform the internal examination, I make a Y incision in the chest, pull back the skin, and examine the lungs and the heart and the liver as well as other organs, checking for rupture, for gross abnormalities. We weigh and measure the organs. We take tissue samples. And then we send the samples to toxicology and await the results, in order to make a reasonable and factual conclusion about the cause of death.”

“What were your findings of note during the autopsy?” Odette asks.

“The liver was slightly enlarged. There was slight cardiomegaly and a minimal grade one patent ductus, but other congenital defects were absent-there were no valvular or plumbing abnormalities.”

“What does that mean?”

“The organ was a little large, and there was a small hole in the heart. However, the vessels weren’t hooked up wrong,” he says. “There were no septal defects.”

“Were any of these findings something that suggested the cause of death?”

“Not really,” the medical examiner says. “There was good reason for them. According to the patient’s medical records, the mother had gestational diabetes during the pregnancy.”

“What’s that?”

“A condition that leads to high blood sugar for a mother during pregnancy. Unfortunately, that high blood sugar in mothers also has an effect on their infants.”

“How so?”

“Infants who are born to mothers with diabetes are often bigger than other babies. Their livers, hearts, and adrenal glands may be enlarged. These infants are also often hypoglycemic after birth because of increased insulin levels in the blood. Again, based on the medical records I studied, the patient’s postnatal lab work indicated low blood sugar, as did the femoral stick done during the code. All of the findings of the autopsy, as well as the low blood sugar, would be consistent with an infant born to a diabetic mother.”

“What about the hole in the baby’s heart? That sounds serious…”

“It sounds worse than it is. In most cases, the patent ductus closes up by itself,” Dr. Binnie says, and he glances at the jury. The woman who is a teacher, juror number 12, actually starts fanning herself.

“Were you able to determine how the baby died, then?”

“Actually,” the medical examiner says. “That’s more complicated than most people think. We medical geeks make a distinction between the way a person died and the actual change in the body that causes the termination of life. For example, let’s say there is a gunshot and someone dies. The cause of death is the gunshot wound. But the mechanism of death-the actual physical event that ended his life-would be exsanguination-loss of blood.”

He turns his attention from Odette to the jury. “And then, there’s manner of death-how it came about. Was the gunshot wound an accident? A suicide? Was it a deliberate assault? That becomes important-well-when we’re sitting in a courtroom like this.”

The prosecutor enters another exhibit. “What you’re about to see,” Odette warns the jury, “may be extremely disturbing.”

She sets up on an easel a photograph of the body of Davis Bauer.

I feel my breath catch in my throat. Those tiny fingers, the bow of the legs. The acorn of his penis, still bloodied from the circumcision. If not for the bruises, the blue tint to his skin, he might be asleep.

I had taken this body from the morgue. I had held him in my own arms. I had rocked him toward Heaven.

“Doctor,” Odette begins, “could you tell us-” But before she can finish, there is a crash in the gallery. We all spin around to see Brittany Bauer standing, her eyes wild. Her husband stands in front of her, holding her shoulders. I can’t tell if he’s trying to keep her subdued or keep her upright.

“Let me go,” she shrieks. “That’s my son!”

Judge Thunder raps his gavel. “I’ll have order,” he demands, and not unkindly, “Ma’am, please sit back down…”

But Brittany points a shaking finger directly at me. It might as well be a Taser for the current that runs through my bones. “You fucking killed my baby.” She stumbles into the aisle, approaching me, while I stand caught in the spell of her hate. “I’ll make you pay for this, if it’s the last thing I do.”

Kennedy calls out to the judge as he smacks his gavel again and calls the bailiff. Brittany Bauer’s father tries to calm her down, too, but to no avail. There is a shudder of shock and gossip as she is escorted from the courtroom. Her husband is frozen, caught between comforting her and staying for the testimony. After a moment he turns and runs out the double doors.

When the judge calls order, we all face forward again, riveted by that giant poster of the dead infant. One of the jurors bursts into tears and it takes two others to calm her, and then, Judge Thunder calls a recess.

Beside me, Kennedy exhales. “Oh, shit,” she says.

–

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, everyone but Brittany and Turk Bauer has returned to the courtroom. And yet their absence is almost even more visible, as if the negative space is a constant reminder of why we had to break in the first place. Odette leads the medical examiner through a series of photographs of the baby’s body, from every angle possible. She has him explain the different test results, what was standard, what was deviant from the norm. Finally, she asks, “Were you able to determine the cause of death for Davis Bauer?”

Dr. Binnie nods. “For Davis Bauer, the cause of death was hypoglycemia, leading to hypoglycemic seizure, leading to respiratory and then cardiac arrest. In other words, low blood sugar made the infant seize, stop breathing, and that in turn stopped his heart. The method of death was asphyxiation. And the manner was undetermined.”

“Undetermined? Does that mean the defendant’s actions had nothing to do with the baby’s death?” Odette asks.

“On the contrary. It just means that it was not patently clear whether this was a violent or a natural death.”

“How did you go about researching that?”

“I read the medical records, of course, as well as a police report that provided information.”

“Such as?”

“Mr. Bauer told the police that Ruth Jefferson was aggressively beating on his son’s chest. The bruising we found on the sternum could support that allegation.”

“Was there anything else in the police report that led you to fill out the report the way you did?”

“According to multiple accounts, there was an indication that the defendant did not take any resuscitative efforts until other personnel came into the room.”

“Why was that important to the autopsy results?”

“It goes to the manner of death,” Dr. Binnie says. “I don’t know how long that infant was in respiratory distress. If the respiratory failure had been alleviated sooner, it’s possible that the cardiac arrest would never have occurred.” He looks at the jury. “Had the defendant acted, it’s possible that none of us would be sitting here.”

“Your witness,” Odette says.

Kennedy rises. “Doctor, was there anything in the police report that indicated there was foul play or intentional trauma to this infant?”

“I already mentioned the bruising to the sternum…”

“Yes, you did. But isn’t it possible that the bruising might also be consistent with vigorous, medically necessary CPR?”

“It is,” he concedes.

“Is it possible that there might be other scenarios-other than foul play-that might have led to the death of this baby?”

“It’s possible.”

Kennedy asks him to review the neonatal screening results she entered into evidence earlier. “Doctor, would you mind taking a look at exhibit forty-two?”

He takes the file and thumbs through it.

“Can you tell the jury what you’re looking at?”

He glances up. “Davis Bauer’s newborn screening results.”

“Did you have access to this information while you were performing your autopsy?”

“I did not.”

“You work at the state lab where these tests were performed, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Can you explain the highlighted section on page one?”

“It’s a test for a fatty acid oxidation disorder called MCADD. The results were abnormal.”

“Meaning what?”

“The state would return these results to the hospital nursery, and the doctor would have been immediately notified.”

“Do infants with MCADD show symptoms from birth?”

“No,” the medical examiner says. “No. That’s one of the reasons the state of Connecticut screens for it.”

“Dr. Binnie,” Kennedy says, “you were aware of the fact that the infant’s mother had gestational diabetes, and that the baby had low blood sugar, correct?”

“Yes.”

“You stated earlier that the diabetes was what caused the hypoglycemia in the newborn, didn’t you?”

“Yes, that was my conclusion at the time of the autopsy.”

“Isn’t it also possible that hypoglycemia might be caused by MCADD?”

He nods. “Yes.”

“Isn’t it possible that a newborn’s listlessness and lethargy and poor appetite might be caused by MCADD?” Kennedy asks.

“Yes,” he admits.

“And an enlarged heart-is it potentially a side effect not only of maternal gestational diabetes…but also of this particular metabolic disorder?”

“Yes.”

“Dr. Binnie, did you learn from the hospital records that Davis Bauer had MCADD?”

“No.”

“Had these results come in in a timely manner, would you have used them to determine the cause of death and manner of death in your autopsy results?”

“Of course,” he says.

“What happens to an infant who has the disorder yet has gone undiagnosed?”

“They are often clinically asymptomatic until something happens to cause metabolic decompensation.”

“Like what?”

“An illness. An infection.” He clears his throat. “Fasting.”

“Fasting?” Kennedy repeats. “Like the kind of fasting done prior to a baby’s circumcision?”

“Yes.”

“What happens to a baby who is undiagnosed with MCADD, and who suffers one of these acute episodes?”

“You might see seizures, vomiting, lethargy, hypoglycemia…coma,” the doctor says. “In about twenty percent of cases, the infant can die.”

Kennedy walks toward the jury box and turns so that her back is facing them, so that she is watching the witness with them. “Doctor, if Davis Bauer had MCADD, and if no one at the hospital knew it, and if the medical protocol was to have him fast three hours prior to his circumcision like any other infant without the disorder, and if an acute metabolic episode occurred in his little body-isn’t there a chance Davis Bauer would be dead even if Ruth Jefferson had performed every conceivable medical intervention?”

The medical examiner looks at me, his gray eyes soft with an apology. “Yes,” he admits.

Oh my God. Oh my God. The energy in court has changed. The gallery is so quiet I can hear the rustle of clothing, the murmur of possibility. Turk and Brittany Bauer are still gone, and in their absence, hope blooms.

Howard, beside me, breathes a single word. “Day-umm.”

“Nothing further, Your Honor,” Kennedy says, and she walks back to the defense table, winking at me. I told you so.

–

MY CONFIDENCE IS short-lived. “I’d like to redirect,” Odette says, and she gets up before Dr. Binnie can be dismissed. “Doctor, let’s say that this abnormal result had come into the nursery in a timely fashion. What would have happened?”

“There are some abnormal results that require a letter to be sent to the parents in due course-suggesting genetic counseling,” the medical examiner says. “But this one-it’s a red flag, one any neonatologist would consider emergent. The baby would be monitored closely and tested to confirm the diagnosis. Sometimes we send the family to a metabolic treatment center.”

“Isn’t it true, Doctor, that many children with MCADD are not formally diagnosed for weeks? Or months?”

“Yes,” he says. “It depends on how quickly we can get the parents in for a confirmation.”

“A confirmation,” she repeats. “Then an abnormal result on the newborn screening is not a final diagnosis.”

“No.”

“Did Davis Bauer ever come in for more testing?”

“No,” Dr. Binnie says. “He didn’t have the chance.”

“So you cannot say, beyond a reasonable medical doubt, that Davis Bauer had MCADD.”

He hesitates. “No.”

“And you cannot say, beyond a reasonable medical doubt, that Davis Bauer died of a metabolic disorder.”

“Not entirely.”

“And in fact, the defendant and her legal team might be grasping at straws to try to throw some shade in another direction, any direction that doesn’t point to Ruth Jefferson intentionally harming an innocent newborn first by withholding treatment and then by reacting so forcefully she left bruises on his tiny body?”

“Objection!” Kennedy roars.

“I’ll withdraw,” Odette says, but the damage is done. Because the last words that jury has heard may as well be bullets, shooting my optimism out of the sky.

–

THAT NIGHT EDISON is silent on the way home. He tells me he has a headache, and almost as soon as we have walked in the door and I’m starting supper, he comes back through the living room with his coat on and tells me he is going out to clear his head. I don’t stop him. How can I? How can I say anything that will erase whatever he’s been through, sitting behind me every day so far like a shadow, listening to someone try to make me into someone he never believed I could be?

I eat by myself, but really, I just pick at the food. I cover the rest with tinfoil and sit at the kitchen table waiting for Edison. I tell myself I will eat when he returns.

But an hour passes. Two. When it is after midnight and he does not come back and will not answer my texts, I put my head down on the pillow of my arms.

I find myself thinking about the Kangaroo Suite, at the hospital. It’s a room with an unofficial name that has a mural of the marsupial on the inside. It’s where we put the mothers who have lost their babies.

I have always hated that term-lost-to be honest. Those mothers, they know just where their infants are. They would in fact do anything, give anything, even their own lives, to get them back.

In the Kangaroo Suite, we let the parents spend time with an infant who has died for as long as they’d like. I’m sure Turk and Brittany Bauer were put in there with Davis. It’s a corner room, next to the charge nurse’s office, intentionally set aside from other labor and delivery rooms, as if grief is a communicable disease.

This isolation means that the parents don’t have to walk past all the other rooms with healthy babies and mothers in them. They don’t have to hear the cries of newborns coming into the world, when their own child has left it.

In the Kangaroo Suite, we put the birthing mothers who knew, thanks to ultrasounds, that their babies would be born in a way that was incompatible with life. Or the mothers who had to terminate late, because of some gross anomaly. Or the ones who delivered normally, and who-to their great shock-lived both the greatest moment of their lives and the worst within hours of each other.

If I was a nurse who was assigned to a patient whose baby died, I’d do handprints of the baby in plaster. Or hair samples. I had professional photographers I could call, who knew how to take a picture of the deceased and touch it up so that it looked beautiful and vibrant and alive. I’d put together a memory box, so that when the parents left the hospital, it was not empty-handed.

The last patient I had who had used the Kangaroo Suite was a woman named Jiao. Her husband was getting a master’s degree at Yale and she was an architect. For her entire pregnancy, she had too much amniotic fluid, and would come in weekly to have an amniocentesis to check the baby, and to siphon off fluid. One night I took four liters of fluid off her, to give you a sense. And obviously that’s not normal; that’s not healthy. I asked her doctor what she thought it was-was the baby missing an esophagus possibly? A baby in utero normally ingests amniotic fluid, yet clearly if that much was accumulating, the baby wasn’t swallowing it. But the ultrasounds were normal, and no one could convince Jiao that this was a problem. She was certain the baby was going to be fine.

One day she came in and the baby had hydrops-fluid collection under his skin. She stayed with us for a week, and then her doctor tried to induce, but the baby couldn’t tolerate it. Jiao had a C-section. The baby had pulmonary hypoplasia-the lungs just didn’t function. He died in her arms quickly after birth, puffy, swollen, as if he were jointed of marshmallows.

Jiao was put in the Kangaroo Suite, and like many mothers who had to come to terms with the fact that their babies had not survived, she was robotic, numb. But unlike other mothers, she did not cry, and she refused to see the baby. It was as if she had this image in her mind for a perfect little boy, and she could not reconcile anything less than that. Her husband tried to get her to hold the baby; her mother tried to get her to hold the baby; her doctor tried to get her to hold the baby. Finally, when she was on her eighth hour of catatonia, I wrapped the baby in warm blankets and put a tiny hat on his head. I carried him back into Jiao’s room. “Jiao,” I said, “would you like to help me give him a bath?”

Jiao didn’t respond. I looked at her husband, her poor husband, who nodded, encouraging.

I filled a basin with warm water and took a stack of wipes. Gently, at the foot of Jiao’s bed, I unwrapped her baby. I dipped a cloth in warm water and ran it over her baby’s sausage legs, his blue arms. I wiped his swollen face, his stiff fingers.

Then I handed Jiao a damp cloth. I pressed it into her palm.

I don’t know if the water shocked her into awareness, or if it was the baby. But with my hand guiding her she washed every fold and curve of her baby. She wrapped him in the blanket. She held him to her breast. Finally, with a sob that sounded like she was tearing a piece of herself away, she offered the body of her child back to me.

I managed to hold it together while I carried her infant out of the Kangaroo Suite. And then, as she collapsed in her husband’s arms, I lost it. I just lost it. I sobbed over that baby the whole way to the morgue, and when I got there, I couldn’t let him go any easier than his mother had.

Now, the key turns in the lock, and Edison slips inside. His eyes are adjusting to the darkness; he is creeping because he expects me to be asleep. Instead, in a clear voice, I say his name from my spot at the kitchen table.

“Why aren’t you asleep?” he asks.

“Why weren’t you home?”

I can see him clearly, a shadow among shadows. “I was alone. I was out walking.”

“For six hours?” I blurt.

“Yes. For six hours,” Edison challenges. “Why don’t you just put a GPS chip on me, if you don’t trust me?”

“I do trust you,” I say carefully. “It’s the rest of the world I’m not so sure about.”

I stand so that we are only inches apart. All mothers worry, but Black mothers, we have to worry a little bit more. “Even walking can be dangerous. Just being can be dangerous, if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“I’m not stupid,” Edison says.

“I know that better than anyone. That’s the problem. You are smart enough to make excuses for people who aren’t. You give the benefit of the doubt when other people don’t. That is what makes you you, and that is what makes you remarkable. But you need to start being more careful. Because I may not be here much longer to…” My sentence snaps, unravels. “I may have to leave you.”

I see his Adam’s apple jerk down, and then back, and I know what he has been thinking about all this time. I imagine him walking the streets of New Haven, trying to outdistance himself from the fact that this trial is coming to an end. And that when it does, everything will be different.

“Mama,” he says, his voice small. “What am I supposed to do?”

For a moment, I try to decide how to sum up a life’s worth of lessons in my response. Then I look at him, my eyes shining. “Thrive,” I say.

Edison wrenches away from me. A moment later, the door to his bedroom slams shut. Music whitewashes all the other sounds I try in vain to discern.

I think I know now why it is called the Kangaroo Suite. It’s because even when you no longer have a child, you carry him forever.

It’s the same when a parent is ripped away from the child, but the suite is the size of the world. At Mama’s funeral, I put a handful of cold dirt from her grave in the pocket of my good wool coat. Some days I wear that coat inside the house, just because. I sift through the soil, hold it tight in my fist.

I wonder what Edison will keep of me.

Turk

I PUT MY HANDS ON both sides of Brit’s face and touch my forehead to hers. “Breathe,” I tell her. “Think of Vienna.”

Neither of us has ever been to Vienna, but Brit found an old picture in an antique shop once that she hung on the wall of our bedroom. It shows the fancy city hall building, the plaza in front of it filled with pedestrians and mothers towing children by the hand-all of them white. We always thought that we could save up for a vacation there, one day. When Brit was putting together a birthing plan, Vienna was one of the words I was supposed to use to help her focus.

It doesn’t escape me that I’m whispering the same word I used to calm her when she was delivering Davis-but now I’m repeating it to help her stop seeing the image of our dead son.

Suddenly the door to the conference room opens and the prosecutor walks in. “That was a nice touch. The jury loves a mother who’s acting so distraught that she can’t control herself. But the threat in open court? Not the wisest move.”

Brit bristles. She pushes away from me and gets up in the lawyer’s face. “I am not acting,” she says, her voice dangerously soft. “And you don’t get to tell me what’s a good idea and what’s not, bitch.”

I grasp her arm. “Baby, why don’t you go wash up? I’ll take care of this.”

Brit doesn’t even blink. Just keeps herself like a wall in front of Odette Lawton, like an alpha dog standing over another mutt until it has the good sense to cower. Then, abruptly, she walks away and slams the door behind her.

I know it is already a big deal that Brit and I are allowed in the courtroom, even though we are going to testify. There was a hearing about it and everything, before the trial began. That goddamned public defender thought she could keep us away by asking for all witnesses to be sequestered, but the judge said we deserved to be there because we were Davis’s parents. I’m sure the prosecutor doesn’t want to give him any good reason to rethink his decision.

“Mr. Bauer,” the lawyer says, “you and I need to talk.”

I fold my arms. “Why don’t you just do what you’re supposed to do? Win this case?”

“It’s a little hard when your wife is acting like an intimidating thug and not a grieving mother.” She stares at me. “I can’t call her as a witness.”

“What?” I say. “But we did all that practicing-”

“Yes, but I don’t trust Brittany,” she says flatly. “Your wife is a wild card. And you do not put a wild card in the witness box.”

“The jury needs to hear from Davis’s mother.”

“Not if I can’t be certain she won’t start screaming racist slurs at the defendant.” She eyes me coolly. “You and your wife may detest me and everyone who looks like me, Mr. Bauer. And frankly I don’t care. But I am the best chance-the only chance-you have to get justice for your son. So not only will I tell you what is a good idea and a bad idea, I will also be calling all the shots. And that means your wife is not testifying.”

“The judge and the jury will think something’s off if she isn’t a witness.”

“The judge and the jury will think she’s distraught. And you will be a solid witness in your own right.”

Does this mean that I loved Davis less? Because my grief isn’t enough to keep me from censoring myself, like Brit?

“Yesterday you heard the defense introduce the theory that your son had an undiagnosed metabolic disease?”

It was when the pediatrician was on the stand. There was a lot of medical jargon I did not understand, but I got the gist of it. “Yeah, yeah. I get it,” I say. “It was a Hail Mary pass.”

“Not quite. While you were gone, the medical examiner verified the results. Davis screened positive for MCADD. I did my best to get the jury to discount his testimony, but the bottom line is the defense planted a seed that’s already taken root: that your baby was tested for a potentially fatal disorder and the results arrived too late. And if none of that had happened, he might still be alive.”

I feel my knees giving out, and I sit heavily on the tabletop. My baby boy was actually sick, and we didn’t know? How could a hospital overlook that?

It’s so…random. So pointless.

The prosecutor touches my arm, and I can’t help it, I flinch. “Don’t do it. Don’t get lost in your own head. I’m telling you this so you can’t be surprised during a cross-examination. But all Kennedy McQuarrie has done is find a possible diagnosis. It was never confirmed. Davis wasn’t treated. She could have just as well said that your son would develop heart disease as an adult, because that’s what his genetic predisposition is. That doesn’t mean it would ever happen.”

I think of my grandfather, dropping dead of a heart attack.

“I am telling you this because when we go back in there,” Odette says, “I’m going to call you to the stand. And you’re going to answer just the way we rehearsed in my office. All you need to remember is that there is no room for maybe in this trial. There is no this might have happened. It already did happen. Your son is dead.”

I nod. There is a body. And someone has to pay.

–

Do you swear to tell the truth?

My hand flexes on the leather Bible. I don’t read it a lot anymore. But swearing on it makes me remember Big Ike, from back when I was in jail. And Twinkie.

I think about him a lot, to be honest. I imagine he’s out now. Maybe eating the Chef Boyardee he craved. What would happen if I ran into him on the street? At a Starbucks? Would we do the man hug thing? Or would we pretend we didn’t know each other? He knew what I was, on the outside, just like I knew what he was. But in jail, things were different, and what I’d been taught to believe didn’t hold true. If we crossed paths now, would he still be Twinkie to me? Or would he just be another nigger?

Brit is finally back in the courtroom, anchored beside Francis. When she returned from the bathroom, her face still damp from wiping it with a towelette and her nose and cheeks pink, I said that I’d told the prosecutor no one tells my wife how to grieve. And that I couldn’t bear the thought of Brit having another breakdown, so I told Odette Lawton there was no way she was putting my wife on the stand. I told Brit that I loved her, and it hurt me too much to see her hurting.

She bought it.

Do you swear to tell the truth?

“Mr. Bauer,” the prosecutor asks, “was this your first child with your wife, Brittany?”

Sweat breaks out on my back. I can feel jurors staring at the swastika tattoo on my head. Even the ones who are pretending not to look are sneaking glances. I curl my hands around the base of the chair. The wood feels good. Solid. A weapon. “Yes. We were very excited.”

“Did you know it was going to be a boy?”

“No,” I reply. “We wanted it to be a surprise.”

“Were there any complications during the pregnancy?”

“My wife had gestational diabetes. The doctor told us that wasn’t a big deal, as long as she watched her diet. And she did. She wanted a healthy kid as much as me.”

“How about the delivery, Mr. Bauer? Was it a normal birth?”

“Everything went smoothly,” I say, “but then again, I wasn’t doing the heavy lifting, exactly.” The ladies on the jury smile, just like the prosecutor said they would, if I made myself seem like any other father.

“And where did you and your wife have the baby?”

“Mercy-West Haven Hospital.”

“Did you get to hold your son, Davis, after he was born, Mr. Bauer?”

“Yeah,” I say. When we rehearsed this in the prosecutor’s office, as if we were actors learning lines, she told me how effective it would be if I teared up. I said I couldn’t cry on demand, for fuck’s sake, but now, thinking back on the moment Davis was born, I’m getting choked up. It’s crazy, isn’t it, that you can love a girl so much you can actually create another human being? It’s like rubbing two sticks together and getting fire-all of a sudden there’s something alive and intense there that did not exist a minute before. I can remember Davis’s feet kicking against me. His head in the palm of my hand. Those stormy, unfocused eyes, puzzling me out. “I’ve never felt that way in my life,” I confess. I’m off script, and I don’t care. “I thought it was a lie, when people said they fell in love with a baby at first sight. But it’s the truth. It was like I could see my whole future right there in his face.”

“Did you know any of the hospital staff prior to going to that particular hospital?”

“No. Brit’s OB worked there, so it was sort of a done deal.”

“Did you have a good experience at this hospital, Mr. Bauer?”

“No,” I say firmly. “I did not.”

“Was it like that from the moment your wife was admitted?”

“No. That was fine. So was the labor and delivery.”

The prosecutor walks toward the jury box. “So when did things change?”

“When another nurse took over after the first one went off shift. And she was black.”

The prosecutor clears her throat. “Why was this an issue, Mr. Bauer?”

Unconsciously, I reach up and rub the tattoo on my scalp. “Because I believe in the superiority of the White race.”

Some of the jurors stare harder at me, curious. Some shake their heads. Others look into their laps.

“So you’re a White Supremacist,” the prosecutor says. “You believe that black people, people like me, should be subordinate.”

“I’m not anti-black,” I tell her. “I’m pro-White.”

“You understand that many people in the world-in fact, many people here-might find your beliefs offensive.”

“But hospitals have to treat all patients,” I say, “even the ones whose ideas they might not like. If a school shooter gets injured when the cops try to take him out and he’s brought to the ER, the doctors do surgery to save his life, even if he’s killed a dozen other people. I know the way my wife and I live is not the way others choose to live. But the great thing about this country is that we all have a right to believe whatever we want.”

“What did you do when you found out there was a black nurse caring for your newborn son?”

“I made a request. I asked that she not touch my baby.”

“Is the African American nurse you are referring to here today?”

“Yes.” I point to Ruth Jefferson. I think maybe she shrinks back in her chair.

I want to think that, anyway.

“Who did you ask?” the prosecutor says.

“The head of the nurses,” I reply. “Marie Malone.”

“As a result of that conversation, what happened?”

“I don’t know, but she got reassigned.”

“At some point, did the defendant interact with your son again?”

I nod. “Davis was being circumcised. It was supposed to be no big deal. They were going to take him to the nursery and bring him back as soon as it was done. But the next thing I know, all hell breaks loose. People were screaming, calling for help, crash carts were being pushed down the hall, everyone was running toward the nursery. My kid was in there, and I just…I guess Brit and I knew. We got to the nursery and there was a crowd of people huddled around my son, and that woman, she had her hands on my baby again.” I swallow. “She was hurting him. She was jackhammering on his chest so hard she was practically breaking him in half.”

“Objection!” the other lawyer says.

The judge purses his lips. “I’ll allow it.”

“How did you react, Mr. Bauer?”

“I didn’t say anything. Brit and I, we were both shocked. I mean, they told us this procedure was nothing. We were supposed to go home that afternoon. It was like my brain couldn’t process what was right before my eyes.”

“Then what happened?”

The jury, I realize, is on the edge of their seats. Every face is turned toward me. “The doctors and the nurses, they were moving so fast I couldn’t tell whose hands were whose. Then the pediatrician came in-Dr. Atkins. She worked for a little bit on my son, and then she…then she said there was nothing else to do.” The words become three-dimensional, a movie I can’t turn away from. The pediatrician looking at the clock. The way the others all stepped back, their hands in the air, like someone was pointing a gun at them. My son, too still.

A sob belches out of me. I hold tight to the chair. If I let go, my fists will take over. I will find someone to punish. I look up, and for just one second, I let them all see how empty I am inside. “She said my son was dead.”

Odette Lawton walks toward me with a box of Kleenex. She puts it on the railing between us, but I don’t make a move to take a tissue. I am glad, right now, that Brit doesn’t have to go through this. I don’t want her to have to relive that moment.

“What did you do next?”

“I couldn’t let them stop.” The words feel like glass on my tongue. “If they weren’t going to save him, I was. So I went to the trash and I pulled out the bag they were using to help Davis breathe. I tried to figure out how to attach it again. I wasn’t going to quit on my own kid.”

I hear a sound, a high-pitched keen, one that I recognize from the weeks that Brit did not get out of bed, but shook our home with the force of her grieving. She is hunched over in her seat in the gallery, a human question mark, as if her whole body is asking why this happened to us.

“Mr. Bauer,” the prosecutor says gently, drawing my attention back. “Some people here would call you a White Supremacist, and would say that you were the one who started this ball rolling by requesting that an African American nurse be removed from the care of your child. They might even blame you for your own misfortune. How would you respond?”

I take a deep breath. “All I was trying to do was give my baby the best chance in life he could possibly have. Does that make me a White Supremacist?” I ask. “Or does that just make me a father?”

–

DURING THE RECESS, Odette coaches me in the conference room. “Her job is to do whatever she can to make the jury hate you. A little bit of that is okay, because it shows the jury the nurse’s motive. But just a little. Your job is to do whatever you can to make them see what they have in common with you, not what sets you apart. This is supposed to be a case about how much you loved your son. Don’t screw it up by focusing on who you hate.”

She leaves Brit and me alone for a few minutes, before we are called back to the courtroom. “Her,” Brit says, as soon as the door closes behind her. “I hate her.”

I turn to my wife. “Do you think she’s right? Do you think we brought this down on ourselves?”

I have been thinking about what Odette Lawton said: if I hadn’t spoken out against the black nurse, would this have ended differently? Would she have tried to save Davis the minute she realized he wasn’t breathing? Would she have treated him like any other critical patient, instead of wanting to hurt me like I’d hurt her?

My son would be five months old now. Would he be sitting up on his own? Would he smile when he saw me?

I believe in God. I believe in a God who recognizes the work we are doing for Him on this earth. But then why would He punish His warriors?

Brit stands up, a look of disgust rippling her features. “When did you become such a pussy?” she asks, and she turns away from me.

–

IN THE LAST few weeks of Brit’s pregnancy, our neighbors-a pair of beaners from Guatemala who’d probably jumped a barbed-wire fence to get into this country-got a new puppy. It was one of those little fluffy things that looks like an evil cotton ball with teeth, and never stopped barking. Frida, that was the dog’s name, and it used to come into our yard and shit on our lawn, and when it wasn’t doing that, it was yipping. Every time Brit lay down to take a nap, that stupid mop head would start up again and wake her. She’d get pissed, and then I’d get pissed, and I’d stomp over and bang on the door and tell them if they didn’t muzzle their goddamned animal I would get rid of it.

Then one day, I came home from a drywall job to find the beaner digging a hole under an azalea bush, and his hysterical wife holding a shoe box in her arms. When I came into the house, Brit was sitting on the couch. “Guess their dog died,” she announced.

“So I see.”

She reached behind her and held up a bottle of antifreeze. “Tastes sweet, you know. Daddy told me to keep it away from our puppy, when I was little.”

I stared at her for a second. “You poisoned Frida?”

Brit met my gaze with so much nerve that for a second, I could only see Francis in her. “I couldn’t get any sleep,” she said. “It was either our baby, or that fucking dog.”

–

KENNEDY MCQUARRIE PROBABLY drinks pumpkin spice lattes. I bet she voted for Obama and donates after watching those commercials about sad dogs and believes the world would be a bright shiny place if we all could just get along.

She’s exactly the kind of bleeding-heart liberal I can’t stand.

I keep this front and center in my head as she walks toward me. “You heard Dr. Atkins testify that your son had a condition called MCADD, didn’t you?”

“Well,” I say. “I heard her say that he screened positive for it.”

The prosecutor’s coached me on that one.

“Do you understand, Mr. Bauer, that a baby with undiagnosed MCADD whose blood sugar drops might go into respiratory failure?”

“Yes.”

“And do you understand that a baby who goes into respiratory failure might go into cardiac failure?”

“Yes.”

“And that same baby might die?”

I nod. “Yeah.”

“Do you also understand, Mr. Bauer, that in none of those events would it make a difference whether or not a nurse attempted every medical intervention possible to save that baby’s life? That the baby could still possibly die?”

“Possibly,” I repeat.

“Do you realize that in that scenario, if your son was that baby, Mother Teresa herself could not have saved him?”

I fold my arms. “But that wasn’t my son.”

She cocks her head. “You heard the medical testimony from Dr. Atkins, which was corroborated by Dr. Binnie. Your baby did indeed have MCADD, Mr. Bauer, isn’t that true?”

“I don’t know.” I jerk my head toward Ruth Jefferson. “She killed him before he could get tested for sure.”

“You really, truly believe that?” she asks. “In the face of scientific evidence?”

“I do,” I grit out.

Her eyes spark. “You do,” she repeats, “or you have to?”

“What?”

“You believe in God, Mr. Bauer, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And you believe things happen for a reason?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Bauer, do you use the Twitter handle @WhiteMight?”

“Yeah,” I say, but I have no idea what that has to do with her questions. They feel like a blast of wind that comes from a different direction every time.

She enters a computer printout into evidence. “Is this a post from your Twitter account, made last July?” I nod. “Can you read it out loud?”

“ ‘We all get what’s coming to us,’ ” I say.

“Then I guess your son got what was coming to him, right?”

My hands clench on the railing of the witness stand. “What did you say?” My voice is low, hot.

“I said your son must have gotten what he deserved,” she repeats.

“My son was innocent. An Aryan warrior.”

She ignores my response. “Come to think of it, I guess you got what you deserved, too…”

“Shut your mouth.”

“That’s why you’re accusing an innocent woman of a death that was completely and utterly arbitrary, isn’t it? Because if you believe instead what’s really true-namely that your son carried a genetic disease-”

I stand up, fuming. “Shut up-”

The prosecutor is yelling, and this bitch lawyer is yelling over her. “You can’t accept the fact that your son’s death was absolutely senseless and nothing more than bad luck. You have to blame Ruth Jefferson, because if you don’t, then you’re the one to blame, because you and your wife somehow created an Aryan child with a flaw in his DNA. Isn’t that right, Mr. Bauer?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Odette Lawton walk toward the judge. But I’m already out of my seat, leaning over the rail of the witness box. The monster that has been sleeping inside me is suddenly awake and breathing fire. “You bitch,” I say, going for Kennedy McQuarrie’s throat. I am already halfway over the railing when some blockhead fake cop bailiff tackles me. “You’re a fucking race traitor!”

Distantly, I hear the judge banging a gavel, calling for the witness to be removed. I feel myself being dragged out of the courtroom, my shoes scuffing on the floor. I hear Brit calling my name, and Francis’s rally cry, and the thunderous applause of the Lonewolf.org posters.

I don’t remember much after that. Except that I blinked, and suddenly I was no longer in the courtroom. I was in a cell somewhere with cement-block walls and a cot and a toilet.

It feels like forever, but it is only a half hour before Odette Lawton shows up. I almost laugh when the deputy opens the cell door, and she is standing there. My savior is a black woman. Go figure.

“That,” she says, “was beyond foolish. There have been numerous times I’ve wanted to kill a defense attorney, but I’ve never actually tried.”

“I didn’t even touch her,” I say with a scowl.

“The jury does not care. I have to tell you, Mr. Bauer, that your outburst in there undid any advantage the State might have had in this case. There’s nothing else I can do.”

“What do you mean?”

She looks at me. “The prosecution rests.”

But I won’t. Ever.

Kennedy

IF I COULD TURN CARTWHEELS into Judge Thunder’s office, I would.

I leave Howard sitting with Ruth in a conference room. There is an excellent chance I can get this entire case tossed out. I’ve filed my motion for judgment of acquittal, and I can tell, as soon as I get into the judge’s office, that Odette already knows she’s sunk. “Judge,” I begin, “we know this baby died, which is tragic, but there’s been absolutely no evidence of any willful, wanton, or reckless conduct by Ruth Jefferson. The allegation of murder made by the State isn’t supported, and as a matter of law, it must be dismissed.”

The judge turns to Odette. “Counselor? Where’s the evidence of premeditation? Of malice?”

Odette dances around a response. “I’d consider a public comment about sterilizing a baby a strong indicator.”

“Your Honor, that was the bitter response of a woman who’d been subject to discrimination,” I argue. “It became uncomfortably relevant in light of later events. But it still doesn’t point to a plan for murder.”

“I must agree with Ms. McQuarrie,” Judge Thunder says. “Spiteful, yes; murderous, not by the letter of the law. If attorneys were held accountable for the vindictive comments you make about judges after a case doesn’t go your way, you’d all be charged with murder. Count One is dismissed, and, Ms. McQuarrie, your motion on judgment of acquittal for murder is granted.”

As I walk down the hallway toward the conference room to tell my client the excellent news, I check behind me to make sure the coast is clear, and then skip a little in my heels. I mean, it’s not every day the tide of a murder trial turns in your direction; and it’s certainly not every day that happens with your first murder trial. I let myself imagine how Harry will call me into his office, and in his gruff way, tell me I surprised him. I picture him letting me have my own share of the big cases from now on, and promoting Howard to cover my current duties.

Beaming, I let myself into the conference room. Howard and Ruth turn to me, hopeful. “He threw out the murder charge,” I say, grinning.

“Yaaaas!” Howard pumps his fist in the air.

Ruth is more cautious. “I know this is good news…but how good?”

“Excellent,” I say. “Negligent homicide is a whole different animal, legally. The worst-case scenario-a conviction-carries almost no jail time, and honestly, our medical evidence was so strong that I’d be shocked if the jury doesn’t acquit-”

Ruth throws her arms around my neck. “Thank you.”

“Just think,” I say. “By this weekend, this could all be over. I’ll go into court tomorrow and say the defense rests and if the jury comes back with a verdict as quickly as I think they will-”

“Wait,” Ruth interrupts. “What?”

I step back. “We’ve created reasonable doubt. That’s all we have to do to win.”

“But I haven’t testified,” Ruth says.

“I don’t think you should get on the stand. Right now, things are going really well for us. If the last thing the jury has in their heads is that whack job Turk Bauer trying to come after me, you already have all their support.”

She stands very, very straight. “You promised.”

“I promised I would do my best to get you acquitted, and I have.”

Ruth shakes her head. “You promised I could say my piece.”

“But the beauty of this is you don’t have to,” I point out. “The jury hands back the verdict, and then you go get your job back. You get to pretend this never happened.”

Ruth’s voice is soft, but steel. “You think I can pretend this never happened?” she asks. “I see this every day, everywhere I go. You think I’m going to just walk in and get my job back? You think I’m not always going to be that black nurse who caused trouble?”

“Ruth,” I say, incredulous. “I’m ninety-nine percent sure this jury is going to find you not guilty. What more could you possibly want?”

She tilts her head. “You still have to ask?”

I know what she is talking about.

Namely, everything I refused to talk about, in court: what it is like to know that you are a target, because of the color of your skin. What it means to work hard, to be an impeccable employee, and have none of that make a difference in the face of prejudice.

True, I had said she could have a moment to tell the jury her side of the story. But what’s the point, if we’ve already given them a peg on which to hang their exoneration?

“Think of Edison,” I say.

“I am thinking of my son!” Ruth replies, heated. “I’m thinking of what he’ll make of a mother who didn’t speak for herself.” She narrows her eyes. “I know how the law works, Kennedy. I know the State has the burden of proof. I also know that you have to put me on the stand if I ask you to. So I suppose the question is: Are you going to do your job? Or are you going to be just one more white person who lied to me?”

I turn to Howard, who is watching our volley like we’re the Women’s Singles Final at the U.S. Open. “Howard,” I say evenly, “would you step out for a moment so I can speak to our client alone?”

He jerks his chin and slips outside. I turn on Ruth. “What the hell? Now is not the time to stand on principle. You have to trust me on this. If you get on the stand and start talking about race, you’ll erase the lead we currently have in the jury’s favor. You’ll be talking about issues that will alienate them and make them uncomfortable. Plus, the fact that you’re upset and angry will come through loud and clear and negate any sympathy they have for you right now. I’ve already said everything the jury needs to hear.”

“Except the truth,” Ruth says.

“What are you talking about?”

“I tried to resuscitate that baby. I told you I didn’t touch him at first. I told everyone that. But I did.”

I feel sick to my stomach. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“At first I lied because I thought I was going to lose my job. Then I lied because I didn’t know if I could trust you. And then, every time I tried to tell you the truth, I was so embarrassed that I’d hidden it for this long it got harder and harder.” She takes a deep breath. “This is what I should have told you, the first day we met: I wasn’t supposed to touch the baby; it was in the medical file. But when he went blue, I unwrapped him. I moved him around. I tapped his feet and turned him on his side, all the things you do when you’re trying to get a baby responsive again. Then I heard footsteps and I wrapped him up tight again. I didn’t want anyone seeing me do what I wasn’t supposed to be doing.”

“Why rewrite history, Ruth?” I ask, after a moment. “The jury could hear that and think you tried your hardest. But they could also think you screwed up, and did something that made him die.”

“I want them to know that I did my job,” she says. “You keep telling me this doesn’t have anything to do with the color of my skin-that it’s about my competence. Well, in addition to everything else, I want them to know that I am a good nurse. I tried to save that baby.”

“You have this idea that if you get on the stand, you’ll be able to tell your story and be in control-and that’s not how it works. Odette is going to shred you. She’ll do everything she can to point out that this means you’re a liar.”

Ruth looks at me. “I’d rather they think I’m a liar than a murderer.”

“If you get up there and give a different version than the one we’ve already presented,” I explain carefully, “you lose your credibility. I lose my credibility. I know what’s best for you. There’s a reason we’re called counsel-you’re supposed to listen to me.”

“I’m tired of following orders. Last time I followed orders, I got into this mess.” Ruth folds her arms. “You are putting me on that stand tomorrow,” she says flatly. “Or I’m going to tell the judge that you won’t let me testify.”

And just like that, I know I’m going to lose this case.

–

ONE NIGHT, WHEN Ruth and I were preparing for the trial, we’d been working in my kitchen and Violet had been high on life, running in circles around the house in her underwear and pretending to be a unicorn. Her shrieks punctuated our discussions, and then suddenly the sound wasn’t joy but pain. A moment later, Violet started sobbing, and we both ran to the living room, where Violet was lying on the floor bleeding profusely from the temple.

I felt my knees wobble, but before I could even reach for my daughter, Ruth had her cradled in her arms, and had pressed the bottom of her shirt up to the wound. “Hey now,” she soothed. “What happened?”

“I slipped,” Vi hiccuped, as her blood soaked Ruth’s shirt.

“And I see you’ve got a little cut here,” Ruth said calmly. “One I’m gonna take care of.” She started ordering me around my own house, efficiently getting me to fetch a damp washcloth, antibiotic ointment, and a butterfly bandage from a first aid kit. She never let go of Violet, and she never stopped talking to her. Even when she suggested that we drive to Yale-New Haven to see if maybe a stitch was in order, Ruth was steely, measured, while I continued to freak out, wondering if Violet would have a scar, if I would be flagged by CPS for not watching my kid more closely or letting her run in socks on a slippery wooden floor. When Violet needed two stitches, it wasn’t me she clung to but Ruth, who promised her that if we sang really loud, she wouldn’t feel anything. And so the three of us belted “Let It Go” at the top of our lungs, and Violet never cried. Later that night, when she had a clean bandage on her forehead and was asleep in her bed, I thanked Ruth.

You’re good at what you do, I told her.

I know, she said.

That’s all she wants. To let people know she was treated unfairly because of her race, and for her reputation as a caregiver to remain intact, even if it means it will be tarnished by a guilty verdict.

“Drinking alone,” Micah says, when he comes home from the hospital and finds me in the dark, in the kitchen, with a bottle of Syrah. “That’s the first sign, you know.”

I lift up my glass, and take a long swallow. “Of what?”

“Adulthood, probably,” he admits. “Hard day at the office?”

“It started out great. Legendary, even. And then went to hell very quickly.”

Micah sits down next to me and loosens his tie. “Do you want to talk about it? Or should I get my own bottle?”

I push the Syrah toward him. “I thought I had an acquittal in the bag,” I sigh. “And then Ruth went and decided to ruin it all.”

While he pours himself a glass of wine, I tell him everything. From the way Turk Bauer spouted his rhetoric of hate to the look in his eyes when he came after me; from the rush of adrenaline I got when my motion for judgment of acquittal was granted to Ruth’s admission about resuscitating the baby to the dizzy realization that I had to put Ruth on the stand if she demanded it. Even if it was going to tank my chances of winning my first murder case.

“What am I supposed to do tomorrow?” I ask. “No matter what I ask Ruth on the stand, she’s going to be incriminating herself. And that doesn’t even begin to consider what the prosecutor’s going to do to her on cross.” I shudder, thinking about Odette, who doesn’t even know that this boon is about to be granted. “I can’t believe I was so close,” I say softly. “I can’t believe she’s going to ruin it.”

Micah clears his throat. “Radical thought number one: maybe you need to take yourself out of this equation.”

I’ve drunk enough that he’s a little fuzzy at the edges, so maybe I’ve just misheard. “I beg your pardon?”

“You weren’t close. Ruth was.”

I snort. “That’s semantics. We both win, or we both lose.”

“But she has more at stake than you do,” Micah says gently. “Her reputation. Her career. Her life. This is the first trial that really matters to you, Kennedy. But it’s the only one that matters to Ruth.”

I scrub a hand through my hair. “What’s radical thought number two?”

“What if the best thing for Ruth isn’t winning this case?” Micah replies. “What if the reason this is so important to her isn’t because of what she’s going to say…but rather the fact that she is finally being given the chance to say it?”

Is it worth being able to say what you need to say, if it means you land in prison? If it nets you a conviction? That goes against everything I’ve ever been taught, everything I’ve ever believed.

But I’m not the one on trial.

I press my fingers against my temples. Micah’s words circle in my mind.

He takes his glass and empties it into mine. “You need it more than I do,” he says, and he kisses me on the forehead. “Don’t stay up too late.”

–

ON FRIDAY MORNING, as I am hurrying to meet Ruth in the parking lot, I pass the memorial on the green near City Hall. It commemorates Sengbe Pieh, who was one of the slaves involved in the Amistad mutiny. In 1839 a ship carried a group of Africans taken from their home to be slaves in the Caribbean. The Africans revolted, killed the captain and cook, and forced other sailors on board to head back toward Africa. The sailors, though, tricked the Africans, and headed north-where the ship was boarded by U.S. authorities. The Africans were imprisoned in a warehouse in New Haven, pending trial.

The Africans revolted because a mulatto cook had heard that the white crew planned to kill the blacks and eat the meat themselves. The whites on board believed the Africans were cannibals.

Neither side was right.

When I reach the parking lot, Ruth won’t even make eye contact with me. She starts walking quickly toward the courthouse, Edison by her side, until I grab her by the arm. “Are you still determined to do this?”

“Did you think if I slept on it I’d change my mind?” she asks.

“I had hoped,” I admit. “I’m begging you, Ruth.”

“Mama?” Edison looks at her face, and then mine, confused.

I raise my brows as if to say, Think of what you’re doing to him.

She slips her arm through her son’s elbow. “Let’s go,” she replies, and she starts walking again.

The crowds have swelled in front of the courthouse; now that the media have reported that the prosecution’s side of the case is finished, the taste for blood is getting stronger. I see Wallace Mercy and his crew from the corner of my eye, maintaining their vigil. Maybe I should have sicced Wallace on Ruth; maybe he could have convinced her to duck her head and let justice be served in her favor. But then again, knowing Wallace, he would not turn down an opportunity to speak his mind. He’d probably have offered to coach Ruth in whatever it is she feels the need to say.

Howard is pacing in front of the courtroom. “So,” he says nervously. “Are we resting? Or…”

“Yes,” I say bluntly. “Or.”

“Just in case you wanted to know, the Bauers are back. They’re in the gallery.”

“Thanks, Howard,” I say with sarcasm. “Now I feel even better.”

I speak to Ruth just once more, moments before we are asked to rise at the judge’s arrival. “I will give you just one piece of advice,” I whisper. “Be as cool and calm as possible. The minute you raise your voice, the prosecution is going to be all over you. And the way you answer me should be exactly the same way you respond when Odette’s cross-examining you.”

She looks at me. It’s quick, how our eyes meet, but it’s enough for me to see the flicker in them, the fear. I open my mouth, sensing the weakness, intending to reel her back in, but then I remember what Micah said. “Good luck,” I say.

I rise, and call Ruth Jefferson to the stand.

She looks smaller in the box, somehow. Her hair is pulled back in a low bun, as usual. Have I noticed before how severe that looks? Her hands are folded in her lap tightly. I know it’s because she’s trying to keep herself from shaking, but the jury doesn’t. To them, it just looks like she’s excessively formal, prim. She repeats the oath quietly, without betraying any emotion. I know it’s because she feels like she is on display. But shyness can be mistaken for haughtiness, and that could be a fatal flaw.

“Ruth,” I begin, “how old are you?”

“Forty-four,” she says.

“Where were you born?”

“Harlem, in New York City.”

“Did you go to school there?”

“Only for a couple of years. Then I transferred to Dalton on a scholarship.”

“Did you complete college?” I ask.

“Yes, I went to SUNY Plattsburgh as an undergrad, and then got my nursing degree at Yale.”

“Can you tell us how long that program was?”

“Three years.”

“When you graduate as a nurse, do you take an oath?”

She nods. “It’s called the Florence Nightingale pledge,” Ruth says.

I enter a piece of paper into evidence and present it to her. “Is this the pledge?”

“Yes.”

“Will you read it aloud?”

“ ‘Before God and those assembled here, I solemnly pledge to adhere to the code of ethics of the nursing profession; to cooperate faithfully with the other members of the nursing team and to carry out faithfully and to the best of my ability the instructions of the physician or the nurse’ ”-she falters here-“ ‘who may be assigned to supervise my work.’ ” Ruth takes a deep breath, forging ahead. “ ‘I will not do anything evil or malicious and I will not knowingly give any harmful drug or assist in malpractice. I will not reveal any confidential information that may come to my knowledge in the course of my work. And I pledge myself to do all in my power to raise the standards and prestige of practical nursing. May my life be devoted to service and to the high ideals of the nursing profession.’ ” She looks up at me.

“Is that oath fundamental to you as a nurse?”

“We take it very seriously,” Ruth confirms. “It’s like the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath for doctors.”

“How long have you been employed at Mercy-West Haven Hospital?”

“Just over twenty years,” Ruth says. “My whole career.”

“What are your responsibilities?”

“I am a neonatal nurse. I help deliver babies, I am in the OR during C-sections, I care for the mothers and then postdelivery, for the newborns.”

“How many hours a week did you work?”

“Forty-plus,” she replies. “We often were asked to pull some overtime.”

“Ruth, are you married?”

“I’m a widow,” she says. “My husband was a soldier who died in Afghanistan. It happened about ten years ago.”

“Do you have any children?”

“Yes, my son, Edison. He’s seventeen.” Her eyes shine, and she searches Edison out in the gallery.

“Do you recall coming to work the morning of October second, 2015?”

“Yes,” Ruth says. “I came in at seven A.M. for a twelve-hour shift.”

“Were you assigned to watch Davis Bauer?”

“Yes. His mother had delivered early that morning. I was assigned to do typical postpartum care of Brittany Bauer, and a nurse’s newborn exam.”

She describes the exam, and says she conducted it in the hospital room.

“So Brittany Bauer was present?”

“Yes,” Ruth says. “So was her husband.”

“Was there any significant finding during this exam?”

“I noted a heart murmur in the file. It wasn’t something I felt that we needed to be alarmed about-it’s a very common condition for newborns. But it was definitely something for the pediatrician to check out the next time she came back, which was why I wrote it down.”

“Did you know Mr. and Mrs. Bauer prior to the birth of their son?”

“No,” Ruth replies. “I met them when I came into the room. I congratulated them on their beautiful baby boy, and explained I was there to do a routine check.”

“How long were you in the room with them?”

“Ten to fifteen minutes.”

“Did you have any verbal exchange with the parents at that time?”

“I mentioned the murmur, and that it wasn’t any reason for concern. And I told them his sugar levels had improved since birth. Then after I cleaned the baby up, I suggested we try to have him nurse.”

“What response did you get?”

“Mr. Bauer told me to get away from his wife. Then he said he wanted to speak to my supervisor.”

“How did that make you feel, Ruth?”

“I was shocked,” she admits. “I didn’t know what I’d done to upset them.”

“What happened next?”

“My boss, Marie Malone, put a note in the baby’s file, stating that no African American staff should come in contact with the infant. I questioned her about it, and she said it was done at the request of the parents, and that I would be reassigned.”

“When did you next see the baby?”

“Saturday morning. I was in the nursery when Corinne-the baby’s new nurse-brought him in for a circ.”

“What were your responsibilities that morning?”

She frowns. “I had two-no, three patients. It had been a crazy night; I’d worked a shift I wasn’t supposed to work because another nurse was out sick. I had gone into the nursery to grab clean linens, and to scarf down a PowerBar, because I hadn’t eaten at all during my shift.”

“What happened after the baby was circumcised?”

“I wasn’t in the room, but I assumed it all went normally. Then Corinne grabbed me and asked me to watch over him because another one of her patients had to be rushed to the OR, and protocol required that a postcirc baby be monitored.”

“Did you agree?”

“I didn’t really have a choice. There was literally no one else to do it. I knew Corinne or Marie, my charge nurse, would be back quickly to take over.”

“When you first saw the baby, how did he look?”

“Beautiful,” Ruth says. “He was swaddled and fast asleep. But a few moments later I looked down and saw that his skin was ashen. He was making grunting noises. I could see he was having trouble breathing.”

I walk toward the witness box, and set my hand on the rail. “What did you do in that instant, Ruth?”

She takes a deep breath. “I unwrapped the swaddling. I started touching the baby, tapping his feet, trying to get him to respond.”

The jury looks puzzled. Odette sits back in her chair, arms crossed, a smile breaking over her face.

“Why did you do that? When you’d been told by your supervisor to not touch that baby?”

“I had to,” Ruth confesses. I can see it, the way she breaks free, like a butterfly from a chrysalis. Her voice is lighter, the lines bracketing her mouth soften. “It’s what any good nurse would do in that situation.”

“Then what?”

“The next step would have been to call a code, to get a whole team in to resuscitate. But I heard footsteps. I knew someone was coming and I didn’t know what to do. I thought I’d get in trouble if someone saw me interacting with the baby, when I had been told not to. So I wrapped him up again, and stepped back, and Marie walked into the nursery.” Ruth looks down at her lap. “She asked me what I was doing.”

“What did you say, Ruth?”

When she glances up, her eyes are wide with shame. “I said I was doing nothing.”

“You lied?”

“Yes.”

“More than once, apparently-when you were later questioned by the police, you stated that you did not engage in any resuscitative efforts for that baby. Why?”

“I was afraid I was going to lose my job.” She turns to the jury, pleading her case. “Every fiber of my being told me I had to help that infant…but I also knew I’d be reprimanded if I went against my supervisor’s orders. And if I lost my job, who would take care of my son?”

“So you basically faced either assisting in malpractice, or violating your supervisor’s order?”

She nods. “It was a lose-lose situation.”

“What happened next?”

“The code team was called in. My job was to do compressions. I did my best, we all did, but in the end it wasn’t enough.” She looks up. “When the time of death was called, and when Mr. Bauer took the Ambu bag out of the trash and tried to continue efforts himself, I could barely hold it together.” Like an arrow searching for its mark, her eyes hone in on Turk Bauer, in the gallery. “I thought: What did I miss? Could I have done anything different?” She hesitates. “And then I thought: Would I have been allowed to?”

“Two weeks later you received a letter,” I say. “Can you tell us about it?”

“It was from the Board of Health. Suspending my license to practice as a nurse.”

“What went through your mind when you received it?”

“I realized that I was being held responsible for the death of Davis Bauer. I knew I’d be suspended from my job, and that’s what happened.”

“Have you been employed since?”

“I went on public assistance, briefly,” Ruth says. “Then I got a job at McDonald’s.”

“Ruth, how has your life changed in the aftermath of this incident?”

She takes a deep breath. “I don’t have any savings anymore. We live from week to week. I’m worried about my son’s future. I can’t use my car because I can’t afford to register it.”

I turn my back, but Ruth isn’t finished speaking.

“It’s funny,” she says softly. “You think you’re a respected member of a community-the hospital where you work, the town where you live. I had a wonderful job. I had colleagues who were friends. I lived in a home I was proud of. But it was just an optical illusion. I was never a member of any of those communities. I was tolerated, but not welcomed. I was, and will always be, different from them.” She looks up. “And because of the color of my skin, I will be the one who’s blamed.”

Oh God, I think. Oh God, oh God, shut up, Ruth. Don’t go here. “Nothing further,” I say, trying to cut our losses.

Because Ruth is no longer a witness. She’s a time bomb.

–

WHEN I SIT back down at the defense table, Howard is gaping. He pushes me a piece of paper: WHAT IS GOING ON???

I write back on the bottom: That was an example of what you NEVER want a witness to do.

Odette strides toward the witness stand. “You were instructed not to touch that baby?”

“Yes,” Ruth says.

“And until today you said that you had not touched that baby until you were expressly told to by your charge nurse?”

“Yes.”

“Yet now you testified on your direct examination that you in fact did touch that baby while he was in distress?”

Ruth nods. “That’s true.”

“So which is it?” Odette presses. “Did you or didn’t you touch Davis Bauer when he initially stopped breathing?”

“I did.”

“So let me get this straight. You lied to your supervisor?”

“Yes.”

“And you lied to your colleague Corinne?”

“Yes.”

“You lied to the risk management team at Mercy-West Haven, didn’t you?”

She nods. “Yes.”

“You lied to the police?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Even though you realize they have a duty and a moral obligation to try to find out what happened to that dead infant?”

“I know but-”

“You were thinking of saving your job,” Odette corrects, “because deep down you knew you were doing something shady. Isn’t that right?”

“Well-”

“If you lied to all these people,” Odette says, “why on earth should this jury believe anything you say right now?”

Ruth turns to the men and women crammed into the jury box. “Because I’m telling them the truth.”

“Right,” Odette says. “But that’s not your only secret confession, is it?”

Where is she going with this?

“At the moment that the baby died-when the pediatrician called the time of death-deep down, you didn’t really give a damn, right, Ruth?”

“Of course I did!” She sits up in her chair. “We were working so hard, just like we would for any patient-”

“Ah, but this wasn’t just any patient. This was the baby of a white supremacist. The baby of a man who had dismissed your years of experience and nursing expertise-”

“You’re wrong.”

“-a man who called into question your ability to do your job simply because of the color of your skin. You resented Turk Bauer, and you resented his baby, didn’t you?”

Odette is a foot away from Ruth now, yelling into her face. Ruth closes her eyes with every blast, as if she’s facing a hurricane. “No,” she whispers. “I never thought that.”

“Yet you heard your colleague Corinne say you were angry after you were told you could no longer care for Davis Bauer, correct?”

“Yes.”

“You worked twenty years at Mercy-West Haven?”

“Yes.”

“You testified that you were an experienced, competent nurse and that you loved your job, is that fair to say?”

“It is,” Ruth admits.

“Yet the hospital had no problem taking the wishes of the patient into consideration over respect for their own employee, and dismissing you from the professional role you’d maintained all those years?”

“Apparently.”

“That must have made you furious, right?”

“I was upset,” she concedes.

Hold it together, Ruth, I think.

“Upset? You said, and I quote, That baby means nothing to me.”

“It was something that came out in the heat of the moment-”

Odette’s eyes gleam. “The heat of the moment! Is that also what happened when you told Dr. Atkins to sterilize the baby during his circumcision?”

“It was a joke,” Ruth says. “I shouldn’t have said it. That was a mistake.”

“What else was a mistake?” Odette asks. “The fact that you stopped ministering to that baby while he fought to breathe, simply because you were afraid of how it might affect you?”

“I had been told to do nothing.”

“So you made the conscious choice to stand over that poor tiny infant who was turning blue, while you thought, What if I lose my job?”

“No-”

“Or maybe you were thinking: This baby doesn’t deserve my help. His parents don’t want me touching him because I’m black, and they’re gonna get their wish.”

“That’s not true-”

“I see. You were thinking: I hate his racist parents?”

“No!” Ruth holds her hands to her head, trying to drown out Odette’s voice.

“Oh, so maybe it was: I hate this baby because I hate his racist parents?”

“No,” Ruth explodes, so loud that it feels like the walls of the courtroom are shaking. “I was thinking that baby was better off dead than raised by him.”

She points directly at Turk Bauer, as a curtain of silence falls over the jury and the gallery and, yes, me. Ruth holds her hand over her mouth. Too fucking late, I think.

“O-objection!” Howard sputters. “Move to strike!”

At the same exact moment, Edison runs out of the courtroom.

–

I GRAB RUTH’S wrist as soon as we are dismissed and drag her to the conference room. Howard is smart enough to know to stay away. Once the door is closed, I turn on her. “Congratulations. You did exactly what you weren’t supposed to do, Ruth.”

She walks to the window, her back to me.

“Have you made your point? Are you happy you got up on the stand to testify? All the jury is going to see now is an angry black woman. One who was so pissed off and vengeful that I wouldn’t be surprised if the judge regrets dismissing the count of murder. You just gave those fourteen jurors every reason to believe you were mad enough to let that baby die before your eyes.”

Slowly, Ruth turns around. She is haloed by the afternoon sunlight, otherworldly. “I didn’t get angry. I am angry. I have been angry for years. I just didn’t let it show. What you don’t understand is that three hundred and sixty-five days a year, I have to think about not looking or sounding too black, so I play a role. I put on a game face, like a layer of plaster. It’s exhausting. It’s so goddamned exhausting. But I do it, because I don’t have bail money. I do it because I have a son. I do it because if I don’t, I could lose my job. My house. Myself. So instead, I work and smile and nod and pay my bills and stay silent and pretend to be satisfied, because that is what you people want-no-need me to be. And the great, sad shame is that for too many years of my sorry life, I have bought into that farce. I thought if I did all those things, I could be one of you.”

She walks toward me. “Look at you,” Ruth sneers. “You’re so proud of being a public defender and working with people of color who need help. But did you ever think our misfortune is directly related to your good fortune? Maybe the house your parents bought was on the market because the sellers didn’t want my mama in the neighborhood. Maybe the good grades that eventually led you to law school were possible because your mama didn’t have to work eighteen hours a day, and was there to read to you at night, or make sure you did your homework. How often do you remind yourself how lucky you are that you own your house, because you were able to build up equity through generations in a way families of color can’t? How often do you open your mouth at work and think how awesome it is that no one’s thinking you’re speaking for everyone with the same skin color you have? How hard is it for you to find a greeting card for your baby’s birthday with a picture of a child that has the same color skin as her? How many times have you seen a painting of Jesus that looks like you?” She stops, breathing heavily, her cheeks flushed. “Prejudice goes both ways, you know. There are people who suffer from it, and there are people who profit from it. Who died and made you Robin Hood? Who said I ever needed saving? Here you are on your high horse, telling me I screwed up this case that you worked so hard on; patting yourself on the back for being an advocate for a poor, struggling black woman like me…but you’re part of the reason I was down on the ground to begin with.”

We are inches apart. I can feel the heat of her skin; I can see myself reflected in her pupils as she starts to speak again. “You told me you could represent me, Kennedy. You can’t represent me. You don’t know me. You never even tried.” Her eyes lock on mine. “You’re fired,” Ruth says, and she walks out of the room.

–

FOR A FEW minutes, I stand alone in the conference room, fighting an army of emotions. So this is why it’s called a trial. I have never felt so furious, ashamed, humiliated. In all the years I’ve practiced law, I have had clients who hated me, but no one ever sacked me.

This is how Ruth feels.

Okay, I get it: she has been wronged by a lot of white people. But that doesn’t mean she can so effortlessly lump me with them, judge one individual by the rest.

This is how Ruth feels.

How dare she accuse me of not being able to represent her, just because I’m not black? How dare she say I didn’t try to get to know her? How dare she put words in my mouth? How dare she tell me what I’m thinking?

This is how Ruth feels.

Groaning, I throw myself toward the door. The judge is expecting us in chambers.

Howard is framed in the doorway as soon as it opens. Jesus Christ, I’d forgotten about him. “She fired you?” he says and then sheepishly adds, “I was kind of eavesdropping.”

I start striding down the hall. “She can’t fire me. The judge will never let her do that this late in the trial.” The legal claim Ruth will make is ineffective assistance of counsel, but if anyone was ineffective here, it was the client. She tanked her own acquittal.

“So what happens now?”

I stop walking and turn to him. “Your guess is as good as mine,” I say.

–

TOWARD THE END of a case, a defense attorney will raise a motion for judgment of acquittal. But this time, when I step before Judge Thunder with Odette, he looks at me like I have some nerve to even be raising this issue. “There’s no proof that Davis Bauer’s death resulted from Ruth’s actions. Or inactions,” I add feebly, because at this point, even I’m not sure what to believe.

“Your Honor,” Odette says. “It’s clear that this is a last-ditch effort of desperation for the defense, given what we all just heard during that testimony. In fact I would humbly ask the court to reverse the decision on your previous motion to throw out the charge of murder. Clearly, Ruth Jefferson just gave proof of malice.”

My blood freezes. I knew Odette would come out swinging, but I hadn’t anticipated this. “Your Honor, the ruling has to stand. You already dismissed the murder charge. Double jeopardy applies; Ruth can’t be charged twice with the same crime.”

“In this one instance,” Judge Thunder says grudgingly, “Ms. McQuarrie is correct. You’ve already had your bite at the apple, Ms. Lawton, and I already rejected the murder charge. I will, however, reserve my right to rule on the defense’s renewed motion for judgment of acquittal.” He looks at us each in turn. “Closing arguments start Monday morning, Counselors. Let’s try not to make this any more of a shit show than it’s already been, all right?”

I tell Howard to take the rest of the day off, and I drive home. My head feels cluttered, my mind too tight in my skull, as if I’m fighting a cold. When I get to my house, it smells of vanilla. I step into the kitchen to find my mother wearing a Wonder Woman apron while Violet kneels on one of the kitchen stools, her hand in a bowl of cookie dough. “Mommy!” she cries, raising sticky fists. “We’re making you a surprise so pretend you can’t see.”

There’s something about her phrase that sticks in my throat. Pretend you can’t see.

Out of the mouths of babes.

My mother takes one look at me and frowns over Violet’s head. “You okay?” she mouths silently.

In response, I sit down next to Violet and take a scoop of the cookie dough with my fingers and start eating.

My daughter is a lefty, in spite of the fact that Micah and I are not. We even have an ultrasound picture of her sucking her left thumb in utero. “What if it’s that simple?” I murmur.

“What if what’s that simple?”

I look at my mom. “Do you think the world is biased toward righties?”

“Um, I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it.”

“That’s because,” I point out, “you’re a righty. But think about it. Can openers, scissors, even desks at college that fold out from the side-they’re all meant for right-handed people.”

Violet lifts up the hand that is holding her spoon, frowning at it. “Baby girl,” my mother says, “why don’t you go wash up so you can taste the first batch that comes out of the oven?”

She slithers off the stool, her hands held up like Micah’s before he enters an operating room.

“Do you want to give the child nightmares?” my mother scolds. “Honestly, Kennedy! Where is this even coming from? Does this have to do with your case?”

“I’ve read that lefties die young because they’re more accident prone. When you were growing up, didn’t nuns slap the kids who wrote with their left hands?”

My mother puts a hand on her hip. “One man’s curse is another’s boon, you know. Lefties are supposed to be more creative. Weren’t Michelangelo and da Vinci and Bach all left-handed? And back in medieval times you were lucky to be a lefty, because the majority of men fought with a sword in their right hand and a shield in their left, which meant you could pull off a sneak attack”-she reaches toward me with a spatula, poking me on the right side of my chest-“like this.”

I laugh. “Why do you even know that?”

“I read romance novels, sugar,” she says. “Don’t worry about Violet. If she really wants to, you know, she can always teach herself to be ambidextrous. Your father, he was just as good with his right hand as with his left one-writing, hammering, even getting to second base.” She grins. “And I am not talking about batting practice.”

“Ew,” I say. “Stop.” But meanwhile, my brain is spinning: What if the puzzle of the world was a shape you didn’t fit into? And the only way to survive was to mutilate yourself, carve away your corners, sand yourself down, modify yourself to fit?

How come we haven’t been able to change the puzzle instead?

“Mom?” I ask. “Can you stay with Vi for a few more hours?”

–

I REMEMBER READING a novel once that said the native Alaskans who came in contact with white missionaries thought, at first, they were ghosts. And why shouldn’t they have thought that? Like ghosts, white people move effortlessly through boundaries and borders. Like ghosts, we can be anywhere we want to be.

I decide it’s time to feel the walls around me.

The first thing I do is leave my car in the driveway and walk a mile to a bus stop. Chilled to the bone, I duck into a CVS to warm up. I stop in front of a display I’ve never paused at before and take down a purple box. Dark and Lovely Healthy-Gloss relaxer. I look at the pretty woman in the picture. For medium hair textures, I read. Straight, sleek, and shiny hair. I scan the instructions, the multiple-step process needed to get hair that looks like mine after I blow it dry.

Next I reach for a bottle, Luster’s Pink oil moisturizer hair lotion. A black tub of Ampro Pro Styl. A satin bonnet that claims to minimize frizz and breakage at night.

These products are foreign to me. I have no idea what they do, why they’re necessary for black people, or how to use them. But I bet Ruth could name five shampoos white people use, just off the top of her head, thanks to ubiquitous television commercials.

I walk downtown, where for a little while I sit on a bench for another bus and watch two homeless people soliciting strangers on the street. They target mostly well-dressed white people in business suits, or college students plugged into their headphones, and maybe one in six or seven reaches into his or her pocket for change. Of the two homeless people, one routinely gets a donation more often than the other. She’s elderly, and white. The other one-a young black man-is given a wider berth.

The Hill neighborhood of New Haven is among the most notorious in the city. I’ve had dozens of clients from there-mostly involved in selling drugs near the Church Street South low-income housing. That’s also where Adisa, Ruth’s sister, lives.

I wander the streets. There are kids running, chasing each other. Girls huddled together, speaking a flurry of Spanish. Men stand on street corners, arms folded, silent sentries. I am the only white face in the vicinity. It is already starting to get dark out when I duck into a bodega. The cashier at the counter stares at me as I walk through the aisles. I can feel her gaze like lightning between my shoulder blades. “Can I help you?” she asks finally, and I shake my head and walk out.

It’s unsettling, not seeing someone who looks like me. People I pass don’t make eye contact. I am the stranger in their midst, the sore thumb, the one that is not like the others. And yet, at the very same instant, I have become invisible.

When I get to Church Street South, I walk around the buildings. Some of the apartments, I know, have been condemned for mold, for structural damage. It is like a ghost town: curtains pulled tight, residents holed up inside. Beneath a stairwell, I see two young men, passing cash. An old lady tries to haul her oxygen tank up the stairs above them. “Excuse me,” I call out. “Can I give you a hand?”

All three of them stare at me, frozen. The men glance up, and one puts a hand on the waistband of his jeans, from which I think I see the hilt of a gun protruding. My legs are jelly. Before I can back away, the old woman says, “No hablo inglés,” and climbs the steps double time.

I had wanted to live like Ruth did, just for an afternoon, but not if it meant I’d be in danger. Yet danger, it’s relative. I have a husband with a good job and a house that’s paid off, and I don’t have to worry that something I say or do is going to threaten my ability to put food on the table or pay my bills. For me, danger looks different: it’s whatever can separate me from Violet, from Micah. But no matter what face you put on your own personal bogeyman, it gives you nightmares. It has the power to terrify, and to make you do things you wouldn’t normally think you’d do, all in an effort to stay safe.

For me, that means running through a night that’s tunneling tighter around me, until I can be sure I’m not being followed. Several blocks away, I slow down at an intersection. By now, my pulse isn’t racing, the sweat has cooled beneath my arms. A man about my age approaches, pushing the same pedestrian walk button, waiting. His dark skin is pocked on the cheeks, a road map of his life. His hands hold a thick book, but I cannot make out the title.

I decide to try one more time. I nod down toward the book. “Is it good? I’m looking for something to read.”

He glances at me, and lets his gaze slide away. He doesn’t respond.

I feel my cheeks burning as the walk signal illuminates. We cross the street side by side in silence, and then he turns away, ducking down a street.

I wonder if he was really intending to go down that street, or if he just wanted to put distance between us. My feet hurt, my whole body is shaking with the cold, and I’m feeling utterly defeated. I realize it was a short-lived experiment, but at least I tried to understand what Ruth was saying. I tried.

I.

As I trudge up to the hospital where Micah works, I think about that pronoun. I consider the hundreds of years that a black man could have gotten into trouble for talking to a white woman. In some places in this country, it’s still the case, and the repercussions are vigilante justice. For me, the dire consequence of that stoplight conversation was feeling snubbed. For him, it was something else entirely. It was two centuries of history.

Micah’s office is on the third floor. It’s remarkable how, the minute I walk through the doors of that hospital, I am in my element again. I know the healthcare system; I know how I will be treated; I know the rituals and the responses. I can stride past the information desk without anyone questioning where I’m going or why I am there. I can wave to the staff in Micah’s department and let myself into his office.

Today is a surgery day for him. I sit in his desk chair, my coat unbuttoned, my shoes off. I stare at the model of the human eye on his desk, a three-dimensional puzzle, as my thoughts speed like a cyclone. Every time I close my eyes, I see the old woman at Church Street South, shrinking away from my offer of help. I hear Ruth’s voice, telling me I am fired.

Maybe I deserve to be.

Maybe I’m wrong.

I’ve spent months so focused on getting an acquittal for Ruth, but if I’m really going to be honest, the acquittal was for me. For my first murder trial.

I’ve spent months telling Ruth that a criminal lawsuit is no place to bring up race. If you do, you can’t win. But if you don’t, there are still costs-because you are perpetuating a flawed system, instead of trying to change it.

That’s what Ruth has been trying to say, but I haven’t listened. She’s brave enough to risk losing her job, her livelihood, her freedom to tell the truth, and I’m the liar. I’d told her race isn’t welcome in the courtroom, when deep down I know it’s already there. It always has been. And just because I close my eyes doesn’t mean it’s gone away.

Witnesses swear on Bibles in court to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But lies of omission are just as damning as any other falsehood. And to finish out Ruth Jefferson’s case without stating, overtly, that what happened to her happened because of the color of her skin might be an even bigger loss than a conviction.

Maybe if there were lawyers more courageous than I am, we wouldn’t be so scared to talk about race in places where it matters the most.

Maybe if there were lawyers more courageous than I am, there would not be another Ruth somewhere down the line, being indicted as the result of another racially motivated incident that no one wants to admit is a racially motivated incident.

Maybe if there were lawyers more courageous than I am, fixing the system would be as important as acquitting the client.

Maybe I should be more courageous.

Ruth accused me of wanting to save her, and perhaps that was a fair assessment. But she doesn’t need saving. She doesn’t need my advice, because really, who am I to give it, when I haven’t lived her life? She just needs a chance to speak. To be heard.

I am really not sure how much time passes before Micah enters. He is wearing scrubs, which I’ve always thought were sexy, and Crocs, which totally aren’t. His face lights up when he sees me. “This is a nice surprise.”

“I was in the neighborhood,” I tell him. “Can you give me a ride home?”

“Where’s your car?”

I shake my head. “Long story.”

He gathers up some files and checks a stack of messages, then reaches for his coat. “Everything all right? You were a million miles away when I walked in.”

I lift the eye model and turn it over in my hands. “I feel like I’ve been standing underneath an open window, just as a baby gets tossed out. I grab the baby, right, because who wouldn’t? But then another baby gets tossed out, so I pass the baby to someone else, and I make the catch. This keeps happening. And before you know it there are a whole bunch of people who are getting really good at passing along babies, just like I’m good at catching them, but no one ever asks who the fuck is throwing the babies out the window in the first place.”

“Um.” Micah tilts his head. “What baby are we talking about?”

“It’s not a baby, it’s a metaphor,” I say, irritated. “I’ve been doing my job, but who cares, if the system keeps on creating situations where my job is necessary? Shouldn’t we focus on the big picture, instead of just catching whatever falls out the window at any given moment?”

Micah’s staring at me like I’ve lost my mind. Behind his shoulder a poster hangs on the wall: the anatomy of the human eye. There is the optic nerve, the aqueous humor, the conjunctiva. The ciliary body, the retina, the choroid. “For a living,” I murmur, “you make people see.”

“Well,” he says. “Yeah.”

I look directly at him. “That’s what I need to do too.”

Ruth

EDISON ISN’T AT HOME, AND my car is gone.

I wait for him, text him, call him, pray, but there is no response. I imagine him walking the streets, hearing my voice ring out in his ears. He is wondering if he has it in him, too, the capacity for rage. If nature or nurture matters more; if he is doubly damned.

Yes, I hated that racist father for belittling me. Yes, I hated the hospital for sticking by his side. I don’t know if that bled over into my ability to care for a patient. I can’t tell you that for a moment, it didn’t cross my mind. That I didn’t look down at that innocent baby and think of the monster he would grow up to be.

Does that make me the villain here? Or does that just make me human?

And Kennedy. What I said wasn’t in my mind, it was in my heart. I do not regret a syllable. Every time I think about what it felt like to be the one who walked out of that room-who had that privilege, for once-I feel dizzy, like I’m flying.

When I hear steps outside, I fly to the door and open it, but it is not my son-just my sister. Adisa stands with her arms crossed. “Figured you’d be home,” she says, pushing her way into my living room. “After that, I didn’t imagine you’d be sticking around the courthouse.”

She makes herself comfortable, draping her coat over a kitchen chair, sitting down on the couch, putting her feet up on the coffee table.

“Have you seen Edison? Is he with Tabari?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “Tabari’s home babysitting.”

“I’m worried, A.”

“About Edison?”

“Among other things.”

Adisa pats the couch beside her. I sit down, and she reaches for my hand and squeezes it. “Edison’s a smart boy. He’ll wind up on his feet.”

I swallow. “Will you…watch him for me? Make sure that he doesn’t just, you know, give up?”

“If you making out your will, I always liked those black leather boots of yours.” She shakes her head. “Ruth, relax.”

“I can’t relax. I can’t sit here and think that my son is going to throw away his whole future and it’s my fault.”

She looks me in the eye. “Then you’re just gonna have to make sure you’re here to monitor him.”

But we both know that’s not in my hands. Before I know it, I am bent at the waist, punched in the gut by a truth so raw and so frightening that I can’t breathe: I have lost control of my future. And it’s my own damn fault.

I didn’t play by the rules. I did what Kennedy told me not to. And now I’m paying the price for using my voice.

Adisa’s arm goes around me, pressing my face against her shoulder. It isn’t until she does that that I realize I’m sobbing. “I’m scared,” I gasp.

“I know. But you always got me,” Adisa vows. “I will bake you a cake with a file in it.”

That makes me hiccup on a laugh. “No you won’t.”

“You’re right,” she says, reconsidering. “I can’t bake for shit.” Suddenly she pushes off the couch and reaches into the pocket of her coat. “I thought you should have this.”

I know by the smell-a hint of perfume, with the sharp scent of laundry soap-what she is giving me. Adisa tosses the coil of my mother’s lucky scarf into my lap, where it unfurls like a rose. “You took this? I looked everywhere for it.”

“Yeah, because I figured you’d either take it for yourself or bury Mama in it, and she didn’t need luck anymore, but God knows I do.” Adisa shrugs. “And so do you.”

She sits down next to me again. This week her fingernails are bright yellow. Mine are chewed down to the flesh. She takes the scarf and wraps it around my neck, tucking in the ends the way I used to for Edison, her hands coming to rest on my shoulders. “There,” she says, like I am ready to be sent into the storm.

–

AFTER MIDNIGHT, EDISON returns. He is wild-eyed and fidgety, his clothes damp with sweat. “Where have you been?” I demand.

“Running.” But who runs carrying a knapsack?

“We have to talk…”

“I have nothing to say to you,” he tells me, and he slams the door to his bedroom.

I know he must be disgusted by what he saw in me today: my anger, my admission that I am a liar. I walk up to the door, press my palms to the particleboard, ball my hand into a fist to knock, to force this conversation, but I can’t. There is nothing left in me.

I don’t make up my bed; instead I fall asleep fitfully on the couch. I dream about Mama’s funeral, again. This time, she is sitting beside me in the church, and we are the only people present. There is a coffin on the altar. It’s a shame, isn’t it? Mama says.

I look at her, and then I look at the coffin. I cannot see over the lip. So I get to my feet heavily, only to realize that they are rooted to the church floor. Vines have grown up around the ankles, and through the wooden boards on the ground. I try to move, but I am bound.

Straining in my shoes, I manage to peer over the edge of the open coffin so that I can see the deceased.

From the neck down, it’s a skeleton, flesh melted from the bones.

From the neck up, it has my face.

I wake up, my heart hammering, only to realize that the pounding is coming from somewhere else. Déjà vu, I think, as I swivel toward the door, shaking from the force of the knocks. I leap up and reach the knob, and the moment I do, the door flies back on its hinges, nearly throwing me down in the process. But the police that flood my home push me out of the way. They dump out drawers, they knock over chairs. “Edison Jefferson?” one of them yells, and my son steps out, sleepy and tousled.

He is immediately grabbed, handcuffed, dragged toward the door. “You’re under arrest for a Class C felony hate crime,” the officer says.

What?

“Edison,” I cry. “Wait! This is a mistake!”

Another cop comes out of Edison’s bedroom carrying his knapsack, unzipped, in one hand, and a can of red spray paint in the other. “Bingo,” he says.

Edison turns toward me as best he can. “I’m sorry, Mama, I had to,” he says, and then he is yanked out the door.

“You have the right to remain silent…” I hear, and just as quickly as the police entered, they are gone.

The stillness paralyzes me, presses in on my temples, my throat. I am suffocating, I am being crushed. I manage to scrabble my hands over the coffee table to find my cellphone, which is charging. Yanking it out of the wall, I dial, even though it is the middle of the night. “I need your help.”

Kennedy’s voice is sure and strong, as if she’s been expecting me. “What’s wrong?” she asks.

Kennedy

IT’S JUST AFTER 2:00 A.M. when my cellphone rings, and I see Ruth’s name flash. Immediately I’m awake. Micah sits up, alert the way doctors always are, and I shake my head at him. I’ve got this.

Fifteen minutes later, I pull up to the East End police department.

I walk up to the desk sergeant as if I have every right to be there. “You brought in a kid named Edison Jefferson?” I ask. “What’s the charge?”

“Who are you?”

“The family lawyer.”

Who was fired hours ago, I think silently. The officer narrows his eyes. “Kid didn’t say anything about a lawyer.”

“He’s seventeen,” I point out. “He’s probably too terrified to remember his own name. Look, let’s not make this any harder than it has to be, okay?”

“We got him on security cameras at the hospital, spray-painting the walls.”

Edison? Vandalizing? “You sure you have the right kid? He’s an honor student. College-bound.”

“Security guards ID’d him. And we tagged him driving a car with out-of-date plates registered to Ruth Jefferson. To his front door.”

Oh. Crap.

“He was painting swastikas, and wrote ‘Die Nigger.’ ”

“What?” I say, stunned.

That means it’s not just vandalism. It’s a hate crime. But it doesn’t make any sense. I open my purse, look at how much cash I have. “Okay, listen. Can you get him a special arraignment? I’ll pay for the magistrate to come, so he can get out of here tonight.”

I am taken back to the holding cell, where Edison is sitting on the floor, his back to the wall, his knees hunched up to his chin. Tears lattice his cheeks. The minute he sees me he stands up and walks toward the bars. “What were you thinking?” I demand.

He wipes his nose on his sleeve. “I wanted to help my mama.”

“What about getting your ass thrown in jail helps your mother right now?”

“I wanted to get Turk Bauer in trouble. If it wasn’t for him, none of this ever would have happened. And after today, everyone was blaming her, and they should have been blaming him…” He looks up at me, his eyes red. “She’s the victim here. How come nobody sees that?”

“I will help you,” I tell him. “But what you and I talk about is privileged information, which means you shouldn’t tell your mother anything about it.” What I’m thinking, though, is that Ruth will find out soon enough. Probably when she reads the front page of the damn paper. It’s just too good: SON OF KILLER NURSE ARRESTED FOR HATE CRIME. “And for the love of God, don’t say a word in front of the magistrate.”

Fifteen minutes later, the magistrate comes to the holding cell. Special arraignments are like magic tricks; all sorts of rules can be bent when you are willing to pay extra. There’s an officer acting as prosecutor, and me, and Edison, and the judge-for-hire. Edison’s charge is read, and his Miranda rights. “What’s going on here?” the magistrate asks.

I jump in. “Your Honor, this is a very unique circumstance, an isolated incident. Edison is a varsity athlete and an honor student who’s never been in trouble before; his mother is on trial right now for negligent homicide, and he’s frustrated. Emotions are running very high right now, and this was a hugely misguided attempt to support his mother.”

The magistrate looks at Edison. “Is that true, young man?”

Edison looks at me, unsure if he should answer. I nod. “Yes, sir,” he says quietly.

“Edison Jefferson,” the magistrate says, “you have been charged with a racially motived hate crime. This is a felony, and you’ll be arraigned in court on Monday. You will not have to answer any questions, and you have the right to an attorney. If you can’t afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you. I see that you have Ms. McQuarrie here on your behalf, and the case will be referred to the public defender’s office formally in superior court. You cannot leave the state of Connecticut, and I have the obligation to advise you that if you are arrested for any other offense while this case is pending, you can be held at the state prison.” He stares down Edison. “Stay out of trouble, boy.”

The whole thing takes an hour. We are both wide awake when we get into my car so that I can drive Edison home. The glow of the rearview mirror brackets my eyes as I steal glances at him in the passenger seat. He’s holding one of Violet’s toys-a little fairy with pink wings. It is impossibly tiny in his large hands. “What the fuck, Edison?” I say quietly. “People like Turk Bauer are horrible. Why are you stooping to that level?”

“Why are you?” he asks, turning toward me. “You’re pretending that what they do doesn’t even matter. I sat through that whole trial; it barely even came up.”

“What barely came up?”

“Racism,” he says.

I suck in my breath. “It may never have been explicitly discussed during the trial, but Turk Bauer was on full display-a museum-quality exhibit.”

He looks at me, one eyebrow cocked. “You really think Turk Bauer is the only person in that courtroom who’s a racist?”

We pull into a spot in front of Ruth’s home. The light is on inside, buttery and warm. She throws open the front door and comes out onto the steps, pulling her cardigan more tightly around her body. “Thank the Lord,” she murmurs, and she folds Edison into her embrace. “What happened?”

Edison glances at me. “She told me not to tell you.”

Ruth snorts. “Yeah, she’s good at that.”

“I spray-painted a swastika on the hospital. And…some other stuff.”

She holds him at arm’s length, waiting.

“I wrote ‘Die Nigger,’ ” Edison murmurs.

Ruth slaps him across the face. He reels back, holding his cheek. “You fool, why would you do that?”

“I thought Turk Bauer would get blamed. I wanted people to stop saying awful things about you.”

Ruth closes her eyes for a moment, like she is fighting for control. “What happens now?”

“He’ll be arraigned in court on Monday. The press will probably be there,” I say.

“What am I going to do?” she asks.

“You,” I tell her, “are going to do nothing. I’ll handle this.”

I see her fighting, struggling to accept this gift. “Okay,” Ruth says.

I notice that this whole time, she keeps contact with her son. Even after swatting him, her hand is on his arm, his shoulder, his back. When I drive away, they are still standing together on the porch, tangled in each other’s regret.

–

BY THE TIME I get home, it is four in the morning. It seems stupid to crawl into bed, and anyway, I’m wired. I decide to clean up a little, and then to have a pancake breakfast waiting when Violet and Micah wake.

It’s inevitable that over the course of a trial, my home office becomes more and more cluttered. But Ruth’s case, it’s a done deal. So I tiptoe into the extra bedroom I use and begin to pack up the discovery into its boxes. I stack files and folders and notes I made on the evidence. I try to find Ground Zero.

I accidentally bump a pile on the desk and knock it onto the floor. Picking up the pages, I scan the deposition from Brittany Bauer, which of course never came into play, and the photocopied results from the state laboratory that flagged Davis Bauer’s metabolic disorder. It’s a long, aggregate list of disorders. Most read normal, except of course the line for MCADD.

I glance over the rest of the list, which I never really focused on before, because I’d grabbed the brass ring and run with it. Davis Bauer seemed to be a normal infant in all other regards, his testing standard.

Then I turn the page over, and realize there’s print on the back, too.

There, in a sea of ordinary, is the word abnormal again. This one is much farther down the list of aggregated results-less important maybe, less threatening? I cross-reference the result with the lab tests that were included in the subpoena, a mess of lists of proteins I can’t pronounce, and scraggly graphs of spectrometry I do not know how to read.

I pause at a page that looks like a runny tie-dye. Electrophoresis, I read. Hemoglobinopathy. And at the bottom of the page, the results: HbAS/heterozygous.

I sit down at my computer and plug the result into Google. If this is something else that was medically wrong with Davis Bauer, I can introduce it, even now. I can call for a new trial, because of new evidence.

I can start over with a fresh jury.

Generally benign carrier state, I read, my hopes falling. So much for another potential cause of natural death.

Family to be tested/counseled.

The hemoglobins are listed in the order of hemoglobin present (F›A›S). FA = normal. FAS = carrier, sickle-cell trait. FSA = sickle beta-plus thalassemia.

Then I remember something Ivan said.

I sink to the floor, reaching for the stack of deposition transcripts, and begin to read.

Then, although it is only 4:30 A.M., I grab my phone and scroll through the history of incoming calls until I find the one I am looking for. “This is Kennedy McQuarrie,” I say, when Wallace Mercy picks up, his voice thick with dreams. “And I need you.”

–

ON MONDAY MORNING, the steps are crowded with cameras and reporters, many now from out of state, who have picked up the story of the black kid who wrote a racial slur against his own kind, the son of a nurse on trial just down the hall for killing a white supremacist’s baby. Although I have prepared a song and dance for Howard in case my stay isn’t granted, Judge Thunder shocks me once again by agreeing to delay closing arguments until 10:00 A.M. so I can act as Edison’s attorney before I pick up again as Ruth’s-even if only to be formally fired.

The cameras follow us down the hallway, even though I tuck Ruth under one arm and instruct Howard to shield Edison. The entire arraignment takes less than five minutes. Edison is released on personal recognizance and a pretrial conference date is set. Then we dodge the press the whole way back.

I have never been so delighted to return to Judge Thunder’s courtroom, in which no cameras or press are allowed.

We step inside and walk to the defense table, Edison slipping quietly into the row behind. But no sooner have we reached our spot than Ruth looks at me, frowning. “What are you doing?”

I blink. “What?”

“Just because you’re representing Edison doesn’t mean anything has changed,” she replies.

Before I can respond, the judge takes the bench. He looks from me-clearly in the middle of a charged conversation with my client-to Odette, across the room. “Are the parties ready to proceed?” he asks.

“Your Honor?” Ruth says. “I would like to get rid of my lawyer.”

I am pretty sure Judge Thunder thought nothing else in this trial could surprise him, until this moment. “Ms. Jefferson? Why on earth would you want to discharge your lawyer when the defense has rested? All that’s left is a closing argument.”

Ruth’s jaw works. “It’s personal, Your Honor.”

“I would strongly recommend otherwise, Ms. Jefferson. She knows the case, and contrary to all expectation, she has been very prepared. She has your best interests in mind. It is my job to run this trial, and to make sure it’s no longer delayed. We have a jury sitting in the box that has heard all the evidence; we don’t have time for you to go find another attorney, and you are not equipped to represent yourself.” He faces me. “Unbelievably, I am granting you another half-hour recess, Ms. McQuarrie, so you and your client can make nice.”

I deputize Howard to stay with Edison so that the press can’t get near him. Getting to our usual conference room will require running past the press, too, so instead I take Ruth out a back entrance and into the ladies’ room. “Sorry,” I say to a woman following us, and I lock the door behind us. Ruth leans against the bank of sinks and folds her arms.

“I know you think nothing’s changed, and maybe it hasn’t for you. But for me, it has,” I say. “I hear you, loud and clear. I may not deserve it, but I’m begging you to give me one last chance.”

“Why should I?” Ruth asks, a challenge.

“Because I told you once I don’t see color…and now, it’s all I see.”

She starts for the door. “I don’t need your pity.”

“You’re right.” I nod. “You need equity.”

Ruth stops walking, still facing away from me. “You mean equality,” she corrects.

“No, I mean equity. Equality is treating everyone the same. But equity is taking differences into account, so everyone has a chance to succeed.” I look at her. “The first one sounds fair. The second one is fair. It’s equal to give a printed test to two kids. But if one’s blind and one’s sighted, that’s not true. You ought to give one a Braille test and one a printed test, which both cover the same material. All this time, I’ve been giving the jury a print test, because I didn’t realize that they’re blind. That I was blind. Please, Ruth. I think you’ll like hearing what I have to say.”

Slowly, Ruth turns around. “One last chance,” she agrees.

–

WHEN I STAND up, I’m not alone.

Yes, there is a courtroom waiting for my closing argument, but I’m surrounded by the stories that have blazed through the media but have mostly been ignored in courts of law. The stories of Tamir Rice, of Michael Brown, of Trayvon Martin. Of Eric Garner and Walter Scott and Freddie Gray. Of Sandra Bland and John Crawford III. Of the female African American soldiers who wanted to wear their hair natural and the children in the Seattle school district who were told by the Supreme Court that cherry-picking students to maintain racial diversity was unconstitutional. Of minorities in the South, who’ve been left without federal protection while those states put laws into effect that limit their voting rights. Of the millions of African Americans who have been victims of housing discrimination and job discrimination. Of the homeless black boy on Chapel Street whose cup is never going to be as full as that of a white homeless woman.

I turn toward the jury. “What if, ladies and gentlemen, today I told you that anyone here who was born on a Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday was free to leave right now? Also, they’d be given the most central parking spots in the city, and the biggest houses. They would get job interviews before others who were born later in the week, and they’d be taken first at the doctor’s office, no matter how many patients were waiting in line. If you were born from Thursday to Sunday, you might try to catch up-but because you were straggling behind, the press would always point to how inefficient you are. And if you complained, you’d be dismissed for playing the birth-day card.” I shrug. “Seems silly, right? But what if on top of these arbitrary systems that inhibited your chances for success, everyone kept telling you that things were actually pretty equal?”

I walk toward them, continuing. “I told you when we started this case that it was about Ruth Jefferson being presented with an impossible choice: to do her job as a nurse, or to defy her supervisor’s orders. I told you that evidence would show Davis Bauer had underlying health conditions that led to his death. And that is true, ladies and gentlemen. But this case, it’s about a lot more than I let on to you.

“Out of all the people who interacted with Davis Bauer at Mercy-West Haven Hospital during his short life, only one of them is sitting in this courtroom at the defense table: Ruth Jefferson. Only one person is being charged with a crime: Ruth Jefferson. I spent an entire trial skirting a very important question: Why?

“Ruth is black,” I say flatly. “That rubbed Turk Bauer, a white supremacist, the wrong way. He can’t stand black people, or Asian people, or gay people, or anyone else who isn’t like him. And as a result, he set into motion a chain of events that would lead to Ruth becoming a scapegoat for the tragic death of his son. But we are not supposed to talk about race in the criminal justice system. We’re supposed to pretend it is merely the icing on the cake of whatever charge has been brought to the table-not the substance of it. We are supposed to be the legal guardians of a postracial society. But you know, the word ignorance has an even more important word at its heart: ignore. And I don’t think it’s right to ignore the truth any longer.”

I look right at juror number 12, the teacher. “Finish this sentence,” I say. “I am…?” I pause at the blank. “Maybe you’d answer: shy. Or blond. Friendly. Nervous, intelligent, Irish. But the majority of you wouldn’t say white. Why not? Because it’s a given. It’s identity that is taken for granted. Those of us who were lucky enough to be born white are oblivious to that good fortune. Now, we’re all blissfully unmindful of lots of things. Probably, you did not give thanks for showering this morning, or for having a roof over your head last night. For eating breakfast and having clean underwear. That’s because all those invisible privileges are easy to take in stride.

“Sure, it’s so much easier to see the headwinds of racism, the ways that people of color are discriminated against. We see it now when a black man is accidentally shot by the police and a girl with brown skin is bullied by classmates for wearing a hijab. It’s a little harder to see-and to own up to-the tailwinds of racism, the ways that those of us who aren’t people of color have benefited just because we’re white. We can go to a movie and be pretty certain that most of the main characters will look like us. We can be late for a meeting and not have it blamed on our race. I can go into Judge Thunder’s chambers and raise an objection and not be told I’m playing the race card.” I pause. “The vast majority of us do not come home from work and say, Hooray! I didn’t get stopped and frisked today! The vast majority of us did not get into college and think, I got into the school of my choice because the educational system really works in my favor. We don’t think these things, because we don’t have to.”

By now, the jury is getting uneasy. They shift and shuffle, and from the corner of my eye I see Judge Thunder regarding me narrowly, even though a closing argument is mine alone to give, and theoretically, if I wanted to read Great Expectations out loud, I could.

“I know you’re thinking: I’m not racist. Why, we even had an example of what we think real racism looks like, in the form of Turk Bauer. I doubt there are many of you on the jury who, like Turk, believe that your children are Aryan warriors or that black people are so inferior they should not even be able to touch a white baby. But even if we took every white supremacist on the planet and shipped them off to Mars, there would still be racism. That’s because racism isn’t just about hate. We all have biases, even if we don’t think we do. It’s because racism is also about who has power…and who has access to it.

“When I started working on this case, ladies and gentlemen, I didn’t see myself as a racist. Now I realize I am. Not because I hate people of different races but because-intentionally or unintentionally-I’ve gotten a boost from the color of my skin, just like Ruth Jefferson suffered a setback because of hers.”

Odette is sitting with her head bowed at the prosecution table. I can’t tell if she is delighted that I am building my own coffin out of words or if she is simply stunned that I have the balls to antagonize the jury at this late stage of the game. “There is a difference between active and passive racism. It’s kind of like when you get on the moving walkway at the airport. If you walk down it, you’re going to get to the other end faster than if you just stand still. But you’re ultimately going to wind up in the same spot. Active racism is having a swastika tattoo on your head. Active racism is telling a nurse supervisor that an African American nurse can’t touch your baby. It’s snickering at a black joke. But passive racism? It’s noticing there’s only one person of color in your office and not asking your boss why. It’s reading your kid’s fourth-grade curriculum and seeing that the only black history covered is slavery, and not questioning why. It’s defending a woman in court whose indictment directly resulted from her race…and glossing over that fact, like it hardly matters.

“I bet you feel uncomfortable right now. You know, so do I. It’s hard to talk about this stuff without offending people, or feeling offended. It’s why lawyers like me aren’t supposed to say these things to juries like you. But deep down, if you’ve asked yourself what this trial is really about, you know it’s more than just whether Ruth had anything to do with the death of one of her patients. In fact, it has very little to do with Ruth. It’s about systems that have been in place for about four hundred years, systems meant to make sure that people like Turk can make a heinous request as a patient, and have it granted. Systems meant to make sure that people like Ruth are kept in their place.”

I turn to the jury, beseeching. “If you don’t want to think about this, you don’t have to, and you can still acquit Ruth. I’ve given you enough medical evidence to show that there’s plenty of doubt about what led to that baby’s death. You heard the medical examiner himself say that had the newborn screening results come back in a more timely fashion, Davis Bauer might be alive today. Yes, you also heard Ruth get angry on the stand-that’s because when you wait forty-four years to be given a chance to speak, things don’t always come out the way you want them to. Ruth Jefferson just wanted the chance to do her job. To take care of that infant like she was trained to do.”

I turn, finally, toward Ruth. She breathes in, and I feel it in my own chest. “What if people who were born on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday were never the subjects of extensive credit checks when they applied for loans? What if they could shop without fear of security tailing them?” I pause. “What if their newborn screening test results came back to the pediatrician in a timely manner, allowing medical intervention that could prevent their deaths? Suddenly,” I say, “that type of arbitrary discrimination doesn’t seem quite so silly, does it?”

Ruth

AFTER ALL THAT.

After months of telling me that race doesn’t belong in a court of law, Kennedy McQuarrie took the elephant in the room and paraded it in front of the judge. She squeezed it into the jury box, so that those men and women couldn’t help but feel the pinch.

I stare at the jury, all lost in thought and utterly silent. Kennedy comes to sit down beside me, and for a moment, I just look at her. My throat works while I try to put into words everything I am feeling. What Kennedy said to all those strangers, it’s been the narrative of my life, the outline inside of which I have lived. But I could have screamed it from the rooftops, and it wouldn’t have done any good. For the jurors to hear it, really hear it, it had to be said by one of their own.

She turns to me before I can speak. “Thank you,” she says, as if I’m the one who’s done her the favor.

Come to think of it, maybe I have.

The judge clears his throat, and we both look up to find him glaring. Odette Lawton has risen and is standing in the spot Kennedy just vacated. I stroke my mother’s lucky scarf, looped around my neck, as she begins to speak. “You know, I admire Ms. McQuarrie and her rousing cry for social justice. But that’s not what we’re here for today. We are here because the defendant, Ruth Jefferson, abandoned the ethical code of her profession as a labor and delivery nurse and did not adequately respond to an infant’s medical crisis.”

The prosecutor approaches the jury. “What Ms. McQuarrie said…it’s true. People have prejudices, and sometimes they make decisions that don’t make sense to us. When I was in high school, I worked at McDonald’s.”

This surprises me; I try to imagine Odette timing fries, but I can’t.

“I was the only Black kid working there. There were times I’d be at the register and I would see a customer walk in, look at me, and then go into another cashier’s line to place their order. How did that make me feel?” She shrugs. “Not so great. But did I spit in their food? No. Did I drop the burger on the floor and then tuck it into the bun? No. I did my job. I did what I was supposed to do.

“Now let’s look at Ruth Jefferson, shall we? She had a customer choose another line, so to speak, but did she continue to do what she was supposed to do? No. She did not take the directive to not care for Davis Bauer in stride as a simple patient request-she blew it up into a racial incident. She did not honor her Nightingale pledge to assist her patients-no matter what. She acted with complete disregard to the infant’s welfare because she was angry, and she took her anger out on that poor child.

“It’s true, ladies and gentlemen, that Marie Malone’s directive to excuse Ruth as a caretaker for Davis Bauer was a racist decision, but it is not Marie on trial here for her actions. It is Ruth, for not adhering to the vow she made as a nurse. It’s true, too, that many of you were made uncomfortable by Mr. Bauer and his beliefs, because they are extreme. In this country, he is allowed to express those views, even when they make others feel uneasy. But if you are going to say you are unnerved by how Turk Bauer is filled with hate, you must admit that Ruth, too, is filled with hate. You heard it, when she told you it was better for that baby to die than to grow up like his father. Perhaps that was the only moment she was candid with us. At least Turk Bauer is honest about his beliefs-as unpalatable as they may seem. Because Ruth, we know, is a liar. By her own admission, she did intervene and touch the infant in the nursery, in spite of telling her supervisor and Risk Management and the police that she did not. Ruth Jefferson started to save this baby-and what made her stop? Fear for her job. She put her own interests in front of the patient’s…which is exactly what a medical professional should never do.”

The prosecutor pauses. “Ruth Jefferson and her attorney can throw up a dog and pony show about tardy lab results, or the state of race relations in this country, or anything else,” she says. “But it doesn’t change the facts of this case. And it’s never going to bring that baby back to life.”

–

ONCE THE JUDGE has given instructions to the jury, they are led from the courtroom. Judge Thunder leaves, too. Howard jumps up. “I’ve never seen anything like that!”

“Yeah, and you probably never will again,” Kennedy mutters.

“I mean, it was like watching Tom Cruise-You can’t handle the truth! Like…”

“Like shooting myself in the foot,” Kennedy finished. “On purpose.”

I put my hand on her arm. “I know what you said back there cost you,” I say.

Kennedy stares at me soberly. “Ruth, it’s most likely going to cost you more.”

She has explained to me that because the murder charge was thrown out before I testified, the jury has only the negligent homicide charge to decide. Although our medical evidence definitely creates reasonable doubt, an outburst of anger is like a poker burned into a juror’s mind. Even if they’re not deciding on a premeditated murder charge now, they might still feel like I didn’t care for that baby as well as I possibly could. And whether that was even possible, under the circumstances, I don’t know anymore.

I think about the night I spent in jail. I imagine spinning it out to many nights. Weeks. Months. I think about Liza Lott and how the conversation I have with her now would be very different than the one I had back then. I would start by saying that I’m not naïve anymore. I have been forged in a crucible, like steel. And the miracle about steel is that you can hammer it so thin it’s stretched to its limit, but that doesn’t mean it will break. “It was still worth hearing,” I tell Kennedy.

She smiles a little. “It was worth saying.”

Suddenly Odette Lawton is standing in front of us. I panic slightly. Kennedy also said that there was one other alternative the prosecutor might choose-to throw out all charges and start over with a grand jury, using my testimony to show malice in the heat of the moment, and with a new charge of second-degree murder.

“I’m getting the case against Edison Jefferson dismissed,” Odette says briskly. “I thought you’d want to know.”

My jaw drops. Of everything I thought she might say, that was not it.

She faces me and for the first time in this trial, meets my gaze. Except for our bathroom run-in, she has not made direct eye contact with me the entire time I was sitting at the defense table, glancing just past me or over my head. Kennedy says that’s standard; it’s the way prosecutors remind defendants they’re not human.

It works.

“I have a fifteen-year-old daughter,” Odette says, a fact and an explanation. Then she turns to Kennedy. “Nice closing, Counselor,” she says, and she walks away.

“Now what?” I ask.

Kennedy takes a deep breath. “Now,” she says, “we wait.”

–

BUT FIRST, WE have the press to deal with. Howard and Kennedy formulate a plan to get me out of the courthouse with no media contact. “If we aren’t able to avoid them completely,” she explains, “the correct answer is no comment. We are waiting for the jury’s decision. Period.”

I nod at her.

“I don’t think you get it, Ruth. They’re going to be out for blood; they are going to pick at you and goad you into exploding so that they can get it on tape. For the next five minutes, until you leave this building, you are blind, deaf, dumb. You understand?”

“Yes,” I tell her.

My heart is a drum as we push through the double doors of the courtroom. Immediately there are flashes of lights, and microphones thrust in my face. Howard runs interference, shoving them away, as Kennedy barrels us through this circus: acrobat reporters, trying to reach over the heads of others to get a statement; clowns doing their act-the Bauers in a heated interview with one conservative news station-and me, trying to navigate my tightrope without falling.

Approaching us from the opposite direction is Wallace Mercy. He and his supporters form a human blockade, elbows locked, which means we will have to engage. Wallace and a woman stand in the middle; as I watch, they step forward to lead the rest. The woman wears a pink wool suit. Her close-cropped hair is dyed a hot red. She stands straight as an arrow, her arm tightly tucked through Wallace’s.

I look to Kennedy, a silent question: What do we do?

But my question is answered for me. Wallace and the woman do not come toward us. Instead, they veer to the far side of the hallway, where Turk Bauer is still in conversation with a reporter, his wife and his father-in-law standing by his side.

“Brittany,” the woman says, her eyes filling with tears. “Oh, Lord. Look at how beautiful you are.”

She reaches toward Brittany Bauer as the cameras roll. But we are not in Judge Thunder’s court, and she can say or do anything she pleases. So I see the woman’s hand coming toward her as if in slow motion, and I know even before it happens that Brittany Bauer will push her away. “Get the hell away from me.”

Wallace Mercy steps forward. “I think this is someone you want to meet, Ms. Bauer.”

“She doesn’t need to, Wallace,” the woman murmurs. “We met twenty-six years ago, when I gave birth to her. Brit, honey, you remember me, don’t you?”

Brittany Bauer’s face blooms with color-shame, or anger, or both. “Liar. You disgusting liar!” She lunges for the older woman, who goes down too easily.

People scramble to pull Brittany away, to lift the woman to safety. I hear shouts: Help her! And Are you getting this on tape?

Then I hear someone cry, “Stop!” The voice is deep and powerful and commanding, and just like that, Brit falls back.

She turns around, feral, glaring at her father. “You’re just going to let that nigger say those things about me? About us?”

But her father is no longer looking at his daughter. He is ashen, staring at the woman who now stands with Wallace Mercy’s contingent, Wallace’s handkerchief pressed to her bleeding lip. “Hello, Adele,” he says.

“I did not see this coming,” I whisper, glancing at Kennedy.

And that’s how I realize she did.

Turk

THE CAMERAS ARE ROLLING WHEN all hell breaks loose. One minute, Brit and Francis are standing next to me, listening to me tell some right-wing radio personality that we have only just begun to fight, and then it becomes a literal declaration. A black woman marches up to Brit and touches her arm. Naturally, Brit recoils, and then the woman lobs a blatant lie: that Brittany Bauer, the princess of the White Power Movement, is actually half black.

I look to Francis, the way I have, well, for years. He taught me everything I know about hate; I would go to war beside him; in fact I have. I step back, waiting for Francis to let loose with his famous rhetoric, to cut this bitch down to size as an opportunist who wants her fifteen minutes of fame-except he doesn’t.

He says the name of Brittany’s mother.

I do not know much about Adele, because Brit doesn’t, either. Just her name, and the fact that she cheated on Francis with a black dude and he was so furious that he gave her an ultimatum: leave him the baby and disappear from their lives forever, or die in your sleep. Wisely, she chose the former, and that was all Brit needed to know about her.

But I look at Brit’s long dark hair.

We see what we’re told to see.

She glances up, looking at Francis, too. “Daddy?”

Suddenly I can’t breathe. I don’t know who my wife is. I don’t know who I am. For years I would have easily said I’d knife someone black before I’d sit down for coffee with them, and all this time, I’ve been living with one.

I made a baby with one.

Which means my own son, he was part-black, too.

There’s a buzzing in my ears that feels like I’m free-falling, dropped from the airplane without a parachute. The ground, it’s rushing up at me.

Brittany stands up, turning in a circle, her face pinched so tight it breaks my heart. “Baby,” Francis offers, and she makes a low sound, deep in her throat.

“No,” she says. “No.”

Then she runs.

–

SHE IS SMALL, and she is fast. Brit can move in and out of shadows, and why shouldn’t she be able to? I mean, she learned, like me, from the best.

Francis tries to get the Lonewolf.org members who’ve been at court in solidarity to help us search for Brit, but there is a wall between us now. Some have already disappeared. I have no doubt that they will discontinue their user accounts, unless Francis can do enough damage control to stop them.

I am not sure that I even care.

I just want to find my wife.

We drive everywhere, looking for her. Our network, invisible but wide, is no longer available. We are alone in this, completely isolated.

Be careful what you wish for, I guess.

As I drive, searching the far corners of this city, I turn and look at Francis. “You feel like telling me the truth?”

“It was a long time ago,” he says quietly. “Before I joined the Movement. I met Adele at a diner. She served me pie. She put her name and phone number on the bill. I called.” He shrugs. “Three months later, she was pregnant.”

I feel my stomach turn as I think about sleeping with one of them. But then, I had done that, hadn’t I?

“God help me, Turk, I loved her. Didn’t matter if we were out dancing halfway into the night, or sitting at home watching television-I got to the point where I just didn’t feel whole if she wasn’t with me. And then we had Brit, and I started to get scared. It felt perfect, you know? And perfect means that something’s bound to go wrong.”

He rubs his forehead. “She went to church on Sundays, same church she’d gone to as a kid. A black church, with all that singing and hallelujah shit-I couldn’t take it. I went fishing instead and told her that was my holy place. But the choir director, he started taking an interest in Adele. Told her she had the voice of an angel. They started spending a lot of time together, practicing all hours of the day or night.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know, maybe I went a little crazy. I accused her of cheating on me. Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. I messed her up some, which was wrong, I know. But I couldn’t help it, she was tearing me apart, and I had to do something with all that hurt. You know what that’s like, right?”

I nod.

“She ran to this other guy for comfort, and he took her in. Jesus, Turk, I drove her right to him. Next thing I know she says she’s leaving me. I tell her that if she goes, it’s empty-handed. I’m not letting her take my daughter away from me. I say that if she tries, it’ll be the last thing she ever does.” He looks at me, bleak. “I never saw her again.”

“And you never told Brit?”

He shakes his head. “What was I going to say? I threatened to kill her mother? No. I started taking Brit to bars, leaving her in her car seat asleep while I went in to get drunk. That’s where I met Tom Metzger.”

I find it hard to imagine the leader of the White Alliance Army slugging a beer, but stranger things have happened.

“He was with some of his guys. He saw me get into my car, and refused to let me drive home when he saw Brit in the back. He drove us to my place and said I needed to get my act together for my kid. I was sloppy drunk by then; I told him how Adele had left me for a nigger. I guess I never mentioned that she was one too. Anyway, Tom gave me something to read. A pamphlet.” Francis purses his lips. “That was the start. It was so much easier to hate them, than to hate myself.”

My high beams cut across a train track, a place where Francis’s squad used to hold court, back when they were active. “And now,” Francis says, “I’m going to lose her too. She knows how to cover her tracks, how to disappear. I taught her.”

He is riding a ragged edge of pain and shock, and frankly I don’t have time for Francis’s breakdown. I have more important things to do, like find my wife.

And I have one more idea.

–

WE HAVE TO break into the graveyard; it’s after dark now and the gates are locked. I scale the fence and hack at the lock with a sledgehammer from the back of my rig so that Francis can get inside, too. We let our eyes adjust, because we know Brit might run at the glimpse of a flashlight.

At first, I can’t see her at all; it’s that dark, and she is wearing a navy dress. But then I hear movement as I draw closer to Davis’s grave. For a moment, the clouds covering the moon part, and the headstone gleams. There is a glint of metal, too.

“Don’t come any closer,” Brit says.

I hold up my palms, a white flag. Very slowly, I take another step. She slashes out once. It’s a penknife, one she carries in her purse. I remember the day she bought it, at a White Power rally. She had held up various models, brandishing onyx, mother-of-pearl. She’d pressed a bedazzled one against my throat in a mock charge. Which is more me? she had teased.

“Hey, baby,” I say gently. “It’s time to come home.”

“I can’t. I’m a mess,” she mutters.

“That’s okay.” I crouch down, moving the way I would if I were approaching a wild dog. I reach for her hand, but my palm slips out of hers.

I look down and see mine is bloody.

“Jesus Christ!” I cry, just as Francis shines his iPhone flashlight down on Brit from behind me, and lets out a cry. She is sitting with her back against Davis’s grave. Her eyes are wide and wild, glassy. Her left arm has been sliced deeply seven or eight times. “I can’t find it,” she says. “I keep trying to get it out.”

“Get what out, sweetheart?” I say, reaching for the blade again.

But she curls it away from me. “Her blood.” As I watch, she picks up the knife and slashes her wrist.

The knife falls out of Brit’s hand, and as her eyes roll back in her head, I lift her in my arms and start running to my truck.

–

IT’S A WHILE before Brit is stable again, and that’s a generous term. We are at Yale-New Haven, a different hospital than the one where she delivered Davis. Her lacerations have been stitched, her wrist has been wrapped; the blood has been washed from her body. She has been admitted to the psych ward, and I have to say, I’m grateful. I can’t unravel the knots in her mind.

I can barely unravel the knots in mine.

I tell Francis to go home, get some rest. Me, I’ll stay overnight in the visitors’ lounge, just to make sure if Brit wakes up and needs me, she will know someone is here for her. But right now, she is unconscious, knocked out with sedatives.

A hospital after midnight is ghostly. Lights are low, and sounds are eerie-the squeak of a nurse’s shoes, the moan of a patient, the beep and exhale of a blood pressure machine. I buy a knit cap from the gift store, one that has been knit for chemo patients, but I don’t care. It covers my tattoo and right now I want to blend in.

I sit in the cafeteria, nursing a cup of coffee, and combing through the tangle of my thoughts. There’s only so many things you can hate. There are only so many people you can beat up, so many nights you can get drunk, so many times you can blame other people for your own bullshit. It’s a drug, and like any drug, it stops working. And then what?

My head actually aches from holding three incompatible truths in it: 1. Black people are inferior. 2. Brit is half black. 3. I love Brit with all my heart.

Shouldn’t numbers one and two make number three impossible? Or is she the exception to the rule? Was Adele one, too?

I think of me and Twinkie dreaming of the food we craved behind bars.

How many exceptions do there have to be before you start to realize that maybe the truths you’ve been told aren’t actually true?

When I finish my coffee, I wander the halls of the hospital. I read a discarded newspaper in the lobby. I watch the flashing ambulance lights through the glass doors of the ER.

I stumble upon the preemie NICU by accident. Believe me, I don’t want to be anywhere near a birthing pavilion; those scars are still tender for me, even if this is a different hospital. But I stand at the window beside another man. “She’s mine,” he says, pointing to a painfully small infant in a pink blanket. “Her name is Cora.”

I panic a little; what creep hangs out in front of a nursery if he’s not related to one of the babies? So I point to a kid in a blue blanket. There’s a bit of a glare through his incubator, but even from here I can see the brown of his skin. “Davis,” I lie.

My son was as white as I am, at least on the outside. He did not look like this newborn. But even if he had, now I realize I would have loved him. The truth is, if that baby were Davis, it wouldn’t matter that his skin is darker than mine.

It would just matter that he is alive.

I bury my shaking hands in my coat, thinking of Francis, and of Brit. Maybe however much you’ve loved someone, that’s how much you can hate. It’s like a pocket turned inside out.

It stands to reason that the opposite should be true, too.

Kennedy

IN THE TIME THAT IT takes for the jury to return a verdict, I sit through forty more arraignments, thirty-eight of which are black men. Micah performs six surgeries. Violet goes to a birthday party. I read an article on the front page of the paper, about a march at Yale by students of color, who want-among other things-to rechristen a residential college currently named for John C. Calhoun, a U.S. vice president who supported slavery and secession.

For two days, Ruth and I sit at the courthouse, and wait. Edison goes back to school, knuckling down with renewed enthusiasm-it’s amazing what a little brush with the law can do for a kid who’s flirting with delinquency. Ruth also has-with my blessing, and with me at her side-appeared on Wallace Mercy’s television show, via remote camera. He championed her bravery, and handed her a check to cover some of the money she had lost from being out of work for months-donations from people as close as East End and as far as Johannesburg. Afterward, we read notes that were enclosed with some of the contributions:

I THINK ABOUT YOU AND YOUR BOY.

I DON’T HAVE MUCH, BUT I WANT YOU TO KNOW YOU’RE NOT ALONE.

THANK YOU FOR BEING BRAVE ENOUGH TO STAND UP, WHEN I DIDN’T.

We’ve heard about Brittany Bauer, who is suffering from what the prosecution calls stress and Ruth calls just plain crazy. No one has seen hide nor hair of Turk Bauer or Francis Mitchum.

“How did you know?” Ruth had asked me, immediately after the debacle that occurred when Wallace brought Adele Adams to the courthouse to “accidentally” cross paths with Francis and his daughter.

“I had a hunch,” I told her. “I was looking through the neonatal screening, and I saw something none of us noticed before, because we were so focused on the MCADD: sickle-cell anemia. I remembered what the neonatologist said, about how that particular disease hits the African American community harder than others. And I also remembered Brit saying during her deposition that she never knew her mother.”

“That’s quite a long shot,” Ruth had said.

“Yeah, that’s why I did a little digging. One in twelve African Americans carry the sickle-cell trait. One in ten thousand white people carry it. Suddenly, it looked less like a wild card. So I called Wallace. The rest, that’s on him. He found out the name of the mother from Brit’s birth certificate, and tracked her down.”

Ruth had looked at me. “But it had nothing to do with your case, really.”

“Nope,” I’d admitted. “That one, it was a gift from you to me. I figured there wasn’t anything that could put a finer point on the hypocrisy of it all.”

Now, as we come to the close of the second day with no word from the jury, we’re all going a little stir-crazy. “What are you doing?” I ask Howard, who has been keeping the vigil with us. He’s been typing furiously into his phone. “Hot date?”

“I’ve been looking up the sentencing difference for possession of crack versus cocaine,” he says. “Up until 2010, a person convicted of possession with intent to distribute fifty grams or more of crack got a minimum of ten years in prison. To get the same sentence for cocaine, you had to distribute five thousand grams. Even now, the sentencing disparity ratio’s eighteen to one.”

I shake my head. “Why do you need to know this?”

“I’m thinking about appeal,” he says brightly. “That’s clearly a precedent for prejudice in sentencing, since eighty-four percent of people convicted for crack offenses are black, and black drug offenders are twenty percent more likely to be imprisoned than white drug offenders.”

“Howard,” I say, rubbing my temples. “Turn off your damn phone.”

“This is bad, right?” Ruth says. She rubs her arms, although the radiator is belching and it’s broiling in the room. “If they were going to acquit, it would have been quick, I bet.”

“No news is good news,” I lie.

–

AT THE END of the day, the judge calls the jury back into the courtroom. “Have you arrived at a verdict?”

The forewoman stands. “No, Your Honor. We’re split.”

I know the judge is going to give them an Allen charge, a glorified legal pep talk. He turns to the jury, imperial, to imbue them with resolve. “You know, the State has spent a great deal of money to put this trial on, and nobody knows the facts more than you all do. Talk to each other. Allow yourself to hear another’s point of view. I encourage you to arrive at a verdict, so that we do not have to go through this all over again.”

The jury is dismissed, and I look at Ruth. “You probably have to get back home.”

She looks at her watch. “I have a little time,” she admits.

So we walk downtown, shoulder to shoulder, huddled against the cold to grab a cup of coffee. We slip out of the biting wind into the buzzy chatter of a local shop. “After I realized I couldn’t cut it as a pastry chef I used to dream about opening a coffee place,” I muse. “I wanted to call it Grounds for Dismissal.”

We are the next to order; I ask Ruth how she takes her coffee. “Black,” she says, and suddenly we are both laughing so hard that the barista looks at us as if we are crazy, as if we are speaking a language she can’t understand.

Which, I guess, is not all that far from the truth.

–

THE NEXT MORNING, Judge Thunder summons Odette and me to chambers. “I got a note from the foreman. We have a hung jury. Eleven to one.” He shakes his head. “I’m very sorry, ladies.”

After he dismisses us, I find Howard pacing outside chambers. “Well?”

“Mistrial. They’re deadlocked, eleven to one.”

“Who’s the holdout?” Howard asks, but it’s a rhetorical question; he knows I don’t have that information.

Suddenly, though, we both stop walking and face each other. “Juror number twelve,” we say simultaneously.

“Ten bucks?” Howard asks.

“You’re on,” I tell him.

“I knew we should have used a peremptory strike on her.”

“You haven’t won that bet yet,” I point out. But deep down, I imagine he’s right. The teacher who couldn’t admit to having any implicit racism would have been mightily offended by my closing argument.

Ruth is waiting for me in the conference room. She looks up, hopeful. “They can’t reach a verdict,” I say.

“So now what?”

“That depends,” I explain. “The case can be tried again, later, with a new jury. Or else Odette just gives up and doesn’t pursue this any further.”

“Do you think she-?”

“I learned a long time ago not to pretend I can think like a prosecutor,” I admit. “We’re just going to have to see.”

In the courtroom, the jury files in, looking exhausted. “Madam Foreman,” the judge says. “I understand that the jury has been unable to reach a verdict. Is that correct?”

The foreman stands. “Yes, Your Honor.”

“Do you feel that further time would enable you to resolve this case finally between the State and Ms. Jefferson?”

“Unfortunately, Your Honor, some of us just cannot see eye to eye.”

“Thank you for your service,” Judge Thunder says. “I am dismissing this jury.”

The men and women exit. In the gallery, there are hushed whispers, as people try to understand what this means. I try to figure out in my head the odds that Odette will go back to a grand jury for that involuntary manslaughter charge.

“There is still one final thing that needs to be done in this trial,” Judge Thunder continues. “I am prepared to rule on the defense’s renewed motion for judgment of acquittal.”

Howard looks at me over Ruth’s head. What?

Holy shit. Judge Thunder is going to use the escape hatch I gave him as a matter of routine. I hold my breath.

“I have researched the law, and have reviewed the evidence in this case very carefully. There is no credible proof that the death of this child was causally related to any action or inaction of the defendant’s.” He faces Ruth. “I am very sorry you had to go through what you did at your workplace, ma’am.” He smacks his gavel. “I grant the defense’s motion.”

In this humbling moment I learn that not only can I not think like a prosecutor, I am woefully off-base about the mental machinations of a judge. I turn, a dazed laugh bubbling up inside me. Ruth’s brow is furrowed. “I don’t understand.”

He hasn’t declared a mistrial. He’s granted a bona fide acquittal.

“Ruth,” I say, grinning. “You are free to go.”

Ruth

FREEDOM IS THE FRAGILE NECK of a daffodil, after the longest of winters. It’s the sound of your voice, without anyone drowning you out. It’s having the grace to say yes, and more important, the right to say no. At the heart of freedom, hope beats: a pulse of possibility.

I am the same woman I was five minutes ago. I’m rooted to the same chair. My hands are flattened on the same scarred table. My lawyers are both still flanking me. That fluorescent light overhead is still spitting like a cockroach. Nothing has changed, and everything is different.

In a daze, I walk out of the courtroom. A bumper crop of microphones blooms in front of me. Kennedy instructs everyone that although her client is obviously delighted with the verdict, we will not be making any statements until we give an official press conference tomorrow.

That right now, her client has to get home to her son.

There are a few stragglers, hoping for a sound bite, but eventually they drift away. There is a professor being arraigned down the hall for possession of child pornography.

The world turns, and there’s another victim, another bully. It’s the arc of someone else’s story now.

I text Edison, who calls me even though he has to leave class to do it, and I listen to the relief braided through his words. I call Adisa at work, and have to hold the phone away from my ear as she screams with joy. I’m interrupted by a text from Christina: a full row of smiling emojis, and then a hamburger and a glass of wine and a question mark.

Rain check? I type back.

“Ruth,” Kennedy says, when she finds me standing with my phone in my hand, staring into space. “You all right?”

“I don’t know,” I reply, completely honest. “It’s really over?”

Howard smiles. “It is really, truly, unequivocally over.”

“Thank you,” I say. I embrace him, and then I face Kennedy. “And you…” I shake my head. “I don’t even know what to say.”

“Think on it,” Kennedy says, hugging me. “You can tell me next week when we have lunch.”

I pull back, meeting her eyes. “I’d like that,” I say, and something shifts between us. It’s power, I realize, and we are dead even.

Suddenly I realize that in my astonishment at the verdict, I left my mother’s lucky scarf in the courtroom. “I forgot something. I’ll meet you downstairs.”

When I reach the double doors, there’s a bailiff stationed outside. “Ma’am?”

“I’m sorry-there was a scarf…? Can I…”

“Sure.” He waves me inside.

I’m alone in the courtroom. I walk down the aisle of the gallery, past the bar, to the spot where I was sitting. My mother’s scarf is curled underneath the desk. I pick it up, feed it like a seam through my hands.

I look around the empty chamber. One day, Edison might be arguing a case here, instead of sitting next to a lawyer like I have been. One day he might even be on the judge’s bench.

I close my eyes, so that I can keep this minute with me. I listen to the silence.

It feels like light-years since I was brought into another courtroom down the hall for my arraignment, wearing shackles and a nightgown and not allowed to speak for myself. It feels like forever since I was told what I could not do.

“Yes,” I say softly, because it is the opposite of restraint. Because it breaks chains. Because I can.

I ball my hands into fists and tilt back my head and let the word rip from my throat. Yes.

Yes.

Yes.