Peterson nodded his head. “And how did you find the county jail?” Rafferty asked again.
I knew what he wanted me to say, that it had been the most difficult period of my life, that it had been sorely trying being in an overcrowded facility with seasoned prisoners, that as a result of my beating I had to have major surgery at St. Luke’s hospital. The words failed me. But I could see the girls plainly—Lynelle, Dyshett, Sherry, Debbie—sitting in the back, watching with hope, scorn, affection, disinterest. “I was in awe,” I said, under my breath.
“You were what?”
“I was in awe.”
“Not something you’d like to repeat, I take it?” he said quickly.
“No.”
He carried my log around in his hands, opening it, reading from it, as he asked me at length about specific visits Robbie had made in the previous year. Finally he asked, “In all of the, what—twenty-five visits—we have recorded here, Mrs. Goodwin, did you ever touch Robbie in an inappropriate way?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What did you do to Robbie that you shouldn’t have?”
“I hit him.”
“How many times did you hit him?”
“Once. I hit him once on the face. I slapped him.”
“Did you notify the principal that you’d hit the boy?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I was ashamed. It is awful to lose your temper.”
“What made you ‘lose your temper,’ as you say?”
I closed my eyes, trying to fasten on the correct sequence. “Robbie was a difficult child to treat,” I said. “He was often verbally abusive to adults—he seemed not to have any fear or respect. There was a pattern in his office visits. He would come to the door and stand and stare at me in a way that was extremely unnerving, and then he often made personal remarks. I had tried to get some guidance from both the principal and the school counselor—” I was not answering in the succinct way we had practiced. I couldn’t recall how I had justified the slap. “His derision and his contempt overwhelmed me one day,” I mumbled. “And I slapped him.”
“Is striking Robbie one of the charges that has been brought against you, Mrs. Goodwin?”
“No.”
“Why didn’t Robbie tell his mother you hit him?”
“I suppose Robbie may get hit at home. It may not have been anything out of the ordinary in his life.”
Mrs. Dirks objected on the grounds of hearsay, and the judge ordered the statement struck from the record.
“What did you mean, Mrs. Goodwin, when you said to Detective Grogan and Officer Melby, that you’d hurt everybody. What did you mean by that?”
“Our neighbor, a two-year-old, had very recently drowned in our pond.” I looked at Theresa as I spoke. I said again, “She was two years old.” Rafferty had told me I should not under any circumstances volunteer that information. The judge had written a letter advising that both
Dirks and Rafferty keep Elizabeth Collins out of the testimony. But it was important, wasn’t it, that the jurors know the context; Rafferty himself had said as much. I no longer remembered what I had been supposed to say. I was under oath to tell the truth, and Lizzy’s death was a good portion of the truth. “I was—stricken by that accident. It was an agonizing period. I didn’t feel that I was taking good care of my children, my family, my friend. Everything fell apart for those few weeks after Lizzy drowned. I had no idea what the officers were asking me about that night, but my guilt was considerable.”
Dirks was standing up and yelling as to be expected. Even Judge Peterson was on his feet. I guessed that he called a recess because Dirks was running into the judge’s chamber and Rafferty, head down, hands behind his back, was following. Rafferty said later that he’d never seen the judge so angry, that he shook the air as if to throttle Paul, and shouted. “I granted your motion to keep Elizabeth out of the testimony, and
you
brought it up! Were you playing games with me, Paul? Because if you were you’d better tell me, and I’ll declare a mistrial right now and we’ll start this thing all over again.” To Susan Dirks Judge Peterson said, “Now, Mrs. Dirks, your colleague opened the door and I want you to know that you can have as much latitude as you want to explore that drowning on cross.”
Rafferty didn’t look at me as he finished his questions. He said simply, “So you felt that you were causing harm?”
“Everything feels hurtful, still. This trial has hurt all of us, my children and my husband, and also the Mackessys.”
In his most slow, solemn tones Rafferty asked, “Did you ever sexually abuse Robbie Mackessy, Mrs. Goodwin?”
I shook my head. I was supposed to be honest, forthright, and indignant. He was waiting for me to use words. He tapped his foot four or five times.
“No,” I managed to croak. “No, I did not.”
I knew that Susan Dirks could now ask me about the drowning. I waited for the questions that would turn the jury against me. “Did you like Robbie Mackessy?” she asked as she began her cross-examination.
“No,” I said. “He was a difficult boy.”
“Is that reason for a professional health-care worker to dislike a child? Because they are difficult?”
“It wasn’t necessarily right for me to dislike Robbie,” I said. “I guess our reason isn’t always responsible for our inclinations. It’s a fact that I found him difficult, and that I didn’t like being with him.”
“You hit him?”
“Yes.”
“Are you aware that it is against the law for a school employee to hit a child?”
“Yes, I am.”
“And still you struck him?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you hit him?”
“On the cheek.”
“He was sent to the nurse, to you, and you struck him across the face.”
“That’s correct.”
“You knew it was against the law.”
“Yes.”
“Did you report your conduct?”
“No.”
“Did you notify anyone that you’d broken a state law?”
“No.”
“So you lived with the knowledge that you hurt Robbie Mackessy, just as you lived with the knowledge of the other abuse.”
Rafferty rose with his objection.
“Stick to the facts,” Judge Peterson muttered.
“ ‘I hurt everybody,’ you said in your admission to Officer Melby. That to me suggests something very active.”
“For a parent,” I said, “not taking action, not doing a certain thing, can be just as damaging as willfully striking a child. Not paying attention when they are taking a sharp knife off the counter, turning your back just for a minute when they are in the bath, letting go of their hand when they need you. Sometimes it seems that every minute, every second, there is peril. The officers and I, we were having a general conversation, so I
thought. I meant that I was human, and that I had therefore hurt the people closest to me.”
She was about to speak, but I think I’d caught her off guard. “ ‘I hurt everyone,’ you said.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Did you tell your husband that you’d slapped Robbie?”
“No.”
“Did you tell your best friend, the social worker?”
“No.”
“You were secretive about it.”
“Yes,” I said. “I was.”
When I sat back down next to Rafferty at our table he kept his eyes on his legal pad. I didn’t care if he was infuriated, didn’t care if I would always receive a chilly reception at his door. If he had misjudged me, and my acting capabilities, he had only himself to blame. I didn’t know why Dirks hadn’t asked me about Lizzy, and I wondered briefly if it was something again that I had only thought I’d said. But when she mentioned the drowning in her closing statement, Rafferty nodded. It served me right, he seemed to be saying, to have Dirks throwing the accident in the jurors’ laps. He didn’t lean over and whisper in my ear the way he had throughout the previous days. I was certain that for everyone in the courtroom Lizzy was suddenly the only presence. How could the jurors think of anything but the girl who should have been among us? I wanted to stand and do my own part, stand before them and tell them exactly what had happened: I had gone upstairs to look for my swimsuit, and I couldn’t find it, and I had stopped to look at some old pictures from my childhood, and all the while Lizzy was on her way down the lane.
I remember only bits and pieces from Rafferty’s closing statement. After he’d admonished the jury about their duty he said, “All right then, let’s go right to the meat of the prosecution—let’s go down, as the great poet Mr. William Butler Yeats once said, to ‘the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.’ Let us see what, if anything, has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Mrs. Dirks has shown to my satisfaction, and I suggest to yours as well, that Robbie Mackessy has been abused by someone.”
I prayed while he spoke. I stopped listening and prayed for strength
and heart. When I was very young I used to sit before my map of the world imagining myself in an ideal country, alone and at peace. Now, if I could make the world over, I said to myself in my prayer—and as always, to Howard—if I could make an impossible, new world, Howard, this is who you would see: You’d see Emma, and Claire, and you’d see yourself, and me, all together, dancing on the porch with the shades down, outcasts making a perfect circle.
Chapter Twenty-two
——
I
T HAS TAKEN ME
a long time to know how to remember last year. I’ve wondered if I should go back to the newspapers and clip the articles, put them in a scrapbook so that when they get older the girls can see for themselves what happened. It is tempting to want to brush the whole thing under the carpet, hoping that none of it in any form will resurface. But for the most part when I catch myself in the mirror and see that my eyes look different, the scars of last year so evident in my face, I know that I can’t forget and that, in truth, I don’t want to forget. Howard has suggested, reluctantly, it seems, that we go to family therapy. My guess is that Theresa put that idea in his head. “Give me a little more time,” I keep saying. “A few more weeks.” He always seems relieved when I put him off.
He manages the dairy animals in the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago now, what we laughingly call “the herd.” I cannot tell anyone what my husband does for a living without also wanting to tell them that it is absurd, what he does. The six cows are Holsteins, a word nothing at all like Golden Guernsey, a word you cannot say without looking as if you’re masticating. We can go out on the flat of our apartment roof near Wrigley Field and watch the Cubs play ball. Howard watches the game raptly
from his lawn chair, not because he likes baseball, particularly, but because we have the best seat in the city. If I am awake in the early mornings I watch him down the hall, sitting by himself in the kitchen, running his hands over the table we brought from the farm. His hands move in swirls, as if the table is a Ouija board, about to give him an important message for his future. He has grown quieter, something I used to think impossible, like a turtle evolving into an animal that makes less noise. I don’t know if he is raging or if he is merely resigned. If there is one thing I’ve learned over the years, and learned well, it is how to be still and wait. Periodically he is so fiercely merry, determined to have a good time, that the rest of us, Emma, Claire, and I, slink away to our own corners. And yet once in a rare while Howard and I are able to reach back to the quality of the old days, to sit at our table after the girls are in bed and talk into the night. It is as if we’ve somehow been, as Theresa would say, “blessed with grace.”
On occasion I have thought that we are where we belong, city people returned to the city. We have a sunny apartment, Howard goes off to work, and I am a full-time mother. We have Dan Collins to thank for Howard’s job, for pulling strings with the director of the zoo. We have tried, halfheartedly, to incorporate a few details from Prairie Center into our urban landscape. Howard has built walnut shelves in the kitchen with wood from the farm, from trees he felled himself. Lynelle’s bookmark is on the floor by the futon, the first thing I see when I wake up. We had rolls of film from our farm life, which I recently gathered together in an album. After it was done I put the thing out of reach, out of sight. As for city dwelling, there is the homeless man on our block, the Waldorf school Emma attends with children of all races and creeds, for which Nellie pays. There is the feeling of being in the midst of noise and trash and people and life. What throws me off, every night, when Howard comes home, is the fact that he still smells like cows, like silage. He spends a fair amount of time at a desk, but he is also involved with the animals’ daily care, and therefore, of course, he smells. Even when I am prepared for his entrance I have to brace myself against the fragrance of grain and hay and manure, against all that those smells conjure, against hot summer afternoons and the marvel of the pop-up baler throwing a bale of hay onto the wagon.
We have apparently left Lizzy behind. She is, Reverend Nabor said at
one point to Howard, “forever young.” I wrote Theresa on what would have been Lizzy’s third birthday, and she wrote back, a short note thanking me, telling us that she is pregnant. We are no longer friends, really, and yet I know that we are a part of each other’s lives in much the same way a dead parent, or lover, is only slightly beneath one’s consciousness by day, and always behind closed lids in sleep. I walk Claire to the park on nice days and I sit on the bench reading a magazine while she plays. Sometimes I talk with other women who are also sitting on benches with magazines on their laps. And if we discover that we have more in common than location and ages of children, and if she is lonely too, and invites me for a cup of coffee, my heart races and I try to get away before the exchange of telephone numbers. I’m not sure, I might tell her, how to be friends a little bit, and I don’t have the strength to be friends at full tilt. I don’t have the stamina for the obligation and trust that’s required. I am still preoccupied with the old life. I might tell my acquaintance that I have not yet fully moved into the present. I find myself lingering in our last days in Spring Grove because it was there, and then, that Howard and I, each in our own ways, began the long process of making peace.
The Saturday after the trial I asked him if I could use the car, that I’d like to run a few errands. I think he knew where I was going because he stood in the middle of the kitchen floor pondering my request before he dug in his pocket for the keys. I drove out of town slightly under the speed limit, inspecting the Christmas decorations and the fields, beautiful in their drabness. I imagined I didn’t know I was driving back to Prairie Center.