Bear Is Broken (13 page)

After that I turned my head every half mile or so to study her sleeping
profile against the freeway lights. The younger me would have savored
these moments as an opportunity for silent devotion. He would have
been deep in fantasies about what might happen when we finally got
to her house in Walnut Creek, what might have originally been possible
if my brother hadn’t found her first. What might be possible again now.

Don’t think, Monkey Boy. Just drive.

I woke up at 5 AM on Jeanie’s couch to the clatter of a pan of eggs
dropping and her saying “fuck damn” in the tone of someone who’s
failed to sober up gracefully. Her eyes were bloodshot, her face pale.
She was dressed for the gym and looked about as hungover as anyone
ever deserved to be.

“We can still make six AM rounds if you get your butt in the shower,”
she said.

Once again I drove, battling the early commute while Jeanie sat
with her eyes slitted, her face mashed against the window. We arrived
at the hospital at six and were in Teddy’s room just ahead of the chief
neurotrauma specialist, Dr. Gottlieb, and his flock of four residents,
among them the doctors who’d spoken to me in the ER.

After introducing himself and the residents to Jeanie and me, Dr.
Gottlieb quizzed Dr. Singh on the minutest aspects of my brother’s
condition, forcing him to recite Teddy’s roster of blood chemistry and
vital signs and to conduct a Glasgow test, which involved poking a
pin under Teddy’s fingernail and shouting in his ear. Teddy scored a
six out of fifteen, according to Singh, fifteen being full consciousness.
From what I could see, my brother didn’t react at all.

Dr. Gottlieb asked us to leave the room while they changed the
dressings on the wound.

In the waiting area Jeanie sat with her elbows propped on her knees,
her palms against her brow, her hair hanging in front of her face.
“This is really happening, isn’t it,” she finally said from underneath
the curtain of her hair.

I nodded, feeling thick-headed but not too bad, considering. I eased
back against the wall and closed my eyes.

When I opened them Jeanie was looking up at me. “You’re wrong,
what you said last night. No matter how bad it was, he’d want to go
on fighting.”

She seemed to think that I wanted Teddy to die and that I wanted
that because it would be inconvenient for me if he lived, because I
would have to be there for him in ways that would humiliate him and
me. I was too wounded to respond.

The doctors emerged from the room. We made to stand, but Gottlieb
sent on the four residents and came to sit with us. Leaning forward
with his elbows on his knees, he looked at us in turn. “It’s a miracle
he’s made it this far,” he said. “Even so, the prognosis is grim. He’s in
a very deep coma. There’s brain stem activity, meaning that he could
theoretically recover to breathe on his own. That’s the good news. The
bad news is that a recovery of any kind isn’t likely. After a head wound
like this, people usually don’t wake up.”

He’d said what I expected to hear. So why did I feel an abyss yawning
before me? It hadn’t been real to me until now, I realized. Some
part of me had expected a reprieve, as if some doctor would snap his
fingers and we’d all wake up.

This one parted his hands in sympathy. His movements were gentle
and deliberate. “We have a hospice here that provides support for people
in your situation. Eventually, if his situation doesn’t change—and this
is just to warn you, not to push you toward any kind of premature
decision—we will need to ask you whether you want to continue
life support, hydration, and the feeding tube. Right now I have to ask
whether he had a living will, some kind of document expressing his
wishes for an end-of-life situation, a situation where he wouldn’t be
able to make these kinds of decisions for himself?”

Jeanie shook her head. “When we were married he refused even
to draw up a last will and testament. That’s the equivalent of a doctor
smoking three packs a day. Lawyers are supposed to take care of those
kinds of things, but Teddy hated the thought of dying so much he
refused even to consider making the most basic plans.”

“These issues can be very delicate. I can promise you that if and when
we come to believe that further efforts to preserve his life would be futile,
we will tell you. Ultimately, however, the actual decision to continue or
discontinue life support is the family’s. And I want to emphasize again
that we’re still quite some way from having that discussion.”

I spoke up for the first time: “My decision, in other words.”

The doctor nodded reluctantly. “Yes, I suppose it would be yours.”

A high color had come into Jeanie’s cheeks.

“What if he does come out of it?” I asked. “Is he going to be a
vegetable? Could he ever practice law?”

Doctor Gottlieb nodded, back on what he undoubtedly considered
less treacherous ground. “Generally speaking, anyone surviving a cranial
injury of this magnitude should expect to contend with some degree
of permanent disability. With a frontal lobe injury, especially, there can
be a huge range of impairments. You should expect memory problems,
certainly, both short- and long-term, and cognitive difficulty, usually
involving problem solving and planning and initiating actions. Depending
on what part of the frontal lobe is injured you may see changes in
personality such as pseudopsychopathic behavior, resulting from injury
to the brain’s inhibition centers, or pseudodepressive conditions. And
there is often physical impairment, sometimes localized to one side of
the body, ranging from full paralysis down to loss of fine motor skills.
Again, a very wide and often unpredictable range.

“We won’t have any idea, really, until he wakes up. If and when. And
if he does wake up, he won’t be a vegetable. There will be something
there. He may improve dramatically in a few months, or he may come
to a plateau and sort of tail off. As for practicing law—I won’t tell you
it’s impossible, but it would be the most miraculous recovery from
this type of injury I’ve ever seen. With these patients, it’s considered
excellent progress if they’re eventually able to dress themselves, cook
breakfast without lighting the house on fire, that sort of thing.”

“Sounds like a great life.”

Gottlieb shrugged. “Relationships continue, even though people
change. They find meaning in unexpected places. We’re getting pretty
far ahead of ourselves, but if you’d like to educate yourselves, I can make
some calls, get you in to visit our inpatient rehabilitation center here
at the hospital, maybe also one of the residential rehabilitation centers
people usually transition to for six months to a year after they’re well
enough to leave the hospital.”

“I’d like that,” Jeanie said. “It’s very important to me to be able to
envision what kind of life Teddy might have.”

I didn’t want any part of that scene. I wanted to find the person
who’d done this to Teddy, and I wanted to hurt him.

“I’ll arrange it,” he told her.

“Thank you. Here’s my card.”

He pocketed it and stood. “I’ll let you know when I’ve got it set up.
I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.” He glanced uncertainly
but with kindness at me, then first shook Jeanie’s hand, then mine.

“Take care of yourselves. Of each other. You’ve got a long road ahead.”

“One more question, Doctor,” I said. “If Teddy does wake up, could
he identify the person who shot him?”

“Usually people are left with no memory of the injury-causing
event,” he told me. “I wouldn’t hold out too much hope, though
anything’s possible.”

When he’d gone we sat in silence.

“It’s not your decision,” Jeanie finally said. “It’s our decision. I don’t
care if that’s the law or not. That’s how it is.”

“We’re getting ahead of ourselves.”

“Leo.” Her voice was sharp. “Don’t do this.”

I leaned against the wall again, grimacing with the agony of this
discussion, the idea of it. “We’ll decide together,” I conceded. “But I’m
not going to let him be a vegetable.”

“No one’s talking about that,” Jeanie snapped.

I glanced at my watch. It was seven thirty. “Are you going into work?”

She shook her head. “If I go into the office I’ll only get mired. I came
back from Mendocino early to be with Teddy, so I guess I’ll just stay.”

It made me feel better to be leaving, knowing that Jeanie would be
here. I could see by the disappointment in her eyes that she already
knew some excuse was coming, but I was eager to be gone. I glanced
at my watch again. “I should probably get home and put on a suit in
case this jury comes back today.”

“Go,” she said. “Put on your suit and come back.”

“I thought I might keep reading through the files. Someone has to
be working on this.”

“The police are working on it. Don’t you think you should be here?”

“This Detective Anderson, I don’t trust him. Someone who cares
about Teddy needs to be out there, trying to find the person who did
this. I think that’s what he’d want me to be doing right now.”

I was halfway down the hall before I remembered. I turned back.
“By the way, do you know anyone named Martha or Chris?”

I went home, changed back into my suit, drank some more coffee,
then walked over to the office. The phone was ringing as I arrived.
Tanya wasn’t there to pick it up. The call went to voice mail. I saw
that there were fourteen new messages. Tanya must have been right,
I thought with a sinking heart. The police must be out rounding up
Teddy’s clients from the list I’d faxed to Anderson.

I called the court to check in. Judge Iris’s clerk answered and told
me breathlessly that they were looking for me, that they’d been calling
Teddy’s office, that they were getting ready to go ahead without me.
My heart stopped, then beat again. Not a verdict already, I hoped. I
took a deep breath. “Did you try calling my cell phone?”

“The jury has a question,” she said instead of answering. “They came
back with it first thing this morning.”

I tried to ask again why she hadn’t tried to get ahold of me, but she
cut me off and gave me an earful. I was supposed to check in with the
court every morning at nine thirty while the jury was out, and I had
to be within fifteen minutes of the courtroom at all times. The judge
and prosecutor were waiting for me now. They could proceed in my
absence, if I was willing. I almost said yes, because I had just pulled
Keith Locke’s file and wanted to look through it. Then I thought of
the look in Melanie’s eyes when she rose to make her rebuttal to my
closing argument.

As I was locking the door on my way out the phone began ringing
once more. I let it ring.

The sun made my eyeballs feel like they were popping out. I kept
glancing over my shoulder for a cab as I walked up Sixth Street, earning
myself a crick in the neck, but there weren’t any. No surprise in
this part of town, or in any part of San Francisco, really.

I arrived at Judge Iris’s courtroom sweating and disheveled. The
deputies had brought in Ellis, who sat shackled all alone at the defense
table. He was still in his jail uniform.

Judge Iris was looking right at me when I came in. Apparently she’d
been sitting for some time staring at the unopened doors, like a terrier
at a squirrel hole.

She started speaking before I’d reached the defense table, her eyes
fixed on my forehead. “You’d better have a good reason for keeping
us waiting, Mr. Maxwell, but that doesn’t mean I have any desire to
hear it. You’re aware of my fifteen-minute rule. There are no excuses
for tardiness in my courtroom. I’ve brought your client here to witness
the consequences.”

She ordered the court clerk to enter a finding of civil contempt,
which carried with it a fine of a thousand dollars.

I tried to persuade myself that her heart wasn’t in it, that what she
really wanted to do was invite me back into her chambers, sit me down,
serve me tea in slender-handled cups, and listen to all my troubles. She
had her reputation to consider, though.

I hadn’t said a word and didn’t intend to. I felt Melanie’s eyes on
me but I didn’t turn.

Judge Iris went on with cheerful relief, evidently feeling refreshed
now that she’d managed to bleed me. “All right, now down to
business. It’s ten fourteen AM, and the jury has submitted a question
form.”

Ellis made a soft clucking sound with his tongue. “They took me
away from my program,” he whispered.

“Catch the rerun.”

Judge Iris glanced at us sternly. I allowed myself a sigh and bowed
my head.

She went on: “The question reads, ‘If we decide that one side has
committed perjury, does that mean that the other side automatically
wins?’” She looked up toward the DA’s table, her eyebrows raised, as
if ready to defer to Melanie.

“The way I see it, there’s only one way you can answer a question
like that,” Melanie said. “I think the only thing you can do is refer them
to the jury instructions you’ve already given. One-oh-five and two-two-six are right on point. ‘If you decide that a witness deliberately
lied about something significant in this case, you should consider not
believing anything that witness says.’”

“Counsel?”

“It sounds to me like they’ve taken two-two-six to heart already,
Judge,” I said. “The jury’s question goes much more directly to the
burden of proof and the presumption of innocence. I don’t know
which witness they’re referring to, whether it’s the state’s witness or
the defense’s, but their question doesn’t make any distinction between
perjury by a prosecution witness and perjury by a defense witness.
Given the state’s burden of proof, it matters very much which side
the jury believes committed perjury, and I think Your Honor should
make that clear. My fear is that they’re asking whether in a case of
suspected perjury they can disregard the state’s burden of proof and
find against the defense simply as a matter of principle. I think you
should reinstruct the jury that the state has the burden of proving
its case beyond a reasonable doubt, and if the state fails to do so, Mr.
Bradley is entitled to an acquittal.”