Small Great Things (31 page)

I was dimly aware of Francis speaking, of people clapping. But I was pulled toward Brit, like we were the last two people on earth.

We might as well have been.

“
M
Y CLIENT HATES ME,”
I
tell Micah, as we are standing in the kitchen washing dishes.

“I'm sure she doesn't hate you.”

I glance at him. “She thinks I'm a racist.”

“She has a point,” Micah says mildly, and I turn to him, my eyebrows shooting up to my hairline. “You're white and she's not, and you both happen to live in a world where white people have all the power.”

“I'm not saying that her life hasn't been harder than mine,” I argue. “I'm not one of those people who thinks that just because we elected a black president we're magically postracial. I work with minority clients every day who've been screwed by the healthcare system and the criminal justice system and the educational system. I mean, prisons are run as a business.
Someone's
profiting from keeping a steady stream of people going to jail.”

We had hosted some of Micah's colleagues for dinner. I'd had high hopes of serving a gourmet meal but wound up making a taco bar and offering a store-bought bakery pie that I passed off as being homemade after I broke off the edges of the crust a little to make it slightly less perfect. Throughout the evening, my mind wandered. Granted, when conversation drifted toward rates of retinal nerve fiber layer loss in contralateral eyes of glaucoma patients with unilateral progression, I couldn't be blamed. But I already was obsessing over my earlier argument with Ruth. If I was in the right, how come I couldn't stop rehashing what I'd said?

“But you just don't bring up race in a criminal trial,” I say. “It's like one of those unspoken rules, you know, like
Don't use your brights in oncoming traffic
…or
Don't be the asshole who brings a full cart to the twelve items or less lane.
Even the cases based on stand-your-ground laws steer clear of it, and ninety-nine percent of the time it's a white guy in Florida who got scared by a black kid and pulled a trigger. I get that Ruth feels singled out by her employer. But none of that has to do with a murder charge.”

Micah passes me a platter to dry. “Don't take this the wrong way, babe,” he says, “but sometimes when you're trying to explain something and you think you're dropping a hint, you're actually more like a Mack truck.”

I turn to him, waving my dish towel. “What if one of your patients had cancer, and you were trying to treat it, but she also kept telling you she had poison ivy. Wouldn't you tell her it was more important to focus on getting rid of the cancer, and
then
you'd take care of the rash?”

Micah considers this. “Well, I'm not an oncologist. But sometimes, when you've got an itch, you keep scratching it and you don't even realize that you're doing it.”

I am totally lost. “What?”

“It was
your
metaphor.”

I sigh. “My client hates me,” I say again.

Just then the phone rings. It is nearly 10:30, the time for calls about heart attacks and accidents. I grab the receiver with a damp hand. “Hello?”

“Is this Kennedy McQuarrie?” booms a deep voice, one I know but cannot place.

“It is.”

“Excellent! Ms. McQuarrie, this is Reverend Wallace Mercy.”

The
Wallace Mercy?

I don't even realize I've said that aloud until he chuckles. “Rumors of my superstardom have been greatly exaggerated,” he paraphrases. “I am calling about a friend we have in common—Ruth Jefferson.”

Immediately, I go into lockdown mode. “Reverend Mercy, I'm not at liberty to discuss a client.”

“I assure you, you can. Ruth has asked me to serve as an adviser, of sorts…”

I clench my teeth. “My client hasn't signed anything stating that.”

“The release, yes, of course. I emailed one to her an hour ago. It will be on your desk tomorrow morning.”

What. The. Hell. Why would Ruth go and sign something like that without consulting me? Why wouldn't she even mention that she'd been talking to someone like Wallace Mercy?

But I already know the answer: because I told Ruth her case had nothing to do with racial discrimination, that's why. And Wallace Mercy is about nothing
but
racial discrimination.

“Listen to me,” I say, my heart pounding so hard that I can hear its pulse in every word. “Getting Ruth Jefferson acquitted is
my
job, not
yours
. You want to boost your ratings? Don't think you're going to do it on my back.”

I end the call, punching the button with such vehemence that the handset goes spinning out of my hand and skitters across the kitchen floor. Micah turns off the faucet. “Damn cordless phones,” he says. “It was so much more satisfying back when you could slam them down, right?” He approaches me, his hands in his pockets. “You want to tell me what that was all about?”

“That was Wallace Mercy on the phone. Ruth Jefferson wants him to
advise
her.”

Micah whistles long and low. “You're right,” he says. “She hates you.”

R
UTH OPENS THE
door in her nightgown and bathrobe. “Please,” I say. “I only need five minutes of your time.”

“Isn't it a little late?”

I don't know if she's talking about the fact that it's almost 11:00
P.M
. or the fact that we parted on such a divisive note early this afternoon. I choose to assume the former. “I knew if I called you'd recognize my number and ignore it.”

She considers this. “Probably.”

I pull my sweater more tightly around me. After Wallace Mercy's call, I got in the car and started driving. I didn't even grab a coat first. All I could think was that I needed to intercept Ruth before she mailed back that release form.

I take a deep breath. “It's not that I don't care about how you were treated—I do. It's that I know having Wallace Mercy involved is going to cost you in the short run, if not the long run.”

Ruth watches me shiver again. “Come in,” she says, after a moment.

The couch is already made up with pillows and sheets and a blanket, so I sit at the kitchen table as her son pokes his head out of the bedroom. “Mama? What's going on?”

“I'm fine, Edison. Go to bed.”

He looks dubious, but he backs up and closes the door.

“Ruth,” I beg, “don't sign that release.”

She takes a seat at the table, too. “He promised me that he wouldn't interfere with whatever you're doing in court—”

“You'll sabotage yourself,” I say bluntly. “Think about it—angry mobs in the street, your face on TV every night, legal pundits weighing in on the case on morning shows—you don't want them taking control of the narrative of this case before
we
have a chance to.” I gesture to the closed door of Edison's bedroom. “What about your son? Are you ready to have him dragged into the public eye? Because that's what happens when you become a symbol. The world knows everything about you, and your past, and your family, and crucifies you. Your name will be just as familiar as Trayvon Martin's. You're never going to get your life back.”

She meets my gaze. “Neither did he.”

The truth of that statement separates us like a canyon. I look down into that abyss and see all the reasons why Ruth shouldn't do this; she looks down and no doubt sees all the reasons why she
should
.

“Ruth, I know you have no reason to trust me, especially given the way white people have treated you recently. But if Wallace Mercy grandstands, you won't be safe. The last thing you want is for your case to be tried in the media. Please, let's do this my way. Give it a chance.” I hesitate. “I'm begging you.”

She folds her arms. “What if I tell you I want the jury to know what happened to me? To hear my side of the story?”

I nod, striking a bargain. “Then we put you on the stand,” I promise.

T
HE MOST INTERESTING
thing about Jack DeNardi is that he has a rubber band ball on his desk the size of a newborn's head. Other than that he is exactly what you would expect to find working in a dingy cubicle in the Mercy–West Haven Hospital office: paunch, gray skin, comb-over. He's a paper pusher, and the only reason I'm here is that I'm fishing. I want to see if there's anything they'd say about Ruth that might help her—or that is going to hurt her.

“Twenty years,” Jack DeNardi says. “That's how long she worked here.”

“How many times in those twenty years was Ruth promoted?” I ask.

“Let's see.” He pores through the files. “Once.”

“Once in twenty years?” I say, incredulous. “Doesn't that seem low to you?”

Jack shrugs. “I'm really not at liberty to discuss that.”

“Why is that?” I press. “You're part of a hospital. Isn't your job to help people?”

“Patients,” he clarifies. “Not employees.”

I snort. Institutions are allowed to scrutinize their personnel and find and label every flaw—but no one ever turns the magnifying glass back on them.

He scrolls through some more paperwork. “The term used in her most recent performance review was
prickly
.”

I'm not going to disagree with that.

“Clearly Ruth Jefferson is qualified. But from what I can gather in her file, she was passed over for promotions because she was seen by her superiors as a little…uppity.”

I frown. “Ruth's superior, Marie Malone…how long has she been working here?”

He enters a few keystrokes into his computer. “Roughly ten years.”

“So someone who worked here for ten years was giving
Ruth
orders—dubious ones at that—and maybe Ruth questioned them from time to time? Does that sound like she's being uppity…or just assertive?”

He turns to me. “I couldn't say.”

I stand up. “Thanks for your time, Mr. DeNardi.” I gather my coat and my briefcase, and just before I cross the threshold I turn. “Uppity…or assertive. Is it possible the adjective changes depending on the color of the employee?”

“I resent that implication, Ms. McQuarrie.” Jack DeNardi presses his lips together. “Mercy–West Haven does not discriminate based on race, creed, religion, or sexual orientation.”

“Oh, okay. I see,” I say. “Then it was just dumb luck that Ruth Jefferson was the employee you chose to throw to the wolves.”

As I walk out of the hospital, I consider that none of this conversation can or will be used in court. I'm not even sure what made me turn back at the last minute and toss that final question to the HR employee.

Except, perhaps, that Ruth is rubbing off on me.

T
HAT WEEKEND, A
cold rain pelts the windows. Violet and I sit at the coffee table, coloring. Violet is scribbling across the page, without any regard for the predrawn outline of a raccoon in her coloring book. “Grandma likes to color inside the lines,” my daughter informs me. “She says it's the right way.”

“There is no right way or wrong way,” I say automatically. I point to her explosion of reds and yellows. “Look how pretty yours is.”

Who came up with that rule anyway? Why are there even lines?

When Micah and I went on our honeymoon to Australia, we spent three nights camping in the red center of the country, where the ground was cracked like a parched throat and the night sky looked like a bowl of diamonds that had been upended. We met an Aboriginal man, who showed us the Emu in the Sky, the constellation near the Southern Cross that is not a dot-to-dot puzzle, like our constellations, but the spaces in between the dots—nebulas swirling against the Milky Way to form the long neck and dangling legs of the great bird. I couldn't find it, at first. And then, once I did, it was all I could see.

When my cellphone starts to ring and I recognize Ruth's number, I immediately pick up. “Is everything all right?” I ask.