Small Great Things (40 page)

She wanted to get at the hate of them all, to pry at it and work at it until she found a little chink, and then pull out a pebble or a stone or a brick and then a part of the wall, and, once started, the whole edifice might roar down and be done away with.

—
R
AY
B
RADBURY,
T
HE
I
LLUSTRATED
M
AN

W
E 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.

O
N 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.

L
AST NIGHT,
K
ENNEDY
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.”

M
Y 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.

E
DISON 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.

L
AST 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.

F
IRST 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.

T
HE 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.