Authors: Gail Bowen
We caught up with each other in the lobby under the mosaic of the God of Laws. Zack rubbed his hands over his face and yawned. “Well, the ship has sailed,” he said. “I’m going to back to the office with Sam for a few minutes. After that, we’re free. What do you want to do?”
“What I want to do is irrelevant,” I said. “What I have to do is paint eyeballs for Taylor’s Halloween party. Are you up for that?”
“Hand me my brush,” Zack said.
CHAPTER
10
The days before the jury’s verdict were a time of limbo, but if this was limbo, I didn’t need Paradise. For weeks, Zack’s life had centred around Sam’s trial and now there was nothing to do but wait. I thought he would be preoccupied and on edge, but with Zack there were always surprises. After the case went to the jury, he spent a few hours at the office catching up, then at 5:30 p.m., he arrived at my house with a bottle of wine, and we made dinner together. We had eaten with Taylor and were clearing up when Delia Wainberg arrived with Isobel and Gracie Falconer. The girls had made a last-minute decision that everybody at the party should carve a pumpkin with prizes awarded to the coolest, the lamest, and the grossest, so Delia was taking them off on a final pumpkin run.
Alone at last, Zack and I settled at the kitchen table with a bowl of white floating candles and brushes and paints to transform the candles into bloodshot eyeballs. Zack set about his task with quiet concentration. A visitor from another planet might have believed he’d never seen the inside of a courtroom.
“This is nice,” he said.
“It’s called Ordinary Family Life,” I said.
Zack smiled. “Well, I like it. It’s good to think about something other than the case.”
“Then I miscalculated. I assumed you’d want to talk about the trial tonight, so I invited Charlie and Pete over.”
Zack applied a stroke of red to an eyeball and held it out to me. “Does this need more anything?”
“Taylor tells me the first rule of art is always take one thing away.”
“I notice Taylor chooses not to work in eyeballs,” Zack said. “What are these for, anyway?”
“The night of the party we float them in a bowl of slime and light them.”
Zack nodded. “As long as I know. And I don’t mind seeing Charlie. He’s been a reliable ally.”
“So I noticed,” I said. “Pete’s bringing over his new dog.”
“A new dog? When did that happen?”
“Today. I saw him this afternoon. He’s an English mastiff and he’s huge.”
“But good-natured?”
“Very. He’s just been neutered, but he seems pretty happy.”
Zack winced. “I wouldn’t be happy.”
“Well, Pantera’s braver than you – he was still in there smiling and twitching.”
Zack stopped painting. “Pantera, huh? That’s a nice tribute to a great metal band.”
“You know who Pantera is?”
“Everybody knows who Pantera is. The day Dimebag died was the 9/11 of rock.”
“Who was Dimebag?”
“Pantera’s one-time guitarist. He was shot by a deranged fan.”
I shook my head. “How do you know these things?”
Zack finished his eyeball and held it up for my approval.
“Perfect,” I said.
“Not bad,” he agreed. “Anyway, when I have lunch with my clients during a trial, we talk about what they want to talk about. One of my guys was a serious Pantera fan. After the trial was over, he sent me some
CDS.”
“To thank you for getting him off.”
“No, to console me for not getting him off.”
“There’s a lot about you that I don’t know,” I said.
“There’s a lot about you that I don’t know,” he said. “I thought that’s why we were getting married – to find out.”
“What happens if you don’t like what you find?”
Zack shrugged. “I’ll live with it,” he said. “Speaking of our marriage. When are we going tell your family?”
“Taylor’s birthday’s on a Friday. I was thinking we could invite Mieka and Greg and Angus and Leah down on the weekend to celebrate her birthday and make the big announcement.”
“Let’s invite the Falconers and the Wainbergs too. They’re as close to family as I have.”
“Sounds like a major shindig,” I said.
Zack looked at me hard. “You don’t look very happy about it – cold feet?”
“Just a twinge. Everything’s happened so fast with us.”
He reached for my hand. “Too fast?”
“No,” I said. “Every time I look at you, I know I don’t want a miss a moment of our life together.”
It was a nice moment, short-circuited as many nice moments in my home were by the arrival of one of my kids or their friends. This time the friend was Ethan, and he was positioned at what appeared to be his favourite post: the kitchen door.
I walked over and invited him in. He was wearing a black knit watch cap that made him appear older than thirteen. As always, he was jumpy and abrupt. “Is Taylor here?” he asked.
“She and Isobel and Gracie went out to buy more pumpkins for the party.”
“I didn’t think I’d be invited,” Ethan said. “But Taylor asked me today at school.” For a beat, the three of us stared at one another, waiting for deliverance. “I should get out of here,” Ethan said. “If Taylor sees me, she’ll think I’m stalking her.”
It was an exit line, but Ethan didn’t exit. Finally, accepting the inevitable, Zack threw Ethan a lifeline. “Why don’t you stay for a while? I’ve wanted to talk to you since I noticed you in the courtroom.”
“You
saw
me?” Ethan’s voice cracked with alarm.
“You were always somewhere around the doors at the back, right? So what’s the deal? Are you interested in becoming a lawyer?”
“No,” Ethan said. “I’m interested in justice.”
Zack’s mouth twitched to suppress a smile. “They’re not supposed to be mutually exclusive.”
Ethan flushed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like a dork.”
“Neither did I,” Zack said. “So, do you think justice will be done in this trial?”
“I don’t even know what justice is in this trial. At first I thought I did; now I’m not so sure. That’s why I keep coming back.”
“That’s why I keep coming back too,” Zack said.
“To make sure that the right people are punished.”
“And to make sure that the right people go free,” Zack said.
“That’s a noble aim.” Ethan’s fingers crept towards the pentangle around his neck. “The poet says that Gawain possessed five virtues that made him a noble knight – love and friendship for other men, freedom from sin, courtesy that never failed, and pity. His five senses were free of sin, his five fingers never failed him.” Ethan’s eyes were glazed as he quoted the ancient lines. “ ‘And all these fives met in one man / Joined to each other, each without end / Set in five perfect points / Wholly distinct, yet part of one whole / And closed, wherever it ended or began.’ ”
For a moment he seemed to exist in a parallel universe; then he vaulted back to ours. He stood up so suddenly that, in what appeared to be his signature move, he knocked against the table. Zack reached and caught his jar of paint just in time.
“Now you really will think that I’m a dork,” Ethan said.
“Not at all,” Zack said gently. “I enjoyed our talk, Ethan. Maybe we can do it again sometime.”
“Okay,” Ethan said. “I’d better get home.”
“I’ll tell Taylor you stopped by,” I said.
Ethan looked stricken. “No. Please. Don’t. She’ll think I’m insane.”
And with that, he raced off into the dark.
Zack stared at the door through which Ethan disappeared. “I’d forgotten how much being thirteen can hurt,” he said.
“Was it a bad time for you?”
“Apart from being friendless, hornier than hell, and convinced that the only person I’d ever have sex with was myself, it was a blast.”
“Well you have me now. All your troubles are over.”
“And believe me, I’m grateful. When I was thirteen, I never thought my troubles would be over. I’ll bet Ethan doesn’t think so either. What’s his home situation?”
“His parents are divorced. He was living with his father, but his father’s new wife doesn’t want Ethan. He’s with his mother now. She doesn’t seem to want him either.”
“So faced with a shitty world, Ethan spends his time with Gawain.”
“And longs to spend time with Taylor,” I said. “And that is beginning to trouble Taylor, which means it’s beginning to trouble me.”
As soon as the girls got back with their pumpkins, they began drawing up rules for the contest, an activity that was abandoned the moment Pete’s truck pulled up and Pantera unfolded himself from the back seat. Ungainly, enthusiastic, graceless, and boundlessly energetic, he was irresistible. The girls ran him around the backyard, then I brought Willie out and everybody bundled up and came out on the deck to watch Willie and Pantera get acquainted. The night was crisp and starry – perfect weather to sit on the deck and observe the meeting of the titans. But we had miscast our titans. After a few rips around the yard with Willie, Pantera spotted Zack, loped over, dropped his great maw on Zack’s lap, and refused to budge. Rejected, Willie slunk over to me. Pete offered wieners and praise in an effort to induce his new dog to play, but Pantera wasn’t buying. Finally, we accepted the inevitable. The girls drifted back inside to plan; the rest of us stayed outside and talked.
For Charlie, only one topic mattered: the trial. “So what’s going to happen?” he asked Zack.
Zack rubbed Pantera’s head. “Serge Kujawa used to say that speculating on what a jury is doing and why was a total waste of time, so he spent all his time speculating.”
“So if you’re speculating, you must have some idea about the outcome.”
“I’d say our chances are fifty-fifty,” Zack said. “If Linda Fritz had been there all along, the odds would have been different.”
Charlie pounced. “But Linda Fritz wasn’t there.”
“And the charge she decided on was. That was a break for us. With attempted murder, the Crown has to prove intention to kill and that’s difficult to prove. If the Crown had gone for a lesser charge, it would have been a slam-dunk for them – even with Garth.”
“Then why didn’t they go for the slam-dunk?” Pete asked.
Zack absently wiped Pantera drool off his slacks. “Why do people do anything? But Linda’s a person of principle, and I think she genuinely believed that when Sam pulled that gun he intended to kill Kathryn Morrissey. She also knew that Sam had the money to mount a strong defence.”
“And that’s relevant?” Pete asked.
“There’s an old saying, ‘The more evenly matched the lawyers, the better the chance of justice.’ Linda knew Sam had enough money to get a fair kick at the can. And truthfully, no matter what the jury decides, I think Sam had a good defence. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m going inside. It’s getting cold out here.”
I stood back to watch how Pantera would react when Zack wheeled away. Pantera watched for a moment, then trotted off behind the chair as if he’d been doing it all his life. I felt the wisps of a challenge developing in our lives.
The girls’ Halloween party was Zack’s introduction to pre-teen, pre-dating culture, and he was as captivated as Margaret Mead had been when she clapped eyes on Samoa. The ritual of boys and girls trying to impress one another while pretending not to be impressed by one another was intriguing, and the fact that these girls and boys were in costume gave the ceremony an extra fillip. As there had been every year since my kids were little, there was a solid contingent of
Star Wars
characters: Princess Leia with her light sabre; Queen Amidala with her royal pistol, Luke Skywalker and two Darth Vaders. Marge Simpson made an appearance with a swarm of bats and a half-dozen pacifiers nesting in her elaborate cone of hair; Grace, Isobel, and Taylor had dressed as triplets – a clever choice because they were inseparable, and a funny one because they were as physically different as it was possible for three girls to be. Zack had a lot of fun spotting and identifying costumes, but there was one that baffled him. “What’s that kid supposed to be?” he whispered, pointing to a boy with a plastic dagger and little boxes of cereal stapled to his track suit.
“I thought you’d get that one,” I said.
He frowned. “Well, I don’t.”
“He’s a cereal killer.”
Zack beamed. “Clever.”
We’d doled out the chili and were just about to slip into the family room with Zack’s collection of
The Simpsons’
Halloween episodes when Ethan arrived. He was late, breathless, and without a costume.
“Am I too late?” he asked.
“Of course not,” I said. “There’s some food left if you’re hungry.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I don’t feel like eating. But Taylor mentioned something about carving pumpkins, and I’d kind of like to do that.”
“Then you’re timing is perfect,” I said. “Because they’re just about to start.” I reached into my utensil drawer and pulled out my favourite paring knife. “Take this,” I said. “Good carving tools are in short supply tonight.”
“Thanks,” Ethan said. “I’ve got my own knife.” He sounded as if he was close to tears. I touched his hand. “Is everything okay?”
“Nothing’s ever okay for me,” he said bleakly, then he turned and walked into the party.
Zack and I were just nicely into our third episode when my daughter popped in with the ballot boxes for the winning pumpkins. Taylor had shown me sketches of the design she was planning. It was of a phoenix, and as she described how the flames would flicker behind the bird rising in flames, I figured she was a lock for the coolest, but Ethan’s mystical heraldic coat of arms with its glowing pentangle surrounded by a ring of flaming hearts won hands down. His prize was three hours of Phantom bowling at the Golden Mile Lanes, and whether it was Taylor’s genuine delight at his win or the fact that the other kids had voted for him, Ethan was ecstatic.
“Maybe it’ll work out for him, after all,” Zack said.
“I hope so,” I said. “No kid should think his life is over at thirteen.”
“No,” Zack said. “C’mon, enough gloom. Mr. Burns is just about to remove Homer’s brain.”
We looked at each other and recited Mr. Burns’s trenchant line. “ ‘Dammit, Smithers. This isn’t rocket science. It’s brain surgery.’ ”
Later, as he zipped his jacket and pulled out his car keys, Zack gave the pumpkins glowing in our living room a final glance. “Is it always this much fun around here?” he asked.
“Stick around,” I said. “The best is yet to be.”
The next morning when I walked into St. Paul’s Cathedral for the 10:30 service, Zack was at the back of the church waiting.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“I thought you’d be pleased.”