I said, “That’s the main reason he’s up there, the drug thing. They’re not putting him on trial. Plus to show no one else was investigated.”
“Sure,” Mike said. “Sure.” He noticed the bread basket we’d brought from my table and folded a large slice of baguette impressively into his mouth.
Mike was an interesting case study: someone with a career’s worth of experience in human rights, who still couldn’t quite handle justice if it would affect his buddy.
Not that I was callous about the fallout for Robbie. It was a source of nagging guilt for me that in reopening the case, we’d brought him the attention he never got the first time around, pre-internet. Colleagues and friends would now be looking at him at least with pity, if not unfair suspicion. I didn’t want to imagine what people might say to his kids. There was a website, not terribly active, called RobbieSerenhoIsGuilty.com. Dane Rubra had fixated most recently on the theory of both Robbie and Thalia leaving their dorms in the middle of the night to drink, Thalia’s time of death being incorrect, Robbie having a ’roid rage issue. Which was ridiculous, because coke and pot maybe, but Robbie Serenho was not on steroids. He’d been all wiry muscle, designed for flying downhill.
“Is he doing okay?” I asked.
Mike just shrugged.
“Show me a picture of your nephew,” I said, and he spent a minute on his phone, then showed me a boy who looked exactly like himself at fourteen, only a bit like Lola, too, foggy-eyed, thin-lipped.
I said, “He’s gonna break some hearts.”
I once told a male friend that an army photo of his grandfather, back when he’d looked just like my friend, was the hottest thing I’d ever seen. I once told a writer that I had a crush on his （clearly autobiographical） main character. I think of this as oblique flirting, and it works surprisingly well. To be clear, I wasn’t coming on to Mike Stiles, exactly. I was more demonstrating—on animal instinct—the fact that I could. It was a display of dominance. I was now a person who could amuse myself by flirting with him, or not, as I saw fit.
It was also part of my broader attempt to steer the conversation away from the hearing, but we were back on it just moments later, Sakina saying that if things took as long in medicine as they did in law, all her patients would die.
“I know they have to do things right,” she said, “but I have to do things right at three in the morning sometimes. We don’t just wait for the perfect moment. Like, sorry, lady, I can’t give you a C-section for two more months because we need this paperwork first.”
“The wheels of justice—” Mike started, far too sincerely.
“The wheels of justice came off the wagon a long time ago,” I said.
He laughed, sort of. He said, “Were you always funny?”
I hadn’t meant to be.
Sakina said, “It’s turning into a class reunion up in here. You ever think the three of us would be drinking together? You ask me in 1995 who I’m having drinks with from Granby in 2022, and what are the chances my answer is Bodie Kane and Mike Stiles? And, Mike, look at Bodie! Didn’t she turn out hot? Who could have predicted?”
Mike looked mortified, but I couldn’t tell if it was because he was a married man being asked to appraise a woman’s looks, or because he was offended on my teenage behalf. He reached for his beer like it would save him, and raised it. “To the present,” he said.
8
In late 2020, just as we got the news that Omar’s hearing would be further delayed, I got a call from Fran and assumed it was related. She had mostly forgiven my meddling once the blood was discovered. Or rather, she was still upset, on behalf of Granby, but more at the world than at me personally.
But she wasn’t calling about the case; she was calling to tell me Carlotta had stage 3C breast cancer. “Inoperable is apparently not the same as untreatable, though,” Fran said.
I understood that Carlotta only had energy for one Granby phone call, but it still stung that she would call Fran and not me. I swallowed my selfish hurt and said, “Which breast?”
“What?”
“Which breast?”
“God, I don’t know. Probably both at this point. Does it matter?”
It did, it mattered to me, because I could still feel Peewee Walcott’s fingers digging into my right breast. Which meant he’d grabbed Carlotta’s left breast. And although it made no sense at all, I knew he had damaged her, had planted something in her that would, twenty-five years later, mutate her cells, turn her body against itself. It was impossible, but it was true.
Her kids were eleven and eight and six. The treatments were going to be brutal, an aggressive poisoning of every cell in her body.
It worked, somewhat. Her hair even grew back afterward. But now, a year later, she was sick again. The cancer had metastasized, and Fran had set up a second crowdfunding page. The kids were now thirteen and nine and seven.
There had been a shift, a few years back: For a long time, when any classmates from high school or college passed away, it was a sudden accident, something fast that left no space for suffering, just for the shock of the survivors. But then a college friend had died a year back from leukemia, and then another from a brain tumor, and another from drawn-out COVID complications and a weak heart. And here was Carlotta, her skin waxen in photos, her life stretched thin like the last impossible pull of Silly Putty before it finally turns to air. I knew that in thirty years, there’d be a steady stream of regular obituaries describing lives well lived. But this middle phase, these deaths of people in their early forties, felt the cruelest. Maybe because there were always kids involved, ones far too young to leave behind.
Carlotta wasn’t going to make it. I’d known it for weeks now, I’d felt it as a dull ache, but then Sakina confirmed it as we walked back to the inn that night. And Sakina knew what she was talking about.
I’d been right: I’d found out eventually from Carlotta herself, it was her left breast. Well, now it was everywhere, in her bones and liver and lungs. But it had started in her left breast.
9
Early the next morning, before they were due in court, I met for practice testimony with two of the assistant defense counsel in the “Blue Ballroom” of the Calvin Inn—a room that resembled a ballroom only in size. Its blueness came from an elaborate paisley carpet that must have camouflaged a few decades of stains. They’d pushed banquet tables together, and we sat on padded white-and-gold chairs with high backs, ones clearly meant for weddings.
We’d originally thought I might testify that afternoon, but the state was taking far more time than anticipated to cross-examine each witness, and now it was likely I’d go late tomorrow. More time to second-guess every word I planned to say. Britt would take the stand today, I knew from Alder’s texts, and speak to the discovery of the blood evidence. I’d told Alder he could let me know who was testifying, as long as he didn’t report what they said. He was also allowed to tell how the judge seemed （Looks like a serious dude who’s secretly a fun grandpa, Alder wrote, unhelpfully. Wish I could read his mindddd） and how Omar was doing （Hard to tell. He’s not supposed to react . . .）， but I’d get to see both those things for myself soon.