Yahav wrote, Is defense still presenting? Defense could still call whoever. Or if they already testified, could recall during rebuttal after state closes. What happened???
Really nothing, I answered, more accurately than I would have liked. Just curious.
28
A correction: Beth was gone, but, I discovered, not far. On her Instagram, she’d posted a photo of herself and her handsome husband at a fire pit on a restaurant terrace. She’d labeled it #selfcare and #r&r, and had tagged a ski resort in Stowe, Vermont—one that looked, from its website, to offer luxury spa services and locally sourced food. It clicked now why she’d waited for her husband to pick her up; they were having a nice weekend before his surgery.
I scrolled through her older photos: Beth on a footbridge, Beth’s husband in a tux on a crosswalk, Beth’s kids sprawled across her bed in what looked like a magazine shoot, and possibly was. One photo showed her getting vaccinated last spring, blue eyes welling with happy tears above her mask.
I didn’t know what I was looking for. I didn’t know if she’d be able to help, or willing, and nothing here would answer those questions. But I had to try. If I ruined her weekend, I ruined her weekend.
Alder was back in court, but Britt was not—and Britt could be trusted with discretion. She was the one I called to ask if she’d drive me to Vermont. The sequestration rules were my last concern. Britt had driven here from Smith, and she picked me up in front of the Calvin Inn in her Kia.
As we drove, Britt said, “If we’re right—I bet that’s why Robbie brought his family. Don’t you think? He was scared of something like this happening. He wants to look good.” Britt was convinced by Alder’s theory, even if the defense team wasn’t. They weren’t about to discuss it on the podcast yet, but they could always do that down the road, if need be.
The drive took us two and a half hours—the roads, as we got up into the mountains, still packed in places with opaque gray ice.
I asked Britt if she was seeing anyone at Smith and she said, “I’m still with Alder.”
I was glad she was looking at the road and didn’t see my gobsmacked face. To the extent that I’d considered it at all, I’d assumed both of them were interested in the same sex. And I’d never had the slightest hint that they were an item.
“That’s so great!” I managed to say after too long a pause. “How long has it been now?”
She shrugged. “I guess since your class, basically. The long-distance thing has been chill.”
Asking more seemed invasive, so I dropped it. But the news delighted me. Proof that it wasn’t only a trail of chaos I was leaving behind.
Britt said, “I’ve been feeling optimistic. Even before today. The problem is, that’s usually a bad sign.”
“I know what you mean.” I’ve always preferred to hedge against optimism. But hope—wasn’t that how Omar was staying alive? Knowing hell might one day end?
All day I’d been filling with hope for Omar. I’d imagined him stepping out into the wind of a spring day. I’d imagined him moving in with his younger brother, and the new, soft sheets his brother might buy him. I imagined him eating all the foods he wanted. Ice cream, hot bread, a beautiful salad. I imagined him getting a massage, getting acupuncture, seeing a chiropractor, lighting up a joint. I imagined him moving through space the way he used to, graceful and muscled, on springs. Getting in a car and driving fast, fast, fast.
Of course, even if his conviction were vacated, it might be two or three years until a new trial. Maybe longer, if there were more waves of COVID. In the meantime, the state could appeal and the New Hampshire Supreme Court could reverse the judge’s decision, just like that. It was unlikely that bail would be granted, since it wasn’t granted back in ’95. And all of this was the best-case scenario, the pipe dream.
We arrived, finally, at a resort much larger than I’d anticipated, a parking lot teeming with out-of-state SUVs.
“God, I didn’t think this through,” I said. I’d had some vision of staking the place out all day, but it was already three p.m., and I didn’t want to make Britt retrace these mountain roads in the dark.
She messed around on her phone, then put it on speaker, deftly navigating the phone menu of the resort spa until she reached a silken-voiced woman. “Yes,” Britt said, “my name is Beth Docherty. I believe my husband made an appointment for me today, but he forgot to tell me what time.”
Shuffling and confusion on the other end, and the woman said, “I have you as already checked in for your 2:30 facial. Are you not—”
Britt hung up on her and tossed me her phone like a hot potato, and we sat gasping with laughter.
I said, “My friends and I could’ve used you at Granby. We spent so much time pranking people on the dorm phones. You never knew who’d pick up.”
29
I waited on a cushioned bench outside the second-floor spa, a place called Seasons! that emanated a soothing shea butter scent even through its marbled glass doors. Britt had sauntered into the business center like she lived there and headphoned up to work on edits.
Something I wish I’d figured out earlier in life: Walk into any place like you belong, and you will.
I killed time watching a video Jerome had sent of Silvie jumping rope on our driveway. Her legs were so strong, her face so jubilant with concentration and success. She jumped normally, then crossed her arms, then normal, crossed, normal, crossed. A new trick.
I thought of a friend in LA who’d said recently, of her own daughter, “It feels wrong to give her all this happiness and confidence when we know what’s coming. Seventh grade’s gonna hit like a wall. It feels like fattening a pig for slaughter.”
But what was the alternative? Starving the pig?
Beth emerged from the spa looking down at her phone. She was makeup-less, her face raw but glowing, and she wore spa-issued green foam flip-flops, cotton between her freshly magentaed toes. She carried her shoes in her hand. I stood from the bench with enough urgency to attract her attention.
She looked me fully up and down, as if the bottom half of my body might explain what I was doing here. She said, “What. The fuck.”
I had considered whether I’d explain or apologize or try to pretend it was all a coincidence, but what I’d settled on was “I’m going to buy you a drink downstairs and then I’ll get out of your hair forever. But you need to come with me right now.” When you’re kidnapping someone, it’s best to be assertive.
And despite muttering to herself and sending a voice message to her husband that “some incredibly stupid shit just came up,” she did follow me down the long hallway, down the grand curving staircase, and into an oak-and-red-leather bar lined with photographs of celebrities who’d stayed at the resort over the years.
We sat at a small, sturdy table under a signed picture of Bing Russell in a cowboy hat. A waiter was immediately upon us, filling glasses with ice water and telling us they were short-staffed but he’d be right back, which Beth seemed put out by; it implied we were staying more than thirty seconds.
She said, “Well?” Her eyes were the crystalline blue of a movie villain’s; her pupils had shrunk to pinpricks.