“Will you go tomorrow?”
“I think I will go when the jury is ready to decide. I want to hear what they decide. Do you think that will be tomorrow or the next day? Or later?”
“I don’t have any idea.”
“Well, you let me know. Please. If you can. I’m sorry, Raymond. I know you wanted me to go. But I have a long, sordid history with death and dying. When something brings it back up, it just knocks the legs right out from under me. Not that Luis’s death in the present is not enough, but the combination of past and present is more than I can bear.”
He stood a moment, his shoulder leaning against the doorjamb, hoping she would volunteer more about her past. Failing that, he hoped he would discover that he had grown into someone who was brave enough to ask.
Neither wish came true.
“One thing I want to ask you before I go,” he said, but it was a milder, easier thing. At least, he hoped it was. “Last night when you met the baby. You were so thrilled. And then all of a sudden . . . you . . . weren’t.”
“True.”
He leaned in silence for a few additional seconds, wondering if it would be right to ask more. As it turned out, he didn’t need to.
“At first I was just so taken by him,” she said, “and how perfect and innocent and vulnerable he is. And for a while that seemed only like a wonderful thing. And then I started to worry about the world into which he’s just been born. What will it do to him? How much will it take from him? Look how much it’s taken from him already, and before he could even so much as come out of his mother and look around to see what he’s gotten himself into.”
He waited, but she did not seem inclined to say more. He glanced at her clock radio and saw he didn’t have a lot of time to spare. Besides, nothing he could say would be any more optimistic than her assessment.
“Okay,” he said. “You just rest. I’ll come by later and tell you how it went.”
“Ms. Hatfield,” the defense attorney said to his client, “will you please explain to the jury why you turn off your hearing aids when you’re walking on the street?”
It was nearly three hours into the morning court session. Almost the whole session so far had consisted of the defendant testifying, questioned by her own attorney.
Raymond looked down at his notes and realized he hadn’t typed much. Because she hadn’t said much. Granted, she had spoken many, many words. But in Raymond’s mind they didn’t seem to add up to anything.
Raymond felt he could sum up the whole morning session in just a sentence or two.
Look at me; I’m a nice person. I’m just like you.
But it would have felt weird to type that in his notes. Besides, he didn’t think their campaign was working. She was nothing like him, and he didn’t think she was a nice person. She was defensive. That was all he could see or feel. Defensiveness.
He looked up at her face in that split second before she spoke again. She had big, round cheeks. Plump. They seemed a strange contrast to her nose and chin, which were sharp. Her brown eyes were small and set strangely close together.
“Believe me, if you wore hearing aids, you’d understand. They amplify background noises. It’s very irritating. It’s grating, you know?”
“Okay,” her attorney said. “I think we understand. No more questions.”
Raymond thought it was a weird place to end the testimony. He wasn’t sure what the defense attorney felt he had just accomplished.
He typed a few quick notes, then looked up to see the prosecutor approach the witness stand and the defendant.
“I’m not at all sure I do understand,” he said. “So I’d like to clarify this, in case the jury is confused as well.”
“What don’t you understand?” she asked.
Defensive.
“Why don’t you just turn the hearing aid down until the background noise is bearable?”
“You can’t understand unless you wear them.”
“That really doesn’t answer my question. Help us understand.”
“It’s a very grating noise, even on low volume. The traffic and all. It’s artificial sounding, like static. It irritates me.”
“I should think it would be an important safety issue to have it on.”
“In what respect?” She sounded suspicious. As if he were trying to sell her something. Something she knew better than to buy.
“What if you were crossing the street and there was a car coming?”
“I look both ways.”