35

For David, the worst part of having the girls with him was confronting what a crotchety old fussbudget he’d become.

He liked to think of himself as fairly relaxed and easygoing, but now the smallest things bugged him inordinately. Lindsay, for example, always left a dusting of grounds around the coffeemaker. Jordan, although she was dainty in most ways, found it impossible to sprinkle sugar on her cereal without scattering a quarter teaspoon next to her bowl. David found himself muttering each morning after the girls took off for school, when he was left to wipe the counters. It was such a little thing, but he’d asked them three times, and they’d promised, and it still made no difference. Had he always been such a crab?

He reminded himself that they were good about putting their dishes in the dishwasher and their shoes in the mudroom most of the time. Still, it pained him when he came home and found clothes and books dumped on the sofa and Lindsay’s softball equipment and Jordan’s My Little Ponies scattered everywhere. The constant noise of television or discordant pop music left him edgy and off balance.

Both girls made amazingly frequent use of the toilet facilities. On one disastrous occasion, the girls’ bathroom ran out of paper, and David had to promise to close his eyes while he threw a borrowed wad from the roll in his bathroom to Jordan, who was stranded with her bare bottom on the seat, very concerned that he might get a peek at her.

One incident where his lack of equilibrium reached life-­threatening proportions was emblematic. Jordan’s new friend Brianna was teaching Jordan how to play jacks, and Jordan had been practicing on David’s bathroom floor, the bounciest locale for her little red ball. Jordan picked up afterward but overlooked one jack, which David of course stepped on with his full weight the next morning as he emerged from the shower. It hurt like blazes, and as he hopped around on one foot, he lost his balance and crashed over sideways into the bathtub.

By some miracle he didn’t seriously injure himself, but as he was floundering back up—jarred, naked, and soaking wet—Lindsay banged on the door asking if he was okay. He had an idiotic moment of panic that she would open the door and catch him in the altogether. As he snatched at a towel, he drove her off by shouting out that he was okay and everything was all right. She wouldn’t go away at first, trying to interrogate him through the door about what had happened. He told her to never mind. He was fine. Really.

Things like this kept happening. He felt as though he was losing command of his life.

Worse than the physical disruption was the constant sense of being in the dark about what was going on with the girls. David learned from Jordan that Brianna was being raised by a single dad, a carpenter named Hank who encouraged his daughter, and Jordan, to call him by his first name. A quiet word with one of the deputy marshals got him a records check on Hank that turned up a twenty-year-old possession of marijuana conviction as well as an arrest for DUI, later dismissed. This could mean anything. When he briefly met Hank as he was dropping Jordan off, he noticed that the guy had garish tattoos on his arms and the side of his neck. He suggested to Jordan that she might like to invite Brianna over to their house more often. She replied that Brianna’s dad had built an awesome playroom in their basement. Sheila Norcross, he imagined, must have worked out some way to manage these situations, but he was lost.

The problems with Lindsay were even more acute. He wanted to know as much as possible about what was up with her, and she for some reason seemed to want him to know hardly anything. She “needed her space.” One weekend night, she told him she was meeting new friends at a hockey game and going out for pizza afterward, which seemed an unobjectionable, even positive, development. But, after he dropped her off at the rink, it struck him that she was perfectly capable of heading off anywhere once his car was out of sight. They’d agreed, with minimal eye-rolling on her part, that she would be home no later than midnight. When she didn’t make it back until 12:20, he had to restrain his fury while she trolled through an explanation that never would have passed muster in his courtroom.

Then, one day when he came home early from work, he found a pickup truck on its way down the driveway, with some weedy twenty­something behind the wheel. Later, Lindsay told him he was the older brother of one of her friends, giving her a lift home when she’d had to stay late after school for some vaguely described project. It sounded plausible, but he had no idea whether it was true, and it seemed pushy and mistrustful to ask exactly whose brother this fellow was. He never saw the guy again, but whether this meant Weedhead had disappeared or merely that Lindsay had gotten more careful, he had no idea.

In this wilderness, Claire was a godsend. She came over once, sometimes twice, a week to make something special for dinner. At meals, she was so much better at thinking up things to talk about with the girls than he was. Still, these oases were only occasional and left him on his own most of the week.

The most serious crisis occurred one morning when both kids had taken off for school and he was allowing himself a second cup of coffee. He had a so-called Markman hearing facing him that afternoon, a highly technical proceeding in which he would be taking evidence on the proper scope of a patent involving a laser device used to shrink the prostate. Two years earlier, reeling from his first patent trial, he had stuffed a folder up onto a shelf in the closet of what was now Lindsay’s room summarizing how the appellate courts wanted a Markman hearing to be conducted. On the morning of the hearing, he decided to make a quick foray into the room, retrieve the article, and escape with as much of his sanity as possible.

As he crossed to the closet, Marlene, who typically slept with Lindsay, stood guard in the doorway, eyeing him suspiciously. He quickly retrieved the file and then noticed a square Amazon box wedged way back into the corner. Puzzled, David took the box down and opened it. Inside was a flattened Ziploc bag of what the DEA liked to call “green, leafy material.” David sniffed it, and from long experience in the courtroom, recognized it immediately as marijuana, about half an ounce, with a street value of between fifty and a hundred dollars.

Holding the contraband, David felt a surge of disgusted anger combined with despair. This was a stupid, stupid thing for Lindsay to be doing, especially knowing his position, and she was smart enough to realize that. At the same time, he suspected that if Lindsay learned he’d been snooping around in “her” room, his transgression might far outweigh, in her mind, any drug felony she might have committed. What on earth was he supposed to do?

He eventually decided on two things. First, he wouldn’t say anything to Lindsay. Ray was improving, and the tentative plan was that she and Jordan would go home to Washington for Christmas vacation. If the holidays went well, the girls would just stay on after New Year’s, picking up with their old schools for the next semester. In that case, a confrontation with Lindsay would be neither necessary nor helpful. Second, he’d confiscate the marijuana and dispose of it without saying anything. Even Lindsay wouldn’t dare complain, and the evidence would be gone.

David retreated from the bedroom, making sure that the empty Amazon box was tucked back in its corner and that nothing looked disturbed. He felt like a housebreaker.

Leaving the room, he looked down at Marlene. “No snitching, okay?”

A short time later, when he was departing for the courthouse, he popped the baggie in his glove compartment. He’d dispose of it at some handy Dumpster on the way to work. Of course, with the Markman hearing bearing down on him, he immediately forgot all about it.